← Back to context

Comment by renewiltord

9 days ago

In the history of the sport one woman made the Top 100 of the sport and this is supposedly evidence. And how many black? Count them out. They form at least a sixth of the world population. Now how many old? And perhaps then we find out that we can invent reasons for the defence of the old: traveling is hard, they have more responsibilities with children, they are more senior in primary career.

> The fact that the women's side hasn't exploded just like the men's side can mostly be tracked to the fact that chess isn't considered a "feminine pursuit" worth putting the time into (that finally seems to be changing slowly in recent decades).

A defence that doesn’t pass for software engineering, amazing. This old canard. The girls just don’t like engineering. It’s not feminine enough. Damore got whacked for this.

4 comments

renewiltord

Reply
thrance  9 days ago

The first generation of programmers counted more women than men. Chess would have more women than men if it was taught to more girls than boys. Simple as.

  • bsder  9 days ago

    > The first generation of programmers counted more women than men.

    I have heard this before, but you need to back that up with more qualifiers.

    There were a lot more female plug technicians because women were trained as phone operators. There were a lot more female keypunch operators because women were trained in typing to be secretaries. However, most people would not refer to those as "programmers" like we would definitely say for someone like Margaret Hamilton.