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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.'"
When you redefine sexual harassment as any unwanted attempt to connect then sexual harassment is quite common indeed, and I have been sexually harassed by a number of women as well by that definition.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
"It's all a matter of power, Hicks pointed out -- and women have never had their share of it,"
Here is some blatant Marxist propaganda, and very false at that.
Rich versus poor, Higher class versus lower class, oppressor versus oppressed, winner versus loser, fit versus unfit, selected by nature for life versus selected by nature for death....and then they project this pattern, to which I could concede to an honest Marxist that there is at least some truth, onto something to which there is absolutely no truth: left ear versus right ear, left eye versus right eye, left hand versus right hand, left brain versus right brain, man versus women.
First they begin by greatly (and most often disingenuously and falsely) characterizing the tradition wealth disparity.
Then when you're worked up about that they slide in a similar image trying to get you to look on something entirely different with the same eyes. There are critical differences that you're more likely to ignore in an emotional state. They build up this emotion in the culture day after day, year after year, generation after generation until there is enough of this capital of human irrationality to slice a civilization in halves like a hatchet would split a bone lengthwise, and then they consume the marrow.
Men and woman are complementary forces with distinct tendencies in behavior, many of which seem opposite for a given situation. I'm not going to go on about this, but that Damore Memo doesn't go nearly far enough. This is supposed by the Marxists to be "sexist". Sorry, but by your definition nature itself is "sexist", "wrong" and "evil".
When a human tribe encounters a problem, men and women (are supposed to) attend to their different domains in order to cover all the aspects of the situation.
This fool featured in the article goes on to attribute the necessities of economic forces to the ill will of "the patriarchy" with absolutely no logical argument.
The simplest observation flips his narrative upside down to show its yellow belly: the industrialists don't care how the work gets done, they just want more work to get done. They don't see their slaves, so why would they care what they look like? They only care how to extract more labor from the population, which is why they drive wedges between us with the media, schools, and universities, which, of course, they own nearly all of. In this way they open up more shafts in their huge mine through unstable areas of the earth, getting at the gold they never could have reached before.
So really, all that is going on right now is that some rich people are telling you that certain other rich people are bad so they can take their wealth and create even more disparity all the while giving you a tiny sliver of it and using technology to distract you from the overall astronomical growth of wealth of humanity.
Conspiracy theory you say?
This easy rejection of anything you don't want to hear is a canker, so I'll give a brief rebuttal. In short, look at the stock market. Everyone is invested in everyone else's business. So a collective interest forms. When you have a great deal of wealth you can afford to invest in everyone who shows promise, and so you profit greatly from the vast majority of successes and so gain influence over every success, many to a great degree. If you don't end up controlling a given success, odds are you know some one who does and has a significant stake in one of your own investments.
And so the birthing grounds for conspiracy take form.
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
Women dominated computer programming in its early days
Reading the articles about it, it sounds more like they dominated operating the machines, not designing the actual software (or hardware).
But plenty of totally unverifiable anecdotes!
Sounds like a good basis to instigate social change!
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
I've been harassed by men. I've been harassed by women. in my case anyway, none of it has ever been sexual. Just because it's between a man and a woman doesn't automatically make it sexual harassment.
Is that so many young women today are utterly deluded about their attractiveness. I have seen plenty of women who, all made up and ready for a night on the town, are no better than a "6" who seriously believe they're hot stuff. Like really believe they're hawwwwt and normal men should count themselves lucky to even buy them coffee. It's really bad with the college-educated set who also often scoff at the idea of blue collar men, even if they make more money than the average man in their social circle.
This is why our grandmothers' generation often cannot believe what they're hearing when they drill down into what a lot of "harassment" is. It's because they're thinking "honey, you ain't the prettiest girl in the office, you keep acting like a stuck up bitch to guys who are an even match for you and you're liable to end up a cat herder in your 50s."
...when the summary adequately communicates the size of the chip on the author's shoulders.
I don't doubt women still get sexually harassed, or that it was more common and accepted in the past. I ALSO don't doubt this 'historian' is so biased she sees sexual abuse in men saying 'good morning' to her and has no sense of humor at all.
When I talk about why I have a problem with feminists because people like this represent the movement (never mind that the movement itself is sexist because it's only interested in women - give me egalitarianism any day), THIS is the kind of person who is the velvet glove over the iron fist of the man-hating feminists.
Oddly enough, as a man, I have a huge issue with people who assume I'm a woman-abusing monster because I have a penis.
Can't believe this was modded up. I guess nerds are really assholes through and through.
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.'
Seriously? The system wasn't "specifically designed" to "cause an error code" - it was programmed to process male or female, nothing more than that. The "human" system let the worker take an eraser and change an "F" to an "M" under gender as the person requested.
The system was designed to accommodate an "F" or "M" in the gender position, it's no more nefarious than that. That a computer system is now designed to accommodate any Unicode character for gender doesn't mean it "supports" transgender rights.
This is like arguing that older COBOL programs were designed assuming the world would end before the year 2000, so they didn't allow for "century" in date fields, optiong instead for only a two-digit number to represent year.
Ken