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Sexual Harassment In Tech Is As Old As the Computer Age (ieee.org)
Tekla Perry writes: Historian Marie Hicks, speaking at the Computer History Museum talks about how women computer operators and programmers were driven out of the industry, gives examples of sexual harassment dating back to the days of the Colossus era, and previews her next research. "It's all a matter of power, Hicks pointed out -- and women have never had their share of it," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Women dominated computer programming in its early days because the field wasn't seen as a career, just a something someone could do without a lot of training and would do for only a short period of time. Computer jobs had no room for advancement, so having women 'retire' in their 20s was not seen as a bad thing. And since women, of course, could never supervise men, Hicks said, women who were good at computing ended up training the men who ended up as their managers. But when it became clear that computers -- and computer work -- were important, women were suddenly pushed out of the field."
Hicks has also started looking at the bias baked into algorithms, specifically at when it first crossed from human to computer. The first example she turned up had "something to do with transgender people and the government's main pension computer." She says that when humans were in the loop, petitions to change gender on national insurance cards generally went through, but when the computer came in, the system was "specifically designed to no longer accommodate them, instead, to literally cause an error code to kick out of the processing chain any account of a 'known transsexual.'"
Hicks has also started looking at the bias baked into algorithms, specifically at when it first crossed from human to computer. The first example she turned up had "something to do with transgender people and the government's main pension computer." She says that when humans were in the loop, petitions to change gender on national insurance cards generally went through, but when the computer came in, the system was "specifically designed to no longer accommodate them, instead, to literally cause an error code to kick out of the processing chain any account of a 'known transsexual.'"
It isnâ(TM)t like in the work environment we are hugging and touching the other guys
Now that's just utter bollocks. I've been hugged by many men and women in the workplace, touched on the arms, back, shoulders and head by a lot and touched on the leg by a couple.
Physical contact in the workplace is commonplace, for men and women.
rating their sexual assets
I've sat with women discussing which man from the call centre they'd like a tumble with.
I've sat with a man that's been pointing out the male construction workers across the canal he'd like to fuck.
Sex is part of life, and it does happen in the workplace.
We can have friendly relations with employees without crossing that line.
Some people can't. I've been accused of sexual harassment for holding the door open for someone; I mentioned this a few years later and someone else said they'd been reported to HR for exactly the same thing. Some women are so fucking paranoid about harassment that basic courtesies are being misinterpreted.
If you are too stupid to know when you are getting in the gray zone where harassment could be considered then you really should stay out of society.
Given all that, no. Society should fucking well fix itself so that the grey zone gains some clarity, because right now it's a fucking mess that's impossible to navigate.
There is nothing illegal in flirting with women.
For a feminist any such advance is a rape, yes, but they are a sicko tribe, next to some Stone Age Saudis that keep their women in burlap bags for life.
Well, I'm old enough to have met a number of these women, so I can clear a few things up.
First of all, in the very earliest electronic computers there wasn't really such a strong division between operating a computer and programming it. You had to rewire the computers for each new problem. Second, there wasn't always such a strong division between operations and programming even in stored program computers; that division was sharper in business data processing than it was in scientific and technical computing. Third, yes, there were lots and lots of women who absolutely were what we'd consider "programmers" today.
You have to understand a few things. First, computers really took off in WW2, and a shortage of men on the homefront opened up a lot of jobs for women. I knew a woman (passed away now) who got a degree in math from an Ivy League university; her expected career path was marriage, but instead she went to work programming on a number of early computers, from Harvard's Mark 1 (1944) through MIT's Whirlwind (early to mid 50s). However interesting these jobs were, they were always viewed as temporary. At first it was only until the soldier came back from the war, and then she was expected to marry at any time and retire. Since the pay was low and there were no other jobs for math geek women other than school teacher, that's what she ended up doing.
I remember as late as the late 70s there were still many data processing departments with almost entirely female staff and a male supervisor (i.e., no career advancement path). In the early 80s my wife was a member of the first class in her graduate school to be half female; yet the data processing department was staffed with young women who were expected to marry and retire. In addition to operations they did many of the programming tasks you'd give to a student these days, since back then even graduate students wouldn't have had much computer experience). The faculty called the information processing staff -- and I am NOT making this up -- "data dollies".
There was another path to programming that would be surprising to younger people. Most men before 1980 didn't know how to operate a keyboard. Rather than *learn* how, it was customary to hand off handwritten programs to a low-paid typist or (in the case of punch cards) a keypuncher, who was invariably a woman. Naturally the clever one figured this programming thing out, and in the 80s it was still common to meet women who'd learned programming this way. Their role in computing was largely as cheap temporary labor, but by then some of them were starting to be viewed as career women.
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Where are these stories of people being accused of sexual harassment by touching a coworkers bare shoulder during a group picture?
Garrison Keillor, the "Prairie Home Companion" guy, just got fired for the same amount of contact.
Key paragraph:
“I put my hand on a woman’s bare back,” he wrote. “I meant to pat her back after she told me about her unhappiness and her shirt was open and my hand went up it about six inches. She recoiled. I apologized. I sent her an email of apology later and she replied that she had forgiven me and not to think about it.”
Thanks to feminism, women are now untouchables. No amount of empathy or emotional connection is permitted. You'll see more and more men adopt the "Pence rule" as the only way to avoid lawsuits.
Holy shit. Go work in corporate for a year or two, you'll see this everywhere. On the other side, if a women commits sexual harassment? You're likely still going to be working with her. And if your company really hates you for bringing up a women committing such, they're going to do their best to make sure you're both working early hours and alone. Oh that'll also happen at the behest of HR, which is 99.9% women.
Hell go work in a government office where it's all women, you think men are sexually aggressive? Please. Once they forget you're there, you'll hear the stories about how they're trying to commit pregnancy by deception, backstabbing against whoever, and so on. My own examples when I was working as a cadet for a police service, where I'd work bars, parades, and so on? I'd get groped by women 50-70 times a night. Male police officers keep track of this, but you're expected to brush it off and not make a scene. The constable I worked with was once groped 137 times by women in a 5hr shift in a club.
Oh and have you never ever in your entire life worked in a female dominated environment? HR? Short-line assembly? Accounting? Boy oh boy are you in for on hell of a lesson on the double standards that currently exist. Here's the thing with sexual harassment. If a women accuses a man, his life is effectively over. Full stop. That's it. Even if he's proven innocent in the court, even if the accuser retracts and says she lied, it doesn't matter. He will always have that stigma, he will be turned down for future education, jobs, friends and family will abandon him. The very worst cases? You see them all the time where the guy simply kills himself. There is near-to-zero punishment for false allegations by women against men. The times where there are punishments are when the women has committed dozens of fraudulent complaints, and she might, maybe, possibly get 2 years less a day--that means no federal time, which would be around 10 years for men.
Om, nomnomnom...