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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."
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...
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'
Women interested in IT face a hostile environment that discourages them from participating. While I'm of the mind that they should grow thicker skin, let's be honest, they're facing a lot more obstacles than you deal with as a pasty male geek with no fashion sense.
"It was a billion times better than cobol, but still really retarded." -AC
.... 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.
At least as a male you can get into it if you play the game. As a female I'm pretty much locked out of the old boys club. I'll never even get to be buddy buddy with my boss.
I have a good friend at work who sometimes repeats to me the horrible conversations that occur between the males at work. 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) He's married w/ a wife and kid. This is the kind of stuff I won't ever be a part of that precludes me from being in the club.
Which explains why a paper submitted to a journal by a writer with an unambiguously male name (Robert) gets a better reception than the *same* one submitted an ambiguous name (Robin) which gets a better reception than the same one submitted under an unambiguously female name (Roberta).
Which explains why a female scientist who had a sex change operation found that after the procedure, when he was interacting with his peers, he would hear people talking about how much more insightful, meaningful, impressive his research was than his "sister's".
Or you know, how men somehow always got those jobs performing in orchestras, because they "played better", until someone came up with the blind audition, at which point the proportion of women getting positions jumped dramatically.
There are boatloads of studies demonstrating that holding all else equal, men are chosen preferentially over women even today. Hence the common belief that a woman has to be twice as good at something before she'll get as much credit as the half as competent man.
It isn't whining to point out that maleness is a huge automatic plus when it comes to people assessing other people's work. It is whining to complain when that fact gets pointed out.
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.
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
Why should she lower her expectations one bit? If Leah is looking to date, she just needs to look somewhere else where the options are broader than "attractive asshole" and "unattractive geek."
What you have proposed is a false dichotomy (and a philosophical error) that most people ("Nice Guys") apply to women: they can choose between attractive assholes (corollary: "...and deserve what they get") or unattractive guys who are "nice" (which really only means "inoffensive"). The problem is, this is usually a pretty bitter attitude, and it doesn't imply any additional respect on the part of the Nice Guys (typically, quite the opposite).
The thing to do is not be nice...just be a good guy.
the "intelligent" and well-educated male contingent should be taking steps that the "rest" of male culture does not
What makes you think that the rest of culture hasn't already taken that step? "women of all educational levels from 21 to 30 living in New York City and working full time made 117 percent of men's wages, and even more in Dallas, 120 percent." http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/03/nyregion/03women.html?hp=&pagewanted=print Add to this that most women are promoted faster than men. (They are paid less for the same position but they get the position 5 years earlier, thus earning more than men their same age.) If anything the post gen-X generation (gen-Y?) favors women over men. Men are often portrayed alternatingly as predatory or frivolous in women's literature and television, and are considered extraneous to the family unit by the courts. (except of course for financial support) So when I hear someone bemoaning a patriarchal culture in the US, I think that perhaps want they really want is for women to be superior in the business/tech venues as the overwhelming female superiority in the legal/cultural/family venues is not enough anymore.
We are all just people.