This isn't gender specific. As a guy I have worked in teams where asking for help is terrifying. To the point I stared at code for hours lest I ask how the uber-abstraction and hack soup worked.
This happened with me in real life when I expressed some questions about the veracity of the clock kid case to an associate. "You think that [being charged with possessing a hoax explosive device] would've happened to a white kid?!" - "Uh, yeah. I was almost arrested for installing VNC on the school computers..." - "That's such an ignorant white thing to say!" No way to win.
Maybe we can stop allowing these conversations here, because this is an infinite loop that I don't see us escaping any time soon.
Individual instances of biased decision-making are impossible to prove, but that doesn't mean we should stop bringing up the possibility. I'm sure you check yourself against common biases when you think they might be relevant. Prejudice is a common bias, and we should keep talking about it.
A while back I read a study that found that work culture inside a company is primarily made from gender culture if a single gender become dominant. The minority gender, be that male or female, then has to choose between assimilate or leave. Both men and women tend to chose the later option, which result in profession becoming more homogenic in regards to gender. Only work in professional environments where there is a fairly equal amount of both genders do unique work cultures become dominant.
But that model does not fit common biases. It models both women and men as pushing each other out and discriminate against each other. As such, we don't see such models being discussed, and we don't talk about it. The only model that fits in our existing biases is men as the eternal aggressor and women as the eternal victim, and there isn't much worth to discuss within that limited space that hasn't been discussed to death already.
If you don't want 10 person teams with the same gender, ask yourself this: why has those men being pushed to work there and excluded elsewhere? Why are women being excluded to work there and pushed elsewhere?
The Swedish institution of education made a report that noted that as gender roles are being made more equal, work titles has gotten more gendered in the process. The correlation seem to imply that men and women project gender roles onto work as an reaction to having their gender roles being made less distinct in home and society at large.
The same report also noted than in 15 years of efforts to get women to take up more male typical classes like engineering, only very minor progress has been made. No efforts (their exact wording) has been made to make men go to areas dominated by women, and the report predict that no major change in gender equality in education is going to occur until both genders starts to compete to get into classes dominated by the other gender. You need to pressure both side at the same time in order for gender lines to break.
But again, people aren't really interested to talk about this since it doesn't match current biases. It easier to just assume that men are evil, women victims, and try to fix problems under those assumptions. Next time you say that "There are plenty of things worth discussing", here was a explanation why there won't be a worthwhile discussion.
I can strongly recommend page 33 if you don't have time to read the whole thing. If you do have time however, it's references are as significant as the report itself. I also strongly recommend reading some anecdotal stories from people that are minority in professions where the gender inequality is 90%:10% and over.
It's also interesting to note that the women could be very clannish leaving us males as isolated individuals.
Probably, and they probably didn't have impure intentions. Who are you to say no rational argument can be brought against the idea of universal suffrage? Surely our forefathers thought the argument was sufficient for nearly 150 years.
One may agree or disagree, but their ability to express their arguments shouldn't be stigmatized.
Exactly. During my time, white kids were being kicked out of school for wearing trench coats (and getting their lockers searched). But race was never brought into it..and people don't really care because it didn't get you attention.
The issue isn't really sexism or racism. The issue is that many people don't really realize how abusive some groups of people really are....to everyone.
Back when computer science was an esoteric subject only studied by your stereotypical neck beard, most developers I met in college were not really interested in helping beginners, regardless of your race or gender. If you did ask a stupid question, it was often met with a condescending response and arrogant attitude.
The Internet made it better, because you could learn so much information, without having to deal with the crap.
Only now, that computer science is cool and anyone and everyone is trying to get into it for a high paying job, does the mainstream see the same issues that have been going on for decades.
It should piss anyone off that went through them years ago and nobody would listen..because they weren't one of the magical genders or races that instantly gets you sympathy.
On a side note, why aren't we going after the fashion industry? It's equally as abusive and if you are a heterosexual man? You will be pushed out pretty quickly.
Nobody truly wants true equality, they just want retribution for perceived injustices and the power to abuse others without any consequences. It's pretty evident from all these discussions.
At the same time I'm hesitant to dismiss all gendered/racial discussion. For example, I once had to deal with a female classmate being referred to as "woman" over her real name in a condescending manner several times by upperclassmen when trying to pursue a computer science degree. I'm pretty sure this wouldn't have happened if she was a white male.
There's a space for such discussion when people run into them because otherwise, what, we're telling them to shut up and not talk about their experiences as you seem to suggest?
I have been in Chemistry classes where the teacher was solving problems with something like Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures, and I was too petrified to admit that I hadn't understood what a partial pressure was, let alone some law involving it -- i.e., I was a "dumb" guy in a chemistry class.
In my opinion, the one thing that can be done to stop this is stop demonizing people who don't know things and fully internalize the simple truth that everyone starts free of knowledge in this world.
A stray "Wait, what does that mean again?" is no problem and actually probably helps a lot of people in the class who are too shy to speak up, but you can't let class time be monopolized by slow students. The slow students shouldn't be ashamed and should go get the help they need, they just need to be directed to the appropriate venue.
The same is true in programming generally. We need to make it easy to identify the appropriate forum for the issue one is having and then we need to encourage them to seek resolution there.
A way to improve SO would be to make it more obvious that the only questions that should be asked should be questions that are not Googleable, give a link to a "how to Google for programming help" guide, and when questions that violate this rule get added, include a direction to a helpful beginner's chat room or something along with the closure message.
"That student is daring to be stupid. By calling attention to himself, he runs the risk that his fellow students will think him an idiot. But you know what? That student is the smartest student in the class. Because he doesn't want to be left behind, he doesn't want to misunderstand something, and he wants to know if that mistake is a mistake in the teacher's writing or in his understanding. That student, by daring to be stupid, assures that he doesn't end up actually stupid."