Comment by rds2000
11 years ago
What creates a hostile environment for woman is where a sector, made of predominately men is scrutinized with a hysterical "boy who cried wolf" mentality.
It's a vicious cycle.
1. First there is a tiny group of feminists, mostly consisting of marketers, call themselves coders, but if you were look them up, they're twittering and having fun more than building. They seem very happy to stir indignation.
2. Then, people in positions of power bend toward the illegitimate trolls who cried wolf. I'm talking, the word "meritocracy" being offensive by github CEO [1], python board members referring to geekfeminism.org as a charter [2] for pycon conferences.
Pack up and go home, these are the leaders, the chiefs, the alphas of engineers - and they are cowing down to politically correct trolls on twitter, who aren't even participants to the causes.
Twitter and blogs allow anyone to claim to be anything. You used to need a degree to Marketer! Now any girl with an iPhone can be one! Twitter lets anyone call themselves a programmer.
However, Github holds people accountable for actually having to program - funny how meritocracy came up as a bad word to these people!
What is really creating a hostile work environment for woman? I can tell you, men who stay silent watching this bogus stuff happen, woman with legitimate skill and talent may be cast off as a liability.
Consider this: if you are a woman, and you would let a bad joke ruin someone's life, or abuse politically correct sympathy as a female to get benefits - is that going to help your cause? If you are a leader or boss, and you let these trolls shape you - You lack backbone. I feel this is a lack of integrity, and they're not fit to lead.
I hope leaders set an example and not feed these attention trolls and call their crap out. These are woman creating a hostile environment for woman who would otherwise feel grateful to earn their way and belong.
[1]: https://twitter.com/defunkt/statuses/426104782894284800 [2]: http://jessenoller.com/blog/2012/12/7/the-code-of-conduct
Hey dude, here's a hint: perhaps these women are arguing on social media because guys like you fail to give them the basic modicum of respect as a human being, and they have to spend time fighting to be respected, which takes away from their time to build stuff. Whereas, unlike your privileged life wherein people don't fundamentally deny you basic human respect, you have plenty of time to spend on doing things you enjoy, rather than getting people to treat you like an equal human being.
Beyond that, the entire rest of your comment reeks of sexist views (prejudiced biases against women), so I’m probably already wasting my time trying to get you to open your mind slightly to the possibility that perhaps nobody here is "cowing" to anyone, that being "politically correct" is actually the admirable and proper way of being a decent human being (aka "not being an asshole"), that people favor those leaders who listen to complaints from within their communities rather than those who behave like dicks and tell huge numbers of people to go away, like you're suggesting. But if you entertain these ideas for some time and express a genuine desire to learn, rather than find support for your skewed and misinformed perspectives on how the industry (and society) works in the dark recesses of a community that was once full of people sharing your harmful worldview, then I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.
> unlike your privileged life wherein people don't fundamentally deny you basic human respect
Nerds are not afforded basic human respect unless their rare obsession happens to become valuable to somebody. We're merely being tolerated for the time being. And I don't believe anyone has ever gained a shred of respect by complaining about the lack of it. That just reinforces one's image as weak and unpleasant to interact with.
> I’m probably already wasting my time trying to get you to open your mind slightly
Rather than wasting time casting aspersions on one commenter (which just looks petty), I suggest supporting your arguments for the many other readers will have greater overall effect.
>Nerds are not afforded basic human respect unless their rare obsession happens to become valuable to somebody.
I do think this might be part of why the social justice warriors and feminists seem so hellbent on targeting the tech community lately; people who have been bullied their whole lives tend to just put up with more of the same, and nerds have long been an acceptable target for bullying. I don't see a lot of self flagellation about sexism from the lawyer profession, which attracts a different personality type entirely.
>I suggest supporting your arguments for the many other readers will have greater overall effect.
That's very generous of you, but these people rarely have an argument. Hence the plethora of bland ad hominems, I suppose.
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Are you really arguing that the “oppression” faced by white, heterosexual, cisgendered, male nerds is comparable to the denial of human rights that women, non-whites, transgendered people, and other oppressed groups face every day of their lives? I'm not looking to get into the oppression olympics, but to claim that it's in any way comparable suggests a fundamental, offensive lack of awareness about others' experiences.
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It's adorable how you think "nerds" are a legal demographic. Or that they are not privileged because BULLIES??? Or that someone fighting for their right to be respected against a society that has discriminated against them their entire lives is somehow "[reinforcing their] image as weak and unpleasant", rather than a strong, courageous and independent person.
We have been supporting our arguments. That's the whole reason Github got rid of the stupid rug. It's the reason why increasingly many people—men and women and others alike—are vocally calling out stupid bullshit like "bro pages" that reinforce the idea that computer science fields are for men.
Perhaps you should stop ignoring all the stuff we say and start listening for a change. Would do you much good.
>Whereas, unlike your privileged life wherein people don't fundamentally deny you basic human respect, you have plenty of time to spend on doing things you enjoy, rather than getting people to treat you like an equal human being.
Making a lot of assumptions there about someone you know nothing about. How the hell do you feel you have any right to say these things? You are the one very clearly failing to give basic human respect here.
Interestingly, you both are right. That's the thing about human behaviour. It's very complex.
> but if you were look them up, they're twittering and having fun more than building.
The irony of this comment being in a long-winded post on Hacker News is lost, perhaps? You do realize the vast majority of "programmers" aren't building 100% of the time.
Judging by that and the fact you throw out "feminist" like it's an insult, I'm going to say you've got some pretty heavy bias.
I don't want to make personal examples, if you compare the look at the replies to @defunkt's twitter post, the females cheering - who even go so far as to overly call themselves feminists - have basically no engineer cred to speak for. Not on github, not on LinkedIn.
Bias? Feminists on twitter? Hypersensitivity and hysteria about sexual harassment at conferences? Spooking male engineers into special consideration just because they're girls? Geekfeminism.org being mentioned by the pycon organizer? Merit being a taboo word?
In engineering culture, we consider this disruptive behavior disruptive and call it trolling.
Our consumer culture makes everything so easy and convenient. Our compassion to woman and how nice we are to them allows some of them to take advantage. This is a case of it.
In any case, removing merit from the dictionary won't get you into an engineer position. These tricks and trolls may have worked for special treatment before, but programming will take honest, hard-work and effort.
Have you ever considered the idea that your apparent dislike towards all things and people described as "feminist" suggests that you have, over the course of your seemingly-angry life, adopted a huge amount of misogynistic perspectives on things? Because, hate to break it to you, but you were born a feminist. Everyone is. Every person that has ever lived on planet Earth was born a feminist. Because the idea that women are somehow in any way inferior to men is a completely fabricated notion by a sexist society that instills these views onto people (meaning all of us), and feminism at its most fundamental is simply the premise that women and men are not different (in terms of hierarchical notions, like one being better than the other, or more "valuable", …etc.), which is the default view of any newborn mind.
You are born a feminist; if you don't die a feminist, you lost a bit of your humanity during your life.
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One thing I've always loved about math and science and code is how gender neutral it is. Historically, sure, there's been some bias, but it's mostly a thing of the past. Equality of opportunity (which we are now approaching, if we haven't achieved already, at least for the female gender) is not necessarily going to give us an equal 50/50 representation of the sexes in a specific field. Boys and girls tend to utilize their free time very differently.
Engineering has always been about results, so being capable is really the most important thing. I can see how that would be offensive to feminists, who like to push affirmative action and so on, but at a very basic level science and the fields deriving from it do not care about the social attributes of the person performing them.
This might be why the sjws have such a hard time understanding why tech people are so allergic to them--the sjws derive value exclusively from superficial attributes, like race and sex. However, bad code is bad code whether it's an evil cis white male who wrote it, or a poor queer poc. Logic is fundamentally egalitarian. SJWs are very anti-egalitarian.
Feminists are all for women in tech, so long as they don't have to be the woman in tech. Unless, as you've noted, "being a woman in tech" means tweeting to friends all day long. Sometimes I feel like the people who complain about stereotypes the most are the reasons those stereotypes even exist.
::looks at responses to @defunkt's twitter post::
1) it appears to be a pretty even mix of men and women responding positively. 2) a huge number of the people who responded positively (male and female) are in fact software engineers, some of them fairly well known (e.g. conference speakers), several of which work at big name companies.
So, uhhhh, what the hell are you on about?
> However, Github holds people accountable for actually having to program - funny how meritocracy came up as a bad word to these people!
Uh, no it doesn't? There are plenty of reasons someone might be a programmer that doesn't have work on github. Maybe their employer has a really restrictive invention assignment agreement and they don't feel like giving them free code. Maybe it's their day job and they do other things with their free time, like paint. Maybe they don't have any free time because they're a single parent or whatever.
>These are woman creating a hostile environment for woman who would otherwise feel grateful to earn their way and belong.
EXACTLY THIS. Listen up, white knights, and please--knock it off.
You are such an embarrassing cliché, I don't even know where you would have to begin to gain some perspective.
Primary and secondary school history lessons, probably.
"How dare you disagree with me!"
One of the good things about discussions like this, is that it brings out the real dregs of the community. If not for posts like these, I might be naive enough to think the community really is a welcoming place for all people. But then I see things like "group of feminists, mostly consisting of marketers" and "now any girl with an iPhone can be one!"
You haven't noticed the horrible abuse of the word "hacking" lately? I'm surprised.
Once something's mainstream, everyone tries to jump on it if they think it's considered cool. It's not really a women specific phenomenon.
There's male feminists, by the way. I know, mind-boggling for you, absolutely clear to anyone with the empathy of at least a stone.
I can't imagine why this sector predominately consists of men.
I'd like to see you question street cred of all brogrammers with such scrutiny. Like, you know, grant them rights in a community according to quality of their code and what they post on Twitter. Just let me get my popcorn.