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
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are born a feminist; if you don't die a feminist, you lost a bit of your humanity during your life.
Sympathy, courtesy, favors and censorship can't substitute the effort to learn programming and build.
Believe in God? Congratulations, you're a Catholic!
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.
The only thing I'm seeing people say is that both sexes need to earn their stripes and credibility through effort - and this needs to be true in programming just like any other field.
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.
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?
I gather that you describe yourself as a feminist. I would assume that means that you do not think highly of MRAs? If so, have you have watched this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp8tToFv-bA
Wouldn't it be a good idea to watch this video to the very end to develop more and better ways of arguing against them and their 'crazy' ideas?
EXACTLY THIS. Listen up, white knights, and please--knock it off.
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.
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.
Also, please stop hating on the white het cis males. I may not be one myself, but they are my friends, and my allies, and I also don't like seeing people treated poorly for the way they were born (having experienced too much of that myself). You are setting back the GLBT and PoC equality movements every time you hate someone based on their sex, race, gender, or sexual orientation. It's not appreciated.
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.
If everyone is born feminist, where did this allegedly sexist society come from in the first place?
You are neglecting to account for the entire field of biology and genetics, as well as making feminism sound like some sort of creepy religious cult (although it's certainly starting to resemble that, recently). People aren't really a blank slate at birth. Nature and nurture are fundamentally intertwined.
Additionally, what a "feminist" is seems to vary widely, from "thinks people should be equal" to "we should exterminate men." Your claim seems ludicrous in light of the fact that even feminists do not seem to know what exactly a feminist is.
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.
I'm sensing some religious overtones... Everyone is a born into this world an innocent child, but the world is not run by God. But everyone wants to reconnect with God.
> 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.
Sure, if feminism = equality of sexes, and just that. Maybe I'll also say to you that you were born a communist, and if you don't identify as one, you hate equality. (Or you hate freedom if you're not a capitalist, for that matter.) What is the problem with me saying something like that? Maybe communists intent and goal is equality, but it is not just an idea that people should be more equal; it also brings with it all kinds of things on how that should be achieved. It's an ideology. In the same vein, feminism isn't just about equality between the sexes, but about a whole lot of other stuff, like how that equality should be achieved, worldviews, if equality of opportunity is enough or if we should have equality of outcome. So if the ideology doesn't fit your worldview, even though you might agree on the goals they have, you might want to find a different kind of ideology.
Feminism is more unique, in this regard, since it is the only mainstream ideology that concerns itself with equality of the sexes. As a result, anyone who says that they are not a feminist because they don't agree with some parts of the approach ideology and the culture, even though they might be for gender equality, can be easily targeted as social piranhas because they don't have any mainstream school of thought to claim allegiance to. So then they might be told that "you don't need to look for a school of thought on the problems of gender equality because there already is one: Feminism! Clearly, if you are not one of us, you are against us on all levels!"
> You are born a feminist; if you don't die a feminist, you lost a bit of your humanity during your life.
Again, religious overtones. :)
Recently? :) Find some articles and pictures from the '70s.
Very weird that you took the comment that way; it's an atheistic credo that all people are born atheists and must be taught to believe in god. So this is actually the exact opposite of a religious view.
Though it seems obvious that most people are religious as a matter of upbringing rather than as a cause of something like a personal, spiritual insight or feeling, someone might argue that people are predisposed to religious institutions from nature's side, because it helps them make sense of the world, it makes creating social contracts easier, or something to that effect.
Primary and secondary school history lessons, probably.
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.
Get some fucking perspective about the reality of the world, already. You're being the quintessential bad example of Hacker News, here; the reason why HN has this reputation of sexist, racist idiots who think they know everything but keep spouting COMPLETELY IDIOTIC bullshit like you just did.
I am part of three of the minority categories you listed above as experiencing Serious Oppression. I'm also a nerd.
Perhaps it is you who needs some perspective?
Wait, no, clearly you do not realize that. But you should. Please do. It's getting tiresome.
You're being so incredibly disingenuous here and discrediting yourself so fiercely on any topic relating to society, economics or social justice that I truly do not understand why you keep opening your mouth. But by all means, go on.
OK, so I'm being snarky there, but the nucleus of computer science and programming is truly objective and has no preference or prejudice based on race/sex/religion/disability/etc. As others have said, the compiler doesn't care who or what you are. And there are a ton of free resources available online. A person who wants to learn this material, who truly has the will and drive to mastery, and an internet connection, can do so.
The barriers to learning that you describe are cultural, not intrinsic to the subject, and people are chipping away at them (Ada, Black Girls Code, etc), and that's a fine thing too. Changing the stereotype of "programmer" as a fat white guy in a basement chugging Mountain Dew and covered in Cheetos dust is a goal we can all get behind.