The "shut up and build things" position embodies the tacit assumption that the world naturally pushes itself to an equillibrium that is fair and just. The assumption that racism and sexism result in elastic deformation of society that will go away as soon as you remove whatever force is warping it.
I don't think history bears that out. Society is a soft ductile metal. If you bend it, it'll stay bent. You have to hammer it back into straightness. Talking (and browbeating and prosecuting when necessary) is how you do that.
PS: I don't disagree with the author that not everyone needs to be on the front line of every culture war. But I think someone needs to be.
"The "shut up and build things" position embodies the tacit assumption that the world naturally pushes itself to an equillibrium that is fair and just."
It does not. It embodies the tacit assumption that some people prefer to spend their time building something tangible rather than devoting their lives tilting at the windmills of eradicating racism, sexism, and all the other bigotries endemic to our society.
Tilting at those windmills is important, and might be a cause worthy of devoting your life to it, but it's not everyone's calling.
Lastly, the author of the original article is arguably doing more to advance the cause of women in technology by participating in and engaging with the community, than many of the people writing articles and complaining about the problems.
> Tilting at those windmills is important, and might be a cause worthy of devoting your life to it, but it's not everyone's calling.
"Tilting at windmills" means attacking imaginary enemies, you really can't have it both ways of calling work on eradicating racism, sexism, and other bigotries "Tilting at windmills" and then say it's important.
Further, eradicating racism, sexism, etc.. IS EVERYONE'S CALLING. If you don't hear the call, you're part of the problem, PERIOD.
You propose a world where a handful of us don't get to participate in society because all we have time to do is to yell at you about being a dummkopf.
Your comment is fascinating because it is a glaring example of what another commenter described "you are either with or against us" attitude that the extrimist parts of any movement show. I understood the person you responded to to see your cause as a good one and thus be on your side. If you attack anyone who doesn't want to go on a crusade you will never achieve what you set out to and will in fact drive people off. Not to mention that you will be very frustrated.
I don't think it's an attack, just the observation that indifference and inaction supports the status quo. It's not "against us" in an active sense, but it is in a passive sense; it's not pure neutrality, as many posters here seem to think. It's sort of like walking past an elderly person who has fallen because you don't want to interrupt your game.
I respectfully disagree. Those who claim "if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem," are fallaciously dividing the field into just two factions.
In reality, there are those part of your preferred solution, those who actively oppose your solution, those who are content with the situation as it stands, and those who may prefer different solutions, or perceive the problem from a different perspective.
What you propose is a world where people are constantly being accused of stupidity and insulted simply because they hold different opinions than their accusers.
I am not responsible for the whole of human behavior. I am only responsible for myself. If I, myself, make a token effort to neither exhibit bigoted behaviors nor teach them to those under my influence, is that not enough? What if one of my personal values is that other people are entitled to their own opinions, even if they are incompatible with my own?
A few of my in-laws and distant cousins are extremely racist, but it is not my job to "fix" them. Nor could I. Their minds are closed tightly. And they too tend to think that "if you are not part of my solution, you are part of my problem."
If you spend so much of your time screaming that other people are doing it all wrong that you have no time to do anything yourself, then who is the dumb-head?
"Further, eradicating racism, sexism, etc.. IS EVERYONE'S CALLING. If you don't hear the call, you're part of the problem, PERIOD."
I guarantee that if I knew you and how you spend your time, I could quickly point out endemic, crucially important problems with a clear moral imperative, that you are contributing very little, if anything, to solving.
I think this was a fine comment until you decided to call people (and, by pretty direct implication, the commenter you replied to) "part of the problem". I'm closer to your side of this debate than 'jimbokuns and I winced when I read this.
Further, eradicating racism, sexism, etc.. IS EVERYONE'S CALLING.
I've got a friend who is very white and very male and very straight, and honestly, it's worked out pretty well for him.
What is his incentive for abolishing racism, sexism, etc.? That incentive is certainly not outweighed by what he gives up.
Your argument (such as it is) is as foolish and baseless as his is practical and repugnant.
EDIT:
Downvotes as expected. Look, the only progress to be made is to show those folks that there is really a better outcome if they are more egalitarian.
The current guilt-based argumentation doesn't work, because it alienates the people who are actually trying to do the right thing and utterly fails to register for people like my friend who would agree with the points of privilege and proceed to exercise them to their fullest.
If you stock a team of people attacking a problem with people who fit one precise mold, you'll miss out on the breadth of problems that people from other backgrounds face. More importantly, you'll miss out on their solutions to those problems. You're trading global progress for a blip of personal comfort extracted at a high cost from more vulnerable people.
Seriously in the most crass cynical context imaginable, diverse teams should be expected to outperform homogenous ones. For some HN-relatable examples to this 101-level topic, see TNG: The Masterpiece Society, DS9: Melora, or Bill Burr's "Ashy" bit.
Does that explain the "incentive" to not be a bigoted shithead devoid of empathy?
If you stock a team of people attacking a problem with people who fit one precise mold, you'll miss out on the breadth of problems that people from other backgrounds face.
If I'm building an algorithm for packing bytes into an array, inverting matrices, or some similarly technological issue, why would insights into police profiling or sexual harassment be useful?
Seriously in the most crass cynical context imaginable, diverse teams should be expected to outperform homogenous ones.
I note that two of your examples are from science fiction television, and the third is a (good) comedy routine.
I don't disagree with the spirit of the common-sense "should" in your sentence. I do question--because Lord knows we'd all be better off with concrete numbers so we can put this to bed and win a decisive victory for diversity--whether or not this diversity actually results in better outcomes reliably.
You're trading global progress for a blip of personal comfort extracted at a high cost from more vulnerable people.
Well, yes...that's pretty much the definition of capitalism as currently implemented: running arbitrage on scarcity of material or knowledge so as to enrich oneself and one's stakeholders.
~
Again, I'm all for diversity and these things. I'm just pointing out that these arguments would benefit from much more intellectual and practical rigor than many seem to possess.
If I'm building an algorithm for packing bytes into an array, inverting matrices, or some similarly technological issue, why would insights into police profiling or sexual harassment be useful?
Because most software that actually gets used on a day-to-day basis doesn't purely work on theoretical constructs, for one: even if your application just needs really basic things like names [1] or addresses [2], it will implicitly make at least some assumptions about users, which a diverse team is much better equipped to check and correct.
Yeah, I wasn't sure how to address this one. In addition to most software not existing inside a pure abstract context, things like using 3 random points to determine the quick sort pivot just sat there undiscovered for a few decades. Since hypothesis-generation is the big undefined area, it would seem that diverse backgrounds would necessarily help. Plus we're implicitly assuming that diverse backgrounds lead to sub-par work in the pure theory domain, which is kinda shitty on its own.
And I think the parallels between a solid understanding of police "kettling" as they would apply to distributed systems and/or queueing are fairly clear. But I wouldn't expect someone who thinks inverting a matrix is tricky to appreciate either.
You didn't start out asking for "much more intellectual and practical rigor than many seem to possess." You started out with a broad assertion that there was no possibility of anything existing in this "incentive space" for a straight, white man to do anything but kick minorities to the curb and languish on unearned privilege. I firmly believe that something like "Ashy" is undeniable explanatory of the incentives around it for someone aggressively invested in maintaining their own privilege.
As charming as it is to see you sprint down the field with those goalposts in tow if you honestly thought your first reply warranted intellectualism instead of bro-pandering you're deluding yourself. Do yourself a favor and plug "diverse teams perform better" to educate yourself on a variety of studies across science, finance, and engineering coming to this conclusion. Don't act like "how do I convince my shithead friend" should be met with reams of dry papers instead of introductory pop-culture pablum to get the 101-grade materials across.
I think you're right about the ductile nature of society, but at the same time I think you're on a fine line about how to change it.
I really believe that only love can overcome hate- you can't fight personal negativity with more negativity or disparagement. It only makes people dig their heels in deeper. I know this is a controversial and probably offensive opinion, but it's a core part of who I am so I feel I should say it and take whatever comes.
The assumption that racism and sexism result in elastic deformation of society that will go away as soon as you remove whatever force is warping it.
Yes, this is the economic assumption - folks are greedy and will exploit undervalued resources.
I don't think history bears that out. Society is a soft ductile metal. If you bend it, it'll stay bent.
This ignores the history of various oppressed groups who unbent themselves (east Asians, south Asians, Jews, Irish). It also ignores the fact that women have unbent themselves in most fields, just not math heavy STEM fields.
> Yes, this is the economic assumption - folks are greedy and will exploit undervalued resources.
Except that's not what history shows us. Economics didn't free the slaves. Guns did. Economics didn't end segregation in housing and education. Bitter, expensive litigation did.[1] Economics didn't make gay marriage legal. Waging a cultural war on homophobes until it became social suicide in most circles to be one did that.
Economics did end segregation of Asians, Irish, Italians and Jews. Again, the fact that some groups have been violently unbent does not mean that groups can't unbend themselves. Just because you can cite other examples doesn't mean that the ones I cited don't exist.
Incidentally, you are aware that Jim Crow laws were mainly about economic protectionism, right? Raising wages for (white) workers by using guns against the competition. Folks at the time were well aware that greedy employers might tolerate black as long as it came with extra green. In fact, all your examples live outside the realm of greedy economic actors interacting via voluntary trade, so I really don't get the relevance at all.
These positive claims, whether they are accurate or not, regarding economics, segregation, and oppressed minorities are all fine and dandy in an abstract world. What are your takeaways from such arguments? Is it something along the lines of: "Since all of these other groups managed to unbend themselves when the economic factors were right, we (society as a whole/at large) should wait for other oppressed groups do the same?"
To amend yours, one such normative claim might be: "Since all of these other groups managed to unbend themselves when the economic factors were right, we (society as a whole/at large) should figure out how the groups (or treatment thereof) which didn't unbend themselves differ from those that did."
This is a weird lens to look at slavery through. The circumstances in the US were unique: intense economic coupling to slavery, very large regional identity defined by slavery, &c.
More importantly, I'm not sure what this has to do with Rayiner's point. The realization that many plantation slaves would be better utilized as doctors and lawyers did not free the slaves, nor did economic competition from non-slaveholding plantations. It did, in fact, require coercion.
IMO the blame lies at least partly on American hyper-competitive mentality, where you have people on both sides willing to go to war over slavery, or "wage cultural war on homophobes" today. My link was intended to show that not all countries are like that.
I just can't agree with Rayiner that we should escalate more because the current conflict is all-important. Game theory tells us that if everyone thinks that way, society loses. And game theory offers a way out: you need a shared culture that enables de-escalation without losing face. Conflicts would still get resolved, but without wasting tons of resources on both sides. Many countries have that.
just to add, some writers distinguish between societies where slavery existed (almost every human society) and "slave societies", where "the definition of the relationship between ownership and labor -- is defined by slavery". (see: http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2011/09/the-slav...)
> intense economic coupling to slavery, very large regional identity defined by slavery, &c
If we wish this to be relevant to the current discussion: do you think the US has intense economic coupling to few-women-in-tech? Large regional identity defined by few-women-in-tech?
> It did, in fact, require coercion.
In a minority of instances, it was achieved through coercion. That doesn't mean coercion was the only way it was ever going to happen in those instances.
And when someone says "it took guns, not economics" then it seems entirely to the point that guns were only involved in a minority of instances. I'm not sure how you can not think this is relevant to what Rayiner was saying.
> This ignores the history of various oppressed groups who unbent themselves (east Asians, south Asians, Jews, Irish). It also ignores the fact that women have unbent themselves in most fields, just not math heavy STEM fields.
I almost had a crazy theory about what determines if a group can overcome their oppression and become mainstream, but the Irish provided a counterexample that shot it down.
The theory was that to overcome oppression, a group had to contribute a cuisine or food style that became mainstream. Asians. Check. Jews. Check. Italians. Check. Hispanics. Check. Blacks...they contributed soul food, but it has not gone mainstream the way the others have, and they have not overcome oppression. Indians. Check.
But I don't think I've ever even seen an Irish restaurant in the US, so my beautiful theory went down in flames.
Good news! Irish pubs are pretty great (I guess many thematic pubs are?), and while not pop-culture mainstream, are at least common enough that you likely have one not-too-far away. At the very least, it gives your idea something to grab onto :)
so basically you're saying to un-oppress women, they should get back to the kitchen :-P (I'm kidding! I'm kidding)
it's an interesting theory, and as HCIdivision said, there's indeed Irish pubs, and (mainly in the US) also that whole St. Patrick's Day thing that does indeed put Irish in a good light.
but realistically, for women in tech, I don't think baking cookies is going to do the trick. however going with the Irish example, some general celebratory thing could be nice. even if it doesn't work, at worst, you'd have a great time? I've always been of the opinion that pretty much whatever you do with a group of people (be it a convention, a party, study, or work) just steadily gets better in many ways the more the gender ratio approaches 50/50.
out of curiosity, what is popular Jewish mainstream food? (I can't think of any, perhaps it's something that I forgot was originally Jewish)
Perhaps they were referring to the respective diasporas who succeeded by investing in their own education. The groups cited tend to be high academic achievers or at least put great emphasis on academics so much so that American born sometimes avoid some school districts with high achieving groups for being over competitive.
Jewish folks and South Asian folks overcame discrimination from Americans by killing them? Are you from Earth-2?
Read Steven Dutch's essay "The world's most toxic value system" [1] before you recommend violence as a solution to any group's problems. It's a comfortably direct approach, but it backfires. It creates a class of violent people who will push others down, so the group as a whole stays down.
I just suggested one become a little more familiar with history before making absurd claims and value judgements against whole races of people. Every single one of the cited examples had to fight bloody wars of independence against occupation before their refugees were even seen as human. We enslaved the Chinese. We used the Irish in proxy wars between street gangs that still are going on today in parts of the Northeast. The Jews spend hundreds of years trying to assimilate into European society, and then the Germans killed 6 million of them. We gave them back their own country. Out of guilt.
Spouting a bunch of stereotypes about the local immigrant population is a pretty fucking ignorant view of that history.
I just tried to educate myself about the Chinese getting enslaved and fighting a war for independence, but unfortunately I failed. Which events are you referring to?
They don't face it in contemporary America, but they did face it when they started immigrating to the US many years ago. Given that you don't discern any anti-Irish sentiment I might argue that they did a fine job of "unbending themselves"
I'm not suggesting that "unbending yourself" is the only way to do things, just that it does seem as though it's possible. Maybe not easy, maybe not quick, but to suggest that "it can't be done" would be disingenuous.
Only place I've ever heard people openly hate Irish people is Scotland, only place I've heard people claim intellectual inferiority is Australia. One of my parents is Irish, and I don't have an accent, so people tend to say what they think.
The rest of the world stereotypes and is occasionally ignorant of history, but that's common for people from most countries.
Every single year America celebrates the de facto Irish holiday, St. Patrick's Day, by getting as drunk as possible and pretending to be stereotypical Irishmen.
Note: I am of Irish descent and not at all offended. What I wonder is if this impassive attitude to a relatively minor transgression, came about before or after the cultural "unbending"?
> I don't think history bears that out. Society is a soft ductile metal. If you bend it, it'll stay bent. You have to hammer it back into straightness. Talking (and browbeating and prosecuting when necessary) is how you do that.
Society is constantly in flux: it's not like a metal in any way. Rather, it's like a fluid (or a particulate flow, such as a sand pile).
If you change things about the underlying flow dynamics -- viscosity, particle size, pressure, channels, etc -- you get significant effects on the structure of the society, or in analogy, the dynamics of the flow.
You're mistaking the foam for the wave, and the tsunami as being a crashing wave. Really tunamis are just little disturbances over a wide area, and they're best addressed at that stage, not when they're a crashing wave.
However, if you adjust something about the mechanics, it will settle in to a new flow, and remove the crufty parts on top naturally as those pieces of the flow dissipate.
> Nothing that happens between twelfth grade and death decreases the percent of women interested in computer science one whit.
Statistics [1]: 56% of women in technology leave their employer mid-career, and 24% of these women take a non-technical job with a different employer. "This is double the turnover rate of men."
It would appear, then, that actually something does happen between high school and death which decreases women's interest in CS. It is not due to women leaving their career for family either, since many of this 56% decide to continue working, but in a non-technical role.
I'm probably going to get the shit flamed out of me for being a woman daring to comment in a thread about feminism, but fuck it. Maybe the Internet might surprise me.
I'm one of those 56% of women who left mid-career for a non-technical job; I don't have a family of my own, so that wasn't a contributing factor. Sexism was not the primary reason why I left, but it was a major factor in my decision. I returned to the field after a decade because no other job has been as satisfying as coding is, but it's still a really unbalanced field.
The things that most guys don't get is that it's usually not anything they consciously do. It's unconscious behavior. The one I wrestled with the most - and still wrestle with - was the unspoken assumption that because I'm a woman that I'm not technically competent. If I enter a technical conversation with male colleagues, their default stance is that I'm either less knowledgeable than they are (even if I'm the senior dev), or that I'm wrong. Either I get challenged and attacked on what I say, or I'm talked down to like a child. My male colleagues don't treat other men this way, even if the men they're speaking to is non-technical.
It's also about isolation. I'm on a team of 30, but counting myself, there's only two women. The only thing that's unusual about it is that there's two of us. It's far more common for me to be the only woman in the room. I can count the number of female developers I've worked with on one hand with fingers to spare. Tech is an incredibly isolating field for women; we're in an environment that is frequently uncomfortable (and sometimes outright dangerous) with very few allies and even fewer mentors and leaders. The women mentors and leaders we do see are often publicly lambasted and denigrated for existing, or harassed completely out of the field.
It's not getting easier to be a woman in tech, it's getting harder. Used to be I could connect to other women techies online without much difficulty; now we find our community spaces overrun with trolls and strident voices about phantom spectre of "the SJW". I can't read about women coders on places like Slashdot or HN without the legions of comments about how feminism is evil and women are inferior. I'm a developer in a highly specialized field, and I have seriously considered ceasing any contribution to the Internet outside of my code deployments, because there's only so much harassment one person can take before they just give the fuck up.
The one I wrestled with the most - and still wrestle with - was the unspoken assumption that because I'm a woman that I'm not technically competent. If I enter a technical conversation with male colleagues, their default stance is that I'm either less knowledgeable than they are (even if I'm the senior dev), or that I'm wrong. Either I get challenged and attacked on what I say, or I'm talked down to like a child. My male colleagues don't treat other men this way, even if the men they're speaking to is non-technical.
I really appreciated this comment. As a black software engineer I feel I've experienced a lot of the same condescension and isolation in my career. Most days it isn't so bad that it makes me want to quit, but sometimes it is that bad. I can definitely understand how someone could get to the point where she would want to leave the field altogether.
I liked the parent article, but what I think the author misses is that the dismissiveness we sometimes encounter from collaborators isn't just about hurt feelings or disrespect, but can actually pose a serious obstacle to solving the problem at hand.
> It is not due to women leaving their career for family either, since many of this 56% decide to continue working, but in a non-technical role.
I'm not sure how you jumped from A to B there? Yes, this is an anecdote, but I know more than a handful of women who were in non-technical roles to begin with, started a family, and then entered a completely different industry when they went back to work. Most of them just didn't like what they were doing in their old job.
You quite possibly have a valid and correct point, I'm just having a hard time justifying it based on my own experiences.
It would appear, then, that actually something does happen between high school and death which decreases women's interest in CS. It is not due to women leaving their career for family either, since many of this 56% decide to continue working, but in a non-technical role.
I would posit, that this "something," if it exists, is also experienced by older programmers and by programmers who, for whatever reason, have a harder time presenting themselves as a "Standard Silicon Valley guy."
As an oddball older programmer, I would attest: I strongly suspect this "something" definitely exists.
Don't forget ugly people, short people, and fat people.
That "something" is bias and is going to be impossible to overcome so long as we let human emotions be involved in decision making processes. The best you can do is recognize them and try to overcome them (when appropriate), but they are still there (and you are then just being biased with your anti-bias, since you are more likely to catch your known biases).
The comment you are replying to was deleted before I could read it so I don't have sufficient context to know if this distinction matters, but the part you quoted talks about interest in computer science, but the stats you cite are about practicing computer science. There are many reasons one might stop practicing something other than losing interest in it.
There are two assumptions between that claim that I don't think are proven: first, that a hostile environment in the tech industry can't have an indirect effect on young women considering a career in tech; second, that the cohort taking the AP Computer Science test is a close reflection of the tech workforce, and that an attrition rate can be meaningfully derived between the two.
The latter assumption in particular is one that I find highly dubious. This is only anecdotal, but I have noticed that many more of the women I meet in software started coding later in life than the men -- college or later. It's more likely to be a second or third career. Sometimes it was an aptitude discovered while working as non-technical staff at a software company. So an attempt to measure the effect of misogyny in the tech industry via attrition from AP Computer Science seems doomed from the start.
Yes, it’s true that only 20 – 23% of tech workers are women. But less than twenty percent of high school students who choose to the AP Computer Science test are women.
Perhaps women choose not to study computer science because they feel it'd be overly difficult to get in to an industry made up of 80% men. What if the fact there are relatively few women tech workers is the reason few women study it, and not the reverse as you're inferring.
I think you're supposing that young women have any inkling of what the tech industry is like. The overwhelming evidence is that they don't.
What is abundantly clear is that young women and men are influenced by cultural norms and act accordingly when choosing a path through life.
Most servers/flight attendants/nurses are women. At my sister's nursing school graduation, there was only a single man on stage to receive his BSN and he was a former medic in the Army.
What gives? There are plenty of women doctors now. Why don't men find nursing to be a rewarding and satisfying career option?
> What gives? There are plenty of women doctors now. Why don't men find nursing to be a rewarding and satisfying career option?
Not sure why this post is being downvoted. The lack of men in nursing is a real problem in that field, and the post builds up to this in a way I don't necessarily agree with (I think the tech industry's cultural appearance outside of it is completely garbage, and I think most folks know it) but I think is worth rolling around in one's head.
I met a guy in his 50's who was a retired Sgt. Major from the Army and was working as a flight attendant. He used to get questions from his female coworkers on what it was like to be a gay man in the military. (He wasn't gay)
Male nurses (again, this is anecdote from my sister) are handed the most troublesome and aggravating patients with the assumption that they are willing to be "rough" with them (and the implied threat to the patient is that if they are nice, they get the pretty nurses to come back). They are given the jobs that require heavy lifting (like moving patients) in a medical setting and are subjected to vicious gossip campaigns about their sex lives.
I've worked in an all-female IT department. Six women, one guy. Believe me I've got stories. Not all internet gender-memes are universal. All experiences are valid and inform the debate. Even those that don't conform to the proffered agenda.
We need to be a little more empathic all-around. It's not a contest to see who can be more outraged or oppressed.
I don't believe that hypothesis is compatible with the available evidence.
As a counterexample, I offer the military industry. Under your hypothesis, the all-male military would have remained as such forever, because women would have seen the near-0% proportion of females in the military, and would never have attempted to join it. So how did the military get up to about 15% women?
Clearly, it was because at some point a decision was made to actually accept those who attempted to enlist, and not because the industry already had enough women in it to encourage the attempts to be made.
Nevertheless, it is still a perfectly testable hypothesis, and an experiment might still be in order before we go around saying it's no good.
I don't think history bears that out. Society is a soft ductile metal. If you bend it, it'll stay bent. You have to hammer it back into straightness. Talking (and browbeating and prosecuting when necessary) is how you do that.
PS: I don't disagree with the author that not everyone needs to be on the front line of every culture war. But I think someone needs to be.