Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

This article appears deeply confused, and doesn't seem to bear much relationship to its title.

By "more women needed in technology", what it appears to actually be advocating is "more women needed in designing products for women, because men are condescending in their design of female-oriented products".

... and ok. Then the author follows it up by saying "it's basic economics! More women will buy your products!", but doesn't follow that up with "and so market forces will make it happen!". But whatever. If you want to try and change how an industry talks to your group, have at it.

But then also the author has taken the time to produce a cartoon book telling young women to go in to computers and technology, because (from the image provided) apparently all young women ever hear is badly-spelled messages telling them that they should focus on home economics (untrue) and that programming generally involves working in dark cubicles (sometimes true) and being a nerd (all too true). Why doesn't the author already know that ...?

Because the author, and head of this campaign ... isn't actually a woman in technology. She's a woman in advertising, who has decided that more women need to be in technology. Not her, just other women. So how does she know that women can thrive in technology? How is she able to legitimately address their concerns? It all feels a bit condescending towards ... people in technology. "Here I am, a person outside of your field, telling you that you talk to women all wrong, and I'm going to fix it with a swish advertising and graphics campaign".

If you want the message to be taken seriously, get Marissa Meyer to say it. Bring me the opinion of Danese Cooper. Shouldn't tech role models come from, ya know, tech?

Conclusion: the message I probably agree with. Diversity of every sort in technical teams is a great thing in my previous experience. But what the hell is this article about, and who is this advertising exec to tell deliver it?

These articles always tend to be quite bad.

They always address the two main questions/premisses "more women needed in tech" & "why are fewer women in tech" flippantly with weak, unthoughtful arguments & cliche explanations. Both are genuine questions that need to be addressed. Even if you are willing to accept that women need to be equally represented in tech as self evident or fundamental, you should still find out the real reasons why things are this way if you want to fix it.

Any answers that you come up with to the "why" question need to answers it in a way that doesn't equally apply to law, medicine, academics & government. Professions that women entered a generation ago.

In any case, I'm only half convinced about the economic rationale given by this article: We need women to design stuff for women. It is a definitely a real problem people designing tech products are disconnected from many of the people using tech products. But women are the one "group" that technology designing men do interact with. I think if you want to add useful perspectives something to encourage might be technology as a second career. People who spent 10 years as farmers, nurses, builders or rodeo clowns.

Law firms took concerted efforts to recruit women into the profession. Today, those efforts are no longer necessary because the representation of women in the field (about 55/45) seems to be self-propagating.

Engineering departments have been taking concerted efforts to recruit women into the faculties for years, with less effect. I assume some technology companies have too.

I'm not sure how to quantify the efforts put in by different fields.

To play devil's advocate:

We need more women in trash collection. It is a national problem. The disparity between genders in the field is huge, has been going on for years, and relies on outdated, presumptuous, and sexist stereotypes that women do not like to be smelly and dirty. And the discrimination goes all the way up to the top: every CEO of a trash collection company you meet is male. We need to reach every girl and indoctrinate them to like trash as early as we can so that more of them will go on to collect it.

What I mean is: Sure, we really like computer science and allied fields. But there are other ways to live, and it seems really arrogant (and speaking of stereotypes, American ;) to unilaterally decide that our way is the best way and roll in and try and "fix" the problem. Anecdote, but the people who do well in CS are intrinsically into it.

By "more women needed in technology", what it appears to actually be advocating is "more women needed in designing products for women, because men are condescending in their design of female-oriented products".

An interesting converse of this is that if you aren't building a female oriented consumer product, women probably aren't that helpful. If your product has primarily male consumers (e.g., that huge samsung phone, a database), you probably want to make sure your designers are all/mostly men.

I wish people would fully think through the logical implications of their arguments, since I somehow doubt the author of this piece would agree with that.

http://ladygeek.com/team-2/ <-- where is programmer geek?

link is dead at the moment. I've worked with them and considering they thought it was an good idea to pitch a c# developer for a c position, I'd rather they didn't have a programmer geek category.

Site seems to be down. Probably using female servers.

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