The evidence seems to suggest that it's not because they've been told they shouldn't do it, it's because they don't actually want to do it, and that there are possible biological reasons why most -- not all -- women might have that preference.
But _why_ they don't want to do it?
The problem is you can't reasonably expect children to grow up in gender-neutral environment. As soon as he/she crawls out of the crib and starts interacting with the world, world _will_ tell them what is expected from them, how they should act and what they should wish for. Picture book with boy fixing a toy car? ABC block with D for doll (getting dressed up by a girl)? There you go, you already have seeds of gender roles planted.
The only way to test for biological reasons in this is to start a colony with completely neutral environment and no outsiders to bring in biased views on gender. I think it's not quite feasible to do in any significant scale.
And the only way to break stereotypes is start breaking them right from pre-school on the global scale. Special hiring/education/etc. programs are like plastering the walls instead of mending the foundation.
And are quite possibly misguided. Even babies show gender bias -- female babies are more likely to fixate on faces, male babies more likely to fixate on tech. Linguistic skill is known to be hormone related (the linguistic skill of pre-op transexuals is known to shift in the appropriate direction when they receive hormone treatment, for example, and double-blind trials have shown that men become better at interpreting facial expressions when given a dose of female hormones). None of this denies the social factors, but there do seem to be biological factors too (although that seems to be an unspeakable truth). It's important to remember that the biological differences are averages and are no basis for discrimination for or against a specific person, but that seems to be too complicated a concept for some people.
In the context in which Pinker uses it, it's simply a reflection of actual gender profiles in the professions. The analysis of the causes comes after the observation that there is a gender disparity and the further observation that the relationship between improved women's rights and that gender disparity is paradoxical.
I am guessing the moderators didn't get your reference of the talking Barbie Doll.
But I think that is root of the problem. While woman are going into college in record numbers, most of them are not going into majors required by high demand fields which require Math and Science. With the exception of Biology, most Science degrees are still men only. It isn't that woman cannot do the work, but because culture has told them that they shouldn't do it.
The evidence seems to suggest that it's not because they've been told they shouldn't do it, it's because they don't actually want to do it, and that there are possible biological reasons why most -- not all -- women might have that preference.
The "widespread infantilisation of women" is a bias, yes: one that pushed women into traditionally male professions, and the decline in numbers of women in those professions in countries such as the USA and UK suggests that the bias is no longer a dominant factor in career choice or success, although it still exists as evidenced by quota systems.
Charles and Bradley observed that the governments exerting strong controls over curricular trajectories, such as Korea and Ireland, had less female underrepresentation in computer science.
That would be the infantilisation of women Pinker referred to: women being forced into careers they don't want because the government "knows better".
Well, if "most browser settings are not sophisticated enough for websites to assume that consent has been given to allow the site to set a cookie" that means that I can't assume consent has been given for my site to set a cookie, doesn't it? Unless I find out which browsers are sophisticated enough and check for them. Remember the onus of proof is on whoever sets the cookie.
There are other explanations for the decline. For example as maternity rights have increased and employers have been faced with a well paid and highly skilled worker taking a year off in the middle of their career there has been some reluctance to hire women in the first place. Scare stories about frivolous sexual harassment lawsuits and so forth have not helped either.
There has been a bit of a backlash against women in the workplace, especially in skilled roles.
Pinker cites lots of case studies, which pretty consistently show that (at least in senior positions) those factors are not significant in reducing the number of women. I'd strongly recommend anybody concerned about these issues to read the book.
Quite. There's nothing to see here any more. For implied consent you just need a suitably descriptive privacy policy page which the users pass through before any cookies are set, which most sites don't already have. The 11th hour guidance means things are as bad as was feared.
FTFY
.
More quotes from the guidance:
"It has been suggested that the fact that a visitor has arrived at a webpage should be sufficient evidence that they consent to cookies being set or information being accessed on their device. The key here is that the visitor should understand that this is the case. It is important to note that it would be extremely difficult to demonstrate compliance simply by showing that a user visited a particular site or was served a particular advertisement unless it could also be demonstrated that they were aware this would result in cookies being set.
In compliance terms this difficulty arises because although the person setting the cookie may think that there is an inference of consent, without information being given to the user, it is unlikely that they will understand that they are giving any sort of agreement. This remains the case if information is provided to the user but only as part of a privacy notice that is hard to find, difficult to understand or rarely read."... "Many users will have some general notion that websites and third parties will collect information about how sites are used but it is difficult to take these rather vague notions and assume that all users will have sufficient knowledge to allow the person setting the cookie to infer consent simply because the user’s browser requested the content or the user searched for the service."... "To rely on implied consent for cookies, then, it is important that the person seeking consent can satisfy themselves that the user’s actions are not only an explicit request for content or services but also an indirect expression of the user’s agreement that in addition to providing such content or services the provider may store or access information on the user’s device.
To be confident in this regard the provider must ensure that clear and relevant information is readily available to users explaining what is likely to happen while the user is accessing the site and what choices the user has in terms of controlling what happens."
"Setting cookies before users have had the opportunity to look at the information provided about cookies, and make a choice about those cookies, is likely to lead to compliance problems."
All of which seems to mean I would need to provide a landing page to explain about cookies before taking the user to any pages on which analytics are applied
There is still a greater social expectation upon men that they must have a career. I would not expect clse to fifty-fifty participation in the absence of hiring bias as there is always a greater proportion of women who choose to focus their lives on other areas than work. The social pressure - of being valued only by what job you have - tends to drive men up the career ladder as they have little other option. (A woman who focuses on her family is "a valid choice"; a man who does so is assumed to have failed in his career.)
Pinker addresses that. In particular that about 80% of women are primarily motivated by intrinsic factors such as job satisfaction and a sense of community and cooperation at work, whereas this is only about 40% for men. About 60% of men are primarily motivated by extrinsic factors such as money, power and status, whereas that's only about 20% for women. That alone accounts for the disparity in the boardroom -- it's not that women don't have what it takes to run a company, it's just that lots of them would rather be doing something else. Pinker complains that measures such as pay or presence in the boardroom are actually buying into a male model of success, and that women are right to reject them if they want to, but with a 60/40 split amongst men it's not all that much of a male measure either. It's just that those with power and status tend to set the agenda, whatever their gender.
I can't find that in there. The nearest I can find seems to be "If the user's browser accepts cookies, and the user has a good understanding of what cookies are and how they are used then they agree to the cookies being stored", with the onus being on the site owner to prove that the users have that level of technical knowledge before setting cookies. That would probably be ok for a tech site, but not for a site aimed at the general public. The one site I manage doesn't use cookies, but if I wanted to implement analytics for example then I reckon I'll still need to implement a landing page.
But I think it's incredibly obvious that there's a bias against women in any male-dominated field, just as there's a bias against men in female-dominated fields. No one can reasonably claim that society doesn't apply a lot of gender roles in every aspect of a person's life, so any task dominated by one gender will by nature be harder to get at for the other, because the context the minority group has as less applicable.
The "Sexual Paradox" Pinker talks about is that as women get more opportunities the number of women in traditionally male roles increases, then as they get more opportunities still it falls again, though not to original levels. My interpretation of her analysis is that the downturn happens when women's choice outweighs the effect of the bias, and this has happened in most professions in most developed countries. So although the bias probably still exists in places, it is not the dominant factor in
determining the male/female ratio in most professions. Yes, it's good to tackle that bias where it exists, but the effect is unlikely to be significantly more women in those jobs (which is what tokenism attempts to address) but is more likely to be a better working environment for women. In other words, we're using the wrong measures and the result is that we're drawing the wrong conclusions and formulating the wrong policies from them.
You solve that by making it faster and fixing bugs. The reason to retire an application is only if there isn't any market for it (it doesn't even need to be a big market, as it was already written).
Or if it isn't cost-effective to service that market. Whether the code is already written comes into that equation but it's not all of it. The company I work for withdrew a product simply because the cost of supporting it was higher than anything we could earn from it.
There's a problem with Flickr? My kids still use it a lot, and don't do Instagram. As far as I can see they do completely different jobs; they're not in competition. Nowadays, photographs are used for (at least) two purposes: record and communication. Flickr is great for the former, crap for the latter. Instagram is crap for the former, great for the latter but is in direct competition with tools such as Facebook which is what my kids use.
Do you have evidence that there is bias and prejudice keeping women out of IT, rather than, for instance women tending not to want to go into IT for other reasons? In The Sexual Paradox, Susan Pinker presents a lot of evidence for such other reasons (and complains about the widespread "infantilisation" of women which assumes that women are not fit to make their own career choices), although it's possible that there might be bias and prejudice as well.
It did strike me that that was one reason people with positive personalities would live longer. Their suicide rate is likely to be lower. Also people who feel they have a lot to live for tend to be more careful driving and so on. Does the study distinguish between natural causes of death and all causes? (It's probably in the RA, but this is/. so I'm not going to read that, am I?)
And the trouble is, they're doing all that because it's necessary ass-covering. The public would scream about corruption and rival suppliers would sue the pants off them if they couldn't prove that the process was unbiased. I've worked in UK government procurement and recognise what you describe, but I remember that it didn't used to be that way, and it wasn't internal bureaucracy that pushed for all those hurdles, it was public and vendor pressure.
What's wrong with Warren Buffett? He's made a lot of money for himself, true, but he's made a lot of money for other people besides. And as for his own wealth, he's in the process of donating it all to charity, to the tune of billions going toward important causes that governments are too broke or shortsighted to fund. He was instrumental in convincing Bill Gates to do the same. If you're going to demonize some successful, wealthy American, I can think of a lot of better targets.
And "Margaritaville" was a decent song if you like country music. Oh, wait...
Well, I was socially awkward and didn't know how to talk to women long before I got any access to video games or porn. I put it down to being a teenager. Maybe if we do away with teenagers this problem will go away eventually?
So discrete CMOS gates, I used to build half-adders, full adders and the like when I was learning CS were presumably ridiculously underpowered and they should have given me access to a mainframe? Well, actually, they did give me access to a mainframe, too (admittedly by submitting decks of Hollerith cards, which a van picked up). I learned different stuff on that.
Slashdot Mirror
Said person/company who misled you is answerable to the charge of treason.
Probably not in their country of operation.
The evidence seems to suggest that it's not because they've been told they shouldn't do it, it's because they don't actually want to do it, and that there are possible biological reasons why most -- not all -- women might have that preference.
But _why_ they don't want to do it?
The problem is you can't reasonably expect children to grow up in gender-neutral environment. As soon as he/she crawls out of the crib and starts interacting with the world, world _will_ tell them what is expected from them, how they should act and what they should wish for. Picture book with boy fixing a toy car? ABC block with D for doll (getting dressed up by a girl)? There you go, you already have seeds of gender roles planted.
The only way to test for biological reasons in this is to start a colony with completely neutral environment and no outsiders to bring in biased views on gender. I think it's not quite feasible to do in any significant scale.
And the only way to break stereotypes is start breaking them right from pre-school on the global scale. Special hiring/education/etc. programs are like plastering the walls instead of mending the foundation.
And are quite possibly misguided. Even babies show gender bias -- female babies are more likely to fixate on faces, male babies more likely to fixate on tech. Linguistic skill is known to be hormone related (the linguistic skill of pre-op transexuals is known to shift in the appropriate direction when they receive hormone treatment, for example, and double-blind trials have shown that men become better at interpreting facial expressions when given a dose of female hormones). None of this denies the social factors, but there do seem to be biological factors too (although that seems to be an unspeakable truth). It's important to remember that the biological differences are averages and are no basis for discrimination for or against a specific person, but that seems to be too complicated a concept for some people.
In the context in which Pinker uses it, it's simply a reflection of actual gender profiles in the professions. The analysis of the causes comes after the observation that there is a gender disparity and the further observation that the relationship between improved women's rights and that gender disparity is paradoxical.
I am guessing the moderators didn't get your reference of the talking Barbie Doll.
But I think that is root of the problem. While woman are going into college in record numbers, most of them are not going into majors required by high demand fields which require Math and Science. With the exception of Biology, most Science degrees are still men only. It isn't that woman cannot do the work, but because culture has told them that they shouldn't do it.
The evidence seems to suggest that it's not because they've been told they shouldn't do it, it's because they don't actually want to do it, and that there are possible biological reasons why most -- not all -- women might have that preference.
The "widespread infantilisation of women" is a bias, yes: one that pushed women into traditionally male professions, and the decline in numbers of women in those professions in countries such as the USA and UK suggests that the bias is no longer a dominant factor in career choice or success, although it still exists as evidenced by quota systems.
Charles and Bradley observed that the governments exerting strong controls over curricular trajectories, such as Korea and Ireland, had less female underrepresentation in computer science.
That would be the infantilisation of women Pinker referred to: women being forced into careers they don't want because the government "knows better".
Well, if "most browser settings are not sophisticated enough for websites to assume that consent has been given to allow the site to set a cookie" that means that I can't assume consent has been given for my site to set a cookie, doesn't it? Unless I find out which browsers are sophisticated enough and check for them. Remember the onus of proof is on whoever sets the cookie.
There are other explanations for the decline. For example as maternity rights have increased and employers have been faced with a well paid and highly skilled worker taking a year off in the middle of their career there has been some reluctance to hire women in the first place. Scare stories about frivolous sexual harassment lawsuits and so forth have not helped either.
There has been a bit of a backlash against women in the workplace, especially in skilled roles.
Pinker cites lots of case studies, which pretty consistently show that (at least in senior positions) those factors are not significant in reducing the number of women. I'd strongly recommend anybody concerned about these issues to read the book.
I agree -- but that does seem to be what the guidance demands.
Quite. There's nothing to see here any more. For implied consent you just need a suitably descriptive privacy policy page which the users pass through before any cookies are set, which most sites don't already have. The 11th hour guidance means things are as bad as was feared.
FTFY
.
More quotes from the guidance:
"It has been suggested that the fact that a visitor has arrived at a webpage should be sufficient evidence that they consent to cookies being set or information being accessed on their device. The key here is that the visitor should understand that this is the case. It is important to note that it would be extremely difficult to demonstrate compliance simply by showing that a user visited a particular site or was served a particular advertisement unless it could also be demonstrated that they were aware this would result in cookies being set. In compliance terms this difficulty arises because although the person setting the cookie may think that there is an inference of consent, without information being given to the user, it is unlikely that they will understand that they are giving any sort of agreement. This remains the case if information is provided to the user but only as part of a privacy notice that is hard to find, difficult to understand or rarely read." ... "Many users will have some general notion that websites and third parties will collect information about how sites are used but it is difficult to take these rather vague notions and assume that all users will have sufficient knowledge to allow the person setting the cookie to infer consent simply because the user’s browser requested the content or the user searched for the service." ... "To rely on implied consent for cookies, then, it is important that the person seeking consent can satisfy themselves that the user’s actions are not only an explicit request for content or services but also an indirect expression of the user’s agreement that in addition to providing such content or services the provider may store or access information on the user’s device.
To be confident in this regard the provider must ensure that clear and relevant information is readily available to users explaining what is likely to happen while the user is accessing the site and what choices the user has in terms of controlling what happens."
"Setting cookies before users have had the opportunity to look at the information provided about cookies, and make a choice about those cookies, is likely to lead to compliance problems."
All of which seems to mean I would need to provide a landing page to explain about cookies before taking the user to any pages on which analytics are applied
There is still a greater social expectation upon men that they must have a career. I would not expect clse to fifty-fifty participation in the absence of hiring bias as there is always a greater proportion of women who choose to focus their lives on other areas than work. The social pressure - of being valued only by what job you have - tends to drive men up the career ladder as they have little other option. (A woman who focuses on her family is "a valid choice"; a man who does so is assumed to have failed in his career.)
Pinker addresses that. In particular that about 80% of women are primarily motivated by intrinsic factors such as job satisfaction and a sense of community and cooperation at work, whereas this is only about 40% for men. About 60% of men are primarily motivated by extrinsic factors such as money, power and status, whereas that's only about 20% for women. That alone accounts for the disparity in the boardroom -- it's not that women don't have what it takes to run a company, it's just that lots of them would rather be doing something else. Pinker complains that measures such as pay or presence in the boardroom are actually buying into a male model of success, and that women are right to reject them if they want to, but with a 60/40 split amongst men it's not all that much of a male measure either. It's just that those with power and status tend to set the agenda, whatever their gender.
48 hours before the law came into force, the ICO issued new guidelines at http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/blog/2012/updated-ico-advice-guidance-e-privacy-directive-eu-cookie-law.aspx which basically reads as "If the user's browser accepts cookies, then they agree to the cookies being stored". Making the whole things pretty moot. Why they waited until the "11th hour" to state the obvious is annoying...
I can't find that in there. The nearest I can find seems to be "If the user's browser accepts cookies, and the user has a good understanding of what cookies are and how they are used then they agree to the cookies being stored", with the onus being on the site owner to prove that the users have that level of technical knowledge before setting cookies. That would probably be ok for a tech site, but not for a site aimed at the general public. The one site I manage doesn't use cookies, but if I wanted to implement analytics for example then I reckon I'll still need to implement a landing page.
But I think it's incredibly obvious that there's a bias against women in any male-dominated field, just as there's a bias against men in female-dominated fields. No one can reasonably claim that society doesn't apply a lot of gender roles in every aspect of a person's life, so any task dominated by one gender will by nature be harder to get at for the other, because the context the minority group has as less applicable.
The "Sexual Paradox" Pinker talks about is that as women get more opportunities the number of women in traditionally male roles increases, then as they get more opportunities still it falls again, though not to original levels. My interpretation of her analysis is that the downturn happens when women's choice outweighs the effect of the bias, and this has happened in most professions in most developed countries. So although the bias probably still exists in places, it is not the dominant factor in determining the male/female ratio in most professions. Yes, it's good to tackle that bias where it exists, but the effect is unlikely to be significantly more women in those jobs (which is what tokenism attempts to address) but is more likely to be a better working environment for women. In other words, we're using the wrong measures and the result is that we're drawing the wrong conclusions and formulating the wrong policies from them.
You solve that by making it faster and fixing bugs. The reason to retire an application is only if there isn't any market for it (it doesn't even need to be a big market, as it was already written).
Or if it isn't cost-effective to service that market. Whether the code is already written comes into that equation but it's not all of it. The company I work for withdrew a product simply because the cost of supporting it was higher than anything we could earn from it.
There's a problem with Flickr? My kids still use it a lot, and don't do Instagram. As far as I can see they do completely different jobs; they're not in competition. Nowadays, photographs are used for (at least) two purposes: record and communication. Flickr is great for the former, crap for the latter. Instagram is crap for the former, great for the latter but is in direct competition with tools such as Facebook which is what my kids use.
Do you have evidence that there is bias and prejudice keeping women out of IT, rather than, for instance women tending not to want to go into IT for other reasons? In The Sexual Paradox, Susan Pinker presents a lot of evidence for such other reasons (and complains about the widespread "infantilisation" of women which assumes that women are not fit to make their own career choices), although it's possible that there might be bias and prejudice as well.
If Apple colluded to fix the prices, they had complete control over the book prices. Derp.
If they had complete control over the book prices, it wasn't collusion. Hint: you can't collude with yourself.
Do you really think that texting behind the wheel is a sign of a healthy social life? Or of somebody who is desperate for approval?
It did strike me that that was one reason people with positive personalities would live longer. Their suicide rate is likely to be lower. Also people who feel they have a lot to live for tend to be more careful driving and so on. Does the study distinguish between natural causes of death and all causes? (It's probably in the RA, but this is /. so I'm not going to read that, am I?)
And the trouble is, they're doing all that because it's necessary ass-covering. The public would scream about corruption and rival suppliers would sue the pants off them if they couldn't prove that the process was unbiased. I've worked in UK government procurement and recognise what you describe, but I remember that it didn't used to be that way, and it wasn't internal bureaucracy that pushed for all those hurdles, it was public and vendor pressure.
What's wrong with Warren Buffett? He's made a lot of money for himself, true, but he's made a lot of money for other people besides. And as for his own wealth, he's in the process of donating it all to charity, to the tune of billions going toward important causes that governments are too broke or shortsighted to fund. He was instrumental in convincing Bill Gates to do the same. If you're going to demonize some successful, wealthy American, I can think of a lot of better targets.
And "Margaritaville" was a decent song if you like country music. Oh, wait...
Well, I was socially awkward and didn't know how to talk to women long before I got any access to video games or porn. I put it down to being a teenager. Maybe if we do away with teenagers this problem will go away eventually?
So discrete CMOS gates, I used to build half-adders, full adders and the like when I was learning CS were presumably ridiculously underpowered and they should have given me access to a mainframe? Well, actually, they did give me access to a mainframe, too (admittedly by submitting decks of Hollerith cards, which a van picked up). I learned different stuff on that.
It can't run most educational software nor children's oriented flash websites. I do not see the value in these.
Until HTML 5 takes over they wont be that usefull and the article is looking at these as Mac and PC replacements for outdated equipment.
The schools have computers that do that, and so do most of the kids. These are for teaching computer science, not web browsing 101.
"give classrooms Raspberry Pis"
Uhm.. no thanks.
Better than frosty...