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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
"specifically designed to no longer accommodate them, instead, to literally cause an error code to kick out of the processing"
Perhaps because the process as it currently exists can't handle input for individuals who have previously been recorded as both sexes having been coded to expect each record to have male or female. In which case kicking it out manually probably expedites the solution.
I'm all out of popcorn and have to go to the shops to get some.
Could you all hold off for half an hour?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"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.
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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).
That's funny, in my 35 year career as a software engineer I've had my share; perhaps 40% of my managers have been women. And they were generally pretty good too. I can't say the same for the men managers I've had. There were one or two who were atrocious.
And yes, I'm male.
But plenty of totally unverifiable anecdotes!
Sounds like a good basis to instigate social change!
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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."
The feminists find they miss it because it means men either don't find them attractive anymore or are at least just flat out ignoring them.
A normal man who flirts with a normal woman isn't being an asshole, even if he doesn't immediately stop. Plenty of women who end up in happy LTRs will laugh and say "his persistence is what got me" or something to that effect. Women usually don't respect men who obediently go away the moment she says "not interested."
Granted, there may be a cultural difference here. I'm a southerner working in a big metropolitan region in the south. I have never seen ANY of the sort of in-your-face behavior in our offices that one would believe is par for the course on the West Coast. So my assumption is normal flirting and push-pull, not "hey babe, wanna fuck in the bathroom?" to a female colleague.
Please note, I fully support just about everything that Ms. Hicks says in her article, I invite you to click on the link provided and see more details. However there is one claim that she makes (in the original article) that I wish was substantiated:
"The British computing industry, both governmental and private sector, hemorrhaged talent, she says—and essentially lost its lead in tech because of it."
I'm sure the British computing industry DID hemorrhage talent because of this pervasive bigotry (like against gays, R.I.P. Alan Turing) but did it "lose its lead" because of it? Doesn't that imply that conditions were better in other, competing countries? I'm sure they were in some, I've heard that the Soviet Union valued women much more equally than the West; however I'm assuming she's referring to the U.S. Were conditions in America that much better? (Maybe they were, I didn't see the movie "Hidden Figures"; how did that portray Minority(!) women doing high level STEM work? Was it accurate?)
As far as I'm concerned women make excellent programmers, the top coder in our company that has exceptional talent (numerous winners of national mathematics/programming awards) is a woman. To that end, we've actually designed the facility to make sexual harassment more difficult (like glass doors to all non-rest rooms so that nobody thinks they can make a move on someone without possibly being seen).
...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.
*yawn
That "Brogrammer" culture goes back to when programming was usually done with pen and paper and then punched onto cards to be submitted as part of a batch job to be fed into a room-sized mainframe computer." This is about as much news as the sun rising in the morning,
Most areas have friendly neighborhood prostitutes who you can harass for very reasonable rates, perhaps $25 to $150. The more things change the more they stay the same.
I haven't harassed a woman in my life, but you keep talking about my profession like it's a cesspool of harassment, which is not true. You're incessantly damaging my well-being and reputation. Stop it!
Grace Hopper *was* a developer. Did amazing work. Wrote one of the first compilers. Remington Rand made her director of programming languages for the UNIVAC project. She made rank of Captain in the Navy, then honorary rank of Commodore (then Rear Admiral.) They named a ship after her.
But nobody seems to talk about her that much these days. Weird.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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
I'm going to have to call BS on this one. Back in the days before automation, a request to change gender (particularly in Britain) would get you a trip to the local police department, much like Alan Turing. Once computers were brought in, the lack of a change process (without extraordinary circumstances) just carried forward from manual methods of recordkeeping.
Have gnu, will travel.
And none of these come even close to being sexual harassment.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
But she wasn't forgotten. There was a 60 minutes piece about her in the 1980's. Back when people in the computer industry didn't often make the news. Reagan making her Commodore made the news and the papers. Everyone in the industry knew her, and a lot of people outside of the industry did, too.
But nowadays when people mention women in the computer industry they talk about Ada Lovelace... and that's pretty much it.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Hello, there. Want to see my bit?
#DeleteFacebook
Then you woke up.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Sexual harassment is basically an ugly guy trying to get some. If it were her crush, she'd see him as taking the lead
At work, most of the project managers, team leaders, service delivery managers and what else, are women.The people they are managing are all men.
A lot of things were different 60 years ago.
L'Idiot
/. is infested with alt-right whiney boy-men who hate women. I've been here a *long* time (stopped posting logged in due to stalker types several years ago). Every year it gets worse, if it wasn't for a few occasional quality technical threads I'd give up.
Again, maybe it's a cultural thing, but a lot of the boorish behavior making the news is just not something you hear about in "fly over country" and the south in the workplace. Where I live, you whip your dick out in front of a colleague you've got a greater than 90% chance of getting fired with cause the moment she utters the words "he showed me his dick." Management won't even ask if consent was involved; whip your dick out and it's security has you by the arm, you're getting a gentle push toward your car. If you just grabbed your colleague's boobs, it'd probably involve asking "do you want us to call the police too?"
Fact is, Weinstein and Lauer would probably be under criminal investigation in most of the deep south. The shit these men pulled on women would not fly before corporate counsel or a court of law around here.
The field is still this way. Agism is rampant and fingers often wear out. The "proper" goal is to somehow slip into management.
Table-ized A.I.
Von Neumann has an early computer architecture named after him. Everyone who takes a computer architecture class knows who he is. One of my professors brought up the "Goto Considered Harmful" paper as well.
In the general populace, not so much, but the article in question is talking about the computer industry specifically.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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
And yet you stay in that job... Interesting.
Ken
Democrats are trying to validate the concept of "resignation after accusation" and denying "innocent until proven guilty" in hopes of finally finding a way to remove Trump from office.
The basic argument is going to be "We kicked out all the democrats without proof, why won't you kick the president out without proof?"
Ken
Because of all this social agenda s*** I have to redefine words in my mind until I have evidence to the contrary.
Sexual Harassment = A man that had the balls to make a pass at a woman or ask to go out on a date.
Sexual Offender = Someone that got drunk and pissed on a tree.
Amber Alert = A disgruntled man that temporarily takes his own child because of a child custody case/situation.
As to the article/subject itself... men and women are different.(Why is that so hard to believe?) They have different but overlapping bell curves for aggressiveness. Compound that by a subject matter that attracts solitary people that generally have slight to moderate autistic anti-social issues.
It's a fair argument, but rednecks would be one of the last groups I'd expect to stand up for women's rights.
Your ignorance is showing - southerners, AKA "rednecks" are polite to women in the south, put them on a pedestal - it is the northerners that treat women as crappy as they treat men in a quest for "equality".
Ken
Sexual Harrassment in Movies is as old as the Studios.
Sexual Harrassment in Politics is as old as the Government.
Sexual Harrassment in Business is as old as Business.
Sexual Harrassment in {Insert anything} is as old as {anything}.
Basically, it's a demonstration that power corrupts, and often that corruption takes the form of sexual harrassment. Not just in Tech, but can occur in any environment.
Historian Marie Hicks doesn't know the difference between a business rule and an algorithm.
Could the reason be that she's a historian?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Roger Moore? What did he do that's so bad? Also, fuck you fascist.
I'm not sure why everyone is just focusing on sexual harassment and not harassment in general. Males and females alike have to endure harassment at the workplace all the time and that's what we need to work toward eliminating. In my experience the same guy that sexual harasses women at work acts like a douche bag to everyone he works with and harasses men too.
Things are always grey. One of the problems with society now is that everyone sees everything in black and white. Only the sith deal in absolutes.
That's just so much rubbish. Companies are where groups of _people_ meet and do an activity. You don't leave your humanity at the door in the name of 'being professional'.
The sexual harrassment training is a tick box for companies so they don't get sued as an entity when someone complains. What the most successful companies have is enough flexibility that people can be people, while having recourse so that the real problematic people can be deal with appropriately.
The big problem with "grey area" is that it's now being used to have punishments given out, depending on someone's whim _after the fact_. So if a guy approaches the woman, and she decides she likes him and decides to be receptive, happy days. If she decides she really doesn't like him, she can get to call sexual harrassment by the regulations.. And it's always for the protection of women, not men..
I've asked female friends what they'd think of a hypothetical situation where a man was to get into the bed of a woman who wasn't interested in her and proceed to grope her.. Every single one said "He should go to court and be charged with sexual assault". Now I've had a couple of women do exactly that to me, and I've asked them what they thought of that, and every single one said "You must have thought it was a good night.". No, I didn't.. It was awkward, embarrassing, and really made living around them hell. When I explained that, they still said, "well, it's different for you, your're a guy.. It's not that bad"..
That's what really aggravates me.. Most of these vocal women want a world where they can do what they want without consequence, but they want to deny those freedoms to men, and by and large, the law supports that. Then they accuse men of entitlement syndromes?
There always is a gray zone in human interaction, no exceptions. It is critically needed for calibration. Without it it becomes impossible to find out what is still acceptable without doing something unacceptable, no matter how careful you are.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
the tech industry. Sexual harassment is actually as old as the human race, but this article narrowed the focus to "tech" jobs, so I guess by definition you can't go before the beginning of the tech industry.
As far as the transgender issues go I've yet to see a published ISO spec for what a gender field should look like.
How many chars of storage should be devoted to it? Is there at least a unicode symbol to denote a non-binary agender anteater-kin? Or should the field be stored as a BLOB and always rendered as a memo field? In fact, I just typed "agender" into Firefox and it's not even in Firefox's dictionary. That's highly problematic.
Sexual Harassment ... Is As Old As the Proterozoic Eon.
Sex first developed a billion years ago, and since then, males have been giving females lots of attention, wanted or not.
Ever watched a nature show on PBS? Ever notice that in every species the males pursue and badger the females? Why? Because it is in their DNA and has been for the last billion years.
If you think humans, who have the same ancestors as those animals, are any different, you are deceiving yourself.
Really? Where? Nowhere in Europe since Christianity took over has polygamy been tolerated. And even in the near east where it was permissible, the vast majority of men had one wife, with polygamy reserved for the very rich and limited to four women apiece. While some men in all society remain unmarried for a variety of reasons, nowhere has this been the norm.
Nowhere in Europe since Christianity took over has polygamy been tolerated
Adultery has, though. Mistresses have not been uncommon at all. The more powerful the man, the more accepted it has been. Not to mention droit de seigneur. Or bedwarmers. Or serial monogamy.
Large parts of Europeans can trace their genes back to kings.
It doesn't matter if women are "sexually harassed" or not. It does not matter to anything important at all. If they can't stand up for themselves and function in their job against adversity, they need to stay in the house and exist in their traditional role. We don't need them to work. Men can do everything woman can do in the economy.
Our society is becoming completely and totally unhinged because of all the double standards. Everyone is going insane. We do not need to adapt the workplace to women. Women need to adapt to the workplace. The weak must adapt to nature. Nature must not adapt to the weak.
This is all a symptom of the rampant interventionism of the government in every aspect of life. The plutocrats are simply destabilizing every aspect of society they can access with government, education, and media so they can manipulate us into giving up our humanity and becoming worker drones.
We need to destroy this system and start over or we are all going to be turned into insane brainless slaves who exist for purpose other than work. Humanity is being destroyed and you are letting it happen because "the poor women and minorities can't exist on their own strength in the 'white patriarchy'"
FUCK the women and FUCK the minorities. If they can't play with the big boys then they can go back to the kitchen and the sandbox. We have no obligation to interrupt our productivity to let them participate. In fact we have an obligation to stop them from participating if they can't roll with the punches.
We can't breed weakness into our society because some complete losers have hurt feelings. They should feel LUCKY to have nothing more than hurt feelings, because if nature has it's say they would be DEAD.
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In this day and age, that would quickly lead to somebody a half mile away from the King's motorcade with an army of explosive drones dropping out of the sky.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
This is just pre-canned marxist / feminist dogma.
"It's all a matter of power, Hicks pointed out -- and women have never had their share of it,"
It's all a matter of free wheeling, over-sprawled, flimsy generalizations.
Why is harassment worse in IT for women? The author doesn't care. It's just thumping marxist / feminist POWER POWER POWER.
I think you don't know what the word fascist means.