Women in Tech: I can learn more. And so can you | Hacker News Reader

Women in Tech: I can learn more. And so can you

blog.fogus.me

28 pointsbfe22 comments

This was a short post, but it was a good reading list.

I'm always in a strange spot with these posts, because I don't so much disagree as take a completely different angle. Any discussion of the relative scarcity of women in science needs to consider the risks of a career in science.

I wish Phil Greenspun's infamous "women in science" article were a little less caustic, because it really does provide a pretty remarkable explanation about why women in particular, but people in general, might want to avoid science as a career.

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

A less provocative but very data-driven study by the RAND institute found that the American aversion to science careers (at the PhD level) is rational and market driven.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html

The whole thing is very complicated. A career as a research scientist is very different from trying to start a tech company, so we're talking about a very wide range of issues.

I also want to make it clear that "science is a terrible career" doesn't mean we shouldn't worry about the scarcity of women. It's one thing to claim sour grapes for yourself, it's another thing entirely to tell someone else not to worry because the grapes are sour.

However, I do think the general context is meaningful - that any discussion of women in science need to include the possibility that science is a poor career choice compared to other options available to highly intelligent, academically motivated, hard working people, men and women.

I actually think that if your focus is PhD/academic research positions, you're not so much taking a different angle as having a different conversation. The attractiveness of a post-doc in biology is barely relevant at all to the attraction of a dev job at Google or a Silicon Valley startup, for instance. And I might be biased because I am a professional developer, but that's the context I've always thought of for these conversations.

That lack of room for bias is a reasonable intuition, but at least one straightforward experiment contradicts it:

"In a randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student — who was randomly assigned either a male or female name — for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant."

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109

Graphs summarizing the results are here:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/09/19/...

I'm sorry? I don't know if you meant to reply to my comment. When I said 'I might be biased', I meant 'towards talking about professional programmers over academics'.

Another post that will get cut down within the hour. Hopefully a post of this quality from from fogus disappearing will help convince some that this really is an issue.

I'm not holding my breath though. On the topic of women, Hacker News is a depressingly conventional community.

[EDIT: true to expectations, this comment got downvoted. Better find another community that actually values a frank discussion about real problems in our society.]

I don't know, this title makes it sound like it's telling women what to do, so it should get a few HN upvotes on that basis alone.

That title paraphrasing is... unfortunate.

I initially thought so too but then I realized that this person is actually being sarcastic.

Great post from Fogus, but the post he responded to was just wow. That author has simply painted herself as a liability. I don't care how good a developer is, male or female, if they have an attitude like that they are not someone I would ever hire. I also can't imagine how someone so full of rage would be able to control themselves to prevent that attitude from leaking out into their general day-to-day behavior.

People who want to work in tech, being helped and being able to work in tech, regardless of gender, religion, social demographic, accent, body size, colour, shoe size? Fantastic. I am all for that.

From experience, the last thing most women in tech actually need or want is feminist dogma.

This. I worked hard for my place in the team. My boss and I are the two women in our small close-knit team, and we recently had trouble with another women who joined and started causing a lot of 'equality' noise and troubles. She did all this despite it being the most meritocratic place I have worked.

I really can't stand feminism. I'm all for women learning to program, though. In fact, I put more support in women learning than men. We do need more women programming. Feminism though, no.

I didn't understand this for a long time, but the best way to approach the texts is not as a debate where you have to critically analyze the positions and pick a side. You literally don't have to agree with a single assertion they make. Just let them sit in your head as: this person had this experience, and this is how they interpreted it. Eventually you will build a very complex and self-contradictory map. You will find people who call themselves "feminists" on every side of each argument.

Such a confusing mess seems counter-productive if you're trying to objectively solve a puzzle. But it will benefit you immensely in terms of experience and empathy. You can still disagree with people, just don't dismiss them.

From what I've gathered while researching this blog post, the term feminism has as many facets and internal conflicts as any other system of thought. It seems unfair to dismiss "feminism" as a whole.

What, exactly, do you think feminism is?

I clicked on this link: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/the-brog... and I honestly think it's awful. Calling programmers "brogrammers" is a sexist label to begin with. More is explained in the comments. This is not an attitude that helps anybody.

Regardless, maybe it simply doesn't have an explanation. You see, humans (and yes, women are humans) have herd mentality. And just like we get financial bubbles, maybe we get gender bubbles, with different genders doing different jobs. There is no "why", just like there is no why you rolled 1 on dice.

In the book Butterfly Economics, there is a famous experiment described. You have an anthill, and you place 2 heaps of food at the same distance from it. The ants normally leave pheromone trail, and basically decide where to go partly based on the trail (that is, decisions made by other ants) and partly independently of it. What happens?

Intuition would suggest that ants will divide 50/50 between the two food heaps, or very close to that. However, in the real world, the ratio of ants taking the food will fluctuate wildly, with up to 80/20 ants going to one heap. Then it may swing the other direction, and so on.

in the context of that given blog it seems that feminism is anti-thetical stereotype to the stereotype of all the bad stuff the blog attributes to "white men"

Probably the same thing as you(equality). But what it is or is supposed to be isn't my issue. My issue is the outcome.

And that outcome is?

Degradation of society as a whole.

That's a very strong statement. Without a more detailed and eloquent defense, I'll have a hard time taking you seriously.

In fact, I put more support in women learning than men.

Absolutely. Damn those privileged Black and Hispanic men in tech!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com