The Male Programmer Privilege Checklist
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Also, I'm sure the ensuing discussion is going to resemble at least three other HN discussions.
I don't agree with every item on the list, but the point of the exercise is plain.
2) I would surmise that the point of lists like these are to raise awareness of injustices or slights that are done, particularly ones that others may not be aware of, because they are not subjected to them.
3) You're a member of the community, can you really not think of anything you could do to make things different? Why not do something that bucks the geek/nerd stereotype? Why not help someone else do it? Why not encourage/help someone who's not a stereotypical nerd into the field? Why not just object to stereotyping of programmers?
These aren't problems that are going to change immediately. Being reminded that there are still problems isn't a bad thing imo. Just as being reminded that people do care about the issue, and would like to make things different (as you have done).
So the problem has been recognized. There is a will to do something about it. Let's do something. There are organizations like RailsBridge that are forming ( http://railsbridge.org/ ). The ACM-W exists ( http://women.acm.org/ ).
If you want things to be different, pick something to do and do it.
However, i just can't fathom how it could be the case that there's nothing we can do about it, regardless of what our ages may be. Why aren't we addressing the pipeline into the industry? That can take the form of direct involvement with the lives of students (which is also something that should be undertaken carefully. My wife took programming classes in high school, and even her instructor for the class was creepy), or indirectly, again through trying to defeat the stereotypes about who is in our industry.
And i think we need to broaden our perspective on where the feeder into the pipeline is. Why aren't we trying to get analytical individuals from other fields who already do train their students to think analytically?
Probably because trainability of those folks would cause more "anyone can do it" sentiment, devaluing our skills.
As to the pipeline, now you're calling for outright altruistic activism, not a change in day-to-day behavior at work. Also, if I set out to "encourage women in computer science", it would probably be perceived as "creepy".
That makes me want to facepalm a bit. Do you work with open source software?
Also, if I set out to "encourage women in computer science", it would probably be perceived as "creepy".
Then don't. Set out to encourage students who are good at analytical thinking to get into programming, and keep an eye on equal promotion of the utility of programming (note, that programming is not the same as computer science. I've got a linguistics degree, and i am a perfectly competent programmer [okay, so yes, i 've got a minor in computer science too]).
Yes, but for ego boost and/or personal bugfix reasons.
Dietetics/Nutrition and Nursing are dramatic cases with the opposite gender distribution (My wife happens to be in Dietetics). The treatment of guys in dietetics is just as strange as the treatment of girls in programming.
None of this absolves the programming community. Just because it's not a unique problem, doesn't mean that it doesn't need to be addressed.
In the 1980's, about half[1] of computer scientists were women. Now? 10-20%. Something is being done, and it is being done wrong. So it's not as simple as "They don't want to" or "Society makes them".
[1] I believe it to be about half. However, it might be slightly more or less. Definitely far higher than today.
Where are your #s coming from? What are you defining as "a computer scientist"?
Also, I believe their metric may have been students, but I am not sure.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16digi.html
One thing that the article notes is that women have achieved parity in other technical fields:
"When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys."
I find it rather hard to believe that software professionals are especially sexist compared to those in other engineering fields, thus I tend to think that other factors -- a reputation for grueling work hours, the "nerd factor", perceived drop in availability of jobs due to outsourcing, etc... -- are driving women away.
Wasn't 1980 still a completely different time, when it was more typical for women to stay at home? In that case, it would be even more surprising if there was parity back then.
I had the impression that a lot of women from Russia tended to be into technical careers, I wonder what was behind that. "Better" childcare (as in children being raised by the state)?
Oh Really?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/46457493@N00/230535210/
> Having potential romantic partners assume from your career that you're smart and well-to-do rather than unattractive and unfeeling.
Unattractive, unfeeling, AND with neck beard is our stereotype.
> Joining in appreciation of the sex object du jour without having to be gay or bisexual.
This goes the other way too. Johnny Depp doesn't exactly place guys in a less awkward position, you know, because we're all totally comfortable with our sexuality in the male community.
> Listening to speakers refer to an inanimate software construct as "this guy" without getting distracted.
And ships are referred to as "she"'
All in all, there are some good points hidden among many "grass is always greener" style arguments. Programming is hard work, people are insecure by their nature, and yes, there are gender related issues in the community. Hopefully, the stigma against women programmers will continue to lessen as the stigma against all programmers (bunch of nerds) also subsides.
Yeah, I didn't get that either. I have never had anyone identify me as smart and well-to-do from my career choice. People just seem to assume I'm nerdy, socially awkward, and would rather have sex with a robot (actually heard that one before, for some reason).
Some of us are (somewhat) normal dammit :(
> Having your desk near the entrance to your office without visitors assuming you're the receptionist.
I'm male, I've had the desk near the entrance and guess what - I got treated like a recptionist too. It's not gender, it's that your the first person people come across.
>Having interests that are unstereotypical for your gender and getting seen as cool and progressive rather than freaky and asexual for it.
A male (programmer or otherwise) with interests that are unstereotypical for a male is rarely seen as "cool and progressive" - being seen as freaky and gay is far more likely.
"If you're married, having people take you to lunch without them speculating on how your spouse would feel about them taking you to lunch."
She is assuming here that the person "taking them out to lunch" is also male. If the offerer were female and the offered were male and married, there definitely would be speculation as to his fidelity, perhaps moreso than with the roles reversed.
People don't seem to care as much when you assume a girl on the Internet is a guy, but assume a guy is a girl and everyone is up in arms. (This may be a point toward your post.)
My name, as the author, is at the top. Do you know a lot of women named "Tim"? (Kake, the original author, is a woman, but I contributed that particular item. Yes, I know that's not obvious from the list, which is why I clarified.)
If we don't take those opportunities to think about what makes someone else uncomfortable (maybe because it makes us uncomfortable ourselves?) then, over time, the people with the willingness to speak out about something which could be improved simply leave and an opportunity to improve that society vanishes with them.
Which is a great sadness because I think we've all got our own stories about things we don't like about the software biz and I think many of us feel a little bit hopeless about ever being able to change some of that...
...but discouraging folk willing to talk about things that can improve, even if it's not something we find important ourselves, means that it's a little less likely that any other conversation about improvement is going to get a hearing either.
For the record, I'd like to see more women and other types of human than white&male&alpha in software myself because over fifteen years of doing this I have found that the most toxic development environments (high levels of stress, distrust, dishonesty, coercion etc.) have also been the environments with the lowest human diversity.
It is not difficult to scare away people who are different from you or people who you expect to silently put up with problems caused by your point of view.
But the problem is, as that happens, without differences your society slowly stops having anything to communicate about and without communication it becomes dumber and without intelligence it eventually becomes a target for attack and takeover by some other failed community with an eye to your resources. (Sun / Oracle anyone ? ;-D)
Added the fact that in most tech companies guys outnumber girls 2 to 1 or worse (i am including marketing, sales, hr also), if you are a single and decent looking girl you will probably be hit on a lot.
Not sure if there is a solution to this.
As a counterpoint, i worked in a company of about 80 people, where 60 were female, and i got hit on a lot. I actually enjoyed it when girls were flirting with me. But that's the main difference i guess, women are more likeley to be more annoyed from non-wanted advanced than men are, call it evolution or social, i don't care.
The fact is that being the one differnt from your collegues, might make you feel a little bit like a fish out of water. And in this case is being female, where you are probably outnumbered 4 to 1 or worse.
A woman who dresses provocatively in the office is a distraction. Far be it from me to tell women how to dress, but most women do not understand the effect they have on men, and of those who do, very few understand that men are, essentially, helpless when it comes to their reaction (even, as I said, if it is a reaction that they suppress). Heterosexual men who do NOT have this aspect of male nature are in the vast minority, although thy do exist. It is a part of being male, and as such, I refuse to apologize for it.
I was totally with you until the "I refuse to apologize for it" part. I'll apologize for it, because that's a part of being decent. I'll also explain the effect that kind of clothing has, and if the lady in question doesn't change the way she dresses, I'll inform HR so they are aware.
All of these things are, at best, accidents. However, unlike normal accidents, where you could have prevented them by close scrutiny of your environment, this kind of accident may have an original cause that puts you somewhere in the "chain of responsibility", but what actually ended up doing the damage was pure probability and physics. These things are usually called "acts of God", or, to be more empirical, "acts of nature."
Our evolutionary urges and drives are such an act. Why apologize for them? What are you actually apologizing for? Being unable to compensate for them?
Would you accept "the estrogen made me do it" from a woman as an excuse for behaving incivilly?
To simplify: there is no need to apologize for your urge to punch someone you don't like in the face. There is no need for them to apologize for defending themselves, or calling the police. Both make subjective sense. Apologies are for when you were wrong given your own perspective.
What I don't apologize for is having the urge in the first place. As another commentor well said, you may as well apologize for a force of nature.
On the other side of the coin, if you work closely with 10 other people of the opposite sex, it confuses me as to why you wouldn't think one of those people would be attracted to you. Who else would they be attracted to?
This is just my perspective as a guy, but I've noticed that in environments where females know that their competence is respected, they tend to let their guard down about sex issues.
Going 'PC' is indeed the breakdown of human communication. Writing up speech codes about how we're going to respect each other is organizational fail. So stop the fail at the source. Start respecting female or transgender co-workers.
I've worked on a few projects with female programmers, designers, and even welders and electronics designers. When there's just no question about competence, it's sex jokes all day long. Or maybe that's just us. ;) But seriously, I suggest trying it.
That's not true in my observation. Most adopt a prefab ideology that they try to impose on the world around them. They like to label this "critical analysis" (or that old stalwart, "thinking for yourself"), but it isn't: if it were, their ideas and positions and tone wouldn't be so predictable. Actually, trying to impose a rigid ideology on others is a large part of what makes them prissy. The OP seems to me a nice example.
Your statement, while pithy, misses the point.
It once occurred to me that to be angry about hypocrisy is hypocritical, since no one's words and actions are in complete agreement. I toned down a bit after that :)
"# Listening to speakers refer to an inanimate software construct as "this guy" without getting distracted. " - So no "Hi guys", fair enough
"Not being the special case ("hi guys and girls, I guess, too, if you want to get really technical about it!!") " - So no "Hi guys and girls", err..
I wouldn't generalise too far off this list, though. It looks like an amalgam of things that annoy different ladies. I only picked out 5 of them that I agreed with.
Although I say "Hi Guys!" sometimes when greeting my wife and daughter, so I don't really see what's so offensive about it.
The difference between "hi guys and girls" and "hi guys and girls, I guess, too, if you want to get really technical about it!!" is that the second sentence goes out of its way to call attention to the Other-ness of the marginalized group. But why not circumvent the issue entirely and use a gender-neutral term like "folks", "everyone", or (depending on the formality of the occasion) "distinguished colleagues"? It perplexes me that people who have no trouble writing a compiler or debugging device drivers apparently find it so difficult to phrase a simple sentence in a way that doesn't exclude anyone.
Hofstadter makes the same point (that words that claim to be both gendered and gender-neutral are never the latter) in a less snarky way in Chapter 7 of his book _Metamagical Themas_, entitled "Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness". You can find it on Google Books.
Perhaps a better checklist would be "actual reasons why the average human, without regard to gender, does not enter technical fields"
I wasn't sure why this particular item was included, but I suppose I too am momentarily distracted when I hear a woman personify an inanimate object as 'she'. I mean, I understand it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but there's just that split second where the world seems to turn inside-out and I have to recollect my thoughts.
I wouldn't call it a Male Privilege, though.
Guilting every male programmer for both real and imagined slights.
The beauty of startups is that no one cares who or what you are, so long as you can deliver. So stop complaining , AND BUILD SOMETHING ALREADY.
PS. Mostly I try not to guilt my co-workers about stuff. I don't think it makes them or me any more productive.
It depends wholly on if and how you play the gender-card in the game. Or how you can be coerced/forced to play it.
> Note that whereas there have always been talented women musicians, the number of women hired by orchestras rose significantly when candidates began auditioning behind a screen. This is why there is affirmative action. In all my experience, I have never seen a woman or an African American hired through an affirmative-action program who didn't strongly deserve it -- that is, who wasn't already arguably the best applicant. When hiring committees are no longer composed only of white men and we stop hearing expressions of open prejudice, then we can relax affirmative action. As it stands, people who are different -- who, for one reason or another, make powerful older male physicists uncomfortable -- are not hired.
(This was in the context of an argument about how physics institutions often filter out challengers to orthodoxy: including those who think differently, not just look differently.)
I don't get this. You think men don't get problems if they fail? And why do you even ask, how about trying it out? It sounds as if you don't even want to try it because of all the prejudice.
I already have one (fairly minor) failure under my belt. I seem to have got away with it. I'm still in my job, still working on the same kind of stuff I was before, and no-one told me not to bother my pretty little head about that bit because I'm clearly not so good at things like that.
Yes, I think everyone gets problems if they fail. But my worry is about second chances, and blocking off areas of computing for other people.
Someone I know made an off-hand comment about every girl who has worked in this department has worked on the UI. I don't know if they've ever had a girl on the build team. I don't know if they've ever had a girl working on the really low-level stuff. There certainly aren't any at the moment. Is there an underlying current of 'girls are better at the touchy-feely UI stuff'? Do girls overall really tend to work better with UIs? Am I comparing teams with a high turnover with teams with a low one? Am I trying to generalise from too little data again?
So, let's have a hypothetical opportunity for me to go and work on some arbitrary low-level stuff. Maybe it's to do with networking protocols. And maybe for one reason or another I'm blindingly obviously no good at it whatsoever. Will this affect my ability to go into unrelated areas with similarly few past examples of successful ladies later? Will it affect Alice (who knows not just about networking protocols, but also basic cryptography) when she is hired next week? Will she then have to work harder than Bob to persuade everyone that she is competent in that area? Maybe I should play it safe and work on something that is less challenging and that I know I can succeed at. After all, if Alice fails as well, then Eve may be looked over entirely. And that would make me feel really guilty. So the penalty for failure is higher.
Of course, there's a good chance there is no bias whatsoever. And I'm fairly likely to take a few risks. But you don't need actual bias for this to have an effect. If there is enough fear of bias you'll end up with too much risk-averse behaviour, and thus under-performing ladies.
But why start out with the fear of bias? For what it's worth, there are a lot of bad male programmers. I even suspect most programmers think that most other programmers are bad. And for men, there can be bias, too, like "we have always been disappointed by coders who did not study to university level" or "coders from India" or "Java developers" or whatever.
Res Ipsa Loquitur. This is called "confirmation bias."
Laughing at jokes like this (http://codetojoy.blogspot.com/2007/08/closures-are-hot.html) because women holding bumper stickers about closures is funny in the same way pictures of cats "reading" calculus books is funny, rather than wondering whether your colleagues see you in the same way as those women.
I do think the Code To Joy thing is funny. Why? Because the discussion about closures in java (so far as i am aware) has left the realm of technical discussion, and now is just gridlocked. The opinion on closures of women at bars (however well informed), at this point is just as relevant to me as other discussions on the pros and cons of including closures.
It's not funny because girls are stupid, or because being hot precludes one's knowledge of pros and cons of closures. I would not expect random strangers at bars (be they male or female) to have an informed opinion about closures in java. The fact that Code To Joy picked only pictures of women to post may be sexist in the sense that they show a bias, but i don't think that the joke is demeaning to women.
I'm sure it makes you feel good, Mr Ultra Feminist, but you're not advancing "your" cause whatsoever by trying to guilt people - and with such weak, whiny examples, too.
You just make women look weak and whiny. (And, by extension, yourself, since you're not even a woman.)
That's unproductive and leads to - guess what! - women being not taken seriously, and being avoided because well-meaning men will assume everything they say will cause offense, and women not getting hired or picked because they make everyone else uncomfortable.
Isn't that ironic?
You also treat all women the same when you presume to speak for them. That's just more plain old sexism dressed up in a suit of righteousness.
I hate people grouping me with all other breast-and-vagina people, and assuming I like them, and agree with them, and share their agenda... and support them speaking on my behalf, as if we are all alike.
If you want to create change, you have to stop whining, stop laying blame, stop pointing fingers and saying "YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE WHEN THEY CALL OBJECTS 'GUYS'!!!!" and do useful, productive things. This is not it.
For what it's worth, men in IT are more likeable than women, because when men fail, they don't blame it on other people's oppression of them due to their sexual equipment.
The "extreme male brain" is overrepresented in programming, and programming tools are made by the people in programming.
But those "male-oriented" languages would be better describe as "extreme male brain-oriented" because it's more common in men but not exclusively a male trait. I have met women just like that, too, and there are tests that place you on a gender scale (for lack of a better way to put it), based on your cognitive style. (I test as more male than female in my own cognitive style, for example.)
So these "extreme male brain-oriented" languages don't really exclude anyone, but they may not feel comfortable or natural. And I wouldn't say they are unnatural for women, but unnatural for anyone with a more "typical female brain" cognitive style -- including some women of course, and lots of men who happen to have different cognitive styles, including designers, linguists, architects, teachers, musicians, etc.
I think Ruby is an anti-example of this assertion. So is HyperCard, AppleScript (to some degree), Logo, and Ethan, and there are others.
Of course, it's entirely ridiculous to say that the fact that languages are "extreme male brain-oriented" is some kind of oppressive conspiracy.
People who have to make their own tools, make them to suit themselves.
You (and many others) are making an assertion about the intent of the list. Why do you assume that this is guilt tripping? Are they calling out this behavior to blame someone? Why isn't the assumption simply that they want particular behavior to cease, regardless of what the cause is?
So i want one of two things for people accusing this of being a pointless exercise in flagellation.
1) If there are valid issues in the list that should be addressed (and i would assert that there are), how should the information be communicated in a way that doesn't raise hackles (but still gets the point across).
2) If you don't think that the contents of this list should be raise, how does one raise and preserve awareness of the gender disparity in the programming world, and that there are problems that arise because of it (at least with some segment of our community)?
Additionally, there are other sardonic lists of things particular programmers hate (that questionably characterize their subject matter). Why is this one causing everyone to get their mad on?
* laying it out as List Of Privileges People With Penises Have And Don't Realize They Have, and posting it on "news" sites dominated by young men, or...
* keeping the list to yourself, and doing something about it?
Everything I know about being powerful, and being effective, says "For the love of god, take door #2."
Weak people lay out all their cards and say, "Fix it for me" and "Let's have a discussion." Strong people work behind the scenes and fix things so nobody even knew they were broken to begin with.
The bonus of the "strong and silent" choice is that it doesn't lead to these stupid kind of tail-chasing, bitchy, whiny, finger-pointy, divisive "discussions." It just creates... change.
Also, to say that the tech industry is a community - it is to laugh.