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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: 3, Insightful) by Sir Garlon on Monday April 07 2014, @05:04PM
Such a claim is only unfalsifiable on an individual level. Actually, even there is it testable but I would advocate against trying. You can absolutely conduct experiments to determine whether institutional bias exists. The one that comes to mind is the study on blind orchestra auditions [theguardian.com]. Orchestras who tried gender-blind auditions, where the application plays music behind a screen so the hiring panel did not know the applicant's gender (or age or race, presumably) saw a statistically significant increase in the number of women who passed the first round of auditions.
I have seen a handful of studies like this, sufficient to convince me the *possibility* of gender bias is widespread.
I do take exception to your adversarial language. I am not advocating "accusing" anybody of anything. You can no more condemn someone for unconscious bias than you can condemn him for spelling mistakes. OK, some people still do it but they're jerks. :-) A better approach is to try to identify where it exists and introduce mechanisms to remove it. One of those mechanisms, in my opinion, is just to prove it exists so people are aware and make an effort to minimize it in themselves.
Part of the problem is that the word "bias" has been used as a gentler euphemism for bigotry. This is what you often see in the press. That's not what I mean when I use the word; what I mean is cognitive bias [wikipedia.org] in the technical sense. It's no wonder people get defensive as soon as some uses the word, though.
Cognitive bias is scientifically detectable, measurable, and falsifiable.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.