Sexism in IT part2
-
On a slightly different note - why is it that there are so few "hardcore" female programmers out there? In my long a somewhat illustrious career, I have worked with a number of female IT folks. I've known good female graphic artists, DBA's, sysadmins etc, but I cannot remember one who I would consider a real hardcore hacker. I wonder why this is? I suspect that it has a lot to do with brain function - the internal thought processes of the average semi-sociopathic junk-food fueled geek are about a un-female as I can imagine. So really, I don't find sexist adverts such a big thing - if an employer thinks that he'd work better with male software developers, but female graphic designers, I think it's up to him and nobody else.
-
Why? Because they know better than that.
-
On my "last" job I was hiered to even out the female/male quote of the IT-Department...
The company actually had more female developers then male ones. Butt on the other hand, the requiered qualifications for the job where "slightly odd" and "blondes" had already passed most requierments to get a job there. And they where usually the breast programmers you could get.
I dont mind working there no longer, but only from a TECHNICAL point of view...
-
@rdrunner said:
On my "last" job I was hiered to even out the female/male quote of the IT-Department...
The company actually had more female developers then male ones. Butt on the other hand, the requiered qualifications for the job where "slightly odd" and "blondes" had already passed most requierments to get a job there. And they where usually the breast programmers you could get.
I dont mind working there no longer, but only from a TECHNICAL point of view...
I wonder how many people will miss the humor in your post...
-
I knew one. But that was way before I got into college, and I've completely lost contact with her.
There are no female hardcore programmers around here, but I know two women in my course who are big into quantum mechanics. One of them specifically wants to work with quantum computing. And I think it's not just the new cryptography techniques and such, she's going for really low level things having to do with qubit operations. How does that sound?
-
[quote user="Renan "C#" Sousa"]
I knew one. But that was way before I got into college, and I've completely lost contact with her.
There are no female hardcore programmers around here, but I know two women in my course who are big into quantum mechanics. One of them specifically wants to work with quantum computing. And I think it's not just the new cryptography techniques and such, she's going for really low level things having to do with qubit operations. How does that sound?
[/quote]
Good for her - I didn't say such women didn't exist, just that I had never been lucky enough to meet one.
Do she have a nice butt? and a phone #??????
-
My current workplace has, by my count, 26 men and 1 woman in pure development positions. That is, not managers, not IT, not DBA, but full time coders.
Most places I have worked, it was more like 5 men to every woman. The currently place was like that, too, but coincidentally a whole lot of women left the company or changed jobs over the past couple of months.
One level up, at the lowest management level (the one that coders directly report to), it's a 50/50 ratio.
Conclusion: rarer to begin with, female coders are also more likely to move up. Males are more likely to stay in the trenches.
-
@zedhex said:
[quote user="Renan "C#" Sousa"]
I knew one. But that was way before I got into college, and I've completely lost contact with her.
There are no female hardcore programmers around here, but I know two women in my course who are big into quantum mechanics. One of them specifically wants to work with quantum computing. And I think it's not just the new cryptography techniques and such, she's going for really low level things having to do with qubit operations. How does that sound?
Good for her - I didn't say such women didn't exist, just that I had never been lucky enough to meet one.
Do she have a nice butt? and a phone #??????
[/quote]
I'm putting the moves on her, so I'm not giving you her number =p
A few minutes ago I was browsing through Think Geek. I found this, which I think has to do with the topic:
-
[quote user="Renan "C#" Sousa"]
I'm putting the moves on her, so I'm not giving you her number =p
A few minutes ago I was browsing through Think Geek. I found this, which I think has to do with the topic:
[/quote]
The prompt $> preceding the error message shows that the T-Shirt was not made by someone who really knows the command line.
-
The development organization I work in is about 4:1 men-women, but we do have hardcore female programmers. They're all married with kids and they've been doing this for 15-20 years or so. They're probably not hacking the Linux kernel in their spare time, but neither is anyone else here. Their husbands more often than not work in the same company. My particular team is all male though.
When I was in college it was your typical CS department with 1 female senior every year. From the ridiculously small sample size I know, I'm surprised how many seek out jobs in hardware engineering. I thought that was even more stereotypically dorky and male.
Then again, just read this site; maybe they're smarter than us for not working in this industry.
_________________________________________________A few minutes ago I was browsing through Think Geek. I found this, which I think has to do with the topic:
-
I don't think there is any "sexism" at work when it comes to the gender gap in programming. Based on what I've seen, the females that are very good at programming are not too good at being, well... [i]female[/i]. All of the women in IT that are more feminine are either a) management or b) terrible programmers. Men find it easy to work within the confines of systems with rigid or immutable rules and having their work subject to harsh scrutiny, while women are geared towards working with people and relations and work that does not necessarily result in a concrete product. Programming is anti-social, women are social. Design is probably the most technical field where women thrive because it is more about communication with people, but it is still dominated by men thanks to the tools and mediums used.
It's not taboo to say it anymore: men are better at certain things than women. Women are better at some things than men. If you look into the "gender gap" in math and science at educational institutions, you'll see an interesting pattern. Women in scientific courses of study mostly choose those that relate directly to life: biology, biophysics, biochemistry, medicine, etc..
Maybe the Agile methodologies could actually attract more women to the profession... but unfortunately that's one of the last things you are exposed to when you start learning about software. I think that women might be even better suited to an Agile development process than men in some ways.
-
I'm a female in the business for over 15 years now. I consider myself a serious software engineer but not a geek. I play computer games in my off hours, but I don't program for a hobby. (I do it all day at work.) From my female perspective, I think it's purely socialization. Women are STILL programmed (in general, by society at large) to think of themselves as not as smart as boys. It takes a great deal of defiance to push against that. And also because women are very sociable and people-oriented and the business is still generally portrayed as head-in-the-circuits-no-life-dweeb-city, it's not very attractive as a career. Of course the business ISN'T really like that, but they never find out. There are tons of jobs where they need skilled engineers who are also skilled at people. Not every company can afford to hire separate engineers and analysts.
I'm not sure what to do to fix the problem, though. In my first programming job, I was asked to make a presentation at my ex-high school on career day. "What it's like to be a computer programmer." The audience was about 50/50, but a much larger percentage of the girls were totally disinterested and glazed over compared to the boys. (That was a small glimpse into teaching. I can't imagine having to present educational material to such glazed over dull eyeballs like that every day.)
-
Oh, another thing I just thought of... Back when I was in college in the 1980's the IT industry in general was pretty egalitarian. It didn't seem to have the "old boys network". Ads in computer magazines highlighted the products. As opposed to, for example, calendar bimbos that are put out by car manufacturers that get hung up in mechanic's shops. (I grew up with truck drivers and mechanics.) I thought that was soooo cool! Here is a job where people are valued for what they could do instead of who they could screw.
I've noticed that these days ads in copmuter magazines have bimbos draped over the products. Sure you could argue that a person needs to overlook that, but it does have a psychological effect. If ads were sexualized like that when I was in college, I probably would have majored in something else too!
-
We never had sexualized IT-related ads here and girls play videogames and do other things which considered boyish 20 years ago as much as boys now. And we have a gap larger than you guys in the US. Okay, all you said counts, but there's gotta be more than that to it.
-
@ammoQ said:
The prompt $> preceding the error message shows that the T-Shirt was not made by someone who really knows the command line.
Pffft. export PS1="$> "
Okay, done being a smart-ass for now. My theory (and it may not be mine, originally), is that once girls/women find out about the sexism around computer... stuff, and find out what a royal pain it is to deal with computers on a daily basis, they give it up and find something more rewarding to do. So the only ones that are still at it, years later, are actually really good coders. On the male side, we only have one of those problems to deal with....
-
@AssimilatedByBorg said:
@ammoQ said:
The prompt $> preceding the error message shows that the T-Shirt was not made by someone who really knows the command line.
Pffft. export PS1="$> "
And why would a prompt of any kind precede the output of a program? If you're going to be a smart-ass, you should make sure you're right.
-
@Random832 said:
@AssimilatedByBorg said:
@ammoQ said:
The prompt $> preceding the error message shows that the T-Shirt was not made by someone who really knows the command line.
Pffft. export PS1="$> "
And why would a prompt of any kind precede the output of a program? If you're going to be a smart-ass, you should make sure you're right.
Background process spewing its crap onto your terminal. Happens all the time.
-
@asuffield said:
@Random832 said:
@AssimilatedByBorg said:
@ammoQ said:
The prompt $> preceding the error message shows that the T-Shirt was not made by someone who really knows the command line.
Pffft. export PS1="$> "
And why would a prompt of any kind precede the output of a program? If you're going to be a smart-ass, you should make sure you're right.
Background process spewing its crap onto your terminal. Happens all the time.
I tried to reconstruct this case, but at least in my linux distro, a core dump of a background process is not spewing onto my terminal.
-
@ammoQ said:
@asuffield said:
@Random832 said:
@AssimilatedByBorg said:
@ammoQ said:
The prompt $> preceding the error message shows that the T-Shirt was not made by someone who really knows the command line.
Pffft. export PS1="$> "
And why would a prompt of any kind precede the output of a program? If you're going to be a smart-ass, you should make sure you're right.
Background process spewing its crap onto your terminal. Happens all the time.
I tried to reconstruct this case, but at least in my linux distro, a core dump of a background process is not spewing onto my terminal.
(sleep 1 && echo crap) &
-
@asuffield said:
(sleep 1 && echo crap) &
That's not a core dump ;-)
The original text goes like that:
$> man woman
$> Segmentation fault (core dumped)Of course the second line could be just some random output from the program, but if we go that way of thinking, all of it could be just some text on a lousy t-shirt.
Assuming that this is something that happens on a Unix or Linux command shell, and that the first line somehow triggers the second line, and that the second line is really caused by a segmentation fault.
My test case goes like that:
[erich@iTux ~]$ ./baba
Speicherzugriffsfehler
[erich@iTux ~]$ cat baba.c
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
sleep(1);
int *x=0;
*x=0;
}
[erich@iTux ~]$ cat bubu
./baba&
[erich@iTux ~]$ ./bubu
[erich@iTux ~]$
[erich@iTux ~]$
[erich@iTux ~]$
Nothing happens...
("Speicherzugriffsfehler" is German for "memory fault", as you may have guessed...
-
@ammoQ said:
The original text goes like that:
$> man woman
$> Segmentation fault (core dumped)Of course the second line could be just some random output from the program, but if we go that way of thinking, all of it could be just some text on a lousy t-shirt.
Ah, then you need to realise that (a) that specific message is from your shell's job control logic and not the program or system libraries, and (b) this only happens when you have set -b, which is not normal (because it's bloody annoying). Also this shell is apparently not bash, since that gives a slightly different message. It's probably Korn or something old like that.
Try this for something roughly similar:
set -b
sleep 600 &
Then go find a different shell in another terminal and use kill -SEGV on that process.
Pretty contrived, though. I certainly wouldn't run a shell like that.
-
The last seven posts were a fine example of why there are so few women working in IT.
-
[quote user="Renan "C#" Sousa"]The last seven posts were a fine example of why there are so few women working in IT.[/quote]
The T-shirt itself might be, but the posts were just nitpicking its design.
-
@Random832 said:
[quote user="Renan "C#" Sousa"]The last seven posts were a fine example of why there are so few women working in IT.
The T-shirt itself might be, but the posts were just nitpicking its design.
[/quote]I think he meant the seven-post thread derail discussing something that's completely extraneous to the topic and no one cares about at all. Unless you were being sarcastic? Maybe I just can't tell.
-
Maybe, but I'm not sure. Once I tried to participate in the alt.fashion usenet group, thinking I could share peeves about cosmetic packaging and get advice on clothing. But it was swamped (like 1000-messages a day swamped) with postings about "What I bought today" and "what I made for dinner". As if anybody besides the poster cared. And these were predominantly women.
Unless the difference was that men would have nitpicked the dinner recipes and the shopping list prices?
-
@jetcitywoman said:
Maybe, but I'm not sure. Once I tried to participate in the alt.fashion usenet group, thinking I could share peeves about cosmetic packaging and get advice on clothing. But it was swamped (like 1000-messages a day swamped) with postings about "What I bought today" and "what I made for dinner". As if anybody besides the poster cared. And these were predominantly women.
Unless the difference was that men would have nitpicked the dinner recipes and the shopping list prices?
Men would have been absolutely the same, except (supposing they were nerds) it would have been about "what computer part I bought" and "what new driver I installed"
-
@dhromed said:
@jetcitywoman said:
Maybe, but I'm not sure. Once I tried to participate in the alt.fashion usenet group, thinking I could share peeves about cosmetic packaging and get advice on clothing. But it was swamped (like 1000-messages a day swamped) with postings about "What I bought today" and "what I made for dinner". As if anybody besides the poster cared. And these were predominantly women.
Unless the difference was that men would have nitpicked the dinner recipes and the shopping list prices?
Men would have been absolutely the same, except (supposing they were nerds) it would have been about "what computer part I bought" and "what new driver I installed"
Sounds like a few boards where a few of my college mates spend a lot of time on.
