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In Response To Anti-diversity Memo, YouTube CEO Says Sexism in Tech is 'Pervasive' (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has responded to the Google anti-diversity memo, writing in a column for Fortune that the questioning of women's abilities is "pervasive" in tech and that the memo is "yet another discouraging signal to young women who aspire to study computer science." Wojcicki opens by saying her daughter asked her, "Is it true that there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership?" Wojcicki says no, it's not true, but the question has still plagued her throughout her career. "I've had meetings with external leaders where they primarily addressed the more junior male colleagues. I've had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by men. No matter how often this all happened, it still hurt," she wrote. In the meanwhile, The Guardian reported on Wednesday that more than 60 current and former Google women employees are considering suing Google on the grounds of sexism and a pay gap.
I've had useless coworkers in several fields, races, and genders. Most of the time I encounter a girl programmer, she's not very good--probably because about 95% of all programmers I encounter are not very good. Pigeon hole principle.
So, to recap: I've encountered about 12-15 male programmers who weren't very good and 2 female programmers who weren't very good in the past 10 years. I've encountered 1 non-shitty male programmer and 0 non-shitty female programmers. Jeff Attwood doesn't count because I haven't worked directly with him or had to support his development team. Statistically, there's a huge problem with sample size here.
As for leadership positions? The field of project management is strangely full of men who function as mindless bureaucrats and women with star performance. I don't know why. Tres Roeder spearheaded the inclusion of project stakeholder management in the latest edition of the PMBOK; maybe women are pretty good at that and men are generally fucking terrible. We can make guesses all day, and most of them will probably be wrong.
Let's try not to draw conclusions from low-quality information, or make simple conclusions about vastly-complex topics.
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Google management is now actively white washing the news never addressing what was in the memo and spreading pure BS, people have to read themselves the memo and compare what Google management is saying, things don't add up at all.
When she was 3-4 she started playing minecraft.
When she was 6, we assembled her first PC.
When she was 9, we upgraded her video card.
She's 11 now. She understands underlying components, she understands basic TCP/IP networking. She understands partitions, how to install an OS. She knows what to not click, and how to keep her computer free of crap. At 11, she's got an equal understanding of tech from when I started at 20. Yet she doesn't want to do it. She wants to be an artist. She thinks all babies are super cute. People call her "Mini-me" because she looks like me, and is good with computers like me. There's nothing wrong with saying, "She's biologically predisposed to not go into an engineering role"
She never played with dolls or barbies. Always computers, her choice. Yet she does not want to go into an engineering role like her mom and dad. (Actually, her mom moved onto management years ago)
And here you are virtue signaling about how much you hate SJWs and virtue signaling.
Kinda ironic really.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Also, welding machine / cables can be super heavy. My gf friend is an electrician and need men's help to carry some wire spools because she's too weak to carry these.
A good friend of mine is a female journeyman industrial electrician. She's fully cognicent that she doesn't have the strength to do certain tasks, but has advantages in other ways. On the job, she basically makes a deal with the guys. They do the heavy work, she squeezes into the stupid nooks and crannies where they have to do work, or climbs up on the wire platform, or whatever, where it would be impossible for the guys to get to.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Really? You're really using that insult?
. Two of them, including the aforementioned one, were obvious diversity hires
Yeah because shit male developers never get hired apart from all the fucking time. I love how only the bad female developers are separated out for comment.
The two of them made the lives of the other female developers miserable, just from suspicion and spillover,
That's literally sexism in action. No one seems to ever consider "that guy" (you know the one) to some how cast doubt and suspicion on all male developers, yet when you get bad female developers there's suspicion and spillover.
What the fuck ever happened to merit over gender?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Google leadership really, really wants more people to choose tech as a career. The under representation of women in tech makes them a big juicy target. So they are doing everything they can to socially-engineer women to want to go into tech.
When someone points out that there are perfectly valid, biological reasons why many women might not want to do this, that undermines the whole effort. The last thing they want is for an on-the-fence young woman to start thinking it is "ok" to stick to professions that are more popular among women because she, too, is wired to dislike a career in tech. On the contrary, they would absolutely love it if they could make women feel ashamed of themselves for not throwing themselves into tech (of course, they can't have that, so they are focusing on the "it's great for women and all women naturally love it and are great at it" message).
Don't get caught up in the "sexism" smoke and mirrors. That has nothing to do with the memo, nor the firing. It's all about the social engineering, which cannot abide the harsh light of truth.
I (female) have been in the software industry since the 80's. My first job was with a small company that made custom printer interface cards. I constituted the entire tech support and software maintenance department (as I said, small company!).
I would sometimes get calls from customers having problems who would simply not accept what I was telling them. In cases like these I would go down the hall to a male coworker's office and tell him that I had a customer that "needed a deeper voice". He (manager - no technical knowledge) would take the call with me on the extension at the back of the room mouthing the answers to the customer's questions which he would then speak into the phone. The customer would then be quite satisfied with the answers and we would have a good laugh.
I suspect that things have improved some since then but still run into people who seem to "need a deeper voice".
Thanks for mansplaining the previous comment.