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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.
"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.
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.
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.
If we want to treat people as equals, perhaps we shouldn't think of each other as belonging to arbitrary groups.
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/...
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
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... .
Yes, you can group people by any number of different characteristics that really have no relevance to the workplace.
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
Worst haiku ever.
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.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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?
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.
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?
No they aren't, rates are climbing.
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.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
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 ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *