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Although Sroor says she does not always find encouragement for her technological pursuits in Gaza, there is one place where she feels at home: A seed accelerator and workspace in Gaza City's bustling al-Rimal neighbourhood called Gaza Sky Geeks.
"The people here are like my second family," Sroor told Al Jazeera inside the loft-like space, amid the buzz of dozens of Palestinian designers, developers and freelancers who work here daily.
The organisation, founded in 2011 with a $900,000 grant from Google, provides mentorship and support to startups in Gaza to help to grow the territory's nascent tech industry.
Since 2013, four companies that went through the Gaza Sky Geeks "incubation" process secured investments ranging from $30,000 to $65,000, the accelerator's social media coordinator, Dalia Shurrab, told Al Jazeera.
Gaza Sky Geeks is now focusing on bringing more girls and women into the fold. Currently, about half of the founders of the startup companies that Gaza Sky Geeks mentors are women, said Rana Alqrenawi, who is in charge of the organisation's female-centred programmes. The goal is to get to 80 percent, she said, in an effort to overcompensate for the current gender gap in the tech world.
They shall know Code, and Code shall set them free.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 02 2016, @02:55PM
Huh?
The rhythm of what you wrote would seem to mean something, but I have no idea what you're talking about.
Can we all speak plainly here? I would hope it's been firmly established that on Soylent you can say whatever you want, but for mod's sake say it with as much crystalline vigor as you can. Parody wrapped with allusion cloaked in allegory will have us all chasing Will-o'-the-wisps into the marsh.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday December 02 2016, @07:14PM
Fair enough. I'm surprised that got an up mod.
We know that in the West we have a perpetual shortage of women programmers. I've also heard that in the Middle East, women don't have these difficulties becoming programmers, even though objectively they're far more oppressed than any woman will be in the USA even if Trumpence does their worst.
So we've been flailing and self-flagellating the past few years about why there are no women programmers. The popular theory seems to be that male programmers are driving women out of programming careers with sexual harassment, death threats, and other nastiness: clearly, TBTP say, there must be no women programmers because they're so horribly mistreated and oppressed. The main stream media (lizard person moon matrix) have been relentlessly pushing the “misogynerd” narrative, that men who are interested in tech (and video games) are generally horrible people. (The contrapositive is interesting: men who are not interested in tech and video games are therefore generally good people.)
However, there are several problems with this assessment. It's well known that even just 100-level CS courses are sausage-fests; it's clear that women are not pursuing CS degrees, which seems to be the regular route to a programming career (even if many of us on this board didn't take that route). Being a highly technical vocation requiring lengthy training as well as excellent critical and abstract thinking skills, this is something that one cannot possibly learn in various “bootcamps,” most notoriously the “hour of code.”
Some feminists have put forward the theory that the subject matter itself is offensive to a woman's nature (see the short essay that sparked C+= as well as the history in feminism of interpreting maths texts as “rape manuals”). (This is odd considering that 150 years ago, Lovelace had to contend with men who did not want to include her in scientific and mathematics pursuits for the same reason!) Arab women, on the other hand, do pursue tech or programming careers. Finally, I can't help but to bring up the example that if we look at trans women (assuming we can see them as authentic women), again, we see no overwhelming difficulty with the subject area compared to cis women.
Clearly, there is some kind of phenomenon that is preventing Western, cisgendered women (not Arab or trans) from being interested in programming and tech. Google and the rest of the tech industry have come under incredible pressure to somehow fix that sociological phenomenon on their own because, presumably, if we assume the “misogynerd” narrative is true, then they are the only ones responsible for it.
It seems that Google has figured out that while it's not possible to make women programmers precipitate out of the æther when there are no women in Western CS courses, it is possible to go where there are women programmers.
Google's efforts seem highly cynical in that light, but it's difficult to blame them.
In searching for some alternative means to get Western women interested in programming, I postulated that the common denominator between men in the West who become programmers and Arab women who become programmers is ritual infant genital mutilation. The issue of ritual infant genital mutilation is highly frustrating to me on a personal level.
In 2010 iirc, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a report that noted that a problematic number of Muslim women travel to Africa and the Middle East to have their newborn daughter's genitals mutilated (the report describes a few different methods used and identifies the most common one) under less than sanity conditions leading to unnecessary health risks such as infection. They recommended that hospitals in the USA be allowed to perform infant female genital mutilation upon request under sanitary, surgical conditions as a harm-reduction measure. This report was utterly condemned by feminists and the main stream media. In the space of a month, political pressure forced the AAP to withdraw the report entirely.
In 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics released another of their intermittent reports on ritual male infant genital mutilation. It noted that fewer and fewer males have been mutilated at birth, down to roughly 50% in 2012, and it raised concerns about UTI, AIDS, and HPV risk. The timing was interesting because it arrived on the coat-tails of a controversy about teenage HPV vaccination. The fear was that vaccinating 10-12 year old girls against HPV would be exposing them to sexuality too soon. The combination of the two led a number of news reporters to conclude that we're better off mutilating male genitals at birth to prevent the spread of HPV since vaccinating against HPV is too controversial. Nobody said as much in one piece, but taken overall, the import was unmistakable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @07:55PM
Thank you for your input, but it is no surprise to me that cutting up male penis is not only accepted, but probably the core of all feminist fantasies. Regardless, the men can take the HPV vaccine as well, if it is too controversial for to women to do so, it beats having their dick mutilated.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 02 2016, @08:23PM
Thank you, that's clearer. I have not thought about gender and technology at all, so it's interesting to look through the window you've opened. I couldn't guess why more women don't go into CS. All I can do is note, as you did, that women don't really sign up for CS in America. Is there something fundamental about computers, programming, etc. that turns women off for some reason? Is it the approach to the material, the socioeconomics, or something deeply epistemological? I have no clue, and would never have a clue without spending many scads of hours of study and deep thinking that I don't have to spare (there are only so many hours in the day and I have devoted all mine to fighting lizard people). Perhaps places like Gaza have more luck attracting women to software because it is a rare outlet in a repressive society. Again, that's pure speculation based on nothing.
Prima facie, circumcision doesn't seem a persuasive cause for prevalence of programming interest. In my career I have worked with women software engineers from Russia, China, Vietnam, and India (Hindu, that is, not Muslim). I have never worked with a female muslim programmer. Female circumcision is not practiced in Russia, China, Vietnam, or by Hindus. If female circumcision (the thought of the practice makes me shudder) were so causal as you suppose, we ought to be awash in female Muslim programmers, oughtn't we? Again, that's anecdotal. Maybe we are awash in female Muslim programmers and I haven't seen the data.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @09:05PM
Opinions of news reporters should not be of any value for medical procedures.
Do you have a reference for:
mutilating male genitals at birth to prevent the spread of HPV
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday December 02 2016, @10:32PM
From The American Academy of Pediatrics [aappublications.org] September 2012:
There is also good evidence from randomized controlled trials that male circumcision is associated with a lower prevalence of human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) transmission, as well as a decreased likelihood of bacterial vaginosis (BV) in female partners. The evidence for male circumcision being protective against syphilis is less strong, however, and male circumcision was not found to be associated with decreased risk of gonorrhea or chlamydia.
Further down:
HPV is among the most commonly occurring STIs in the United States and can lead to the development of cancers, including cervical cancer. The population-based data from NHANES 2003–2006 indicate that the overall prevalence of high- and low-oncogenic risk HPV types was 42.5% among US women aged 14 to 59 years. The prevalence of infection was lower for the 2 viral types with the highest risk of causing cancer, however, at 4.7% for HPV type 16 and 1.9% for HPV type 18.
There is good evidence that male circumcision is protective against all types of HPV infection (nononcogenic and oncogenic). Two prevalence studies with good evidence found a 30% to 40% reduction in risk of infection among circumcised men. These studies fail to provide information on the risk of acquiring HPV and may reflect persistence of HPV rather than acquisition of infection. Four studies provide fair evidence that male circumcision protects against HPV. The selection of anatomic sites sampled may influence the results.
Good evidence of the protective effect of male circumcision against HPV is available from two of the large randomized controlled trials in Africa. In the South African study, the prevalence of high-risk HPV was 32% lower in circumcised men. In the Uganda study, the risk of oncogenic HPV infection (adjusted for other factors) was 35% lower in circumcised men.
There is also good evidence that male circumcision reduces the risk of male-to-female transmission of high-risk HPV from HIV-uninfected men. In the Uganda randomized controlled trial, the prevalence of high-risk HPV infection was 28% lower in female partners of circumcised HIV-uninfected men, while the incidence was 23% lower. Good evidence from another Uganda randomized controlled trial of male circumcision in HIV-infected men indicates that a circumcision did not reduce the risk of male-to-female transmission of high-risk HPV from HIV-infected men.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday December 02 2016, @10:34PM
I forgot to cover the “at birth” portion. From the American Academy of Pediatrics Circumcision Policy Statement [aappublications.org]:
Systematic evaluation of English-language peer-reviewed literature from 1995 through 2010 indicates that preventive health benefits of elective circumcision of male newborns outweigh the risks of the procedure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @04:56PM
Thanks for providing the links, especially to an AC.