Sometimes I wish people would just shut up about the whole women in technology thing. | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I wish people would just shut up about the whole women in technology thing.

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22 pointsjlees17 comments

Men "won't concede that I could beat them at Halo or CS any day" either. (EDIT: I meant that men won't concede that MEN could beat them either. I think this was clear, but I also think that the post is incorrect as written.)

I remember hearing of, but can't cite, a study or article that noted that women felt they were being discriminated against in the workplace, when in fact the men were just being as competitive with them as they were with other men.

Mm, that's true enough, and it's also partially a cultural thing (I think it's less extreme here in the UK, for example).

But I do think there's a minor difference in the way you're treated in either case. People might not assume you're any good at the games, they just don't assume I play them at all. I wish I could capture some of the facial expressions I get.

In order to be competitive in technology, you must be good at distinguishing issues from details.

In this case, gender is a detail, not an issue. Anyone overly concerned with it is missing what really matters.

Unless, as swolchek says above (or possibly below), there are cultural differences to be aware of. Women and men can respond differently to the same stimuli, just as different cultures do (consider, for example, what seniority means in a Japanese workplace versus Silicon Valley).

You're right that gender is not so much the point as people with different perspectives being able to collaborate efficiently and effectively.

I just wanted to emphasize that the goal is a broader open mindedness of people interaction.

I've never really understood why people get so worked up about this. I mean, if there were few women in tech because of flagrant discrimination, that's one thing. As near as I can tell, though, there are few women in tech because few women want to be there. Am I wrong about this? Is it in any way a bad thing? I'm not in a great hurry to convince a certain type of person to pursue career X just because the demographics are unbalanced.

Lets forget about technology.

Technology is by no means the only work area that's very out of kilter in terms of gender distribution. Technology is just a very well paying and fairly prominent industry, so it's talked about a lot more then say truck driving.

Lets concentrate purely on gender imbalanced groups. Any gathering of humans where the sexes are not proximately 50/50 or 60/40 but 90/10 or even more extreme.

I think we can all agree that this is neither natural nor healthy.

But, once a population goes out of what like that, the imbalance can work to maintain intself. It's an interesting group dynamic, but I've heard male nurses complain much like I've heard female programmers complain.

That's why I think that a 90/10 or worse split is obviously not a good thing, for almost any human endeavor. Some exceptions certainly apply, like monasteries.

And I think a 90/10 or worse split can become self maintaining.

But I'm not sure there's a practical solution for this. No amount of encouragement or gentle prodding will fix this.

>"Lets concentrate purely on gender imbalanced groups. Any gathering of humans where the sexes are not proximately 50/50 or 60/40 but 90/10 or even more extreme.

>I think we can all agree that this is neither natural nor healthy."

I agree with your main point, but not this one. There are clear differences in personality distribution between the sexes, either due to biology or culture, that can effect their relative desire to participate in various activities. A few activities will have gender ratio imbalances, and that's not necessarily unnatural or unhealthy. Men have been doing the lion's share of hunting and war since time immemorial.

The problem is that CS doesn't obviously have to be one of those activities. It seems to maintain its gender imbalance more through inertia than necessity, as you said. While other sciences also have gender imbalances, they tend to be much less extreme, and I think it possible that CS can move in that direction.

Some exceptions certainly apply, like monasteries.

That's to say, yes I agree with man have and will almost certainly continue to make up the vast majority of soldiers.

But as you said, the gender imbalance in IT, or for that matter nursing, seems to have a lot to do with inertia. Which is just kind of sad.

I don't think we can argue that it isn't natural. Before the last century or two it was rather natural, among other species it is quite common for genders to have specialized roles as well, and there are certain roles which will always be imbalanced (childbearing, for one).

As I understand it, in the end the objection to gender imbalance is that it constitutes an unfairness to either the minority (executives, programmer) or majority (nurses + school teaching during the period their wage/benefits were still severely depressed by gender imbalance).

I don't think we can argue that unfairness is a threat to the system or to groups, it is universal. Rather, I think we just prefer not to realize it's there.

Among other species exist all kinds of adaptations, for example birds can fly, and that's natural for THEM.

Just because elephant herds consist of females and juveniles, while bull elephants roam alone, that doesn't make it natural for us hominids.

The only time the sex ration goes well beyond 70/30 in great apes or monkeys it's because of some natural disaster.

A century or two ago, women were property, and kept out of a lot of social life. Like they are today in Saudi Arabia. That also does not make it natural.

While gender imbalance is often about economic discrimination, and especially has been in the past, I think today women have ample economic opportunities. So I don't perceive the lack of women in tech. as punitive to women.

I think it's punitive to the (overwhelmingly) men and women who are in it today. It's just a weird environment, and that weirdness in itself has no benefit.

Why is it neither natural nor healthy?

An industry is not a society. You aren't restricted to choosing a mate from your company or your industry, so the main issue of an extreme gender mix (mate resources) is not an issue.

I don't doubt that the percentage of women who choose technology as a career is less than the number who would make competent technologists. However, I would love to see some actual data on the effectiveness of the proposed methods of addressing this. You could measure the results by increasing the number of females at a college who choose CS as a major, or take a career in software, or a number of other ways.

The nascent computational pedagogy field (itself a fringe, underappreciated movement in CS academia) is doing some good work on this.

Without numbers, we're all just throwing opinions out there.

Is talking about women in technology the problem, or is talking about women in technology without following through and doing something useful the problem?

I don't know why you're voted down. It seems to me that the title once again misses the reasonable point hidden in the article.

Communication is always important. How one communicates, or in this case talks about minorities, is important, as are addressing a complex problem in multiple ways (eg, with actions as well as communication).

Did you read the article? She talks about a gender-specific effort she was involved in, that didn't work and perhaps worked against promoting girls who game.

Exceptionalism is a bad way to effect change... and nobody will bother trying to create pro-female environments, etc., without making them explicitly for women, which makes them exceptionalism.

I, on the other hand, do create pro-female content, because I write for designers and right-brained people... and since I don't go "Learn Programming: For People With Boobs!" then I also help many right-brained men, too.

Sometimes, I wish I could pull wool over the eyes of people who have their heads buried in the sand.

Hooray, my favorite least-favorite topic.

I've written about this several times[1], and my final conclusion is: Maybe the lack of women in IT just goes to show: they've got sense!

Unless you're in the top 10% -- or higher -- then the tech field sucks. Most programming jobs are deep inside massive companies where they treat programmers like slightly more skilled typists. There's a reason Office Space was about developers.

I'm gonna commit a major sin and quote myself here: 'It's like we're all busy eating the same shit sandwich and—ill-content to eat it alone—we are holding a slice out to these putative women blocked by sexism, and saying "Hey, this goes GREAT with Wonderbread. Want a taste?"'

I will definitely use the OP's "don't treat me like a three-headed" monkey line in the future, however.

[1] http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/womenintech/2007/09/12/i-don... (where women in technology bash me for saying it's a non-issue!) and http://www.slash7.com/articles/2008/10/19/can-we-can-it-with... (where above quote comes from)

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