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Technology's Man Problem

posted by LaminatorX on Monday April 07 2014, @08:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the Don't-be-a-jerk! dept.

Ethanol-fueled writes:

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?

 
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  • (Score: 1) by Serial_Priest on Tuesday April 08 2014, @09:33PM

    by Serial_Priest (2493) <{accusingangel} {at} {autistici.org}> on Tuesday April 08 2014, @09:33PM (#28468)

    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

    by SuggestiveLanguage (1313) on Thursday April 10 2014, @01:09PM (#29423)

    The current science says your point is moot [sciencedaily.com].

    The new study, by Mertz and Jonathan Kane, a professor of mathematical and computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, was published on Dec. 12, 2011 in Notices of the American Mathematical Society. The study looked at data from 86 countries, which the authors used to test the "greater male variability hypothesis" famously expounded in 2005 by Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, as the primary reason for the scarcity of outstanding women mathematicians.

    That hypothesis holds that males diverge more from the mean at both ends of the spectrum and, hence, are more represented in the highest-performing sector. But, using the international data, the Wisconsin authors observed that greater male variation in math achievement is not present in some countries, and is mostly due to boys with low scores in some other countries, indicating that it relates much more to culture than to biology.

    The new study relied on data from the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the 2009 Programme in International Student Assessment.

    "People have looked at international data sets for many years," Mertz says. "What has changed is that many more non-Western countries are now participating in these studies, enabling much better cross-cultural analysis."

    The Wisconsin study also debunked the idea proposed by Steven Levitt of "Freakonomics" fame that gender inequity does not hamper girls' math performance in Muslim countries, where most students attend single-sex schools. Levitt claimed to have disproved a prior conclusion of others that gender inequity limits girls' mathematics performance. He suggested, instead, that Muslim culture or single-sex classrooms benefit girls' ability to learn mathematics.

    • (Score: 1) by Serial_Priest on Thursday April 10 2014, @08:54PM

      by Serial_Priest (2493) <{accusingangel} {at} {autistici.org}> on Thursday April 10 2014, @08:54PM (#29709)

      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

        by SuggestiveLanguage (1313) on Friday April 11 2014, @12:55PM (#30004)

        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

          by Serial_Priest (2493) <{accusingangel} {at} {autistici.org}> on Friday April 11 2014, @07:27PM (#30226)

          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.