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.

Comments

Totally agree with Bechdel

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite porn always passes the Bechdel Test.

Re:Totally agree with Bechdel

[ChrisMaple]

It is only pervs who consider images of unclothed women degrading.

Re:Totally agree with Bechdel

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, it's just a joke.

By the way, I like to have sex with women because I LIKE IT. Not because I want to objectify women. Not because women are some subclass species that must be subordinate to my every whim. Because it's in my nature to want sex with females of my species. The fact that you feel this is wrong in some way just speaks to how out-of-touch you are with reality.

Re:Totally agree with Bechdel

[ShanghaiBill]

Kinda sad this got modded up so quickly. it seems a kneejerk putdown.

It was a joke. Which is all this idiotic topic deserves. The Bechdel test makes some (although not much) sense for a movie, where the characters and dialog are the whole point. But for a software project? Why should I care about the gender of who wrote the software I am using? Why should I care about whose function calls another function written by whoever?

How many garbage trucks, driven by women, pick up trash cans that were put on the curb by a woman? My suspicion is the percentage is very low. Is Obama doing anything about that?

Re:Totally agree with Bechdel

[cayenne8]

I'm trying to figure out why anyone would give a fuck whether any thing or occupation passed this test or not....

Seems a stupid test on just its premise alone.

I don't get why anything would ever need to pass such a test or why anyone would care?

Re:Totally agree with Bechdel

[Shoten]

It is only pervs who consider images of unclothed women degrading.

Not true. A lot of religious fundamentalists also consider imag...oh. Uh, yeah...that's right...good point.

Re:Totally agree with Bechdel

[Citizen of Earth]

The Bechdel test makes some (although not much) sense for a movie

The widespread failure of the test confirms that movies about women are boring box-office losers. You might think that the 51% of the population that is women might be interested in paying to see such movies, but apparently not.

Re:Totally agree with Bechdel

[Jane Q. Public]

That is the crux of the problem, that you do not care.

Absolute nonsense. No programmer I know gives the slightest damn who wrote a function they use. They just want it to work. And that's the proper way to look at it.

Insisting that a program include functions written by women that access other functions written by women is by definition sexist. The opposite of sexism isn't more sexism in the opposite direction... it's truly not caring.

You don't fight discrimination by institutionalizing discrimination. It hasn't worked, and it doesn't work. You fight discrimination by eliminating its consideration.

I no more care whether a software tool I use was written by a woman or a man than I care whether a bolt or a piece of material used in a weekend project was made by a woman or a man. It just has to work. Who made it is completely irrelevant... and should be.

Here's MY test

[NotDrWho]

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. "

Re:Here's MY test

[Anonymous Coward]

Woman are actually the majority in many countries. Including the united states.

http://www.census.gov/prod/cen...

Minority does not mean what you THINK it means. What you mean is 'disadvantaged'.

Re:Here's MY test

[shadowrat]

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. "

i'm a white male and most of my projects don't pass. It's a joke i know, but it's a good metric in a way. Really, joking aside, to pass, a project should feature at least one function written by a developer that calls a function written by another developer. i'm aware that sadly, I don't work as well with others as i should. I often reinvent the wheel and isolate my codebases. From what i've seen, this is common.

Re:Here's MY test

[Anonymous Coward]

It offends me because I could give two shits who wrote a function in a program. All I give a fuck about is does the fucking thing work the way it's supposed to when it hits production; and if not whose salary am I cutting in half next quarter? All groups - Men, Women, each with various levels of melatonin dictating skin color and race - contain shit programmers as well as brilliant ones. It's about the fucking dedication of the coder. Fuck the race card. Fuck the gender card. If I have to fucking fix your shit in production cuz you couldn't be bothered to make sure it works in test and model environments, you're a shit coder. I don't give a shit who you are.

Re:Here's MY test

[sycodon]

Or, women don't give a shit about programming. Like I don't give a shit about interior design, or the latest clothing fashions, two areas dominated by Women.

Re:Here's MY test

[fey000]

If you can substitute the term "white male" into your premise and suddenly find it offensive, then was actually racist/sexist all along.

Why on earth would you find this offensive if you made the swap? Because you're a white male and it would highlight how virtually no software fails the white male test, but a huge amount fails the female test?

Why on Earth is it relevant if a software project passes the test? Does it make the code better?

This is a completely made up non-issue. Should we start rabblerousing about the white guy Bechdel test in the NBA? What about the unfairness of native English speaking programmers in Russia? Should we start a test for them? No, because it's fucking stupid, and contributes 0 to anything other than the wallet of those who get "offended" about "representation" as a profession.

Re: Here's MY test

[Fwipp]

You just unintentionally illustrated the entire point of the Bechdel test - how many team software projects pass your version of the test? Nearly all of them, right? The bechdel "test" is meant to illustrate how low the bar is, and how many movies/projects still fail it.

Re:Here's MY test

[Orgasmatron]

Sigh.

It is sad how many people don't get your point. It isn't that anyone is expecting much software to fail your test, it is that the test itself is foul. The original test.

Perhaps subtlety is no longer called for. Run the whole article through the translator.

I'm about fucking done with the SJW invasion of slashdot. Is it possible to take the site back?

Re:Here's MY test

[itzly]

50% of every team needs to be people who miss the point, otherwise it wouldn't be fair.

Re:Here's MY test

[NotDrWho]

Why on earth would you find this offensive if you made the swap?

I tell you what. Call a meeting with all of your minority and women programmers and ask them if they would find a requirement that all future code "must feature at least one function written by a white male developer, that calls a function written by another white male developer" offensive. If they say "No, it's fine, we're cool with it," then I'll concede the point.

Re:Here's MY test

[itzly]

What makes you think women don't like programming? Is it because there are so few women doing it? That sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Because most women have simply no interest in it. Otherwise, they could just buy a computer, and teach themselves how to do it. They could buy a hardware device, plug it into their computer, and discover that Linux has no support for it. They could decide to figure out how to write their own device driver, and become a kernel hacker. They may even start their own business. Many men have done exactly that, without anybody pushing them, or even supporting them.

Re:Here's MY test

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. It could be that female privilege gives them opportunities to work in other careers that men are excluded from. For example, it could be due to rampant discrimination in education where 76% of primary and secondary school teachers are female. With 3.7 million teachers, we have 864 thousand women just in the US that pull from the software developer candidate pool. Teaching isn't the only field where we can see this kind of imbalance.

After looking at this, we can also look at the number of women who choose to work as opposed to MUST work. If men could simply sleep their way into not having to work, you can be sure the number of men in fields that require life long dedication would decrease. I'm not saying that all women sex their way through life, but during the years when career choices are made, there most certainly are a very large number of them that do, and most of the rest have the option. The fact that this affects career choices isn't because of some genetic difference between men and women. PEOPLE who have the privilege of not working are simply far more likely to... well... not work.

You can see this with attitudes towards parents after the birth of a child. A father is more likely to get the advice that he now has to buckle down with work, while women are asked if they will just quit working all together. This is going to have an effect on people's career choices. Not because of some genetic factor, but due to environment.

Re:Here's MY test

[meerling]

As have the socio-economic pressures to excel at sports, crime, or whatever, when other opportunities for self betterment are primarily excluded by cultural and economic restrictions. You grow up poor and black in the ghetto, you are a lot more likely to go into pro-sports than get an engineering degree at Harvard simply due to expenses you can't pay and education quality that wasn't available to you.

Do you know why historically the Jews were so into banking? It's because stupid discriminatory laws of many countries in Europe used to ban them from almost all other professions. You earn a living in whatever way society will let you.

Re:Here's MY test

[ceoyoyo]

That's actually a more interesting fact than you might think. Males are actually more likely at birth, and outnumber females until the age of 30 or so. But in the > 30 demographic females are in the majority, and that majority increases with age. Why? Because males die at a higher rate. Being male has a higher risk of death than being female.

Re:Here's MY test

[itzly]

True, employers love self-taught programmers.

I wasn't talking about getting hired. I was talking about following a passion. That's where it all starts. And if you have a passion for programming, you'll find that the barrier to get started is very low. All it takes is a cheap computer and access to the internet. And you can even pick a neutral nickname/e-mail address, and start working on open source projects without anybody even being able to judge you on your gender.

The simple fact is that very few women are interested in that. Incidentally, very few men are interested in that kind of stuff either, but still a lot more than women.

Re:Here's MY test

[jedidiah]

> But in practice we have half the population who are capable of programming but who are severely underrepresented

That's a totally unsupported assumption.

It also ignores the question of DESIRE. It completely degrades half of the population by stripping them of any sort of free will at all.

That's the whole problem with these do-gooder crusades that fixate this kind of "imbalance" while ignoring the the imbalances in the skilled trades or nursing.

Re:Here's MY test

[itzly]

Have you considered that there may be societal pressures about what a woman is supposed to be, and a nerdy programmer doesn't fit that?

Yes, I have considered that. Have you considered that there's also societal pressures against men who are nerdy programmers ? Or against men wanting to become fashion designers ? Still, if you have a passion, you're not going to let society stop you.

Or try giving a young girl a lego set for her birthday and see what the other adults think.

I have a son and a daughter, and we had boxes of legos, cars, dolls, and various other toys all in the living room where both could play with anything they wanted. And from the beginning it was very clear that they had their own interests. Even if they were both playing with the legos, my son was always building cars and bridges with them. My daughter was building houses and people.

Re:Here's MY test

[geminidomino]

Or try giving a young girl a lego set for her birthday and see what the other adults think.

I did that for my niece. My brother looked at me like I was Satan incarnate, and instantly developed a psychosomatic limp...

Re:Here's MY test

[izat]

The proportion of women in my workplace is about the same as the proportion of women in my computer science courses. Blame schools, parents, or the media. This imagined discrimination in the workplace has nothing to do with it.

Re:Here's MY test

[Em Adespoton]

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. It's been declining over the years while the frat boy attitude in the workplace has been going up.

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.

I'm old enough to remember when people claimed there was no racism in the 70s either.

To answer your first question: Women aren't underrepresented in computing as much as they're underrepresented in many computing-related roles. There are, for example, very few women code monkeys who are willing to replace their social life with writing software. This has nothing to do with how good they are at it, but more a) that they value a social life more than individual accomplishment, b) don't want to spend their time fueled by energy drinks in front of a computer in dim lighting surrounded by overweight sweaty men with pizza stains on their shirts, c) don't want to have to deal with the large number of social misfits such occupations usually attract, and d) the hiring managers tend to hire the people most like the ones who currently are their best performers (which makes getting women into the roles in the first place very difficult).

Plus, there's the whole education issue; women often don't get the training in the first place to even place for these jobs, due to societal pressures, having to deal with those same people in school, and choice.

So... we talk about women being underrepresented in computing mostly because these are highly paid jobs. We don't talk about women in garbage disposal being underrepresented, even though the ratios are similar and likely the reasons for underrepresentation are also similar.

The truth is that there HAS been centuries of mysogeny at work, and some level of gender bias in the other direction is needed in order to combat the pressures that have nothing to do with individual ability. As such, this sort of test is useful at measuring current norms.

HOWEVER, this sort of test is NOT good at gaming gender bias or effecting change. That has to be done on a much more general level. Getting your three female coders to specifically write code that depends on each other's code doesn't really change anything other than the test results. Encouraging the daughters of all your coders to come in and see some of the rewarding things their parents are working on could have a much more significant long-term effect.

That said, I recently had to have "the other talk" with my kids -- the one about racism. Not because people were being racist, but because they stumbled into "affirmitive action" plans that made absolutely no sense to them, and they couldn't figure out why people would set up rules like that. It was equally incomprehensible to them that people would link intelligence/suitability for a task to someone's skin colour or grandparent's continent of origin. But if my generation hadn't had those affirmative action campaigns, my children would now know exactly why such plans are (still) in place.

Re:Here's MY test

[goose-incarnated]

No one is asking whole populations to change. In particular, no one is asking self entitled while male programmers to stop programming, if that is indeed what they're so scared of that causes them to panic whenever the subject comes up.

To be honest, it's the "for" gang that have been getting more strident and abusive; I expect that this is because too many people are posting actual statistics and asking the activist camp to provide some sort of evidence for their assertions. I ask for evidence all the time and never get any, but the minute you do you get labelled as a misogynistic, scared, white male. I'm not even a white male, but it seems that asking for evidence is the ultimate insult to a certain group of people.

The dumbest thing

[JonathanP.Bennett]

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.

Re:The dumbest thing

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the kind of thing that discourages women in traditionally male-dominated fields. Nobody cares if a programmer is a man or a woman if they can write good code. But when a team member starts disrupting the work culture with irrelevant things like making things a man vs. woman contest, they're no longer going to be welcome regardless of their sex.

Re:The dumbest thing

[Sarius64]

Whoa! Stop with those common sense arguments you AC devil, you!

Re:The dumbest thing

[JonathanP.Bennett]

Then someone else will make it work. The test suggest that we should care about the gender of the coder more than the effectiveness of the code. That is sexism. How exactly did I call for a stop to learning? If someone really wants to examine their code for such a test, that's up to them. I'll stick with prioritizing code quality over gender, thanks.

Re:The dumbest thing

[Anonymous Coward]

And what if the people who could make the code work are women who don't want to work in IT due to some hitherto-undiscovered reason?

The hitherto-undiscovered reason was discovered a long time ago. It's just that you radfems refuse to listen to it because it goes against your already strongly held prejudices. It's simple: When women have the freedom to choose all else being equal, they choose differently to men.

Just once, it would be fucking great if one of these radfem retards started a business that was, you know, concerned with software development. As far as I know the only businesses they ever start are about their own self-promotion. They almost never studied STEM subjects themselves.

Re:The dumbest thing

[Austerity Empowers]

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.

Moreover, it's probably sexist. We have established that there is a gender imbalance issue in the workplace. If the requirement is that two women are in close collusion on the project, that's statistically less likely than two men (which may number 5:1 in some fields, including mine). The mathematical proof is left to the reader, but select 2 from N where N is a collection of one of three genders with a skewed distribution: Male, Female & No Interaction where No Interaction defines tasks that are purely self-contained and represents the greatest part of the distribution. The way to pass this test then is to force your women to work together and isolate them, functionally, from the men. The odds of those two interacting increases dramatically (but as much of our work is solitary, it's not a definite). To get definite interaction you need to have a woman work on the user facing portions of the code (i.e. "outside" the engine) and another who is a user. Either way this doesn't strike me as good for anybody, and certainly doesn't seem very equal opportunity/diverse/ideal or even rational.

It has to be much, much worse on the kinds of software projects I see a lot these days. Someone buys/acquires some code written elsewhere by persons gender unknown but almost certainly male (more so as the software approaches the OS/hardware level). You can have an entire company of women tying their code into this codebase and they may never write a function for each other, each tackling this big hairball independently for her own module. They may not have cause to interact, and your all-woman company fails the test.

Bad idea. In any event I don't think it solves any issues I see affecting women in the workplace in a helpful way, it just seems to be more distracting data-points leading away from the cause of the actual problem that should be examined.

Re:The dumbest thing

[frank_adrian314159]

And that's the thing... Egalitarian and fair are neither when one group has been systematically discouraged for (well, forever).

You actually need to go with stats then to redress the issue. And the stats don't actually lie (much).

You don't like their stats? Get your own. Figure out how many % of women are actually interested in programming vs. anecdotal evidence that "women don't want to do STEM" or "networking is biased". There are other places where you could gather appropriate statistics and bolster your case. However, whining about fair, when (as we all know) the world isn't fair, is still just whining.

Show how they are wrong with numbers. And then show how the world is (somehow) unfair to you and work to make it better for you. That is what these women are doing.

It basically shows that they're better tactical thinkers than you, because they're fighting on the ground, not up in ivory towers whining about "egalitarian" and "fair". They're better strategic thinkers than you because they will end up winning and redefining egalitarianism and fairness while you're still whining about ideals. I'm with Chairman Mao on this one - power flows through the barrel of a gun. They're fighting -you're whining.

Re:The dumbest thing

[Em Adespoton]

I can show one thing: the first computer software written would have failed this test.

That's because it was all written by Ada Lovelace.

Bletchley Park would have been an anomaly at the start of the digital computing era; almost all the coders were women. Of course, they weren't doing function-based programming for the most part.

The truth is, male-bias in computing didn't happen until sometime in the 80's, which is really pretty recent. This test would actually be useful to apply retrospectively to historical code more than it is useful to apply to current/future code.

I should set up a script...

[seepho]

That automatically comments on Nerval's submissions asking why no one mentions that Dice is /.'s parent company.

discussion

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

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.

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?

Re:discussion

[HornWumpus]

Stupid metrics are bad because they can be gamed. This is a stupid metric.

Re:discussion

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

Any industry which does not appeal to ~half of its prospective workers might want to spend a bit of time trying to figure out why,

You mean like receptionists, secretaries, nurses, day care attendants, elementary school teachers, and cosmetologists?

instead of getting all defensive and blaming everyone and everything else for the issue.

"Defensiveness" and "blame" imply that there is anything wrong. I don't believe there is anything wrong.

Here's a question: Would you enter such a discussion open to the idea that you are wrong?

Wrong about what?

What if someone showed you concrete evidence of, say, widespread institutionalised misogyny - would you accept it?

If there were "institutionalised misogyny" at my company, it would be something for our management to think about, and it would be up to them whether to do anything about it or not. If they want to run an all-lesbian development team, I'm happy to leave and find another job.

Re:discussion

[Sarius64]

Hey, if I say there's misogyny you better accept it mister!

Re:discussion

[itzly]

so that's your argument - programming is analogous to sports, that women are inferior coders?

Pretty much, yes.

because their brains aren't as strong as men's brains?

'Strong' is the wrong adjective. I would say that male and female brains are optimized for different functions, just as their bodies are. But for some reason, it's okay to talk about the different optimization in the physical body, whereas it is a taboo to discuss differences in the brain.

This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This is stupid

[Fire_Wraith]

It's also sort of funny just how strongly the idea of the Bechdel Test has taken hold, even to the point that the underlying idea has been somewhat lost. It made a point of how unusual it was for movies to treat women as independent characters, rather than as attachments or ornaments to the male characters. It's not a perfect test though - for instance, the last James Bond movie passes the Bechdel test, yet is probably far and away from what anyone would consider remotely feminist, that one scene aside.

Now, as for this proposed test, I would suggest that the problems of gender disparity are already known, and something like this isn't going to significantly improve anything. It would likely lead to companies gaming the system, making sure they had exactly enough to pass the "test", so they could slap the seal on their product. Worse, it would divert resources and attention from the real problems, which lie in various points along the educational pipeline and career, nevermind the attitudes that it would create on the programming teams - "Oh, she's just here for Bechdel compliance."

Bottom line, if we want more women in tech, we need to focus on encouraging more women in tech, not by establishing silly metrics to highlight something that is already a well known condition.

Someone doesn't undestand the Bechtel test.

[gurps_npc]

It isn't about getting jobs for female actors.

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.

Re:Someone doesn't undestand the Bechtel test.

[Anubis IV]

Exactly. The Bechdel test is about the broader misrepresentation of women in media more so than it is about gender imbalance. It makes little sense to apply it in a work environment, simply because we're already dealing with reality there, meaning that women can represent themselves how they choose.

The project I'm currently on has two full-time employees working on it, both male. We routinely call functions written by one of the original devs on the project who was a woman and was responsible for much of the core of the architecture. Despite that, our project would fail the test, since she was the only female dev on the project, meaning she never called another female's code.

A different project across the hall has two women working on it. Neither of them were there when the underlying framework was written by a male, and they each handle their own vertical slice of the app. Even though we'd credit them with being the ones most responsible for the success of the app, their project still fails the test, simply because they haven't called each other's code.

Two other small projects each have just one developer. One of them has a male developer, and the other has a female developer. Both fail the test for obvious reasons.

Four project lifecycles, four women and four men, all working harmoniously in a cooperative and successful business environment, yet all four projects fail the test.

Moreover, the vast majority of projects are in the long tail of projects that have very small development teams, and the test falls flat in dealing with them, since even if we assumed that half of software developers were women, the test would fail 50% of the time for projects with three people, 75% of the time for projects with two people, and 100% of the time for projects staffed by a lone developer.

Between that and the examples above, we have some good indications it's a bad test.

Re: Someone doesn't undestand the Bechtel test.

[Fwipp]

The room passes, they talk about Claudette's breast cancer.

What are they trying to show?

[91degrees]

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?

18F is not a tech firm - it's the government

[Anonymous Coward]

18F is not a tech firm. It's a technology program at the General Services Administration of the Federal Government. https://18f.gsa.gov/

Political Science, not Computer Science

[ggraham412]

Maybe code should be written by Political Science majors from now on. It's important that the right categories take credit.

Author vs. content

[DrYak]

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.

Re:Author vs. content

[AmiMoJo]

The Bechdel test is far from perfect, but it's an interesting test to apply to movies that have no real reason not to pass it. It's supposed to make you think. It's supposed to make you question why not just women but lots of other groups often get stereotyped or sidelined in films, or why directors don't think that the more central characters can be female, or if they even considered it.

As always, it only goes one way...

[bradley13]

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.

Re: classic example?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

One could, if one had very bad reading comprehension.

Gender segregation

[puzzled_decoy]

Literally the best way to pass this test about gender imbalance is to segregate genders based on project. .... ....
I don't even....

Re:classic example?

[ewibble]

"The objectifier treats the object as something whose experience and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account" -- check

Your experience of sex must be very different from mine. A very important part to me is that the woman enjoys it too.

The other parts well, are very general.

"The objectifier treats the object as a tool of his or her purposes"

Arguably you do pretty much everything for your own purposes, even making someone else happy. You do it because you experience pleasure from there happiness.

"The objectifier treats the object as interchangeable (a) with other objects of the same type..."

If someone you want to have sex with refuses, what are you supposed to do? Not have sex ever again because no other man/woman will do? If you get no longer want to have sex with someone clearly they are not interchangeable since the old person will not do.