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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.
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.
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.
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?
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'
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.
In a way. I think there is a clear difference between hubris and self-confidence. Both enable you to take on challenges that you're not quite sure how you can complete. The difference is what happens when you realize things are going sour, and you need to admit failure and/or ask for help; this also takes certain self-confidence.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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
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 girls don't want to get into tech why are we trying to encourage them.
By the time they get to college, they don't. And they stay away from math and science fields as well. But before high school, the interests (and skills) of boys and girls tend to be pretty well matched. High school is where one or two loud mouthed mysoginists start making trouble and imposing their world view on the social order. And the faculty is powerless to do much about it
There has been some success at splitting the genders up and allowing women to develop interests and study in all girls classes or schools. But this does introduce socialization problems when these students re-enter mixed gender organizations (college or the workplace). Particularly if there is no attempt at weeding out the troublemakers from the mainstream. Perhaps the best solution is for grade schools and middle schools to cull the knuckle-dragging morons from classes and divert them into trade schools. Where their abilities more closely match a future career of breaking rocks with sledge hammers.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
That's Mrs: 'Masters of Residential Science'. We saw a lot of that in engineering. Pretty freshman girls that only wanted to associate with juniors and seniors, weren't making grades and didn't care. Good times, unless you were fool enough to actually marry one.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I've worked for women. Wasn't that bad. Better then working for a _short_ man. That really sucked.
I will never again accept work from any man shorter then 5'6''.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
There are some pretty awesome pictures of the front rack floating around:
I knew it was a matter of time before the misogynistic jokes started.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
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...?
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.
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/)
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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