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Comment by imaginenore | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. Look, boilermakers are 99.8% male. You never ever hear feminists complaining about that.

https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/chal...

Yes you do.

This point has come up on HN so many times that anyone continuing to repeat it is at best willfully ignorant, but probably deceitful.

A simple websearch [boilermaker women] shows you're wrong with plenty of sites calling for more female boilermalers.

You hear a lot less about calls for more males into nursing or primary teaching (lower paid generally than male dominated professions, like engineering).

False.

You hear a lot less anout it because you don't read any nursing or teaching magazines or blogs or message boards.

This is now a great dogwhistle -- anyone saying things similar is clearly dishonest.

I hear a lot less of it, not only on HN but on general newspapers and sources that are not focused on tech. Does that make the point more valid to you?

Maybe they do now after it was pointed out. Take the bottom 20 positions from that list and see how many of them feminists talk about. It's pretty much non existent.

You've missed the point. Women WANT to do SME. They are spending years at university, going through the lower stages of employment, making it to a certain point and then leaving the industry.

And bringing up the straw man of "feminists" hardly adds to the conversation.

Ok, so they are leaving. It's their decision.

Many people get into programming for the money only to discover it's actually harder than it seems. Most people don't realize you have to keep learning just to stay relevant in IT. How many professions require that?

I'm yet to see any evidence that women leave IT because they are harassed on a mass scale.

I recommend reading this (or at least pages 4-6 if you're in a rush) and the footnoted sources:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1soIYek-YEIvqtu9brv3ecdPb...

Your own link says "The main reason women give is dissatisfaction with their pay and promotional opportunities".

So it's not harassment.

So basically they leave for the same reasons men leave.

I've never been promoted, ever. I got a salary raise once, I think. I increased my pay by switching jobs, just like 95% of the IT people out there.

They don't need to be harassed for them to feel like the environment is hostile, or, at the very least, unwelcoming.

I sometimes think men and women need to be careful for what they wish for. Right now Programming is portrayed glamorous. People saw the Social network and said wow that's cool. They hear about how fun and stimulating it is to get the opportunity to work at Google. They hear about college dropouts making billions.

That all might be somewhat true now, but will change. I don't see unions making any headway into the industry, and when the bubble bursts--why do I have a feeling the industry will go back to people staring into monitors, complaining about pay--long hours, vitamin D deficiency, and Coding will go back to Programming?

(I hope this doesn't happen. I have met too many homeless former programmers that were hot in the 80's-90's)

http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/07/myths-women-non-traditio...

Saying 'strength in a social construct' as that article does shows a massive ignorance of strength and is an insult to female strength athletes who work much harder than men for gains.

Anyone claiming that strength is a social construct is either disingenuous or using a different definition of the word.

In terms of physical strength, there are obvious and clear differences between men and women: http://www.powerliftingwatch.com/records

I am not a boilermaker. I work in technology, and I can actually do things to fix this. So can you.

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