Slashdot Mirror
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
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...
"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
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?
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'
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
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
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.
.... 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.
He is just trying to get some action from the new receptionist.
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.
So how do we quantify "stupid"? Knowing most of the dialogue to Holy Grail?
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
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
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.
Bullshit.
Research has shown that when a women shows the same behavior that is supposedly prized in men, than she's labeled a "bitch" and the like, and continues to be on the receiving end of discrimination, just of a different sort. The actions are the same, they're just perceived differently because of who they're coming from. Apparently, So as a result, it's damned it you do, damned if you don't.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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'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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
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.
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).
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.