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The Ugly Underbelly of Coder Culture
snydeq writes "Today's developers are overwhelmingly young and male, and they're barring the door from a more diverse workforce, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. 'Software development isn't just failing to attract women. It's actively pushing them away. ... Put all the pieces together, and you're left with an impression of developers that's markedly different from the geeks and nerds they're made out to be in popular culture. On the contrary, developers harbor the same attitudes and engage in the same behaviors you see whenever a subculture is overwhelmingly dominated by young males. They've even coined a clever name for programmers who think and behave like fraternity pledges: brogrammers,' McAllister writes. 'Developers like to think of their culture as a meritocracy, where the very best developers naturally rise to the top. But as long as the industry tends to exclude more than half of the potential workforce, that's nothing but pure arrogance.'"
I could write a few sentences to refute it, but that would just add to the bullshittyness of it. I'm not sure if i spelled bullshittyness right.
I've had enough of your sensationalist BS stories /.
Bookmark deleted, and goodbye.
That structural patriarchy shit is still very mainstream in the college community. It's bullshit, of course, but it is clever bullshit. See, you can't ever disprove it because there will always be some layer of patriarchy to unfold. And it always kind of ends up at "it is men's fault. But there is nothing specifically you, a well-meaning male can do, because the damage is already done, and you should just suck it."
Also on the same curriculum is privilege, where anything anyone in the "dominant" group gets they got because society is set up to make it easy for them, and anything the non dominant groups achieve was way harder for them to achieve because they had all this privilege to overcome.
It's the same bullshit the GOP tells its followers: "you are poor, miserable slobs because the Demmy-crats done it to y'all."
CS students and CS departments can't do anything to attract more female students. The problem is that the industry has been dominated, lock, stock and barrel, by foreigners on guest worker visas and green cards. If females wanted to experience Indian culture and be assaulted by the stench of curry all day, they'd move to Calcutta. Nobody is going to study CS degrees, especially females, as long as the industry is so dysfunctional in terms of hiring domestic talent. Females know better than to place their career hopes on an industry that only hires often 1 in 50, 1 in 200, even 1 in 1000 applicants (ie: Google), or worse metrics at other firms.
If the industry wants more females, it needs to start treating everyone with a significant amount of more respect.