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NPR: '80s Ads Are Responsible For the Lack of Women Coders
gollum123 writes: Back in the day, computer science was as legitimate a career path for women as medicine, law, or science. But in 1984, the number of women majoring in computing-related subjects began to fall, and the percentage of women is now significantly lower in CS than in those other fields. NPR's Planet Money sought to answer a simple question: Why? According to the show's experts, computers were advertised as a "boy's toy." This, combined with early '80s geek culture staples like the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, as well as movies like War Games and Weird Science, conspired to instill the perception that computers were primarily for men.
As I recall, it was more that, in movies and TV, women found romance working in business, and rarely in computing.
Computing meant anti-social. Business meant meeting attractive men in business suits with lots of money and power.
Geeks only had time travel in bad looking vans.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The only thing responsible for a "lack of women coders" is that fewer women than men are interested in software development as a career path. So what? I have yet to hear a convincing argument as to why this is a problem, why this is something to be concerned about, or why millions of dollars are being thrown around in an attempt to change the situation.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
How many smart people are swayed by advertising?
Or salespeople?
Rhetorical of course. Advertising and salespeople only sway stupid people.
Men started to outpace women at an accelerated rate when the highly personal learning style of "having a pc to play on" became an option. Given that we see more and more of an imbalance in favor of women in group learning environments (college and even moreso in graduate programs), maybe this is just something very obvious, and a good thing for men, as men can excel in solitary study which they can tailor to their own interests and pace. As my wife, a school psychologist said, girls tend to learn better in groups, and don't typically like to work in competitive/solo situations given the choice, whereas boys often do. I'll take the advantage on this one, gladly.
When computers were viewed as toys, it was acceptable for girls to have them. Once they became tools, however, they were only for boys.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
FFS, enough with the concern trolling. We get it, there isn't a 50/50 ratio of men and women in tech.
I fail to see why we have to try and forcibly "fix" that and can't just accept that women, for whatever reason, don't want to go into tech.
You don't see anyone complaining about the lack of men in nursing or as elementary school teachers or the lack of women garbage collectors. Stop whining about the same thing in tech.
the thing is that computer science was transformed to during the 80's and not the same thing it was before
previous discussion about this
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Who cares! Coding is on average a dead-end job with long hours. Why not talk about good long-term careers for women instead, rather than high burn-and-churn jobs? Coders happen to be demand right now, but we've seen bubbles before, and will probably see them again.
Table-ized A.I.
I am by no means a feminist; but this sounds like patronizing, paternalistic bullshit. News flash: woman have brains and they do what they want. They don't want to code. Deal with it.
Back in the day, computer science was as legitimate a career path for women as medicine, law, or science....
I'd really like to seen some substantiation for this assertion, as it is so important for the validity of the other assertion that there has been a change since then.
I read a post about this article somewhere else the other day and someone pointed out that there was a drop in CS majors at the same point for males as well. Possibly due to more varied degrees which involved computers being offered. So there may not have been a real drop in female CS majors at that time, just an overall drop.
If 80's pop culture had that much lasting influence, every college student would still be majoring in kicking commie ass and breakdancing.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Madonna wore a Boy Toy tee shirt. Does this explain the lack of female pop singers today?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
In before SJW brigade comes in demanding everyone involved apologized.
Nope, only the white males--the source of all evil in the world. Any other group may use their "Victim of Evil White Male Oppression" card in lieu of an apology.
There were many other things going on during the '80s. The country was in the middle of a deep and prolonged recession. Women were given hiring preference in most technical fields. Comp Sci programs became more competitive. Maybe 0.1% of coeds ended up in other fields for various reasons.
That might be the same article that mentioned that Cosmo used to push the idea of women programmers. Do they still do that or did they stop doing that in the 80's.
It's the SJW ninnies that are trying to pretend that nerds are the perpetrators here when they are generally powerless and denigrated.
Nerds are the tail end of the problem. You're expecting them to wag the dog when it's the greeks and the jocks that control all of the really relevant media outlets.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
We have a great reason, in fact I read it the other day and said "Wow, this is brilliant!". What is this reason? People are making too much money as developers so people are trying to drive the market price down. The same issues we talk about for women programmers are used for getting kids interested in programming, and the same reasons we are seeing all this hype to increase the H1B numbers for developers.
I know, I know.. it's really hard to believe that big businesses would collude for nefarious purposes because all of these businesses are purely altruistic and have never harmed society. It's probably harder to believe that the Government would be in on this collusion, because our Government has never harmed it's own people either. (if the sarcasm is not obvious I can't help you)
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Assigning guilt/blame to a group of people based on a characteristic outside of their control tends to do that.
And the results in most IT offices being a f'in sausage-fest.
Whilst I have no aptitude for HR or marketing, I'd urge any undecided young person out there to fully consider.
the computer establishment was shown as Big Brother and all the tech workers were depicted as mindless slaves. All shown in dull black and white footage.
Then comes running a feisty young woman in colorful athletic clothes. She hurls a hammer and destroys the system. Lesson: girls hate computers and break them!
I'm now the parent of both a young boy and a young girl, and already I'm starting to see the social cues kick in. My wife, who's incredibly smart and finance-minded rather than IT minded also confirms that the separation of roles starts very early and parents really have to work against it if they want to avoid pigeonholing. Even now, in the 2010s, the idea of girls being swept away by handsome princes is still drilled into girls' heads right from the start. Same thing goes for girls being conditioned to think of nothing but their wedding day for the next 20+ years. Boys don't have this same relentless pressure for whatever reason...they're still steered towards harder subjects in school, and conditioned that they will be the breadwinner someday. It's been a while since women would go to college solely to find a husband, but the messaging is still there.
But...one of the things that isn't mentioned is the fact that I think women self-select out of the profession as well. Regardless of gender, you have to put up with a lot of crap in an IT or development job. Being a woman makes it worse because of the potential for sexual harassment, the perception of women not being able to contribute as much due to their childbearing responsibilities, etc. If I were a woman, I sure wouldn't want to work around some of my colleagues, whose behavior and attitudes toward women sometimes make me uncomfortable. (And I can deal with a lot -- I'm far from some PC feminist.) I work for some pretty conservative companies too, I can't imagine the environment at a Web 2.0 startup where most of the management are the founders' hand-picked fraternity brothers.
...so today are women ndividuals who can do anything men can do and are perfectly capable of functioning in modern society to wit, choosing the career path that they want to follow out of interest, talent, and education?
Or are they intimidatable, wilting violets incapable of exercising free will, intimidated by the faintest approbation, and unable to choose a career because some shitty 1980s movies didn't ACTUALLY show "girls doing data entry"?
I'm just trying to keep track here. I need to know if I should treat them like plain old people, or tread delicately around their fragile sensibilities?
-Styopa
The dominance of computer's as something for men in 80s pop culture was probably reflecting the trend rather than causing it. The timeline seems too short for so few pop culture things to influence.
The market for coding evolved at first primarily from 'data entry', which required nearly no training. Women of the time (disadvantaged or disinclined from training depending on your opinion) could take those jobs and men who needed to 'provide' sought higher trained jobs with higher pay. Basically straightforward data entry started to become 'advanced data entry' that started incorporating things like formulas and continued on from there. Perhaps because it started to demand more and more skills, narrowing the labor pool and driving up compensation, enticing men to start participating more heavily and an overall male-favorable social bias started to take effect. Or perhaps the nature of the work fundamentally changed enough in a way that drive a different male/female interest. Or some other factor, these are all guesses.
I just doubt that a handful of 80s movies changed the entire landscape of female participation in the market basically within a couple of years of the first movie's release, and there's a lot of alternative explanations that are quite viable.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's the SJW ninnies that are trying to pretend that nerds are the perpetrators here when they are generally powerless and denigrated.
I find the idea that nerds would ever chase off women particularly amusing. Hell, most of us would KILL to have women around. If women are electing to not pursue the field, it's certainly not because they're unwelcome. On every team that I've ever been on with women, the guys went out of their way to be nice to them.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Assigning guilt/blame to a group of people based on a characteristic outside of their control tends to do that.
Ok, so they group of people being assigned blamed here is advertising executives, but I gather you meant that another group felt guilty?
My wife has an electrical engineering degree and has been developing software for about 20 years, and in my time knowing her I can say she's worked with some real ignorant, arrogant, and possibly sexist men. Her ideas are frequently ignored when she states them, but listened to when a man states them. She approaches problems from different angles and many people she's worked with refuse to stop their single-mindedness to look at the problem from a different direction. IMO it's issues like these that drive women from engineering more than anything else. There's a culture that is almost hostile for women, and it is certainly harder to get anywhere in our field as a woman.
I admit I suffer from this at times when we are working on a problem together. The difference is I actually care to hear her input even if I have to force myself to shift gears. It isn't easy but her view is so alien from mine, but it has ALWAYS been valuable. Her view either directly leads to a solution or sets us off in another direction for the eventual solution.
It's not that women can't do it, but imo it really seems like men don't want them in the field.
One of the worst shows on NPR if you ask me.
I knew all that "the Jews control the media" antisemitic stuff was bullshit. Glad to hear I was right and it's actually the greeks.
Or, it could be, that this is complete nonsense:
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
The entire field had the same bump. It wasn't just women. The percentage of women in the field has never risen above about 35%
I'd argue that's when the field was new and exciting. Then it tapered off and remained stable until the internet bubble... and tapered off again.
I think that, if anything, this shows women are savvy. They saw a new tech, took advantage of it. After the industry became less flashy, and the best jobs were harder to get they moved on. Then when the realities of the industry started to sink in and the industry collapsed they again left.
It might be that they are intimidated by my stylish wardrobe furnished by TJ Max.
In the dawn of computing, women were largely typists, inputting data.
I was doing computer work in the 1980s. I worked with women who were programming, doing VAX & mainframe admin, and performing actual rigorous systems analysis.
The claim that women are not interested in technology or computing is just false.
Good work! I *knew* this wasn't a complex problem with multiple related causes spanning decades. Now we know The Truth: One cause, from a small span of years. IN YOUR FACE, everyone else!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
This, combined with early '80s geek culture staples like the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, as well as movies like War Games and Weird Science, conspired to instill the perception that computers were primarily for men.
I had no clue that "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy was a popular book in 1984. My Apple ][ class in middle school at that time was split down middle between boys and girls. Some teachers must have read that book, noted the errors of their ways, and pushed the girls back into the typewriter class thereafter. Well, duh.
That might be the same article that mentioned that Cosmo used to push the idea of women programmers. Do they still do that or did they stop doing that in the 80's.
It's the SJW ninnies that are trying to pretend that nerds are the perpetrators here when they are generally powerless and denigrated.
Nerds are the tail end of the problem. You're expecting them to wag the dog when it's the greeks and the jocks that control all of the really relevant media outlets.
I wonder what this portends for the future of programming.
Because if young women are turned away, indeed discouraged by anything not completely positive, it means that Programming and all of the other Tch type careers will have to be completely revamped.
Case in point, I went for a tech career. I wanted it, and I gave not a flying fig what anyone thought about whether it was cool, socially uplifting, or fashionable. I was not in any way shape or form discouraged by my meekness, nor the portrayals of tech people on Television
All of the females I worked felt exactly the same way.
All of the males I worked with felt exactly the same way.
And we worked hard, put in a lot of hours because that is what we wanted to do. And we did it.
Now it appears, that we must change. We must adapt our requirements toward people who are easily swayed out of this carreer path. We must, in the name of equal representation, educate and employ people who are highly susceptable to social approval by others.
Hey - we'll need good luck with that. I've always said that the only way to get gender balance will be to force young women into Tech jobs.
Or perhaps Tech isn't a job for everyone?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I wonder how many of these folks trying to peel the onion of female tech empowerment are actually in the fucking industry. Seriously, blame the 80's? How about blaming parents that don't teach their daughters the realities of the career prospects for Art History major or Marine Biologist. Technology in America is the ultimate democracy. Anyone willing to truly master a skill set that is in demand in the industry can have their shot given enough talent and persistence. The only segment you could really say gets shut out is anyone who cannot for whatever reason pass a background check. One of the things that keep us honest in this industry is being free to speak our minds, so people need to cut out the "boys won't play nice" rhetoric. If women need men to change their attitudes before they are willing to participate it will be a long road to progress.
I'm a woman. I was born in 1979, so I grew up during the 80s. We got our first computer when I was 2 and I wrote my first program at 7. I was a girly girl in the sense that I liked frilly dresses and pink. I still love fashion. I also grew up with Star Wars and Star Trek! I still love Sci Fi. As a kid I enjoyed playing with Legos, robotics, and star wars toys. I didn't care for barbies, but did like my rainbow bright doll and strawberry shortcake doll. I get excited about programming! I never saw my career choice as a way to get into management. I just love to code and don't care for working in a group. I find I like to be social, but not while I'm working. I also love gadgets and get excited when new ones come out. So while I'm a rare girl and I think other girls need to know that you can be girly and into software and gadgets all at the same time! I'm a Senior Software Engineer who enjoys C#.NET and have been for 12+ years.
...that women act like lemmings?
Actually that's part of the problem.
Women frequently don't like being fawned over by unattractive men. Usually when women get "chased off" by nerds it's that very "would kill for more women to be interested in this stuff" attitude that does it.
Apologies are cheap. And they don't come with implied commitments. I don't mind apologizing for being a rich white male so long as I can continue laughing all the way to the bank.
Honestly, I really am sorry that I have more money than you do. I wish you the best in obtaining similar money. Thanks for the chat, see you later!
The ads showed computers as toys for boys because that was what the market was like and not the other way around.
In the mainframe days most people only met a computers in their college days. Some would become more interested in them than what they were supposed to be studying (physics, biology, whatever - computer science courses were pretty rare back then) and would end up becoming programmers. It was mostly men, but there were a reasonable number of women (a lot more than today in relative terms, fewer in absolute numbers).
The microcomputer revolution happened because a certain kind of guy (as far as I know, no women participated in the Homebrew Computer Club meetings, for example) wanted to have his very own computer even if it was completely useless. Normal computer people looked down on those weirdos, but they soon hit it big. As prices came down it was possible to give a kid a computer as a toy. Practically no girls were interested (and those that were tended to be discouraged by parents and friends) but most boys were also not excited about calculating Fibanacci sequences or typing in Basic listings to draw mazes. It was a rather specialized market and that is what the ads aimed for.
The computers in the 1980s ads simply were not interesting for the general public. This changed in the early 1990s with the home office - a computer with disks and a reasonable printer and compatible with the one you had at work and changed yet again in the late 1990s with the Internet. That brought its own set of problems (which the Raspberry Pi was created to address) without killing the "computers are toys for boys" image that had been created.
I find the idea that nerds would ever chase off women particularly amusing. Hell, most of us would KILL to have women around. If women are electing to not pursue the field, it's certainly not because they're unwelcome. On every team that I've ever been on with women, the guys went out of their way to be nice to them.
My experience exactly. Some female representation is a good addition to the workforce. But they do need to be aligned toward a Tech outlook. And no, that is not the stereotype of the ass grabbing testosterone fueled Techie, becaue maybe 99.9 percent of Techs are painfully shy.
No, as I recall, it takes a lot of hours, a lot of caffeine, and junk food sitting at a computer screen.
And unless we change that little bit of ground truth, we are not going to attract the young women who are more interested in other careers at the present..
Instead of the increasingly vicious attacks on geeks, perhaps the young ladies need to adapt just a little?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
On every team that I've ever been on with women, the guys went out of their way to be nice to them.
That's creepy (j/k, sort of).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, that's unfortunate. Because, try as I might, I've yet to find a way to make my team more attractive. I guess I could hire some male models, but they generally make pretty shitty coders.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It's the SJW ninnies that are trying to pretend that nerds are the perpetrators here when they are generally powerless and denigrated.
I find the idea that nerds would ever chase off women particularly amusing. Hell, most of us would KILL to have women around. If women are electing to not pursue the field, it's certainly not because they're unwelcome. On every team that I've ever been on with women, the guys went out of their way to be nice to them.
If you listen to the NPR segment, they have a couple of women who were former compsci majors give accounts of how the men in their classes denigrated them and mocked them for missing some knowledge. I'm not certain it's motivated by a "no girls allowed" attitude. I think there's a broader culture of elitism in compsci that motivates people to try to bolster their own egos by jumping on perceived weaknesses in others.
It's important to note that to focus of the segment was on university compsci courses in the 80s, not women who get employed on professional teams. Generally people are a bit more mature in the workforce (generally). These are 18-22 year old males. They likely were a bit ostracized as nerdy in high school. I think they just get overzealous once they find themselves in a world where athletic prowess is no longer the ultimate display of dominance. they make bad decisions.
They might even be simply showing off. I think i've tried to impress nerd girls the wrong way. Where i thought i was communicating, "hey look at how good i am at this!", i really was saying, "OMG YOU ARE A STUPID GIRL". I certainly wasn't very good at communicating with women in my late teens and early 20s. i'm only marginally better at it 20 years later.
Am not really sure about this, as a male I've been given shit plenty of times when I screwed up as a student. I even had one of my lecturers give me the 'women are better than men' speech once.
Funnily enough I didn't leave the course/sue him for sexism or demand a feminist blog cover my plight.
The majority of men that try to get custody of their children in court succeed. The myth that women are unfairly given custody in the court system needs to go away.
Your story is very cool, but you realise that you in no way represent the typical US female right?
For every woman like you there's probably 1000 that can't and don't even want to try to think logically about anything, much less attempt to understand or deal with anything even slightly technical. In fact most seem to think that being interested in tech or even just sci fi is a socially undesireable character flaw.
How many women are entering the IT field TODAY?
If you assume that the women who were influenced by 1980s pop culture stereotypes were 10-20 years old, they're now in their 40s or older now. That might explain the dearth of women in more senior IT positions, but what about women entering IT now, ie, women who were too young to be influenced in the 1980s?
Despite the fact that most young women have smartphones and are heavily influenced by their own peers to use them, there's probably some other narrative that tries to explain away women's lack of involvement in IT.
So it's also the 80s movies to blame that women are not interested in careers like soldier, spy, pilot, policeman (apology, -woman), archaeologist, exorcist, karate fighter,...
Has anyone ever looked closer at the 80s? The 80s were not a geek decade. The only movie I can remember where geeks were not just the comic foil (ok, even in that one they were) was "Revenge of the nerds". The whole "engineering geeks" were no role model in 80s movies, and even less so in TV series. Whenever they were in some prominent role, they were the little sidekick of the actual hero. Be it Automan's creator Walter, who was mostly a comic sidekick (ok, the show wasn't that memorable, but the special effects were great for its time) or Street Hawk's Norman who was some timid, beancounter-ish scaredy-cat. The geek roles were at best meant to make the hero shine some more.
Actually, the only engineer role I can remember that was allowed to be superior in areas to the hero and be more than a nuisance to him was that of Bonnie in Knight Rider.
A woman.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is crazy. I programmed PC's way back in the TRS-80 days. Yes, there was social stigma - the "nerd" archetype. The crazy part is it WAS discouraging but directly aimed towards us geeky guys who were doing it! Why is this now interpreted as something that specifically affected woman? MEN who had interest in programming were stereotyped and depicted as lifeless, sexless, unattractive, socially awkward, physically weak, and all-around laughable. (See characters in old films like "Revenge of the Nerds"). Is it supposed to be that men are happy to be characterized disparagingly and woman aren't?
Really, I never once considered what was going on in hollywood when I started playing with computers in the late 70s, nor did any of my friends. The women I did know who got into it got into it for the same reason they got into chess and maths and DnD and all other geek activities.
and self reliance and self definition? It is always the larger world that wronged someone, or coerced them to act in ways they never would have on their own? Maybe just maybe we need men and women looking at themselves and deciding for themselves what and who they want to be without societal influences bending our wills one way or another. If it is societies fault/influence does it matter if a man or women isn't coding or breast feeding? They've lost the only battle that matters which is free thought.
"If you listen to the NPR segment, they have a couple of women who were former compsci majors give accounts of how the men in their classes denigrated them and mocked them for missing some knowledge. "
That is not sexism. Guess what? They did the exact same thing to males in the class.
I have read studies that show that women do better in all women schools because men tend to compete and display while women tend to co-operate.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Hell yeah! I would love to be fawned over and flattered, and have people help me with my work and buy me free sodas. My colleagues and subordinates are more than welcome to do that for me any day!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It's creepy to be nice to the people you work with???? WTF kind of place do YOU work at?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It's the SJW ninnies that are trying to pretend that nerds are the perpetrators here when they are generally powerless and denigrated.
I find the idea that nerds would ever chase off women particularly amusing. Hell, most of us would KILL to have women around. If women are electing to not pursue the field, it's certainly not because they're unwelcome. On every team that I've ever been on with women, the guys went out of their way to be nice to them.
Replace the word "nice" with "creepy." The problem with the unwashed coding masses is that they have no idea how to treat women as people, learn how to communicate in the their language, show any interest in what they like, etc.. Instead they try to find women who are just fantasy versions of themselves, but with boobs.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
I didn't really claim it was sexism. i guess when i described the situation i was thinking it was obvious that the mocking is part of the culture regardless of gender. I didn't get the impression that TFA laid the mocking out as the sexism either. TFA was more focused on the idea that the sexism was marketing computers towards boys as toys.
Yeah I would say "OMG YOU ARE A STUPID ____" is endemic to the tech industry. I'm definitely guilty of it. Within half an hour you can have two people do it back and forth in half jest. But it's also true of nerdy girls in school and nerdy boys. Nerds are generally the victim of mocking so to be superior gives them an opportunity to take it out on others. It's not helpful--but it is understandable.
Well who can stand being around a total Maxxinista?
Nothing posted to
I prefer the term "mangina"
Wow, not only is this wrong, it's stupid. Home computers were aimed at FAMILIES, especially Commodores. Apples were ubiquitous in education, and I don't remember girls being asked to leave the room while the boys hacked on BASIC and LOGO. Were there male-oriented ads? Yes, but I don't remember any unless you count Shatner's-- and that would be only if you were some ironic sexist who thought Star Trek wasn't for girls. The author provides a biased sample by digging up two that happened to feature boys in them-- and they still have girls present. If I felt like slogging on YouTube for an hour, I could probably find ten that had girls and women prominently involved.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I'm sorry, but wtf is your point? Are you saying that we should be hostile to women instead of nice, or nice instead of hostile, or that we should completely ignore them?
You say that men who are mean to women chase them off. Then you say men who are nice to women chase them off. And I'm pretty sure you would say that men ignoring women would chase them off. SO WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU SUGGEST?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
So ... here's an article from the Globe and Mail, http://www.theglobeandmail.com... .
Research first reported in Science Magazine regarding the contribution of women to the collective intelligence of a team garnered worldwide attention, particularly the studies highlighting the performance of women when tested on tasks relating to brainstorming, complex problem-solving and decision-making. The findings confirmed that a group’s collective intelligence was strengthened by the inclusion of women and their enhanced capacity for listening, collaborating and intuitiveness. The CIA is one example of an organization that made a notable transformation of its culture by not only ensuring women had greater representation in senior positions, but also explicitly recognizing that it was women on their team who discovered the location of Osama Bin Laden, allowing for him to be captured.
You want men and women working together. Simple as that.
The business case goes like this:
The financial benefits of greater gender equity are undeniable. Extensive global research conducted by Credit Suisse, Catalyst and McKinsey & Co. examining the link between women on boards and stronger financial performance of Fortune 500 companies has been cited in numerous publications. Examining the return on sales, return on invested capital, and return on equity, their research confirmed that companies with women on their boards of directors outperform those with the least number of women by significant margins in each category.
Credit Suisse is not exactly some radical feminist organization out to overthrow patriarchy.
he problem with the unwashed coding masses is that they have no idea how to treat women as people, learn how to communicate in the their language, show any interest in what they like, etc.. Instead they try to find women who are just fantasy versions of themselves, but with boobs.
Now who's stereotyping?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
they only cooperate if there are no men around
If you listen to the NPR segment, they have a couple of women who were former compsci majors give accounts of how the men in their classes denigrated them and mocked them for missing some knowledge. I'm not certain it's motivated by a "no girls allowed" attitude. I don't think y there's a broader culture of elitism in compsci that motivates people to try to bolster their own egos by jumping on perceived weaknesses in others.
I think any woman who entered the elite architectural and engineering schools in the eighties could have told you that "No girls allowed!" was the message broadcast loud and clear from Day 1.
Compsci was not the only offender.
If I were working on a serious project in which I needed no distractions, I would not be pleased at the idea of anyone being nearby, man or woman. I code best when I lose myself in the project and ignore everyone and everything else.
Don't be mean to women and also don't go out of your way to be excessively nice to them. Both of those things can make someone feel uncomfortable, just treat them like everyone else.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Yes, it is creepy to go out of your way to be nice with a subset of the people that work there.
Learn to love Alaska
Now it appears, that we must change. We must adapt our requirements toward people who are easily swayed out of this carreer path. We must, in the name of equal representation, educate and employ people who are highly susceptable to social approval by others.
The problem with memory is that we often see the past not as it was, but as we want it to be.
Software development is usually done in an anti-social way. You chunk up a release or backlog or whatever into features, each dev takes a feature and goes off and writes some code. Later there is some collaboration in testing, code reviews, troubleshooting, etc.
But that is a TERRIBLE way to do it. The wrong code gets written way too often. Designs are bad because people aren't contributing along the way. Requirements get missed because the developer makes an assumption that s/he didn't know was an assumption. The more eyes on the code at all times the better. Devs should be constantly communicating with testers and people who understand the business case (product owners). One way to do that is pair programming. It sounds like a waste of time, but it is actually faster. Silly mistakes get caught right away. Debugging goes faster. Another way to do that is to chunk the work into very small pieces and constantly communicate to integrate your tiny piece with the other devs' tiny pieces. This leads to clean interfaces and modular code.
The Cowboy Superhero model of software development only makes sense if you are the only one developing a project. And remember in that case, your code dies when you get hit by a bus (or kill your wife and go to prison).
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
You say that men who are mean to women chase them off. Then you say men who are nice to women chase them off. And I'm pretty sure you would say that men ignoring women would chase them off. SO WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU SUGGEST?
How about treating women like you treat everyone else, so that they feel like people instead of walking tits?
(And no, I'm not an SJW, I'm a fat hairy nerd.)
weinersmith
Most men don't want custody. They just don't want to pay child support. It's the lying dead-beat dads that perpetuate these lies.
Learn to love Alaska
Women like attractive men, and they choose work where they'll come into contact with attractive men, dressed nicely, well groomed, etc. That's not in IT. It's in banking, law, real estate, sales, and so on.
If the computer industry was where all the good-looking dudes were working, then women would outnumber us in a decade or less.
"Don't be mean to women" "treat them like everyone else"?
MAKE UP YOUR MIND!
Treat them just as you'd treat your non-female co-workers. Of course, then you'll end up with an Adria Richards type who thinks your mentioning of a dongle is sexual harassment.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Die in a fire, you anti-hellenic faggot.
But wouldn't faggots be pro-hellenic, or are the stories I heard about 'doing it like Greeks' incorrect?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Now it appears, that we must change. We must adapt our requirements toward people who are easily swayed out of this carreer path. We must, in the name of equal representation, educate and employ people who are highly susceptable to social approval by others.
The problem with memory is that we often see the past not as it was, but as we want it to be.
I actively worked in recruitment and retention of female tech workers, up to the time I retired, a couple years back. Perhaps 2012 is recent enogh to pass your validity test? What have you done to support women in Technology, and retention of women in Technology?
If I might go so far down the line as the "Take your Son's and Daughters to Work" days, almost none of the young ladies ever expressed an interest in Technical field or engineering. The young ladies were tending toward lawyers, and MBA', and those of a more science based career tended toward Medical doctors or Veternarian fields.
These were young ladies who were largely daughters of Engineers and Tech workers.
Now if you just figure I'm some senile old dotard, you can stop here. I'm going to give you my assessment of why the situation exists. It might just conflict with your worldview.
In the mid 70's, the first large group of women entered the professional workforce. They came into it in many fields, and there was a mix of professions.
Then over time, they sorted things out, Many found reasons to gravitate towards some professions over others. .
And quite frankly, how is being a coder or other computer science worker, going to compare ot being an MBA, or a Veterinarian, or even a lawyer?
If you want to be a coder, you had better be prepared to work a lot of extra time, and not extra time like say, the MBA's do. Veterinarians have irregular hours, but in most cases there is one on call at any particular time. I certainly worked more than my share of 80 hour weeks, and some number of 100 hour weeks, and seldom ever less than 55 hours. My better half deserved a medal for putting up with that, or at least bringing me in achange of clothing If I got a 5 O'clock surprise. Plus, I was paid very well, but that reflects on the time I was willing to put in. Those who couldn't be bothered, made a lot less.
Same with Engineers, and scientists.
Point in fact, it is not all that desirable a profession, unless you really want to do that as a profession.
Finally, a person who gets into coding today doesn't have much of a job outlook in the US.
So other jobs with better pay, less hours, and more respect, versus long hours, little respect, and a future of diminshed earning potential - and people are saying it's because guys in Tech are pigs? Tempting, I suppose, if you want a sound bite answer, but I'd bet that if the work situations were similar between Tech jobs and the more popular careers for women, we would see a lot more women in tech jobs.
After all, I trust that youre not so naive to suggest that there is no sexism in the Law,, Veterinarian, or Business environment do you?
If sexism kept women out of fields, you wouldn't see one female MBA..
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
1) Just earlier today I saw a *different* posting saying that female involvement in CS peaked during the '01 .com boom. Which is it? The '80s, or the .com boom? The conclusions were similar, though, men oppressed women out of the field.
2) If you are a woman and you apply to a CS program, you're MUCH more likely than a man to get in. At the top schools, they get fewer female applicants, but the matriculants include many women.
3) If you are a woman, you are much more likely to get an NSF GRFP.
4) Once you get to that big faculty stage, you're more likely to get hired, because they need to pad out the number of female profs.
5) Companies will bend over to hire you. The top companies are seeking female coders.
6) You get all kinds of school programs to help you get into coding.
Still, I'm supposed to feel bad for you because fewer women go into CS. I'm supposed to put *my* career on hold and let less-qualified applicants through because they are female. That isn't to say, being female made them less qualified. That is to say, because we need more people who have vaginas in this field, I'm supposed to let you get the job, and hey, fuck me, I have all of this "privilege."
Excuse me if I think that this is bullshit, and, while I'm at it, fuck you for your bullshit.
I remember those days well. What's your point? Are you trying to say that the reason we have toxic and thin drywall is because of Hispanics? That's the dumbest thing I've heard all week!
I found an interesting graph. Why is there no uotcry about the declining number of men getting degrees in the following discaplines? Biology, psychology, communications and journalism. And no outcry about the historically low levels in the following fields? Health professions, public administration, education, foreign languages, English, and Art and performance.
It's the SJW ninnies that are trying to pretend that nerds are the perpetrators here when they are generally powerless and denigrated.
I find the idea that nerds would ever chase off women particularly amusing. Hell, most of us would KILL to have women around. If women are electing to not pursue the field, it's certainly not because they're unwelcome. On every team that I've ever been on with women, the guys went out of their way to be nice to them.
Actually, sorry to break it to you, but "OMG OMG OMG it's a female programmer she must be a nerd like us OMG OMG OMG AWESOME" is going to be very scary to most women. It is mal-adjusted and creepy. That it feels like a positive reaction to the guys who respond that way doesn't make it any less scary, it just makes it more difficult to correct. And any unusual behavior that is based on gender is going to be "unwelcome," it is not only intentionally unwelcoming behavior that is unwelcoming.
That there might be a co-worker who would "KILL" over having her around is... exceptionally unwelcome.
It is creepy to be differently-nice to some people based on their gender, yes. WTF kind of place do you work at where nobody has ever mentioned it?
It is actually a bit of a "no-brainer."
In the 1980s, the boys that were into math and science and (especially) computers were also getting their asses kicked on a regular basis by the popular kids Perhaps the girls were smart enough to not want any part of that.
Or at least they'd rather follow other interests than be associated with something or a group of people who were at the bottom of the social scale.
do() || do_not();
80s ads are responsible for the lack of male shoppers at shopping malls because the merchandise in stores appeal predominantly to women.
Really, it all comes down to marketing. The mens' clothing I see in stores have zero appeal to me because women are usually in charge of purchasing at clothing stores and they stock colors and patterns that are too effeminate. Not to hard to see a parallel with computers as they simply LOOK like mens' tools. Next time you see a woman using a palmtop or cellphone, note the accessory(s) that are matched to her wardrobe.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Movies are to blame for why more men aren't nurses, news at 11.
Oh, this just in, movies from the 80s are also to blame for why the NBA is mostly black, news at 11:05.
Seriously, different groups of people have different aspirations. Let it be. If this was on CNN or something fine, but every 2 days on Slashdot it's "this is why women are oppressed and it's the tech industry's fault." Wtf.
The only movie I can think of that features a male nurse as the protagonist has nearly everyone else in the picture making jokes about his sexuality. But I digress...
The reason I hear from the trenches of why there aren't many male nurses is because:
1) Many hospitals have a policy against hiring them. It's illegal, but it exists.
2) A majority of scholarships for Nursing school have a big fat requirement on the top that says "Applicant must be female". That's not illegal, and it exists.
3) Just how women find a "good ole boy's club" in the workforce, there's the reverse in Nursing, where males are handed all the 'shit jobs', treated like 2nd class citizens and are excluded from certain opportunities for no reason other than they've got a penis. Affirmative Action still applies, but it also still applies in favor of females. This isn't every hospital or clinic, but it's a LOT of them.
4) At the college level, advisors will try to steer men into more traditionally male roles. I lost count of how many times I heard "You know, we've got a really good welding/firefighter/law enforcement program here for guys into good honest work".
I could go on, but what's the point?
Oh I am aware that bigots and ideologues find logic to be inconvenient. Nothing new there. I just find it useful to find the central fallacy in their running stream of bullshit so that when they pop up again with the same old crap... I can bop them on the head with logic and then go back to doing whatever.
In the case of this branch of feminism...
The killer point is that women are either inferior and in need of our aid as the big strong men. Or they are our equals and as adults able to manage their own lives can handle it on their own.
Next issue. :-)
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The article is not saying that nerds are not welcoming women. But.. there are some really bad examples of women in technology being treated really badly. Look at some of the latest gaming activism against female game journalists. If you really want to look behind the surface on what happened, it is thoroughly disgusting.
I think that's more to do with the fact the main pusher of that doesn't know shit about games and is talking out of her arse and any gamer can see it. But because her videos have some half decent production values and lots of big words everyone else eats it up. And we are all accused of sexism when we try and point it out. Yes there are some bad apples helping to prove their 'point' but that is true of everything.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Actually CS classes were what engineering boys in the 1980s enrolled in if they wanted to meet girls (also they very easy subjects for the first two years). In 1987 the introductory CS subject at the university I attended was just over 50% female. Less than 1% in engineering.
I don't know how many of that 50% ended up finding a job related to CS. I suspect it was very few of them.
It's just the people that are utterly feral about the situation that need to change. One medical example is a city where all the orthopedic surgeons had played Rugby and for some reason nobody who hadn't passed the requirements for the medical specialty. Even the woman that thought she could get around the unspoken qualification by being a match doctor at state level games didn't pass despite high scores. So no girls or weedy nerds allowed.
We've got similar shit festering in IT and it's dragging us down by creating monocultures where it manifests.
So it's not about change unless there's counterproductive unwritten rules that probably need to be changed.
I find the idea that nerds would ever chase off women particularly amusing. Hell, most of us would KILL to have women around. If women are electing to not pursue the field, it's certainly not because they're unwelcome. On every team that I've ever been on with women, the guys went out of their way to be nice to them.
Anecdotal counter-'evidence': ... you know the drill). Computers and programming from there on out. I'm also quite good with women. A late bloomer. like most of us, I've gotten the hang of it in the last decade. I dance Tango and have had a measure of affairs since roughly the age of 35. And I enjoy the embrace of a cute women very much. It's also fun to learn how nerdy and insecure women themselves are! And sexually frustrated in just about the same amount as men! ... Only better at hiding it. :-) ... anyway:
I'm a programmer and IT expert. Regular 80ies computerkid (zx81, Sharp PC 1402, Basic, Peek & Poke, etc. growing up in parallel with microcomputers
I also run into female IT and Tech experts. Sadly not that often, for the known reasons, but occasionally I do. On at least two occasions I've caught myself being slightly disrespectful to women in tech, albeit with no bad intent. Once was explaing my tango partner - a women in her late 20ies on her way to a PHD in electronics - how I would use a dual-cinch-to-3,5mm jack audio adapter to hook a player to loudspeakers. Roughly 20 seconds in it dawned to me that, if anything, she would explain to me how to do it. I inmediately appologised and we resolved the awkward situation with some humor.
It was embarrasing none-the-less.
On another occasion I was basically explaining my smartphone in very simple terms to a female PHD in CS with expert Java knowledge - a team-lead. It was an Android phone. She'd actually just wanted to know which Android version it was running when she asked "What is that?". With a cliche computer guy or male web-hipster asking it, I might have caught the gist. The simple fact that she was quite young and good-looking had triggered male dominance behaviour in me and had me look like somewhat like a jerk. Again, I noticed it about 10 seconds in, but by then I'd already done it. She handled it very professionally, but I felt like a total douche. Still do actually, when thinking back.
Bottom line:
You may think you're treating women respectfully while you're actually appearing quite condescending. Observe yourself if you get the chance - I've alway thought the same as you did, but since discovered some fine-tuning requirements in my behaviour towards women in our profession. QED.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If they are a very small minority, how come so many people want to mention them at every chance they get?
I'm making efforts to remind myself that they *are* a minority (it gets tricky to remember on the net these days), and they are a very, very 'vocal' minority. Vocal, and generally full of shit.
It is interesting that this is happening in a society that every objective power metric is male dominated.
See? Lind of like this one.
is she cute??? if so yes
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I'm sorry, but I'm not a tightrope walker. I'd rather just be nice to them and take my chances that they'll be scared away by us not being mean enough.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Yes, it is creepy to go out of your way to be nice with a subset of the people that work there.
Intent is always relevant.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Replace the word "nice" with "creepy." The problem with the unwashed coding masses is that they have no idea how to treat women as people, learn how to communicate in the their language, show any interest in what they like, etc.. Instead they try to find women who are just fantasy versions of themselves, but with boobs.
I can't speak for anyone else, but my fantasy women were all invented by Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein, or Piers Anthony. I'll readily admit that's still quite sophomoric, but at least it's beyond infantile.
I also can't speak for anyone else, but part of the attraction to computing for me was that it is a solitary activity. Not necessarily because I want to be solitary, but because I don't have as many social skills as many other people. My mother was depressive and my father was depressive and absentee, so they had nothing valuable or positive to teach me. I was moved away from my peer group right at the end of elementary school and never recovered socially. So that supports your theory, if not your vitriol.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But wouldn't faggots be pro-hellenic, or are the stories I heard about 'doing it like Greeks' incorrect?
Not all homosexuals have buttsex, although the logic there escapes me completely. I'm pretty sure that if I were gay, I'd still want to fuck. In any case, the ancient greeks didn't believe (overall) that women and men could have equitable relationships of any kind, so women mostly hung out with women and men with men. They wrote a lot more about male-male sex than female-female because it was mostly men doing the writing, and they were extremely self-centered, but apparently there was a lot of female homo sex going on too.
I think they should return the Olympics to its original condition, though permitting females to participate. That would really liven things up...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As much as I have looked into the general subject of why women don't "Y" and why men don't "X." People keep wanting to believe that it's "male domination" and completely forget about the functions of our bodies and how they drive and support our behaviors.
If it were a cultural issue, there would invariably be some example somewhere of an exchange of roles between men and women on earth SOMEWHERE. There really isn't.
At the core is essentially a way of devaluing ALL people (both male and female) by removing their significance and importance in any given role. This serves to further weaken families and other structures which invariably compete with other control structures like... uhm... government.
Sorry, but when someone, no matter their gender, asks me a question as vague as 'what is that' while pointing at my phone I'm not gonna assume they're asking which version of Android the phone is running. Instead I will assume lcd status of the questioner in regards to the object in question.
Perhaps Women in Management positions.
Most "coders" are entry level positions. I have been working in my field for 15 years now, and I grew up in the 1990's really. If you grew up in the 1980's you might still be or do coding, but most would be at a high level position now. Ad's from the 1980's would have little effect.
Now you might make the argument that, most of those Managers would do the hiring and have a preconceived idea about hiring Women VS Men. However you could pretty much use the same argument for any field of work, none of which has anything to do with stupid 1980's ads.
Speaking of perpetuating lies, most men behind on child support are in arrears because they cannot afford to pay, not because they don't want to. Non-custodial women are much fewer in number, but have more in arrears, percentage wise, than non-custodial fathers do. Yet no one calls them "lying dead-beat moms" when they cannot make the payments.
Who's to blame for the lack of men being secretaries? A lot of these discussions are pointless. People will do what they want to do. If that means breaking social norms, be my guest. Good for you.
In general, women tend to prefer situations involving lots of moving pieces, and the relationships between them, while men are tend towards activities involving a single, tight focus. We're different, we tend to be better at different kinds of things. Programming a computer requires your mind to build a mental model of the logic, and then execute it internally. That's a very good example of a single, tight-focus task, that women often find unpleasant. A woman might enjoy talking about complicated relationships with a friend on the telephone, at the same time that she is watching a television show about complicated relationships. As a man, I would this task to be impossible, and certainly unpleasant.
--- wad
You can't be serious!! I was into computers back in the TRS-80 and Commodore 64 days. I built my own computers and coded in Basic, Fortran, Pascal and a number of other languages and never heard anything like this. I was a super big fan of the Zenith/Heath Do-it-yourself electronic kits. I was a math & physics major but I loved gadgets and programming/coding was like crossword puzzles to other people. So, from my own perspective, I never heard anything of the above and actually thought the field was more womanly and that guys who were in this field on the soft side (as opposed to the real man side).
I'll second this for many shops I've worked, but those actually tend to have a good male/female dynamic anyhow. On the other hand, the workplaces that did *NOT* have a good dynamic,often had guy who, yes, tried to be nice but really came off creepy or giving a used-care-salesman type vibe. Sharing weird material, and sharing with other male co-workers after discovered a female c/w's previous "modelling" career was particularly uncool. That the CEO was also early 20's and most of the women tended to be of a certain age/appearance demographic may have also contributed (not that people can't be smart/productive and attractive at the same time, but experience in that environment did indicate that it was a primary contributing factor).
Thankfully, I can honestly say that particular workplace was an outlier, and that most workplaces I've had seem to promote respectful and have good interpersonal relationships.
Except that in many shops "like everyone else" means odd jokes with a certain amount of sarcasm, and things that interpreted a certain way may end up as a trip to HR...
And these days, I *am* seeing more female gamers (though often more casual etc).
Many guys I know started with computers/coding because they wanted to replicate the stuff they played on in younger days. Perhaps we'll see more young girls who grow into women with similar aspirations, which may be a feedback loop resulting in more cross-gender-friendly games.
This makes no sense whatsoever. The article claims that *marketing* had a bright idea along the lines of, "Hey, I know how we can cut our consumer audience in HALF!" Yeah, right, marketing departments do that all the time, because, hey it's more important to support patriarchy than make money, right?
Might it just be possible that those marketing execs were thinking more along the lines of, "Hm, our audience is primarily male, set's market to our primary audience."
There's no conspiracy here, people. Nothing to see here.
I just listened to this story and one of the key points was that male college freshman had been given computers as toys and already had several years of tinkering with them before college while the profiled women had not had that experience. They posit that this disparity was due to computers being advertised as toys for boys in the early 80s. The one woman also implied that the college professors were expecting that the students would have that computer experience before entering the program.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
I'm sorry to SOUND misogynistic, but whenever I hear a rant like; "It's there fault, and they should be more X, but on the other hand not too anti-X," I interpret what they are saying as "Blah, blah blah, DO ME, blah blah blah HARD, blah blah-blah NOW."
I could pepper this comment with a lot of psychology, thoughtful hemming and hawing, or some sort of shared responsibility. I am after all a feminist and I think Gloria Stein is awesome. But the difference here is that men recognize when they just need to get -- SomEthing eXactly appropriate -- and are OK with admitting it.
At NPR, they are all sponsored by companies they formerly used to challenge with cutting edge investigations. Now their legacy nod to anything Liberal is to whine about issues that Liberals used to champion. It's got to be difficult coming up with material that pretends to challenge the status quo -- but in acceptable ways inside of the "free speech zone" they've been quarantined in by sponsors and overly sensitive donors. I'm not Professional, but I'm willing to bet that everyone at NPR is in dire need of SomEthing eXactly.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Some, sure, but exact (ly the) same? no.
Of course there are some guys who have no clue about technical stuff too, but i don't beleive the divide is even slightly as strong or numerous as it is with most women.
Its a fact that men and women's brains are psychobiologically different, Independent of upbringing, wealth, social class etc. Women are, on average, significantly better at skills relating to communcation, and men are, on average, significantly better at skills relating to 3D spatial awareness and to a lesser degree, logic. This has been proven time and again.
No matter how much some groups live in denial of these differences, or try and impose their idea of "political correctness" on us all, It is clear that most men are actually hardwired mentally to be better at engineering than most women. I don't see that living in denial of that is healthy.
I beleive women already have the same or better opoortunity than men to enter Engineering if they want. There are already plenty of financial support structures available only to women for the study of engineering. There are none that are only avaialble to men. I therefore don't see that spending even more effort in trying to coax more women into engineering is necessary or beneficial, especially as the reason for the bias is most women are apparently disinterested in the whole field in the first place, so its actually their own choice thats keeping them out. I certainly disagree with tilting the playing field to artificially benefit/encourage women more than men working in engineering, which some clueless morons apparently believe is the right way forward.
There are plenty of professions where women massively outnumber men, such as nursing and teaching. I don't see anyone worried about "fixing" those.
Please someone dowmod the troll that posted the "fucking troll" post.
Women make up for around half of the mathematicians, and a solid percentage of economists, biologists and chemists are women.
Why do women avoid CS and engineering programs? I don't know, but it is the wrong question:
Why does it matter?
Faux diversity like gender and race is not something to aspire to. Finding students who have the aptitude and interest is far more important than meaningless demographics.
In my undergrad and graduate experience and working in industry women tend to fall along the same curve as men.
Very few are great, most are average and some suck.
The great female programmers bring nothing different to the table that the great male programmers bring. The female CS students that were great were naturally interested in the field and were self-driven into it. I have yet to meet anyone who was talked into majoring in CS that wasn't an abysmal failure.
So what does it matter if fewer women are interested?
I am far more concerned about universities dropping weed-out courses than faux-problems like attracting more women. CS and Engineering programs need to stop graduating substandard students, and instead these students should be booted out of the major and forced into brain-dead nonsense like business and communication.
It wasn't that long ago that the undergrad program I went through had 4 weed out courses(2 were CS courses and 2 were math), you had to complete it with a B- or better to pass, and you only had 2 chances at it. There was also a weed out written and programming exam that needed to be passed to get promoted to a upperclassmen and take 300 or 400 level courses. All of that is now gone.
Every course in my graduate program started with a qualifying exam, which you had to take the first or second day of class and you got dropped from the class if you failed it which meant you might as well drop out because it was a small program and each course was offered once a year. It was a masters program and not a PhD. program but less than half who started made it to the point where they could start their thesis or project and less than half of those made it to and passed the defense.
This isn't a "I had to walk 10 miles in the snow both ways" whine, this is a specific reason why CS graduates suck today and why it doesn't matter what the demographics of CS majors is.
That is the sort of thing that needs to come back, not a senseless drive to try and force women into careers they aren't interested in.
Yes, it is creepy to go out of your way to be nice with a subset of the people that work there.
Intent is always relevant.
Well, the intent of a stalker infatuated with someone is to go out of his way to be super-nice.
No, the intent of a stalker infatuated with someone is to insinuate themselves into their life, and being super-nice is a tactic they use to do that. But there are other reasons why you might be very nice, and what you are suggesting is that nice equals creepy. Congratulations, you're part of the problem.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Maybe women need to adapt to tech culture instead of tech culture adapting to women.
BTW it is not all women it is some individuals that are discouraged and those are both male and female.
So now equality is just not good enough?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Intent is generally unknowable. So people err on the side of caution, and all "nice" is "stalkerly".
Learn to love Alaska
Speaking of perpetuating lies, most men behind on child support are in arrears because they cannot afford to pay, not because they don't want to.
That doesn't work as an argument when the "deadbeat dad" I know worked cash-only jobs after being ordered to pay, with the intention of hiding actual income from the courts. When arrested and ordered to pay $15k in back child support, he called a friend to run his cash stash over, and paid up and walked out.
He had the cash to pay it, knew he owed it, but tried to hide the income, and lied to the court about his ability to pay, trying to get it lowered. Also, the cash-only jobs was to help keep hidden so they couldn't garnish wages, or find him to arrest him. It wasn't until a traffic stop long after the arrest warrant when the nabbed him.
From what I can tell, that's the "typical" dead beat dad. He's so bitter that he walked out on the family he didn't want responsibility for that he'll destroy his own life in an attempt to make theirs harder.
My own father was a deadbeat dad, but did so in the '70s, when there were no laws against it. At least he didn't run away and hide like the modern examples I know. He was kicked out for being an alcoholic cheat.
Learn to love Alaska
In any event, I think we can agree the AC is a moron.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
And granted it lacks clarity in headline and it's a bit wish-washy in focus (is it just a synopsis of the podcast?) but movies/ads are given very light mention in a paragraph. The most interesting idea to me is that girls fell behind in personal computing at about the same time they fell behind in computer science. And that makes a lot of sense. I knew no girls who spent a lot of time on Atari 800s and Commodore 64s and the early IBM PC compatibles outside of a classroom.
We can probably lay some of that at the feet of baby boomer dad's gender issues and the assumptions math and science teachers have about girls that they don't even realize but I also suspect there's a more general cultural problem with young women not being taught how to handle failure well. Because learning/doing anything new beyond just being a non-power user in technology is 90% failure. You try and try again until it works. Academia is different. They have problems to solve and they'll show you the solutions. You can copy those down, memorize them and always have them ready. Whether you succeed is often largely about whether you have any aptitude for it and whether you studied.
One thing I remember a lot of girls saying even in high school in the late '80s/early '90s was "I'm just not a <fill-in-the-blank> type person" and then they'd quit whatever discussion/problem they had just been exposed to. It was easier to to redefine their identity to a more limited narrow view than it was to try something and maybe fail at it.
Even my own wife who is brilliant, creative, a very successful artist, has borderline photographic memory, and can do math in head as well as I do swears that Algebra 1 was a horrifying experience for her. Says she just "can't handle the mixing of letters and numbers." She had to take a stats class recently to wrap up a long-delayed degree and aced it. Hated every minute of it but she attacked it and rote-memorized and got through but couldn't tell you a thing about stats a year later. And it's the same with technology. Any time something doesn't just work as well as it probably should she gets so frustrated she can't even think through what the problem might be or a potential workaround.
If she could do that, she'd be great at it. She's the kind of smart that could be great at anything she lets herself get interested in. But she's not a "that" kind of person. Men put themselves in boxes too but never to that degree, IMO. And I think that's at least in large part probably a cultural thing, but absolutely crippling for women facing tech problems once they carve any aptitude for it out of their identities like that. It should take more than one asshole teacher to dissuade you from an interest.
That was when the movies and TV started to portray technical people as being wierd and unappealing. It made a great joke and sold tickets, but it slandared the real Techs and Engineers.
I think it was partly because many of the corporations were taken over, about that time, by former salesmen and lawyers. The were afraid of the Techs because they didn't understand them, so they tried to "cut them down". And were able to make it stick, until we started to have problems because too many corps were run by salesmen.
Now it's beginning to change, but change is slow...
Kids, remember, if someone tells you not to act smart because it's not "cool", they are -not- your friend. They are just trying to sabatoge you, so they can continue to be lazy. 8-)
Yes, idiots get screwed by the system. But, as you noted, he refuses to hire a good lawyer. With a 50/50 joing custody agreement, his best option is to either file kidnapping charges against his ex or kidnap the kids.
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