Appropriateness of posts

Nick Sabalausky SeeWebsiteToContactMe at semitwist.com
Wed Mar 19 01:38:42 PDT 2014


On 3/18/2014 12:20 PM, "Ola Fosheim Grøstad" 
<ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com>" wrote:
> On Monday, 17 March 2014 at 23:02:13 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> People see that software development is predominately male, and they
>> assume "Oh, it *MUST* be because those EVIL, SEXIST men are TRYING to
>> keep women out!" That genuinely pisses me off, what the hell is this,
>> 1920? When people actually *wanted* to
>
> As a student I taught introductory courses in programming. There was a
> reasonable number of females because they needed the course for biology
> etc. I think the programming talent was fairly evenly distributed. But
> your average female student value belonging to a group of other females
> so when the ratio fall below a threshold only the determined, tomboyish,
> selfconfident or very smart females will persist. And my impression is
> that they tend to gravitate either towards the social side of IT or
> towards the mathematical side, but fewer go for the "tinkering" fields?
>

Yea, there's always been one or two women in almost any computer science 
class or programming team I've been in. I've never taken a programming 
course that was required for people outside the CS major, although from 
what I remember of the "intro to programming" tutoring I did, there does 
tend to be a...less uneven...mix in the introductory courses.

In any case, there's definitely a "group effect" regardless of gender. 
Men do become nurses these days, but most people who pursue nursing are 
still women. And yet, I've never heard of anything actually trying to 
keep nursing a "women's club".

I suspect that some people misinterpret their own natural, often 
subconscious, apprehension towards entering a "predominantly different 
from me" group as being "They don't want me there."

And then sometimes they may try to over-compensate for that, which in 
and of itself can be rather off-putting to other people (perhaps 
triggering a negative feedback cycle?)


> Of course, among the males the "tinkerers" start out in their nerdy
> teens in social boyish groups. So they have a five year+ head start.
> Female teens will have problem accessing those groups if they don't have
> a nerdy big brother who is kind or a very nerdy dad… Are teenagers
> sexist? Of course…
>

Heh, teenagers can be all sorts of unsavory adjectives ;) I was quite 
uncomfortable around teens back when I was one - many of them were 
real...well, better not to finish that thought.

Ehh, but it's true of adults, too. The local public libraries around 
here intentionally segregate off the teenagers (which is asinine in and 
of itself) citing concerns over noise. And yet, I've been a *very* 
frequent patron of those libraries for several years and the *only* 
people I've ever seen failing to grasp the whole "library == quiet" 
notion were middle-aged. One of them was even some upper-manager for the 
very library he was loudly blathering on in. Even more bizarre was the 
nature of his noise: He was very loudly boasting how he'd arranged the 
library so that the noisy teenagers were shoved off into a remote 
corner. And yet, at no point had I ever come across noisy teens there 
despite, for several years, being regularly there (including visiting 
the "teen" section because that's where the library decided manga 
belongs) twice a week at exactly the time of day when teenage traffic 
was at a peak. The teenagers: Dead silent. Various parents: "BLAH BLAH 
BLAH BLAH BLAH!!!"

And then I see people carefully whispering in bookstores, or order 
"Mc"Nuggets at Wendy's, etc, and loose all hope for humanity...

>> rule against women. And yet somehow programming is allegedly full of
>> women-hating men? Fucking crock of shit.
>
> Yeah, but programming is full of awkward teenage boys who lock
> themselves up in their basements where the girls cannot find them. ;-)

Hmm, something about that sounds very familiar...almost as if I know 
someone...someone I know very, *VERY* well who...oh wait...nevermind. ;)



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