I code like a girl
volumelabs.net
volumelabs.net
Once? It's naive to think that these attitudes do not persist, albeit in somewhat disguised forms, perhaps.
At some universities, for instance, engineers regard CS majors as "wimps". Engineering is hard, CS is soft.
Moreover, think about how there is an attitude that some "softer" or "easier" programming is lower on the pecking order. While programming as a broad category may not be "women's work", web design (even with client and server scripting) is "for girls" and, say, writing drivers for a network switch is for "real men".
Oh, the hard/soft stereotyping in digital tech is alive and kicking!
What do they think about electrical engineers? Circuit board sewers...?
The general opinion was:
ME was harder than CS.
Math majors were unlikely to get a job.
Electrical and Chemical engineering were harder than ME (especially chemical)
Civil engineering was a joke. (Probably because our statics and mechanics of materials classes were so easy in comparison with ME classes).
These aren't my opinions just some observations of general opinions of undergrads.
Social construction of gender will seep into dynamics at any point where something can be argued as "weaker" than another thing.
The vast majority of the recruiter spam I get, as a female, is front end web development or UI/UX work. I removed all mention of "HTML/CSS" type skills from LinkedIn, but that hasn't stopped it. I'm beginning to suspect that removing my photo from public profiles would probably do more to stop the inappropriate job spam than anything I could actually change in LinkedIn, however...
I'm transgender, and I can tell you that I got that kind of spam both before and after I transitioned. In fact, most recruiter spam I've ever gotten is wholly irrelevant to my skills.
You're getting that spam because the positions are in high demand, so there are a lot of them, and recruiters will spam all their positions to every single email address in their database.
They just plain have no respect for other human beings. Half the recruiter spam I get uses my old name, even though I legally changed it almost a year ago and changed it on my resume (which I posted to all job sites) a few months before that. I also list on every job site that I cannot relocate and I'm only seeking full-time work. Most of the recruiter spam I get is for positions out of town and for contract jobs. They never get it. I've written scathing emails to recruiters lambasting them for suggesting I uproot my life and move out of state for a shitty 6-month contract. I usually don't get a reply.
One recruiter took the cake. He emailed me about one such position, then called me the next day after I ignored his email, and I told him I wasn't interested in any contract work and that I don't ever want to do business with him. A few days later, he emails me again about the same position. I replied with a Cease & Desist notice making it clear that he is to have no contact with me from now on, and then he calls me again to try and convince me to take the job. I spent the next few minutes shouting at him and berating him for harassment. I planned to contact his firm's HR department about his conduct, but I never got around to it, sadly.
I might have to go back to front end work if that's really the hot thing everyone's clamoring for these days... (kidding! I love what I'm doing right now).
It's always interesting to hear about transgendered experiences in the sciences and programming. We need more points of view with control groups! ;)
Crazy thought I know.
My whole point was that that situation is bad, and hearing experiences such as ones from MTF or FTM transgendered individuals in tech can be valuable. I don't see any reason for you to be a jerk about it here.
The blame lies squarely with you.
I see a few reasons for this (at least where I went to university).
First, CS required less math classes. Harder than most sciences, but still not as much as the default for engineers. There was a correlation between who math a STE major required and how hard it was viewed. Psychology which didn't require calculus and had a watered down stats course was considered the weakest. Physics and Engineering was at the top.
Second, professors in engineering were far less forgiving (I took a few classes). They were stricter and while their work wasn't harder, they were far more likely to just give a 0 for doing something wrong. Also their tests had more chain problems (answer to question 1 is input to question 2), and every one I had always insisted you had to have the right answer (so if you had the right answer to question 2 using the wrong answer from question 1, you got a 0).
Third, there were easy computer degrees. Name a degree in Information Management, while not CS, was often associated and it did not require the most complex CS classes. There were not easy engineering degrees.
Specifically, programming itself was often considered secretarial work and, as such, was generally given to women.
Men tended to participate as engineers or mathematicians.
I don't think anyone would contend that CS is a female-dominated field although I take your point that some may consider it somewhat lower on the testosterone chart than traditional engineering.
Then I stop smiling and remind myself that, even in praise, it's not relevant.
And you know what - on an aggregate, societal level - it might actually be: men and women are not the same, and that's OK. But this is a statistical observation that only applies to the population as a whole and is completely invalid at the individual level. If you feel yourself reaching for this knowledge at that level then evidently you don't have enough good information about the individual in front of you - that is the problem you need to fix.
If we took away all the contextual stuff we know about our founding mothers and fathers and referred to them only with asexual codenames like 'Person X', absolutely nothing would change. If one's aim is achieving equality, the only way to truly do that is to strip away all the bullshit: gender - just like hair colour, accent, and anything else you care to name - shouldn't even register. It's a non-thought.
If that's what feminism is about then I'm a feminist; but I'd never actually call myself that because 90% of the feminism I see today is most definitely not like this, it seems instead to be about making gender register in a very big way - and that's just as misguided and self-destructive as misogyny.
http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/women-arent-welcome...
> According to a 2005 report by the Pew Research Center, which has been tracking the online lives of Americans for more than a decade, women and men have been logging on in equal numbers since 2000, but the vilest communications are still disproportionately lobbed at women. We are more likely to report being stalked and harassed on the Internet—of the 3,787 people who reported harassing incidents from 2000 to 2012 to the volunteer organization Working to Halt Online Abuse, 72.5 percent were female. Sometimes, the abuse can get physical: A Pew survey reported that five percent of women who used the Internet said “something happened online” that led them into “physical danger.” And it starts young: Teenage girls are significantly more likely to be cyberbullied than boys. Just appearing as a woman online, it seems, can be enough to inspire abuse. In 2006, researchers from the University of Maryland set up a bunch of fake online accounts and then dispatched them into chat rooms.
> Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7.
http://time.com/3305466/male-female-harassment-online/
> [W]omen’s harassment is more likely to be gender-based and that has specific, discriminatory harms rooted in our history. The study pointed out that the harassment targeted at men is not because they are men, as is clearly more frequently the case with women. It’s defining because a lot of harassment is an effort to put women, because they are women, back in their “place.”
Remembering some of these women, and the early history like this, is very relevant today to show that that's nonsense.
Modern women are statisticaly less interested in programming. That's because boys 20 years ago got c-64 or PC because they wanted to play games, and girls 20 years ago got barbies.
Turns out barbie doesn't have the same side effects.
Ex communist countries worked differently.
That's what most of games were about in 8bit and 16bit times, so boys were interested in them more than girls (because of natural inclination and social norms), so there's more boys than girsl in IT right now.
This will change because there's more gaming girls now, and there are other reasons to have computer.
Natural inclination is unnecessary to the story. The burden of proof is on you to prove that it exists in the first place.
> Testosterone-related differences in aggression in the non-delinquent sample were studied as well. None were statistically significant. The only difference manifested was that adolescents with higher testosterone were more likely to respond more vigorously in response to challenges from teachers and peers. The vigorous response finding is consistent with our assertion that testosterone is linked with aggression only when it is part of dominance behavior.
> Using measures that incorporated self, peer and teacher ratings, Tremblay and his colleagues discovered that testosterone levels at the start of puberty were linked to social dominance a year later but not to physical aggression. Dominance was not related to current aggression or aggression over the previous three years. On the other hand, body mass was a predictor of physical
> Although research provides considerable evidence that testosterone is associated with dominant behavior, correlation does not prove causation. If the administration of testosterone was followed by an increase in dominant behavior, we would have a stronger case for asserting a causal relationship. Two experiments support the idea that the link is causal. In one study with a double-blind, randomized, crossover design, young men were given doses of testosterone or a placebo. Subjects were paired with a fictitious subject and told that each member of the pair could, by pushing a button, reduce the cash flowing to the other member. The subject was told that the other individual was reducing the cash that was flowing to the subject. Subjects receiving testosterone rather than the placebo pushed the button significantly more times (Kouri, Lukas, Pope and Oliva 1995). A second study with the same design was conducted with men aged 20 to 50 years (Pope, Kouri and Hudson 2000). This time testosterone was administered over a six-week period. Subjects participated in the same experiment. Results indicated that those who had had the treatment pushed the button many more times. These studies put us in a much stronger position to claim that testosterone stimulates dominant behavior.
That's just one study, but there are a lot more.
And, using common sense, how many cultures do you know, where women play team sports, and men don't? Where girl play war and boys play home?
I'm all for allowing to ignore social roles, I'm not good example of stereotypical men myself, but let's not ignore evidence that's all around us. It would be enormously unlikely, that biological differences between sexes, and behavior differences were just accident.
Of course social influences have big part, but they don't explain everything.
And there's a reason that men made games, and women didn't, when both were present at first in programming. I doubt it's just because of social reasons.
Though while this might be large enough to be considered statistically relevant, nothing I've seen suggests a natural bias strong enough to account for more than a fraction of the mis-balance we see in later life in the science & technology arenas, so social pressure (even "accidental" pressure due to, as you suggest, the "toys" parents and other family buy), both at a young age and as kids progress through school, are presumably the larger factors by quite some margin.
There are natural gender biases, mental as well as physical, that are not caused by external cultural pressure, and to completely disregard that would be a mistake. But I think (caveat: going by my experiences here rather than any scientific study) in most cases that the difference between the average man and the average woman is smaller than the range of differences within each gender (so if you consider only the bulk of the population it might be valid to consider us identical overall).
Research is of varying quality. We see some terrible research comin from actual professors in real universities. Here's one example of someone at a prestigious institution who has anti-science viewpoint: http://wjh.harvard.edu/~jmitchel/writing/failed_science.htm
So, when companies like Mattel (or whoever) do research into the colour pink and girl's toys we should probably be a bit wary about the conclusions they draw, especially when they don't release the full data.
I interviewed at a company a week or so ago and was very happy to see their lead developer was a woman. I didn't dare bring up the topic in the interview, but I'd have loved to hear if she was aiming for CTO at a later point in her career instead of escaping tech work.
The shame of it is, almost any dev team I've been on is better with at least one capable woman on it, yet so few stay.
Also those where the days of playing video games on home computers. Professional IT work was decades later.
And boys weren't the gate keeper to the technology either - how should that have worked? Today as then, if you are interested in doing stuff with computers, nobody can prevent you from doing it.
No many women don't like being hit on constantly by people. That's not the same thing as "not liking nerds".
My claim was that nerds back in the days of home computers would have been happy to meet a girl interested in computers. That is a far stretch from the Beavies and Butthead scenario you are trying to create. It's simply normal and healthy to hope for other human beings to share some interests with you.
Nerdy boys largely get ignored by their non-nerdy peers. There's an attitude of "I don't know why anybody would like that, but whatever".
On the other hand, nerdy girls are treated like absolute shit by other girls. Instead of "not my cup of tea", it's more like "eww, that's disgusting, and you're disgusting for liking it". The movie Mean Girls could have been a documentary.
And adults can influence this too. Even well-meaning feminists are more likely to steer young girls towards careers in more "acceptable" professions like business, law, or medicine rather than something down-and-dirty like engineering. And if science is involved, it's likely to be either medicine or a research career in natural sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry).
Mean Girls was actually based on a book on helping your teenage daughter survive bullying in school ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Bees_and_Wannabes )...
It's been my observation that the bulk of female programmers aren't hobbyists and just program because it's a job and it pays well enough. When they go home, they don't think about code.
There are exceptions (hell, I'm one of them, and I personally know a couple others), but in general, female hackers are much rarer than female programmers.
I'm not sure if it's proportionate to guys or not. There are plenty of male programmers who aren't hobbyists either (think of the legions of VB drones in the '90s). I don't know if the just-another-job to hobbyist ratio is just more noticable with girls because there are fewer of us in general or if the percentages are actually different.
* Lynn Conway, who co-launched the Mead & Conway revolution that made VLSI feasible for the first time
* Sophie Wilson, who developed the ARM architecture
Sophie Wilson was "born Roger Wilson" (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson).
"While struggling with life in a male role, Conway had been married to a woman and had two children." (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway)
"Hey, class full of young women with university aspirations! Don't be put off from entering science and engineering fields. Look, there are even famous women in tech such as X, Y and Z which are behind some technology that you probably use, like the instruction language understood by the chips in most tablets and cell phones. Oh, they were born men and even had wives and kids, but don't let details like Y chromosomes and functioning penises be a distraction from this forcefully convincing rhetoric which I painstakingly prepared last night in my hotel room, on the backs of these two crumpled restaurant receipts. I'm confident that you can identify with them as human beings with struggles in their lives---just like you!"
My point is that certain kinds of examples can detract from a thesis, by drawing focus to some other thesis or factors that may be perceived as confounding or whatever.
Sidenote: Disclaimer: I was heavily influenced by my Biology professors. I don't think society evolved in vacuum separate from genetic evolution. So while I don't appreciate insulting people by gender. I do however think there are gender differences.
Another person on HN linked me to this documentary, which opened my mind. https://vimeo.com/19707588
Because we put our heart in it - so we code like amateurs. The best professionals are amateurs who just happen to be paid.
I dunno, this feels off. Did I misunderstand the analogy ?
My heart says I should spend the next ten weeks optimizing this interesting function that gets called once a year, because all higher priority tasks look like boring grunt work.
I like your definition - it puts authenticity in caring for one's partner at the center of the professional relation... First time in a long time that I read "professional" and it does not ring empty !
Yes, that is the etymology of the word 'amateur' : 1784, "one who has a taste for (something)," from French amateur "lover of," from Latin amatorem (nominative amator) "lover," agent noun from amatus, past participle of amare "to love" - http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=amateur
Later this word has been used derogatorily, but it is not its original meaning. When people use 'amateur' derogatorily, I believe that 'dilettante' is the more accurate word.
What does that mean? Suit and tie? Clean shaven, short back and sides?
Ex.I might expect a professional python programmer to follow PEP8 code style.
I think rather than coding like boy or coding like girl, we should be aspiring to be professional or at least competent . That's the far bigger and inclusive problem.
That would pretty much mean the death of almost every open source project that depends on unpaid amateurs.
However as I'm usually short on time, I'd prefer to just read the scientific articles for myself.
Do you have any notable scientific articles from the book references to recommend ?
Its also why I avoid books like outliers by malcolm gladwell.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll probably check it out eventually.
What does this even mean really? That they did a bunch of research and instead of writing numerous papers wrong a single book? Does it give a detailed explanation of each experiment enough so that they can be repeated? Or is it like those pop-sci books that take a few specifically picked studies, a lot of anecdotes, and a few 'expert' interviews and try to get the average reader convinced on a point (which may or may not be correct)?
Most human beings need protection and help. Programming is hard. Learning to program is hard. Leaving happily in these crazy times is hard.
Just be empathetic, dont be condescending and bam, your help will be greatly appreciated by men and women. That's what I think one should treat anyone else in this particular regard.
> Get your head checked. Is this the kind of treatment you were talking about? :D
I'm in the military and there are only a few women I know who would hold their own in a fight against a similarly fit man. I can think of maybe 1 off the top of my head.
Years of evolution made us this way, it can't just be undone by an egalitarian sentiment.
Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Because of this, she is often described as the world's first computer programmer.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_number#History
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#Compu...
Given that, as someone has already mentioned in the comments, there are people that hold the view that women are always at least second best to a man in regards to ability in computing because they are female, the fact that the first 'programmer' did so without documentation on a machine that existed in theory was a woman is very much central to the subject.
> "Software design and programming were considered clerical work."
But it seems to me that the vast amount of code written is still, in fact, "clerical work". Whether it's gluing together enterpriseBeanBuilderExpressionListMochaBusinessLogicAuditingFactories, or hooking up your node.js to your express.js to your bootstrap.js to transfer JSON over REST into your DOM, or even converting your 4000 character, 50 pipe bash one-liners into nicely polished scripts that properly account for exit codes, handle non-standard locations for sysfs, and work on a multitude of platforms, at the end of the day, a lot of this really does come down to clerical-style work. The difference is that the language, terminology, abstractions, and platforms are more obtuse than the previous generation's clerical work. The nouns are different and strange, but the predicates are all the same.
There are indeed wondrous areas in computer science and software engineering, but I think for most of us, we're just doing fairly menial work. We feel smart doing it, because it's still new enough that the objects and content of it are still uncustomary for most folks, and in fact the best of secretaries and clerks have indeed possessed great intelligence. But at the end of the day, we need to recognize that most of what we do is mere clerical work, glorified only by the odd shapes of the more obscure symbol keys on our keyboards.
ducks
"I swear, by clerical, I meant the clergy!"
ducks again
And this is actually what you don't want to do. You don't want to ignore gender, age, race, or creed. You want people to understand it, be open to the value it brings, connect with others outside their comfort zone, and embrace the differences. Doing things 'regardless' is how we've got here in the first place. We are all different. Ignoring those differences is not helping the problem.
Given that anyone with even a basic understanding of history would be awed by some of the women in the industry (ada and grace anyone), you would have to pretty stupid to come to the conclusion that women cant code.
Recently, there has been an effort to "take the phrase back" and turn "... like a girl" into a good thing - instead of being considered an insult - Like the commercials that tout "Running like a girl".
I've never heard "coding... like a girl" either, so you have to frame it as part of this movement.
Y'know how some film might have "hackers trying to break the FBI's firewall key"? And we all laugh because those film makers are so stupid about technology? Or how a newspaper will tell you how magnets and cabbage will cure your brain age?
Find some forums for historians[1], and you'll see historians laugh at how bad common understanding of history is.
Many people don't have an understand of basic history.
[1] e.g. http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/
Who gets the credit for e.g. iPhone? Chinese workers? That person who was tweaking the icons to look pixel-perfect (pre-iOS7)? CEO?
If as the article says the ENIAC news reports were along the lines of 'here is a machine that can calculate trajectories, and these are the men who designed it', who's to know that maybe half of the effort was undertaken by others not mentioned?
I don't know squat about CSS or how to fix this for real, but I've bumbled around enough to be able to override this crap when it makes an article physically uncomfortable to read.
it's funny how grown women are referred to as girls, yet it's less common that grown men are referred to as boys - in my experience.
Just my penny.
those _are_ boys.
I'll gladly refer to myself as a girl, but I only ever use "woman" in formal contexts.
anecdotally my girlfriend (Russian if that makes any difference) absolutely hates when I refer to her as a young woman, or use the word "woman" at all. She much prefers to be referred to as a girl.
I have no issues with being called a man.. not saying that this pattern is everywhere but it's very apparent with her and her family.
No critical thought here is necessary, I suppose? It just... so happens that women "like" to look youthful? Maybe it's biological? Just the natural order of things? I am reminded of the ads from the National Geographic I own from 1940.
But indeed, perhaps this is outlier behaviour and others pay less attention. I suppose it's a tic i have because i'm in such a masculine-dominated field -- i try not to make it worse by talking as if i expect everyone to have XY chromosomes.
Disclaimer: i have a penis.
In other ways, to be a boy is to be like a girl, as in "the hardships in this remote camp separate the men from the boys" (i.e. the hardy and able from the weak and effeminate).
"Woman" is stuffy and formal, and it makes me feel old. When I hear the word "woman", I think either Hillary Clinton or somebody's grandma, neither of which I have any desire to be.
I only use the word "woman" in formal contexts.
Lady and Ladies is another set of words that could be used.
It's interesting that "Woman" is seen as stuffy and formal, whereas "man" is often used like "be a man" or "man up".
You usually have to put an adjective on "man" to give it a negative connotation, in my experience.
I still think of guys as "guys" and not "men".