"Making a pop culture reference no one understands" is a punishable rule? Wait... the author works at a game company? How does one build games without understanding pop culture and what people enjoy about it?
Most all the sexism issues in the industry start in elementary school and persist until anyone, male or female, enters the work force. Teachers and parents (male or female) all participate in fostering and perpetuation the issues encountered in industry.
To claim its an "industry thing" is naïve. Open-source isn't an industry and almost every single open-source community begins and matures absent any industry involvement at all. By the time business opportunities arise in a community, the culture is already mature and well-formed.
NodeJS for example is a viable part of the tech industry now, but 4-5 years ago it was a bunch of hobbyists. There was no industry to speak of. I imagine that most of the members of that community back then were men, just as it is today. This suggests that the entire NodeJS like almost every other tech community has formed its identity well before every being an "industry".
Want to solve this issue? Find out how to make sure future new tech communities are more egalitarian and inclusive from day one. Trying to bolt that on afterwards may mitigate the harms, but it certainly isn't going to fix them. Path dependency has presents problems, but you can't just ignore the role of path dependency in getting us to where we are now.
This is a great point. Open source communities are ones in which you are very unlikely to see any sexism, as most people in these communities neither see each other, nor have a very clear way of identifying gender, and generally hold egalitarian political beliefs to boot.
So its clear that the idea of gender roles starts much earlier. Now whether you think that gender roles are a bad thing, or you think they are a reasonable evolutionary strategy that has contributed to our success (we are certainly not the only mammals who adopt gender roles), that's a separate question.
There are also certain biological reasons that may lead to more men being attracted to these fields - Robert and Chevrier found boys performed significantly better in spatial tasks than girls, but girls performed better at language tasks. So maybe as programming moves from lower-level languages (more spatially oriented) to higher level languages, we'll see more women get into the field.
I personally have worked with some excellent women in the tech world, and think the presence of at least some women on the team changes the dynamic for the better, but if we want to do it correctly, we cannot pretend that biology doesn't play a role. We'll have to make the strengths of the different genders work together.
Nope. IBM was >30% women engineers when I interned there in 2004/2005. About half the interns were women and there was plenty of racial diversity as well. My boss was a woman, my mentor was a woman, and frankly it was the most diverse place I have ever worked.
I have to say that I dislike it when someone says Bigcorp was like this, that is what Bigcorp's culture is. Having worked in several bigcorps, they are huge, diverse, and it's impossible for one employee to say that their experience is reflective of the entire company. There are differences from department to department, from team to team, and for the multinational bigcorps, from continent to continent. A warehouse worker for Amazon cannot say that they had the same experience as a merchandising agent, and we can't even start to compare those experiences with that of an AWS devops engineer.
When someone says, "My experience at Bigcorp was like this!", we should always tone it down to read it as "My experience on the whatsit team in the whazzat department at Bigcorp was like this!"
> In your example, I bet IBM was still predominantly male despite the anecdotal hiring of a few women that you mention.
Responding to someone's completely unsupported generalization with an anecdote to the contrary is still a step up in the conversation. If you're genuinely interested in improving the rigor of the conversation, perhaps you should reply to the grandparent with, "how do you know?"
Google is reportedly over 30% women, too. I wonder if it is just something about startups - higher risk, lower guaranteed reward, worse training programs, higher pressure. The startup world compares well to the original California gold rush - a risk for a small shot at a high reward - and that was mostly male, too.
Also, keep in mind that it's a zero-sum game. If Google and IBM each hire 1,000 female engineers from top schools, that means that startups get less diverse.
> I wonder if it is just something about startups - higher risk, lower guaranteed reward, worse training programs, higher pressure.
This is explained equally well by inexperienced managers hiring people similar to themselves culturally, racially, and socioeconomically. Likewise, if I were a woman, I wouldn't want to work on a team with five dudes oblivious to their dude-dom.
Who in their right mind would want to work on a team of highly-intelligent, socially-challenged, culturally-homogeneous young men whose experience to date is primarily steeped in the casual misogyny, homophobia, and racism of MMORPG chat-channels; dorm-room bike-shedding; and adolescent dude-bro jokes?
If they're good coders, sure. I can ignore work-unrelated stupidity, but if I have to work with someone incompetent at their job that becomes very unpleasant very quickly.
I'll just note that coding is actually more a collaborative activity than a solitary one, so the 'socially challenged' are not very likely to be 'good coders'.
Across all cultures (perhaps across all of history), women are more risk averse.
In fact, feminist activists didn't push to get more women into tech until tech was a higher paying, lower risk endeavor.
Only then did it become scandalous that young women were choosing different career paths (but interestingly, the fact that young women are earning more than young men and graduating from college in far greater rates than young men isn't scandalous).
I think this is misleading. Men and women face different risks, and heterodox strategies are not indicative of very much. First, you need to be careful how you infer "risk taking" from "not taking the same bets", because the actual riks taken is a portfolio riks calculation which is blind. Second, you don't have any data to infer anyrthing about the quality of the risk taking they are in fact taking; that is in terms of actual/realize and even provability weighted expected returns. To give one crass example, a women could take a strategy of legal ownership of "high risk realized assets" through marriage. This is a "high-risk strategy", but it is also empirically true that many rich men are married.[1] Of course, the odds of success in this strategy are also not evenly distributed amongst women as a group, either. Another person could look at that and say that marriage to a rich person is a "risk avoidance" strategy...and again, this may or may not be true. Because wealth and genetic fitness need not correlate, and so your frame of reference on the purpose of strategy quickly turns into quite a bit more complex calculation.
[1] Marriage as a legal contract has a financial value; a derivative, with contingent claims on of the underlying (asset) value of couple's cumulative/aggregate incomes.
You and your complexifyin' aren't welcome around here, friend! All that nuance just makes our arguments much harder to make. You'd best take it elsewhere.
You've obviously made a serious study of this and that's why you have such justifiably strong opinions on the matter. Can you do 10 minutes of googling next time and share more? Or maybe 20?! Think of how informed you'd be after 20 minutes!
> If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe.
There's plenty of room between "justify everything from first principles" and "perform an ad hoc 5-minute search of the web for research that confirms what I already believe." I'd also say, the closer one is to the former, the more justified one is in feeling certain about their beliefs.
> It's pretty difficult to have a serious conversation if you have to fully define and prove every single piece of content in a comment.
That's good, because nobody here is advocating that!
> Common sense is getting to be pretty rare around here.
Well, as they say, "Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen."
What's "common sense," here? That women are more risk-averse? I disagree, at the very least until one defines "risk" and "risk-averse" very precisely. My "common sense" tells me otherwise. Shucks. Ain't that the problem with "common sense?"
I think part of the reason these discussions never get anywhere is because of blatant dishonesty in discussions. You actually think there is no "feminist activist" movement?
I don't, and I never made that claim because it's insane. I object to the idea that "feminist activists" "didn't push to get more women into tech until tech was a higher paying, lower risk endeavor."
There's a claim "women are more risk averse", and another claim "feminist activists exist", both of which are feasibly true, that do not lead to general conclusion that "feminist activists did not push to get more women into tech until it was a higher paying, lower risk endeavor". Which is a broad, unsupported argument, for which the data directly contradicts:
"And who are these "feminist activist" strawmen(straw-women?) you have set up?"
I took that to mean (generally) that the idea that there is such a thing as a legitimate feminist activist is nonsense - that in reality any reference to one is as part of a straw man argument. Not what you were saying?
What I meant was that he was characterizing all feminist activists as wanting or doing X (X being unsupported, anyways), which seems to me to be an unfair generalization and an easy to knock down, stereotypical villain.
I should have clarified in the original post, apologies.
30% is probably including sales org, it is high for engineering. Anyway, consider the difference between 2-3 women of 12 people in an startup, vs 200 of 1000 in a big company, where women may cluster on some teams, or have "dotted line" relationships outside their official hierarchy.
google may be 30% women overall but I would be shocked if that where true of engineering; Rachel of rachel by the bay definitely didn't have that experience
I've only had sleep paralysis a couple times and I agree that it is AWFUL. I felt like someone was standing in the room with me and was (irrationally) terrified.
I lucid dream far more often, probably once a week. I agree that it's nowhere near as frightening but I find it to be unpleasant as well. It's not very fun to stay dreaming when I know I'm awake.
It's funny but the movie Inception really helped me with my lucid dreams. Falling (in my dreams) will wake me up. I double-check that I'm actually dreaming by flying first (aw yeah, I can fly in my dreams - kind of like swimming in the air). So I'll often wake up by flying high into the sky and then falling to the ground.
I've got a few pretty reliable lucid-dream indicators too, but I'm always too afraid to actually take advantage of them, just in case I'm actually not really dreaming. I wish I could fly in my dreams; that'd be a good safe "this is definitely a dream" indicator.
For me, it's mostly that feeling of wanting to run but not being able to make my legs work properly. Which, from what I understand, is due to some of the same brain chemistry that contributes to sleep paralysis.
I've only experienced something like sleep paralysis a few times, and I think it must have been a very mild version of it -- just a couple seconds of "wait a sec, my body isn't moving when I want it to!" and then it goes away.
>"...kind of like swimming in the air"
OMG. That's exactly what I dreamt more than couple of times. In my dreams I would be walking on water. Like if I pump my legs up and down fast enough, that keeps me afloat on the surface of water in a swimming pool, or a pond etc. Kind of like that lizard that walks on water (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhsxo7vY8ac) . It feels so realistic and so normal an ability to have. Alas I tried it quite a few times at our local swimming pool, and it never worked :)
