Except that the lack of women in computing is a new trend in the West (consider the gender near-parity in computing in the 1960s). If there's a biological reason, it developed in the last few decades.
And it somehow managed to avoid women in countries such as Malaysia, where IT is not a male-dominated field.
Care to give an example or two of factors in the IT workplace that "women don't like" (i.e. enough for significant numbers to avoid/abandon lucrative careers in what was once a very gender-balanced field), but are not themselves sexist?
Your flippant comments about potpourri and color coordination imply that you haven't researched the issue very thoroughly. Or maybe at all.
In general food security is not a problem with insufficient yield so much as issues with poverty and distribution. We don't need to produce more, we need to make sure the food we do produce gets to the people that need it.
It never hurts to tell phone monkeys what you do for a living.
It almost never helps, either.
During my phone monkey days at a broadband ISP, it was common for customers who happened to own more than one computer to introduce themselves in the first thirty seconds as "network administrators." Invariably they'd left something unplugged or mucked up a default setting, which made for some frustrating calls when said "network administrator" refused to check the basics. After all, they were "network administrators" and would never make such a noobish mistake.
After enough calls like this, the phone monkeys learned to interpret any statement like "I work on networks for a living" merely as a forecast of how obnoxious the customer was likely to be.*
Now they forward me to a technician.
Little did the network administrators know that they were being transferred back into the regular queue. Where, more often than not, the issue was resolved.
*The real shibboleet was mentioning in the first 30 seconds that you were on a Linux box. That'd get you a real technician every time.
Re:"Any Key" phone call really happened ...
on
IT Calls of Shame
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· Score: 1
I'm a Verizon prepay customer, for what it's worth, but there is no such link on my profile page. I only have an option to set my messaging level to low, medium, or high.
Why is the argument silly? Men used to hunt, while women gathered food and tended to the young. Over 100,000 years or so, this can lead to differences in psychology (which have been confirmed, btw). Who knows, maybe you will have a harder time at it - what you're doing here won't help; you're basically yelling at the guys in charge (such as that exists) to stop being mean instead of stepping up.
I'm pretty sure I wasn't yelling at anyone to do anything. And while I wouldn't argue your statement about traditional gender roles 100,000 years ago, we're talking about programming, which isn't exactly a "risky" activity or one that requires use of obvious physiological differences between men and women (like muscle density or childbearing hips). In fact, from your "psychological development from prehistoric social roles heavily influences aptitude in industries that have only been around for a few generations" theory, the argument could be made that women are inherently better programmers because of the 100,000 years they spent developing algorithms to test which plants were safe (note the element of risk here as well) to eat. But that probably sounds just as silly to you, eh?
Putting aside for one moment speculations as to the cause of the scarcity of women in programming, let me ask you this: Do you think that the programming industry would benefit from having a greater percentage of female programmers?
I believe you that your post was not intended to be flamebait, but I must say it was very frustrating for me (a female programmer) to read. I agree that there are many factors that contribute toward the scarcity of women in programming. But the implication of your post, or perhaps just your title, sends a message that I shouldn't bother trying, because "I'm just not good at it." I don't think this was your intention, but I'd like to point it out as an issue that most, if not all, female programmers are forced to address at least once in our careers.
One of the most commonly cited reasons for the lack of women pursuing computer-related professions or hobbies (e.g. video games) is that they aren't encouraged--indeed, some say they are actively discouraged--to do so. Has it ever been said of you that you'd likely never be among the best programmers because you are a man? If so, how did it affect the development of your career goals?
I don't think it's correct to view the computing world as a bunch of men gathered behind locked doors and discussing ways to keep the girls out of their clubhouse, either. But there are certainly prevailing assumptions about the capabilities of wo/men in general that force a lot of women to seriously question why we'd want to work in an environment that doesn't value them as highly as men, simply because we're women and they're men.
Another example would be a different post in this thread speculating that men were better programmers because they were "wired" to be bigger risk takers (huh?). These arguments, while silly (and probably not ill-intended), still send a message to women that we'll have a harder-than-normal time succeeding in the industry. It's not surprising that many of us choose to try something else instead!
That may be; however, Rowling herself was a frequent visitor and vocal supporter of the Harry Potter Lexicon website for years before this suit. She's also gained a lot of street cred in various fan/fanfic communities for her support of sites like the Lexicon.
Rowling's right to defend what is legally perceived as her intellectual property isn't the issue that is getting her fanbase up in arms. It's her rapid flip-flop from "Hey, it's great that you're doing this and I have no problem with your website" to "I'm suing you for copyright infringement." It appears unlikely that Rowling is doing this because she personally feels her creative "child" is negatively affected by the existence of the Lexicon.
Nor do I think her motivation is financial--it's obvious she doesn't need the money. But as someone else pointed out, Warner Brothers' name is also on this lawsuit. I'm going to venture out on a limb here and guess that whatever agreements were signed in blood before the Harry Potter series became a merchandising gold mine have way more to do with this lawsuit than Rowling's personal opinion on the fair use of her creative works.
I'd say this is a great example of what happens when copyright passes from the control of the creator to a distributor.
This is the same Michael Robertson who founded MP3.com, a company whose death knell was sounded by a lawsuit from UMG over similar issues of online file storage and intellectual property. Robertson has a long history of run-ins with the recording industry; it'll be interesting to see how this one pans out.
After reading the talk page, I'm wondering if Slashdot's mention of this story constitutes the secondary resource required for the adware issue to be mentioned on Snopes' Wikipedia page.
If I get featured on Slashdot, am I notable enough to be mentioned on Wikipedia too?
Most of the main characters in comics are men, because men are the people who buy the majority of comics. And why are men the people who buy the majority of comics?
It really shouldn't be that difficult for writers to produce stories that appeal to women. Why are comics of this type so rare?
If they're not rare, why aren't women buying them?
As a woman who appreciates good storytelling and great artwork as much as any man, I have a very hard time finding comics with main characters that appeal to my interests. The industry would have a lot more of my money if they could figure out a way to appeal to my interests.
Featuring strong female leads who didn't routinely get raped/sterilized/possessed/kidnapped/driven insane/refrigerated/etc. might be a good start, but I agree that heroic stories often require high tragedy counts whether the victims are male or female.
So how about featuring strong female characters whose strength (or fatal flaw) didn't ultimately derive from their husbands, brothers, sons, or breasts?
It's great that Lois Lane outlived her husband, but she was still just "Superman's wife." My introduction to Kara Zor-El was as "Supergirl, Superman's female cousin." When male comic books characters actually do end up subservient to female leads like Wonder Woman, more often than not there seems to be an undercurrent of lesbianism (or goddess worship) intended to titillate a heterosexual male audience. I wouldn't deprive the heterosexual male audience of those comics even if I could, but I'd still love to see more comics out there that were written and drawn for my enjoyment or titillation. It seems to me that more stories written by women is a step forward in that goal.
Copyright laws are not, and never have been, about protecting the livelihoods of authors or artists. They protect the interests of centralized distribution, which is rapidly going the way of the dodo thanks to the Internet.
Your publisher really wants you to think copyright is the only thing protecting you from starvation. The truth is that artists and authors made decent livings long before copyright laws came into being. Furthermore, the artists and authors who work outside the copyright model today can still do pretty well for themselves.
The idea that you need a publisher in order to sell a book is strong evidence of copyright's badness.
You jumped from communicable diseases like polio to cancer. How exactly did you make that leap? HPV is a major contributing factor to several types of cancer, such as cervical cancer in women.
That's why females will take a warrior over a wimp - they too have instinctive attraction to the alpha male who will give them healthy children and security. Actually, traditional gender roles have very little to do with biology. They're more of a social construct.
In other news, not all relationships are male/female, not every woman wants children, there are chicks who play Halo (or even read Slashdot), and I'm engaged to a man who loves Beautiful Katamari. If humans ever had an instinct as powerful and universal as what you're describing (i.e., that it dictates all of our actions despite our ability to make conscious decisions), we evolved out of it centuries ago.
Unfortunately, when people believe that they are supported by "instinct" or some other biological process, it's a lot easier for them to justify weird ideas about human behavior, like attempting to draw a causal relationship between violent video games and violent actions. Or promoting the idea that all women must act a certain way because it is programmed in their genes to do so.
On the west coast of the United States, Dungeness crab season has usually opened by Thanksgiving. It's not unheard of for families to have fresh crab for Turkey Day. Although this year, a nasty oil spill has been causing a lot of problems in San Francisco Bay, so it's been much harder to come by.
It many sound like a downer, but I look at it the other way -- for human history, art has always been a folk expression. People got together in the village after they were done in the fields and danced and sang. Simple as that. One very important aspect of the Renaissance was the very successful PR campaign (spearheaded by artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer) to increase the status and pay of the artist. They had been seen throughout the Middle Ages as humble craftstmen, on the same social and economic level as carpenters and others who worked with their hands. It was largely due to the efforts of these artists to gain status that the idea that art was necessarily an intellectual and creative pursuit came into being. Artists began to be accorded the same status as learned people, even aristocracy or nobility. There's evidence of this happening in the Classical period as well.
Of course, today we have the aforementioned stereotype of the Starving Artist, evidence that the status of the artist is much lower than it was in the Renaissance, and probably lower than it was in the Middle Ages as well. But it wasn't always this way.
Interestingly enough, the sunset of the High Renaissance also saw the birth of the first copyright laws...suppose there's some sort of correlation?
I don't see a lot of heroin addicts feeding or the poor, housing the homeless, finding homes for orphans or giving Christmas gifts to children whose parents can't or won't afford it, all while demanding absolutely nothing in return.
Heroin addicts and atheists are just as capable of altruism as any church-goer.
Some heroin addicts even go to church.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that the lack of women in computing is a new trend in the West (consider the gender near-parity in computing in the 1960s). If there's a biological reason, it developed in the last few decades.
And it somehow managed to avoid women in countries such as Malaysia, where IT is not a male-dominated field.
Care to give an example or two of factors in the IT workplace that "women don't like" (i.e. enough for significant numbers to avoid/abandon lucrative careers in what was once a very gender-balanced field), but are not themselves sexist?
Your flippant comments about potpourri and color coordination imply that you haven't researched the issue very thoroughly. Or maybe at all.
drowning out the remaining 80% of the country who is too poor to be heard.
With pepper spray.
In general food security is not a problem with insufficient yield so much as issues with poverty and distribution. We don't need to produce more, we need to make sure the food we do produce gets to the people that need it.
It never hurts to tell phone monkeys what you do for a living.
It almost never helps, either.
During my phone monkey days at a broadband ISP, it was common for customers who happened to own more than one computer to introduce themselves in the first thirty seconds as "network administrators." Invariably they'd left something unplugged or mucked up a default setting, which made for some frustrating calls when said "network administrator" refused to check the basics. After all, they were "network administrators" and would never make such a noobish mistake.
After enough calls like this, the phone monkeys learned to interpret any statement like "I work on networks for a living" merely as a forecast of how obnoxious the customer was likely to be.*
Now they forward me to a technician.
Little did the network administrators know that they were being transferred back into the regular queue. Where, more often than not, the issue was resolved.
*The real shibboleet was mentioning in the first 30 seconds that you were on a Linux box. That'd get you a real technician every time.
I'm left-handed, you insensitive clod!
They don't call it Nintendo Hard for nothing.
I'm a Verizon prepay customer, for what it's worth, but there is no such link on my profile page. I only have an option to set my messaging level to low, medium, or high.
How about Leekspin?
It's been done.
I'm pretty sure I wasn't yelling at anyone to do anything. And while I wouldn't argue your statement about traditional gender roles 100,000 years ago, we're talking about programming, which isn't exactly a "risky" activity or one that requires use of obvious physiological differences between men and women (like muscle density or childbearing hips). In fact, from your "psychological development from prehistoric social roles heavily influences aptitude in industries that have only been around for a few generations" theory, the argument could be made that women are inherently better programmers because of the 100,000 years they spent developing algorithms to test which plants were safe (note the element of risk here as well) to eat. But that probably sounds just as silly to you, eh?
Putting aside for one moment speculations as to the cause of the scarcity of women in programming, let me ask you this: Do you think that the programming industry would benefit from having a greater percentage of female programmers?
I believe you that your post was not intended to be flamebait, but I must say it was very frustrating for me (a female programmer) to read. I agree that there are many factors that contribute toward the scarcity of women in programming. But the implication of your post, or perhaps just your title, sends a message that I shouldn't bother trying, because "I'm just not good at it." I don't think this was your intention, but I'd like to point it out as an issue that most, if not all, female programmers are forced to address at least once in our careers.
One of the most commonly cited reasons for the lack of women pursuing computer-related professions or hobbies (e.g. video games) is that they aren't encouraged--indeed, some say they are actively discouraged--to do so. Has it ever been said of you that you'd likely never be among the best programmers because you are a man? If so, how did it affect the development of your career goals?
I don't think it's correct to view the computing world as a bunch of men gathered behind locked doors and discussing ways to keep the girls out of their clubhouse, either. But there are certainly prevailing assumptions about the capabilities of wo/men in general that force a lot of women to seriously question why we'd want to work in an environment that doesn't value them as highly as men, simply because we're women and they're men.
Another example would be a different post in this thread speculating that men were better programmers because they were "wired" to be bigger risk takers (huh?). These arguments, while silly (and probably not ill-intended), still send a message to women that we'll have a harder-than-normal time succeeding in the industry. It's not surprising that many of us choose to try something else instead!
Have you ever read Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator? It's full of racist innuendo.
Arrrr, be that the one wi' the ship's wheel in yer trousers and how it be drivin' ye nuts?
That may be; however, Rowling herself was a frequent visitor and vocal supporter of the Harry Potter Lexicon website for years before this suit. She's also gained a lot of street cred in various fan/fanfic communities for her support of sites like the Lexicon.
Rowling's right to defend what is legally perceived as her intellectual property isn't the issue that is getting her fanbase up in arms. It's her rapid flip-flop from "Hey, it's great that you're doing this and I have no problem with your website" to "I'm suing you for copyright infringement." It appears unlikely that Rowling is doing this because she personally feels her creative "child" is negatively affected by the existence of the Lexicon.
Nor do I think her motivation is financial--it's obvious she doesn't need the money. But as someone else pointed out, Warner Brothers' name is also on this lawsuit. I'm going to venture out on a limb here and guess that whatever agreements were signed in blood before the Harry Potter series became a merchandising gold mine have way more to do with this lawsuit than Rowling's personal opinion on the fair use of her creative works.
I'd say this is a great example of what happens when copyright passes from the control of the creator to a distributor.
This is the same Michael Robertson who founded MP3.com, a company whose death knell was sounded by a lawsuit from UMG over similar issues of online file storage and intellectual property. Robertson has a long history of run-ins with the recording industry; it'll be interesting to see how this one pans out.
After reading the talk page, I'm wondering if Slashdot's mention of this story constitutes the secondary resource required for the adware issue to be mentioned on Snopes' Wikipedia page.
If I get featured on Slashdot, am I notable enough to be mentioned on Wikipedia too?
I must admit that I hope the answer is "no."
It really shouldn't be that difficult for writers to produce stories that appeal to women. Why are comics of this type so rare?
If they're not rare, why aren't women buying them?
As a woman who appreciates good storytelling and great artwork as much as any man, I have a very hard time finding comics with main characters that appeal to my interests. The industry would have a lot more of my money if they could figure out a way to appeal to my interests.
Featuring strong female leads who didn't routinely get raped/sterilized/possessed/kidnapped/driven insane/refrigerated/etc. might be a good start, but I agree that heroic stories often require high tragedy counts whether the victims are male or female.
So how about featuring strong female characters whose strength (or fatal flaw) didn't ultimately derive from their husbands, brothers, sons, or breasts?
It's great that Lois Lane outlived her husband, but she was still just "Superman's wife." My introduction to Kara Zor-El was as "Supergirl, Superman's female cousin." When male comic books characters actually do end up subservient to female leads like Wonder Woman, more often than not there seems to be an undercurrent of lesbianism (or goddess worship) intended to titillate a heterosexual male audience. I wouldn't deprive the heterosexual male audience of those comics even if I could, but I'd still love to see more comics out there that were written and drawn for my enjoyment or titillation. It seems to me that more stories written by women is a step forward in that goal.
Your publisher really wants you to think copyright is the only thing protecting you from starvation. The truth is that artists and authors made decent livings long before copyright laws came into being. Furthermore, the artists and authors who work outside the copyright model today can still do pretty well for themselves.
The idea that you need a publisher in order to sell a book is strong evidence of copyright's badness.
In other news, not all relationships are male/female, not every woman wants children, there are chicks who play Halo (or even read Slashdot), and I'm engaged to a man who loves Beautiful Katamari. If humans ever had an instinct as powerful and universal as what you're describing (i.e., that it dictates all of our actions despite our ability to make conscious decisions), we evolved out of it centuries ago.
Unfortunately, when people believe that they are supported by "instinct" or some other biological process, it's a lot easier for them to justify weird ideas about human behavior, like attempting to draw a causal relationship between violent video games and violent actions. Or promoting the idea that all women must act a certain way because it is programmed in their genes to do so.
On the west coast of the United States, Dungeness crab season has usually opened by Thanksgiving. It's not unheard of for families to have fresh crab for Turkey Day. Although this year, a nasty oil spill has been causing a lot of problems in San Francisco Bay, so it's been much harder to come by.
In other words, we need a car analogy.
Of course, today we have the aforementioned stereotype of the Starving Artist, evidence that the status of the artist is much lower than it was in the Renaissance, and probably lower than it was in the Middle Ages as well. But it wasn't always this way.
Interestingly enough, the sunset of the High Renaissance also saw the birth of the first copyright laws...suppose there's some sort of correlation?
I don't see a lot of heroin addicts feeding or the poor, housing the homeless, finding homes for orphans or giving Christmas gifts to children whose parents can't or won't afford it, all while demanding absolutely nothing in return. Heroin addicts and atheists are just as capable of altruism as any church-goer. Some heroin addicts even go to church.