You started out explaining how men’s brains are wired in such a way that gives them an advantage at programming. Then you say we should be more feminine?
It does not follow.
With regards to #2, you don’t have to be a programmer to write history on the Internet. Every innovative service released in the past few years seems to be aimed at opening up the Internet to any non-programmer. You got your Facebooks, your Twitters, your Tumblrs, your YouTubes, your Wordpresses. Programmers are not the only ones writing history, and if they were the Internet would be a terribly uninteresting place.
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Men are jerks, and accept their fellow men are jerks, and have their contests and rivalries. Note you are not suggesting women toughen themselves, but why? Why is man bad woman good?
Also, note you said you would give an iPad. Steve Jobs was the opposite of diversity. A diverse committee will at best hit Mediocrity. Maybe Steve Jobs should have been kinder, gentler, and as nice as you suggest men become.
Plumbers and mechanics solve problems. So do programmers. It might require agression, fight, to attack such problems. A bit of testosterone. That is the evidence. You may not like reality, but no amount of wishful thinking can alter it. You can only castrate the engineers who gave us things like the UNIX kernel. Or give the women a dose of testosterone. But don’t be silly and pretend there is no difference, or that no difference will matter.
Diversity is great in some places, but horrible in others. Some things are strengthened with new, unique ideas. Taking the best one can find. But today it means to dumb down, to restrict, to punish so that no one does much above the average. A marathon where everyone finishes between 9 and 10 hours and everyone gets the award, no gold, silver, and bronze for the fastest.
Personally, I believe in merit. If you can do it and do it better, you should get the job. As long as you do the job and don’t get screechy-preachy about how all your co-workers need to change.
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No, I believe ‘historical’ does not imply ‘natural’. That would be like saying “Things are the way they are, therefore it must be natural for them to be that way.” That’s a tautology, and useless.
Let me try again. There are causes besides nature for things we can observe historically. I claim the causes in this particular case are not natural, but social.
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There are efforts to get minorities into the tech field as well. Focusing on only one aspect of diversity doesn’t invalidate the effort to get women involved.
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Yes, it is a problem, because they are missing the perspectives and values of women. Artifacts can have politics.
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More and more jobs are relying on technical skills beyond the IT sector. Many “tech companies” nowadays are not really tech companies, but
$industrycompanies that use tech. In 10 years this is going to be even more the case.
Regarding the rest, women are harassed, assaulted, abused, and driven out of the industry at far, far higher rates than men. Some men may be bullied (I have been bullied, myself, and have unfortunately been a bully at times). That is certainly a problem that workplaces need to address if it happens, but it pales in comparison to the systemic hostility toward women. And it’s not always blatant behavior.
The Hack and Tell meetup group in New York City is considering a code of conduct inspired by the Hacker School rules in response to several women describing subtle behavior that has discouraged them from coming to other meetups. Just this morning I read a post on their discussion board by a woman talking about how she was the first to raise her hand during a Q&A session and was completely ignored until every other man who raised a hand was called on. Then, her valid, expert question about an issue with his algorithm was dismissed by the presenter as “that will never happen”. On top of that dismissal, nobody at the meetup (including the Hacker School founders) called the presenter out on the behavior. Thankfully, she talked herself into coming to future meetups, despite feeling humiliated.
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Thank you so much for this Jeff. I have been doing a lot of coaching lately and I am seeing a lot of females trying to learn Ruby. This is an AWESOME thing my male friends. Male dominated fields are missing out.
Your post also made me realize I might just be on that ‘spectrum’. I am very good at attacking code, I never try to attack people, yet people think I am attacking them not their code. Either they are on the spectrum and can’t seperate themselves from the code, OR maybe I just can’t see how they would get so riled up because I am ‘on the spectrum’
thought-provoking
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Historical evidence can imply natural function (but does not PROVE it).
Regardless, the question still stands, on what basis do you claim the the causes are social rather than biological?
“Man problem is right.” It manifests as ego.
I can do it better. Software development is a competition! It’s not about helping others.
I don’t need connections. How dare anybody check my work / suggest an improvement!
The users have to do what I say because I know their needs better than they do.
Customer service is a waste of time - surely any person with a brain can figure out my application!
I don’t care about the user’s actual needs - this software is really, really, really cool!
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While we’re at it, can we please make sure women get equal pay?
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I don’t know about what “men should do”, but i’m pretty sure i know what they (and women who do so) should STOP doing: generalizing all men as problems or accidents waiting to happen in hope of being perceived as a better person than they perceive their own sex.
Just imagine an article that posits that “woman problem” exists somewhere where there are many women, as this article casually does.
Or an article with “from one woman to another, it’s your job as a woman to [whatever]”.
These “problems” are the people you’re trying to address, and who you’re trying to shame into useful behavior some sentences later, where gender stereotypes are fully ok again, and “it’s a man’s job to protect their daughter mother and coworker” is suddenly an argument*.
Despite the good intentions that may have led to this article, I consider it to be harmful for gender equality, because like so many others it furthers a zero-sum-game thinking, where everything one “side” achieves (for example, having a lot of people interested in the subject) is somehow construed as an attack on the other side.
Confronted with this kind of thinking, i predict, in the long run men will just “chose sides”, because it was made clear to them that they can’t “win” by siding with the people who declare them problems without even looking if they did something wrong.
So, on a more constructive note, everyone please stop framing articles in this way. After gang related crimes, you wouldn’t write an article “what can blacks do?”, even if the perpetrators where black, because you know: that is not the problem.
Attack the Problems: Harassment. Bullying. Stereotyping. But don’t declare someone to be a bully-in-spe because of his gender, and don’t imply it by setting different standards for them.
And no, i don’t consider this to be an overreacting, given that the very article considers giving a child a toy (not: disallowing another toy, just giving) is somehow already discrimination.
*) standing up is the correct behaviour. But that’s the correct behaviour for everyone, not just for the man. If there are excuses like anxiety, fear of losing the job, beeing the target of bullying etc that you would count for women, you have to accept them for men too.
You cite stats that 12% of CS students are women, and 20-29% of working programmers are women. That suggests the problem does not lie with male-dominated workplaces, loutish as they can be, but far upstream.
Students are woefully uninformed about working conditions post-graduation (otherwise no one would go into majors with no realistic prospects of employment like Psychology, PhysEd or PhDs in English lit) so I doubt it is the prospect of a hostile workplace that is dissuading them.
The real issue is tacit social norms that hard sciences are somehow not an appropriate field of study for women (Medicine is an exception an women are very well-represented there). These norms need to be actively countered at around the ages of 15 to 18 when young students decide on their majors. A little encouragement or mentorship at that crucial age can make a huge difference. Case in point: a female cousin from a very traditional South Asian family was considering doing mathematics at NYU. I encouraged her to stick to her guns, and she then had a very lucrative career as a Wall Street quant,
This does not mean programming workplaces should not be made more welcoming, but the real problem should be tackled where it is.
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Perhaps I am misreading, but you seem to imply that:
- Office relationships are bad because when they inevitably fail, the result will be general discomfort;
- Drinking events are bad because when people drink, they lose their inhibitions and bad things will happen.
I disagree with both of these. Banning these does nothing to empower women; instead, you are indicating to your office culture that Bad Things Will Always Happen, and that the correct way to deal with that is to shove it under the rug rather than pulling it out in the open. The second item especially reads like the “well she was asking for it” defense - if something bad happens, the perpetrator and others in the culture can conveniently claim that “she never should have put herself in that situation”, rather than blaming the colleague who failed to control himself like a rational adult.
Also, on a separate note, why this? https://twitter.com/shanley/status/459725204944478209 It’s a pretty serious allegation, and it seems like you are being the very definition of a “bad ally”.
You should also admit you desire the opposite of Diversity. You’ve already banished men as men, but after eliminating the rest on your list of the banished, you end up with a modern politically correct monoculture where everyone has to act and think the same, or else.
Coercion only teaches that power matters, not reason. You can enforce tolerance with an iron fist, but then the women would have to tolerate coarse men, and they would have to tolerate chivalrous men. We had Christianity and Chivalry. It was considered sexist.
If you are saying men have to condescend to be careful around these delicate flowers, are you not just as sexist if not worse? Are women equal or not?
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#1: You have a point, of course. My issue with this is the way everything is framed, more specifically, how more women in our field is something that should happen, no questions asked. Yes, diversity is a good thing, but no one is stopping to ask why we’re doing this in the first place, and this is sheer hypocrisy. Because if there are no differences between men and women, and an equally capable man and woman go through the exact same schooling… where exactly is the diversity in thinking? And if there is a diversity in thinking then one must admit that then there is a difference between men and women. We can’t have our cake and eat it too.
#2: If it’s such a problem why is it that there is virtually no literature on it? Men have quite literally built all of the world’s structures. Men have literally built the world. How is this not a problem? Of course, people are going to cite biological differences and say that on average, women are not as strong as men, which might explain that discrepancy. But the moment anyone dare suggests that there are biological differences in the way we think, and that that could potentially explain discrepancies in female and male-dominated jobs, you get crucified.
Like I said, the hypocrisy is just awful.
#3: This is a valid point. More and more jobs are going to be using tech. However, the argument shouldn’t then be that
therefore more women need to get involved
but rather,
therefore everyone needs to get involved
Despite being a male-dominated field, the majority of people don’t actually hold an IT-sector job. I’d love to see more qualified people join our industry, regardless of the genitalia between their legs. I’d rather not shoehorn people into a field they wouldn’t feel comfortable in just because they’d diversify it. That’s the wrong way to do things.
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when I started in CS, my graduate class was gender balanced, and our head of department was a woman. Two of the three top students in class were women. When I started working in IT, the split was maybe 55-45 male-female. This was in South Africa, a strongly patriarchal society…
So the question is, what happened since the 1980s that women nearly vanished from CS and IT ?
It clearly is not a question of aptitude or interest.
This isn’t just my perception, peak CS for women was the early 80s according to this NSF report,
http://womendev.acm.org/archives/documents/finalreport.pdf
I have my theories, related to PCs, gaming culture, and the increasing glamorization of IT and associated money flows available: would be interested to hear of others.
Also read Zeynep,
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I don’t think the question is whether the doll is boring, unimaginative toy, but more what type of interaction and scenarios it encourages.
My brother and I grew up playing with legos. I always built things and then he would use the things I built in social interaction scenarios. I became an engineer and he went into psychology.
If we only had dolls and their related props, he would have been happy but I don’t know what I would have done. And I don’t know whether I would have known that building things was what I wanted to do.
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Number 1. More women in tech is a good thing. More black men (and latino men, etc.) is also a good thing.
But slapping a big banner up that says “Yay diversity” doesn’t accomplish anything except making people feel less guilty. What can accomplish something is identifying actual obstacles to diversity and trying to fix them.
Encouraging specific changes in tech culture to make it more friendly to women does not hurt the enterprise of encouraging specific changes in tech culture to make it more friendly to members of underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities. But these aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Are black people underrepresented in tech for the same reason that women are underrepresented in tech? And are the people who are most able to identify what the obstacles are for black people in tech the same people who are most able to identify the obstacles for women in tech? The answer to the second question is definitely no, and the answer to the first is probably not. So I think it’s going to make more sense to have separate but parallel movements to handle each of these problems as its own thing.
So while some of us work to improve gender diversity in tech, if you feel strongly about racial diversity in tech, you should totally work on that. That would be an awesome thing to do.
Number 3. Real wages are stagnant and declining in most jobs, and they have been for decades. Tech is one of the few industries where a traditional middle class lifestyle is still possible. People with equivalent aptitude for the field being denied equivalent opportunity is straight-up economic injustice.
Also, as far as being into Trek and fandom and such, the point isn’t that it’s wrong to be into these things or that you should have to hide it. It’s that when you socialize with a group of co-workers and you consistently choose topics of conversation and ways of bonding that make a few people feel left out, you’re being incredibly rude. That’s true regardless of what the actual topics are. Being cliquey and exclusionary isn’t any nicer from people who were looked down on in high school than it was when it was jocks and cheerleaders doing it, and doing it at this stage of life is even worse, because it can also harm people’s careers.
And that’s even before we get into all the policing of gender that goes on in fandom with things like “fake geek girls.”
As far as workplace bullying goes, yes, that’s bad. But pretending that this is gender neural in the face of an 80/20 gender ratio is laughable. Stopping workplace bullying is another thing that ought to be happening anyway independently.
And as far as “female dominated jobs”, the reason there’s not the same level of focus is because these jobs are traditionally poorly compensated relative to male dominated jobs. Arguing that the fact that there aren’t as many male receptionists is comparable to the fact that there aren’t as many female software engineers is missing the point by a mile.
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Given the twitter conversation that likely inspired you to write this, you should have at least attributed Shanely’s post from last year, also titled, What Men Can Do which you read.
As much as you might not like the way she expresses her opinion, or her opinion itself, it’s hard to believe her work was not a heavy influence on yours given the hostile twitter exchange you had recently.
For reference: twitter conversation.
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Thank you for calling this out, Scott.
This is a ridiculously good example of men taking credit for things women say.
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