Written in a New York Times article and summarily paraphrased here,
Elissa Shevinsky can pinpoint the moment when she felt that she no longer belonged. She was at a friend's house watching the live stream of the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon, when she saw that it opened with two men who developed an app called Titstare. After some banter, one of Titstare's developers proudly proclaimed, "This is the breast hack ever."
Ms. Shevinsky felt pushed to the edge. Women who enter fields dominated by men often feel this way. "It's a thousand tiny paper cuts," is how Ashe Dryden, a programmer who now consults on increasing diversity in technology, described working in tech. Women in tech like Shevinsky and Dryden advocate working to change the tech culture from inside-out, but other women like Lea Verou write that,
' women-only conferences and hackathons cultivate the notion that women are these weak beings who find their male colleagues too intimidating...As a woman, I find it insulting and patronizing to be viewed that way.'
This all being hot on the heels of engineer Julie Ann Horvath's departure from Github as a result of similar concern.
Any of you care to address your own personal experiences or opinions regarding the subject matter; as well as the accuracy of the articles' stories compared to the industry-at-large?
(Score: 1) by Serial_Priest on Monday April 07 2014, @12:50PM
I see articles and complaints like these as a symptom of the larger Western pro-victimhood orientation. In my experience, students today are trained to search for grievances against some aspect of their identity. Such grievance is empowering, and to be "oppressed" gives a certain type of person a special pleasure and status.
The metaphor about "a thousand tiny paper cuts" was especially suggestive in this regard. A tiny paper cut is insignificant, unless you are (as noted above) looking for publicity or ways to not get along with your colleagues. It's more a personality issue than a gender issue, and you can usually recognize these "lawsuits waiting to happen" before they're hired.
Moreover, as noted by others, men and women will always have different psychological approaches to group dynamics. The preferred solution in the West - to force men to adopt feminine traits - may work from a corporate PR perspective, but it only masks the differences. The "tech world" (and world in general) would be a better place if jokes about "dongles" weren't viewed on par with actual sexual harassment and meaningful gender prejudice (assuming female incompetence, unwanted sexual advances, etc., the real wounds compared to the "paper cuts" mentioned elsewhere.)
(Score: 1) by SuggestiveLanguage on Monday April 07 2014, @08:19PM
And yet there are legions of female IT graduates with advanced degrees streaming out of Asian schools and straight into industry. Does that mean the majority of the world's population has a completely different biology than ours? The claim you advance begs skepticism.
(Score: 1) by Serial_Priest on Tuesday April 08 2014, @09:33PM
My point was that being quick to take offense is a personal problem, not a gender problem, and that everyone should avoid it. That men and women *in general* have different psychological tendencies rooted in biology doesn't mean they can't work together or to excel individually in a given field. Neither does it mean that we ought to pretend that everyone is the same (sense of humor, personality, etc.) or that different people ought not to show some tolerance for each others' (possibly irritating) differences, within reason. As to your specific example, I would speculate that the "searching for victimhood" mindset in American higher education doesn't have as much traction in, say, Chinese schools (which have their own pathologies - normalized academic dishonesty comes to mind - but that's another discussion.)
(Score: 1) by SuggestiveLanguage on Thursday April 10 2014, @01:09PM
The current science says your point is moot [sciencedaily.com].
(Score: 1) by Serial_Priest on Thursday April 10 2014, @08:54PM
Missing the point. The "problem" that the article suggested and that I was responding to isn't individual talent at mathematics or hard sciences, but rather individual hyper-sensitivity and social inflexibility. The broader conclusion I am drawing is that interpersonal flexibility is important for heterogenous groups. And I think it's fairly uncontroversial to observe that a group of men and women is not homogenous, and that, in general, there are gender-associated interpersonal styles.
(Score: 1) by SuggestiveLanguage on Friday April 11 2014, @12:55PM
That claim amounts to hand waiving away the central point: There is no correlative, cross-cultural relationship between the intellectual performance of men and women in STEM fields. Now you've shifted the argument to murky goal-post shifting to difficult to pin-down social constructs (which I have to read as difficult of falsify assertions) I will have to bow out of this discussion. Good day sir.
(Score: 1) by Serial_Priest on Friday April 11 2014, @07:27PM
I don't think we actually disagree. (Reread my comments re: intellectual performance; there is no "waiving" going on.) And yes, "social constructs" like the "sense of belonging" or "comfort" identified in TFA are hard to "falsify" or quantify. That's exactly my point. The article depicts efforts to reconstruct corporate policy on the basis of emotion and psychology. Such efforts are arguably problematic for a variety of reasons. Your comments on graduation statistics, STEM performance, etc. are interesting but have only a tangential relationship to the central problem, which, as I initially noted, are grievance-prone personalities and intolerance of group heterogeneity.