191 karma · joined March 23, 2012
This was one of the places where the model could be a lot more accurate, but at the cost of much more complicated math.
Interestingly, data I found from 2010 was very different. It seems like more recently the popularity of early acquisitions (especially in biotech) and more robust seed funding have shifted the distribution of outcomes. It could definitely change again: success rates are by no means consistent.
Coding mistakes come from a lack of attention and tooling, not from innate skill. Being willing to take the time to proofread, use a spellchecker and write unit tests is important for anyone, regardless of learning disabilities.
I had intensive, systematic training in sound-symbol correspondences, and though it did not seem particularly effective for me who knows where I would be without it. I do know it was incredibly frustrating and a miserable experience as a child to be faced over and over with the one thing you are terrible at.
If I were encountering greater difficulties or my coping mechanisms were less sufficient I would seek it out now, but I don't feel it is necessary.
Most people grossly underestimate the forces of genetic drift and personal preference on phenotypical evolution. The null hypothesis for any gender-linked trait having evolved should probably be "it made them more attractive to a fertile population of the opposite sex."
His use of venues that have been traditionally hostile to women, conferences and open source, to try to make his group look better is pretty disingenuous too.
Also: Wendy Cukier, Denise Shortt, and Irene Devine. 2002. Gender and nformation technology: implications of definitions. SIGCSE Bull. 34, 4 (December 2002), 142-148. DOI=10.1145/820127.820188 http://www.jise.org/Volume13/Pdf/007.pdf
Do you have any citations, or are you just pulling your sexism out of your ass?
The includes links to studies (like Sapna Cheryan, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Saenam Kim, Classrooms matter: The design of virtual classrooms influences gender disparities in computer science classes, Computers & Education, Volume 57, Issue 2, September 2011, Pages 1825-1835, ISSN 0360-1315,) that show a "lack of ambient belonging", that is being alienated by other group members, was the primary cause, and another that interacting with sexist male engineers lowered women's performance ( http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~billvh/LWSIvHB.JPSP.09.pdf)
Few people seem willing to accept that the lack of women in tech has something to do with men, but it does. Included the "high school girls" who aren't interested: the Girl Scout's study found that the biggest thing keeping them out was expecting to face sexism if they chose those professions.
What is being described isn't a genetic trait; it is curiosity and optimism that is all to easy to loose or waste.
I would define A-Plus Players not by what they want to do, but by what they actually do. They are the people who do advance the field and produce work that is good enough rapidly so they can respond to feedback and adapt. They are the people who inspire the people around them, who are excited to collaborate especially across disciplines. Their curiosity is rooted in real-world problems and their advances are almost accidental in the process of making the world a slightly nicer place to live. At the same time, they know what kind of balance they need and take care of themselves. Otherwise they don't stay A Plus Players for very long.
To encourage more such people, I would seek to construct cultures of sufficiency, where people can take risks without suffering excessive penalty in case of failure or hurting the people they care about. I would find ways to provide stability that didn't diminish the opportunity for creation (this is where Apple did well.) And I would change schooling to provide more agency to children, so that they learn how to learn, instead of that learning is a chore other people force upon you.
Now I feel like a shmuck for having assumed the same of you. Glad you found a way to dismiss everything I said so you can keep believing whatever it is you want to believe.
The whole experience is very lizard-brain; I can rationalize it after the fact and compensate for the dynamic when making decisions, but that doesn't completely get rid of the emotions in the first place. Like how just because you know a film is a horror film doesn't mean you don't startle when something jumps out at the screen.
I don't know for sure if it affects my performance, since I haven't performed tests on myself, but I believe the evidence I have read that suggests it probably does. I can't really explain the mental toll that that being a constant visible outsider takes, especially when people around you say things about the group you belong to without remembering that you are one. It's not crippling, but it isn't pleasant either; sort of like wearing ten pound weights all the time.
I don't think having more women around would make me more confident in my job performance, but it would make me more confident in my employment and leave more energy to devote to the job. Jobs, especially programming, include teamwork, camaraderie and talking with coworkers. It's a lot harder to relax and fit in when you don't entirely no matter what you do.
I don't want to give the impression that this is all in women's heads either. Groups of people bond over whatever they have in common, whether it is shoes, pets, culture or gender. Right now, if some guy in the work place says something sexist or talks about how weird and incomprehensible their wives are or talks about typically-masculine things like cars or football or scotch or how they hate GUIs or how people need to stop being such pussies or how the best coders are all men, they are signaling group membership by defining themselves against another group, which I can't help but belong to. Even if I don't say anything at all, just existing is enough to disrupt the maleness-centered bonding that would otherwise be going on (at best. At worst I get "complements" like, "oh, you're not like other women!" and they keep on defining group membership in a way that would exclude me if they hadn't made some careful and possibly-temporary exception in their mind.) Once there are enough women in a space, dudes stop trying to bond over how male we all are and we can start bonding over the work we do or the books we like or whatever the reason is we are actually there.
I think when there get to be enough women in a group it improves some men's performance too. There are some men who backlash when it happens because they have defined themselves by the masculinity of their groups. They are the ones who talk about how we don't need to worry about there being no women in CS and how the whole thing is biology; those opinions don't magically change when women do enter a field, even though they become pretty silly. On the other hand, other men can stop worrying about whether they are acting manly enough and stop spending effort to hide parts of themselves to better fit in to unrealistic masculine norms and focus instead on the work at hand.
It's not even that I think about it all the time; it's that I am subtly reminded of it over and over again. It is impossible to forget, because the environment and people around me reproduce them, mostly entirely unintentionally. Even just the lack of women is a subtle, ever-present reminder that I am doing something weird and kind of awkward.
It's not something that is easy to describe. I'd compare and contrast this with, say, science fiction conventions, which are usually 40% women and where I encounter none of the same awkward out-of-place-ness. Still uber-nerdy, still has lots of socially-awkward men, way fewer reminders of how many stereotypes I violated getting there.
As for the biology quip, I apologize for being unclear. I meant that telling me to "man up" would be like telling you to "be a woman": illogical. The only thing I was attributing to biology was gender itself (and even that can be mental, physical, both or neither.)
I feel like there is a huge double-bind, where anything science-y is boring and dry and long and qualified with caveats and error bounds, so no one reads it. On the other hand, anything short, rhetorical and designed to communicate the human cost of the problem gets dismissed for being nothing but the writer's opinion.
I don't really know what the answer is; I would love to hear any suggestions people have.
I recommend finding or writing some articles about the problem and posting them. I look forward to discussing them.
I am sorry you encountered gender-policing behavior at your last job: that is exactly what I, as a feminist, am trying to fight against for both men and women. Saying that because patriarchy hurts everyone it isn't a problem to be solved, though, is unhelpful. It is a matter of "yes, and": it hurts men and it hurts women measurably more (https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/bitstream/1808/258/1/Sc...) and in neither case is it acceptable.
It's not just at work: conferences, meet ups and most of all online I encounter attitudes every day that either demand I act like a man, just as you did. The difference between us is that they aren't asking you to do something that is biologically impossible, and reminding you in the process that you will never, ever be able to simply fit in to your chosen profession.
No one wants to hire someone as a coder who is only in it for the money. Since most of us still working for someone else are at least partially in it for the money, we are often polite and lie and promise we're not gold diggers. I don't think that people with Master's degrees are even inherently less interested in the work; it is just harder for them to get away with the conventional, polite lie that we are utterly happy where we are.
The problem with "we should focus on women's technical achievements!" is that it rapidly becomes "but we shouldn't focus on women's technical achievements because they are women! We should focus on technical achievements!" which even more quickly magically morphs into "We should focus on men's technical achievements!" Wired represented Grace Hopper with a picture of a dude in glasses last week. The NYT thinks men invented the internet. How many men even know that Liskov of the Liskov substitution principle is a woman? Or that Alan Turing is gay?
As long as we don't address benevolent sexism and erasure, the best intentions for meritocracy will continue to fail.
Part of the point is imagining what the world would look like if women stopped holding themselves to a higher standard than men do. I find it funny that some men seem terrified by the idea: now you know how we feel all the time
Basically research found that when people think they are part of a meritocracy they believe they are justified in making decisions based on biased subjective opinions.
Eating doesn't affect anyone around you (though tuna sandwiches are definitely an issue to get HR involved in...) Sexuality, violence, religious conversion and the stench/filth of defecation affect people around you whether they want to deal with them or not. Ergo, it is rude to make "working" contingent on dealing with your literal or metaphorical shit.