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A Bechdel Test For Programmers?
Nerval's Lobster writes In order for a movie or television show to pass the Bechdel Test (named after cartoonist and MacArthur genius Alison Bechdel), it must feature two female characters, have those two characters talk to one another, and have those characters talk to one another about something other than a man. A lot of movies and shows don't pass. How would programming culture fare if subjected to a similar test? One tech firm, 18F, decided to find out after seeing a tweet from Laurie Voss, CTO of npm, which explained the parameters of a modified Bechdel Test. According to Voss, a project that passes the test must feature at least one function written by a woman developer, that calls a function written by another woman developer. 'The conversation started with us quickly listing the projects that passed the Bechdel coding test, but then shifted after one of our devs then raised a good point,' read 18F's blog posting on the experiment. 'She said some of our projects had lots of female devs, but did not pass the test as defined.' For example, some custom languages don't have functions, which means a project built using those languages would fail even if written by women. Nonetheless, both startups and larger companies could find the modified Bechdel Test a useful tool for opening up a discussion about gender balance within engineering and development teams.
My favorite porn always passes the Bechdel Test.
If you can substitute the term "white male" into your premise and suddenly find it offensive, then was actually racist/sexist all along.
"a project that passes the test must feature at least one function written by a white male developer, that calls a function written by another white male developer. "
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Seriously, this is the dumbest thing ever. Just make the code work. I don't care at all if women wrote it. There are so many issues that actually matter, and this isn't one of them.
That automatically comments on Nerval's submissions asking why no one mentions that Dice is /.'s parent company.
jesus christ this is retarded! really?
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
And what exactly is it you want to "discuss"? Are you entering this "discussion" being open to the idea that your ideas about "gender balance" are wrong? Or are you just trying to hit other people over the head with your particular views?
The Bechdel test is, quite literally, a joke. It started as a joke in a cartoon, and it remains a joke because it is utterly useless as a measure for anything at all. This new test, from the description above, is no better.
The Bechdel Test is about female characters. It depends on the story taking their characters and lives seriously.
This stupid thing is nothing like that. It totally trivializes the real gender inequalities that still exist.
Code has no gender.
It's about people misrepresenting the world as lacking interesting women with something on their mind besides men.
If all you do is insist on two functions, each written by another women calling each other, you have made a mochery of the test.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The Beschdel test is based on the idea that many writers will create female characters not as actual characters but as a love interest. Hence the qualifiers. It's not a perfect test but you can at least see how it is likely to correlate to a specific type of poorly written character.
So what ae they testing for here? Are they saying that female developers are just macguffins?
How does passing this test make the show better?
What does having a bare minimum of female interaction teach me about life or being a person?
Will I look back on my life and consider it a success if I watched these shows?
18F is not a tech firm. It's a technology program at the General Services Administration of the Federal Government. https://18f.gsa.gov/
Christ, I am getting bile in my mouth regularly these days reading all this fluffy PC crap.
And I thought it couldn't get any more useless and idiotic than the original Bechdel test!
Learning something new every day!
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I have to agree with the previous poster who said, "Seriously, this is the dumbest thing ever. Just make the code work."
in a nutshell
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Here's how foolish this nonsense is. Assume we have two classes, Woman, and Kitchen, which are written by different women. Passing the Bechdel test:
self.sandwich = [woman getSandwichFromKitchen:kitchen];
I learned something about myself writing that. Objective C really is as shitty as Java. I should stop oppressing Java programmers.
On my team, there are as many Y chromosomes as X chromosomes. It's impossible to pass this test. In my almost 30 years of writing software, The only time there was more than 1 woman on my team was a year during the dotcom boom. Otherwise, if there is a woman, she's the only one. I didn't need this test to know that.
You don't need to come up with circuitous gimmicks to prove that there aren't a lot of women in tech. We know it. Everyone who has worked in this field knows it. Society knows it. The unknown here is why? can you come up with something that demonstrates brogrammer culture is scaring them off? can you show that kindergarten teachers discourage girls from interest in computers? can you show that hormones make women afraid of logic? can you come up with a test that shows that HR departments throw women's resumes in the trash so i never see them?
...could make real names for themselves by writing, respectively:
Then every web page on Earth can pass the Programmer Bechdel Test just by consuming the web service.
However, I suspect that's not what the test is intended to accomplish.
Finding God in a Dog
Maybe code should be written by Political Science majors from now on. It's important that the right categories take credit.
This even stupider, because the original "Bechdel Test" is about the *content* of the movie.
i.e.: the Alien movie discussed in Bechdel's comics happens to have been written and directed by guys. But none the less, it depicted strong female caracters, who actually have motivations, goals, etc. of their own.
the female *characters* of the movie aren't passive decorations, they are not only here to observe (or obsess about) the guys, they have a life of they own, their actions are here to move the plot forward.
counter exemple: you can probably find tons of romantic film or novels, written by author which happen to be female, but completely fail the test as their female protagonists are more or less only here for the sole purpose of falling in love with male caracters.
This "Programmer's test" is stupid because it only considers the *author* of code.
An author should be judged solely based on the quality of the work produced, no matter what sets of reproductive organs the author happens to be equipped with.
What should be judged in theory, is the depiction of gender role in the produced work. As code is sexless, there is no point in that. It doesn't depict roles or creates models for future generation, in merely gives instruction to hardware.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nonetheless, both startups and larger companies could find the modified Bechdel Test a useful tool for opening up a discussion about gender balance within engineering and development teams.
Or you could just, you know, write good code and make that the thing that matters.
Check out iNotRacist an app to tell exactly how racist you're not.
No wonder dudes refuse to see sexism, if they refuse to even look for it.
I work alone. I'm still at the point of writing boilerplate I'm very picky about, and it will take time before I'm doing anything for an end user. When I hit that point, I will probably still work alone because building a commercial product with the possibility of later pay rather than the liability of payroll isn't really the easiest thing to organize. I would LOVE to have some talented programmers on my team in times coming within the next year, but they won't be no matter what their gender is.
HOWEVER, I have had some serious thought about opening my source from square one when the boilerplate is ready. It has so many possible applications that there will be real value in what follows it, and it's incredibly unlikely anybody would do the same things with it that I will. Suppose that following that step, programmers decide to jump on board and help with the next step too. Great! Not working alone would be nice. But I can't select their genders. I don't get to pick that.
I like the idea of Bechdel Test for programmers, but I think it's kind of important to bear in mind that only well monied developers even have that option. My suggestion to female programmers who have trouble finding a team is to do what I'm doing. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. In my case, it's because I have an idea that I want to do the work to realize. But there are plenty of developers who freelance for other reasons.
The Flintstones, The Honeymooners, Here Comes Lucy
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I knew a woman who complained to management when other people used code she wrote. She felt she was being denied credit for work she had done.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
In short, I think it makes for an interesting thought experiment, kind of evaluate where you and your team/department/company stand. I'm sure people will get all defensive, yell about quotas and all that jazz, but really it just asks you to think about it for a moment. Not at all unreasonable I think.
Now, if you'll excuse me, build's done.
I teach computer science. No one will be surprised to hear that most of our students are men. This is a problem, at least, we are continually told that it is.
The news yesterday had a report on schools that train people to become small-animal veterinarians here in Switzerland. They happened to mention that 80% of the students are women. This is apparently fine; there is no outcry to find more male veterinary students.
My son works in professional child care, where women are something like 95% of the workforce. No one seems terribly concerned by this, even though the lack of male role models for young boys is arguably an actual, genuine problem.
Personally, I am very tired of articles like this. Why the continual one-way focus on women? Why can't we just let individuals be individuals, and do whatever they want? Ensure that there are no artificial barriers due to gender (or skin color, or hair color, or whatever), stop pushing people in directions they don't want to go, and just let people choose whatever career they want.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I often feel like I am the last person alive who remembers when programming used to be about code and making shit do shit. Now its all drama and I often want to quit as now the only thing people look at is what I say - looking for a phrase they can twist - and not the code I make.
The key point this misses is that the Bechdel test is about the work itself, not who wrote it. This test is thus susceptible to certain flaws. In particular, it will flag numerous single-developer projects as "sexist" due to simple chance.
This would fail at least 50% of all single-developer projects, even if there were no sexism anywhere. Other small projects would be unfairly penalized, and projects with tiered architectures and tiered development would be especially susceptible.
This is obviously contrary to the goal of the "test", and in fact bears only superficial similarity to the Bechdel test (the point of which, by the way, is not to determine which works are sexist or not (after all, Debbie Does Dallas passes), but to show how endemic weak female characters are by the sheer number that fail).
The Bechdel test is about content, not about authors.
Furthermore, there are reasons to assume the average women is less interested in programming than the average male. Science seems to indicate this difference in interests is already present in newborns. I can strongly recommend this documentary on that subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Also, I strongly suspect nearly all good programmers to have some kind of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), often undiagnosed, simply because that "disorder" makes them exceptionally good at tasks typically performed by programmers. ASD is prevalent in males 4.3 times more than in females.
All in all there are more than enough valid reasons to assume the gender gap in software engineering is absolutely normal and is here to stay. I don't see why this subject is even worth discussing; it's about as interesting as the gender-gap amongst nurses: not interesting at all.
0x or or snor perron?!
Hey! For some of us, that's our jobs. Yes, we check statistics on code check-ins to see what's going on. We believe in visibility and bringing access to this data for warehousing and analysis. And we can often see issues with modules (like code suckage - for example when your defect database has particular components that align with points of high code churn, it's not a spot you'd want to vacation in). Statistics about the code and its production can tell you a lot, if you listen. But I don't think you're interested in listening.
That is all.
I'd love to have a test that determines if an article is fembaiting drivel, and then promptly discourages me from clicking on it. Who cares if a function is written by a woman, or by a man, or a transgender, or by the application itself in a meta sort of way? Is this what they talk about at the Woman only tech conferences (like this one, which for the first time ever, is allowing men to attend the 'celebration of Women' tech conference!), in addition to ironically talking about equality and being included in the "male dominated tech club" ?
Ooo hey I like making up arbitrary tests too!
The Bach-Dell Test
A movie is not pants if, at any point, two characters named Del Bachman are in a dell listening to Bach on Dell laptops.
The Bake 'Til Test:
A pastry passes this test if it was baked by bakers, for bakers, for a number of minutes equal to the number of bakers involved.
The Beck Tell Test:
A joke is only funny if it's about the musical artist Beck, and told by Beck to himself.
tl;dr: it's basically a yo dawg gag
Nothing posted to
If no one gives a shit about who writes functions, then why are women so underrepresented in computing? Do not say it because women don't like programming or engineering, because that's clearly false. Women had much more representation in the industry 30 years ago.
I had a girlfriend who was an actual developer, MS CS, 68K embedded systems. A close female friend with a BS CS was a developer and DB person in the corporate world, now a project leader in such areas. I had a female project leader who although not a developer was quite tech savvy and a good leader/manager, and a gamer. Regrettably these are few and far between. However I think your argument demonstrates a basic failure in statistics. Recall how in your statistics class caveats such as "all other things being equal" were constantly being thrown about. You fail because the workflow of the industry decades ago was radically different.
Decades ago there was a lot more "clerical" work is software development, especially in corporate and government environments. A great-aunt was a punch card operator who took code written on paper by developers and created the punch cards to be fed into the mainframes. It was considered an inefficient use of resources to have an "engineer" create their own punch cards when one could hire a "girl" to do so at a fraction of the cost. This sort of thing contributes to the higher participation of women in the tech industry in the past.
Whether or not there is some inherent bias against coding tasks, a bias that occurs naturally more often in females than in males, is an unanswered question.
It's been declining over the years while the frat boy attitude in the workplace has been going up.
Also read up on causality in that statistics textbook. Frat boy behavior may be the result of a lack of women. Males in isolation deviate from their normal behavior. I'm not 100% sure but I think it has been documented that men typically voluntarily act "better" (self control and self censorship in the less childish sense) when women are around. As a long term participant of the industry I've certainly seen such behavior as the rare female developer joins/leaves the team. Most, like me, thought it good to have women around, that the sausage fest and the stupidity that results is dumb.
If you're perfect, then great. But there are many men who are offended that women would even compete with them, many men who intimidate others especially women, many men who think telling a dirty joke is proper on-the-job conduct, many men who see discrimination but do nothing about it and thus reinforce the status quo.
Substitute "many men" for "some men" and your comment becomes more realistic and less political dogma. Then note that you are merely saying that there are a few a-holes in every large group. Well, yeah.
I'm old enough to remember when people claimed there was no racism in the 70s either.
And I'm old enough to remember being in elementary school during the 70s and that there was no racism between the four white boys (me one of them) who had the desks adjacent to a black boy in a blue collar neighborhood. Racism is largely a generational thing. Most often you were raised that way or you weren't, and for the exceptions its probably far more common for someone who was raised racist to reject it than for someone who was raised without it to embrace it. Racism has been in sharp decline for many decades. As has sexism. My grandmother who had done electronics assembly for Navy aircraft during WW2 was "let go" when the war ended to create a job for a man returning from the war. She may have been able to get a clerical job, like her sister, in a tech company but not anything close to technical work as she had done. Today's issue being crude frat boy jokes demonstrates remarkable progress.
that realistically shows computer use and yes NCIS I am looking at you :-)
By the way, I like to have sex with women because I LIKE IT.
One could argue that this is a classic example of objectification...
Let's see:
"The objectifier treats the object as a tool of his or her purposes" -- check
"The objectifier treats the object as interchangeable (a) with other objects of the same type..." -- check
"The objectifier treats the object as something whose experience and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account" -- check
I see all these articles about gender bias in the IT industry.
Then I scroll down to the comment section on the slashdot mobile site and think "yes, that character in the Game of War app has really big boobs"
What are you talking about!?!?
You should architecting your software and planning your development teams based on the gender of the programmers, so female programmers can integrate with other female programmers without a male programmer getting in their way.
That's how you write robust software.
Wait a minute...
The occurence of in a project may not necessarily reflect the attitude of the project towards gender issues, but may be more reflecting the percentage of women in a team.
It is funny how somebody who acts as a CTO tries to convert a test which specifically examines the dialogs (which are untimatly a important part of a movie) to something where the statistics will skew results to meaningless garbage to derive from some weird side definition.
Maybe she was mistaken, function calls are not human interaction. More interesting would be an closer look at the process of the creation of the function (like "at least two roles in the project interacting directly must be filled by women") Still, there would be the statistics issue with this, but at least it could tell something about the human interaction.
most important thing the CTO of a tech company finds to consider, I think the tech company has a problem. I want well-written, well-tested code. I really don't care about the DNA of the person (people) who wrote said code. Now that I think about it, most of the code I've encountered in my life has been modified by multiple people before I ever got to it. How do I tell the gender of the person who wrote the function, particularly if the function has been modified by several people? And how can I even check their gender if all that is associated with an update is a userid? Perhaps the "T" in CTO stands for "Twaddle"?
linquendum tondere
Literally the best way to pass this test about gender imbalance is to segregate genders based on project. .... ....
I don't even....
When people start misapplying gender equality to inappropriate topic tests this publicly, one has got to wonder if the topic has become a new fad.
For as long as old men, sit and talk about the weather,
For as long as old women, sit and talk about old men,
But then George was a man, so what does he know ...
I agree that this application of the Bechdel test to coding is vacuous. The best alternative I can come up with is asking a woman to make a presentation at a conference, or put up a blog post with her photo on the page while taking a strong position on a controversial topic, like maybe, male dominated gaming culture. I would give it a fail if anyone made a comment that involved her gender.
All of you towering intellectuals who made comments about who gives a fuck / just make the code work / who cares who wrote it / miss the point entirely. You added nothing to the conversation except to highlight that no matter how weak the Bechdel test might be, you might be the reason the test exists.
No wonder dudes refuse to see sexism, if they refuse to even look for it.
I don't see unicorns either - doesn't mean I should waste my time looking for them.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Most stupid thing ever.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Given that this is an generic requirement for PC (Politically Correct) software, software engineering best practice requires that this be abstracted into external library, decoupled from any code with purely orthogonal technical requirements and of course unit tested to provide the PC green tick of approval. Additionally, according to the rules of the Turing test and modern queer theory, lib.woman is legally allowed to be autogenerated by a computer that can successfully convince it's audience that not only is it human, but that it self-identifies as a woman.
describe("diversity", function() {
it("should pass the Bechdel test", function() {
expect( require('woman').getAuthor().getGender() ).to.be("female");
expect( require('woman').makeMeASandwich("sudo") ).not.to.throw(Error);
})
})
Gender balancing is the wrong concept at play, it doesn't matter if a female / male does 0% of a project or 100% of a project, it's a meaningless percentage to take. The very fact that you've broke the system down to look at it as a percentage of work means that you're concept of fairness isn't genuine. Fairness means you extract the very fact that a person is a man or woman and just see them as human, a human wrote this, a human wrote that, not a male or female. All these tests prove is that we need an excuse to not be sexist, well the only people who aren't are the people who don't need a test to be fair.
So pen the remake, Twelve Angry Women.
It's probably due to be recycled anyway..
Yeah. A language without functions/procedures/methods/named predicates/subroutines (same thing basically) is not a programming language, unless it's assembler, in which case, if you're not using standard conventions that essentially implement organized subroutines (i.e. functions...) you're not doing it right.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?