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posted by Fnord666 on Friday May 11 2018, @11:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the controversial-topics dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Over the last several months, I’ve witnessed many controversial discussions among my friends, in my San Francisco community, and on online forums about James Demore’s memorandum. People of both genders are wrestling with the fact that fewer women go into computer science and trying to find explanations that balance their experience, empathy, and ethical aspirations. I’ve heard lots of good-intentioned people consider discouraging theories of biological superiority because they can’t find any other compelling explanation (like this post on HackerNews, for example). As a woman who studied computer science, worked at some of the top tech firms, and has founded a software startup, I’d like to share my take on why fewer women go into CS and my opinion on how to address the issue.

[...] I graduated from Stanford with a BS in Mathematical & Computational Sciences in 2015, interned at Apple as a software engineer, and worked as an Associate Product Manager at Google 2015-2017. In October, I founded a video editing website called Kapwing and am working on the startup full-time. Although I’m only 25, I’ve already seen many of my female friends choose majors/careers outside of STEM and have been inside of many predominately-male classes, organizations, and teams.

This article is one person’s humble perspective, and I do not speak for every woman in tech. But hopefully having the view of someone who has “been there” can help people trying to understand why there are fewer women in tech.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday May 12 2018, @12:01PM (11 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday May 12 2018, @12:01PM (#678790) Journal

    What's telling in your reply is that you clearly didn't understand my post. My post was about finding friends and treating women as people rather than potential mates. Instead, your reply immediately launched into complaints about the dating scene and bad stuff that can happen there.

    I'm not at all going to disagree that the dating scene with young people has become complicated. And I would NOT want to navigate that minefield myself.

    But that has absolutely no bearing on my post. See, the fact that I was talking about being a friend, and you suddenly start thinking about dating the woman... THAT there: that's what makes you creepy. Even if you don't intend it, it's clear you aren't focused on just being a friend. She will likely sense that. You will come across as creepy, and if you start doing little things like patting her on the back, you'll linger a little too much. You'll give into sniffing her hair or something.

    When I interact with female students (and yes, to all those other replies, I have been on college campuses recently), I don't see them as potential dating material AT ALL. They are absolutely off limits. You can't control whom you're attracted to, but you absolutely can control whom you decide is impossible to date. And once you adopt that mindset, amazingly women around you likely won't see you as trying to "get in their pants," because you're not. And you won't be creepy... And you definitely won't be tempted to do something that would be construed as sexual harassment.

    Are there crazy uber-feminists out there who will perceive every encounter with a man as aggressive? Sure. But for 99+% of women, acting like a PERSON who views them as a PERSON is mostly all that is necessary. (And frankly, I can generally spot the small percentage of wackos in the first 15 seconds of talking with them... It's clear they don't want to talk with you, so just go away. Again, generally that's the way to avoid being creepy: if it's clear a woman -- or a man for that matter!! -- doesn't want to talk with you, don't hang around them and force it. That IS creepy.)

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  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday May 12 2018, @05:30PM (10 children)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday May 12 2018, @05:30PM (#678883) Journal

    THANK YOU! I wish I could print this out, bronze it, and pass it around to like every guy between the ages of 15 and 60 in the country! People, THIS is someone who gets it!

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Saturday May 12 2018, @08:28PM (7 children)

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday May 12 2018, @08:28PM (#678928) Journal

      Hardly!

      No, he is someone who has not been wracked with loneliness and a head full of hormones with no outlet. He's that one guy who had all the girls on a string, and so felt no need to finely sift through every inflection of voice or gesture to see if maybe somebody liked him, because he had the luxury of not having to do that. He was truly lucky for this to have been the case for him.

      It is not the case for so many of his peers. Especially in a technical field, he is the unicorn he is that rare.

      And we talk about this as a societal issue because it happens when everyone is young and inexperienced; but men reach their sexual peak then, when they are least equipped to cope with it, while their female peers can take it or leave it, hormonally speaking. So male missteps are amplified. Women, however, don't hit their sexual peak until middle age, when everyone else has moved on or is settled or has ceased to care; seeing a middle-aged woman sitting by herself at a bar, hoping someone, anyone, will talk to her is the saddest sight in the world. So their pain is invisible. It's not fair to men to be judged so harshly when they are expected to manage biological processes they can barely understand much less contain, and it's not fair for women to be so overlooked when they have so much perspective and complexity and such a burning desire to share it with someone else.

      It's life, and it's just the way it is, but we could all practice a little more compassion and understanding for each other's loneliness and yearning for companionship instead of pathologizing or ignoring it.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 2) by fliptop on Saturday May 12 2018, @11:42PM

        by fliptop (1666) on Saturday May 12 2018, @11:42PM (#678975) Journal

        Women, however, don't hit their sexual peak until middle age, when everyone else has moved on or is settled or has ceased to care; seeing a middle-aged woman sitting by herself at a bar, hoping someone, anyone, will talk to her is the saddest sight in the world.

        This. Menopause is the cruelest joke in nature.

        --
        Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
      • (Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday May 13 2018, @12:07AM (4 children)

        Women, however, don't hit their sexual peak until middle age, when everyone else has moved on or is settled or has ceased to care; seeing a middle-aged woman sitting by herself at a bar, hoping someone, anyone, will talk to her is the saddest sight in the world.

        Speak for yourself. To me it means we're both getting laid tonight and there's a high likelihood that we'll both have a pretty good idea of how to make sure the other person really enjoys themselves.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 14 2018, @03:19PM (3 children)

          by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday May 14 2018, @03:19PM (#679594) Journal

          Actually I'm not speaking for myself. I am happily married and quite content in every department.

          But there is a bar on the corner of my block I walk past coming back from meetings or work late at night, and I see the middle-aged women sitting there, with half a glass of wine. They have their best makeup, shoes, and outfits on and they toss their hair at men who pass. Nobody talks to them. The memory of my teen-age self, desperately lonely and totally disregarded, remembers the ache they're feeling. In my early 30's I mocked them because the bitterness of female rejection was still sharp, but not anymore.

          --
          Washington DC delenda est.
          • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday May 16 2018, @04:52PM (2 children)

            by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday May 16 2018, @04:52PM (#680443) Journal

            Define middle age. I'm 32 and people still think I'm in my mid or late 20s, and happily taken such that dating isn't even on my radar screen. And if it ever gets to be, aside from the expected amount of drama you get when it's all women dating other women, I don't expect to have too much trouble. This sounds like a problem with the way straight people approach love and sex, not age itself.

            --
            I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
            • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 18 2018, @10:19AM (1 child)

              by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday May 18 2018, @10:19AM (#681094) Journal

              I don't think it's a question of gay or straight, but rather a numbers game. By the time the female libido fires up in the late 30's to middle 40's, the available pool of potential partners has shrunk. It's not a problem if a person is in a committed relationship; have at it with gusto. But if through divorce or death of a partner that woman finds herself alone, the imbalance of the desire for intimacy and the sheer number of people you can be intimate with becomes acute.

              So, as a numbers game I'd surmise it's a priori more acute for lesbians who find themselves middle-aged and alone, as you are a happy few to begin with. As for the quality and nature of how lesbians approach love and sex vs. straight women, well, not being a lesbian or a woman I'm totally out of my depth on that one. But the difficulty of finding someone does seem to be a staple of lesbian humor and plot lines (didn't the L Word do a whole episode where they charted it out and figured everybody had dated the same people?).

              Let's hope none of us find ourselves bereft of love and comfort in this broken world.

              --
              Washington DC delenda est.
              • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday May 18 2018, @07:30PM

                by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday May 18 2018, @07:30PM (#681338) Journal

                I won't lie, lesbian dating is a weirdly closed ecosystem. There's just not that many of us, a dangerous (IMO) proportion of us have a tendency to "U-Haul," and there's a lot of drama. I'm one of the lucky ones, in that I met my current girlfriend online after helping stop her from commit suicide, and we'd been friends for over half a decade before realizing we'd fallen in love. But that's an odd case.

                As far as libido goes, mine started ramping up around age 21 or 22, weird as that sounds. It's still pretty high at 32, and I expect there are another 10-15 years left.

                --
                I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
      • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday May 13 2018, @12:30AM

        by krishnoid (1156) on Sunday May 13 2018, @12:30AM (#679002)

        seeing a middle-aged woman sitting by herself at a bar, hoping someone, anyone, will talk to her is the saddest sight in the world

        That's dumb. She should be at the comic book store instead.

    • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday May 13 2018, @12:27AM

      by krishnoid (1156) on Sunday May 13 2018, @12:27AM (#679001)

      Maybe even try to get it inserted into sex ed classes. Hey, the current social climate may make schools more receptive to this than they've been in the past; I bet it wouldn't be too hard a sell to help schoolteachers and administrators keep teen guys' (at least) hormones under control, considering all the other testing laws, parenting issues, budgeting, social media exposure, and the other crap they have to deal with. You might even get support from the pro-abstinence local school boards and legislatures.

      Plus, I bet teen guys - especially considering the cultural variety you find in some school districts - could use some (any) good behavioral examples and baselines to start with.

    • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Wednesday May 16 2018, @04:03AM

      by Sulla (5173) on Wednesday May 16 2018, @04:03AM (#680278) Journal

      I think there is some misunderstanding here. Just because I interact with a woman on what I feel is a completely platonic level does not mean they do not see something in it that is strictly platonic. For a lot of the guys I work with the extent of their interactions with others are inviting them to a bar to bullshit with them. You can invite a girl out to a bar and say you are going out with some coworkers, but how are you insured that she sees it as only platonic? No means no and yes can also mean no. Will I face a complaint in the morning because even though she said she would love to go, drove herself there, hung out for a couple hours, then went home alone, that she wont say she felt pressured into going and was put in an uncomftorable position? Yeah I get that the chances of that are very low, near 0 when we are talking about people who are over 40, but the risk for me is my job, house payment, car payment, stain on my record. The risk of not interacting is nothing. A few bad apples are spoiling the barrel and it seems that men are unwilling to risk their futures on any level of interaction.

      When invited to go do something I will accept, but I will never ask first.

      My work had a thing where very second monday coworkers go out to the bar. There was this unattractive socially awkward guy who was trying to get over it and would force himself to hold brief convos with people in the office. Simple stuff, weather, sports, nothing "weird" like anime or politics. At one point he asked if it was okay if he went along and was told that its cool, after the invitation but before the event I heard coworkers (younger women) badmouthing him as a creeper. He hadnt said anything out of line but was bad with eye contact. This situation goes both ways.

      --
      Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam