This is Not ok
blog.jessitron.com
blog.jessitron.com
At the risk of derailing the thread, why do so many people want to get more women into programming? Isn't that just as misguided as trying to get more men into nursing? Just because we strive for gender equality doesn't mean every job has to have exactly the same gender ratios.
It's worse than just females in tech, it's OMG men and women are different! Eeek!
I kinda like the difference myself. Not because I don't want women in tech, but because women should be able to pursue whatever they want that makes sense when you consider their differences from men.
I assume this makes me a bad person.
I think the first and most urgent job is to change cultural assumptions amongst the insiders. If they are thinking that outsiders aren't biologically inclined towards living in a keep, not qualified to maintain a keep, &c., that's a huge barrier, a moat if you will.
So we remove that. The next problem is that even with the moat gone, the outsiders fear being uncomfortable inside, whether from being one of a very few outsiders amongst a lot of insiders or from other outsiders resenting them moving into the keep.
I think it's important to remove those sources of discomfort and to actively encourage outsiders to consider moving inside so that we get all of those who woud like to come inside but fear unpleasant consequences.
After that, I don't think we need to try to convince people who like living outside to come in. Let them be happy outside! But I do think we should remove barriers to coming inside and encourage coming inside to counteract any fears of negative consequences for those who would otherwise like to come into the Keep.
I also find it very weird that an entire industry went from being female dominated to male dominated and everyone defends it saying "it's always been this way! Equality isn't about enforcing even ratios!"
Well no, it's not, but when you have these situations, where the number of people who could do something is vastly different to those that stick it out as a career, and those that do talk about systematic intolerance and abuse, there is a problem there.
I mean, traditionally, there were less than 100 programmers world wide. No-one has any problem with ignoring that.
I agree that getting more women into tech is a solution, but this always operates under the assumption that women actually want to be in tech.
>There are women out there that get interested in tech but society pushes them away because it's not feminine
I'm not sure if it's societal pressure that is the deciding factor for young women they picking a field of interest.
Actually for pretty much any job not based on manual labour it does mean that. And even then it's mostly because we don't have enough robots.
There are women out there who would make great programmers / sysadmins / etc, but never finish the process of becoming one, are dissuaded from ever starting, or flat-out quit the industry after N number of years, simply because of the barriers put in place by men assuming that the field is only for men.
It's also possible that some of the pressure comes from other women , not just men. A woman might be considered weird by other women for wanting to hang around in an environment dominated by geeky men.
I know tech women who have been called dykes by their female pier group in the same way male nurses might be accused of being gay.
This is simply how humans operate, probably because it has survival value and is more a function of evolution than prejudice.
It's not a difficult assumption to get past anyway, talking knowledgeably about something a recruiter would probably not know or even wearing a tech related T shirt would make people change their assumptions.
The only way to solve that particular problem properly would be to have more women in tech.
An actual barrier would be a company or a CS programme deliberately discriminating against women by not employing them. Now I'm sure this does happen in some cases and would be difficult to gather evidence of because any company admitting to this practice would be open to law suits. Another example would be of creating a workplace that was somehow misogynistic in some way, but I actually find that more common in other industries than in tech.
OTOH , many universities seem to actually discriminate in favour of women for CS, in some cases lowering entry requirements on giving a priority on placement. They still tend to end up with 80%+ men though.
One observation I have made about women who work as developers or in an engineering/science field is that the majority I have met have tended to be chinese. This makes me wonder if there is in fact a stigma attached to western women going into tech but I don't necessarily think this stigma comes from the inside.
Programming is about most gender-agnostic industries there are: there's no heavy lifting of anything (except figuratively speaking) and you don't need to deal with that many people so it doesn't basically matter if you're a man, woman, or an alien.
It certainly is that programming isn't for everyone, men included, and the current bias seems to signal that significantly more men are interested in programming as a career than women.
The heavy use of logic is a masculine trait which might contribute to the outcome in the case of programming, but similarly the heavy use of aesthetics and social interaction in cosmetology is a feminine trait which might contribute to the outcome of the gender distribution for that vocation.
You can bring the horse down to the water but you can't make her (or him) drink.
The pervading attitude of The heavy use of logic is a masculine trait is a rather good example of at least one barrier. Do you not see how that statement is extremely problematic?
Besides, if programming ability could be accurately quantified, there wouldn't be a constant stream of articles on how difficult it is to separate the wheat from the chaff when hiring.
First, note that it's my impression that logic and action are more dominant with men. Based on my experience on life, women, men, and relationships, logic and action seems to strenghten men's inherent identities. Men feel manly when they build stuff and solve problems, and that's generally essential to a male identifying himself as a man. This applies to cocky behaviour and winning women, too.
Now, women can certainly do both. I know women with high capabilities in logic and action such as my wife but the thing is that women often choose not to: their identities are enforced by other things in life. Unlike with men, for women it's not essential to exercise logical problems in order to be a woman. My wife doesn't rediscover her feminine identity in solving problems and fixing stuff eventhough she has done and succeeded in that before we met. My daughter is more interested in fixing bicycles and learning to use the tools in my toolbox than my son is, but it's the other things that she already does that she's using to learn how to grow up to become a woman.
Thus, I suggested the especially masculine trait of enjoying logic might contribute to the gender bias of programming as it seems to contribute to the gender bias of other activities, too. (Or it might not, but I didn't happen to suggest that.)
It's not a barrier, however. It's choosing not to drink, even if brought down to the water. And that's perfectly okay!
This might just be too much to accept for people of naivete. Men and women are different and there's generally no way around that in the long run.
EDIT: Back to the topic: programming doesn't give a squat about whether you're a man or a woman. It only requires logical capabilities and the willingness to use them. It doesn't dictate where the willingness comes from and for what I know, my fellow programmers don't give a rat's ass who wrote the code. They would accept women where they accept men because gender isn't a criteria in communicating with source code.
- the tendency of people to assume that boys are better at math, encouraging boys and discouraging girls
- the tendency for people to encourage young boys to play with spatial & logic toys such as Lego and for girls to play with dolls
The heavy use of logic is a masculine trait ...
OK, this is Poe's Law territory. You're trolling us, right? Because otherwise you just wondered aloud what possible barriers there could be to women joining our field and then exposed yourself as one of them.
Women aren't biologically inclined to not like STEM fields (which I sadly see is a popular sentiment). The reason women don't go into these fields is because of the misogynistic culture. The stereotype of a computer whiz is a man. Ask yourself why you never considered becoming a nurse (if you are a man) and you will understand why women reject the idea of working in the tech industry.
The way I figure there is no biological reason why a girl wouldn't want to expand her mental capacities via technology and programming. It's strictly because it's seen as a nerdy guy stuck in basement thing, then the brogrammers came out and people realized it's also a guy-that-views-women-as-objects field. Yeah, those brogrammers really helped the cause.
Went off on a bit of a tangent there. Sorry.
I would also like to point out that the gender imbalance in nursing is not blamed on the nurses - you yourself describe it as a social stigma.
Fixing societal attitudes needs something rather more than an introspection on the tech industry and why we are full of terrible people. It needs parents and schools to encourage girls to study the relevant areas, it needs schools to get all of their pupils trying out basic programming in a rewarding, exciting and gender neutral environment.
I could be wrong - but to my mind this is a problem in all of STEM and fixing it needs a broad response to treat it as a single issue.
N.B. Women not going to conferences because they are home to a host of manchildren who spend half their time drunk is a separate issue and one deserving of serious attention.
EDIT: I have no idea why some of this seems to be in italics. Sorry :(
That is quite an assertion. Surely you can see that there are many, many more factors than just this one, even if you discount "biological inclination"?
True.
> The reason women don't go into these fields is because of the misogynistic culture.
Ehm... not always. I've found that there is a cultural bias that the STEM fields are considered asocial and culturally women/girls have been raised to dislike asocial activities.
An argument could be made for a broader more general form of misogyny.
In most western societies there is very little that keeps girls from these activities. But then there is the boob tube, watch some disney channel and study the stereotypes present in the shows. It kind of answers both questions. But it is not only Disney Channel I would consider it pervasive in western culture as a whole. e.g. Like TV shows like The Big Bang Theory.
[Citation needed]
http://www.lpfi.org/sites/default/files/tilted_playing_field...
I have some insight into this. I'm engaged to a mechanical engineer who works in a largely male dominated industry. To this point, I've never heard her discuss another female engineer at her company. We've discussed the issues of women in engineering and how interesting the dynamics are for a woman and I can agree that it would be an enjoyable ideal if there were more women in her field. At the same time, she wants nothing to do with women in her field that are simply there to prove that women can do the same jobs as men. I have to agree with her on this point. Every time I see ads for computer schools encouraging people with no experience to get a degree and flood the market, I shake my head. Why should I want someone with no passion, who simply wants a job, to enter my market and drive down the price of labor?
So, I understand where the author is coming from here. She enjoys the company of her sex and would like to have a larger network of her peers be female. I have no problem with that. I would say, though, to be careful about what you wish for. You want women who are passionate to join the workforce, not just any old gal.
Because for every 10 people with no passion who simply want a job, you get one who is incredibly passionate but simply wanted a job. One who didn't realize that hey, this is actually pretty cool stuff, and maybe it's more than just a job, it can be a passion and a career.
I am of course making up the numbers. But discarding someone because they don't care before they've even learned a subject is even sillier than assuming that women don't want to be in tech because they're not interested in tech, rather than simply because they never took to looking into it because of all of the stereotypes (many of them true) about the male dominance of the industry.
I'm saying that simply wanting women or any other sociological division of people to be more prevalent for the sake of presence is a mistake. In your example, you say that out of 10 people that are encouraged/trained, you might get one very passionate developer. I know the math is made up, but if you look at this in the other direction, you now have 9 developers that are bad at their job, dislike/don't care about their job or possibly both. This would mean that 90% of the workforce is now comprised of people who are hindering the other 10%. That 90% of the code written is probably poorly executed.
I think that the career of being a developer is attractive enough that anyone interested in pursuing it would see it as a viable option. Segregating encouragement along the line of sex I think does more harm then good though.
I expanded a bit on my underlying point at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4597547 , and there is an excellent reply regarding early-stage discouragement by nancyhua there as well. I have no interest in a sociological division being more prevalent just because. The problem is they're subtly discouraged from joining our field altogether, and, as others have pointed out in the past, that means we're missing out on a full 50% of potential awesome developers (or whatever other subfield you want to talk about).
Or potentially so. We don't know, because there isn't a truly equal sense of this field being a possibility.
On one hand, I'm all for supporting the goals and opportunities of all individuals equally. When it requires special interest in certain groups though, I sometimes worry that it will create a larger divide. Sexual identity has such a huge impact on us during our developmental stages. The pressures of it don't just stem from adults, but from peers and school as well. I'm of the opinion that rather than singling out individuals by sex, it would be more valuable to expose all of them to it.
This is anecdotal, but I have a personal experience with a program that encouraged more adoption of specific fields by females in my classes. In middle school, a large number of girls were separated from the regular classes to attend special math and science classes. These girls were provided a more in-depth education when it came to mathematics and were given more support in learning the material. It really irked me, especially at that young age. I couldn't understand why these girls were being singled out for certain topics and why I couldn't be involved with them simply because I was a boy. I can't speak to the effectiveness of this program. I do know that a large percentage of these girls ended up in my high school math and science classes which regularly had a nearly 50/50 split, but again, that's not evidence that the program worked.
What it did do, though, was make me realize that I was not an equal. It was probably my first realization that not everyone was treated equally and that there was really no rhyme or reason to why. I saw similar things throughout my years in school, but this one affected me the most. When I hear about the professional female organizations that go to schools and encourage girls specifically to pursue careers in mathematics or engineering, I cringe. I want equality, but I don't know how inequality gets us there.
In my view, you're technically right. We shouldn't have to emphasize one side over the other. The problem is we're combating an existing, underlying emphasis. If a balance scale is unbalanced towards one side, you don't balance it out by adding weight to both sides. You have to add weight to the one side until you've restored balance.
Now, I think it's fair to question how much we should segregate and isolate with respect to that. What you describe as happening in middle school is probably not the best approach. I think it would probably make more sense to open a whole class, gender-unspecific, but, again to create that social support, perhaps try to group the girls in the class into one of the sections (assuming there are multiple ones). The problem is, in that case, probably a marketing one. Presenting it as an girls only course may increase the mystery and interest, and, thus, enrollment.
She's complaining that at an event with 97% of attendance by men (by her own statement), they got, say, 92% of the bathroom facilities, and then throws a fit.
Not buying it.
If this is the biggest outrage in your life you should consider yourself fortunate.
She's wasn't upset that there was less bathroom capacity for women, but rather that this illustrated the (in her view) woefully meager representation of women at the conference.
As for women in IT, I can see why IT would want women, but I can't see why women would want IT.
So... why do -you- want to work in IT?
Who said I wanted to work at all...
A liberal White member sighs, "I don't understand why the Black people don't want to relax in our luxurious club, play a round on our excellent course, and eat our sumptuous dining fare. What is the problem?" Meanwhile, the Blacks are thinking, "Who needs to join the club and have all these racist assholes resenting the fact that we're in their club and tiptoeing around us in case the N-word slips out in our presence. How fucking uncomfortable."
p.s. Did I say 1965? What's the deal with Agusta National and Blacks and/or Women?
I can't really speak for women (for that matter, in 1965 I was too busy potty training to join any golf clubs). But I do wonder whether a certain number of them might look at the industry and shy away even if they haven't been personally exposed to any hostility or overt discouragement.
Just a conjecture, I am not speaking from data or anecdotes.
Augusta National isn't remotely comparable to the issue at hand. Its a VERY private, invite only club. There are numerous private clubs of all sorts that only allow men, only women, only blacks, etc. You can't compare a private club to a employment profession.
I don't necessarily agree with Augusta's position but they are a private club, so I just wouldn't join. If you were going to force Augusta to admit everyone then you'd have to go tell the Junior League they have to let men in, head up to the Ladies Golf Club of Toronto and tell them they have to admit male members, etc.
That said, Augusta National has invited black members since ~1990 and two women as of last month, Condoleezza Rice and Darla Moore if it tells you anything about the exclusivity of this club.
I think it's very relevant to the discussion at hand. We're talking about a profession that outght to be nothing at all like a private club, but the point is that it does behave like a private club. if we in fact didn't behave as if we were members of a club, not only would my comment be irrelevant, these kind sof blog posts wouldn't exist in the first place.
So.
Yes, I agree that the social dynamics of a private club ought not to have anything to do with the social dynamics of a profession, but alas they do in this case.
It is an unfair comparison between a profession and a club. They do not hold even close to the same place in society.
Male only anything is bullshit. Nothing but sexism and the preservation of privilege.
"Female only gyms protect women from being leered at and feeling objectively and justifiably unsafe."
So, the basic premise is all men are leering and will act on their animal instincts. That isn't true as some men aren't interested in women, yet they too are not allowed. Others, were taught by their parents to be gentlemen. They too are not allowed. Never mind the women interested in other women.
"Male only anything is bullshit"
There is so much wrong with this statement, I don't know what to make of it. I could go with the basic support groups as one basic example.
If you expect female-only to be allowed then male-only needs equal protection.
Then she starts throwing around statistics in paragraph 6 with absolutely no segue. She goes from whiny complainer about something trivial to I'm gonna fix the world's problems by talking to other women at this conference.
She's just not a good writer and her being a woman has nothing to do with that.
First, you wouldn't have gone to a NKOTB (New Kids on the Block) concert if you weren't going with your daughter. You didn't actively want to be there. The author of the article was going to a programming conference of her own will.
Second, I don't think that NKOTB are important enough that it matters what the gender composition of their audiences are. Programming, on the other hand, is very important, and will only get more important in the future. Such a huge gender imbalance at the most important PL conference will be problematic for women in the future (and for men as well, if you can believe it).
Third, you "doubt" that there was a similar reaction at the PL conference. I presume you weren't actually there, then? I wasn't there either, so I wouldn't even begin to think about making up random suppositions and using them to support my argument.
The issue is something like this. Most people have a tough time realizing that 99% of the times their net condition on any day is result of their own doing.
You see the problem manifest here.
1. Notice non equal participation of women.
2. Blame men.
3. Shift the onus of change on men not women.
4. Wash your hands off the situation, and claim high moral high ground.
The first step to change the world is basically start by changing oneself first. Now if you do all this and still get limited by the environment around you, then you can start by blaming the other things.
But even before starting, trying and doing something. You have 100 people to blame you are not likely to see any improvement soon.
No, I don't have statistics to prove this, but it's been the case throughout my 30+ year life living in various places throughout the US. The only time there's typically a longer men's room line in my life is at tech gathering, and it's usually still not the kind of wait where people give up, as often happens to women I know.
How exactly after this do you expect anyone to take you seriously?
Gender equality isn't about having just as many women programmers, and it certainly isn't well servered by having tantrums over the bathroom arrangements.
There's no such thing as a "tone" argument. Recall your freshman year Greek rhetoric course -- what are the three main elements of argumentation? Logos (logic), pathos (appeal to emotion), and ethos (morality or "greatness" of character).
If you start yelling at someone, chances are you're going to destroy your pathos and ethos. Being persuasive involves more than just logos, it involves convincing your audience that you are on the right side.
This, by the way, is why many technical people are awful at arguing. They don't understand that argumentation is about convincing people, not having a bullet point list that you haughtily defend to the last.
The real reason you're right is that the author was clearly adding a bit of dramatization and flair to the piece, rather than blowing up and insulting their opponent.
Think of "tone argument" like "ad hominem", it's a reply to what someone says, but you don't actually respond or address what they said, instead you address how they said it in a very angry manner ("tone argument"), or based on what sort of person they are ("ad hominem")
However, this isn't especially relevant to the real point of the article.
I am also slightly bored of people finding things they wish to change and then simply publicising the observation. I was actually hoping that somewhere near the bottom she would offer some insight and/or offer solutions. It might be "Not OK" - but please take a few extra steps and suggest what you think could be done?
Oh please, calm down. Closed the tab.
It could have been more clearly explained, and closer to the start of the article, but if you read the rest of the article you would have seen this.
Women (and other humans) are allowed to be angry about both perceived and actual injustice. TFA isn't even an actual emotional outburst. It's a reasoned account of something happened to the author.
Try to see what she's angry about first. Sometimes people are angry at what they think are gross injustices. Maybe she has a point.
More importantly, I think it's valid for you to have a very binary perspective on tech, either you aren't interested or you're so interested that "To hell with the torpedos, full speed ahead." I know of at least one such woman with the same perspective:
http://raganwald.posterous.com/a-womans-story
Of course, that doesn't mean everyone will have the same reaction. Some might be more inclined to join, perhaps some less. I'm not a woman, and I don't want to be patronizing and try to suggest that there's going to be one overwhelmingly consistent reaction.
I was just trying to point out that our discussions about gender are as much a part of our culture as the culture we're allegedly discussing.
(Not that anybody is doing that, it's just an example).
She probably could have been more clear of what she was not okay with. But a decline in women in the tech field is a deep and complicated topic, and the solutions weren't probed in this article. This article was more of how things are today - and we all already know that there's an extremely small percentage of women in the field. What would have been more provoking of an article would have been discussions of the root causes and reasons of why there are so few women in the industry, and why their career paths tend to differ than their male counterparts. Contributions to this topic by someone like her would be enlightening for sure.
I read the first part and immediately thought how immature you were, then I read more, and being more open-minded I read over your point, swallowed my previous thought and agree. Not everyone will do that.
I agree we need more women representation, I disagree with the manner the article was written.
I read the first part and immediately thought how immature you were, then I read more, and being more open-minded I read over your point, swallowed my previous thought and agreed. Not everyone will do that.
I agree we need more women representation, I disagree with the manner the article was written.
These debates are often not logical or rational.
I think this is our[1] problem. Or a generalization of it: the ability to share another's viewpoint. To step into their perspective and say “oh. I see.” And to accept that maybe, just maybe, their viewpoint is valid. This isn't always true, by the way. But it is sometimes true, even often true. And even if it is valid, you may not agree with it.
But here's the thing. There's this idea that maybe women aren't in tech because they aren't interested. That's cool. I'm not interested in nursing, right?
Well it turns out, I've never done nursing. I haven't even looked into it. I haven't talked to anyone about it. Because I just assumed hey, I'm a guy, nurses aren't guys. Not even worth thinking about. That's the mindset. It's not that you know you're not interested, it's that you don't even give it a second thought! [2]
The funny thing is, people here have generally found their passion—be it startups or tech. And when you have your passion and it fell into your lap, it's easy to say “well these people who aren't interested shouldn't be doing this anyway, because they're not passionate”. Even if they had no chance to develop that passion? Even if there was no exposure? Maybe we're being a tad too dismissive here, no? Perhaps we should give people a chance to explore a subject before assuming they'll never be passionate about it. Just a though.
What about those who did reach that passion? Those who entered the tech world, found a minefield of sexism (of which that's-what-she-said jokes are just the very very tip of the iceberg, but more on that in a second), and said “screw it, I'm out of here”.[3] Usually those stories lead to another set of excuses, because the first set of excuses just weren't effective enough to deal with the full scope of the people being shut out of technology, willingly or not.
Let's talk about that's-what-she-said jokes. There are men who say “psh, seriously? Come on, it's just a joke! Why would you have a problem with that?” And there are women who say “well, I can take them. Not only that, I dish them out! Why would you have a problem with that?” Why would you have a problem with that? The trouble with that question is it's so often rhetorical. Not only do you not reaaally want to hear the answer to it, but you don't stop to think about the answer before asking. That kind of question should lead to more understanding.
So I propose, without further ado, that instead of trying to understand why something (anything!) is a problem from your point of view, you consider trying to understand why it's a problem from the other person's point of view, and if, with a little effort, you still can't figure it out, then you ask and look for a real answer. And read the answer. And try to understand then. Because I see far more effort devoted in most of these threads to defending one's own point of view than to understanding the other person's. And these questions, the question of women in tech, the question of social awkwardness, the question of sexism in tech, they are not math problems. There is not necessarily a single correct answer. One person being right doesn't mean the other person is wrong. And right vs wrong is not always immediately obvious.
[1] - when I say our, I mean the tech industry.
[2] - I can't speak to whether or not this is considered a problem in the nursing industry. It's irrelevant to the point at hand.
I would suggest it is mainly the latter, look at any IT/CS type course at a college and you will see mainly men and these are people who haven't even entered the field yet to get a chance to be scared off.
The point regards passion is an interesting one, I imagine that there are a fair number of people here who got an interest in tech at an early age long before they had to worry about starting a career.
The question for these people would be, if you were at that age and were instead a born a woman but had the same interests would there have likely been anything that would hold them back? If so what would it most likely have been?
I think we are generally wrong when we try to presume what a group of people would be interested in. Like who knew Japanese people would get so good at baseball? Whoever said, "Japanese people aren't interested in baseball in the first place bc they like samurai swords, not projectiles," would've been totally wrong, as wrong as whoever said, "Women aren't interested in being doctors. They get hysterical and like to sit quietly in drawing rooms," or as wrong as people who say, "Women don't like math or science or computers. They prefer art and writing and medicine and biology." Maybe one day people will be saying, "Women don't like intergalactic war travel, they prefer math and science and computers and tesseracts."
I don't feel any desire to downvote you. Here's my take as a woman who studied math at MIT and was always one of few if not the only woman in her classes/ nerd camps/ jobs throughout my entire life:
If you're the type of person who always knew what you were passionate about, you should realize this focus and passion is not common. There are some people who can explode out of some small town where everyone's main interest is football and still become a tech mogul. Most people are not like this- people do what their peers do and what they perceive as normal for whatever group they identify with. I think this might actually be especially true for children. Very few children see a scientist doing science or see something cool like a machine and then say, "Mom and Dad, I want to learn to do/make this thing," or then go online and research it. Most of the time, someone is showing the kid what they think this kid should learn or the kid is looking at stuff other people are giving to them, including their peers. Based on this, many girls who aren't deliberately introduced to tech/science as a possible interest don't realize they are interested in tech.
Most kids are friends with kids of the same gender. In middle school, when I went into a classroom to learn QBASIC as the only girl, it was less fun in every way except 1 than being in a classroom filled with girls who were my friends. I didn't make any friends in any of my middle/high school programming classes and generally kept quiet because boys made me shy, and vice versa- I also made them shy when I spoke to them. They weren't doing it on purpose- I think it's just human nature for us all to behave the way we did.
If I were less interested in programming and more motivated to have a fun classroom experience or to fit in (being a girl with my interests made me weird, which bothered me slightly but I was also interested in art so that kind of evened it out. I can imagine it bothering other people much more than it bothered me, sufficient to make them avoid this feeling of strangeness by avoiding atypical (for their peer group) activities), I easily could've not gone to those CS classes or to any of my nerd camps. When I went to a Theoretical CS nerd camp called Andrew's Leap at CMU, out of the other 30 kids, only 3 others were girls. We 4 girls were all Chinese and we became great friends. We also befriended the boys but it wasn't as easy because both boys and girls interested in Theoretical CS don't tend to have PhD's in male-female interaction or even human-human interaction.
Most kids do whatever their friends do. Most people do whatever they perceive people of their type to do. I think having a woman scientist in a popular movie does a lot more for planting that possibility in the popular imagination than many types of affirmative action programs. If anyone is saying, "Black people don't like hockey bc they prefer basketball," I think it just takes a great movie about a famous black hockey player to get more black kids to start saying, "I want to play hockey."
If I have a thesis, it's this:
1) Most people do whatever they perceive the group they self-identify with as doing. If you're a person who self identifies as an intelligent male, maybe you're more likely to think, "I should become a businessman," than, "I should become a nurse." In contrast, a person who self identifies as an intelligent female might be more likely to think, "I should become a doctor," instead of "I should become a programmer." If you're a person who self identifies as an athletic, white male, you might be more likely to think, "I should play basketball," than "I should play pingpong." People don't tend to want to be "weird" because of complex cognitive stuff to do with identity.
2) Most kids do whatever their friends do, and most kids are friends with people their own gender, and most people prefer being with their friends than not. So if you're a girl walking into a classroom full of nerdy, Starcraft-playing boys or a man walking into a yoga studio full of giggling females, you might think, "I should find another room where I fit in better," instead of discovering whether you have an interest in this strange field. Hence the chicken and egg thing. It's less fun for kids to be "weird" because being weird is lonely.
My mom always says(Who had a working career of almost 30 years), that working women live in a world of their own. Her sisters never went to work. She always found that amazing, that a few individuals can spend their whole life doing nothing. Yet now when you talk to my aunts they live in their own world where they have every reason in the world why not working is right. When they both talk about it, men and their influences rarely pop up. Its always discussions about work life balance, stress, affects on kids and own physical and biological selves.
In my opinion the bigger struggle in empowering women will not be to counsel men, but women themselves. Most women who don't go to work do for their own reasons, and not because men don't want them to work. If you can convince women to come out of their comfort zones, take risks, try and even taste failure at times. Let me tell you women will be far well off.
But there are always going to jobs which are going to very demanding for women. There are also security issues with respect to working and traveling late nights, pushing very tough long work hour schedules. Most of those clots will dissolve slowly with time.
Remember in ancient times, women used to work in fields with men all the time and that generally used to do a lot of work more physically demanding than what most women have today. If it worked fine then, it can now. But the transformation will be slow.
The working mom thing is a separate issue from representation of women in various industries such as tech. For me, I'm hoping to band together with friends so we can all watch each others' kids and cooperate more and have the whole childrearing thing be more "village"-centered and less of an individual burden.
I have seen men from all walks of life crack ugly jokes, so I am really not convinced that it is especially bad in the tech industry. Not to defend ugly jokes, I just think the problem is blown out of proportion. There are bad apples everywhere, but the majority of people are actually fine and nice to get along with.
I am a guy and I wouldn't be comfortable in a sexist environment, and I haven't found the tech industry particularly uninviting so far.
If anything, I guess modern women have a problem in that computers are sometimes more interesting than women. If that is sexist, too, OK, we have a problem in the tech industry.
As for nursing, I suspect part of the problem is that men can not afford it. That is, it doesn't pay well enough to support a family.
I'm not real fond of the ratio, mainly because lack of female programmers means we get a lack of female managers with programming experience. Women who came up through the ranks and get the gig. I have encountered too many men and women who have no clue how to manage technical projects.
I should point out that at least female programmers are not subjected to the crap that happens to male ECE (early childhood education) instructors. Many places will say to an applicant's face that, because of potential lawsuits, they will not hire males.
[1] There are actually a lot of facilities that have sliding partitions that allow the number of stalls to be changed between events. I cannot find it right now, but there is a video explaining research done into average time using the stalls - male vs female and percentage of people doing #1 vs #2.
Stop being sexist.
EDIT: No "keynoters, the language designers, the authors of seminal texts" in this millenium. And there was Grace Hopper too.
Double edit: Admittedly, anything in 1xxx is technically the "last millenium". My mistake.
All right. Now what?
In education & day care, the complaint usually centers around the lack of role models for children.
In nursing, it's usually related to the anecdotal observation that male nurses are almost always good nurses.
As for fashion, males seem to be quite prominent already.
People do this all the time if one room is full.
What? I can understand being frustrated but that reaction doesn't seem constructive at all.
Compare and contrast to the story about John Orwant throwing his mug at a wall at a Perl conference - and single handedly inspiring the start of the Perl 6 project.
But then that's ok. He's a guy.
Yeah that was obviously the implication. A guy tossing a fit in the bathroom would be just as randomly nonconstructive.