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Berners-Lee Challenges 'Stupid' Male Geek Culture
ZDOne wrote with a link to a ZDNet article discussing some comments made by Tim Berners-Lee on the discrimination women face within 'stupid male geek culture'. The respected developer expressed frustration at a culture that would 'disregard the work of capable female engineers, and put others off entering the profession.' From the article: "'It's a complex problem -- we find bias against women by women. There are bits of male geek culture and engineer culture that are stupid. They should realize that they could be alienating people who are smarter and better engineers,' said Berners-Lee. Engineering research facilities that interview candidates based only on how many papers they have had published also risk adding to the problem, according to Berners-Lee, because of an apparent in-built bias against women."
You want a cease fire? Fine. start playing fair with us and we might play fair with you.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
...he's read Slashdot, now, then?
Hey Jiggles, grab a pad and back that gorgeous butt in here.
When are we going to realize that some fields are shaped by the people they attract? How many people have sacrificed a weekend out partying to rebuild a Linux cluster? How many women want to sacrifice cute outfits to sling greasy wrenches under cars all day? I'm not saying there aren't lots of awesome women in IT (I've worked with them). Yes, there's discrimination, but in IT I chalk it all up to a field that practically demands a certain type of personality.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Wow, the article has basically no more information than the summary. It doesn't tell us what "stupid male geek culture" is, or what the objectionable elements of it are. It's hard to have more than an emotional reply when the article contains so little description of what is actually wrong...
not lies but utterly useless brain fart.
"which could lead to greater harmony of systems design"
Being male or female neither enables nor disables the ability to create harmonious systems.
My twitter
"'...They should realize that they could be alienating people who are smarter and better engineers,' said Berners-Lee."
Last thing we need is smarter and better people. How're we supposed to keep our job?
This Berners guy isn't very bright, is he.
Tim Berners-Lee is a dude why the hell would I care what he has to say about women in the office ... maybe he's a sensitive 90's guy ... or maybe he just has nothing to right about!
Don't confuse the two. There is nothing personality-wise that isn't shared by both genders.
On the other hand, he does kind of skip over the other professions that also discriminate against women. How about the military?
And don't even get me started on the 'construction' industry. Try working as a woman there!
What good does it do to bitch about something that is inevitably going to occur somewhere regardless of the profession or sex?
Basing -any- major decision heavily on publications is dangerous -- but it happens in a lot of disciplines. Whether or not the publications are any good is often overlooked, just as long as you've generated something in a journal. I've known good solid smart researchers who had half the publications of rather poor scientists (who were nonetheless better paid and higher ranking!), because those researchers chose to put out solid work instead of half-baked MPUs (minimum publishable units)
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
The very short article consisted of Berners-Lee saying that male geeks act stupid, and that causes women to not want to enter the field. It would be nice to have some examples of this so-called stupid behavior. You're always going to have idiots, both male and female. I don't think this is the rule.
I work as a software developer, and being male I am the minority. We have 3 men and 7 women on my team, and none of us act stupid. I would say most teams here have at least 50% women.
This sounds like ranting that has no factual basis what-so-ever. Don't bother reading the article, it contains no more info than what is contained in the summary.
I got nothin'
They should realize that they could be alienating people who are smarter and better engineers,
No, they're not. Women are better at breast feeding. Men (real men) are better techies.
I'm willing to bet that people working in high tech fields without a four-year (or more) degree face more discrimination than women with a four year degree any day. The playing field isn't about who can actually get the work done these days, at least not everywhere.
That doesn't make either right, obviously.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
It seems as if he intended his "article" to be flame bait by using the word "stupid".
Engineering research facilities that interview candidates based only on how many papers they have had published also risk adding to the problem, according to Berners-Lee, because of an apparent in-built bias against women.
I don't get it. is the task of writing papers inherently biased against women?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
He's just saying that cause he wants to score. Geeks have a hard time meeting women on their terms. He just wants to turn it around so that they meet on "geek terms".
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
I think what is commonly pointed at as male bias against females is really just biology.
Males are naturally aggressive, looking for whatever advantage they can to get the upper-hand and conquer.
Woman are naturally passive, looking to nurture and keep the peace, often times at their own personal expense.
One style is no better or worse than the other.
Women entering any competitive environment need to realize that if they feel there is a bias against them it is because they allow there to be one not because they are being singled out and discriminated against as women.
Men treat all competitors equally; if they think they can dominate you then they will try to dominate. If they don't think they can dominate you, then they give you respect and work with you in a partnership. Unfortunately for women, navigating this kind of environment is often counter to their natural biology and inclinations so the common outcome is that women make easy targets to be competitively dominated. They aren't being singled out for being women; men treat other men the same.
On the flip side, men need to realize that most women don't enter a competitive environment with the same goals of domination and aggression like men do. Men assume that women compete just like men; to dominate and conquer their opponents. Men will often do things out of ego or to assert their authority regardless if that's beneficial for the task at hand whereas women work out of good faith and with the belief that everything they do is for the good of the group rather than the good of themselves.
Instead of pointing fingers and calling foul on one gender or the other, we need to start understanding and accepting the differences and motivations that influence each gender's actions.
Runesabre
Enspira Online
This is news? A fairly closed off and socially inept social subgroup can turn off normal people from wanting to be a part of it?
Where are the tears for average guys looking to educate themselves receiving derision from holier-than-thou geeks? This isn't so much a gender issue as it is a problem endemic to geek culture: Perceived superiority due to an established knowledge base. You see the same behavior from informed body-builders, laughing at skinny people who express an interest in exercise but don't know where to start.
This is a fearsomely difficult and touchy topic... for what it's worth, here's what I believe.
There is meaningful bias against females in parts of tech culture. There is also meaningful bias against geeks in parts of female culture, as gurps_npc notes. Doesn't excuse either bias. Gets into philosophical hierarchy/expectation/etc issues I suppose.
Some of the worst cases of anti-female bias I've seen have been driven by other females. I'm not sure what that means.
Men and women are socialized significantly differently.
Men and women are biologically different. There is meaningful evidence that men are simply drawn more strongly to technology (I'll phrase it in terms of interest, rather than aptitude, but that's another variable we should consider). Since men and women *are* different, we shouldn't necessarily expect males and females to be present in equal numbers in technology fields. But we shouldn't use sex differences as an excuse for anti-female biases.
We'd all benefit if participation in tech fields (as well as the rest of society) was wholly meritocratic. It's definitely not right now. I believe females do tend to get unfairly marginalized by some parts of tech culture.
I thought this was an interesting take on sex differences, which could perhaps be applied to explore differences of participation in technology fields.
Err, whilst there is nothing personality-wise that is displayed by one gender and is found nowhere in the other, there are definitely traits more common in one than the other.
Males are more likely to take risks and indulge in competition (testosterone does that). It's just a fact of life.
I don't know if that behaviour is linked to liklihood to be good at software/IT, but it's a perfectly valid example of a personality difference between the genders.
... she said you can have your balls back now. :)
.... the female telecom engineers I work with are on a whole, worse & sloppier than the male engineers.
There is a war going on for your mind.
So women face discrimation in the "Stupid Geek Culture"...does that mean that they are discriminated against because they don't like Star Wars, have a 40th level Orc in WOW, and played a Magic User with lame powers in D&D in the 80's? They don't know TSR from WOTC? They could care less how the terminator chip left in 1984 was tehn used to build the terminator itself? Um...Is this discrimination, or simply not wanting to be part of workplace banter? I worked in a fitness center for three years with the common conversations being about how much people bench, what their peak hart rates were, etc. Just becuase I didn't give a damn doesn't mean I was discriminated against...it meant it was the wrong group for me to try and interact socially with.
I'm happy to talk to a women, let alone discriminate against her.
Where does Berners-Lee say this and what exactly does he mean by "stupid male geek culture"???
It is difficult to evaluate his statements when we are given almost no details/explanations....
I work for a fortune 100 company as a software engineer and I face this discrimination all the time. I frequently get this vibe from my male co-workers that they don't take what I say seriously. And then when I do great work, they all try to get their hand in the pot and take credit for things I did, which frustrates me to no end. A male co-worker actually got a promotion which seemed to me (from the little congratulations email went out describing all his wonderful accomplishments), mostly based on MY work. And did I get a promotion? Nope. And when I do, I'll still be at a lower level than most because my raise will be based on a percentage of what I currently make which apparently was pretty low compared to my male counterparts.
And then there's this whole thing all women have to deal with at work that being aggressive = bitch. And I feel like whenever I try to get other people's names detached from my work, my bosses don't take it seriously and have even gone as far to joke about it infront of other people!
And whenever I come to work dressed somewhat fashionably I get weird comments, not compliments, they are actually making fun of me I think. What the heck is that about. Sorry I'm not wearing wrinkled khakis and a wrinkled blue dress shirt like the rest of you slobs (we're corporate so don't do the jeans/t-shirts thing).
Yeah so the other day I was talking to a female in marketing at my company asking her what it's like there cause it's really not cool in IT.
...advantage.
(sarcasm off)
Tell you what, get male-female teachers to parity, with role models in a wide variety of "not geek" fields, and perhaps women would have a greater chance in technology fields.
So how do we quantify "stupid"? Knowing most of the dialogue to Holy Grail?
"Engineering research facilities that interview candidates based only on how many papers they have had published also risk adding to the problem, according to Berners-Lee, because of an apparent in-built bias against women"
This idea of interview based only on the number of papers published is more likely to overlook qualified and talented people, not from some "gender bias" that sees fewer women getting published, but because it creates a bias that seeks quantity over quality.
Just because some hack spun a whole bunch of papers off one good idea, he/she is going to get an interview, yet someone that has had numerous and significantly profound ideas but only published a handful of papers that covered the ideas will not get noticed. This is independent of gender.
Berners-Lee said that a culture that avoided alienating women would attract more female programmers, which could lead to greater harmony of systems design. "If there were more women involved we could move towards interoperability. We have to change at every level," he said.
That seems like an awfully stereotypical and biased view of female programmers on the part of Tim Berners-Lee.
Seems to me, having been an IT director in the past, that the "bias" we see in IT has more to do with deeper cultural issues than anything specific to the IT industry, and could be applied to many hands-on fields, and even to your average corporation and management selection.
Our built-in selection criteria for "better" IT employees, which is cultural and psychological, is related to several factors. Dedication being one of the major ones that I used to look for. Because IT employees generally are exposed to so many concepts, ideas, and a breadth of knowledge that can be staggering, men, who are more likely (from a cultural and possibly genetic standpoint) to be willing to dedicate higher percentages of their lives to immersion in the culture end up being better employees. This isn't specific to the IT industry.
It also strikes me that being "adventurous" is definitely a plus in IT. The willingness to figure things out, to go way beyond the required knowledge, is something that lends itself to the male-stereotype of being adventurous and exploring. My old *nix admin used to "explore", by which I mean he build image after image, broke things, changed things, generally just messed with crap to see how it worked. This is a trait more in line with male psychology than female.
As someone who's responsibilities included help desk support, I was always looking for good female employees. Abusive users were far less likely to get beligerent with a woman than a man, and the problem I always faced was finding women with the skills, attitude and abilities to be a part of our group. We were a meritocracy. I had 11 people running an ISP, and there was no room for people who couldn't produce, who couldn't keep up, or needed to be directed. I never hired for experience (one of my best finds was a manager at a gas station who didn't own a computer the day he started; a month later he had build his own linux system (hardware and OS) from the ground up. I also had a woman who eventually became my help desk manager, as she was willing to learn, taught herself HTML, etc. She was good with customers and didn't have to be hand-held or babied.
While I understand what TBL was saying about publication issues, I think that the underlying factors in IT gender-bias are as much cultural and applicable to many industries, rather than just IT.
Bill
I don't think they need men or other people to make excuses for them. Women honestly interested in IT and have skills will make it. How about we work to remove the males from IT who don't have the skills to really be there.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I don't know why everyone's suddenly demanding citations and evidence and stuff for this. It's not like it should be news to geeks that there's a huge misogynist streak in geek culture! We've had articles here on /. before on the subject, but I guess some people like to pretend.
Heck, I've noticed this nastiness going back decades. I remember hearing fellow geeks back in the late eighties make snide remarks about how Dona Bailey "didn't REALLY write Centipede, Atari only gave her credit for it as a marketing stunt aimed at liberals and women's groups."
That reminds me, Gamasutra recently did an excellent interview with Dona Bailey: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1659/the_original_gaming_bug_centipede_.php?page=1
- mantar
I may agree that this requirement alone might not be enough to select the best professional, but everybody suffers with that, not just women.
Come on, let's not bias the bias!
As an employer of programmers, admins, and basically all-around geek jobs, I deal with a lot of resumes.
Maybe one resume in 30 or 40 is a women.
This to me is actually a large improvement.
When I first started years ago, if I got one women in 100 resumes it was considered amazing.
To me, the rate of women entering the IT section has very much improved from where it used to be.
I don't see any discrimination, I see lack of interest.
We hire both designers and IT.
The rate of good male resumes applying to be designers has actually dropped in my company.
We hire less women for IT positions because less women apply.
We hire less men for design positions because less men apply.
With that said though, as noted above, the ratio of women applying for IT positions has, at least in terms of my company, significantly increased.
I don't see there being any problems, I see it getting better.
And on a personal note, I couldn't be happier -
Uber-nerds here are not the most hygienic, and we have a lot of programmers that could really learn a thing or two in that area.
Having women around, the office actually smells nicer.
Not because of any female perfume, but because the men are actually taking showers now.
Gloria Ironbox: The filing's done, Mr. Griffin.
Peter Griffin: Thank you, Miss Ironbox.
Peter Griffin: You are a valued member of our business team.
Peter Griffin: And I will give you a raise tomorrow if you come to work without a shirt on.
Gloria Ironbox: Mr. Griffin!
Peter Griffin: I'm sorry. That came out wrong. Let me try again.
Peter Griffin: Nice ass.
Gloria Ironbox: You haven't heard a word I've said!
Peter Griffin: Now that's not fair. I've heard everything you said.
Peter Griffin: There's some subtleties to the rules that aren't so easy to understand.
There isn't a job field of any size that does not have its own culture and a tendency to make those who don't fit the culture feel like outsiders (regardless of their ability to perform the job). It may not be right, but it is human.
Men and women are completely different in behavior. First realize that 80% of our ancestors collectively are women. Yes, 40% of males who ever lived died without producing an offspring. The Y chromosomes that survive today did so by using completely different strategy than the X chromosomes. No matter how successful, attractive, dominant, creative a woman is, she can't produce more than 5 or 10 offspring in her lifetime. Very dominant men typically marry more than one wife and produce easily more children. What it means, statistically is, the subdominant Y chromosome does not get to breed.
Upshot of it is, that Y chormosome takes more risk, it produces more variation. On both ends of the spectrum. It produces brilliant mathematicians and horrible criminals. TBL should ponder on the fact that 85% of our prison population and 85% of the combat troops are also men. XYs form shallow relationships over a very wide network. XXs form very intense relationships in a much smaller network. Men went out in expeditions and ships and joined the armies and 40% of them died without ever producing an offspring. Men form groups and their hostility is directed outside the group. Females form small cliques and their hostility is directed to other members of the clique. The X chromosome does not have to take that much risk to realize much of the potential maximum of 5 or 10 offspring.
So TBL might rave against unfairly denying opportunities to women or discrimination. But to expect 50% of the nerds to be women, it ain't gonna happen. Much as I would like my daughter to be a scientist or a programmer, she is likely to end up as an academic in a soft science.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Maybe she'll understand what "traits more common in one than the other" means.
You obviously didn't.
I for one, welcome our new (jiggly) Female Engineer overlords!
I don't think geeks directly hold it against female engineers who decide to skip happy hour and don't hang around for the after-hours LAN party. Its their choice, just as its ours to hold and attend those events. The folks who skip those events miss the socialization that results in better teamwork, and that's also their choice. And if anyone wants to initiate other team social events that they like, I'll support them 100%. Heck, I enjoy picnics, camping and all sorts of activities that someone else makes the effort to organize.
But don't tell me I shouldn't hold the weekly quake deathmatch because it might alienate the female engineers. That's a load of crap.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Over my 25+ years of being a software developer I've worked for many different companies in both the US and several different European countries and I can truly say that I've not EVER personnaly experienced any workplaces where female software engineers weren't treated at least as equal as male software engineers.
Actually what I have found is that most if not all companies I've ever worked for trip over themselves to ensure female software engineers do get given at least equal breaks, so actually females can end up getting better treated than their male counterparts.
I've also met several women engineers that even though they're actually being treated at least equally still think they are being treated worse.
Its also common to see female engineers get more recognition after actually achieving less than other unrecognised male engineers just apparently because management want to avoid any chance of being accused of discrimination.
I don't really see where he gets the idea that there's discrimination. Most of the male geeks I know would love to see more women in the tech fields. Of course, that's not because they like diversity so much as it is because they're lonely.
Here on slashdot, there is the stupid running joke about "In Russia [noun][verb] YOU" It contains an implied sentence "you [verb][noun]". For someone to compose such a joke, or to understand it, they must understand the rules of grammar which are very useful in programming computers. Futhermore, if somone understands the joke, and likes it, we can infer that they like the mechanics of tranformational grammars and are therefore comfortable working with them regularly.
In summary, from one idiotic joke, we infer that they have some of the skills and interests that make for a good programmer.
That adding "culture" to a group of people seems to allow for blatant bigotry.
> Upshot of it is, that Y chormosome takes more risk, it produces more variation.
Read your post again and ask yoursef: might I have an extra chormosome?
Or maybe I'm just not getting what expeditions, ships and armies have to do with pasty nerds in lab coats doing calculus, watching Star Trek and eating Doritos. How are hard scientific or technical disciplines "risky" from an evolutionary perspective? You kind of gloss over that part in your post.
Interesting yet, but I don't think anyone expects 50% of the women to be programmers, and I don't think that your description of the male traits describes most programmers. IMHO, most programmers are NOT aggressive macho types. In fact, they tend to be more like the women your describe... comfortable in small groups, etc. I think the problem starts long before the asperger tinged misogynistic corporate geek culture kicks in. Think back to your Comp Sci classes. How many women were there? Not so many. "Math is Hard' Barbie has just as much to do with this problem as your "Will Compile for Food" t-shirt. I think the point TBL makes about female programmers being just as guilty as men is especially interesting. I recall back in college, one of our professors was an infamous (female) hacker who literally "wrote the book" on UNIX. (yes, the woman whose name is on the red bible). She was notorious for being EVIL to the few girls who dared to try to take her classes. She probably thought she was doing them a favor by not going easy on them. By the time it gets to the professional level there really aren't many women to add to the work pool. As a hiring manager I'd say I probably hired a higher % of the females I've interviewed than the men. They tend to be better programmers (since they made it this far without giving up) and yes, I feel like they contribute a "women's perspective" to the products we build. Our users aren't all men, why should the developers be? That said, in 15 years I've hired about 200 people and I think 6 of them were women.
May no camel spit in your yogurt soup.
"The article sucks, therefore Berners-Lee must be wrong, even though he didn't write the article. I have anecdotes, that I've experienced and understood from my own point of view, which do not challenge my understanding of the situation."
Are you adequate?
Interesting and thought provoking. Nice post!
Runesabre
Enspira Online
When reviewers for papers and conference submissions are aware of the identities of the submitters, the acceptance rate gets skewed towards white males. Many academic associations and journals have switched to anonymous review, and the amount of work accepted from women and ethnic minorities typically shoots up immediately afterwards.
Are you adequate?
Hey Hunky, could you carry this 100 pound box for me up the three flights of stairs here? God, you're so sexy when you're exerting your self... :)
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Just be happy with who you are and none of this matters, simple as that.
I was not the original thinker of such great insight. I will dig the referent and give credit to the one whose article I posted, most likely with some mangling.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Tim Berners-Lee is ignoring all of those other fields which lack women. For example, crime. In this country, over 90% of the people in prison are men. Why are women discouraged from persuing a life of crime?
I don't know. Maybe male criminals are stupid idiots, and discouraging women from entering the field. Well, stop it now! I, for one, will no longer put up with the low percentage of women in crime.
Is There Anything Good About Men? by Roy F. Baumeister is the original author whose ideas I tried to paraphrase. Forgive my errors.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Comes from people not understanding and acknowledging that there are differences. I saw a fairly insightful article, I don't remember where, talking about how women said they wanted to be treated the same, but objected to same treatment. Specifically this was relating to guys harassing each other. At every work place I've been at, there's been light hearted harassing of people. Never anything mean or serious, just poking fun at others. However it seems that many women aren't ok with this. I've known those that are and participate, but I've known those that aren't, they get very hurt. They then cite this is people not accepting them, not treating them equal. What they don't seem to realise is that it IS equal treatment. They are being treated as "one of the boys," that just isn't what they really want.
I think one thing that would help progress is for people to admit that yes, men and women ARE different and we don't necessarily want the same things. Along those lines, it would be useful for people to do some introspection and figure out what they really want. If you want to be treated the same as the men, great, but understand what that actually means. If what you actually want is for them to respect that you DON'T want to be treated that way then that's what you need to make clear. I think most people really want to try to be nice to others, but you have to make clear to them what that means.
Same advice as for personal relationships: First know and understand what YOU actually want, don't like to yourself. Then make that clear to others.
Yet, the visual biases that are present start right in before one speaks. In my chosen field of work, I run into far more men than women. It really starts when the person opens their mouth and says that they have been in the field for greater than ten years and have experience but when the discussion continues on, their responses show that they are really clueless. Personally, I have run into some women in the field that are really, really sharp. Bad part about it is that they are very few and far between and that is too bad. I believe that when you have a design team with a balance of the sexes on it, and they all have their brains screwed on right, the results are far better than the results from a unisex team (my personal experience).
But that's because... I've barely seen any.
There were a million programs at my school to attract women to CS - They have their own special program as part of the college, study groups, sorority, scholarships, special counselors, whatever. There were still only ever one or two in a given class.
I don't think any women applied for my current job when it opened.
At my last job, I worked with two women programmers - one was competent and taken completely seriously by the team. The other my supervisor (also a woman) admitted to me was a worse programmer after years of experience than I was after a semester of interning. But even she was taken as seriously as she presented herself.
I'm sure the bias exists in some people.. but for the most part I don't this massive group of women wanting to go into IT and being pushed out of it by chauvinist guys. The schools are practically begging women to sign up.
I see a lot more women who just plain aren't interested in computers and never were. I know one who started in CS but was't really into it, and wanted to hang out with more girls and less nerdy guys (although the same girl married a CS grad - go figure).
And this at a school where the engineering department in general at least has a decent-sized minority of women in it.
I think CS still has a very large "hacker" or "hobbyist" culture associated with it - my wife admits to being intimidated by how much the other freshman knew when she first started - she wasn't sure she belonged not because anyone treated her poorly, but just because they knew so much more than she did at first. Most guys going into CS started building systems when they were in high school. Most girls... never did that.
Part of the entertainment at the final night party was Grinder Girl. That made things awfully awkward between the male and female coworkers. It shouldn't amaze anyone why females get this impression. Hell, one of the biggest tech conferences of the year added fuel to the fire.
Spelling and grammar mistakes specifically left in to give the grammar and spelling nazis a meaning to their life.
Being male or female neither enables nor disables the ability to create harmonious systems.
La Griffe du Lion & Camille Paglia would beg to differ.
Whoa you mean to tell me there are chicks in the IT field that do development? You mean there are chicks that work at IT companies that aren't in help desk, project management, or accounting? I'd have to see this to believe it.
basically every male-dominated profession. Why hasn't a similar effort been made to encourage women to go into medicine, for example? Not that I think this is a bad thing, but it's a bit weird that the focus is so heavily on IT.
That poor sucker didnt know that s/he could have re-submitted the papers under a different name, rather than undergoing a complete sex change? Must have done it before the first web browser! I bet s/he is thinking what a stupid idea it looks like now!
Maybe there is, um , how to say it ... boys are better at playing with trucks and girls are better playing with dolls cuz that's the way our genes make us.
So somebody took the time to write an article stating that geeks scare away females? I thought everybody knew that already. Lets check the wiki:
"a person often of an intellectual bent who is disliked"
"A person with a devotion to something in a way that places him or her outside the mainstream"
"A derogatory term for one with low social skills"
"A person who rejects society, yet is involved in it -- unlike and in contrast to a hermit."
"a bright young man turned inward, poorly socialized..."
"...many of the classic eccentricities associated with geeks has been due to their social awkwardness..."
so yeah, i think this was pretty common knowledge.
But seriously, this is like complaining about hanging out with joggers because they run too much. Geeks have rather strange behaviors, it's part of how our brain works. The male and female brains do NOT operate the same way. I'm not saying one is better than the other, just that they are different. A geeks brain works in an even "more different" way. Always figuring, calculating, imagining, obsessing. Studies even show strong similarities with certain diseases like Aspergers and Adult Autism. While the article specifies females, I would be willing to bet that it applies to males who do not show the "geek" traits, but do have an interest in technology. They just don't get counted because there are already so many male "geeks" in the tech industry.
Bias exists in lots of professions both ways. There is a stigma against male grade-school teachers (fear of sexual abuse) and male nurses. And these are not "low level" careers, for nursing pays relative well these days.
Table-ized A.I.
How long can we ignore science and realize men and women do have biological differences in their brains. I don't mean one is smarter than the other, but they function with some minor, but important, differences. The sooner you apply what we have learned from neuroscience, biology, genetics, anthropology, and psychology the sooner we can stop playing this game of "man-hate".
The other thing to remember is that, for the most part, a lot of tech is open to anyone. If you have a good idea you can base a company around it. We have numerous examples of this. If your product or service is good people will pay you for it no matter what your sex is. No one is stopping women from creating their own culture, their own companies, their own way of doing things, etc.
This is the problem with the Myth of Exclusion. For some reason one group of people carry the onus of creating and maintaining the so called exclusionary group. Yet when supposedly faced with exclusion others will choose to complain or sit on their hands. This is the totally wrong way to look at things. If you perceive exclusion then go around it and create your opportunity.
Throw rocks at them.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
If male geeks act stupid, then having a hottie walking around the Google campus would certanly trigger the most stupidest behaviors on earth: ...
geek1: "hey beavis, check it out"
geek2: "whooooa, boobs"
geek1: "yeah baby, come to butthead"
girl walks by, barely notices the schmucks...
geek1and2 hold their breath as she passes by, then uncontrolable nervous laughter starts...
geek2: "hey butthead I think she smiled at me"
geek1: "no way fartnocker"
geek1: "hey beavis, how come they never get to hire these hotties?"
geek2: "uhhmmm, I don't know. If I'd be erick smith I'd like hire her in a minute"
geek1: "yeah, I'd make her my personal assistant"
geek2: "what assistance would you be looking for butthead"
geek1: "uhhm, I'd like take her to the bathroom when I fee like pissing, and she would take my weener out..."
geek2: "cool!"
geek1and2 uncontrolable nervous laughter resumes...
One academic went through a sex change, submitted the same papers under both identities, and found that papers were accepted from a man but were rejected when they came from a woman, said the web inventor.
You think it might have been easier to just submit the papers under different names?
i very much doubt that you can produce a single peer-reviewed citation for even one clause, let alone sentence, in your description. hand-waving retrospective analysis to justify the status quo is fun, but as a method of arriving at the truth, it leaves much to be desired.
Not sexiest. It confused me for a moment as well. But really, the truth is that the assholes ruin it for the rest of us, be they geeks, christians, waiters, or your mom. :-)
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Yeah, I read that blog post too. It was interesting, but it has some problems.
Basically, he is arguing that X chromosomes tend to influence towards tight distribution of behavior, and Y towards broad distribution. That's fine and all, but if a guy only has daughters, how's his Y chromosome going to pass on the characteristics about him that make him so aggressive and alpha-male?
This is almost Lamarckian reasoning, and while there *are*, as we've found, ways in which parental characteristics and even grandparental characteristics influence children non-genomically, he's specifically claiming genomic inheritance transfers characteristics, but there isn't a reliable way of doing that (that I know of.)
Much of his reasoning can be equally well explained by social conditioning, especially the networking issues. I like what he's saying, I just think he's far overstating his case, and proposing unlikely mechanisms for how it happens, when it seems possible that it's just due to how people are raised and what expectations they absorb from society. If women musicians don't have any reasonable expectation of becoming famous through their compositions -- or indeed becoming famous at all -- why would they expend much effort composing? Johann Bach's wife composed a lot of wonderful music, and it wasn't until 200 years later that anyone even realised they were her compositions, rather than her husband's.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
His post is ripped off from the introduction to this. Which is long but actually very interesting.
You've got it wrong. The difference is almost a secret but it is known.
Talk to women who've taken testosterone in order to become trans-men. They take higher than natural doses in order to create the physical changes quickly and they find out that:
Testosterone is a strongly psychotropic hormone. Women who take it not only find themselves having an pornographic imagination (compared with what they were used to), but they find that heightened visual thinking makes mathematics and physics easier.
They also find that they start having the same emotional and social problems as men. I remember listening to this trans-woman talk about how testosterone turned her from a cool dyke into a very uncool male geek who couldn't help offending women by watching them too closely. But she got a degree in physics.
In the comment I was replying to.
Are you adequate?
How about we just concentrate on keeping intelligent, qualified people interested in IT & engineering careers? Unless you're trying to date your co-workers, why does it matter how many men & women are in particular job?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I'm a computer programmer and have worked in this kind of job for about 15 years. Out of all the dozens of computer programmer colleagues I have had in those years, exactly ONE was female.
Now, that could be interpreted as confirmation of our industry's anti-female bias, but in my experience, that's not how it is at all. OK, maybe there are software development companies out there that do have a misogynistic culture; maybe my experience is completely a-typical... But in those places where I have worked, female colleagues would have been welcomed with open arms. Problem is, there just weren't any to be found.
(Note that there were plenty of women in those companies, at all levels, from the cafeteria staff to upper management. The only type of jobs where they were conspicuously absent were the hard-core technical ones, that is, programming and system administration.)
Maybe, just maybe, there are so few women IT workers because there simply aren't a lot of women that want that kind of job. Accusing the IT profession of being hostile to women seems like a knee-jerk reaction; sure, the theory fits the facts, but it's by no means the only explanation. Before I believe in sexist discrimination in the IT industry, I'd like to hear from some people who have actually witnessed that kind of thing first-hand.
To the US geeks who are scratching their head and wondering what TBL is smoking--
I've worked in both the the UK (England as well as Northern Ireland) and the United States in the IT field (doing a lot of Unix administration and a little development), and I have to say that his comments are a lot truer on the European side of the Atlantic than in the States.
In the UK in particular I experienced what can only be described as a "boys club" mentality. US geeks tend to be quite thrilled to work with females (assuming they are competent-- incompetence always breeds contempt in geek culture, regardless of your sex), whereas the UK geeks tend to see it as more of a lifestyle threat.
Anecdotal, but there's my $.02.
Even more ominously, [Sandler 1986, page 6] reports: In one study, first done in 1968 and then replicated in 1983, college students were asked to rate identical articles according to specific criteria. The authors' names attached to the articles were clearly male or female, but were reversed for each group of raters: what one group thought had been written by a male, the second group thought had been written by a female, and vice versa. Articles supposedly written by women were consistently ranked lower than when the very same articles were thought to have been written by a male [Goldberg 1968, Paludi et al 1985, Paludi et al 1983]. In a similar study, department chairs were asked to make hypothetical hiring decisions and to assign faculty rank on the basis of vita. For vitae with male names, chairs recommended the rank of associate professor; however, the identical vita with a female name merited only the rank of assistant professor [Fidell 1975]. Anti-female bias is strongest in traditionally male fields [Top 1991, pages 96-97]. Link.
So if you are submitting a paper for publication to a journal, your peers are likely to think less highly of it if the name on it is female rather than male. That's the bias against women in scientific papers, provided that the department chairs and college students in the study act like peer-reviewers for scientific journals.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
- You are male
- You are aggressive and proactive
- You speak loudly, clearly, and fluently
- You speak and offer your suggestions without prompting
- You bring a previously unmentioned idea or approach to the conversation
- You only need to be told something once
- Your last project was successful
- You are unwavering in your opinion or suggestion
- You can recover from mistakes gracefully and tactfully
- You are not a whipping boy
- You have previous work credentials
- You have academic credentials
The more of those attributes you have and the more that are lower numbers, the higher your perceived value is going to be.Camping on quad since 1996.
I think what you describe is regular office politics and common razzing, not so much gender discrimination. They may razz you differently than they do male coworkers, but razzing is razzing.
And then there's this whole thing all women have to deal with at work that being aggressive = bitch.
So? Stop caring what they think. If you want to move up the ladder you have to grow a thick skin (for good or bad). I myself don't want to go into management because of the nasty and subtle social games it requires. I find more enjoyment in technology itself.
Table-ized A.I.
By the way, listening to male to female transsexuals who take (massive) hormone is fascinating too.
It becomes clear that the discernible emotional and mental differences between men and women can be switched back and forth by changing hormones.
I suspect that all of the theories about brain structure differences are looking at unimportant things - the important differences are hormonal, period.
First of all, I am not generalizing but it this post is rather one-sided so read critically and literally.
...of course, every person is different and you can't judge an entire group - but I would be more interested to see what kind of experience the "geeks" involved had beforehand. It could just be that they had a few rare but bad experiences and generalized?
Of friends and family and IT, what I've heard sounds like women in the industry were more interested in making themselves look "good enough" even if it means backstabbing coworkers and playing political power games over doing their actual jobs. My father, a systems analyst, recently did a contract where a few female engineers basically played social-political office games to undermine the project leaders and circumvent them until they ultimately had a small circle of only women who would discriminate almost openly against male team members and rule autocratically from their tight social circle... then the project bombed because they'd alienated the only people with the needed experience and those who had been ignored simply left the sinking ship.
In my own limited experience, the women in my department are respectively:
1. Totally efficient and eager to work. Cheerful, model employee.
2. Constant complaints and loud emotional tantrums in an otherwise quiet shared office. Needs a ton of non-work comfort items that clutter an already nigh-unnavigable space. Has more "junk" than we have equipment in the department.
3. Unable to get anything right even if written out explicitly down to model and serial numbers.
4, 5. Totally normal great employees.
That said of professional ability, they're all great people personally, but my company just seems blessed that way.
every situtaion you go into will be biased one way or another. But lest stick with It.
What about the typical corporate IT nerd and Macs?
i work for (large airplane manufacturer), and the hostility i was met with when i was tasked to do digital video recording, editing, and analysis in the field with a desktop Dell - and i suggested they get me a PowerBook G4 (at the time), i dare not even relay the facts here because you would think i was making them up.
there are all kinds of biases in all kinds of jobs. Certain jobs attract certain types of people.
Try this... if you work for a big company, go look at your company's webpage... are you telling me that HR is discriminating against men because your company's HR lead is a woman?
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
I got an engineering degree as a non-traditional student. It was a waste. i didn't learn much about engineering, I sure as hell didn't learn as much from $1000 of tuition and lectures as a I would have from $100 of book and some reading. I guess I could have wasted a lot of taxpayer money, drinking at college for 5 years, but instead I actually made a positive contribution after high school.
Go fuck yourself, slashtard.
It's because the problems are invisible to you, because you are never subjected to them, and have never had the chance or bothered to understand them.
Are you adequate?
actually women engineers are males, only with the wrong sex...
I am not sure about the premise here. Do real programmers, the hackers in the old sense, like the "geek culture" of today? I can't say that I like it, or even pay attention to it. Geeks seem to be more into buying gadgets as soon as they come out and playing games than actually using and understanding software design and computer science the way the real hackers of old did. Do modern geeks produce anything like Emacs, LISP, UNIX, etc? Or do they just buy products? (I'm not sure exactly what the definition of "stupid" is, anyway.) If this is true, then even getting rid of male geek culture probably wouldn't increase the total number of programmers, since they are not contributing towards it in the first place. Maybe I don't know what a geek is. Do the creators of Linux, Python, Ruby, etc (where the real innovation is) call themselves geeks?
And wouldn't it be a survival mechanism to alienate people smarter than you so they don't compete in your arena? Sounds like survival of the fittest at work.
Much as I would like my daughter to be a scientist or a programmer,
I don't want my daughter to be a programmer after seeing what globalization did to the field. I'd rather see her be a business executive ordering the offshoring instead of being offshored.
Table-ized A.I.
Why is Berners-Lee relevant? Has he done *anything* significant since the invention of the Web? Yes, it was a truly righteous hack that changed the world. But this does not make him an authority on geek culture.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Phrases like this, "capable female engineers" and "qualified minorities", are so tiring because they're used by people who are generally suspect of the innate capabilities of women and underrepresented non-whites.
So, take a trip into this though experiment -- it's 12,000 years ago. Humanity lives in tribes. Yes, bigmen ( and that is a technical term in anthropology ) can afford 2 or 3 wives, but they have trouble taking care of them and all of their offspring, and also making sure that their 15-year-old brides aren't sleeping with other 15-year-old lovers when they're in their eighties. Let's say that 10%-20% of men never produced a child. Then, cities and civilization spring up. God-Kings have harems of thousands of women, guarded by eunuchs. Terrible despots like Genghis Khan sweep over whole continents, killing male children and raping thousands of women. Tyrant Kings like Herod order the death of all male infants. Whole societies go to war against their enemies, and kill every man, woman, and child. Suddenly, in a few thousand years, the representation of male ancestors in the population goes from 80% to 60%, on account of a few dozen tyrants.
So yes, currently, only 60% of male ancestors are represented in the current population. But that doesn't mean that 40% of men never had an offspring.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Does it really require a certain type of personality? I'm a very capable female computer engineer, however, due to my emotionality, and my passive nature, I get stomped on at work, and treated extremely poorly.
:) ), malicious gossip, are all part of any human gathering, even of educated individuals, and not necessarily a male or female thing.
So, like me, you get the business end of the human nature gun. I'm a very capable male computer engineer, and i also have a very passive nature.
Once, I got into this political mess with a coworker, a mano-a-mano with a guy that was the boss' protege so to speak, and I nearly had a frickin nervous breakdown because I was sure this guy (a guy with zero technical worth, but a weasel) was going to push some buttons and get me fired, and my reputation smeared, by proxy. Fortunately that didn't happen, and actually found out that the boss had me in a higher esteem than I thought, but nonetheless this other guy's intentions were targeted to "cutting my throat" so to speak if I got in his way, and he actually suggested that to me so once.
The point I'm trying to make is that basic human nature probably has more to do with the situation you're describing than plain sexual discrimination. Power struggles, competition, backstabbing (we call it "sawing somebody else's feet" here
Humans aren't made with cookie cutters, all of us have different personalities, and the fact that your friend is tomboyish (as you describe her) just says that she is an individual with a powerful personality, so she thrives in that environment.
Or then again is just discrimination . . . I'm not there with you to have a clearer view of the situation.
Just my zwei/dos/two cents.
How many men want to sacrifice their absurd, even antiquated perceptions of women?
Oh come on, Captain Male Guilt. We can generate a question that is both much more offensive to your tender sensibilities while simultaneously much more interesting.
How many women would categorically reject the idea of surgery to enhance their breast size? Answer in terms of percentages of women grouped according to cup size.
(Correlation: how many men would agree, anonymously, that breast size is important in terms of selecting a mate or a job applicant?)
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
I stand corrected. You are right. 40% of the men who ever lived don't have living descendants today is exactly how the talk I was reading about mentioned it. Fault is mine, not the original author's.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Now I have the perfect opening line for my cover letters: "Not only can I address all of the requirements for this position but I can make your workplace smell better just be being there."
if he means anything like "artful", "creative", or anything remotely humanist, then yeah, women not being involved will result in an inferior outcome
Why?
Because men are inherently inferior at creating anything remotely artful, creative, or humanist?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Technically you are correct, but I would have preferred if you have not used the term "ripped off". I mentioned my source and posted a link too.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"They talk at the urinals, they fart and laugh about it infront of each other, they tell each other stories about whatever girls they brought home from the bar, and ugh the worst thing I heard yesterday was my boss likes to go to the strip club and wear thin sweatpants so he can feel everything! (/vomit)"
And women don't do that? They don't talk about the size of men's dicks, or who has a nice ass, or their periods, or yeast infections? Please...
I was a school teacher surrounded by women, in very much the same position that you are now. Go ahead and TRY to tell me that doesn't happen, so you can lose what little credibility you have left.
You're calling men out for behavior that is ubiquitous, that being, when with a group of like minded people, you lower your guard and discuss more intimate subjects.
You're acting like normal human behavior is discrimination, because you WANT it to be. That's on you, not the (seemingly normal) people you work with.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
I don't know if they act stupid or not, but they certainly aren't accomodating of femininity in general.
I'm very curious, so please elaborate about what not being "accommodating of femininity" means to you. I'd like to hear about some of your experiences in this regard.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
I happen to like geek culture thank you very much. yes, I'm a blonde and yes I still enjoy jokes about WOW, relativity or the lastest microsoft issue. My experience geek males are more than happy to welcome females of any type and will even explain the jokes and various other aspects of geek culture to them if they don't understand.
"They should realize that they could be alienating people who are smarter and better engineers,"
I would lay pretty good odds that being shown up by a woman is among the reasons male geeks treat female geeks badly. Pointing out that some of these women are smarter and better is more likely to get insecure men to try harder to put women down so nobody will notice if they do have a superior talent.
I'm a geek, sure. And I can fit in geek culture. But what bothers me about it is that it is so ridiculously exclusive. If someone doesn't get a certain class of jokes or references, they are quickly labeled and outsider. Maybe it's some kind of retribution for what geeks perceived as being excluded in school? Whatever it is, it sucks. Surrounding yourself with only one type of person is a great way to get your head completely up your ass.
As to females in tech -- they are few and far between for sure. When I managed a development team, I got almost no resumes from females. But interestingly, the few that I interviewed were particularly good. Specifically, I'd say that 3 out of 4 tech males don't know what the hell they're talking about. But it's only 1 out of 5 tech females are similarly clueless. I suppose the rude exclusivity pushes all but the very best into another field.
I also notice that generally speaking, tech ladies survive _in_spite_ of the culture, not because they find a way to fit in. Which is an unfortunate way to have to live. But the friction is not so much because they're female, but because they don't fit in with the other aspects of geek culture, and as I mentioned earlier, geek culture is overly exclusive.
I think there are different natural tendencies for women and men, and I think that even without any culture problems there would probably be fewer tech ladies than tech guys. But I think the ratio we see today is way off from that, and everyone would benefit if geek culture was a little more open to different types of people.
Cheers.
all the geek women want to keep those geek men to themselves. that's why they don't want more geek women around. :-)
Power to the Penguin!
This is so utterly stupid that I don't even know how to structure my rebuttal. In my experience, "geek culture" is far more accepting of women than the men outside of that category. You can inflate statistics to say whatever you want just by altering the wording being used slightly or by data-mining or an other similar process, but if you spend a day among this section of the world you are indicting you will realize instantly that geeks are only too happy to include an intelligent woman. Perhaps the problem here is not that women are not accepted, but that the ones being discriminated against just aren't as good. You should never make allowances for people based on race and gender or you are just guilty of another form of racism/sexism. The point at the end of the day though is that I have never met anyone more accepting of women than the intelligent "geek culture" that is denounced in this bullshit article.
"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fear, fraud, greed, imagination, and poetry." -Edgar Allen Poe
And plus I have no reason to believe it would be different at any other company.
Behold the inextricable chip on your shoulder. Indeed, the universe is stacked against you, and you will be nothing but a helpless victim for the rest of your life. But at least you have us here at Slashdot who will listen to your endless problems, right? Or are we part of the conspiracy as well?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Thx
A lot of people are talking a lot of shite about how different men and women are.
Individuals vary a lot. Gender differences are small.
Yes, when you look at large groups there are statistically significant differences in average risk-taking behaviour. But the averages aren't very different and it's a big bell curve. That means that about 45% of women take more risks than the average bloke, and about 55% of women take less risks.
As for the claim that this is chromosones instead of culture: if so how come the percentage of women who are top mathematicians has quadrupled in the last 30 years, and how come the risk-taking differences vary so wildly when psychologists repeat the experiments cross-culturally?
And please spare us the ill-informed evolutionary just-so stories - or go climb the wall of a zoo-cage and tell a lioness that she's "not aggressive outside her group".
Warren Farrel is a 3 time member of the National Organization for Women NY chapter board and feminist champion. He began researching the biases of pay and employment between men and women. He came to some very interesting conclusions which he discusses in this book.
One of the more controversial was that, in fact, women do not earn less for the same work and in some cases/fields earn more. Previous researched was too vague in job descriptions according to Farrell. For example, previous surveys would lump heart surgeons and foot surgeons into a general category of "surgeon". After taking a closer look, he found that woman often ended up in professions that payed less.
By assessing what women and men were looking for in a job (through surveys and such), he found that woman usually avoided jobs with long work hours, dangerous environments, frequent travel, or personal confrontation (like sales) preferring flexible work hours, no overtime, safe work environments, no travel, etc. It just so happens that these are the very professions that pay the most. Incidentally, Farrell thinks we men should take a page out of woman's book in career choices as they also had higher rates of job satisfaction, lower stress, and overall life satisfaction.
It would seem that though there may be various social road blocks that they don't lie in the employers or necessarily in the environment. . . unless we start getting really nit picky such as "the foot surgeon community is less sexist then the heart surgeon community"...since they probably just work on different floors of the same hospital.
And anecdotally, for every woman I've known who had obvious familial pressures to "get married and raise a family" or some other stereotypical career path, I've known a male who was pressured into some career that he neither wanted nor enjoyed. . . . often in the non-science, blue collar genre.
I'm not saying sexism doesn't exist or that social norms don't push people toward certain career paths, but what's more sexist? Thinking woman are the ones being socially discriminated/pressured because more of them don't choose higher paying, more stressful jobs or that jobs which provide greater personal and career satisfaction, low stress, and flexible work hours are "lesser work" because they don't pay more? By many measures, these woman are far more successful then their higher earning male counterparts.
We will never make progress on equality if having some form of advantage in one area disqualifies one from pointing out injustice in another.
I have known a couple of women who do not fit the nerd mold who are very good at nerdy pursuits, anyone like that (pretty girls who are good coders for instance) who is kept out of a profession by the actions of those in the profession are kept out to the detriment of the profession.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I'd like to point out the person who posted "fatbittervirgins" as an article tag, while presumably trying to ridicule the story, is leaving a pretty good example of the barely concealed viciousness that Berners-Lee is talking about. This attitude is undefendable and an embarrassment to the community. Grow up.
gb2/kitchen/ Oh, and take off those shoes. How did you pay for them? You aren't allowed to have a job. Are you stealing the children's allowance again?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
your never going to get any pussy in life.. gaywad
Just help me out because from its opening statement right through to its bitter end, I couldn't find an argument.
The whole thrust of the piece was based around;
"A culture that avoided alienating women would attract more female programmers",
this is identical reasoning to the following;
"A culture that avoided alienating blue people would attract more blue programmers"
The last time I took Sir T.B.L. at his word was the whole CURL (http://www.curl.com/) fiasco.
He is owed deference, but really this article sounds as if it was dashed out. I can't believe this is anything other that a reporter just filling in the blanks following a quick statement or two.
Complete nonsense.
in the long run, we're all dead anyway.
They should realize that they could be alienating people who are smarter and better engineers,' said Berners-Lee.
How do you think they keep therre jebs? Why is it in any worker's interest to attract more skilled people into the job pool to compete against?
The female engineers I have worked with are as varied in personality and skill as the male engineers I have worked with. I don't know why there are not more female engineers, but I don't particularly care either. If you want this career, go ahead, I'll gladly work with anyone who is rational and professional. But I don't give people special treatment because of their genitalia, male or female.
I can worry about someone's gender and sexual preference when I am looking for an intimate partner, but seeing as I already have a girlfriend I am uninterested. In addition if I were available I certainly wouldn't be chasing tail at work, seems pretty tacky to me. I don't think I would like a woman who responded positively to unprofessional behavior.
And I'm not in the minority here, my male coworkers are as blind to gender, if not more so, than I am. It's totally irrelevant to the job of sitting at a desk designing technology.
Now if I were fire fighter or police officer, maybe the biological bias of male physical strength would have a profound impact on the ability for someone to do their job. But really my bias would be expressed as a distrust of coworkers who are physically weak women, but not for physically capable women. (who can drive firehoses up staircases, or whatever it is fire fighters need to do)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I really don't see the IT field as more discriminatory than others. Seeing how well women are welcomed in this field I really see it as a field for equal opportunity. All the feedbacks I had from female coworkers, friends, or school mates were all positive, they enjoyed the IT world and felt very welcomed in it.
I have yet to see someone who thinks that his virility is expressed in BogoMips or in coding skills (yeah, I know some claim that the bandwidth is a function of the penis size, but this is some sort of cult, they are not, like, orthodox ITers).
I do have, however, to point a bias that exists among women against IT. I will accept a fellow female engineer with no problem, but any "regular" girl sees IT as some sort of a district of Hell. Speak of stupid gender-specific prejudice, nerds have underwent quite a few. It is a lot more socially safer to assume at first, when speaking to an unknown woman, that she knows nothing about computers, even if it is rude for the 1% of them who actually have some technical knowledge (1% isn't exaggerated).
I don't think that the low number of women in IT professions are due to stupid geek jokes (ever heard of dirty jokes from the sales department ? So gross it's boring ) but more because of a wrong idea among "female student culture" about the IT field.
So stop saying this is a machist field, this is only making the prejudice more important.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
In a comment buried under a comment buried under a comment. It's no surprise I didn't see it. But yes, "ripped off" was a bit strong.
There are 10 types of women in the world!
Those who understand binary and those who don't!
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
We'd all benefit if participation in tech fields (as well as the rest of society) was wholly meritocratic. It's definitely not right now. I believe females do tend to get unfairly marginalized by some parts of tech culture.
Just so long as it's true that women are as capable or better than men, there only needs to be a few companies without a gender bias to swing this around. Those companies will employ the women who are underpaid and underappreciated and that will give them a competitive advantage, with which they can crush their biased competition.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But the assholes ALWAYS get more tail. What does this tell us?
The human race is generally pretty fucked up.
Women don't play video games because other women don't play video games.
Women don't study engineering because other women don't study engineering.
Women don't like math because other women don't like math.
Its not true for all women - there are women engineers (I am one of them) but in general its a true statement - the biggest impediment to women in engineering is not having a peer group of other women engineers.
But its not what happens in college that matters - the problem starts in middle school and earlier.
Women and men are both heavily influenced by peer pressure. The difference with computers and engineering in general is while there are 10 year olds playing video games, hacking computers and building Lego Mindstorms. If you are a girl who likes computers - you're going to have a hard time finding any other girl in class to share that with.
And thats how it goes - the divide starts early, in the days when peer pressure matters way more than interests.
When I started college I had been coding since I was eight, I knew about 7 programming languages, and had a 720 on the math SAT. On paper, I was a well prepared freshman computer science major. But I was screwed when I got to college Computer Science courses because I hadn't taken and formal computer science classes in high school.
The bias starts early - girls don't do computers because other girls don't do computers. If I had taken AP Computer Science I would have become a social pariah among my female friends. At age 15, I wasn't really keen to be a pioneer. Most girls aren't. And if the roles were reversed - most high school boys wouldn't be that brave either. (How many men study Literature?)
If you want more female engineers, you fix the culture at age 10 - not age 20.
and my girlfriend does too.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
However, the "twice as many female ancestors as male", if true, puts a hard cap of 50% on the portion of males with surviving ancestors . . .
hawk
I'm not saying sexism doesn't exist or that social norms don't push people toward certain career paths, but what's more sexist? Thinking woman are the ones being socially discriminated/pressured because more of them don't choose higher paying, more stressful jobs or that jobs which provide greater personal and career satisfaction, low stress, and flexible work hours are "lesser work" because they don't pay more?
Why the followon question? If you accept that sexism exists and that society pressures women to avoid risk and long hours, then there's work to be done. We don't need to convince women that answering phones is just as "fulfilling" as being a heart surgeon, we need to convince them that, if they want to be, they probably can become a heart surgeon.
While it can be admittedly sometimes entertaining watching the zingers fly back and forth, especially when one is cheering for those expressing a truth one believes in, I strongly believe that the oneupsmanship that is more common among men, especially Western men, I believe this approach is both anathema to many women, and not the best way to disseminate well-thought out opinions or inform others (or even to be funny). And as soon as any emotion is showed, or an appeal to balance, the very typical mockery ensues. Such a quick-to-argue culture is not a sign of healthy debate--it is a sign of partisan-infected, non-learning-mode immaturity and inefficiency that is sadly a part of the wider culture as well (we also are really, really deluding ourselves by thinking that our partisan system is necessary to democracy and the best way to find a qualified candidate--why do you think so few scientists get elected?). This is childish and typical of a masculine extreme. When I say masculine, this is an excess definitely correlated with many males (really, how many women engage in this kind of battling?) but this is not mutually exclusive of coexisting in society with feminine extremes either, so don't take this as being about women-good, men-bad and respond in kind).
The use 'male geek culture' is nothing more than an attempt to take a large number of individuals who share no commonality except working in somewhat related professions and using a stereotype to blame those individuals for the troubles of others individuals who want to find someone to blame for their own inability to succeed professionally.
I am a white male geek who only sees legitimacy in grouping by gender in matters related to sex, whose ancestors neither owned nor partipated in any slave trades, whose family is dirt poor and apparently missed out on the part where they were supposed to have benefited economically and thus owe people who haven't been repressed in the slightest an advantage despite having never repressed anyone.
Just because a number of individuals who happened to share a characteristic said and/or did bad things to others who happened to share a characteristic doesn't you can group me in if I happen to share a characteristic with the former or that you are entitled to anything simply because you share a characteristic with the later.
The entire affirmative action crap needs called out as well. Forget simple reverse discrimination. Even if I had benefited because of the discrimination of others (which I sure as hell didn't), so what? I am no more responsible than a security company that gains new customers because robbers target those without security. The CURRENT society discriminates based on wealth, some of us weren't born with any, some were born with plenty. Unless you want to read a story book it really doesn't matter what history led to us being born poor or wealthy, that is our lot in life and you be a lot more successful in making the best of it if you stop asking for handouts and a leg up and start making your own opportunities.
Please, tell the community how your life has been impacted by this culture (sic) you reference. If we're to indulge your stereotype, the women you're not playing fair with (women interested in geeky stuff who you apparently feel justified in excluding) are a vastly different crew to the women who you feel alienated by. Discrimination is discrimination. Every bigot feels they have a good reason. Yours appears to be that you had (or are having) a hard time in school from the popular girls. You might want to be getting over that some time.
An excellent question. When I entered college in 1974, female math and physics majors were very rare. Out of a student body of around 1000, the college would graduate 20-30 male math and physics majors each year. One woman might graduate in those subjects every other year. There were a lot of folks back then who wrote that asymmetry off as a natural sex-linked biological variation in mathematical aptitude. In 2001 I went back to school for an M.S. in Applied Math, and low and behold, a third of the students in my classes were women, and they didn't seem to be having any more trouble with the material then I was. I recently checked on my undergraduate college and over the last few years they are graduating 7-8 women in math and physics per year while continuing to produce 20-30 male math and physics graduates. I don't think female neuroanatomy or neurochemistry have changed much in the last four decades, so I have to take the "it's just sex-linked genetic variation" argument with several grains of salt.
Every female I've ever encountered in a tech-related field had little-to-know actual interest in the tech itself. They were always looking for a fast-track into management, indeed expecting a fast-track to management roles.
I'm talking about all the women from my school days, then those at a top university and of course in the workplace subsequently. They resented having to get their hands "dirty" with actual tech work (so to speak), yet always considered themselves to be somehow superior. They flatly refused to be on-call and attend out of hours. If they couldn't refuse, or rapidly move "up" to management, they quit.
But it was never their fault. Nup. It was those horrible, sexist, male chauvinist pigs.
I'm sure that somewhere out there is a true geekgirl who genuinely loves technology (beyond her Tivo or iPod) and who would rather play with a soldering iron, or stay up weekends coding, than cafe-hop at the mall, but such a person is very hard to find. Most chicks just want to be the boss and hang out in their own office for 25 hours-per-week.
Don't worry, I know this is going to get modded down into post hell. The truth and facts aren't often welcome on Slashdot.
This is exactly what needs to be said! Thank you!
In later news, Tim Berners-Lee revealed in an exclusive interview with Womens' Magazine that he was frustrated with the absence of women in IT, especially those who thought the Semantic Web was fascinating and would bring a New Millenium to mankind.
"Stupid male geeks are alienating smarter women with whom I had intended to procreate, build the Semantic Web and take over the WWW." However in a brief unguarded moment, TBL revealed to interviewer Lisa Likalot that "I'm not getting any. In fact my last girlfriend left me for a delivery-truck driver. She said I was out of shape. She did not have the ability to appreciate my beautiful mind."
Pretty risky. Look at all us sexless engineers joking about how we never get laid. Look deeper, and you'll see that some of us are actually kinda proud of it.
Doctor: "It's better to have a wife. Someone can take care of me when I get sick!"
Lawyer: "It's better to have a mistress. Someone can take care of me when my wife gets sick!"
Engineer: "It's better to have both. My wife thinks I'm spending the night with my mistress. My mistress thinks I'm spending the night with my wife. Finally, I can spend some time at the lab and get something useful done!"
Women don't go into engineering because they're smarter than us. They go into marketing and product management because it pays better.
These women want to be part of a predominantly male culture. The fact that it is predominantly male makes them feel uncomfortable. Their natural reaction? Why of course - the men should all change! What bullshit! If you don't like geek culture - don't be a part of it!
So I, for one, would like to know how much time Berners-Lee has been spending recently cranking out code in the trenches. I am currently working at my first major non-American company, and it is disproportionately male there, but I'll say the women there actually work for a change. The company is driven and innovative, not just looking for more ways to dredge up easy money.
I encountered one gal in school who really seemed to have the temperament for hueing out code. I know there must have been others. Perhaps I just didn't notice them. One prevalent thing I seem to notice about female culture is the desire to be entertained. It seems like more women from past generation had the will to dig in and do something, but I'm not seeing it so much anymore. I notice a movement to try to re-structure work as entertainment, though I am skeptical of it ever really gaining traction. I'm glad to be somewhere where work is still valued. It's nice not to feel guilty for threatening the status quo.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
F U .. (sigh) what a bunch of Friday-night losers!
So it's Friday night and I don't have a date. I am wiped out on Pinoqachole.
Mom is busy gun-running in El Salvador. Bah- I don't give a shit!
All you momma's boys in your basement crashpads replete with three Athlon X64s, and your groovy 802-11N can go fuck yourselves.
Most of the women I know have gone off to climb Everest in July. And they did not even invite me.
Just 'cuz I didn't show 'em how to to tune a chainsaw's idle.
So who cares? I'm gonna climb Mt Kilimanjaro. AND set up a webserver up there.
Catch me on Google-Earth then.
There are many balanced people who accomplish a lot in the world, but you fail to recognize the difference between self determination and self discovery. Is it really true that a person can decide to follow either path (a pure choice) without sacrificing any golden geese either way? Or is it more the case that you figure out that your obsessive fascination with an intellectual problem brings something to the table that an overt attempt to style yourself balanced would sacrifice or destroy?
I think the key perspective on this question is that the majority of deep discoveries in mathematics have come from individuals under the age of twenty-five, even if some of them were published later. There are a few exceptions of course, but much of the history of mathematics was paved by young males (mostly) in their youngest, most obsessive years. Obsessive energy is part of the human condition when we peak as young adults. Especially for males, who face a higher risk of not mating at all.
Later on when we are old and slow and stupid, obsessive behaviour has fewer rewards, while balanced behaviour has more. I had all my best ideas in my twenties. Fortunately, I kept a couple of those ideas to myself, so I can still pretend to be obsessed about something I'm busy inventing, but it's just the geek equivalent of buying a convertible when your hair turns grey.
I've known a number of males whose obsessiveness surpassed any concern over group belonging. I haven't met nearly so many women who regard inclusiveness as negotiable.
I don't think the issue is that male engineers have something that women engineers are denied. I think women wish to enter engineering on terms males never demanded. That's probably a good thing. The great advances in future society are more likely to come from groups than individuals.
I also think that women sometimes set their sights too high. If there has ever been an MRI scan taken of a geek coder in the moment of supreme creation (at the keyboard), I don't think you'd see a lot of blood flow to the chit-chat circuits. I do math rarely, but every time I have a math problem to solve, so much of my brain is recruited, I become inert to my surroundings. Any culture where that kind of departure from life is part of the discipline, is going to develop differently, and maybe in ways that women don't enjoy as much, above and beyond boys being boys, and jerks being jerks.
What I'm suggusting is that if you could magically take geek engineering culture and strip away the discriminatory aspects, I believe there are many women who would continue to complain about the end result as an unfriendly work environment. If you don't have some hard edges in engineering culture, you get the NASA effect, where too many people are checking out the social and political consensus, and not enough people are saying, "uh, excuse me, you can't do that that way" with least regard for affiliation. And not just one guy at the bottom of the chain of command.
Or maybe I'm just not getting what expeditions, ships and armies have to do with pasty nerds in lab coats doing calculus, watching Star Trek and eating Doritos. How are hard scientific or technical disciplines "risky" from an evolutionary perspective? You kind of gloss over that part in your post.
It's pretty straightforward. The person is spending years of their life learning a subject rather than finding a mate and having children. The other side of the coin though is that if they do well, they'll have an easier time down the road attracting a mate. Ie, take more risks, possibly get more reward.Where I work we are almost constantly looking for new people. Currently our crew is entirely men simply because I have never seen a qualified femaile resume. In fact I don't even think I've seen any unqualified female resumes.
I've worked in past jobs with quite capable female engineers. I've also worked in past jobs with female 'engineers' who did nothing but sleep with the boss to get ahead. I've seen the entire spectrum. But in general the reason I feel there aren't more female engineers is because there just aren't that many women that want to work with computers. For whatever reason there just aren't that many women drawn to it. And if someone doesn't enjoy this work they're not going to be any good at it, period.
I would love to hire female engineers where I work. It would probably stop the constant and tired penis and gay jokes I have to listen to all day.
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
Your comment is full of political correctness. The fact of life is that women are not as good as men in science, math and technology. You can see that in the way women act in domains that there is no man around to affect them.
Before labeling me as sexist, let me tell you something: I am not. There are women that are very good, even better than most men, in sciences. But they are just the exceptions that confirm the rule. Nobody makes women drivers act stupidly on the road, nobody makes women managers or army officers bitches, nobody makes women watch stupid reality shows, nobody makes women talk about fashion, actors and singers all day long.
A girlfriend of mine once insisted that if women ruled the world, the world would be paradise. History proves otherwise though. Some of the most cruel or hard leaderships in history are by women: Thatcher, Catherine the Great, Theodora of Byzantium etc.
And every day life has many examples of women actually being harder/less sensitive than men. In relationships, most women act authoritatively at home, especially when married. Women can easily break a man's heart, but men can't.
So women are not interested in IT not because men are hostile or anything else, but because women can't really have deep and analytical thinking which is required in these fields. Most women are dominated by their emotions, and it's very hard for them to weed their emotions out so as that they dedicate their brains to the tasks IT requires.
And I 've heard lots of times by women that "I don't like programming, because I don't like to think".
"I frequently get this vibe from my male co-workers that they don't take what I say seriously"
How should we take women seriously when they are so superficial? Watching Oprah and stupid TV shows, bitching about every little thing, driving absolutely insanely (yeah most people that drive slowly in the left lane are women), etc?
Ok, so you are a super genious, coolest person ever. But look at the other women.
"And then when I do great work, they all try to get their hand in the pot and take credit for things I did, which frustrates me to no end. A male co-worker actually got a promotion which seemed to me (from the little congratulations email went out describing all his wonderful accomplishments), mostly based on MY work."
That is not discrimination against women. It happens between guys as well...all the time.
"And then there's this whole thing all women have to deal with at work that being aggressive = bitch."
They are. And males that are aggressive are bitches as well. You can always talk calmly.
"And I feel like whenever I try to get other people's names detached from my work, my bosses don't take it seriously and have even gone as far to joke about it infront of other people!"
Can you say "bad working environment"?
"they are actually making fun of me I think"
So? do they mock you all the time or occasionally? because if it's not systematic, then you are not their target.
1. If a woman smiles at me and she is the one that starts a conversation with me, about this and that, then she might be interested in me.
... Z then most probably am better than you in the field.
:-)
2. If I know more than you in X, Y,
3. And all males are stupid.
4. Yeah, quite normal (seriously: what are the managers doing? why do they let it happen?)
5. if you want to finish the product in time, sometimes they are required.
6. Spending one hour in the kitchen making coffee, one hour around the photocopier chit-chatting around anything and having 5 chat programs on all the time makes the rest work 80h.
7. So what, coding skills is directly proportional to breast size?
8. yeah, in around 0.000000000000000001% It shops around the globe.
9. You never had a girlfriend, eh?
10. Well, if a female manager tends to bitch more for silly little things than important things...
I think IT has fewer women because women are superficial and they don't like to tax their brains (I've been so told by almost every girl that I have told them I am a programmer).
There is only one barrier that matters in Engineering. It is hard! anthing short of 100% determination (and ofcourse being rasonably smart)and you will loose interest and/or fail out. If I had another carreer option that I could have found myself being reasonably good at, I might have quit too. As for geek culture, what exactly is it and how does it alienate women? I have been told I am a geek, but aside from my having a good handle on all things technical, what exactly makes me a geek? A little off argument, but I have three sisters all of whom are brilliant engineers. But only because anything short of Doctor/Engineer doesn't get much respect where we came from, and medicine was so far out of the realm of interest.
First of all, we all know there are no women on the Internet, so this article is pointless.
Second, and in a more serious stance, geeks are systematically discriminated against by most women, who are always after stupid, loud gang trash that treat them like dirt (which they call "confidence") and beat random people up and use drugs (which they call "funney"). They only care for this, as well as money, looks, and trendy fashion social crap. They isolate us because we are not social monkeys who care for who were Mary with the other day as she passed by a fashion store, and we treat them as people (most women hate this). They discriminate us from life and don't give sex, so in return we don't want any of their stupid fashion faggotry in this business. I think it's a pretty modest retaliation, and the typical shallow women who care for looks and are after idiots that beat them wouldn't make good engineers anyways.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
The guy who picked SGML as the basis for an end user markup really shouldn't complain about "geek culture".
This is an interesting week to have this thread come up because it was the week of the Engineering Career Fair here at Texas A&M University. 250+ companies, about half oil and gas but many famous names in the mix (AMD, Intel, Microsoft, BOEING, Samsung, Dupont, Dow, Chevron, ExxonMobil), all looking for candidates majoring in mechanical/chemical/electrical/industrial engineering, physics, computer science, oceanography, geological science, and many others.
So there I was, walking around the arena floor along with hundreds of other students, most in the 19-25 year range (I am a tad older), nearly all in business casual attire and many in suits and business skirts. The male to female ratio is tilted a bit towards male, but there are still hundreds of female students coming in to make contacts. What I found both amazing and sad is this: I could tell at a glance who the computer science majors were, particularly the male comp sci students. The few females sporting comp sci nametags I saw were all international students; the males were both international and domestic. Every domestic student who was dressed just a little shabbier than the rest (jeans instead of pants), or who had inappropriate facial hair (long unkempt goatees or completely shaven heads), EVERY one of them was a male comp sci major.
And the worst booth of the bunch? Microsoft. Two really young guys with laptops next to some huge poster with this "Hey Genius!" thing on it (see http://www.hey-genius.com/). It was LAME. They had very few people coming to talk to them even though they have hired directly from A&M before.
I've got a BS in comp sci. I worked in several places with a well-known large multinational and was fortunate NOT to have had the "geek subculture" surrounding me 24/7. Now I'm back in school for a MS in engineering, and in my discipline (at two different schools I've been to) the male to female ratio is within 2:1 and it makes a huge difference. Teamwork is valued, the overall output is higher, and the social culture is far more inclusive. One can still be the quiet and shy type and succeed, but one can also be the extroverted socialite without being labeled an idiot. Male engineers in my program often as not have girlfriends, active social lives, and can work with female and international colleagues without pissing them off. Our program is also branching out to nano and bio and is going to be right in the middle of the next technology revolution. But my discipline is sort of special: due to geo-political reasons it has a strong need for a diverse workforce, and as such the major universities have made a strong effort to make the discipline more inclusive. Due to their work to make this an inviting place for everyone, we now have a pool of quite decent engineers who can compete globally.
This is Berners-Lee's point: if the IT industry wants that kind of globally competitive workforce, they need to stop tolerating this male geek bullshit (which BTW is really just a repackaged version of while male redneck except with computers instead of NASCAR) that drives women*, POC, and many international students** away from the discipline.
* - To everyone who insists that they are really meritocratic and they treat women the same as they treat men and women need to suck it up, the way you treat men IS the behavior women keep complaining about. "Joking", "ribbing", "teasing", "punching": these are stupid behaviors appropriate to a schoolyard, not a workplace. Furthermore, this behavior is in fact aggressive and it is only non-threatening if the other party is capable of being equally aggressive in their response; women in general are penalized in numerous ways if they respond to this kind of aggression with their own aggression. The solution is not to insist that women become more aggressive in their response, but rather for the subset of men who engage in this aggressive behavior to find a way to be both productive in thier work and socially inclusive
Because composing is inherently rewarding and fame is not actually the main motivator? (In fact I'd argue it's more likely to be a major deterrent!)
Case in point. Not getting recognized didn't stop her from composing all that wonderful music, why should it stop anyone else?
Very interesting talk, thank you for the link.
And what is this nice apparel? Would it be a me too suit, me too "business casual," or me too emo-ware (tm) from the mall? Although I am on the art geek graphic designer end of the spectrum I say a pox on "nice apparel" and fall into the don't care about clothes get it at the thrift store camp. The old hippies and civil rights people got it right when they said we ought to judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin (or clothes). And note this isn't something we should get mad at women about as in the very first post but the fashion industry and media industry that promotes a shallow culture. The fashionista women are every bit as much used by the fashion industry through being pressured to buy over priced crap to fit in as the "uncool" geeks rejected by the fashonista "culture." Know your true enemy and fight them not your fellow people being victimized as per usual by the corporations.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
That's always been my reaction to the copyright-motivates-musicians argument, actually: people have *always* composed music, art, and writing, and no amount of copyright or lack thereof is going to alter the creative instinct.
The argument at hand, however, is that women in the 1800's, although professionally trained in music, didn't 'compose' at all, which he used as supporting evidence that women try and create stuff for narrow/deep connections rather than shallow/broad ones. My contention is that society wasn't predisposed to accept women composers, so whether or not they wrote, A: they weren't going to be recognized as major composers, and B: they weren't writing in efforts to become major composers, because of A. That doesn't mean they didn't write, and it doesn't mean the stuff they wrote wasn't just as good as what men wrote. It means that it was received differently by society, and was written differently as a result of its expected reception.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
"You don't seem to realize that the "you too!" form of argumentation is generally in poor taste and logically flawed."
And you don't seem to realize your reading skills suck, because I didn't do anything of the kind here.
Learn to read or stop posting.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
The key is the double negative. I'm not denying its existence, but I'm not asserting that it plays a significant role either. What I am saying is that it could be sexist on our part to think that women *should* go for male oriented jobs. Are we perhaps advocating pushing them into being more "man like" instead of accepting their natural preferences? Again, I don't know. Lots of empty assertions on how things should be rather then how things are.
I think you may have missed my point, it's hard to say "why" they make such choices. It *could* be due to some sort of stereotyping, it *could* be due to biological differences and stress coping, it *could* be due to most of society still thinking men should be the bread winners (which leave woman more open to pursuing vocations rather the avocation with good pay).
What was made apparent is that a) woman are paid the same for the same work b) that no clear discrimination towards woman is reflected in pay or career advancement and c) woman tended to have overall higher "satisfaction with life" indicators. If they're happier in their jobs/careers overall then men, why are we even worried? What, is it unfair that they are happier then the average male? Must we make sure to close the "hate my damned job, but love my check" gap? Happiness is the true measure of success in every case. Money can make it a bit easier, but it's not absolutely necessary. . . as woman are showing us every day in their career choices.
You're totally right--it would be at the very least ignorant and, at worst, incredibly sexist to try to "push" women towards "manly" jobs. But as it stands, there is a clear cultural bias against them; that means that on some level they lack the opportunity to get into these jobs unless they push back really, really hard.
As I told another poster who complained about how hard it was being a geek since society (the sophisticated, wildly sexually attractive part of it, anyhow) is so down on geeks--imagine that, only worse, and that's what it's like for women.
Consider this: plenty of women do nothing more than raise kids. That's their life, they go to college (or not), get married, and pop out a sprog or three. And I'm pretty sure that motherhood is fulfilling on multiple levels (mom said so, anyway). But think about the circumstances under which women make career decisions: they are acting rationally but within a different social framework from yours or mine. So it's not like they're just making these decisions in a vacuum.
Again, this is a bias in the whole culture and we're all soaking in it. I would guess that it has a lot more to do with that than "natural differences." And ask yourself this--where is this research on "natural differences?" Where's the data? All we're operating on when we make suppositions like that is--drum roll--cultural bias. Bigotry. Sexism.
The fact that women can get the same salary for the same job is a huge leap in equality over the past 50 years. When any random teenage girl looking at career paths is totally free to choose among "fashion model" or "chemical engineer" then we'll be a hell of a lot closer.
I happen to agree that, in the end, happiness is the number one factor to consider. I'm at a stage now where, honestly, I'd rather be a chef or something. But instead I'm a security consultant making a ridiculous salary, and, y'know, that's alright, I guess, there are worse things. But I also recognize that I had the freedom to choose this path and a lot of women don't. All I ask is that you (everyone) think about it a bit more.