Heh, Louden's book? Still got it here somewhere. For an hour of nostalgic fun and an excuse to burn a Bass Ale while your wife watches DWTS, take a look at the 1130 emulator at http://ibm1130.org/sim
Another epic HN failure was confusing an obviously single word substitution issue like using the word wife instead of spouse as if it changes anything in the discussion other than the political correctness level, with actual intentional hate speech. You have to prioritize your problems and this is like "cut yourself shaving and also have a broken leg" one should be prioritized above the other.
Something never discussed about sexism in tech, at least on HN, is its an almost purely coastie "brogrammer" phenomena. I am not part of the apparently locally dominant dirtbag coastie culture, so I literally do not understand how it perpetuates itself. To explain myself, locally, behavior that is rewarded tends to be repeated and behavior that is punished tends to be suppressed, and simultaneously a highly effective way for a guy to make sure all females will never be in contact with any of his precious bodily fluids is to go all "make me a sandwich" on any other female. Even a false accusation is fairly effective at enforcing celibacy. So I'm fairly mystified why this problem perpetuates. Like are all men on the coasts 40 year old virgins or gay, so they don't care about lack of "fun time" with women, or perhaps the women on the coasts refuse to stand up for each other and this is the inevitable result, or maybe secretly most women really love that kind of treatment and its only a small vocal minority who complain (although I find this last theory unlikely)
The only real problem seems to be the lack of tech jobs in the midwest. Tech women, if you want to be treated with respect as human beings by professional gentlemen, move to where the gentlemen are if you want things to change. I'm off the market, but speaking for the local single gentlemen, I'm sure they'd greatly enjoy your presence here, unless you really secretly like how the brogrammers are treating you...
And, yeah, the concept of a gentleman was, and I think still is, very much in play. However much feminists complain about it, it sure seems to result in women getting treated a whole lot better. And at least where I came from, there was enough Midwestern and Western pragmatism that female ability in things you might typically think as male was not such a big thing, or threatening. E.g by some distance the best shot on my high school rifle team was a girl, an old friend from kindergarten. The rest of us were boys, and her example (not to mention help) pushed us to strive harder vs. tear her down. Maybe it was in part the genre (yeah, right, harasses the school's best shot???), but I read all this high school harassment stuff of the demean the woman type and wonder if it swept the nation later, or is in part a regional phenomena.
Given that, I would not be entirely surprised if the root cause of some anti-woman brogrammer behavior could be statistically highly correlated with one anatomical part being unusually small. Aka if the girls are going to laugh at him anyway, may as well pre-emptively strike against them first, not much to lose. Although why this behavior is seen more on the coasts than the midwest and the other civilized areas, is still unclear under this theory. We may simply grow 'em larger here thus less root cause for the anti-social behavior. I do not have enough observational data, and frankly I've gathered it all inadvertently rather than intentionally. A suitably geo-located chatroulette image analysis program might help. Although a theory that seems to "explain it all" is highly appealing, it none the less may or may not be proven out by actual statistical research. I would assume some sociologist with a ruler could probably figure it out for us, along with a questionnaire about brogrammers opinions about their physical self image (in other words they may not actually be shrunken mutants, but inaccurately think they are...). I don't think population migration necessarily disproves this theory; consider if hormone contamination in the water causes shrinkage or perhaps some other environmental toxins; the coasts certainly have plenty of environmental toxins compared to other areas.
Initially my response was much longer and included a discussion about female-female partnerships. In the end I cut it right back, because as far as I know "wife" is always a term used for a spouse who identifies as female.
You're part of the problem.
First of all, you need to go do some remedial math. The percentage of DWTS watchers who are women is no predictor of what women do. This fallacy is called confusion of the inverse, and it's a probabilistic variant of the better-known converse error.
Second, even if 99% of women were to be DWTS fans, it has no bearing on anigbrowl's comment. The reason that "while your wife watches DWTS" is part of the problem (as anigbrowl identified) is that it implies that (watching DWTS) is to women as (checking out 1130 sims) is to men. It implies that in situations where men do interesting tech things, women watch TV (I assume "DWTS" is some kind of TV?). It's basically a put-down against women collectively. Note that if someone were to be putting down humanity collectively, I wouldn't complain.
Third, "politically correct" is a label principally used by reactionary dullards to dismiss arguments or objections that they see as excessively leftist. It's equivalent to calling someone a commie. Mind you, some people are communists, some people are knee-jerk excessive leftists, etc... but if that's true in a particular situation, you can just explain why it's true. Calling it "political correctness" is just a lowbrow dismissal.
That's a lot of incorrectness for one 20-word sentence.
Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive.
Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse. Of course they would react unkindly to being called out on it but I would advise you not to take their defensive lashing out at face value.
In response to the second, I don't understand your point at all. Help me out here?
As to the third, I agree that there certainly exist some fools, most of them white and liberal (and maybe prigs?), who have a mental pattern wherein they make knee-jerk complaints about certain behaviour being offensive, without having a well-considered ethical system that justifies this complaint, instead using these complaints to signal their belonging to a certain social clique. If that's what you mean by political correctness, I agree that it exists, and is odious. Whether or not such fools object to your remarks should be entirely beneath you, however. So raising the potential political incorrectness of your remark appears, to me, to be saying "I'm going to use this straw-man argument to attack those who disagree with me". And this is why I brought up the fact that it's a lowbrow dismissal, and suggested that on those rare occasions when the label does fit, you can instead construct an independent explanation of what's wrong with the political correctness.
Second point was pretty easy to understand - if a household has 2 adults and 1 TV, only one Adult at a time can watch their preferred TV shows. If there is a second TV, possibly more, the Adults stand a fair chance that they will be able to watch their shows.
Okay, fair enough, understood, and I'll direct my response to my disagreement about the math of it.
Why would it matter that 2/3 of DWTS viewers are female? Suppose that I publish a fanzine called "jh's dumb stuff", for which 100% of the readers are female (that's right, my mom is the only reader). Would it make sense to say "you can look at this awesome thing while your wife reads 'jh's dumb stuff'"? No.
The relevance, here, is that original oafish-seeming comment was "while your wife watches DWTS", which appears to imply that it's typical for wives to do that. And, based on the stats I could find, it is NOT typical for wives to do that. Over 90% of American women do not watch the show, right?
Mathematically, the fact that 2/3 of DWTS viewers are female is just not relevant.
Also, I didn't call you a reactionary dullard. I see that your literacy is as poor as your numeracy. What I said was that such was the principle use of referencing political correctness, and advised that you could do better yourself. If I was sure, at that time, that you were a dullard, I wouldn't have bothered getting into it.
So it wasn't, at that time, a lowbrow dismissal. By now, you're getting a dismissal. I guess that the collective audience can judge for themselves whether it's lowbrow or not.
I didn't say that you did.
If you've defined it that way, of course that'll be how you see it and nobody will shake your conviction. This makes conversations with you on the topic as dull as someone who doesn't grasp enough statistics to understand trivial errors, but so be it.
The rest of the world has a more nuanced take on it, which begins with the idea that being rude to people who lack relative power in a given situation is still morally wrong and tactically quite stupid.
I happen to enjoy watching the same shows and movies my wife watches on TV, and I somehow assumed it was true of the majority of couples.
Indeed so, but it doesn't follow that they are watching it instead of writing code, which implication was what I objected to in the first place; although it wasn't malicious, it was a lazy piece of stereotyping that I didn't feel was appropriate in the context of a discussion about sexist stereotyping.
Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time.
???
Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse.
Oh noes, you have outed me! I shrivel up in the face of your freethinking ways. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
(Actually I don't know hga's gender, but wow - I have never seen an example of gender stereotyping as explicit as that on HN, and in a discussion about sexism in programming too. I'm really hoping your comment was supposed to be ironic)
does gender stereotyping manifests an intellectual failure on the part of the one expressing the stereotypes? If yes, does such intellectual failure is localized, say to the area of percepting and understanding gender relations in the industry, or is it a system-wide failure of the intellect of the stereotyping (i.e. something like a habit/instinct of using stereotypes)?
I can't remember if there were any women in that high school class, but there were in the summer programs I took after it, and as far as I can remember they didn't get treated any differently than the men. Of course, back then, computers, especially serious ones, were scarce and getting lots of time on them wasn't trivial. I also wasn't the sort of person who would put up with harassment or bullying in my presence, nor were the instructors, but as I recall it was never a problem (all the local stuff was in the cultural South...).
Long before the zero-tolerance bullshit, so my entirely serious threats of disproportionate including sometimes lethal force were taken as "don't do that crazy thing" vs. I was the problem for objecting. E.g. after the incident that went the furthest, to my drawing live steel in college, a counselor did pull me aside to make sure I wasn't the type to do that except when needed to prevent a felony. I gather a very different time, no cell phones and therefore no helicopter parenting, unsupervised play outdoors with a very few rules, the high school rifle teams used .22LR firearms instead of air guns, etc. etc. etc.
This was all new, neat stuff and perhaps we were having too much fun exploring and learning it, and helping each other (I did a lot of the latter, including joining the college computer "club" for which that was our mission). There was no doubt serious self-selection, including it being long before to the "do this for lots of money" concept and the pathologies that brings. And it sure sounds like my college bound peers and I were a lot more polite that the sort of things I'm hearing from more recently (I don't think "make me a sandwich" was even in the lexicon, one source I just found dates it from nearly two decades later). It was certainly a while before serious pushback to feminism inevitably developed in the communities I was in, the ethos was "women are good", not yet "and men are bad".