Happy Ada Lovelace Day (findingada.com)

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a time to celebrate the achievements of women in STEM fields. Several publications have put together lists of notable women to commemorate the day, such as tech pioneers, robotics experts, and historical engineers and scientists. Other are taking the opportunity to keep pushing against the elements of tech culture that remain sexist. From the BBC: On Ada Lovelace Day, four female engineers from around the world share their experiences of working in male-dominated professions. When Isis Anchalee's employer OneLogin asked her to take part in its recruitment campaign, she didn't rush to consult the selfie-loving Kardashian sisters for styling tips. "I was wearing very minimal make-up. I didn't brush my hair that day," she said. But the resulting image of Ms Anchalee created a social media storm when it appeared on Bart, the San Francisco metro. Lots of people questioned whether she really was an engineer. "It was not just limited to women — it resonates with every single person who doesn't fit with what the stereotype should look like," she said.

"My parents, my brother, my community, all were against me," said Sovita Dahal of her decision to pursue a career in technology. "I was going against traditional things. In my schooldays I was fascinated by electronic equipment like motors, transformers and LED lights. Later on this enthusiasm became my passion and ultimately my career," she said.

Comments

ADA shoves a greased up Yoda Doll in my ASS

[Anonymous Coward]

How to Shove a Yoda Doll up your ass! The 9 Step Greased Up Yoda Doll Shoving process. Go Linux! Tsarkon Reports

9 steps to greasing your anus for Yoda Doll Insertion!
v 4.97.3
$YodaBSD: src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/yodanotes/9stepprocess.sgml,v 4.97.3 2015/9/3 15:42:20 tsarkon Exp $

1. Defecate. Preferably after eating senna, ex lax, prunes, cabbage, pickled eggs, and Vietnamese chili garlic sauce. To better enhance the pleasure of this whole process, defecation should be performed in the Return of the Jedi wastebasket for added pleasure.
2. Wipe ass with witch hazel, which soothes horrific burns. (Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda certifies that his lips, raw like beaten flank steak from nearly continuous analingus with dogs, are greatly soothed by witch hazel which makes it perfect for the anus after diarrhea.)
3. Prime anus with anal ease. (Now Cherry Flavored for those butthole lick-o-phillic amongst you - very popular with 99% of the Slashdotting public!)
4. Slather richly a considerable amount of Vaseline and/or other anal lubricants into your rectum at least until the bend and also take your Yoda Doll , Yoda Shampoo bottle or Yoda soap-on-a-rope and liberally apply the lubricants to the Yoda Doll/Yoda Shampoo/Yoda Soap-on-a-rope. You may need your gay squire/lover to help with this since your fat corpulent ass cannot do a self-reach-around.
5. Put a nigger do-rag on Yoda's head so the ears don't stick out like daggers!
6. Make sure to have a mechanism by which to fish Yoda out of your rectum, the soap on the rope is especially useful because the retrieval mechanism is built in.
7. Pucker and relax your balloon knot. Doing Kegel exercises several times actuating the sphincter muscle and relaxing it will help prepare your ass for what is to come.
8. Slowly rest yourself onto your Yoda figurine. Be careful, he's probably bigger than the dicks normally being rammed up your ass!
9. Gyrate gleefully in your computer chair while your fat sexless geek nerd loser fat shit self enjoys the prostate massage you'll be getting. Think about snoodling with the Sarlaac pit. Read Slashdot. Masturbate to anime. Email one of the Slashdot editors hoping they will honor you with a reply. Join several more dating services - this time, you don't select the (desired - speaks English) and (desired - literate). You figure you might get a chance then. Order some fucking crap from Think Geek. Suck and gag on a Dr. Who sonic screwdriver like it was the Doctor's dick in your mouth. Get Linux to boot on a Black and Decker Toaster Oven. Wish you could afford a new computer. Argue that cheap-ass discount bin hardware works 'just as well' as the quality and premium hardware because you can't afford the real stuff. Make claims about how Linux rules. Compile a kernel on your 486SX. Claim to hate Windows but use it for World of Warcraft. Admire Ghyslain's courage in making that wonderful Star Wars movie. Officially convert to the Jedi religion. Talk about how cool Mega Tokyo is. Try and make sure you do your regular 50 story submissions to Slashdot, all of which get rejected because people who aren't fatter than CowboyNeal

Re: ADA shoves a greased up Yoda Doll in my ASS

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow the level of depravity required to do this is seriously "special"

Re: ADA shoves a greased up Yoda Doll in my ASS

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually found the dedication required to do that kind of impressive. Sad, but impressive.

Re:ADA shoves a greased up Yoda Doll in my ASS

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish i could moderate this up. heheh

Re:ADA shoves a greased up Yoda Doll in my ASS

[Anonymous Coward]

Linda Lovelace, right?

Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get why more don't just go to school and learn STEM. I really don't see it as a problem, other than getting laid in University. That will happen later.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

Yes, the assholes like we see on Slashdot every time this topic comes up.

Apparently a bunch of childish assholes like to loudly defend their right to be childish assholes.

They seem to think behavior which would get you fired or charged with sexual harassment are perfectly normal.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[tripleevenfall]

It's perfectly legitimate to move from asking why there aren't more of Group X working in a certain field to asking why there aren't more of Group X qualified to work in that field, or why there aren't more of Group X pursuing the relevant education.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[OhPlz]

If we want to treat people as equals, perhaps we shouldn't think of each other as belonging to arbitrary groups.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should look in a mirror.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

so /. users are literally keeping females from entering the field? Or are they assholes because they are tired of feminist bullshit being shoved down their throats?

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's the assholes on Slashdot that are keeping women out of STEM in Universities.....

How are they doing this again?
Are they stealing all the pens?
Because they can borrow mine.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you know the answer already, it's screaming MISOGYNY as loud as possible.

Sadly it's the only answer since it drowns out everything else.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. typical social 'justice' warrior using ad hominem instead of at least attempting an argument.

2. The assholes are the ones justifying treatment of men and women as classes instead of looking at them as individuals. They have a conspiracy theory called patriarchy that claims all men are out to abuse women, so therefore privileged treatment of women in every context is justified. Little do they realize that this is just as oppressive to women as their constructed male bogeyman strawman. Why? It paints women as having no agency or ability by default. It denies them opportunities to earn respect as real equals.

3. These people seem to think that sexual harassment is asking a woman out for coffee..or whatever she says is sexual harassment, because, you know, we should 'listen and believe' like anita sarkeesian suggests. Apparently, using our brains makes us assholes. Riiight.

This story was submitted by amimojo. Why am I not surprised?

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently a bunch of childish assholes like to loudly defend their right to be childish assholes.

That would be the first amendment there Jackass.

Maybe you want to give it up, but I don't.

And I'll call you all kinds of childish things I want to because I CAN!

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, distinguishing between men and women is 'arbitrary' grouping now?

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[serviscope_minor]

That's the whole point.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[OhPlz]

Yes, you can group people by any number of different characteristics that really have no relevance to the workplace.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Darinbob]

Or maybe people can treat them as equals? Wow, too radical probably.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt they could ever tire of bullshit. Look carefully at our audience.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am surprised amimojo's day is FRIDAY, NOT TUESDAY.

At least on Friday I get the weekend soon. NO this BS has to start on a TUESDAY now.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, they're just assholes. Any other questions?

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Chris Mattern]

1. typical social 'justice' warrior using ad hominem instead of at least attempting an argument.

Oh, the irony.

"Ad hominem" means you hang a derogatory label on a person instead of refuting their assertions. Pop Quiz: What have you done in this statement?

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[ShanghaiBill]

They have a conspiracy theory called patriarchy that claims all men are out to abuse women

Many successful women will tell you that the greatest resistance to their advancement didn't come from men. It came from other women. If you want to see a real cat fight, assign a young woman to manage older women.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Usually I would say no, the "barriers" that TFS talk about aren't barriers at all. But for once, TFS actually got it right.

"My parents, my brother, my community, all were against me," said Sovita Dahal of her decision to pursue a career in technology.

Depending on just how broad "community" is in this context, these are the correct barriers to be overcome. None of this shaming of corporations/universities for having "too many" of a particular gender, what needs to change is for parents, family, perhaps even friends, to stop discouraging people from pursuing such careers in the first place.

And because I know someone will choose to misinterpret what I said, no, I do not believe a legislative action is the right way to get things to change. I would also like to point out that there is a difference between actively encouraging something, and simply not discouraging something.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That sounds like a circular argument. Since that moniker is generally applied intentionally to people with views perceived as ridiculous, it is at worst a tautology. Not contributing to furthering the debate but not much more than that.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are all of these women letting assholes ONLINE keep them out of STEM studies in the REAL WORLD?

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Chris Mattern]

No, it's not circular. I was referring mostly to "Social 'Justice' Warrior" part which the OP obviously (particularly with the scare quotes) regards as derogatory.

Re: Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as equal in this kind of discussion. You are either defending the poor and defenseless or you are part of a huge conspiracy. The problem is which side is which?

If I say everyone has an equal shot, I'm defending the status quo. If I say one side should have a greater shot I being sexist.

Based on the argument structure I cannot be equally supportive of both sex's since to do so would "hide" from the "truth". Whatever that means?

Yes I am a middle aged, white, male engineer but I have had many bosses. Some male. Some female. Almost all of them have sucked. A few have been great. It has never mattered to me. I don't make pay decisions and I don't manage anyone but myself. I do have 3 daughters who I hope do well in their futures and I hope they don't run into a bunch assholes where they work.

Change takes time. We all have to make it together. Lumping everyone into camps as For or Against doesn't help.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[alvinrod]

If more women don't want to get involved in STEM I wouldn't be surprised if it's because of the constantly reinforced narrative of how much sexism they'll face, which is mainly put forward by people who think it that sexism exist because there isn't a perfect 50/50 gender ratio and refuse to consider any explanation for this other than sexism.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Happy birthday Einstein

Einstein gave us the theory of general relativity, ...

Happy birthday Ada

If only more women did X, need more women, women this women that. What were we talking about again? Oh, Ada! I'd almost forgotten.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because all those assholes online are ALSO people in the real world. They aren't all chatbots, you know.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

So why are you talking about women and STEM? I was perfectly fine to just think about my colleagues as equals long before your kind came and told me that some of them were to be positively discriminated.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not. An ad hominem works like this:

1. Chris Mattern says ad hominems are equal to insulting someone without refuting their assertion.
2. Chris Mattern is a dick face.
Conclusion: since Chris Mattern is a dick face (2), the statement (1) must be false.

ctrl+f 'Informal Structure of ad Hominem'

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[KGIII]

I employed more male programmers than I employed female programmers. I actually had more female traffic engineers than I had male traffic engineers for a while. I had zero in the server room. I had a female accountant and all the secretarial staff was female. There were times where I hired a female programmer because she was the best candidate for the job. Their pay was exactly equal and gender had nothing to do with it.

I never gave a male preferential treatment. We never had sexual harassment in the workplace. We were assholes from time to time but it was universal and spanned the genders. I never gave a female preferential treatment. I hired the best because I wanted the best. We had multiple genders and sexual preferences - even a strange old man who was the epitome of anti-everything. Don't mind him. He's a wizard. He was the database admin. I don't know how he did what he did but he did it well. Did I mention he was a wizard?

Anyhow, I've since been told I'm a sexist because I was (still am, really) an egalitarian. I still have yet to have someone explain why that is true. I've been told that I'm part of the problem. This is likely to turn into a novella, it's not easy to explain in text short enough to fit on a bumper sticker. So, read or skip it, I guess.

Also, we had no sexist crap in the office. There were office romances and even two weddings. I'd have fired the first person who made disparaging remarks because of someone's innate traits like gender, race, or sexuality. Immediately. That never happened. Yet we were all geeks - each and every one. Our geekiness even rubbed off on our secretarial staff and others not involved in the tech aspect. Heck, we even set up our accountant with their own system early on as they too were just entering the business world - she'd worked for the state revenue service prior to hanging out her shingle. She did payroll and our taxes and her business grew as well.

Now, I am assuming that we were not unique in any way. This sexism or harassment in the work place was not pervasive - in fact, it was non-existent. Again, I'd have fired anyone on the spot and that never happened. We had loads of harassment, it was good natured and ubiquitous, but it was never due to anything like gender - not even jokingly. I think the closest would have been a female employee who used to always say, "Well, I'm a blond girl, of course I don't know anything about math." Really, she was brilliant.

Is this something new? Has IT been taken over by new people? I retired when I sold my business as I've mentioned countless times - that was eight years ago. There were quite a few women in the tech field back then. Has this changed? We started in the early 1990s.

If this is a problem, is it as systemic as is claimed? I see no reason to give preferential treatment to anyone but the best candidates but if there's a real abuse issue then that's certainly a management issue and needs to be resolved.

*shrugs* I keep asking new questions hoping to understand more and to understand better. In my experience it simply wasn't a problem. If anything, we were welcoming of anyone and everyone because, you know, we were a bunch of freaks - nerds and geeks, working to do something that was new and different. We were doing things that hadn't been done before. We were, by our nature, oddballs. We welcomed anyone who was accepting of us enough to speak with us in public. Hell, we had gaming sessions that would last through a weekend and we'd still be smelly and dirty come Monday morning and still rolling dice when the rest of the crew started meandering in. We were pretty damned welcoming of anyone.

Has this changed? Is this really an issue? Are people more sensitive or are they overly sensitive to things that aren't actually there? Not long ago we had a shooting by a gay black man who was sure that being sent out into the field was a racist comment and he overreacted. Is it like that or is there a real problem?

Sorry for the novella and questions but I keep asking and

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[OhPlz]

I didn't post the article.

Re: Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

I asked HOW.
You just said they are... and trailed off hoping no one would notice.

So how are we, the online community of Slashdot, keeping all these brilliant women out of STEM?

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[TWX]

Happy birthday Einstein

Einstein gave us the theory of general relativity, ...

And Marie Curie pioneered our understanding of Radioactivity, and given that they were a little over eleven years apart in age, they were essentially contemporaries. Both are Nobel Laureates.

Happy birthday Ada

If only more women did X, need more women, women this women that. What were we talking about again? Oh, Ada! I'd almost forgotten.

From my own experiences in college and in the workplace I see very, very few women in applied computing. Few women in desktop support, few women in consulting, few women in network support, few women in server and application support, and few women in programming. I suspect that since boys usually end up as adolescents dabbling in these areas in significantly greater numbers than girls of the same age do, boys essentially define the culture that surrounds the hobby and later, the profession. Since this means that the conditions that define the culture predate the workplace, I don't see it radically changing unless girls are also encouraged to dabble from the same early age, such that the culture from adolescence changes.

For other forms of science, mathematics, and engineering I simply cannot say, but at the same time, there doesn't seem to be much adolescent culture in math, high-end engineering, and science as there is in computing among either gender outside of that which is school-organized, so that might explain why those professions have more women per-capita than computing.

Re: Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

I asked HOW.
You just said they are... and trailed off hoping no one would notice.

So how are we, the online community of Slashdot, keeping all these brilliant women out of STEM?

The answer to the question of how are ./posters keeping women out of stem is partially answered by this statement: Because the online assholes are the same people who are assholes in real life. The assholes in real life drive away women by, well, being assholes to them.

The answer, with specifics, is in the linked articles that either you didn't read or are too stupid to understand.
I'll read them for you.

From one of the articles:
"The reason why we don't have more women in tech is not because of a lack of STEM education. It's because too many high profile and influential individuals and subcultures within the tech industry have ignored or outright mistreated women applicants and employees. To be succinct—the problem isn't women, it's tech culture."

So it's being ignored and mistreated? How, you ask.
Here's an example from one of the articles:
"I have had interviewers attempt to solicit sexual favors from me mid-interview and discuss in significant detail precisely what they would like to do. All of these things have happened either in Silicon Valley working in tech, in an educational institution to get me there, or in a technical internship."

That shit happens non-stop. BTW, I'm a sysadmin and I know what I've seen. Women are second-class citizens, and they get ignored and insulted way too often while they're trying to just do their jobs. I didn't, and I'm not going to, do anything to help them because I don't give a shit about people, and anyway women need to toughen up.

But, I do give a shit about truth and accuracy, so that's why I'm taking the trouble to inform you.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ad hominem" means you hang a derogatory label on a person instead of refuting their assertions. Pop Quiz: What have you done in this statement?

Expressed contempt. "You are a filthy SJW" is an insult, but not an argument. "You are wrong because you are a SJW" is a fallacy. An argument contains an ad hominem only when an irrelevant personal attribute is used as a part or the entirety of the premise.

Re: Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

So a few men in influential positions are to blame.

I was unaware that the audience for Slashdot, nay, the entire internet was actually just a handfull of sexists assholes.

I feel like there's a word for those types of reasonings. Stereo type comes to mind.

Seeing as I'm online now, and have no affiliation to STEM education at all.
Therefore I am blameless.

Re:Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[silentcoder]

True, but you also get to live with the consequences.
For example - most non-assholes will want to avoid going anywhere near you. And if you have enough assholes in your field, that lots and lots of people (basically anybody who isn't also an asshole) stop wanting to be part of it.
Then you get to deal with the consequence of having the whole world pointing fingers at you and saying "Look what you did ! Asshole !"

Re: Is there some barrier to women in STEM?

[Anonymous Coward]

So a few men in influential positions are to blame.

I was unaware that the audience for Slashdot, nay, the entire internet was actually just a handfull of sexists assholes.

I feel like there's a word for those types of reasonings. Stereo type comes to mind.

Seeing as I'm online now, and have no affiliation to STEM education at all.
Therefore I am blameless.

The reason that you are unaware "that the audience for Slashdot, nay, the entire internet was actually just a handfull of sexists assholes." is because no one said that. Don't make up shit and try to claim that I said it. I didn't say that and no one else did. If you think that was what was said (or even implied) then that will serve as proof that you are in fact stupid.

As for your being blameless for problems associated with STEM education (which this article is not about), I am certain that someone of your limited abilities is in no position to influence anything. For that reason alone, you are indeed blameless.

Here here!

[wkwilley2]

Here's to more women in the techincal workplace. They deserve it.

Re:Here here!

[epyT-R]

Hopefully because they earned it, not because 'social justice.'

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

He was implying that many times STEM is thankless and stressful work.
And always have a backup plan in case you get the memo to start planning to train your H-B1 replacement soon.

Re:Here here!

[epyT-R]

He was? There's nothing in the post about any of that.

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Q: Why do women bleed every month, have babies in agony and all that BS?

A: Because they deserve it.

Re:Here here!

[Darinbob]

If they do earn it, half their misogynist colleagues will still think they didn't deserve it and are diversity or affirmative action hires. On slashdot it seems that even encouraging girls to pursue STEM fields is wrong headed, like we're supposed to stand back and patiently wait for stereotypes and preconcpetions and barriers to dissolve by themselves.

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the way I read it, but hey, I'm not the optimist you are.

Quite frankly the post can be interpreted many ways, it's rather vague at the end.

Re:Here here!

[epyT-R]

If they do earn it, half their misogynist colleagues will still think they didn't deserve it and are diversity or affirmative action hires

Well, there you go. Time for affirmative action to go, right? That's why social justice policy is the real threat. It oppresses both men and women by corralling them into oppressor and victim roles, respectively, instead of treating them as individuals.

Re:Here here!

[AmiMoJo]

As the BBC article mentions, one of the problems women face is that when they do make it people start muttering about how they probably only got there to fill a quota or improve the company's image. Congrats on being part of the problem.

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe the problem is the Social Justice mentality which wants this diversity without all the hard work that goes into it.

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

How about you let your children choose their own path instead of shoving them into something because of gender quotas?

Re:Here here!

[Darinbob]

I don't necessarily think it needs to go. Passive action is the problem, people sitting back and assuming that problems will fix themselves. As in declare that the slaves are free without any followup for one hundred years.

Re:Here here!

[epyT-R]

The counterargument from the anti-'social justice' crowd is that affirmative action is its own form of discrimination. It categorizes people into classes based on attributes that aren't supposed to matter, and then judges them accordingly. The system should be looking at people as individual humans first, not as a collections of skin tones or genitals. If 'a' woman or man claims to have been discriminated against (or another discriminated FOR) on attributes that the person thinks are irrelevant, the right of redress should be guaranteed. That doesn't mean we should guarantee a favorable outcome in any direction. The facts and justifications from involved parties should be considered. This is a 180 from current affirmative action policy, which favors women over men, darker skin over lighter skin, non-straight over straight, muslims over atheists, atheists over christians etc. The fact this is enforced by the state makes it, by definition, systemic discrimination.

Re:Here here!

[cayenne8]

If they do earn it, half their misogynist colleagues will still think they didn't deserve it and are diversity or affirmative action hires. On slashdot it seems that even encouraging girls to pursue STEM fields is wrong headed, like we're supposed to stand back and patiently wait for stereotypes and preconcpetions and barriers to dissolve by themselves.

And many of us think there is NO problem really...that this is solution or outrage in search of a problem.

I'm not any more worried about this than I am the shortage of males as nurses, the shortage of white jewish players in the NBA, or the number of Asians as lead NASCAR drivers.

Categories of people naturally migrate to different types of jobs/interests. Big fucking deal....

Diversity for the sake of diversity alone, IMHO is just a waste of time..what does it accomplish really? If it happens it happens, if it does't, well...the world won't end now will it?

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, I wonder why people mutter about that? I wonder if it might be because they could be right!

I'm reminded of a recent study about how our "everyone gets a trophy" culture, designed to never let a child's self esteem be hurt, is actually hurting children's self esteem. It turns out that children are capable of evaluating their own performance and can figure out when they perform relatively worse or better. When they see that adults lie to them regardless of how well they do, they assume that even when they do well the praise they get is false praise.

See if you can figure out how this applies to this topic. Oh, forget it, I've seen you post, I'll flat out tell you: it's because when people say that a woman was hired to fill a quota or improve a company's image, there's a decent chance they could be right. In fact, they could be right even if the woman in question was the world's greatest engineer! It's what happens when you make someone's gender more important than their skills: people start assuming that the skills aren't there, because that's not what people are being judged on.

Re:Here here!

[Darinbob]

Once you've divided society into stratified classes you have discrimination. That discrimination does not vanish merely because those in power said they were sorry and promise not to do it again. A declaration of equality does not create equality. So how does it get solved? Do you remain passive so that the historically disadvantaged people remain disadvantaged, or do you try to correct things which results in a few historically advantaged people becoming slightly less advantaged? It's discrimination either way.

Overall, affirmative action helps far more people in very positive ways, but it hurts some people in relatively minor ways. This does not mean a quota system though, it can mean encouraging disadvantaged classes of going to colleges, removing segregation, etc. So some C+ student doesn't get into their first choice of school, big deal (and just roll your eyes a decade later when that person starts accusing others of taken his rightful role).

And opposition to affirmative action is irrelevant to this broader discussion anyway. No one is asking quotas or asking for unqualified people to take positions away from others. Spin around in a circle in any software team and chances are you will see several men who are rather medicore seat warmers. Why protect them against others who are more qualified? Why not get a lot more people into the pipeline who can become engineers, regardless of gender? Why push back against women, why repeat the myth that women aren't good at STEM, and why maintain the stratification that we have?

Re:Here here!

[Darinbob]

But women are migrating AWAY from computing. There is no innate bias from genetic here. I remember when there were many more women in engineering, I remember working with them, and I would like that to come back. I hate the modern male-only offices. But I am NOT stealing your job, I am not trying to get you fired in order to hire someone else. All I want is to encourage women to come back to computing, and break down barriers that discourage them.

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Earning requires recognition, and the key problems here are around a) is the recognition fair (after all we want an employee who's a good chap like the others) and b) do I even feel I have a fair chance? Your "earning" is a small part of a much bigger reason why your company might fail to take on a good female engineer who is actually loads better than the guy you end up hiring.

Re:Here here!

[neoritter]

No they aren't, rates are climbing.

Re:Here here!

[AmiMoJo]

It's not about dividing people, it's about recognizing that the divisions already exist. To say that a young black person is completely equal to a young white person is at best a nice aspiration, but in the real world there are still race issues that will affect one of them far more than the other. Offering assistance does not create those race issues, it just recognizes and tries to correct or offset them.

We need to be clear about a couple of other common misconceptions you illustrate too.

It's not about guaranteeing a favourable outcome, it's about offsetting a disadvantage and fixing identified problems. If your company has no women, maybe that means you need to hire a women. It's not discriminating against men, because many men already benefited from working at a company where everyone looks like them and they don't have any gender issues. It's recognizing that merely saying "women are free to come and work here" isn't enough to fix the fact that the company subtly discriminates against women in a way that ensures zero of them work there. If the ratio extremely low it's a sign that something is wrong.

Secondly, discrimination in this context is not the same as in the engineering context. There has to be some detriment to one group. That's why the word privilege is now used a lot - it's not always that something happens to harm a particular group (discrimination), it's just that another group has benefited from something that causes them to dominate. And yes, it's often straight white guys, because the history of the world is the greatest affirmative action programme ever for them.

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Here here!

Where where??

Re:Here here!

[KGIII]

FWIW - I'm mixed racially and I think affirmative action should never have been a policy. Affirmative action is telling me that I'm unable to do it on my own - that I'm incapable of succeeding on my own merits and that I must have help from the people who were supposedly oppressing me. Now I have bumped into overt racists. I just chalk it up to them being ignorant and go on my way - I do my task as well as I'd have normally done and continue to strive to do the same things i'd have done even if I'd not encountered them.

The idea that I can't do it on my own is an affront. I can, and have, been able to accomplish my goals. Obviously, nobody really does anything on their own (if we want to get really meta) but I didn't need help by being given preferential treatment. In fact, I'd rather not get preferential treatment - it might make me do lower quality work because I know I can get away with it. Don't give me bonus points for my race - give me bonus points for my successes and negative points for my failures. Judge me on who I am and what I do - not what I am or who I do.

It might have made sense at one point where there were systemic biases and people weren't being judged based on their merits. So long as we're judging by merit then let us do so and not prefer one or the other because of the same innate traits we're explicitly told to not judge people by. Saying don't judge me because I'm a girl and then saying give me preferential treatment because I'm a girl just seems hypocritical to me and, hopefully, nobody is doing that. As mentioned above, I'm starting to think I'm behind the times and not really keeping a finger on the pulse as well as I could.

Re:Here here!

[russotto]

As the BBC article mentions, one of the problems women face is that when they do make it people start muttering about how they probably only got there to fill a quota or improve the company's image.

Then you should certainly be strongly against any such quotas or image-based hiring. Because while such mutterings can be dismissed as the babble of the ignorant and subject the mutterer to rebuke when it _isn't_ true, it would be churlish to rebuke the mutterer when it is true.

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

That strawman won't beat itself.

Re: Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

So because some white men have in the past held great privileges over women and other men, (see slavery), those women and men should have the scales tipped in their favor, and you know, some white slaves would be nice too.

Sound about right?

Re: Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, no, you're mixing the rate of change with the growth rate.

Me thinks you slept though your physics classes, or you're lying to prove a point that doesn't exist.

Re:Here here!

[epyT-R]

You mean a convenient assumption of divisions? For the most part, divisions exist on merit as they should. Sometimes, individuals use irrational discriminators to either reject or accept other individuals, and that should be dealt with. However...

The feminists (and their social justice relatives) don't like merit because it conflicts with the precepts of socialist ideology. Their definition of equality is equal outcome at any cost, ie we're all interchangeable drones, and "gender is a social construct", therefore any inequity in distribution must be due to discrimination. I've always found this hilarious because this is brought up under the guise of promoting tolerance of DIVERSITY, which assumes we're NOT all the same. The fact is, women over represent with certain traits and men do with others. Cultures have traits too. This is what makes them diverse. This also means that certain groups will over represent in some areas and under represent in others. This is not systemic discrimination. It's self discriminatory on the part of these individuals. Fewer women choose to go into engineering and fewer men choose to go into nursing. This is ok.

Any attempt to artificially manipulate this will result in the very systemic discrimination feminists claim to fight. What you are seeing, here, on slashdot and other places is resentment of affirmative action's hypocrisy that, if strong enough, will motivate people to discriminate on those traits, eg: "Did she get this senior engineer position because of merit or because of her vagina?" or "You're just criticizing my work because I'm a woman." This shows that the so-called victim classes are actually the privileged ones. They get to escape criticism by playing the oppression card while praise is heaped on them by those wishing to prove their social justice street cred (often just to avoid any future lawsuits).

This is why there are women who are anti-feminist. They want that opportunity to earn the respect of their peers, and I don't blame them. Succeeding on merit is true accomplishment. 'Offsets' as you put it, just deny them this opportunity and build systemic discrimination against men, oppressing them and giving them reason to resent. The feminist response? "Check your privilege!" which is not an argument at all, it's just shaming language meant to shut down the discussion argument because they don't have one.

Apparently, even questioning this narrative like I've done here is an example of bigoted discrimination now. This is certifiably insane, and it's being taught as truth in the university system. Instead of silencing certain forms of speech, I would advocate silencing no one.
http://www.ucop.edu/academic-p...

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

only got there to fill a quota

The real problem is the penis and vagina accountants and their recently increased demands for ever higher P&V counts. Most of us, and the tech industry, got over gender stereotypes decades ago but apparently we all failed to keep accounts of this and now oh boy are we paying for it.

The shaming will continue until the P&V counts improve.

Re:Here here!

[syriapress]

great please visit my site http://syria.press/

Re:Here here!

[epyT-R]

The key point is right at the beginning "Once you stratify.." The premise is wrong. Comparing it historically, society, today is anything but stratified, never mind by some conspiratorial force that conveniently needs another conspiracy to fight it. Just because certain traits don't represent equally in a given population isn't proof them being kept out either. Ensuring people aren't shut out of opportunities based on irrelevancies is fine, but the moment you let some cut ahead of others to force equality of outcome, you enable the same kind of discrimination in the other direction.

No it doesn't. It helps normalize discrimination on the target traits, building it into every institution. Discrimination on irrelevant attributes for or against is wrong, no matter who's involved. What if that C+ student was female and someone, say a male supervisor, rolled his eyes at her? What if that C+ student outplaced a better qualified male because of genitalia? What of his rights?

No. Affirmative action is at the very heart of the matter. It assumes discrimination everywhere by default, thus imposing it by default. Employment quotas already exist and more are being asked for. You suggest we replace seat warmers with people who were selected because of certain genitalia instead of merit? How is that any better?

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's to more women in the techincal workplace. They deserve it.

All the intelligent women with an attitude for computer programming seem to be gravitating towards bioinformatics and computational biology. Two of my instructors this semester are women with doctorate degrees. They know their stuff, they are able to communicate in the classroom, and they can actually teach. As I said the intelligent and smart women are in bioinformatics and computational biology not writing computer games and business applications.

Re:Here here!

[Darinbob]

Society today is stratified. How can you deny that? Do you think poor minorities are that way because of genetics? If you grow up in an impoverished neighborhood it is extremely difficult to get out of it. And many neighborhoods are that way because of past racism. We had segregation for a hundred years and slavery before that, the effects of that history have not vanished. We had white-flight that effectively nullified integration. Stratification is all around us. It may not be as bad as it used to be in some places, but it has not vanisehd.

Look at Oakland for example; poor areas comprised mostly of blacks and hispanics, rich people up in the hills mostly white, with some hipsters in the middle raising housing costs. Palo Alto versus East Palo Alto, the place where the professors lived versus the place where the servants lived. Parents with any appreciable amount of money will go into significant debt to move to a neighborhood with decent schools so that they can avoid the failling schools in the poor ethnic areas.

I am not asking for quotas or advocating them. I am asking that people notice when racism and sexism exists, and work to encourage people to break the stereotypes and remove the barriers. That means encouraging minorities to go to school, apply for the scholarships, etc; and encourage girls to enter STEM fields, get dirty, go get the career even if the parents would rather she get married and be a proper wife, etc. None of this steals anything away from you. No one is cutting in front of anyone else. What the phrase "affirmative action" means is the opposite of passive inaction. Of course, some people deny that any problems exist here.

I am not asking that the seat warmers be replaced by seat warmers of a different gender. I'm saying get rid of the seat warmers and replace them with better people. White male mediocre people get the seat warming jobs because they never face any hurdles. No one ever told them that engineering was not an appropriate field for little boys to be interested in. No one ever rolls they eyes and assume they're only in school because of quotas. They never leave their job because of a feeling that they don't belong. People say "let them get the job on their own merits" and yet we have people of low merits getting the jobs. When you see women in computing they are almost always well above average, they're not seat warmers. That's because to get into a STEM career as a woman you need above average motivation.

So maybe there aren't a lot of men in nursing. Well, that's a separate problem and it doesn't mean this problem in engineering doesn't exist. The causes of both are probably similar. Parents want their boys to be manly and nursing isn't considered manly (in the US); parents want their girls to be ladylike and engineering is not considered to be very ladylike.

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

On slashdot it seems that even encouraging girls to pursue STEM fields by giving them special privileges and overlooking anyone else also qualified is wrong headed

FTFY. Also, the fact that you misrepresented reality that much exposed you as a prototypical SJW.

Assertion: You're a part of the problem, not the solution, and idiots like you are the reason the whole debate continues at all. Protip: Respect the other sides arguments even when you don't agree with them, and learn to counter the stuff you don't agree with with logic instead of poorly thought out strawmen. Understand that while you may view this post as ad hominem, you walked right into it by presenting a foolish argument.

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

How about we toss the quotas and hire based solely on merit?

If you use quotas, they're going to get abused by those with an agenda. Just like the H1B program.

Re:Here here!

[Kartu]

There is no innate bias from genetic here.

Are you aware that boys get SIGNIFICANTLY worse notes at school than girls nowadays? (for some reason, it isn't perceived as a problem)
But there is one glaring exception in that stats: boys still do WAY better than girls at math on average.

Could you explain that from "no genetics bias here" perspective please?

Re:Here here!

[Kartu]

In real world certain groups are over or under represented in certain fields.
That's a fact.

Whether it is because of "race issues" or not, is not a fact. Not at all. Something that SJWs tend to forget.

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Experienced this first hand. Was asked to provide a tech test for prospective developers. Out of 5 three made it to the tech test one being a woman. She scored the lowest in the tests, they were all pretty bad.
In the post interview discussion with the head of dept. it was decided that only one job offer would be made and only to her, "to increase the diversity of the team" and make the department "look good".
Joke was on us as her plan had been to get the job offer and use it as leverage to get a pay rise at her current employer.

Re:Here here!

[silentcoder]

Half the interviewers will demand she suck their dicks. That probably won't encourage her to take the job.

At the other half, a huge chunk of her colleagues will assume she GOT the job by sucking the interviewer's dick (regardless that this is at one of the places where she wasn't asked, didn't offer, and got the job because she had the right skills for it).

And a significant chunk of them will go one step further and assume they get to demand she sucks THEIR dicks as well.

Which is all pretty sucky by itself... but where it gets fucked up is that when she complains about it - all the other guys in the offices will NOT say "seriously ? They did that shit ? Get these assholes fired". They will say: "NOT ALL MEN !"

Which is why that's a comment which, in and off itself, makes you an asshole.

Re:Here here!

[silentcoder]

Here's what you don't seem to get- increasing diversity IS a merrit, it adds business value !

If my company did not decide that we want to be fully diversified in all aspects of the business 25 years ago - we probably would have gone bankrupt in the 1990s (as the vast majority of our peers did).

Why did we survive ? What value did diversity add ? Well, appartheid ended - and that meant that a whole lot of people previous excluded from the economy were now part of it, 50-million odd new potential customers. And we got almost all of them - because we were the only place where they could be served by somebody who understood their languages, their customs, their values.

We are in a trust based business (I work as a programmer for an investment company) - every single tier of our business is about client trust, that's why the entire building is open-plan - it's possible for a customer in the lobby to look all the way up to my desk on the third floor.

Being able to look up in the building and be assured of seeing people like themselves handling their money at every level, and being able to talk to somebody who can explain the complexities of investment in their own languages and with metaphors from their own experience is a critically valuable sales tool.

Diversity adds incredible business value.

But this is not only true in customer-facing things. It is also true in all creative endeavours, the more different perspectives can weigh in on a design - the more robust and innovative the design becomes. Diversity is the cheapest and easiest way to maximize the number of perspectives - because there are aspects of perspective that are shaped by culture, by language, by custom - things which different races, genders and sexual orientations experience to different degrees.

Like it or not, adding diversity is a merit because that adds business value - business value that could easily exceed a small difference in bare-metal skills. Did it ever occur to you that the hiring managers are at least slightly competent at their jobs - and hiring the staff they have the best reason to believe will make them the most money ? That when companies got on board with diversity, it was often because they had recognized the huge profits they were NOT MAKING BECAUSE they were not diverse enough ?

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Social Stack politics, IE the core belief of 3rd wave feminists, only seeks to further stratify.

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do poor white people not exist? The Majority of white people you speak to are not living up in the hills. They're in the same economic status of the minorities. My favorite was the rich hispanic college girl with the free ride, telling the poor white girl who shared a bunk with her mom in a 150 square foot duplex about how privileged she was.

Stratification exists, but only the rich on the hill and the San Fran Hipsters want you to believe it's because of race and gender, not becauseof money.

Re:Here here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully because they earned it, not because 'social justice.'

FWIW, I'll throw in my engineering school experience, albeit from ~30 years back, - as (blind) grading gave pretty pure results. (It also gels with my opinion of the ladies I've met in the technical workspace since then.)

There were few females in the class, maybe 10-15%. Over 4 years they most were consistently near the top of the class grade wise. The valedictorian was female.

Summary: they earned it.

Re:Here here!

[Darinbob]

When I was at elementary school, girls did better at math. I didn't even hear about the meme of girls hating math until I got to college.

Re:Here here!

[wkwilley2]

If they have the experience and the knowledge required, there's no reason they shouldn't be considered. Let's face it, it's a sausage fest in the tech world.

On Ada Lovelace Day, four female engineers ...

[Nutria]

have a hen party and bitch about what pigs men are. Such progress from the coffee klatches of 40 years ago where housewives would have morning hen parties and bitch about their husbands.

Re:On Ada Lovelace Day, four female engineers ...

[phantomfive]

It's your day to feel guilty.
Look what you are doing to women!
You are preventing them from joining the tech industry.
Why are you so bad?

Re:On Ada Lovelace Day, four female engineers ...

[Darinbob]

Worst haiku ever.

Re:On Ada Lovelace Day, four female engineers ...

[phantomfive]

Hai, sensei.

Wait a minute

[Jiro]

Read these carefully. The woman in Nepal describes her problems as "My parents, my brother, my community, all were against me... Nepalese women are still expected to marry at the age of about 21, go to live with their husbands and raise a family"

The others have "problems" such as "Lots of people questioned whether she really was an engineer" which made the woman feel "helpless", "pictures of topless women in the cabins", and a woman from China who described no problems at all by SJ standards (she says that women and men think differently, which is a no-no).

The article is trying to conflate an actual problem that results in actual discrimination but did not happen in the West, with non-problems, in an attempt to equate them. It's more SJ clickbait.

Re:Wait a minute

[serviscope_minor]

"Lots of people questioned whether she really was an engineer"

Yeah no problem at all. I bet that has no effect on jobs and opportunities, nosireee.

No one has *ever* questioned me when I say I'm an engineer.

Re:Wait a minute

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm tall, have long hair, I don't wear glasses and ride a Harley to work.
Oh, and I'm an engineer. I get asked about it all the time.

Should I be screaming Misogyny at people when they do?
Is that the correct response now?

Because I could totally do that.

To answer why that person in the poster is getting questioned about it, she's young and attractive.
And I mean she's attractive enough to model for a poster, which to be honest, most people hire a model for just that purpose.

Re:Wait a minute

[epyT-R]

Well, if a man's ability was questioned in the same manner, we'd want to know the truth, right? Why not the same for a woman?

Re:Wait a minute

[AmiMoJo]

The woman from Nepal certainly had it the worst, by the sounds of it. It's different manifestations of the same thing though. Her family didn't think being an engineer was a "feminine" thing to do, that it was men's work and she should put finding a husband a raising a family first. One of the others had a similar but less severe problem with people not taking per seriously or seeming to assume that because she was attractive she must be a model and not a real employee doing real engineering.

The architect had an issue entering a predominantly straight male work environment. It's probably not so much offence at the girly calendars as they are simply a shorthand way of describing a male heterosexual dominated environment. Think about how it might be if you were male and went to work on a construction site and it was all posters of half naked men and 99% of the workforce was gay and not above oogling or wolf whistling at you. It's not really the specifics that are the issue.

The Chinese lady's story did seem a bit strange. I think maybe something was lost in translation there, or perhaps it's an example of how feminist ideas of equality are starting to take hold there but it's still not that developed.

Re:Wait a minute

[serviscope_minor]

Well, if a man's ability was questioned in the same manner, we'd want to know the truth, right? Why not the same for a woman?

huh?

Re:Wait a minute

[s.petry]

The woman from Nepal certainly had it the worst, by the sounds of it.

So the woman must go find a career and work her ass off to be something, and raising a family has no value, right? It's really sad that so many people buy into this corporate bullshit.

Yes, there is certainly some discrimination and its bad when it happens. What the person from Nepal describes I don't see as discrimination, I see it as society normal. *read it all before hyperventilating in anger* Twenty one years old is the middle of a woman's prime health and the best time for her to have kids. Most societies know this, and it's why and how the norms came about. Back when people were dead by 35-40 the normal was 13-16 depending on where you were.

Until men can carry kids to full term and breast feed, there will be an expectation that the woman handles all of the difficult parts of having children. Pregnancy and childbirth are extremely demanding, and parenting is extremely difficult to do well. Instead of celebrating parenting and trumpeting how critical it is for society, we push "go make money and spend money" as the high road. That, is really really sad.

Finally, as I said above there is certainly discrimination. The US has more laws on the books than it needs to prosecute people for discrimination. The example from the US is a compliment on the woman's appearance. Really now, being "hot" and "good looking" can somehow make a person "helpless"? Don't tell that to models who make an exceptional living off of _just_ their looks (and make 100 times more than a man for the same job).

Re:Wait a minute

[Anonymous Coward]

The big takeaway is that Tu Youyou managed a Nobel Prize working under a true patriarchal society, under threat from China's cultural revolution, and without a postgraduate degree or study or research experience abroad; nor was she a member of any Chinese national academy.

She has also managed to save millions of lives.

Compare and contrast that to the SJ narrative about women in science.

In a sense, I suppose western women need the SJ narrative as when compared to women actual producing results and with orders of magnitude less privilege, they are found rather lacking.

Another thought from another woman working in medicine:

Now if I were to write a book out of my experience, I should begin Women have no sympathy. Yours is the tradition. Mine is the conviction of experience.

Now look at my experience of men. A statesman, past middle age, absorbed in politics for a quarter of a century, out of sympathy with me, remodels his whole life and policy - learns a science the driest, the most technical, the most difficult, that of administration, as far as it concerns the lives of men - not, as I learnt it, in the field from stirring experience, but by writing dry regulations in a London room by my sofa with me. This is what I call real sympathy.

Another (Alexander, whom I made Director-General) does very nearly the same thing. He is dead too. Clough, a poet born if ever there was one, takes to nursing administration in the same way, for me.

I only mention three whose whole lives were remodeled by sympathy for me. But I could mention very many others...

I have never found one woman who altered her life by one iota for me or my opinions.

Now just look at the degree in which women have sympathy - as far as my experience is concerned. And my experience of women is almost as large as Europe. And it is so intimate too. I have lived and slept in the same bed with English Countesses and Prussian Bauerinnen. No [other woman] has ever had charge of women of the different creeds that I have had. No woman has excited "passions" among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me. My doctrines have taken no hold among women...and I attribute this to a want of sympathy.

It makes me mad, the Women's Rights talk about "the want of a field" for them - when I know that I would gladly give £500 a year for a Woman Secretary. And two English Lady Superintendents have told me the same. And we can't get one ... they don't know the names of the Cabinet Ministers. They don't know the offices at the Horse Guards...Now I'm sure I did not know these things. When I went to the Crimea I did not know a Colonel from a Corporal. But there are such things as Army Lists and Almanacs. Yet I never could find a woman who, out of sympathy, would consult one for my work.

I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe says. But how? In having sympathy.

Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so...They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?

I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let each person tell the truth from his own experience.

-Florence Nightgale

Re:Wait a minute

[serviscope_minor]

So the woman must go find a career and work her ass off to be something, and raising a family has no value, right? It's really sad that so many people buy into this corporate bullshit.

Wow that's selective reading to the point of dishonesty. No one said anything like that anywhere. Point is she was under immense pressure to do the family thing not have a career. It ought to be her choice, not yours.

Yes, there is certainly some discrimination and its bad when it happens. What the person from Nepal describes I don't see as discrimination, I see it as society normal.

So... a discriminatory society is not discriminatory because it's normal...?

Twenty one years old is the middle of a woman's prime health and the best time for her to have kids

So what? You're arguing what precisely? That she ought to do what you want because reasons?

Until men can carry kids to full term and breast feed, there will be an expectation that the woman handles all of the difficult parts of having children. Pregnancy and childbirth are extremely demanding, and parenting is extremely difficult to do well.

Nice sneaky false conflation there. Nothing about carrying kids to term stops men from being parents. Even stay at home ones.

Instead of celebrating parenting and trumpeting how critical it is for society, we push "go make money and spend money" as the high road. That, is really really sad.

And the reason that happens is people like you: instead of actually celebrating parenthood, you are complaining that other people are not living life the way you want them to which in practice mans women raising kids rather than having jobs. You're not celebrating parenthood, you're advocating regressive ideals.

Re:Wait a minute

[chipschap]

So the woman must go find a career and work her ass off to be something, and raising a family has no value, right?

What has value is unencumbered freedom of choice. If a woman chooses to be an engineer, that is a valid choice. If a woman chooses to stay home and raise a family, that too is a valid choice; if she combines both, that's another valid choice.

We go wrong when we assume, based on our own values and choices, what someone else should choose to do. It's not up to us, it's up to them.

Re:Wait a minute

[AmiMoJo]

Most of the people who post comments like the GP's don't really want to celebrate parenthood. They oppose things like more paid maternity and paternity leave, equal wages for people with the the added responsibility of children, and resent them rushing off at 5 when they feel obliged to work to 6 to get everything done.

Society as a whole needs kids. We all have a stake in society's future. Rather than trying to pressure women into becoming mothers because it suits us, we should recognize that the majority of women do want to have kids anyway and it's really just a matter of making sure doing is a career killer or ridiculously expensive.

Re:Wait a minute

[KGIII]

It's easier for the OP to beat up a strawman than it is for them to actually approach things openly and honestly.

Re:Wait a minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh fuck right off.

It's not like everyone doesn't have to make hard choices concerning career and parenthood, and especially in the case of men; they have even less choices, less support from law, less support from government, and an over-riding expectation to sacrifice for their careers just to even be considered for having a family.

And in the face of this, the only response from SJW is a glib "patriarchy hurts men too", completely ignoring how so called progressive ideas reinforce this.

You aren't celebrating parenthood either. You're just using it as a smoke screen as it benefits a select group (state support for single mothers), and deride it when it becomes inconvenient (poor women forced to work because it reinforces feminist ideas).

Re:Wait a minute

[s.petry]

Ahh, so you ignore my comments _and_ claim that my comments mean the opposite of what I said. How about asking for clarity if you are confused about someone's opinion (which was pretty damn clear) instead of inventing your own to suite your bias?

My point is, and was, that women are being pushed into a workplace by society. Parenthood and marriage are not just ignored, but treated with disdain. Show me one of these types of articles that mentions the positives of parenting as opposed to touting how great it is for people to work.

You can't show me any such article because they do not exist.

So you keep on lying to yourself and others if you wish, but just know you are a liar. You have to grossly distort my statement to have a leg to stand on, and even then you are practically falling down. I never said women should be pushed into parenthood, I said that they have the toughest job in parenting and are biologically required for at least 9 months of it. They are required for feeding the baby the most healthy food available, which means that for at least 3 years mom must be a parent if the child is to grow up as healthy as possible.

You want her to work in addition to her duties in bearing a kid? Do you want the state raising kids instead of parents so that mom can race back into a workforce after a minimum year hiatus for having a kid? How is stating that women being parents is at least as important work as being a corporate drone bad? That's what you just portrayed.

Re:Wait a minute

[silentcoder]

>You can't show me any such article because they do not exist.

When your table is always forced to eat beans, and you start demanding some steak - that does not mean you are looking down on other people at your table who enjoy beans and may want some. It just means you don't need to demand beans because you already GOT all the beans you can handle, you do need to demand steak because somewhere a long time ago, a bunch of people who didn't consult your table declared that, that table is only allowed to eat beans.

Feminism does not look down on stay-at-home parents, hell if anything they actively encourage it - especially when dads do it, what they DO look down on is taking the choices away from the individuals involved.
If you want a career and do not want children, you should not be shamed for it.
If you want children rather than a career, you should not be shamed for it.
If you want both, you should not be shamed for that either.

And this goes for ALL genders, it just so happens that since nearly all the shaming is in the direction of women, the bulk of the defending has to be in that direction as well - but when people pick on a stay-at-home-dad whose wife is the breadwinner, every feminist I've ever met will defend their family setup too.

Re:Wait a minute

[silentcoder]

>It's not like everyone doesn't have to make hard choices concerning career and parenthood, and especially in the case of men; they have even less choices, less support from law, less support from government, and an over-riding expectation to sacrifice for their careers just to even be considered for having a family.

And you do know that a major aspect of feminist discourse is about how important it is to change that. That's is a patriarchal inequality motivated by the gender stereotype that women are nurturing and men are not. Breaking down that gender role will benefit women AND men - because it would mean that men could demand (with support from every feminist in the world) that paternity leave be the same length as maternity leave (which 'lo and behold is exactly what has happened in the most feminist societies on earth like Denmark - because feminists declared that men are just as capable of being nurturing as women and should not be deprived the opportunity to do so if they want to).

I sincerely doubt the pressures on men are worse than on women (it just doesn't fit the facts) they are certainly not non-existent and there is a fair share of male specific pressures that create their own hard choices, but your best bet for reducing those pressures and making the choices easier for men is to support feminism - which makes it easier for everybody.

I wish, that I had the means to spend the next few years at home with my daughter every day. I love my job, I love engineering, I love this company, and I love my very nice paycheck... but you know what, if I didn't need that paycheck to feed her, I would happilly give it all up in a heartbeat just to stop seeing that sad look on her face when she waves me goodbye every morning.

Re: Wait a minute

[BarbaraHudson]

Until men can carry kids to full term and breastfeed

Give it time - we've already got the second Parr more or less covered . :-)

Re:Wait a minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Really now? Show me ANY feminist discourse in support of men taking lower stress, lower pay positions. Show me any feminist discourse confronting the higher divorce rate for stay-at-home dads (including equal provision for alimony and child custody). Show me an equal critique of women focusing on high earning men as just as objectifying as men focusing on a woman's appearance. Show me any feminist discourse that single fathers should get the same governmental support that single mothers get. Show me any feminist support that males should have equal consideration for adoption. Show me...

Oh but thank god, we have feminist supporting equal paternity leave, except when they don't

http://leftfootforward.org/2015/02/why-i-want-feminism-and-not-equality-and-why-they-are-not-the-same-thing/

but by all means, let's reduce the subject of supporting parenthood to equal paternity leave.

And funny that even with feminism, you are still the cash cow.

Re:Wait a minute

[silentcoder]

It's not hard to find feminist discourse like you describe, only ALL of it.

oh, ada ?

[Spaham]

I thought all day that it was about Linda !

Re:oh, ada ?

[serviscope_minor]

I thought all day that it was about Linda !

Why does this have to come up on every single thread about Ada Lovelace. Please let it rest. It's not funny.

Re:oh, ada ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does this have to come up on every single thread about Ada Lovelace.

While apparently you meant that as a statement, your choice of grammatical structure is typical of a question, so I will treat it as one.

That bad joke comes up every time because it's still better than the horrible joke that is the story. It doesn't matter what the details of the story are, every one on Slashdot that uses the name "Ada Lovelace" is an ugly attack on the entire alleged Slashdot readerbase accusing all of us of somehow intimidating people we've never met and oppressing women by playing single-player games in darkened rooms and avoiding any optional human interaction.

Seriously, the cognitive dissonance to hold some of those opinions makes the court decision that not engaging in commerce is a form of commerce seem completely rational by comparison.

Re:oh, ada ?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Does it really? I'm seeing it for the first time. It reminds me of the joke about Lance Armstrong at least still being the first man on the Moon. I think you'll just have to get used to this class of name jokes, since people appear to be prone to making them.

Re:oh, ada ?

[serviscope_minor]

Does it really? I'm seeing it for the first time.

Then you must have been studiously ignoring Ada Lovelace threads on slashdot. These are just the ones from the first page of google search results:

http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
http://science.slashdot.org/co...
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...

and that's ignoring the downmodded ones.

Re:oh, ada ?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You think other people have no other thing in life to do than to read every Slashdot thread they can? I simply don't recall it from the few times I saw the name mentioned as a topic. And as I said, people will do this all the time if two famous people share a last name anyway. Ada apparently had just bad luck with her counterpart.

/. is now /SJW

[Anonymous Coward]

This is stupid Social Justice Warrior bullshit. Stick to technical crap and leave feminism and feminist bullshit to facebook memes

Re:/. is now /SJW

[Anonymous Coward]

AAAAAND THERE IT IS! DINGDINGDINGDING! WE HAVE A WINNER!

An article about women in tech? Only took about half an hour for someone to use those three useless little letters.

This isn't SJW bullshit. Go back to your little hole in the ground, you useless MRA.

Re:/. is now /SJW

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the beta....

Re:/. is now /SJW

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the stories is about a woman dealing with 1st World Problems in a 2nd World Country.

"People question my profession because I'm a young attractive woman!"

Oh the humanity, cry me a river why don't you.

A real engineer would do their job and not worry about social media so damn much.

Re:/. is now /SJW

[Speck'sBacon]

And the "No True Scotsman" fallacy rears its ugly head...

Re:/. is now /SJW

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't SJW bullshit.

Sure it is, you feminist hypocrite.

Re:/. is now /SJW

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my GAWD, you're Right!

Everyone stop everything you'er doing, RIGHT FUCKING NOW!

And start Googling yourselves!!
IT'S TO HELP FIGHT MISOGYNY!!!!!
DO IT!!

Re:/. is now /SJW

[Anonymous Coward]

Except RTFA, she's a self-taught engineer, meaning there's a difference.

Take your Scotsman defense and cram it up your ass, you dipshit!

Re:/. is now /SJW

[Speck'sBacon]

I think you've missed my point. Saying a real engineer wouldn't worry about social media is flawed. Plenty of engineers have used social media, and I'm almost certain some subset of those care about other people's opinions, even those on expressed via social media. Engineers don't check their humanity at the door when they start an engineering job.

Genital party

[Anonymous Coward]

So what is the reason why we are celebrating that some people in STEM fields have vaginas?

Frankly it's quite sexist.

Why do you have to celebrate me just because I have one?

Re:Genital party

[Anonymous Coward]

Because those fields are "male-dominated". People also celebrate male achievement in nursing. I think.

Re:Genital party

[Anonymous Coward]

You would be correct! I somehow wound up on a mailing list for professional caregivers, and over in those and related fields (nurse) it's pretty much the same with male caregivers and nurses getting the special attention.

Grace Hopper

[i_ate_god]

She did far more for computer science than Ada Lovelace, and she did far more at defying social gender norms than Ada Lovelace.

If anyone should be celebrated for breaking social barriers AND important contributions at the same time, it should be her, not Lovelace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Grace Hopper

[multimediavt]

She did far more for computer science than Ada Lovelace, and she did far more at defying social gender norms than Ada Lovelace.

If anyone should be celebrated for breaking social barriers AND important contributions at the same time, it should be her, not Lovelace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Or, try going back further into history, like Hypatia or Pythagoras' wife, Theano, and daughters. I'm sure there are more in the eastern cultures as well that may predate those examples. No, it has to be a white chick from Britain that we honor. What a crock of shit!

Re:Grace Hopper

[Faust6]

How does one invalidate the other?

Re:Grace Hopper

[serviscope_minor]

Well, down that road lies a pissing contest with no end.

Ada Lovelace was the first person to realise that an arithmetic machine could represent more than mere arithmetic. That was the first step on the path leading to the Church-Turing thesis. It seems simple and obvious now, but the general idea of computation as you think of it didn't exist.

Admiral Hopper did a lot too and is also worth of celebration.

Re:Grace Hopper

[Anonymous Coward]

She did far more for computer science than Ada Lovelace, and she did far more at defying social gender norms than Ada Lovelace.

If anyone should be celebrated for breaking social barriers AND important contributions at the same time, it should be her, not Lovelace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

its not a competition. they're both amazing.

Re:Grace Hopper

[Anonymous Coward]

Ada Lovelace was the first person to realise that an arithmetic machine could represent more than mere arithmetic.

No she wasn't. She hung around men who were the first people to realize that.

As one of my textbooks said, Ada Lovelace is the most overrated person in all of computer science. And it's a shame because there are women who actually are worth respecting.

Re:Grace Hopper

[AmiMoJo]

There is quite a long list of women who deserve recognition. No need to fret over the name, Lovelace was picked because she was the first, not necessarily the one who made the greatest contribution. That's all.

Others mentioned in the various articles:

Joan Clarke, Betty Webb, Mary Every (Bletchly code breaker)
Radia Perlman (Spanning Tree Protocol)
Hedy Lamarr (frequency hopping)
Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu (speaking out on harassment and women's issues)
Mitchell Baker (Mozilla)
Lila Tretikov (Wikipedia)
Emily Warren Roebling (Bro0kelyn Bridge)
Lise Meitner (nuclear physics)
Sophie Germain (mathematician)
Grace Murray Hopper (computer science, coined "debug")
Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO)

Re:Grace Hopper

[Anonymous Coward]

She did far more for computer science than Ada Lovelace, and she did far more at defying social gender norms than Ada Lovelace.

If anyone should be celebrated for breaking social barriers AND important contributions at the same time, it should be her, not Lovelace.

It's high time we limit people to celebrating one female historical figure. I'm tired of all these SJWs trying to mention more than one, because everyone knows that men only celebrate their achievements on one day a year.

- RooshV

Re:Grace Hopper

[AmiMoJo]

Or, you know, we could just stop fixating on the name of the day and distracting ourselves from the many deserving women mentioned in TFA and the issues raised in TotherFA.

Re:Grace Hopper

[Darinbob]

Ada Lovelace gets the role because she was the first "programmer" (male or female) for a hypothetical automatic computation machine. Not for being first female STEM major, or first female scientist, or first feminist, or anything like that. People used to be proud of her for being the first programmer. Being the first tends to be the person that gets remembered.

Ok, her being a "programmer" is slightly dubious, as no such machine existed. But in computer science terms she layed out the abstract framework for programming.

Re:Grace Hopper

[Anonymous Coward]

One of these things is not like the others,
one of these things doesn't belong,
can you tell which thing is not like the others
by the time I finish this song?

OK, several of those things don't belong. Correct answers include:

Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu (speaking out on harassment and women's issues)
Mitchell Baker (Mozilla)
Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO)

Re:Grace Hopper

[Anonymous Coward]

This is debatable. I would encourage everyone to hop over to fourmilab.ch and read A Sketch of the Analytical Engine along with Lovelace's Notes and see for yourself. There is also the theory that most of what's in the Notes are Babbage's ideas. In particular, we'll probably never know who was the first to note what we know as "garbage in, garbage out."

Babbage (as written up by Menabrea) would appear to have written the "first" computer program, albeit a "hello world" program, and made the basic observations. Lovelace should get credit for expanding on those ideas. Notably she touches on procedural programming, calling what we know as functions/methods/subprograms cycles. A charitable reading of some of her other points would indicate she foresaw MP3 players.

It's possible the reason we can wonder why we don't have a Grace Hopper day is because Lovelace had the misfortune of being stuck in the 19th century and programming for an architecture that may never be built. (There is an emulator, however!)

Re:Grace Hopper

[Anonymous Coward]

> As one of my textbooks said, Ada Lovelace is the most overrated person in all of computer science.

You had a textbook that said that? What a crappy book that must be, for the author to stuff value judgments into what should be an objective pedagogical tool.

Re:Grace Hopper

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't want to included Professional Victims now do we?

Re:Grace Hopper

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Quinn? Sarkeesian? Really!? You dared to place them next to Meitner and Germain? Now I've seen it all... Really, you could replace Sarkeesian with Kim Kardashian and I wouldn't notice the difference in notability.

Re:Grace Hopper

[serviscope_minor]

Wow you're sensitive. Over sensitive one might say. I wonder why.

If you back down from your outraged state for long enough, you will see that he was listing people who were mentioned in the various articles. Are you saying he should have edited his reporting of the facts to make you happier?

Re:Grace Hopper

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The first sentence started with mentioning "women who deserve recognition". I was not the only one to notice the "one of them is not like the others" problem. Why the hell isn't Barbara Liskov or Adele Goldberg mentioned instead? Fuck him.

Re: Grace Hopper

[Anonymous Coward]

But we must acknowledge her bravery for agreeing to pose for a poster because she's an engineer and not because she's a pretty face.

Let's also point out one of the other posters with a dude in the magician's hat, because wtf not?

Re:Grace Hopper

[Anonymous Coward]

The first programmer? Surely not counting Babbage, or are we to believe he never wrote a single program for the machine he designed?

Re:Grace Hopper

[Dutch Gun]

You realize that the phrase pissing contest is gender-exclusive, right? You should use a term like one-upmanship ... oh man! Wait... noooooo!

Re:Grace Hopper

[serviscope_minor]

Why the hell isn't Barbara Liskov or Adele Goldberg mentioned instead?

Because he specifically and explicitly lists the ones mentioned in TFAs.

Your complaints are akin to asking him to make up lies because the truth upsets you.

Re:Grace Hopper

[T.E.D.]

Ok, her being a "programmer" is slightly dubious, as no such machine existed. But in computer science terms she layed out the abstract framework for programming.

She also did much of the work in actually laying out specifically how Babbage's machine actually worked, publishing it, and promoting it to help him get funding. Without her, Babbage's ideas would have been mere vaporware. So if the dude gets to hog all the credit for being the "father of computing" for his two (never fully built) engines, then its more than fair to give her credit for writing actual programs for it, which is only a part of what she contributed. She honestly deserves her title more than Babbage does his.

Re:Grace Hopper

[T.E.D.]

Surely not counting Babbage, or are we to believe he never wrote a single program for the machine he designed?

That is exactly what you are to believe, because it is in fact the case. The machines themselves were never fully built (until modern times), so her programs are the only ones ever written for them. In fact, her programs acted as a "reference implementations" to help specify exactly how the machine operated, so she probably deserves some credit for helping design the machine as well.

Re:Grace Hopper

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize that the phrase pissing contest is gender-exclusive, right? You should use a term like one-upmanship ... oh man! Wait... noooooo!

Females can direct the stream using a pair of fingers. Some of them have learned how to do this while wearing pants to enable using urinals to skip long lines.
They can, and do, have pissing contests in the same fashion as men urinating for distance.

Re:Grace Hopper

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw a sign in a unisex bathroom indicating how to manually flush the auto-flush toilet "for those who stand." Can't even assume they're male if they have a penis anymore.

engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the link about Isis Anchalee:

I’m a full-stack engineer at OneLogin...I am a passionate self-taught engineer

She is quite attractive. But self-taught full-stack engineer just doesn't sound right to me. More like "self-taught coder".

Re: engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

The narrative demands she be called an engineer. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a neck beard virgin Misogynist!

Anyone else?

Was AL really a programmer?

[DavidHumus]

As far as I know, Lovelace elaborated some of the theoretical aspects of programming but, since Babbage never finished his "Analytical Engine", she never had to do the hard work of getting code to run on actual hardware. To my mind, this is the nitty-gritty of coding. Without this, Lovelace cannot be anything more than a software architecht, albeit a "PowerPoint architect" (without the PowerPoint) - http://randomactsofarchitectur... .

Re:Was AL really a programmer?

[serviscope_minor]

Church's lambda calculus did not run on a real machine at the time. Neither did LISP at the time of its invention. Based on what's known of the analytical engine, Ada Lovelace's programs would have run correctly.

Very much early computer science was not done on actual computers, especially in the 1950s in mainland Europe. I remember going to a talk by Dijkstra shortly before his death where he talked about this a bit. Things were so wiped out after the war that no one could afford a computer. So they did stuff on paper.

But by your measure, you've just dismissed Dijkstra's early years as nothing more than a software architect.

Re:Was AL really a programmer?

[Arnold Reinhold]

Read her stuff. She got it. Here is a quote from a review by Countess Lovelace of an article about the Analytical Engine by an Italian engineer, Menabrea, that neatly sums up the multidisciplinary nature of computer architecture: "We refer the reader to the ‘Edinburgh Review’ of July 1834, for a very able account of the Difference Engine. The writer of the article we allude to has selected as his prominent matter for exposition, a wholly different view of the subject from that which M. Menabrea has chosen. The former chiefly treats it under its mechanical aspect, entering but slightly into the mathematical principles of which that engine is the representative, but giving, in considerable length, many details of the mechanism and contrivances by means of which it tabulates the various orders of differences. M. Menabrea, on the contrary, exclusively developes the analytical view; taking it for granted that mechanism is able to perform certain processes, but without attempting to explain how; and devoting his whole attention to explanations and illustrations of the manner in which analytical laws can be so arranged and combined as to bring every branch of that vast subject within the grasp of the assumed powers of mechanism. It is obvious that, in the invention of a calculating engine, these two branches of the subject are equally essential fields of investigation, and that on their mutual adjustment, one to the other, must depend all success. They must be made to meet each other, so that the weak points in the powers of either department may be compensated by the strong points in those of the other. They are indissolubly connected, though so different in their intrinsic nature, that perhaps the same mind might not be likely to prove equally profound or successful in both. ”

Re:Was AL really a programmer?

[AmiMoJo]

Lots of noted computer scientists have written software for machines that didn't exist. No-one built a Turing machine during Turing's lifetime, for example. Several people wrote software for quantum computers before they existed.

Writing theoretical software for theoretical machines is a useful way of figuring out if they are worth building or if the design could be modified to perform better. Lovelace's work influenced Babbage's later designs, which in turn influenced the development of other machines that were eventually built.

Re:Was AL really a programmer?

[DavidHumus]

Yes. Yes, I did.

Re:Was AL really a programmer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wtf are you talking about? Alonzo Church died in 1995... more than 40 years after the first implementation of LISP. The only way you can claim that lambda calculus did not run on a real machine is by abusing abiguity by using the phrase "that time" without specifying what time you mean. Here's the rub: Given the context, that is whether or not he could have coded using lambda calculus, "that time" should obviously refer to the lifetime of Alonzo Church. There was a 40 year period where he could, in fact, code using functional languages derived from his lambda calculus. To suggest that Alonzo church wasn't a coder (as Ada must certainly wasn't) is just silliness.

Re:Was AL really a programmer?

[serviscope_minor]

Right, well then you're not using commonly accepted definitions. Try speaking actual English, not your own private version.

Re:Was AL really a programmer?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I think the distinction is maybe more between a computer scientist and a programmer. If we were to accept her as the latter, it might require significantly broadening the definition. At least the usual understanding of the term as being a practical vocation can't possibly apply since nobody paid her for the job. It is not generally understood in the sense of "any person that at least once in life formalizes or semi-formalizes a computational process" today.

Re:Was AL really a programmer?

[cbhacking]

Since when does "programmer" imply "vocation"? Serious question, in case I wasn't clear. What do you base this claim on?

Was Linux not a programmer when he wrote the early versions of the Linux kernel?
Was Stallman not a programmer when he re-implemented the commercial version of Emacs as an open-source program?
Am I not a programmer because, despite having written thousands of lines of C++ in the last week, I did it on my own time and for reasons only mildly related to my day job (which involves computers, but not software development specifically)?

Programming can be a vocation, but "programmer" does not imply "professional programmer". Lots of people program without being paid to do it. Hell, students are usually paying, rather than being paid. Open source developers are rarely paid. Hobbyists who never publish anything are, almost by definition, not paid.

As I understand it, the definitions are very simple. To program, as a verb, to write programs (implication here of computer programs). A programmer is a person who programs. Vocations, pay, and so forth don't enter into it at all. You seem to have a very different view of the term from what almost everybody else uses...

The problem with the ad

[phantomfive]

The reason people got upset about the ad is because it's clearly trying to use her attractiveness to get attention.

The ad itself is sexist.
Its using sex appeal to get people to do things.
People get upset because they know its a lie. Working at that company will not get you surrounded by beautiful women.

It has nothing to do with the model they used, and whether she's a programmer or not.
It's the experience her managers are trying to sell.

Re:The problem with the ad

[XxtraLarGe]

The reason people got upset about the ad is because it's clearly trying to use her attractiveness to get attention.

I suppose you could get that if you were looking at her ad in isolation, but it appears to be a series of ads that includes two guys of whom nobody probably questioned the validity of their acclaimed professions. It's not her fault that she's easy to look at.

Re:The problem with the ad

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't very attractive though...
Or did you not "chose" to notice that?

Re:The problem with the ad

[phantomfive]

I saw them all when they were live in BART.
I wondered whether they were real or not, then moved on with my day.

Re:The problem with the ad

[Anonymous Coward]

That's interesting. I hadn't considered that.

My experience has been that the whole Ada Lovelace story carries with it the toxic baggage that things haven't changed in regards to gender and programming since her time. Wasn't there a film somebody wanted to make where some woman invents a time machine and takes Lovelace to the present day just so she can admonish all those evil cis male misogynerds for being just as sexist as the 19th century? Lovelace did face some incredible barriers she was able to break through. On that basis, I would think she might instead admonish all these gender lunatics who blame people who love programming for the actions and words of high school counselors, elementary school teachers, and PHBs who are the ones really pushing women away from programming.

One anecdote I've picked up is a guy who tried and tried to get female co-workers who would come to him asking that he "teach them programming" to do tasks that required programming knowledge eventually became a misogynist after being admonished by a co-worker who didn't have any technical knowledge whatsoever for bugs in a piece of proprietary software he didn't have any say in purchasing or even the decision to use it. Apparently, because the "first programmer" was a woman, the bugs were his fault, because if the company had hired a woman for his position, the (3rd party, closed source) software wouldn't have those problems. Basically called both incompetent and sexist to his face. Spent years with a chip on his shoulder about women and computers.

I hope that is not the end result people pushing the Lovelace story want. However, it turns out a good way to make a misogynist is to presume him a misogynist against his words and actions and hold him accountable for other people's failures and things beyond his control.

Somebody hook a power generator up to Lovelace since she's probably spinning in her grave.

Re:The problem with the ad

[the gnat]

This was my reaction too. Most of us working in highly technical fields have encountered stunningly beautiful (but nonetheless competent) female engineers. We are also acutely aware of the fact that women in general are very underrepresented in software development. I'm 100% in favor of encouraging more women to pursue technical careers, but in the current environment, my reaction whenever I see an ad like that is to assume it's trying to manipulate lonely male engineers. (Which probably says more about me than the makers of the ad, but the point isn't that the ad is wrong, it's that the backlash is entirely predictable in context.)

I find the Dice ads repulsive, of course, but at least they're acknowledging (and laughing at) the fact that a very large fraction of engineers are hairy, nerdy, not-very-athletic young men. (Also note that it's not considered at all inappropriate to mock hairy, nerdy, not-very-athletic male engineers.)

Re:The problem with the ad

[AmiMoJo]

The reason people got upset about the ad is because it's clearly trying to use her attractiveness to get attention.

I don't think that is supposed by the evidence. There were three ads, two of them with male engineers who also worked at the company. She didn't put on make-up or brush her hair, or go out of her way to look alluring or like a model.

What upset people is that if it had been a good looking guy people would not have assumed he couldn't be an engineer. She also mentions getting this reaction in person. It's hard to believe but I've seen it happen. We had a rep from Seagate come over, she was extremely attractive and some of the guys assumed she was just there to flirt with them. She came with lots of technical info and was able to answer some detailed questions we had, which is why we invited her in the first place.

It reminds me of a puzzle from a 1960s boy's magazine. A father and son are out driving. They are in a terrible accident and the father is killed, but the boy survives. His injuries are severe so they rush him to hospital. They are just wheeling him in to surgery when the doctor says "I can't operate on him, he's my son!" How is this possible?

It's sad that some people still find that question hard.

Re:The problem with the ad

[phantomfive]

She didn't put on make-up or brush her hair

Dude, the article says she wore make-up and her hair has a part.

Re:The problem with the ad

[slimjim8094]

What upset people is that if it had been a good looking guy people would not have assumed he couldn't be an engineer.

You seriously think this is true? Really and actually?

The stereotype is *absolutely* that engineers are not good-looking people of any gender. A good looking Calvin Klein-style (or wherever it is the hot guys are nowadays) man would *absolutely* take flack over whether he was a real engineer or just a model. Frankly the assumption is that people in any of those kinds of ads *are* models and it's sort of a surprise if *anyone* in an ad isn't (and even when they say "real customer" in a commercial I'm not sure I believe it).

Look, I'm really sympathetic if you are an engineer and happen to be female and at a conference people assume you're a recruiter or something. Assumptions suck when they're wrong, and I've been there. The one about being assumed to be the waiter and given an order is an old joke. But without assumptions about people the world doesn't work.

I dare you to avoid assuming *anything* about the next person you meet at work. Start with "do you speak English/native language", then which pronoun (he/she/they/it/xe) they prefer, then where they work (maybe they're visiting!), etc. These and thousands more are assumptions you make all day every day. The alternative is utter insanity.

Is it a problem? Sure, sometimes you mess up - like thinking someone works at a store when they don't - and it's awkward. You fix your assumption and move on. If you don't actually change your mental model right away, then there's a problem - with the woman-at-conference-who's-a-developer example, you'd better not avoid asking her technical questions or asking a less senior male coworker instead, etc, as that is like the definition of sexism. It does happen and those people are 100% part of the problem.

But we're trying to make certain assumptions not acceptable, even if they are highly likely to be accurate. Good luck with that. A buddy of mine in college was - to put it mildly - a good-looking well-toned guy, and I constantly got asked jokingly-but-half-serious if (with varying levels of obfuscation) he was a dumb jock and I was the nerd he made do his computer homework. It was insulting to both of us, but we both understood that it was a more common situation than the good-looking muscly guy being a brilliant CS major, for that same guy to be hanging out with a nerd like me, and for that nerd to be so desperate to "hang out with the cool kids" to be willing to do someone else's homework. No, no, and no - but we got why people thought it and never got too annoyed unless they kept at it.

Slashdot = illuminati controlled propaganda outlet

[Anonymous Coward]

SJW's rejoice!

This holiday offends me.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll continue to celebrate Bjarne Stroustrop Day, thank you very much!

And that is it

[Intrepid imaginaut]

I'm done with slashdot. No more faux-outrage mentally ill social engineer victim narratives will take up another instant of my time, thanks. If anyone can recommend a better site for actual tech issues leave it in the comments.

Re:And that is it

[serviscope_minor]

I'm done with slashdot.

Thank god for that.

Re:And that is it

[Anonymous Coward]

Bye.

Re:And that is it

[Anonymous Coward]

When they find out about you, and they will, your feminism won't help you.

There is no "lots". There is no "one" actually...

[denzacar]

That ONE single post she quotes as an example of "Lots of people" went like this (retyped for your reading pleasure):

This is some weird haphazard branding. I think they want to appeal to women, but are probably just appealing to dudes.
Perhaps that's the intention all along. But I'm curious people with brains find this quote remotely plausible and if women in particular buy this image of what female software engineer looks like. Idk. Weird.

The post never questions whether she is an engineer OR what an engineer should look like.
It questions a trite marketing-lingo quote ("My team is great. Everyone is smart, creative and hilarious.") - which was at the center of the puns aimed at the campaign poster before SJW's showed up...
...and a stereotypical image of a representation of a female techie - when supposedly aimed at women, but actually aimed at "dudes".

E.g. Young (no witches), thin (no fatties), "foreign" (Janie can't tech), handsome (no uglies) and that old staple - glasses because glasses==smart.
That last bit is made even more obvious with her "everyday" photo in her post where she clearly doesn't wear glasses at work.
But is still young and pretty... but not nerdy. Sorry. Can't use THAT photo cause women need such guiding symbols to know that she is a techie.
Stereotypes... Some of them are true. Like what marketing drones think that a representation of a "smart" female SHOULD look like.

It's not about whether someone is an #engineer but what a female engineer SHOULD be like.
Because that is what ads do - unless there is an explicit "NO!", ad is an idealized representation of what something SHOULD look/be/act like.
So... While a female should comment about creative and hilarious teams... you know... girly stuff...
B3ard0 has the autonomy to get things done while "foreign dude" secures data of Fortune 500 companies with his code.

Now, while one would have to really be looking for an excuse to find that post to be representative of "solid examples of the sexism that plagues tech"... from her own words... "socially-accepted, 'smart' and 'normal' guys" and definitely "not bad people" do this:

- I've had men throw dollar bills at me in a professional office(by an employee who works at that company, during work hours).
- I've had an engineer on salary at a bootcamp message me to explicitly 'be friends with benefits' while I was in the interview process at the school he worked for.

One of these things is not like the other...
Now... I may be overacting a bit... but I'm pretty certain that those are NOT "not bad people" and that such acts would earn that someone an immediate and permanent injury where I live.
From the "object" of their "attention", not some self-righteous crusader for societal justice.
At the very least a scene noticeable from a radius of at least several kilometers. Which would include some light physical "attention".
Like a slap, punch, kick or having something significantly harder than a dollar thrown at the culprit. And I'm not talking Euros.

A more civilized society might get them a lawsuit or a cardboard box to take their belongings in while being escorted out to the gate.
But certainly, THAT would not be "not bad people" and "normal guys" or "socially-accepted".

But... she thinks THAT is fine and OK, while a rather neutral post is... "solid example of the sexism that plagues tech".
Now... I can't say I'm a mind reader...
But, while that blog post (from August 1st) about reaction to a marketing campaign has all that HASHTAGsexism HASHTAGiLookLikeAnEngineer HASHTAGonlineActivism... there's this bit:

My stories have become such a source of inspi

Re:There is no "lots". There is no "one" actually.

[KGIII]

She looks almost like my daughter. How odd. My daughter's finished med school and is now working in an emergency room. I don't think anyone questions if she's a doctor. At least not in this day and age. They might have back when I was a kid though. Seriously, they might have.

Re:There is no "lots". There is no "one" actually.

[KGIII]

Also, she has a rather unfortunate name. Not my daughter - the lady in the image you linked. I'm glad I didn't name my daughter 'Isis.' Actually, the thought never crossed my mind.

SJWs Have Destroyed Geek Comradery

[Anonymous Coward]

Geeks knew about Ada Lovelace decades ago, when Hipsters still looked down on this industry. Knowing about Lovelace, along with Babbage's machine, was an accept part of geek lore. It was part of the shared heritage of the Bazzar, like Star Wars or PDP-11s. You just knew about it. They named a language after her in the 70s for christssake.

Now the new cultural conservatives, the "SJWs", have conscripted Lovelace into their campaign to demonise this industry, and geekdom as a whole as being anti-women and misogynist. They're using her as a weapon to bring their sex and culture wars into an industry built on merit for what you can do, not who you are. She can't just be the figure we knew as the first programmer who was also a woman and could mention at dinner parties. Now she's a marytr/tragic-tale/constant reminder that we are all horrible people and we all exclude women and we're all sick nerds etc, etc, and these lying hipster goons have ruined her like they're ruining everything we have.

Programming is above gender, or religion, or age, or race, or what fucking sci-fi show you prefer. It was always above this. We don't need some balding ex-creep to project his past actions onto our past or present. Ada has always belonged to this industry and we don't have to stand by and see her corpse waved around on a propagandists' pole.

Linda Lovelace, who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linda Lovelace takes John Holmes STEM baby.

Re:There is no "lots". There is no "one" actually.

[denzacar]

Was your daughter used as poster child, representing an ethnic and racial AND "gender" minority whose poster child persona was used to promote "hilarious and creative greatness" of her team - while poster boys talked shop in their posters?

Would you question a representation of your daughter's career choice summed up with her photo and "My team is great. Everyone is smart, creative and hilarious." - while REAL doctors talked about saving lives and helping people in their representations of their careers, right next to hers?
What about if she was the only young and good looking female in the campaign while guys were all older and fatter and... well, to male eyes certainly - uglier?
How much of her med school knowledge could be gleaned from such a poster?

Again...
SJWs made that ONE SINGLE critique of a marketing campaign quote into "Whatcha mean 'look like'?" storm over a supposed "lots of people" assault at her looks, sex, gender...
The ONE SINGLE poster questioned if that is what is aimed at women as a representation of what women believe that a female engineer TALKS LIKE and looks like - or if that is what is aimed at men as "sexy nerd girl".
Pretty, young, friendly and interested... but not really someone with much expert knowledge and experience.

As for her name...
Bah... It stood for thousands of years as a name of a goddess. She could do a lot worse.
And whatever the case... Going after her for her NAME would be quite a literal ad hominem.
And a childish one at that. I know. Nobody teased me about mine (Denis rhymes with penis in my language) since... the '80s?

Daughter of Lord Byron

[Anonymous Coward]

"born 10 December 1815 as the only legitimate child of the poet George, Lord Byron and his wife Anne Isabella Noel"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

Pens and pencils

[cwsumner]

The reason people didn't believe she was an engineer, is that she didn't have any pens and pencils in her shirt pocket. You can't be an engineer without a pocket protector and some pens and pencils, right! 8-)

Unconsious stereotypes are everywhere...