This is Not ok

http://blog.jessitron.com/2012/09/this-is-not-ok.html

by nlz1 • 14 years ago

66 153 14 years ago

blog.jessitron.com

TylerE• 14 years ago

This doesn't really make sense.

She's complaining that at an event with 97% of attendance by men (by her own statement), they got, say, 92% of the bathroom facilities, and then throws a fit.

Not buying it.

If this is the biggest outrage in your life you should consider yourself fortunate.

davidw• 14 years ago

If you read the article, she's complaining that there aren't enough women at conferences, not really about the bathroom situation.

moistgorilla4• 14 years ago

I don't think she has a problem with the fact that men got 92% of the bathroom facilities. Especially when it was logically justified. I just think she was disillusioned by the fact that there were so few woman at the conference that a decision like that could be justified.

pdelgallego• 14 years ago

Honest question, Are people concern because there are not enough afro-americans/hispanics/etc in the software industry?

bhughes• 14 years ago

Did you actually read the article?

She's wasn't upset that there was less bathroom capacity for women, but rather that this illustrated the (in her view) woefully meager representation of women at the conference.

ajanuary• 14 years ago

I think it was more of a trigger for the realisation that 97% of attendants are men. i.e. when you're so male heavy you need to convert bathrooms, there is a real problem.

incision• 14 years ago

I had the same initial reaction, but I think that the bathroom situation isn't the point at all, just a symbol of the shrinking number of women in the field - which is what she's actually concerned about.

artumi-richard2• 14 years ago

When you realised that "this doesn't make sense", that was the time you should have asked "or is it me..."

As for women in IT, I can see why IT would want women, but I can't see why women would want IT.

bglass• 14 years ago

You can't see why a woman would want to be paid quite handsomely to do work that is mentally challenging, not physically arduous, and -- in many cases -- can have a positive societal effect?

So... why do -you- want to work in IT?

mcormier• 14 years ago

Not exactly. It's poorly written. It takes a lot of effort to read this and determine the author's point. She does a poor job of transferring from her bathroom story to the general issue of there being an absence of women in IT.

Then she starts throwing around statistics in paragraph 6 with absolutely no segue. She goes from whiny complainer about something trivial to I'm gonna fix the world's problems by talking to other women at this conference.

She's just not a good writer and her being a woman has nothing to do with that.

rmc9• 14 years ago

Sometimes it's the little things that can drive home "You Are Different Here" and make one open one's eyes to how something is wrong.

verroq5• 14 years ago

It is the weekly females in tech industry time again?

At the risk of derailing the thread, why do so many people want to get more women into programming? Isn't that just as misguided as trying to get more men into nursing? Just because we strive for gender equality doesn't mean every job has to have exactly the same gender ratios.

simon• 14 years ago

Upvoted.

It's worse than just females in tech, it's OMG men and women are different! Eeek!

I kinda like the difference myself. Not because I don't want women in tech, but because women should be able to pursue whatever they want that makes sense when you consider their differences from men.

I assume this makes me a bad person.

raganwald9• 14 years ago

Blacks and Whites are different. There's no discrimination, it's just that Blacks are more interested in basketball and driving taxis and making music then getting into Harvard or practising law. We should celebrate these differences instead of trying to tear down barriers that don't exist.

ZoFreX• 14 years ago

I don't want to get more women into programming. I want to end the endemic and prolific discrimination against women in programming. The lack is a symptom.

I also find it very weird that an entire industry went from being female dominated to male dominated and everyone defends it saying "it's always been this way! Equality isn't about enforcing even ratios!"

Well no, it's not, but when you have these situations, where the number of people who could do something is vastly different to those that stick it out as a career, and those that do talk about systematic intolerance and abuse, there is a problem there.

rmc9• 14 years ago

Appeals to history are silly aswell because the whole industry. Software has less history than Coca Cola!

I mean, traditionally, there were less than 100 programmers world wide. No-one has any problem with ignoring that.

verroq5• 14 years ago

As others have said, it's very hard to discriminate against women since it's is mostly based on problem solving/programming skill. But that is not to say there isn't a general air chauvinism and/or objectification in the tech industry.

I agree that getting more women into tech is a solution, but this always operates under the assumption that women actually want to be in tech.

moistgorilla4• 14 years ago

There is a huge stereotype that tech is for men. There is a ton of misogyny in the tech sector. The hope is that by bringing women into the tech sector this stereotype ceases to exist. This is important because there are women out there that get interested in tech but society pushes them away because it's not feminine. There is a ton of wasted potential out there.

verroq5• 14 years ago

Most men didn't pick tech because it's for men, they picked it because they liked it.

>There are women out there that get interested in tech but society pushes them away because it's not feminine

I'm not sure if it's societal pressure that is the deciding factor for young women they picking a field of interest.

klaut4• 14 years ago

Upvoted as well. I see more and more of these complaints lately and it just feels that people complain just for the sake of complaining. Perhaps for the rest of the women (me being a woman in tech) programming and tech just isn't interesting enough to pursue it? That could just be one of the reasons - like i have no interest in nursing, thus i am not pursuing that as a career. Stop looking for reasons for complaining and go and pursue stuff you love.

__alexs3• 14 years ago

> Just because we strive for gender equality doesn't mean every job has to have exactly the same gender ratios.

Actually for pretty much any job not based on manual labour it does mean that. And even then it's mostly because we don't have enough robots.

verroq5• 14 years ago

You are willing to accept physical differences but not psychological differences between men and women?

Pewpewarrows• 14 years ago

The point isn't to have exact same gender ratios in the tech industry.

There are women out there who would make great programmers / sysadmins / etc, but never finish the process of becoming one, are dissuaded from ever starting, or flat-out quit the industry after N number of years, simply because of the barriers put in place by men assuming that the field is only for men.

jiggy20115• 14 years ago

What sort of barriers? Most of this seems to come down to "Women feel uncomfortable in tech because there are too many men" which of course prevents there from being more Women in tech.

It's also possible that some of the pressure comes from other women , not just men. A woman might be considered weird by other women for wanting to hang around in an environment dominated by geeky men.

I know tech women who have been called dykes by their female pier group in the same way male nurses might be accused of being gay.

yason3• 14 years ago

What are the barriers exactly?

Programming is about most gender-agnostic industries there are: there's no heavy lifting of anything (except figuratively speaking) and you don't need to deal with that many people so it doesn't basically matter if you're a man, woman, or an alien.

It certainly is that programming isn't for everyone, men included, and the current bias seems to signal that significantly more men are interested in programming as a career than women.

The heavy use of logic is a masculine trait which might contribute to the outcome in the case of programming, but similarly the heavy use of aesthetics and social interaction in cosmetology is a feminine trait which might contribute to the outcome of the gender distribution for that vocation.

You can bring the horse down to the water but you can't make her (or him) drink.

rmc9• 14 years ago

What's wrong with men in nursing? Or are they just half men, a bunch of fairies for doing 'women's work'?

jacalata• 14 years ago

Because if there were more women in programming I might not have to deal with people doing a double take as they walk into my office and saying 'oh I expected you to be a guy!'

JackDanger2• 14 years ago

The lack of women in the industry isn't the problem, it's the symptom. The problem is a monoculture of chauvinism and sexism.

praptak• 14 years ago

It is sort of a followup to the previous post: http://blog.jessitron.com/2012/09/confessions-of-woman-in-te...

Tichy3• 14 years ago

At first I thought she got angry about an relabeling of the women's room, which would be ridiculous, but I think what she means is that it is not OK that there are only so few women. Could be worded clearer...

sergiotapia• 14 years ago

>That day in the Family Restroom I threw a fit. Hurled my water bottle at the wall and screamed, "This is not OK!"

Oh please, calm down. Closed the tab.

ljf3• 14 years ago

Then you missed the point of the article - she was upset when she realised that they had to convert toilets as there were so few women. Her upset was about the lack of women at the event, not at the toilet arrangements.

It could have been more clearly explained, and closer to the start of the article, but if you read the rest of the article you would have seen this.

__alexs3• 14 years ago

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/27/cameron-...

Women (and other humans) are allowed to be angry about both perceived and actual injustice. TFA isn't even an actual emotional outburst. It's a reasoned account of something happened to the author.

Tichy3• 14 years ago

Sometimes calming down is an appropriate response to the situation at hand, though.

nollidge• 14 years ago

Thanks for participating in the conversation?

rmc9• 14 years ago

You're using the "Tone Argument" derailing technique: http://www.derailingfordummies.com/complete.html#angry

Try to see what she's angry about first. Sometimes people are angry at what they think are gross injustices. Maybe she has a point.

JasonFruit2• 14 years ago

Sometimes inappropriate tone can turn people off of a discussion. That's one of the perks of reading; if you don't care to be shouted at, you can stop reading. Presenting what you think in a way that makes people want to keep reading is important, and failing to do that lost her a reader.

djt• 14 years ago

I think she isn't complaining about the toilets, she is saying that she didn't realize how few women were in attendance until that point.

Tipzntrix2• 14 years ago

I think she forgot Ada Byron when she said there were no important women in computers this millenium.

EDIT: No "keynoters, the language designers, the authors of seminal texts" in this millenium. And there was Grace Hopper too.

Double edit: Admittedly, anything in 1xxx is technically the "last millenium". My mistake.

colomon• 14 years ago

Byron and Hopper lived in the previous millenium...

ehamberg• 14 years ago

Err. Both of them lived and died in the last millennium.

Tipzntrix2• 14 years ago

Fair point. I was thinking the last 1000 years as opposed to 1000, 2000, etc. In that state the same could be said about the last century or even the last decade really.

arjunnarayan• 14 years ago

Barbara Liskov won the Turing award this decade. Cynthia Dwork won the Djikstra prize this decade. Jennifer Chayes is the head of the new Microsoft Research lab in NYC. They're pretty awesome people, but probably not that highly visible outside academia.

indiecore2• 14 years ago

> That day in the Family Restroom I threw a fit. Hurled my water bottle at the wall and screamed, "This is not OK!"

What? I can understand being frustrated but that reaction doesn't seem constructive at all.

simonh• 14 years ago

It was constructive because she then to do something constructive about it.

Compare and contrast to the story about John Orwant throwing his mug at a wall at a Perl conference - and single handedly inspiring the start of the Perl 6 project.

But then that's ok. He's a guy.

indiecore2• 14 years ago

>But then that's ok. He's a guy.

Yeah that was obviously the implication. A guy tossing a fit in the bathroom would be just as randomly nonconstructive.

rheide• 14 years ago

It's not ok that only 3% of people present liked peanut butter! I'm going to make it my mission to get more people that like peanut butter into conferences.

mertd• 14 years ago

It is actually pretty interesting that so many commenters here short circuited into thinking she was complaining about the bathroom situation.

deelowe• 14 years ago

It really comes across that way at first. My first reaction was to close the tab at the "throw my water bottle" statement, but after reading the comments here, I read on and saw the author had more to say than just "someone move my bathroom." It's just poorly written, that's all.

benatkin2• 14 years ago

Nope, the level of reader comprehension here is too low. She said that there was no line at the family restroom before she said she threw her water bottle. If that isn't enough to clue readers in about the real source of her anguish as opposed to the thing that first tipped her off, there's the whole rest of the article.

Ntrails3• 14 years ago

Not really, the anecdote was described poorly and the exit to her main point messy.

I am also slightly bored of people finding things they wish to change and then simply publicising the observation. I was actually hoping that somewhere near the bottom she would offer some insight and/or offer solutions. It might be "Not OK" - but please take a few extra steps and suggest what you think could be done?

rmc9• 14 years ago

It's an easier point to address that than talk about endemic sexism in tech.

hnriot• 14 years ago

"That day in the Family Restroom I threw a fit. Hurled my water bottle at the wall and screamed, "This is not OK!""

How exactly after this do you expect anyone to take you seriously?

Gender equality isn't about having just as many women programmers, and it certainly isn't well servered by having tantrums over the bathroom arrangements.

bryanlarsen4• 14 years ago

She had a tantrum in private, which is the correct place to throw a fit. After you've calmed down, then you can do something about the problem, which she's doing.

hack_edu• 14 years ago

For what its worth, that line is clearly hyperbole.

rmc9• 14 years ago

You have just used the "Tone Argument" which derails the argument. It's a common response (it's in Derailing for Dummies http://www.derailingfordummies.com/complete.html#angry ). Please try to stay on topic.

Locke1689• 14 years ago

You're right, but for the wrong reasons.

There's no such thing as a "tone" argument. Recall your freshman year Greek rhetoric course -- what are the three main elements of argumentation? Logos (logic), pathos (appeal to emotion), and ethos (morality or "greatness" of character).

If you start yelling at someone, chances are you're going to destroy your pathos and ethos. Being persuasive involves more than just logos, it involves convincing your audience that you are on the right side.

This, by the way, is why many technical people are awful at arguing. They don't understand that argumentation is about convincing people, not having a bullet point list that you haughtily defend to the last.

The real reason you're right is that the author was clearly adding a bit of dramatization and flair to the piece, rather than blowing up and insulting their opponent.

rbellio3• 14 years ago

She isn't upset by the fact that the ladies room was relabeled as a mens room, she was frustrated by the fact that she didn't find as many female peers at the conference. She felt encouraged around other women to discuss technology and wants to encourage other women to become excited about the field.

I have some insight into this. I'm engaged to a mechanical engineer who works in a largely male dominated industry. To this point, I've never heard her discuss another female engineer at her company. We've discussed the issues of women in engineering and how interesting the dynamics are for a woman and I can agree that it would be an enjoyable ideal if there were more women in her field. At the same time, she wants nothing to do with women in her field that are simply there to prove that women can do the same jobs as men. I have to agree with her on this point. Every time I see ads for computer schools encouraging people with no experience to get a degree and flood the market, I shake my head. Why should I want someone with no passion, who simply wants a job, to enter my market and drive down the price of labor?

So, I understand where the author is coming from here. She enjoys the company of her sex and would like to have a larger network of her peers be female. I have no problem with that. I would say, though, to be careful about what you wish for. You want women who are passionate to join the workforce, not just any old gal.

shadowfiend4• 14 years ago

“Why should I want someone with no passion, who simply wants a job, to enter my market and drive down the price of labor?”

Because for every 10 people with no passion who simply want a job, you get one who is incredibly passionate but simply wanted a job. One who didn't realize that hey, this is actually pretty cool stuff, and maybe it's more than just a job, it can be a passion and a career.

I am of course making up the numbers. But discarding someone because they don't care before they've even learned a subject is even sillier than assuming that women don't want to be in tech because they're not interested in tech, rather than simply because they never took to looking into it because of all of the stereotypes (many of them true) about the male dominance of the industry.

rbellio3• 14 years ago

I may not have made it clear enough, but I'm not saying we shouldn't encourage women or non-technical people to pursue technical experience and/or education. I personally prefer to work in a diverse workforce and enjoy sharing my workday with people of different sexes, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. I'm not sure what stereotypes you're referring to, either, as I personally have worked across a multitude of domains and have not seen any difference in the approach of the professional development world to that of the rest of the market (my last software company was co-founded by a woman in fact).

I'm saying that simply wanting women or any other sociological division of people to be more prevalent for the sake of presence is a mistake. In your example, you say that out of 10 people that are encouraged/trained, you might get one very passionate developer. I know the math is made up, but if you look at this in the other direction, you now have 9 developers that are bad at their job, dislike/don't care about their job or possibly both. This would mean that 90% of the workforce is now comprised of people who are hindering the other 10%. That 90% of the code written is probably poorly executed.

I think that the career of being a developer is attractive enough that anyone interested in pursuing it would see it as a viable option. Segregating encouragement along the line of sex I think does more harm then good though.

k2xl• 14 years ago

At first I thought she was complaining about the fact they took away the girl's bathroom... But I think the article evolved into a critic of the lack of women in the field in general - saying it's Not OK that so few women are in the industry...

She probably could have been more clear of what she was not okay with. But a decline in women in the tech field is a deep and complicated topic, and the solutions weren't probed in this article. This article was more of how things are today - and we all already know that there's an extremely small percentage of women in the field. What would have been more provoking of an article would have been discussions of the root causes and reasons of why there are so few women in the industry, and why their career paths tend to differ than their male counterparts. Contributions to this topic by someone like her would be enlightening for sure.

JulianMorrison3• 14 years ago

Everyone who rushed in here to say "calm down, dear" in a patronisingly male tone of voice, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.

Stop being sexist.

steele2• 14 years ago

How does one type in a patronizingly male tone of voice? I hope you don't mean "calm down, dear" is characteristically male.

JulianMorrison3• 14 years ago

Yes, I absolutely do. The concept of women as "emotional" AKA "hysterical" is an old, untrue, patronizing and dismissive stereotype, with a long history of being used to oppress women (sometimes in the most horrific of ways). "Calm down dear" and its close paraphrases are a way of asserting male privilege to ignore a woman's reasoned argument, because she got angry.

masterponomo2• 14 years ago

I had a similar experience when I (a gent) took my grown daughter to a NKOTB reunion concert as a nostalgia trip. The audience was at least 95% female, and the arena restrooms were re-purposed accordingly. I asked an usher and he told me it was common practice to adapt to the gender mix of the audience. I observed many groups of women noting this reallocation with loud triumphant braying laughter. I doubt the Strange Loop men had a triumphal reaction to the bathroom allotment.

crntaylor• 14 years ago

That is not a similar experience at all. Even if we ignore that you completely missed the point of the article (she's not complaining about the bathroom situation at all, as seventy trillion other commenters have already pointed out - presumably you didn't read them either?) we still have:

First, you wouldn't have gone to a NKOTB (New Kids on the Block) concert if you weren't going with your daughter. You didn't actively want to be there. The author of the article was going to a programming conference of her own will.

Second, I don't think that NKOTB are important enough that it matters what the gender composition of their audiences are. Programming, on the other hand, is very important, and will only get more important in the future. Such a huge gender imbalance at the most important PL conference will be problematic for women in the future (and for men as well, if you can believe it).

Third, you "doubt" that there was a similar reaction at the PL conference. I presume you weren't actually there, then? I wasn't there either, so I wouldn't even begin to think about making up random suppositions and using them to support my argument.

masterponomo2• 14 years ago

Are you being ironic by using all random suppositions to refute my random suppositions?

kamaal2• 14 years ago

No he is right.

The issue is something like this. Most people have a tough time realizing that 99% of the times their net condition on any day is result of their own doing.

You see the problem manifest here.

   1. Notice non equal participation of women.
   2. Blame men.
   3. Shift the onus of change on men not women.
   4. Wash your hands off the situation, and claim high moral high ground.

Now notice what women did when there was a non equal participation of men. They treat it as it is supposed to be. Which is that men didn't take the initiative to be there and hence laughter.

The first step to change the world is basically start by changing oneself first. Now if you do all this and still get limited by the environment around you, then you can start by blaming the other things.

But even before starting, trying and doing something. You have 100 people to blame you are not likely to see any improvement soon.

andrewem• 14 years ago

There was probably triumphalism because in nearly all large arenas the lines for the women's room are routinely much longer than those for the men's room. So for the men at Strange Loop not having to wait was normal, but for the women at the NKOTB concert it was a highly unusual, pleasant surprise.

No, I don't have statistics to prove this, but it's been the case throughout my 30+ year life living in various places throughout the US. The only time there's typically a longer men's room line in my life is at tech gathering, and it's usually still not the kind of wait where people give up, as often happens to women I know.

bking2• 14 years ago

I definitely agree with your view that there aren't enough women in the field, but starting an article, where most of your readers are going to be men, by saying you threw a temper tantrum because a venue swapped the bathrooms to benefit men is inviting readers to disagree with you before you even started making your point.

I read the first part and immediately thought how immature you were, then I read more, and being more open-minded I read over your point, swallowed my previous thought and agree. Not everyone will do that.

I agree we need more women representation, I disagree with the manner the article was written.

bking2• 14 years ago

I read the first part and immediately thought how immature you were, then I read more, and being more open-minded I read over your point, swallowed my previous thought and agreed. Not everyone will do that.

I agree we need more women representation, I disagree with the manner the article was written.

rmc9• 14 years ago

Even without the "temper tantrum" sentances, people would find something else to disagree with.

These debates are often not logical or rational.

yason3• 14 years ago

In short, it comes down to that she wants more women in the industry. Maybe she seemed a bit lonely among so many men, or maybe something else—I don't know and she didn't tell.

All right. Now what?

moistgorilla4• 14 years ago

I'm kind of disappointed by the comments here. Not just by the fact that people couldn't read the entire article before making judgments but more that I would have thought the people of this website would understand why it's important to bring women into tech.

Women aren't biologically inclined to not like STEM fields (which I sadly see is a popular sentiment). The reason women don't go into these fields is because of the misogynistic culture. The stereotype of a computer whiz is a man. Ask yourself why you never considered becoming a nurse (if you are a man) and you will understand why women reject the idea of working in the tech industry.

Ntrails3• 14 years ago

I don't really see why a dislike of hospitals, excrement, and old people would hold women back from working in the tech industry?

jeremyarussell2• 14 years ago

I think you missed the point on that by a bit. See the point was men don't generally become nurses as often as women, because of the social stigma that it's a woman's job.

The way I figure there is no biological reason why a girl wouldn't want to expand her mental capacities via technology and programming. It's strictly because it's seen as a nerdy guy stuck in basement thing, then the brogrammers came out and people realized it's also a guy-that-views-women-as-objects field. Yeah, those brogrammers really helped the cause.

Went off on a bit of a tangent there. Sorry.

Strang• 14 years ago

> The reason women don't go into these fields is because of the misogynistic culture.

That is quite an assertion. Surely you can see that there are many, many more factors than just this one, even if you discount "biological inclination"?

prodigal_erik2• 14 years ago

If there were a lot of women with the kind of monomania that gets them through http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/L/larval-stage.html, but repelled from the profession by incidentals like role models, then there would be a lot of women hacking alone outside their day jobs. Are they really out there, and just aren't identifiably publishing that work or going to these conferences? Or is that kind of anti-social obsession not evenly distributed among teenagers?

JanneVee2• 14 years ago

>Women aren't biologically inclined to not like STEM fields (which I sadly see is a popular sentiment).

True.

> The reason women don't go into these fields is because of the misogynistic culture.

Ehm... not always. I've found that there is a cultural bias that the STEM fields are considered asocial and culturally women/girls have been raised to dislike asocial activities.

jeremyarussell2• 14 years ago

+ for recognizing that. Consider this though, what causes first, the asocial stigma? And what causes our society to keep girls from asocial activities?

An argument could be made for a broader more general form of misogyny.

nitid_name• 14 years ago

>The reason women don't go into these fields is because of the misogynistic culture.

[Citation needed]

lindseybieda• 14 years ago

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents - evidence of misogynistic culture.

juridatenshi2• 14 years ago

There are definitely studies that show this is why some women leave the field, even after overcoming the hurdles to get into it in the first place.

http://www.lpfi.org/sites/default/files/tilted_playing_field...

enraged_camel2• 14 years ago

People always complain that there aren't enough women in tech fields, yet no one ever complains about there not being enough men in, say, fashion. I've always found this odd.

mitjak2• 14 years ago

How many fashion publications and forums do you read a day?

enraged_camel2• 14 years ago

Two. The consensus among fashion industry veterans seems to be that if a guy wants to work in the fashion industry, he must be gay or at least bisexual.

bryanlarsen4• 14 years ago

I've heard complaints about the lack of men in nursing, education and day care.

In education & day care, the complaint usually centers around the lack of role models for children.

In nursing, it's usually related to the anecdotal observation that male nurses are almost always good nurses.

As for fashion, males seem to be quite prominent already.

nuttendorfer• 14 years ago

If she would have just used the "new" men's room nobody would have cared and she wouldn't have had to write this blog post.

People do this all the time if one room is full.

ljf3• 14 years ago

I'm guessing you didn't read the article? It wasn't about the queue (or lack of) it was about the lack of women at these events.

raganwald9• 14 years ago

Meta-question for both men and women. If you were a woman considering a career in IT and you were to read the comments on a thread like this, would you be more likely to join, less likely, or unaffected by reading the thread?

klaut4• 14 years ago

If i was reading a thread like this, it would mean that I am already interested in tech and there was NO WAY that a thread like this would put me off continuing doing what i am interested in.

raganwald9• 14 years ago

Not necessarily. What if you are following @raganwald because you know him from mountain biking and he tweets about this thread?

More importantly, I think it's valid for you to have a very binary perspective on tech, either you aren't interested or you're so interested that "To hell with the torpedos, full speed ahead." I know of at least one such woman with the same perspective:

http://raganwald.posterous.com/a-womans-story

Of course, that doesn't mean everyone will have the same reaction. Some might be more inclined to join, perhaps some less. I'm not a woman, and I don't want to be patronizing and try to suggest that there's going to be one overwhelmingly consistent reaction.

I was just trying to point out that our discussions about gender are as much a part of our culture as the culture we're allegedly discussing.

benatkin2• 14 years ago

Certainly less likely to join (unless it made me want to get in and change things, which I hope is what women reading this will do). What that gets me is the criticism of her writing, which seems harsher and less constructive than the average on HN. The thing is that it isn't completely false, and the people who post it think we won't notice they're being mean, because there's some truth to what they're saying. But it's only bad writing if you raise the bar of what makes good writing much higher than it normally is for a blog post on HN.

raganwald9• 14 years ago

John Gruber calls this "Grading on a curve." For example, if we make a big fuss over her throwing a water bottle in private but celebrate Steve Jobs for throwing temper tantrums over software quality, we're grading on a curve.

(Not that anybody is doing that, it's just an example).

shadowfiend4• 14 years ago

Empathy, noun: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

I think this is our[1] problem. Or a generalization of it: the ability to share another's viewpoint. To step into their perspective and say “oh. I see.” And to accept that maybe, just maybe, their viewpoint is valid. This isn't always true, by the way. But it is sometimes true, even often true. And even if it is valid, you may not agree with it.

But here's the thing. There's this idea that maybe women aren't in tech because they aren't interested. That's cool. I'm not interested in nursing, right?

Well it turns out, I've never done nursing. I haven't even looked into it. I haven't talked to anyone about it. Because I just assumed hey, I'm a guy, nurses aren't guys. Not even worth thinking about. That's the mindset. It's not that you know you're not interested, it's that you don't even give it a second thought! [2]

The funny thing is, people here have generally found their passion—be it startups or tech. And when you have your passion and it fell into your lap, it's easy to say “well these people who aren't interested shouldn't be doing this anyway, because they're not passionate”. Even if they had no chance to develop that passion? Even if there was no exposure? Maybe we're being a tad too dismissive here, no? Perhaps we should give people a chance to explore a subject before assuming they'll never be passionate about it. Just a though.

What about those who did reach that passion? Those who entered the tech world, found a minefield of sexism (of which that's-what-she-said jokes are just the very very tip of the iceberg, but more on that in a second), and said “screw it, I'm out of here”.[3] Usually those stories lead to another set of excuses, because the first set of excuses just weren't effective enough to deal with the full scope of the people being shut out of technology, willingly or not.

Let's talk about that's-what-she-said jokes. There are men who say “psh, seriously? Come on, it's just a joke! Why would you have a problem with that?” And there are women who say “well, I can take them. Not only that, I dish them out! Why would you have a problem with that?” Why would you have a problem with that? The trouble with that question is it's so often rhetorical. Not only do you not reaaally want to hear the answer to it, but you don't stop to think about the answer before asking. That kind of question should lead to more understanding.

So I propose, without further ado, that instead of trying to understand why something (anything!) is a problem from your point of view, you consider trying to understand why it's a problem from the other person's point of view, and if, with a little effort, you still can't figure it out, then you ask and look for a real answer. And read the answer. And try to understand then. Because I see far more effort devoted in most of these threads to defending one's own point of view than to understanding the other person's. And these questions, the question of women in tech, the question of social awkwardness, the question of sexism in tech, they are not math problems. There is not necessarily a single correct answer. One person being right doesn't mean the other person is wrong. And right vs wrong is not always immediately obvious.

[1] - when I say our, I mean the tech industry.

[2] - I can't speak to whether or not this is considered a problem in the nursing industry. It's irrelevant to the point at hand.

[3] http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/

jiggy20115• 14 years ago

It depends on whether you believe women are trying to enter the tech field and are being scared away, or whether they are not interested in the first place.

I would suggest it is mainly the latter, look at any IT/CS type course at a college and you will see mainly men and these are people who haven't even entered the field yet to get a chance to be scared off.

The point regards passion is an interesting one, I imagine that there are a fair number of people here who got an interest in tech at an early age long before they had to worry about starting a career.

The question for these people would be, if you were at that age and were instead a born a woman but had the same interests would there have likely been anything that would hold them back? If so what would it most likely have been?

jiggy20115• 14 years ago

Downvotes are fine, but I would appreciate a counter-point.

nancyhua3• 14 years ago

We bring up nursing: well, doctors used to be 100% men. Maybe doctors or biologists used to say, "Women are not interested in medicine or biology." Would any person say that now? Poets probably used to say, "Women aren't interested in writing at all." When women became poets, writers probably used to say, "Women aren't interested in serious literature." Artists probably used to say, "Women aren't interested in art- they prefer to pose as our nude models." Would anyone claim women aren't interested in these fields now? I've never taken a woman's studies class or anything but I imagine many of these arguments have occurred in the past regarding industries that used to be male dominated but aren't anymore.

I think we are generally wrong when we try to presume what a group of people would be interested in. Like who knew Japanese people would get so good at baseball? Whoever said, "Japanese people aren't interested in baseball in the first place bc they like samurai swords, not projectiles," would've been totally wrong, as wrong as whoever said, "Women aren't interested in being doctors. They get hysterical and like to sit quietly in drawing rooms," or as wrong as people who say, "Women don't like math or science or computers. They prefer art and writing and medicine and biology." Maybe one day people will be saying, "Women don't like intergalactic war travel, they prefer math and science and computers and tesseracts."

I don't feel any desire to downvote you. Here's my take as a woman who studied math at MIT and was always one of few if not the only woman in her classes/ nerd camps/ jobs throughout my entire life:

If you're the type of person who always knew what you were passionate about, you should realize this focus and passion is not common. There are some people who can explode out of some small town where everyone's main interest is football and still become a tech mogul. Most people are not like this- people do what their peers do and what they perceive as normal for whatever group they identify with. I think this might actually be especially true for children. Very few children see a scientist doing science or see something cool like a machine and then say, "Mom and Dad, I want to learn to do/make this thing," or then go online and research it. Most of the time, someone is showing the kid what they think this kid should learn or the kid is looking at stuff other people are giving to them, including their peers. Based on this, many girls who aren't deliberately introduced to tech/science as a possible interest don't realize they are interested in tech.

Most kids are friends with kids of the same gender. In middle school, when I went into a classroom to learn QBASIC as the only girl, it was less fun in every way except 1 than being in a classroom filled with girls who were my friends. I didn't make any friends in any of my middle/high school programming classes and generally kept quiet because boys made me shy, and vice versa- I also made them shy when I spoke to them. They weren't doing it on purpose- I think it's just human nature for us all to behave the way we did.

If I were less interested in programming and more motivated to have a fun classroom experience or to fit in (being a girl with my interests made me weird, which bothered me slightly but I was also interested in art so that kind of evened it out. I can imagine it bothering other people much more than it bothered me, sufficient to make them avoid this feeling of strangeness by avoiding atypical (for their peer group) activities), I easily could've not gone to those CS classes or to any of my nerd camps. When I went to a Theoretical CS nerd camp called Andrew's Leap at CMU, out of the other 30 kids, only 3 others were girls. We 4 girls were all Chinese and we became great friends. We also befriended the boys but it wasn't as easy because both boys and girls interested in Theoretical CS don't tend to have PhD's in male-female interaction or even human-human interaction.

Most kids do whatever their friends do. Most people do whatever they perceive people of their type to do. I think having a woman scientist in a popular movie does a lot more for planting that possibility in the popular imagination than many types of affirmative action programs. If anyone is saying, "Black people don't like hockey bc they prefer basketball," I think it just takes a great movie about a famous black hockey player to get more black kids to start saying, "I want to play hockey."

If I have a thesis, it's this:

1) Most people do whatever they perceive the group they self-identify with as doing. If you're a person who self identifies as an intelligent male, maybe you're more likely to think, "I should become a businessman," than, "I should become a nurse." In contrast, a person who self identifies as an intelligent female might be more likely to think, "I should become a doctor," instead of "I should become a programmer." If you're a person who self identifies as an athletic, white male, you might be more likely to think, "I should play basketball," than "I should play pingpong." People don't tend to want to be "weird" because of complex cognitive stuff to do with identity.

2) Most kids do whatever their friends do, and most kids are friends with people their own gender, and most people prefer being with their friends than not. So if you're a girl walking into a classroom full of nerdy, Starcraft-playing boys or a man walking into a yoga studio full of giggling females, you might think, "I should find another room where I fit in better," instead of discovering whether you have an interest in this strange field. Hence the chicken and egg thing. It's less fun for kids to be "weird" because being weird is lonely.

Tichy3• 14 years ago

Can you quantify somehow that the tech industry is more sexist than other industries? It has become this meme, but I never really saw any data, just anecdotes.

I have seen men from all walks of life crack ugly jokes, so I am really not convinced that it is especially bad in the tech industry. Not to defend ugly jokes, I just think the problem is blown out of proportion. There are bad apples everywhere, but the majority of people are actually fine and nice to get along with.

I am a guy and I wouldn't be comfortable in a sexist environment, and I haven't found the tech industry particularly uninviting so far.

If anything, I guess modern women have a problem in that computers are sometimes more interesting than women. If that is sexist, too, OK, we have a problem in the tech industry.

As for nursing, I suspect part of the problem is that men can not afford it. That is, it doesn't pay well enough to support a family.

protomyth4• 14 years ago

First, I didn't read it as she was mad about the bathrooms other than what that implied about the ratio of attendance between men and women[1].

I'm not real fond of the ratio, mainly because lack of female programmers means we get a lack of female managers with programming experience. Women who came up through the ranks and get the gig. I have encountered too many men and women who have no clue how to manage technical projects.

I should point out that at least female programmers are not subjected to the crap that happens to male ECE (early childhood education) instructors. Many places will say to an applicant's face that, because of potential lawsuits, they will not hire males.

[1] There are actually a lot of facilities that have sliding partitions that allow the number of stalls to be changed between events. I cannot find it right now, but there is a video explaining research done into average time using the stalls - male vs female and percentage of people doing #1 vs #2.

This is Not ok

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