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Could a Grace Hopper Get Hired In Today's Silicon Valley?
theodp writes "There has been lots of heated discussion on the topic of where-the-girls-aren't, both in the tech and larger business world. Dave Winer broached the subject of 'Why are there so few women programmers?', prompting a mix of flame, venom and insight. Over at Valleywag, Nitasha Tiku pegs 'Culture Fit' as an insidious excuse used to marginalize women in tech. Completing the trilogy is an HBR article, 'Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?', in which Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic concludes the problem is that manifestations of hubris, which occur much more frequently in men than women, are commonly mistaken for leadership potential. So, with a gender and age strike against her, would a Grace Hopper in her prime even land an interview in today's Silicon Valley?"
I only had one girl in my computer science classes in college, but she was an exceptional programmer. Now in the work field, again I encounter very few female programmers but am always impressed with their skill levels and dedication.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
She'd probably miss the job interview on account of being dead for 20 years.
You never see women hanging off the back of a garbage truck. Is this a problem? Why is it a problem that women don't want to be programmers but not a problem that women don't want to be "garbage persons?"
Having met http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_hopper briefly while I was at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_at_Austin back in the '70s I can say without a doubt she would be highly regarded in the current environment. She is known for COBOL but her accomplishments are many, including very early compilers and standards for FORTRAN. She was very influential to me. If she was 40 today I would easily imagine her leading a Silicon Valley company, as her tenure in the Navy was very similar, requiring leadership and technical capabilities, but she chose military service for her career, making what I consider very significant advances in computer science. She really was quite an imposing figure for a 90 lb grandmotherly woman. I wish I could have known her better. During many of her lectures, she illustrated a nanosecond using salvaged obsolete Bell System 25 pair telephone cable, cut it to 11.8 inch (30 cm) lengths, the distance that light travels in one nanosecond, and handed out the individual wires to her listeners. One of her great quips: "The most important thing I've accomplished, other than building the compiler, is training young people. They come to me, you know, and say, "Do you think we can do this?" I say, "Try it." And I back 'em up. They need that. I keep track of them as they get older and I stir 'em up at intervals so they don't forget to take chances."
" manifestations of hubris ... are commonly mistaken for leadership potential "
Not limited to tech jobs in the valley.
'Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?'
Because they're far easier to control.
Of course, anyone with credentials like this: "She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1928 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics and earned her Master's degree at Yale University in 1930." would get an interview at a tech company, or even become the CEO.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Because she didn't have a degree in computer science her resume would never be approved by HR. The hiring manager wouldn't even know she applied.
In your dreams.
Yes, easy to blame evil men for everything - keeping Grace Hopper from getting a job in Tech in 2013 (Assuming she wasn't dead).
In the 80's, women made up most of CS programs around the country. When I went in 2000 - they made up a handful of the entire class. But, engineering was the same (for all engineering majors).
There isn't some evil conspiracy to prevent women from entering tech (some of the best innovators in tech I know are women). They simply, for whatever reason, aren't interested in it.
But they are all Russian COBOL programmers.
But trust me when I say the financial industry has more than you realize -- they just ain't in Silicon Valley, they are in Wall Street.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
And if you are comparing, I would say that we do in the form of Marissa Meyer, and before her Carly and Meg (love or hate.)
Grace Hopper did not stay as a frontline dev person for long.
So you're really asking the wrong question here, which should be more: Why aren't there more . And I'd also submit that it is *because* women are smarter - they know that management leads to better rewards than grunt work.
This article, as well as the source articles are all nothing but professional trolls written for the express purpose of generating page views. What's next, links to articles on Jezebel asking if the average man beats his wife before or after raping her?
Especially at google , We will see more Marissa Meyers, Yahoo CEO from google, as long as the three men block the top at google.
I mean really why does this matter? Why isn't it a problem that there aren't enough males in nursing or males that run baby sitting services. Every time i see this topic i think does it matter. If girls don't want to get into tech why are we trying to encourage them.
As long as she follows /. to discover such great gems as "ctrl+shift+t," though, I'm sure recruiters will be all over her (figuratively, though possibly literally as well).
So, with a gender and age strike against her, would a Grace Hopper in her prime even land an interview in today's Silicon Valley?"
No.
First Grace was a brilliant leader and computer scientist; which means she would be worth quite a bit of money and the Valley wouldn't pay for her talent. (Go to PayScale.com, put in your skills, set the city to SF. Yeah, they pay shit for the cost of living there.)
Secondly, she was much too innovative to work in SV. They'd want to put her to work on some lame-ass "Social Networking Site", some advertising app that hides its intentions by "showing the user their interests" (targeted advertising BS), or some other stupid idea that would be beneath her.
Lastly, in this day and age, I'm not so sure she'd apply her brilliance to computers. I think she'd go where the the new developments are being made; like biotech or something that would challenge her - i.e. Everywhere but Silicon Valley.
Women don't often choose tech as a career. But those that do get paid more and find jobs easier then comparably qualified men.
Every company that does any business with government is always looking to hire females/minorities. They are required to. Don't pretend that doesn't have an effect.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Do you know that the weird way you talk makes you look nuts.. I barely have any idea what you're saying.
not trying to stereotype but here is an observation from me: the job recruiters who call me are mostly men. some women call me too. most everyone who interviews me for a technical / programming / software engineer is a man. i think only four women have interviewed me so far. when the interviewer gave me a tour of an office, most of the people that I saw in the office were men.
come to think of it, most of the senior IT people (managers and lead programmers) that I've met are men too. so yeah, were are the smart women in the IT field? Oddly enough, I did see women of all ages in my IT and information systems courses taking java and database classes. *scratches head*
We're talking about the person who popularized the term "debugging." She was accustomed to making systems do what others said couldn't be done and getting people to fix the flaws in their broken systems. She would probably write a paper on the bugs in the company's hiring system (does not hire programmer if gender is F), hang out at the Starbucks across the street and use social engineering to get someone to deliver the paper to a decision maker who would invite her in for an interview and hire her.
Ten years ago the comments to this story would have been riddled with crude, misogynistic jokes. In fact, I wonder if the story was meant to elicit such a response from Slashdot. Congrats on rising above, everyone.
Isn't that one of the defining characteristics of truly great programmers, along with laziness, and being impatient.
Wake me up when there are womyn-born-womyn [...] If you can't get womyn-born-womyn [...] When do we tell womyn-born-womyn [...]
Wow. SOMEONE'S got a catchphrase stuck a mile up his ass. Do you need to talk about it? Because seriously, that comes right the fuck out of nowhere, sticks out like someone trying to force a meme, is debatable whether or not it means anything, and seriously isn't helping your case at all.
No, really. That would've gone a lot better if you didn't leave a steaming pile of your own clever catchphrase all over the post.
I'm sick of being blamed for their own shortcomings because of the gender I was assigned against my will.
So, you wanted to be a girl and when you popped out and regardless of your protests, the doc slapped a dick on you and called it a day?!
... so we've named a supercomputer after her:
http://www.top500.org/system/176952
It's a pretty giant beastie. There are some pretty awesome pictures of the front rack floating around:
http://news.techgenie.com/files/Hopper-Supercomputer.jpg
Why would anyone hire a grasshopper? They suck at programming. Stupid bugs!
Should we be asking "Could Grace Hopper get hired" or "Would Grace Hopper choose to work as a silicon valley programmer"? My (admittedly anecdotal) experience has been that women view programming more as a tool than a career. When I volunteered to help run a programming course for kids ages 10-12, the way the boys and the girls viewed what they were doing was astronomically different.
When I asked our most enthusiastic boy students whether they wanted to be a programmer when they grew up, most of them responded "YES!" enthusiastically. When I asked the same question to the most enthusiastic girl students, I got responses like "No. I want to use programming to make me a better Chemist/Biologist/Teacher/etc."
This difference in viewpoints has been very apparent at the college level too. While we have very few female computer science grad students, we do have tons of female grad students using Python, Ruby, and C to model simulations in our other science departments. They do not consider themselves programmers; they consider themselves Biologists, Chemists, Geologists, etc that use a powerful tool to put their research into high gear.
Silicon Valley still needs plenty of soulsearching on the subject, but I do have to wonder whether trying to get women to be programmers is an inferior approach compared to encouraging women to leverage programming in order to make them better at whatever career they desire to pursue.
That seem to be a joke. Have you ever had the pleasure of reading any Social Justice type blogs. It's a special language, for special snowflakes.
Or it's a batshit mental circle jerk/echo chamber.
Personally I go with utterly batshit, but you make your own mind up.
They simply, for whatever reason, aren't interested in it.
So by your own admission, in the '80s, more women than men were interested in CS, but that balance had more than reversed itself in a little over a decade.
That doesn't seem strange to you? Just based on the facts. "It was this way, but now, 'for whatever reason,' it's totally different." Forget the "evil men" strawman argument; something changed. What, and why?
There have been lots of studies about this, and one of the most telling related self-employed/small business owners based on gender lines, where men and women had relatively equal qualifications. As self-employed individuals, this avoids the potential bias of a glass ceiling or other unfair discrimination. As you'd expect in today's environment, men outperformed women on average.
However, that's not all. The study included a metric to determine the goals of the individuals; money, etc and if you split it up your comparisons based on their goal focus, you found something interesting; men tended to focus on making money, and would sacrifice vacation, schedule, family, etc to do it, while women placed higher priority on a short commute, flexible schedules, family (including child-rearing), and so on. This is all expected stereotype, not at all interesting.
What was interesting is when matched to those women who made money their motivation, men were beaten handily. In fact, once paired with same-motivation/goal, women out performed men almost across the board, achieving a higher success rate, and in general, a higher level of subjective happiness across those metrics. The averages are just skewed because more men choose money than women, and we tend to use money as an objective measure of success.
The salient point to take from this is: Men and women have different goals and motivations, and that can affect both their career choice and their apparent success in a given field to an uninvolved observer. Trying to artificially adjust this rate will probably end badly, unless you change the definition of success. However, few businesses willing to hold an employee up as 'very successful' when their primary goals include child rearing and vacation time.
As an aside, this is also why there are so few female CEOs, especially of larger, higher dollar businesses. Many of those CEO's have unbroken strings of management reaching 30-40 or more years. On the other hand, many female managers have taken time off for children, family, etc. They're not being penalized, but simply put, one individual shows a greater dedication towards advancing the business than the other. ... I'd like to link to the article, but it was in a business magazine, and I couldn't find a reference to it online
Its the idea that your status in an intellectual setting should be based on how far you can throw furniture. Or how far you could throw a football back in high school. These sorts of attributes may have some validity in some blue collar jobs, like ditch digging or bricklaying. But they have no value in a high tech company.
Have gnu, will travel.
Having met Grace Hopper, and luckily getting to spend a few hours with her where I got the Incredible Luck of sitting at the graduation speakers table. She smoked unfiltered Pall Malls, drank straight scotch, and swore like a sailor. She would have no problem in a place like Microsoft in the early days with bare-knuckle screaming management. She didn't make rear admiral because she was made of Jello.
Why would I hire a deceased old hag?
Pre-modern: Women are property, not persons
Modern: It becomes more common that gifted women make significant contributions to society, science, etc
Post-modern: While occasionally woman are able to overcome or bypass pre-modern systemic bias, we actually should fix the system
Integral: Realization that differences in the way men and women flourish in society is not necessarily seen as a problem, as it is in the post-modern meme, and its goal of flat equality.
Most notably, in a comprehensive review of studies, Alice Eagly and colleagues showed that female managers are more likely to elicit respect and pride from their followers, communicate their vision effectively, empower and mentor subordinates, and approach problem-solving in a more flexible and creative way (all characteristics of "transformational leadership"), as well as fairly reward direct reports. In contrast, male managers are statistically less likely to bond or connect with their subordinates, and they are relatively more inept at rewarding them for their actual performance. Although these findings may reflect a sampling bias that requires women to be more qualified and competent than men in order to be chosen as leaders, there is no way of really knowing until this bias is eliminated.
The bolded part hits the nail on the head for me. In the software development field (as well as management) currently a woman must exert more effort to get noticed so there is a huge selection bias that makes the women more likely to be top of the line, versus your average male manager or programmer. Any woman who isn't gets pushed out of the field or passed over.
We will know when we've arrived when we have a good mix of incompetent, average, and excellent female software developers and managers... Just like we have with men today.
As for why a relatively balanced field (Computer Science) turned into a male-dominated one, I think the period when nerds and geeky stuff weren't cool put a lot of social pressure on women to stay away and now the cycle just perpetuates itself. Even if 29 of 32 guys in a CompSci class are normal non-creepers, as soon as a girl shows up she gets the full attention of the 3 total creepers, who stalk her, follow her around campus, etc... Or the one dude who constantly talks down to her and says software is for guys only. In reality it takes only one asshole to drive the girl away and perpetuate the cycle.
Personally I'd like to see more women entering the field so I try to call out the creepers and assholes whenever I encounter them. One voice of reason often puts a stop to it.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
I'm not aware of any serious study that attempts to explain why women aren't better represented as programmers. There are lots of studies that establish that it is so.
So, we really don't know why. Until someone really can nail this down with a decently reliable study, everyone is just speculating.
Personally, I think looking at programming is too narrow. If you look at the broader aspects of a development project -- application design, programming, human/computer interfaces, information organization, testing, documenting, requirements gathering, customer management, deployment, training, troubleshooting, customer support, etc. -- I think you'd find that the gender distribution is a lot closer to the working population. It truly does take a village to develop software. It's pretty narrow-minded to focus on just one aspect of the problem, and pretend like that's all there is.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I'm sick of being blamed for their own shortcomings because of the gender I was assigned against my will.
You are not being blamed for your gender. You are being blamed for your obnoxious comments / beliefs. In the same breath you said that their absence has nothing to do with you and then continuously repeated a term that you clearly consider derogatory toward them. I wonder why they might not want to be around you.
Would someone with decades of experience developing DoD computer systems and networks at the highest levels find a job in Silicon Valley?
Yeah, I think so.
I have a feeling such people (whether elderly, female or from Mars) are in great demand right now at otherwise youthful homogenized companies.
A better question is: would Navy junior lieutenant Grace Hopper be assigned to a high profile research project at Harvard? There are all sorts of reasons that wouldn't happen.
If it's against your will, you are free to change your gender.
Teach me to read subject more closely. First glance I thought it was talking about Grass Hoppers.
I don't know about female programmers but there are *tons* of female BA's and Project Managers.
Hard to take women seriously. Miley Cyrus set woman back decades in the corp world.
Wow. SOMEONE'S got a catchphrase stuck a mile up his ass. Do you need to talk about it? Because seriously, that comes right the fuck out of nowhere, sticks out like someone trying to force a meme, is debatable whether or not it means anything, and seriously isn't helping your case at all.
Perhaps I can explain a bit. "womyn born womyn" is a term predominately used by what are colloquially called radfems to marginalize MTF's because they don't consider them women.
And yes, I know some men don't either but most of those don't go out of their way to attack transwomen and the radfems DO.
And it's also refererencing the larger than usual numbers of MTF transwomen in computers/IT, that since the radfems don't consider us/them women you would need to ask the non-transwomen why they don't go into programming/IT
As far as I can tell, Velex has had some very bad experiences with Radfems and it's made her a bit... ranty at times about them. But she's got a point and I myself tend to get twitchy whenever I hear the word "radfem" or read their writings.
And yes, there are a larger than usual amount of MTF transpeople involved with computers either professionally or hobbyists. In part it's due to computers not rejecting one when one is young, and of course transpeople quickly figuring out how useful online social-networking was to us personally and the community. Linux use was rather higher than average in some transgender IRC channels, and I know of at least a half dozen transgender programmers at my favorite transgender message board.
I'm not a 'feminine dude'. I wouldn't even say I'm a feminist, insofar as I expect that men and women should be treated the same, not given special treatment in order to play catch up, or whatever. However, that's not what I was pointing out.
The raw numbers say women outperform men in many cases where the stereotype and common knowledge AND anti-male politicking says they don't, but only when they are aligned with the same goals we use to measure success, primarily money.
This is actually a common trend; more women graduate college, they tend to be promoted faster, they do better in male-dominated fields such as stock trading and mathematics, make better managers, business owners, etc.
Really, all this leads up to a single inescapable fact: Since women are better than men in general at white-collar tasks, they should be the primary wage earners, and men should be required to lounge at home watching tv and taking care of the kids. It's a more efficient solution.
One great irony is the issue itself is framed in a paradoxically sexist manner. In a real way, the issue is not just why are women underrepresented in various technical/scientific fields, but also why are they over represented in others. More women are going to college after all.
Really, one way to get more women into technical fields is to get more men to go into non-technical ones, the story really should be why do men and women keep taking the degrees in different areas. If a girl needs to be able to dream of being a scientist I suppose a boy needs to be able to dream of being any number of female dominated educated professions. This is two sides of the same coin and each directly affect the other. Plus it may have the benefit of getting more men into college, something we need to do, by opening up more and different opportunities for them.
I know technical jobs often pay very well, but to an extent focusing on traditional male jobs as being the "good" jobs if anything justifies them having the better salary. So in a way the argument is framed undermines itself!
After all, you can not really argue that, women are just a good at everything as men, but at the same time believe, but they are better at the following things.
I had heard she was accomplished, but the Wikipedia article (linked in summary) on her career was fascinating. Thank you for including it!
women placed higher priority on a short commute, flexible schedules, family (including child-rearing), and so on.
Oh shit, I didn't realize I was a woman. Time to start cross dressing to fit the part.
A hundred years ago, with very rare exceptions, a woman's career was her marriage. The man was expected to participate in the money economy, and provide for her retirement, while the woman engaged in arguably harder and more important work (raising children) that happened to not be part of the money economy.
That, however, was a hundred years ago. Both sexes have to adapt to contemporary realities. It's both a systemic issue of opportunities (which both men and women are responsible for) and initiative on the part of the women to pursue certain careers.
She had no shortage of confidence -- just about all of it earned and well-justified. She could have held her own in today's job market -- especially with her pedigree and reputation.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
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Am I the only idiot that read the title wrong? I was very confused for a while. I know that I'm just another example of an incompetent man that's willing to post on a tech website, but I worked very hard for good karma here! If I was a woman (maybe I was in a pastlife), I would hope that I could push myself for good /. karma still.
The G
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I skimmed the title and thought they were talking about David Carradine.
Since when did technical people get classed as the 'alpha male' type that would be biggoted against women? I have given alot of technical interviews and its just about 'can you answer the questions'. There are less women in the profession because less women CHOOSE to go into the profession. You really think its all those sexist pig alpha males studying computer science? Most of them are nerds who play Dungeons and Dragons. It is loaded with guys who were more likely to be a mathlete than a real athlete in high school. These are the guys the attractive women either ignore or see as the 'friend type' (guy they complain to about their boyfriends). Have these guys ever been around a computer science department? Its loaded with overweight, awkward, pimply faced guys. You think guys like that would have the nerve to harrass a woman? They would probably be super excited because a girl is actually interested in what they are and won't think he is a nerd for talking about coding.
Its time for the feminists to put up or shut up. Teach yourself to code. Get a computer science degree. Stop complaining and do the work to learn the profession. No I won't hold your hand. No I won't help you. No one lifted a finger for me. I have a life outside of work and I want to be able to go home. I don't want to work harder to help you out. Seriously, stop complaining and go into the profession if you want to do it. There are plenty of lousy techies out there, so there is room for people who take it seriously.
But be prepared... learning to code is HARD. Its A LOT of work. Learning to do ANY technical profession is frustrating. Some classes are 40 hours/week of study all by themselves. You will get compile errors. You will get frustrated. You will solve a problem, to only forget the solution 2 days later (happens to everyone), get frustrated and have to solve it again. You will solve one problem to 2 steps later get stuck again. This is hard work. Its why we make more money because there are not enough people who want to suffer through the pain to learn to do this.
Just do it and stop complaining. Seriously, put up or shut up. If you learn to code, get a CS degree (very hard to break into the profession without a technical degree post 2000) and you still can't get in. Get back to us. Odds are its one of 2 things. First you really are not prepared to go to work and did not work hard enough in school. Your classes won't be enough. You have to work on your craft in your free time. Or second, the company can get an H1B to work for less than you at entry level and have 5 years experience. Now you know how the guys feel when they have trouble getting jobs out of school.
Since when are the IT nerds the sexist type?
I think we're way past the time where gender mattered. Except for a few things, everything else is irrespective of gender. History suggests how and why men and women are good in certain fields and why they take interest in certian areas. (Read "Why men don't listen and women can't read maps" by Allan Barbara Pease) but exceptions persist. So, I think its sort-of pointless to be biased and even wonder why "men/women" are or are not in big numbers in certain fields.
- PopplerAlert
She doesn't have 45 years of Java experience. She might be willing to work for $20,000 until people clue her in on the cost of living these days.
Most ladies have no interest in this field. Just like most guys do not take up psychology major.
I really don't care what /. moderators think of what I have to say.
There are a few women with absolutely no skill where I work. I have to put up with comments about how a woman should have my job because the workplace is mostly female frequently enough that I am sick of it. So I come here to bitch.
At every single turn of my life I've been discriminated against---from when I was circumcised and left with 19 years of physical pain; to when the administration at my middle school decided that they wanted to have a story in the newspaper about having a computer cub founded by a girl, not a boy; to when I was required to attend date rape training that girls weren't required to attend to start taking classes in college---and now I have to listen stuff at work about how the production floor is a "pink ghetto" and how I have my job, not because of any skills I may or may not have, but because of my legal gender.
Turnabout is fair play. If women want programming careers, there's tons of information on the internet they could use to learn. But they don't.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
What is the need to promote women for STEM work when the government allows bloated corporations to harvest geniuses globally by the 10's of thousands and then dumps them here, with a job, a place to live, then carts their respective rears back to the cesspool they were pulled from at the end of project? Could it be that the myopia caused by tomorrow mornings bottom line negatively affects the community?
I think the biggest strike against her would be her age, much more than her sex.
Agreed. We just hired a female out of college who by all accounts seems to be a very intelligent woman. Not only is she a good worker and fairly sociable, but she's pretty darn good looking too. What does she want to be? A business analyst and get her MBA.
And that was before she started the job in earnest. Unfortunately, she is now working in a closet with two guys who I found out don't actually talk very much. She appears a little bored. If you want to know what her biggest barrier is here? The people she works most directly with don't socialize. I don't get to talk to her much, but when I do, she seems pretty happy to talk to people.
I noticed that this girl (and girl she is in comparison to my old-age) leaves promptly at 5 usually. While she has a long commute, I do as well and I stay late to not deal with traffic. She wants to GTFO, it's just a job to her. She's not bad at it, but it's not something she's going to stay with too long, I can tell.
You're misinterpreting my motives, willfully or otherwise. For the sake of discussion -- why do you feel that the question of gender equality is so different from that of racial equality that it's inappropriate to mention one in a discussion of the other?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I know that radical feminists aren't your friends, but it _is_ possible to be concerned about the problems that cisgender women face without dismissing the ones that transgender women face.
I don't think anybody is trying to indict you specifically for the failings of patriarchy - nor any individual in particular, for that matter. If you say things that are harmful, you should stop, regardless of whether or not you are cis or trans, straight or queer, dude or lady.
-a transwoman in tech
I have heard many male engineers say that they would prefer a more gender balanced workplace, and have never heard any say they wouldn't like that.
Why would they actually say they wouldn't like a gender balanced workplace? I think most engineers would welcome any competent and professional co-worker regardless of gender. On the other side of the equation the few men who are sexist enough to actually not want women around the office are usually not going to be dumb enough to say it out loud. They (usually) know perfectly well that nothing good could come to them by telling everyone that they don't respect women.
I think the dearth of female programmers is simply that women are not attracted to a career that involves sitting in a cubicle interacting with a computer.
Then how do you explain the huge numbers of women in accounting? I am an accountant and an engineer and have done both jobs. Though I'm not really a software guy I have done some development. I assure you that most accountants spend almost as much time in front of a computer as a typical programmer. I don't think the mere fact of sitting in front of a computer is what bothers women.
Women don't get equal pay for equal work and the supreme court even did a "separate but equal" style ruling on the matter. RECENT HISTORY:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilly_Ledbetter_Fair_Pay_Act_of_2009
We are far from the point where the issue is dead and it's just empty complaining. Even then, some degree of problems will always exist as long as humans are unable to evolve; sub-cultures form new tribes all the time and tribal behavior never evolved out of our DNA. Nerds have their own group and while they tend to be nicer to outsiders they can be tribal too-- and gender has little to do with it (other than they are usually happy to find a female nerd... the culture doesn't promote them, so they are rare... plus it may be the traits that define the culture actually are slanted toward the males who founded it. ) Anyhow tribal issues will result in false positives in the world of P.C.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It doesn't matter what the gender or race makeup is for programmers.
What matters is how competent they are on average and it is a pretty low value.
Not even Alan Turing would score a job in the Silicon Valley. Nobody wants a smug Britt who doesn't Believe in Made-In-America floating point units! The abomination!
Grace Hopper, on the other hand would have become Marissa Meyer on steroids. Or was the saying "in steroids?"
to the question "Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?"
Sadly it's cliche. In my experience, the worse programmers are often the ones promoted to be the new managers. The others are exceptional coders so you'd be shooting yourself in the foot if you promoted one of them. It's like if you had to promote a Patriots player to be the new team coach, you probably wouldn't pick Tom Brady because he's too valuable as a quarterback.
The last time I went through this routine, it was primarily between 3 candidates. A) shit coder, but well dressed, well liked, and extremely sociable. B) excellent coder, well liked, rebel attitude,antisocial. C) great coder, extremely weird *cough*freak*cough*
C didn't have a chance in hell
B probably would've been the best pick
A plays the game, schmoozes, plays golf, man's man, etc
other than that, most managers i've had were completely incompetent, "leading" people who were vastly more intelligent, and often felt the need to justify their power/position
She inflicted COBOL on the world. She is the antichrist. Were she hired today, she would do similarly nefarious work.
Beware: Anyone supporting her work must also be one of her dark minions... Has Slashdot truly gone over to the dark side...?
Some other careers would make a better comparsion.
I don't think the answers are as hard to figure out as we're making them. It's just that the answers are politically incorrect.
Men and women have more differences than the obvious physical attributes. It shouldn't be at all surprising that the male brain and the female brain are different. Differences means that each will be better at some kinds of thinking than the other.
The unfortunate part is that the kind of thinking that the male brain is better at is the kind of thinking we as a society have put a higher value on, and found easier to measure. For instance, the typical IQ test is designed by men and is biased in favor of men. One kind of question those tests favor is geometric manipulations, in which you have to mentally rotate or otherwise juggle objects. Chess has long been considered a good measure of intelligence. Overall, women simply aren't as good at chess. This has made it all too easy to conclude that women are mentally inferior.
Now however, we have computers that are better at chess through sheer brute force. However, no one concluded that computers have at last become smarter than us, and that we have achieved the goal of creating AI. Despite the display on the chess board, they are obviously extremely limited. Chess computers are the ultimate idiot savants, better than any person at chess, and completely clueless about any other kind of problem, even games of the same sort such as Go. What did this really prove? Only that chess is not a good measure of intelligence. We always knew there are very smart people who are poor at chess, but through the 20th century we accepted good chess playing as a sign of intelligence. The Soviet Union believed in this to such an extent that they made it into one of the battlefields of the Cold War. State support of chess has never been higher than during the Cold War.
If one of our most cherised measures of intelligence, the game of chess, is now seen to be a rather poor measure in many ways, what about our other measures? IQ tests all seem to ask the same kinds of questions, logic sorts of questions that all play to the same strengths that makes for a good chess player. The problem goes even further. How do we define intelligence? Is intelligence merely an aptitude for solving logic puzzles? What of an ability to construct puzzles and games, see and model the essential features of problems? How could that be measured? No multiple choice style of test can capture that kind of intelligence. When you have a near infinite number of hypotheses that could explain some baffling observations, an ability to cut through the chaos and lift the best possibilities out of the mess, especially those possibilities that are counterintuitive and so would be missed by most, seemingly could be a better measure of intelligence. But that's what programming is. A programming problem is a much more open ended kind of problem than a logic puzzle. Most logic puzzles are like Sudoku, dealing with such a small number of options that you can just try everything until you find one that works. But a measure that captures programming ability is also not going to be good enough to fully measure intelligence. Like the logic puzzles, it will only measure some kinds of intelligence.
I think it simply does not make sense that women should not be as smart as men. Where is the evolutionary advantage in that? Why would life evolve in such a way as to make females significantly dumber than males? Think of all the biological machinery it would require to dumb down women. And what would any species gain in exchange for such a trade? Does the idea of nonsentient females, as with Niven's Kzinti, make sense? Women would need less food for their smaller brains? But if the female keeps ending up dead because she did something stupid, or more like didn't do anything to save herself when threatened, the advantage of lower energy requirements is shot right there. Men simply cannot a
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Why aren't more men barefoot and pregnant?
Given the ability of some software engineers to have a negative impact on a project, hiring a dead programmer would not have a negative impact on a groups average productivity. It might even bring the average productivity up.
Social engineering is just a way to keep people unhappy. Treat everybody as individuals and call them that. Forget the race and gender labels entirely, if you're actually serious.
Act on what you know is the truth; we are all equally valuable in the eyes of the God. An individual stands alone and will judged alone, male, female, black or white.
Not being a Silicon Valley resident, I can't directly address whether "a Grace Hopper [could] Get Hired in Silicon Valley," but I heard her speak at two conferences and I was the recipient of one or two of her "nanoseconds."
She was an impressive speaker, full of grace (no pun intended) and wit, and an interesting juxtaposition to many of today's well-known technical people.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
I'm not a 'feminine dude'. I wouldn't even say I'm a feminist, insofar as I expect that men and women should be treated the same...
Then you are a feminist. Or do you think it means something different?
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
There are a few women with absolutely no skill where I work.
You've never worked with a man with no skill? I somehow doubt you blame that on their being men. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "they should have hired a qualified woman instead of assuming this know-nothing man was qualified just for having a penis".
You are blaming women for things that you consider yourself discriminated against. They aren't guilty-by-genitalia anymore than you are. The things you are complaining about aren't because of any one gender; they are because of everyone. We all have to work together to make things better. That is why people ask questions like "why are there so few women in tech?".
My father talked about going to a talk by Grace Hopper around 1963. The audience was packed with guys with folded arms, all apparently chauvinistic about their local work on a compiler, the Michigan Algorithm Decoder.
Are you female? If you are not, then how do you know they aren't interested? If it's because they all say they do, have you asked them why? Do they even know why? Do you know why you do like to program?
I am a female programmer. I have been programming heavily for 14 years, starting with C during my senior year in high school (with some off and on summer camps and after school programs through grade school and middle school). I love programming. I love making a computer do what I want. I love making things.
I also love to sew for the same reason.
There are lots of reasons to love programming. Some of them are the same reasons why women like some of the other hobbies they currently enjoy. So what's different here?
As an aside, I avoided those programs for attracting women like the plague. I really hated them.
There have been several serious attempts to figure this out. Most notably at CMU. For more information read, "Unlocking the Clubhouse"
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
Guys, it's because programming as a field doesn't want women there. In a million small, shitty little ways that you probably don't notice, male programmers make it clear that they don't want women in their club, and it gets worse the bigger the company gets. See all those comments up there, where random guys say that the few female programmers they've met are really good? It's because you have to really, really love it to stick with it in spite of all the bullshit that comes from being a woman in a boys club.
Because you get treated differently, no matter what your co-workers say. You're an outsider because you don't have a dick. And having to feel like that every fucking day is exhausting and alienating, even when they're nice to you, because being a woman means you're kept at a distance, especially if you're not pig-ugly and the guys in question are in a relationship. You can never, ever get away from that slight feeling that you just don't belong and they'd be more comfortable if you were a guy.
You want to know why women just avoid programming as a career? It's because we're shoved away from it all the fucking time. When we're growing up and the whole culture of computer nerdity is presented as a thing for boys only. When we go to school and math and science are things for boys too. When we go to college, and by that point any woman left who hasn't been discouraged has to deal with a class that's overwhelmingly male, teachers that are overwhelmingly male, and everything becomes that much harder - networking is harder, making friends is harder, getting help is harder, when you're not the same as everyone else. So we have to want it a hell of a lot more, knowing that it'll be pretty difficult and probably unrewarding and the market is already saturated with programmers and we could be doing something that pays more and doesn't require 60 fucking hour weeks at crunch time, because our parents are asking when's the wedding going to be and friends are already starting families and why are you spending so much time at the office and not at home with the kids, you're such a terrible mother.
And even if you're there on your own merits, people will still wonder. You know the question in their heads, they don't even have to say it out loud. Did she get here because of favoritism, because she slept with someone?
And god help you if you become a public figure in any nerd related field, because the first sign of a controversial opinion will get you rape and death threats.
THAT is what it's like. THAT is why we have to love it. And you, male programmers, by and large, DO NOT HAVE TO FACE THAT.
Don't keep asking why women don't want to be a part of your club when a big chunk of your members seem to go out of their way to make it a shitty place for them. It's not because women aren't interested. It's because your field, and the culture at large, keep telling them in so many ways to fuck off.
Source: I am a female programmer, who knows other female programmers. And yeah, in spite of everything, I love what I do.
What it means to be a feminist appears to be pretty subjective. For some, it means stripping is bad, and for some it means stripping is good - and those are just the extreme cases.
In my personal awareness though, most of the self-proclaimed feminists are not looking for equal treatment. They're looking for special treatment to make up for the fact that they may not have received it in the past, while still holding on to all the gender-based attitudes and differences that are advantageous to them.
I'm not saying this attitude is abhorrent - it's what anyone would do, who would advocate for making their life worse, especially if they're already down a rung or two due to sexism? I'm just saying it skews the common meaning of the word 'feminist' away from concepts of equality, merit-based evaluations, and so on. I like to think that I believe in equality among genders, not equality where some are more 'equal' than others.
To put it another way, I don't believe anyone should receive preferential treatment due to their gender, not even to make up for non-preferential treatment from prior decades. For many, that means I'm not a feminist.
Great as the comment is, "manifestations of hubris, which occur much more frequently in men than women, are commonly mistaken for leadership potential" cannot be the reason for so few women in IT because there is equal or greater hubris in the medical sciences. Some other reason must be at play. Let me think, maybe the work is dull?
Might as well face it I'm addicted to data.
In fact before 1948, the word "computer" meant a human clerk who used paper and a mechanical adding machine to perfomr long calculations. These included log tables, missle hyperbolic trajectories, celestial orbits, and the occasional discrete differential equation. Feyman has a chapter on this in his "Surely you arent joking" book. In the late 40s the word computer was subsumed into the analog and digital machines that did eleaborate calculations. The early "programmers" were often some of these female computers from the war years. They wired the computer, if it was wired programming, or figured out punch cards. The males did the hardware and math. The transpfrmation to males happened in the 19650s - 1960s for unclear reasons to me.
I suspect that "taint" of being a femine discpline delayed the recogniztion of computer programming as a bonafid college degree at schools like MIT and Stanford. At MIT where I matriculated, it was not recognized as a full major until 1980. Before that is was a submajor of EE, math or business. (There were other taints too including its appearance as trade school skill rather than academic discipline/)
In today's cut rate world, someone like Ms Hopper would be over-qualified, and no one would hire her, because they wouldn't be willing to pay what they thought she's worth, or she'd jump ship after 6 months.
What I find irritating: We don't have to change the gender distribution in fields where women dominate (nursing, teaching, etc.). The only pressure is to change the gender distribution in careers where women are underrepresented. As near as I can tell, this is driven by people who have zero clue about the tech field.
I'm involved in a project just now where both programmers are women. That's great and I'm happy to work with them. Back in the office where I do most of my work, all of the programmers - every single one of them - is a guy. That's great and I'm happy to work with them.
I keep hearing claims of misogyny and sexual harassment. I've been in the tech field for more than 30 years, and I'm just not seeing it. Sure there are idiots out there, but I see no evidence that this is a mainstream problem. What I do see are general differences in technical affinity. Just like more men than women enjoy working on the guts of cars, it's also the case that more men than women like working on the guts of computers. Probably evolutionary, possibly cultural - either way, why is it a problem?
TL;DR - When it comes to professional relationships, can we just judge people as individuals, and forget about their gender?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
"So, with a gender and age strike against her, would a Grace Hopper in her prime even land an interview in today's Silicon Valley?"
absolutely not... not in "today's silicon valley"; and not because of gender or age, either.
no certifications, no cs degree.. two things hr reps look for before tossing a resume....
and only knows cobol and fortran? talk about a limited, outdated skill set
There is actually very little discrepancy between the pay of men and women - if you do the study correctly. The problem is: This is very non-PC to say. Heck, read the (purely PC) Wikipedia entry. One sentence: "In the United States, the gender pay gap is measured as the ratio of female to male median yearly earnings among full-time, year-round (FTYR) workers." Note that there is absolutely no mention of comparing years of experience, or choice of job, or anything else. It's just a raw "who makes more" without accounting for lifestyle choices.
There are two reasons for the gender pay gap: First, women pursuing careers tend (more often than men) to interrupt these careers for child-raising. Second, also for child-raising, more women take jobs that have little or no career potential (secretary, receptionist, etc.). The few studies that try to account for this show little or no difference in pay.
Take a hypothetical example: Jane and Joe both graduate from college and start working as programmers. Jane has two children, take maternity leave both times, and works part-time until both children are in school. Joe doesn't, because his wife has taken the brunt of the child-raising. In total, Joe may well have a solid five years more experience than Jane. On top of that, his company will have been able to use him for whatever projects came up, whereas Jane's possibilities will have been limited because of her part-time status and inability to travel.
Now fast forward to when both of them are 40 years old. Jane will, on average, make less than Joe. However, it turns out that she probably makes about what Joe did five years ago - i.e., the earning difference pretty much accounts for the experience difference. On top of that, Jane's may well have missed some opportunities entirely - she may well hit a "glass ceiling", because she wasn't available for some of those critical projects.
I have a friend (a guy) who decided to raise his children while his wife worked. He also never had much of a career. Life is about choices, and guess what: you can't have it all.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I'm curious how you ended up working in China. Are you a citizen or a visa worker? Does the time zone difference from Europe & the U.S. effect you or is your business local?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Meredith L. Patterson is an example of Hopper's legacy. I wish more girls were inspired by both those women.
One example of the problems I ask all candidates is this softball: Write code (in any language, or in psudocode) that determines if a word is a palindrome. There is a very quick way of doing this (str == str.reverse) and then there is the writing of the actual algorithm. If someone gets the quick way first, they get bonus points, but we still ask to see the algorithm written out. When I asked this of the 15 - 20 women I have interviewed, I noticed they second guessed themselves too much, and got intimidated easily. They are not confident (dare I say egotistical?) and back track a lot when we ask them verbal questions.
It could be my experiences only, and there are of course men who are the same way, but what we look for is this: The ability to confidentially and quickly put something up on the board, look it over, realized you fucked up (because almost no one gets things right the first time), correct it, look it over again, realized you fucked up (because very few get it right on the second try), and correct it. Be done with it, then describe all of the other things you were thinking you could do with it. It shows you aren't pressured by mistakes, you own up to problems, quickly fix them, and think of ways to better it later on. This is a quality I don't find in the women I've spoken with (with one exception). It seems like they don't understand shit happens, no one is perfect, and that's what you have a debugger for.
You've never worked with a man with no skill?
I sure have. It sucks. Yet somehow these women believe that a woman with no skill would be a better programmer than an individual who has experience and education in the field. All on the basis of gender.
Now, would you agree that it's sexist to suppose that a woman with no prior experience or education would make a better employee in a computer-related role over a man with prior experience and education?
Every time this subject comes up, it's women who are the ones being sexist.
The basic fact that women never talk about is why so few women are even learning these skills. These are skills that one could learn on one's own with nothing more than a $300 computer and an internet connection.
Instead, we have this feminist propaganda that begins with than the observation that there are no womyn-born-womyn (because trans women clearly don't count to these sexists) in computer career and then jumps to the conclusion of sexism.
It is sexist to presume that the reason there are so few womyn-born-womyn in computer careers is the fault of an entire gender ("all men"). It is sexist to presume that women should even be getting these jobs without being qualified. Therefore, we should look at why there are no womyn-born-womyn who choose to become qualified in the first place.
I agree that it's a problem. What I don't agree with, and why I've decided not to shut up, is that this is a problem that anyone except womyn-born-womyn can do jack shit about. I mean FFS, when you talk to these idiot women who spout off this crap and then go on about Ada Lovelace, it becomes entirely apparent that it's not even good enough for them if I complete gender transition. I'd bet that even if I found a genie and was able to wish myself just to be biologically female, that would be good enough for them. I don't count. If their objective were to get more women in computer careers, one would think they would be cheering a trans woman on towards going full time because that means one more woman and one less man. However, their objective is not to get more women in computer careers. Their objective is to bash anyone assigned the male gender at birth.
They are absolutely blind to the forces that turn women away from mathematics and science, because the ugly thing is that most of it these days it's older womyn-born-womyn letting their daughters feel good about themselves without knowing even basic algebra---when they're not outright training their daughters that things that are "hard" like computers are just for boys. I don't know if it's intentional or not, and frankly I don't care.
I am not a woman to these people, and I don't have mind control powers to force women to sit down on a computer and learn Python or what have you. I have never once made a sexist decision at work. The one time years ago I was working for a smaller company and I was responsible for interviewing some candidates, I didn't even have one damned female apply. I can't hire somebody who doesn't apply!
I also will be assisting with hiring another computer person for the company I now work for in a few months. We've only had one woman apply. One. Unfortunately, as much as I want to hire her (no idea what her background is but a female in this position will probably improve things 100%), she's an internal applicant and somehow she managed to piss off a few of the women who will be her direct co-workers. How can I do jack shit about that? Our sole female applicant, and she's probably not going to get the job because other females don't like her. So, once I start training the new hire, who will inevitably be male, I'll be put through yet another round of "you're sexist because you didn't hire a woman."
Btw, to respond to your earlier post as well, I don't know why I would want women around me. I am interested in computer stuff and science fiction. While I
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Should have been:
I'd bet that even if I found a genie and was able to wish myself just to be biologically female, that would not be good enough for them.
Sorry for any confusion.
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by that time she had created a huge body of work, and new many industry leaders.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Adm Cooper would NEVER qualify for a job. She does not have 5+ years ASP.NET experience with C#, and Perl and Linux a plus. 5+ years "SQL" experience (meaning Microsoft SQL Server). And so on.
or we could do whats better for society and not for man/woman
put both man and woman to work 14 hours/day 7 days a week (with enough breaks to make them work most eficiently) and few that choose babysitting carrier (also 14 hours/day 7 days a week) would take care of other people offspring, its cheaper if one person takes care of 20-40 kids (babysitter in kindergarten) than if 2 persons take care of 1 kid (mom and dad)
also food catering for a home should be default not exception, as in when going from work to home you select food from menu and when your home selected food awaits you on table and you eat and put dirty dishes in bag so caterer can pick them up tomorrow, saves time since its less time needed if one cook cooks for 100 people that if each family cooks separately, saves electricity since coking big food quantities in professional cookware and professional stoves is more energy efficient, costs less when you put all costs on paper, and reduces stress since you don't think about "i have to cook when i get home from work" part whole day
men should be required to lounge at home watching tv and taking care of the kids. It's a more efficient solution.
It's true, men are extremely efficient at lounging - I myself have considerable experience and can do it with almost no energy expended at all :)
I sure have. It sucks. Yet somehow these women believe that a woman with no skill would be a better programmer than an individual who has experience and education in the field. All on the basis of gender.
And there are skill-less men whom would think they are better than women simply by being men. My point is that this isn't a gender problem; it's a person problem. Blaming or pointing out the gender only exacerbates the issue.
The basic fact that women never talk about is why so few women are even learning these skills
They do and they try (situations like right now). Then they are inevitably shouted down with "that's their own fault", "it's not my problem" and "it's got nothing to do with me".
I have never once denied a woman a job solely based on her gender.
Perhaps not but you definitely have a very strong anti-female bias. That can be a problem all on its own. And it is what these "womwn-born-womyn" constantly point out. There is distinct institutionalised anti-woman bias in tech culture. It is always passed off by saying "it's just joking; all for fun", "women are free to learn on their own if they don't like it" or "in my experience women rely on the gender-card to get where they are". We know the problem exists and denying it will not make it go away.
I don't know if it's intentional or not, and frankly I don't care.
The door swings both ways. When you, intentionally or not, make an environment hostile to women they will tend away from it. The difference is that some of us do care. We will point out where others are making an environment hostile.
I do not ask you to give women a free pass. I do not demand women be given jobs instead of men simply for being women. I simply ask you and those like you to reconsider your biases and to not hold all women accountable for the actions of a few people.
This leads to self-selection: Women who aren't focused on competition and self-aggrandizement will choose a less competitive career. So the women who remain will have above-average ability.
This is similar to the social structure in Nepal where women own property and live with their parents. A guaranteed nanny in the house changes the sexual norms: There is no need for marriage since a woman's brother will be carrying the burden of child-rearing. It also makes promiscuity and virginity a non-issue.
But modern society depends on men a lot. He must gather enough property to support a woman and her babies, although traditionally women have also worked. Men must then protect their children from calamity and the violence of other men, even to the point of sacrificing his own life. Women are not left to die with the same ignominy.
Most importantly, a man's emotional needs are devalued: He is a 'sink' where a women can dump her problems.
"it's not my problem" and "it's got nothing to do with me".
Funny, I get that exact same response from women when talking about circumcision.
My work environment is 75% female, and it used to be around 95% female before the economy collapsed.
I have no idea how you expect me to make this environment any more female-friendly. One thing that has happened since the economy collapsed is that it's become less male-hostile. I took the job because I needed one and more or less just sucked up all the male-bashing because the job paid.
There is distinct institutionalised anti-woman bias in tech culture. It is always passed off by saying "it's just joking; all for fun", "women are free to learn on their own if they don't like it" or "in my experience women rely on the gender-card to get where they are". We know the problem exists and denying it will not make it go away.
I have never witnessed this or been a part of it. However, I have been on the receiving end of lots of male-bashing to the point I am simply sick of this notion that the reason women don't get into tech careers must be a man's fault, somehow.
Would you please explain how the hell a potential applicant would know what the work environment is like before they even decide to send in a resume or make a phone call? Would you please explain how the hell a 75% female environment could possibly be female-hostile because of something I've done?
What am I supposed to do? Just sit here and take male-bashing? Is it sexist in your world or hostile in your world to not confront females when they say something sexist?
I have been directly accused of sexism because a woman didn't know what a variable was and was unwilling to learn. I tried and tried and tried. I want a female co-worker. Hell, one of the reasons I haven't been able to go full time as a woman is because my female co-workers have this idea that you need to be a man to work a computer so far up their asses that I wouldn't be surprised if, when the time comes for me to change my name, being good at computers will be used against me as a sign that I'm not really a woman.
I simply ask you and those like you to reconsider your biases and to not hold all women accountable for the actions of a few people.
Seeing as though I got here out of sheer frustration, I'll be happy to reconsider my biases if I ever meet a womyn-born-womyn who is interested in computers beyond bashing me over the head with Ada Lovelace, blaming me for the actions of other people, and in general not being a complete and utter sexist.
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If women want programming careers, there's tons of information on the internet they could use to learn. But they don't.
You really should hear yourself from outside. Talking about women as 'they' as if all women are the same just sucks. Do you really think that saying "All Women/Men/Blacks/Whites/whatever are *like this*" is rational or sane? People are primarily *individuals*, not members of some racial/gender group.
You come across as bitter and irrational.
I can understand that partly, your circumcision was abusive and wrong, and I would be very angry if it had been done to me. But you shouldn't take it out on 'Women' collectively. At least you really should aim more at individuals or organisations who specifically hurt you. Some random person who happens to be a woman is not your enemy.
Could a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates Get Hired In Today's Silicon Valley?
I read these posts and most of them point out the core of the problem. In my field, sysadmin, and in the dev field the workplaces are hostile to women. In appropriate behavior and comments. Lewd comments and jokes. An attitude of if you can't stand the heat, get out of the shop.
I have worked with many women sysadmins. Most have moved onto other things. It is not that they can take the heat. Hell, they can dish it out with the best of them. They just get tired of the oppressive environment and leave.
This is sad because I for one enjoy working with women. They bring a positive attitude and quite often a sunny disposition to the workplace. A can-do, lets work together for a common solution attitude.
I feel exasperated because many men will blow me off saying it is the woman's problem. Which is exactly the problem.
And I don't expect any mod points because it seems that you only get mod points if you agree with the Slashdot point of view. In some ways almost as bad as Fox News. Just with more liberal set of filters.
Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?
All you have to do is look at our Government to see that women are just as incompetant as men are.
Im sure if they try they can be even more incompetant.
In my college course there was only 10% women this figure rose as many lads dropped the course but still they were always a minority. I don't think the issue is about wheter they could get an interview and pass it, which I believe many of them are perfectly capbable of doing but the numbers of women coming into computer science degrees in the first place that has to be addressed.
Also if you wouldn't hire Grace Hopper your either a nut job or to poor to afford her skills.
"Comments for this thread are now closed." - screw Dave Winer
My theory is that a program is a kind of an artificial baby. It reacts to the world and has personality and survives a surprisingly long time and sometimes needs to be changed in the middle of the night. When a woman wants a baby, she goes for a real baby, not an artifical one. We men have to make do with atificial life.
I once had a baby with a girl who was a lousy mother. She lived with her new boyfriend, the baby lived with me. It was perhaps the most rewarding experience of my life.
If your girlfriend is pregnant, do not go for an abortion. Have the baby, keep the baby, shoot the mother.
Funny, I get that exact same response from women when talking about circumcision.
"But she did *blank*" is never valid justification for systematic prejudice.
I have no idea how you expect me to make this environment any more female-friendly.
1) stop using the term "womyn-born-womyn" to refer to women. It comes across extremely demeaning and inflammatory.
2)
I am simply sick of this notion that the reason women don't get into tech careers must be a man's fault, somehow.
Throwing a fit because you assume that anyone talking about sexism in tech fields must be blaming men puts up unnecessary barriers. You make it them against you or from their perspective "you against them". There is no reason for this.
Is it sexist in your world or hostile in your world to not confront females when they say something sexist?
Not at all. If they say something that you find hurtful/unfair/annoying you should confront them about it. But there are good ways and bad ways to go about that. Sometimes people are just jerks though. You have already stated that you are angry and just ranting here so I will assume you are speaking in a more aggressive manner than normal. But if you attacked me like that in person (and I was a women) because of something I said I would definitely assume you were a sexist blow-hard.
3)
I have been directly accused of sexism because a woman didn't know what a variable was and was unwilling to learn. I tried and tried and tried. I want a female co-worker.
This sounds extremely belittling. If you take this into your interactions with all women then you are most definitely sexist.
4)
I'll be happy to reconsider my biases if I ever meet a womyn-born-womyn who is interested in computers beyond bashing me over the head with Ada Lovelace, blaming me for the actions of other people, and in general not being a complete and utter sexist.
Do you not see the giant internal contradiction there? You blame all women because some of them have judged you based on the actions of others. And it may not be the actions of others that have gotten you judged extrapolating from things you've said here. I know several women that are extremely intelligent and talented that would never "beat me over the head" with Ada Lovelace. It doesn't matter that some women may be insufferable. Judging all women under the same brush (womyn-born-womyn) based on your experience with a couple is a clear case of prejudice. If you approach all women with that attitude they will certainly pick up on it and treat you much differently.
My local radio station is airing an ad for a sales training, about 10 timer per day.
I'm not buying it.
1.) Ok, I'll use the term cis woman instead. I had figured that since feminist cis women came up with the term, it would be ok to use that term when referring to cis women.
2.)
Throwing a fit because you assume that anyone talking about sexism in tech fields must be blaming men puts up unnecessary barriers. You make it them against you or from their perspective "you against them". There is no reason for this.
I have yet to have had it presented to me by a cis woman in any other way.
3.)
This sounds extremely belittling. If you take this into your interactions with all women then you are most definitely sexist.
Why does her lack of knowledge in maths make me sexist?
You seem to be unable to understand that the individuals I'm referring to truly do not have a basic middle school grasp of mathematics. That tells me that you're the one who's biased.
4.)
Anytime I'm on the receiving end of sexism, it seems that expecting myself to be judged as an individual is asking too much. I am sick of being held responsible for the actions of others. I will re-evaluate my attitude if I ever meet one of those mystical women who view men as individuals instead of sex objects and objects of their misguided rage.
Of course I'm being prejudiced.
You know what, though? This is going to make you hate me. It absolutely will.
The cis women I work with absolutely love me. They love the work I do for them. They love me for assisting them for the billionth time with the same issue and not expecting them to learn anything about anything on a computer. I figured out that if I treat them like children and view them as children, things just go so much smoother and they LOVE it.
Sure, call me a lair. But I'm telling the truth and there's no damned feminist or cis woman who can convince me otherwise.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Which is harder; Accounting or Engineering? Women fall into bean counting because it's fucking easy.
I have degrees in both and have done both professionally I can safely answer that question. The answer is that neither is harder than the other, especially at the deep end of the difficulty pool. But since you don't actually know anything about accounting (demonstrated clearly below) I would suggest you don't ask a question you don't actually know the answer to.
No unsolvable problems to do their best with, concrete answers, right or wrong.
Congratulations! You just displayed your complete ignorance of accounting and finance for the world to see. Only someone who hasn't even studied basic accounting would be under the delusion that accounting has no difficult problems or that all answers are "concrete". Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a huge amount of ambiguity in even relatively basic bookkeeping. Valuation of assets can be frickin' hard and some outrageously smart people spend their lives trying to figure valuation problems out. (That's basically all everyone on wall street does) Since valuation is to a large degree fundamentally a psychology problem it's often pretty much unsolvable much of the time and what solutions we do have tend to work inconsistently at best in the real world. If you want to get into the most arcane accounting topics you can easily get into problems that they award Nobel prizes for.
Anybody who's coded for more then a year in business is fully familiar with accounting.
And speaking as both an engineer and a certified accountant I call bullshit. I've met relatively few engineers who have even a modest grasp of basic bookkeeping. They certainly don't understand asset valuation, tax law, cost accounting, and quite a few other topics.
Double entry accounting is so easy I can explain it to you in ten minutes.
If you think that is all there is to accounting then I suggest you never try to do anything financially complicated.
Tax accounting, trust accounting and (if I recall my acronyms) GAP.
It's GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) you ignoramus. You're seriously going to pretend you understand everything about a topic you don't even know the name of? Wow. That's a fairly stunning amount of arrogance from someone who has clearly demonstrated in this very thread that they don't actually understand even basic accounting.
Accounting is fucking simple.
Sheldon Cooper? Is that you?
Hi, in answer to your question. I came to China since a local Chinese company offered me a good, well paid job after I had visited them as a consultant, working for a third party middleware company. Normally I could not do this because of my contract, but I just so happened to have been laid off, along with 3/4 of the company while the offer was valid. I am on a guest worker visa. Business is 80% local, foreign business is handled in the morning for the Americas and evening for Europe. We work long hours, so we get a decent overlap window with both.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
As someone old enough to see an office full of typists I can't help but laugh at how silly that argument is.
Face it kids, we're doing indoor work typing on machines, the sort of thing a 19th century man would dismiss as "women's work" until he sees the money. It got turned into close to a boys only club because we've squeezed out the girls to chase after the money.
I did some CS classes in the 1980s for soft credit (not a put down, nearly all first year courses look like soft credit to an engineering student beyond their first year). The ratio was close to even with a slight majority of women in the first year classes.
I think the drastic decline in enrolement since was due to the inability of most of those women to find jobs in the computing field. Why bother to do something hard if you are destined to be an office clerk? As I've written here before, I've seen far more women in professional roles in oil refineries, mines, foundries, full on steelworks and power stations than I have in IT, and those women in heavy industry were coming from courses with 5% or less first year female enrolement instead of the 50% in CS. So since those CS graduates couldn't get the jobs most interested girls later decided in high school that they would be better off being interested in something else.
It's true, I rarely meet women that are computer programmers. I worked for one defense firm where we had four, and other firm where we had two. (They were awesome. I relished the opportunity to interact with nerd ladies.)
But once, I worked for a company that had tons of female programmers. My memory is fuzzy on the exact percentage, but I'd say perhaps a third of them were. That was the TurboTax division of Intuit. Three of the four managers of the programming departments (i.e. cross-platform, MS Windows, Macintosh, and DOS) were women, too. I don't know why that company was so different. But it was a VERY refreshing change of pace.
It's too bad that all of them were either married or in long-term relationships of some kind.
Ah hell, why deny my feelings...NERD LADIES RULE!!!!!!!
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
I started my CS degree at the University of Maryland in 1988, and it was a complete sausagefest. Hundreds of men, vanishingly few women. So either all those women disappeared in two years, or your or my experience was atypical. Or perhaps both were. Percentage of computer science degrees granted to women topped out under 40% in 1984,
Some people are noisy idiots who dominate single issue groups by sheer volume of noise. It doesn't stop them being idiots.
You also seem to have been put in a tight spot by people that like to pretend that they are radical but they are really far too conservative to accept you as you are. It's not the fault of the radical politics but instead people that just cannot cope with your existence shattering their illusions of how the world should be - you expose their flaws to themselves and make them uncomfortable so they blame you.
They want to build Utopia but attempted Utopias universally suck for anyone other than the founders idea of a perfect person. Attempts at absolutely perfect societies end in Salem witch trials. The mark of a decent society is how they let people be people instead of enforced roles.
I think you've just given an example of how childcare training would help any sysadmin :)
It's not just the woman that act like spoiled children at times, you can trust me on this. Thankfully I'm now in a place full of scientists so it's less like childcare and more like IT.
Grace Hopper graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1928 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics and earned her Master's degree at Yale University in 1930.
Hmm, could a woman like that ever be hired in Silicon Valley? Quite a poser.
So...we're all focused on the power jobs. The money makers, the prestige. Everyone pretends it's about fairness and equality.
It's, it's really not. It's just finding more ways personally to gain an advantage by your gender. Regardless of what side of the fence you're on.
When's the last time a fem group went after a construction company and demanded more female pipe layers? More female ditch diggers?
More females in hard labor? Or Sewage jobs? Garbage disposal? Security guards? Street Cleaners? Truck Drivers? Roofers? Welders?
This has absolutely nothing to do with equality. It's just a regular human (Notice that the word human encompasses humans, regardless of gender?) power grab and using any means shamelessly.
>
The worst part for me is that even though I know exactly what this is, I can't be against it, because there still is women with high potential or proven skills that have been ignored.
So although I believe the stated motives are crap, in the end I do think it addresses some problems for equality as a side effect.
Gentlemen, please do your best to not discriminate, so we can stop having special interest groups (Encompassing groups beyond feminists) muck around for
power grabs unfairly and oppressing people not part of that special interest group in the name of equality. it shames human kind to let it continue.
I was in a different country but the start (high enrolement back then), the end result (low enrolement now) and the reason (those women were not getting tech jobs) is the same. An effort to solve the problem by paying more attention to girls in maths at school merely reverse the school roles (now maths is seen as a "girls" subject by the boys and boys don't do as well as they used to) without solving the employment problem. Ultimately the people making the hiring decisions didn't want to employ women. Making the women more capable didn't fix that.
The industries that are seen as being conservative, mining, manufacturing and so on changed, but the office job were being handed out by people that didn't want to change.
You sir are narrow minded
Fuck you and your misogyny.
The problem is that the incentives are whack.
Men found a successful company, they get their pick of partners, and they get to have kids in their 40s or 50s. Women put all their time and energy into the same company, their pool of available suitors dwindles, as do their odds of having their own biological children.
For any woman who wants to have a family or a husband (and that is not everybody, but a lot of us), thanks to forces both cultural and biological, there is absolutely no rational reason to pursue a demanding career. In the tech industry or anywhere else.
None.
Really, all this leads up to a single inescapable fact: Since women are better than men in general at white-collar tasks, they should be the primary wage earners, and men should be required to lounge at home watching tv and taking care of the kids. It's a more efficient solution.
This causes me to wonder how things would be in a world where this was normal. In this hypothetical world, there would likely still be some men who ended up in these fields and would say they were in it for the money, while most of the women would be saying they were in it for the money. I wonder how well this restricted subset of men would compare, versus the restricted subset of women you're referring to. I also wonder about the relative sizes of these two restricted subsets. The best I can do is speculate, but I suspect the restricted subset of men would also perform distinctly better than the unrestricted subset of women. Then the relative sizes and performance of the restricted subsets would tell you whether men or women were actually better.
I can tell you that there *is* a negative bias instilled very young among girls, that we are "naturally" bad at science and math (which is false) and shouldn't strive in those fields. Only the dedicated persevere. Woman like Hopper had a headwind of bias to contend with, and only the truly confident person (male or female) survives such constant buffeting to progress in their chosen field. The only way the numbers will change is if girls get a confidence boost and the inspiration to learn tech during their formative years in school. Period. I had my father; most tech girls I know came from supportive tech-savvy households. The "girls are bad at math" and "girls don't have the patience required to learn (tech)" are ideas I had to deal with in public school, invariably by old white males. Now, if the trolling sexism and man-ifest destiny crap can be done with, please? There really are women listening to all this, even if there aren't a lot of us. :)
"lounge at home watching tv and taking care of the kids." ?!?!?!?!?!?!? jeeeze...
you, sir, have unintentionally highlighted the underlying problem - men (and the corporate world) view taking care of kids as trivial and unimportant. Contemporary culture portrays child-rearing as either trivial, insane or adorable. Truth: it is a long, hard, relentless and very rewarding slog. Children require proximity (even Marissa Meyers understands that, hence the nursery) and time (she misses on that one). Some women are essentally "boys with boobs"...we are biologically programmed (read "The Moral Molecule") to care for babies and kids. Oxytocin literally addicts Moms to their children so as to deal with the monstrous job that is childcare.
That some women put their children above their careers speaks to something other than being less goal oriented...I took off 13 years and payed a ridiculously high price since no one wanted to even give me an interview for a job. You know what? I got a great idea while at home with my grade-schoolers and am about to sell it for millions of dollars AND I got to be a girl scout leader and room mom. DO NOT talk to me about lacking goals. Society needs people like me more than we need Meyers or that annoying Facebook "lean in" lady or Fiorino - with me you get happy, moral kids AND great inventions. So phooey on all the posters here who know not of what they speak!
As a mid-career woman in Technology, I was curious about how my career hasn't taken me far, or challenged my abilities, so being nerdy in this way, I decided to do some research into the topic, hoping to see how other women behaved to succeed.
One interesting study I read, (Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, Allan Fisher and Jane Margolis), looked at female computer science majors and the high attrition rate. The conclusions, in my skewed and biased recollection;
1. computer science is a demanding major, and people who don't want to live and breath only computer science can't compete with all those who can. Women tended to want a more balanced life.
2. women tended not to have tinkered with computers in high school, and started out behind the men as freshmen
3. the women who felt they could choose another field did; the few women who stayed in computer science tended to come from lower incomes, and stuck with it because they felt they had to, or were on scholarships requiring them to continue in the major.
I think # 1, also speaks to the age-ism encountered in Technology. Not just women want to have a balanced life.
Seeing as though I got here out of sheer frustration, I'll be happy to reconsider my biases if I ever meet a womyn-born-womyn who is interested in computers beyond bashing me over the head with Ada Lovelace, blaming me for the actions of other people, and in general not being a complete and utter sexist. ...
1) I would be happy to meet you and disabuse you of the notion that all "naturally born females" hate trans folk, are only into computers to beat you over the head with our superiority, or are sexist.
2). Who the flip is Ada Lovelace, and why should I care? :)
3). You are not responsible for the actions of others, only in your reactions to others.
4). May I suggest you take a deep breath, count to ten, and step away from the keyboard for a bit before returning to the conversation. I enjoy reading your insight but you are obviously getting all worked up about past slights and that unfortunately colors your perceptions negatively... Which makes it harder to accept your arguments.
This was also true of Indian and Chinese programmers; they weren't distributed randomly across companies, but some companies had a lot of one or both groups, and others had almost none.
I don't know what the reasons are for this, just an objective observation.
Which isn't to say I don't try to police it. As far as programming coworkers... pff... I hate you for being human. I'm probably not even that good at it myself but I'm certain you suck regardless of whatever the hell you crawled out from under from and what flavor of gonads ached as you did it. And really all you have to do to shock me is give just one hair off your ass. The most delicate out of place gray perhaps albino or blonde-ish one... it doesn't matter. Just an ounce of effort. And every lady programmer I've encountered has done that.
And that shouldn't be surprising. Any minority new to a sector is going to face challenges that have nothing to do with the only obstacles should matter in a given sector. The minority representative would have to like what they do to put up with those pointless challenges, obnoxious/offensive as they are. I think that's where a lot of smart people in the past have been awarded for open-mindedness. Pay close attention to that guy who is weird/doesn't fit in/isn't the right "type" (even among anglo-honkey nerds there are nerds) but does awesome things, find the right team for him or her, that one that doesn't care that he's not a "cultural fit" and holy cow the things you won't get done.
My father immigrated from Norway in the late '60s and is an electrical engineer. Among the other things he was very good at, he was particularly adept at finding ways to help failing engineers from other countries become absolute powerhouses for the company he worked for. So yeah... fuck "culture." If somebody is a genius or at the least valuable, is not the antichrist, but rubs you the wrong way occasionally, it's probably you or the guys complaining to you about "the problem," not the guy/gal whose naturally going to make the occasional mis-step because DUH, we're nerds an DOUBLE-DUH, s/he has a whole bunch of other cultural barriers to cope with.
That said, the spot where I catch myself being unreasonable is on the lady bosses that suck. The ones that are good don't surprise me at all (Molly Corwin, Chicago DDB, no idea what you're up to today - hope you're still around/happy-healthy - but Holy Cats were you the best damn boss I ever had and no I stole "holy cats" from Olsen who no doubt stole it from Batman or something) but I do have ugly prejudice in how I sometimes react more strongly to women that suck as compared to the men who suck... I don't know what it is... Higher expectations?
Nah. That's a copout. Sorry about that ladies. It's probably IS the "bitch" thing. I hope I've never acted on it but it's there a little bit down under the surface and I don't like that about me. Hopefully fading every year with a bit of attention on it. As for my daughters if I have them, they will NOT take anybody's shit and they'll make me proud not doing so. So I guess my whole point is... I'm sorry that we sometimes blow it and lose perspective on the degree to which we are not being the fair humans we like to think of ourselves as. Perhaps if you allow for that with immediate attention drawn to it and give people the opportunity to correct the mistake with perhaps some tactful slaps upside the head/foots up the ass-equivalents, we'll recognize those neanderthalic attitudes for what they are and we'll see ourselves in light of our daughters who might want to walk the same path that we did without any of the obstacles we might sometimes be tempted to put in front of a woman with prejudice for no damn good reason. So... sorry. And maybe hope or something. It seems like we're finally getting there but I'm a honkey male programmer so it's not like I have a lot to complain about.
And gentlemen it's really not about whether we can tolerate or even appreciate women programming and bossing among us. Duh. We clearly can. That back-patting was best left back at the '80s perhaps even '70s. What it's really about is whether we can be tolerable as they do so.
Am i the only one who originally read the title as "job hopper"?
There is a Grace Hopper singing outside my window tonight :-)
I have always been mystified about the numbers of women NOT in tech. It has always been clear to me that women I have known are just as smart and in many cases smarter than men I know and that includes myself. I think that my fiance, who is a third grade teacher and accomplished classical pianest, is just as good at trouble shooting and problem solving as any male engineer I know. So there is some other factor than ability that discourages them. It may be discrimination that it subtiile enough that any man who screens for tech applicants would insist that he doesn't do it. I am sure that my fiance would make a good engineer and in fact I discovered that she has a near photographic memory, something I just found out, and we first met as teens 42 years ago, and after a haitus of 30 years reconnected two years ago.
"lounge at home watching tv and taking care of the kids." Seriously? Therein lies the problem....
Perhaps women are ALSO better at taking care of the kids...better than you, anyway.