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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.
is calling it an "anti diversity" memo... .thats not what it was in the slightest.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
As I read the memo, it acknowledge that sexism was an issue. Even in the first paragraph.
I think not rationally responding to someone's point is becoming rampant in tech.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
Older white males doubly so because we are also hated by younger white males who hate everybody else who is not like them
She was ignored and talked over until she became the CEO, what a sad story. :(
"Virtue signaling at its peak in SV ivory tower."
I've had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by
While this may be sexism at work and there certainly is sexism in the field, pretty much everyone experiences having their thoughts interrupted and ignored until rephrased by someone else, with someone else getting the credit for those thoughts.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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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> The FACT is that women ruled tech jobs, until men decided they were too profitable for the little ladies and took over. Women were the first computers, calculating endless numbers for a multitude of businesses and government offices.
That isn't a tech job, that was an accounting job.
Did women rule Edison's laboratories and the radar labs in WW2?
There are more women in technical jobs today, than in 1900.
and NONE of that has anything to do with anything. you obviously didnt read the memo.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
She says her feelings were hurt due to her experiences...
coincidentally this vaguely reminds me of a someone who once wrote up a memo about how men and woman can react differently due to biological differences.
I cant quite remember where or who said it, oh well, I'm sure someone can google it for me.
What's the one word to describe women who can't handle the idea that men may be better than them at [fill in the blank]?
And is that one word equally pejorative and dismissive?
Why is it so hard to admit there is rampant sexism in tech? It's been true for at least 20 years, probably longer. It was definitely true during my time in the industry.
Just start by admitting there's a problem.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
The fact that so many men line up to express outrage and hysteria over every single Slashdot story like this is the best proof that there is a serious need for more women in tech jobs.
You are welcome on my lawn.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/0...
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.
Or she's just wrong. Choosing not to believe in something doesn't make it go away.
I'm sure there are plenty of parents telling their children that climate change isn't real, but that isn't going to stop global temperatures from increasing.
And really it comes down to about the same thing. There are some people who have built their world view around a belief that isn't true, and even when presented with large amounts of evidence to suggest otherwise they will continue to dismiss it. I've found that there are very few people who are scientifically minded and rational and even if they did accept the reality of both climate change and sex-based biological differences, there're just as likely to be off the reservation in some other area like the link between vaccination and autism, GMO food, or even something as laughable as the age of the earth.
I don't think anyone's really immune and humans have some terrible cognitive inclinations that make us unwilling to let go of view points once we've latched on to them. I was recently at a family reunion and watched some of my relatives get into an argument over some idiotic event in the past for almost five hours. Even after someone got annoyed enough to dig up an old photo on Facebook to prove their point, the other person still wouldn't admit they were wrong and started inventing all kinds of fanciful reasons to explain away the photo. It was kind of surreal, but I've done the same plenty of times myself. I think there should be a class in school about being wrong about whatever and learning to accept new data that challenges our original assumptions.
Industrial welders can make six-figures easily. (Work on an oil rig.) Truck drivers and heavy machinery operators also.
And PS, so can nurses (at least in much of Canada), with just a bit of overtime.
Are you that white-collar that you have no idea that blue-collar people can actually earn quite well?
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)
Women should not be discouraged from studying CS, Engineering, Math any science
On the contrary. They're encouraged with much more passion than any man ever has been. And they're still not very interested.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I think there are probably some very good and legitimate criticisms that can be made of this memo. I am not even necessarily opposed to this engineer being fired.
But why lie about the contents of the memo? I am very sympathetic to the idea that diversity is a good thing (as apparently the author of the memo was as well), but I am completely turned off by the fact that the strategy utilized by "the other side" (not the other side from me... yet) is to lie about what's in it.
It is not anti-diversity. Maybe it's wrong. But it being wrong doesn't make it automatically anti-diversity. Redistributing this falsehood is intellectually dishonest.
I don't want to be on a side that's wrong. I also don't want to be on a side that's dishonest.
[and btw, you don't really make a 20+ year career in the old field, even men generally last 5 to 10 years before being fed up of the working condition ]
Man-hating post-modernists are doing their level best to destroy any business or entity that doesn't elevate women to the point of female supremacy and doesn't toe the line. Any entity that even questions their claims, or doesn't kow-tow to their claims. They despise any attempt to curb their sadly growing power and their institutionalization of blatant, open sexism. This group tells blatant lies and relies on round tables of repeated misinformation through media outlets to spread their insidious philosophy.
Sexism is pervasive and we need to halt it now.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
You need to pick a less obvious mouthpiece. Nice try, though, Google.
Women don't need to tell me I'm not biologically suited to nursing. I already know it.
And as a man "in tech", I can state that I do not force women or anyone else out. Maybe you're thinking of management, which frequently seems disproportionately concerned with stereotypical appearances, usually in a negative way. "In tech", we generally take a merit-based view of things. Can you do the job? If so, good. Can you be trained to do the job? If so, train well, and you're on board. Could you do the job or be trained to do the job, but want things handed to you because of some stereotype you think holds you back and so the world owes you? Get. The. Fuck. Out. I don't want you. I don't care if you have a hole or a pole, you're a useless pile of meat that isn't pulling its own weight.
The main problem I see is that the inmates at Google started running the asylum. And when a meritocratic ideology begins to take hold and someone dares to call the SJW's out for being what they are (entitled with a victim complex), they cry like babies in the most public possible forums until they get their way.
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...
You should tell the homeless white guys I see every day about their privileged existence. I'm sure they'd love to hear from you.
It will certainly improve my chances of being allowed to telecommute every day.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
Most white males don't have any power.
This. The 1% are thriving by convincing everyone that it's all the white males fault. Most white males aren't part of the 1% however by protecting themselves they keep the mob somewhat at bay and by extension protect the 1%. If you ever want to stop the 1% then think of all the fragments required to piece together a 99% (hint that will include deplorables and others that you don't like). Until you're willing to stop insisting on complete agreement with any given agenda other than economics the 1% will thrive while the peons argue about bathrooms, abortion, guns, and , in this case, benign essays.
I grieve because 'we are the 99%' is a brilliant slogan and an absolutely spot on argument. Unfortunately it's just too easy to fragment the 99% into much smaller groups and get them to fight each other while the middle class declines further.
Not only did a single woman calculate the reentry for Grissom she HAD TO DISCOVER THE NEEDED MATH.
I would like to see you stream a Stock KSP session where you recreate Grissoms flight with only RSS installed as mods.
(i think you have 20 square miles to land in)
Oh and do the calcs by hand on paper with only a simple calculator
I'm still waiting for somebody from either side of this nonsense to clearly explain what exactly penises and vaginas have to do with programming computers.
The computer hardware doesn't care if you have a penis or a vagina.
The programming language(s) being used don't care if you have a penis or a vagina.
The libraries and frameworks being used don't care if you have a penis or a vagina.
In most corporate environments, it's likely that one's penis or one's vagina is hidden under several layers of clothing while engaging in computer programming. (I know some Rubyists like to type with their penises, but we don't find them in corporate environments.)
So what exactly do penises and vaginas have to do with computer programming?
The computer hardware cares about your code.
Your code comes from your mind.
Your mind is produced by your brain.
Your brain is made from your DNA and bathes in hormones.
That same DNA and hormones that defined your gender.
Gender have biological differences. Claiming there aren't is ignoring reality.
Claiming those differences make a gender better at programming is an unsubstantiated hypothesis.
But if you go back to the original memo, never did he claim that women are worse at programming. He said they are more neurotic, more agreeable, more open toward feelings and aesthetics. Which is supported by science.
He said those differences _may_ explain why less women in average have an interest in STEM. Again, I have seen noone, here or elsewhere, or in the original memo, claiming women can't program as well as men.
He then proposed that to make google friendlier to women, to make software engineering more people-oriented, to make tech and leadership positions less stressful, etc. and to not deceive students by embellish what tech actually is.
On the other hand, I've seen plenty of people who obviously didn't read it strawman it like crazy, a bit like what you're doing, and claiming there is no difference between genders, including youtube's and google's ceos, which is blatant denial of reality on the scale of climate change denial. This is sad.
The 1% are thriving by convincing everyone that it's all the white males fault. Most white males aren't part of the 1% however by protecting themselves they keep the mob somewhat at bay and by extension protect the 1%.
The greatest con of 2016 was 1%ers like Trump convincing people that he really cares for the underclass and will totally fight for them. And the underclass was dumb enough to believe him his nonsense, despite being shown time and time and time again that this is bullshit.