Not Enough Women In Computing, Or Too Many Men? 686
itwbennett writes "Do geeks really 'drive girls out of computer science,' as the headline of a LiveScience article contends? Blogger Cameron Laird doesn't think so. In fact, 'I don't think "gender issues in computing" is important enough to merit the attention it gets,' says Laird in a recent post. And maybe the problem isn't that there are too few women in computing, but that there are too many men. 'I'm waiting to read the headline: "Women too smart for careers with computers,"' says Laird, 'where another researcher concludes that only "boys" are stupid enough to go into a field that's globally-fungible, where entry-level salaries are declining, and it's common to think that staying up all night for a company-paid pizza is a good deal.'"
too many everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
I need a job.
Hypocritical (Score:2, Insightful)
"I don't think 'gender issues in computing' is important enough to merit the attention it gets,"
So why are you still talking about it?
Yeah right (Score:3, Insightful)
It's still a great field with good salary, sane work hours and prospects for advancements. It's just not as compelling as during dot com boom. Women should stop making excuses and go into any good field they like.
Cue The Moral Outrage (Score:5, Insightful)
Cue the moral outrage for a person promulgating deragatory gender stereotypes.
Wait, it is a woman? Nevermind.
I am seeing it. (Score:5, Insightful)
The items he mentions are part of the reason I am trying to get out of IT.
IT workers are getting smaller and smaller salaries, having to compete with H1-Bs and out-of-country workers, have to deal with job scope creep, idiot managers, and expected to give up any semblance of work/life balance just to keep up.
It has gotten to the point where working in IT just isn't worth it because the positions just aren't respected.
Oh please... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we get over this whole sexism bullshit already? Who gives a damn if women don't work in IT? If a woman wants to do something in IT, fine. If she doesn't, fine. If you want to look for gender-based discrimination, look elsewhere.
Give me a break (Score:1, Insightful)
Judging by the women I know personally, these points aren't even part of their criteria for considering careers in IT. You know why most of the women I know don't work in IT? It's simple; they don't find the work interesting or engaging. It's the same reason I'm not a farmer or a journalist. People do the jobs they can do; often what people can do is determined by their natural interests. If women by and large aren't interested in technology, they will not work in IT. It has utterly nothing to do with the global economics of any particular industry.
Re:I am seeing it. (Score:4, Insightful)
As for respect, please. management doesn't give a shit about anybody, what makes you so special?
Stupid enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does the job pay your bills at an acceptable standard of living?
Are you doing what you are good at?
Are you having fun?
If the answers above are all yes, then who gives a fuck what some researcher thinks.
Garbage men.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Odd we don't see many stories about the global shortage in female garbage collectors. Or janitors. And isn't a little bit 90's to go with the whole "Whoah, those powerful women are just too smart to go into computers! Girl powa!". It's not going to get you laid, I promise. Computers are a good field compared to most regardless of declining salaries or anything else.
Women aren't in computers because they tend not to be interested in it. Whether this is socialization or genetics or some mixture is up for debate, and of course there are exceptions but we see the ratio of men to women in computing because men are interested in or gifted in computing at a ratio higher than women.
Re:Hypocritical (Score:1, Insightful)
Are women pushing men out of nursing? (Score:2, Insightful)
No, men just not that interested in being nurses, unless they're gay.
Re:Hypocritical (Score:3, Insightful)
Because like everything else, there is a cult that is dead set to create as many conflicts and divisions wherever they can create them. Also to get attention by creating that conflict (to make more dollars). There will NEVER be an "equal" amount of anything in any situation. This is simply a natural phenomenon, nothing ever stays in balance.
There WAS institutional discrimination in our society. Institutional discrimination has not only been eliminated, but has also been made "illegal". While there may still be situations where women/men/black/white people are discriminated by individual employers, but it is no longer "institutional". So instead of railing against the government, we now have the "humanists" railing against society, for everything they do not consider to be the way they want it.
How about this: Women dont play dungeons and dragons. Dungeon Masters must somehow be discriminating.
How about this: Women dont want to work in a cubicle farm, in front of a monitor, doing math all day for little thanx or social interaction. No no... that would go against the paradigm of perpetual class conflict.
Re:Men aren’t so dumb... (Score:5, Insightful)
Men and women tend to make different choices; I don't know if it's Nature or Nurture, but smarts or stupidity have very little to do with it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Men aren’t so dumb... (Score:5, Insightful)
It’s almost like men and women are... well, different!
Re:Oh please... (Score:3, Insightful)
I do, it would be nice to see some more ladies at conferences that I can ogle instead of paying attention.
You ogling is what's scaring them off.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cue The Moral Outrage (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't see a 'successful doctor' (as you put it) hanging onto a nerdy computer guy forever.
Re:Are women pushing men out of nursing? (Score:1, Insightful)
"unless they're gay."
ummm.... I'd say my little brother & his wife would beg to differ.
He makes a lot of money doing what he does and is more likely to get hired than a woman in the field because hospitals prefer men to help restrain patients when necessary. Also it's very unlikely that his job can be outsourced, compared to IT.
Gender dominance in a particular field is more due to interest than anything else. So can we stop with the "this job is more masculine, this job is more feminine" unless your gay/lesbian crap?
Laird accidentally gets it right (Score:1, Insightful)
He's absolutely right. Women are too smart for careers in computers. Most intelligent women take a close look at the unrepentantly fucked-up culture that surrounds computing careers, and run like hell.
It's men who are dumb enough to tolerate the aspy-programmer types, the sneering arrogant IT guys, the mailing lists full of flaming personal attacks leveled by closet bullies empowered by semi-anonymity, the phallic-compensating gadget consumerists, constantly "helpful" types who manage to insult while trying to rescue, and the sexually inept who use pinup wallpaper and leer at any woman in eyeshot. Membership in (or at least tolerance of) a repellant boys' club is an almost-mandatory feature of our industry.
Men don't have to be passionate about computers and programming to do well in our field. It's possible to be a day-job geek who never plays video games, doesn't own an iphone, and doesn't read xkcd, yet still thrive in high-tech. They get flamed them for a few newbie questions and they'll just think you're an asshole. But brilliant women who are not passionate about the field are smart enough to tell us all to go fuck ourselves after the first serious flame, because they know nobody should have to put up with that shit.
So yes. Women are in fact generally too smart for careers in computers. He nailed it.
Re:Oh please... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, we know that there is sexism in the workplace in spots, and we know there aren't many women in IT. That is prima facie reason to suspect there may be sexism involved, and to investigate if we're actually interested.
Ideally, this would be examined in a calm, mature way exactly like the typical Slashdot discussion isn't.
Re:Cue The Moral Outrage (Score:1, Insightful)
keyword 'many'
If you were to drill down all the statistics..would you agree that higher education results in higher pay when doing the same job? Yes, there are many people who didn't go to university and have high paying IT jobs, but there are many more who didn't and have low paying IT jobs.
Just because you are an exception, doesn't mean it doesn't happen
Re:Garbage men.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Or is it just understood that while there's no actual red tape, that life is simply not appealing to most women.
Re:Yeah right (Score:3, Insightful)
Are there really? I don't know of many well-paying tech jobs with "sane work hours", at least the way most fields define the term (40-hour weeks, only weekend/overtime work when there's emergencies, and emergencies don't happen every month).
Re:Oh please... (Score:4, Insightful)
That is prima facie reason to suspect there may be sexism involved, and to investigate if we're actually interested.
But the original argument isn't playing the sexism card, it's just saying a male dominated environment turns off women. Makes sense, some people don't like the big ole arrow that gets placed on them if they're the only "other" in the room. More so with geek boy culture, which plays up the "can't get laid, fantasize about any with breasts" stereotype. If I hadn't spent my entire life hanging out with boys, I'd also probably be quesy about working in a hard core programming shop. I was watching G4 the other day, and the "booth babes" documentary just so perfectly encapsulated the female perspective on a certain type of geek that's expected to be a programmer. So actually, the lack of females in comp sci may be more do to sexism against males then against females.
Re:Laird accidentally gets it right (Score:3, Insightful)
It's possible to be a day-job geek who never plays video games, doesn't own an iphone, and doesn't read xkcd, yet still thrive in high-tech.
What the hell does any of that have to do with being a sneering, arrogant, sexually inept bully?
Re:Garbage men.. (Score:3, Insightful)
but we see the ratio of men to women in computing because men are interested in or gifted in computing at a ratio higher than women.
Working in computing requires a certain amount of rational and logical thinking as well as the ability to grasp complex abstractions and juggle multiple constructs simultaneously in the short term memory. At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, these traits are much more common in men and even then mostly in particular personality types (not every man is cut out to work in computing either). Finally there is a certain minimum intelligence score required to grasp the complex incantations required for high level IT work. That last one was a joke for those not following.
Not again (Score:3, Insightful)
If there are less women in IT than men it is because the women want it that way. I think there were at most 5 women in my entire graduating class that were in the CS program. Most women (and to be fair, most people) just see computers as gadgets and expensive toys and don't really care about how they work on the inside. Again, just being honest here, most men get excited when you ask them about their plasma TV, surround sound, network setup, etc but I've never known any women that could be considered technophiles. I'm sure they exist, it just isn't as common.
Another serious problem I've noticed is that there are not enough women working in construction. Living in Houston, I drive by a lot of construction throughout the city on a daily basis and I have never seen a single woman working at a construction site. Talk about a crisis!
Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Insightful)
More like people should stop trying to make the whole world average. If a particular field has more men in it, who cares?
This just in, there are more female babysitters than males. Oh no, we have a babysitter gender gap!
Why does everything on the planet have to be "fair" in a way that's really not fair at all because it's actually just a contrived view of how "things should be" in some fantasy? And a better question, when are going to stand up to such nonsense and reject the whole premise that the world should be a statistical average reflecting a cross-section of all society?
I would have hoped... (Score:3, Insightful)
If there aren't as many women in computing ("enough women" is a nonsense term: what's "enough") then it's because women don't want to be in computing.
Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's exactly it. Women dont WANT to go into the field, because they dont generally LIKE it.
It's the feminists who are making excuses. On the other hand, I think the majority of women, dont give a damn there are less women "in computing".
and those who do, get a job in the field. Simple, but "un-politically correct".
Oh, the horror.
"Must.. deploy... PC.. mind-reajustment.. field..."
Yes, there are some trashy insensitive guys in CS. but there are in EVERY OTHER field too!
So just get over the fact that there are more guys in computing than women. and go complain about something else. Like how maybe elementary school education is dominated by women.
yes, the pay is poor. But if anyone thinks making the pay equal to the average CS job, would magically even out the numbers.. they're nuts.
Re:I am seeing it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Along a long enough timeline, everything gets commoditized, and IT workers are no exception.
Not true. Some groups form professional organizations and rake in the big bucks by making it difficult for others to join and compete. Lawyers, Doctors, Nurses, Pharmacists, Engineers are a few that have to certified by various professional organizations before one is allowed to practice.
It's not the same. (Score:3, Insightful)
Letting H1-Bs into the country works directly against this, regardless of any (often fraudulent) claim that there is a short-term shortage.
We're supposed to be in a market economy - shortages of skills should result in increasing wages and an increased incentive for employers to train staff. Yet whenever the market begins to move in that direction the government starts shipping in the foreigners: which only benefits the global corporations.
Re:I am seeing it. (Score:2, Insightful)
In none of the cases you cite does the entire toolset change and become obsolete on timescales of 5-10 years. A doctor can still be relatively effective - and certainly not in danger of losing his/her job - working with ideas and technology from 2004. So can a lawyer. So can management.
Just try getting by as an application specialist if the last version you touched was in 2004.
Re:Yeah right (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone knows that a male babysitter would have raped the kids, the family dog and a few inanimate objects before you even got out of your driveway. It should be criminal to even suggest using a male babysitter! </sarcasm>
Re:Are you kidding? (Score:5, Insightful)
I complain about all of those things. Except one day I was hit by a realization at 4am while trying to get a workstation to function: "Hey, I could be getting paid for this." See a lot of us in IT do it, despite all of our bitching and moaning, because we really do love it. We love computers, we love technology, we love being the go-to-people whenever anything that goes "BEEP!" with flashy lights isn't working quite right. We wish we got more respect, and we wish we were better compensated. But then again, who doesn't? Who ever says, "Man, I just make TOO MUCH money!" I work on call hours, and yes it does suck. However the fact remains that the first thing I do when I get home is sit down at my computer. I'm still up til 2am (or later) working on computers. The only difference between that and being on call is that we don't have the control we normally do. But we're still doing the same work. We do it because we love it, even though we say we hate it. Its just one of those things we love to hate.
If you're going to get scared away by the negative parts, take a hard look at how you spend your time now. If you're working on computers all the time, and you enjoy making them work, fixing them, etc, then don't run away quite so fast. If you're a programmer, the same point stands. I left the comp sci department in college because the professor demanded we be in the lab 80+ hours a week. I thought he was crazy. Thing is, every programmer I've met spends easily 80 hours a week programming. Sometimes more. I see them literally pull 48 hour shifts, stopping only briefly to take catnaps without leaving their chairs. They do it because its their passion and there's nothing else they'd rather be doing. Its not like they're hourly. The prof was just weeding out the people who weren't really cut out for it, and he saved me a lot of time, energy, and frustration. Hell, maybe a trip to the psych ward too. It comes down to this: if its what you love, you learn to take the bad along with the good. Don't let other people warp your perspective.
Re:Cue The Moral Outrage (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up. I was in the same situation as this guy. We actually were married, though. Things were great until we graduated and after her residency she started making four times as much as I did. She was being invited by other hot shot doctors to go on yacht "off site meetings", expensive parties, etc. Something about all that made her change in a fundamental way and she started to become a different person. Eventually she started spending more and more time at the hospital (or so she said) until my cell phone broke one day and I had to use hers and noticed she had text messages from another docter insinuating that they were screwing after hours. She admitted what had been going on, filed for divorce, and just left without batting an eye, as if I was a complete stranger to her. Of course, she ended up telling the divorce court complete lies "he was abusive and hit me, I have to divorce him" and the court sucked it up and she ended up taking the house and the car, while I was admonished by the judge because "men like you are a bane to our society". Now I can even date normal women anymore because everyone thinks I am some sort of wife beater... It's pretty much ruined my life. I thought she was a different person... She WAS a different person... But that changed :(
Your depressing story seems like a perfect reason to mod grandparent DOWN because his advice is idiotic. Your sibling post said it best. Either don't rush and let her turn into uberbitch when you're not tied to her, or don't rush and it'll happen anyway because she actually loves him. Tying a "successful doctor" around your neck for the sake of doing so is just pointless.
Re:From a phsychological point of view... (Score:5, Insightful)
Women act more based on emotions and feelings than guys do, whereas guys will act on logic and black & white facts
Nope.
I used to think this 40 years ago, which is about when I started my IT career (with 8 years off to teach physics.)
My observation is that in general, men are much much more likely to get emotional in a business setting when there are differences of opinion. The way that they express emotion, from raised voices, blustering, filibustering to even stomping out of the room are somehow found to be socially acceptable. Men are the first to start emoting and are often the only ones. I've found that it is quite rare for a female to express emotion while in a business/professional setting and usually only after extreme provocation. On the other hand, it's almost a matter of course for men, especially those in or seeking to be management.
Is there anyone who is not aware that that raising your voice, shaking your head, pointing fingers, crossing arms etc are expressions of emotional behaviors?
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. You want to look at the last place institutional discrimination is tolerated by society, go ask a man in a 'working with young children' profession.
Re:Oh please... (Score:3, Insightful)
Who gives a damn if women don't work in IT?
Men who work in IT, who should be asking themselves what is so terrible about IT careers that women, who are filling the ranks of doctors and lawyers with wild abandon, won't go near them.
If a job really sucks--especially if it can get you killed--it is done predominantly by men.
We are society that holds the call of "Men last!" to be honourable and good. It is usually phrased as "Everyone who is not a man first!" Or more specifically "Women and children first!" But semantically they all mean, "Men last!" That sucks. If you're a man.
Re:Yeah right (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to say it, but if the number of women who show interest in and pursue these fields in high school and college is any indication, then bolthole is correct.
There will forever be a disparity in the number of men vs the number of women in this field if there is such a small number of women who show interest in getting into it.
There is nothing stopping a woman from entering college in the CompSci and related fields, yet the disparity is quite large. Thus, if 95 of every hundred college grads is male, then the employment ratio will indicate that.
This would be a story if the college breakdown (m/f) was 50/50 and the hiring rate was 90/10 or 80/20 or even 70/30... but that isnt the case.
Re:Hypocritical (Score:2, Insightful)
In before 9001 trolls and idiots reply with "HURR you're still a man because you have a Y chromosome".
Re:It's not the same. (Score:3, Insightful)
We're still in a market economy, except the market is now the planet. Consequently, the value of skills in transferable jobs has been falling for at least a decade. Don't blame the government for your failure to adapt.
Instead, recognize the trend and invest your self-improvement time in areas that are growing in value. I recommend customization, education and/or cost-benefit analysis in any complex field with long-term growth prospects.
Women are too smart to bother working (Score:3, Insightful)
Many women are too smart to bother working, that is what men are for. The world works in such a way that women do not need to work, provided they are attractive to enough males. Women are taught this from an early age - hence why women mature socially years earlier than men (on average). Easily 50% of women are "kept" in this way, unless they choose to work or are really ugly or have other deficiencies according to men. From age 18 - 33 or so, women have tremendous power over men based on appearance alone.
OTOH, males are trained from an early age that if you want a woman (and all that entails), you need to have a high paying job, power or both. The better the job, the better the woman you will likely attract. Better can mean all sorts of things - family, status, beauty, smarter, fertile, cute, famous, etc. There's almost zero chance of a man being "kept" although I'll keep trying.
Re:Yeah right (Score:2, Insightful)
This sounds like the attitude of someone who benefits from things not being fair.
Re:Yeah right (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:From a phsychological point of view... (Score:2, Insightful)
In a male-dominated world, rage and petulance are not considered emotions. That's why men are "less emotional" than women.
Re:Hypocritical (Score:3, Insightful)
Right. That's why I've caught VP's having meetings in men's rooms,
And the VPs at my company have meetings in the women's room. Ok, so you're VPs are jackasses, learn to deal. Some people are douche bags, that doesn't mean the entire world is out to keep women from IT jobs. There were 6 women in my electrical engineering class, out of 35 total. None of the guys in class made fun of them any more or less than anyone else. Everyone got railed on for setting of the fire alarm, everyone got applause for finishing that damned transistor radio. What it seems like is that some people are too afraid to try and break through the "societal walls" that say they shouldn't be in certain occupations. Get over what everyone else thinks about you and just do what you want. And guess what, if more men want to do IT than women that's not societies fault, it's just the way it is.
And before you spout off about how men don't have to deal with this, try being a man and telling your boss that you need to take a month off because you're having a child. Maybe it takes some guts, but if you go in and tell them your taking the month off (and not asking for it) then you'll probably get it. And who knows, people might respect you more for making your own decisions.
Re:Considerably? (Score:1, Insightful)
Nope. Nice try though.
Click on the link that the average of 77k is based off of. It is coming from one job, that is that of a "SUPERINTENDENT Nassau County Coop Building." It just happened to have the words "garbage" and "one 'man' job" in the description.
http://www.indeed.com/rc/clk?jk=2865f82583fa2637 [indeed.com]
Re:It's not the same. (Score:5, Insightful)
The government is hardly "shipping in the foreigners". Their normal involvement consists of forcibly keeping said foreigners out, which works directly against the market economy by maintaining artificially high prices for labor. On occasion, when they deign to notice a shortage of certain skills, they reduce their interference in the market economy and graciously permit a few more well-qualified foreigners to immigrate.
I'd be the first to admit that their policy as a whole favors certain influential individuals—e.g. shareholders of large corporations—over others, but the solution to that inequality consistent with our market economy is not to further block immigration by refusing H1-Bs, but rather to remove the requirement for H1-Bs entirely, permitting free and open immigration. Naturally this would require that the current welfare system to be significantly reduced in scope, if not eliminated entirely; otherwise the existing citizens would be forced to subsidize the new immigrants' "benefits", a most unjust circumstance. Any nation with open borders, as ours was intended to be, must insist that individuals pay their own way (not counting private, voluntary support, e.g. charity).
Re:Laird accidentally gets it right (Score:1, Insightful)
ITT: Sweeping generalizations that don't hold true. It doesn't take a woman to tell those types to piss off.
The amount of sheer fucking stupidity in this article and in these comments is astounding.
0/10.
Re:Hypocritical (Score:5, Insightful)
When I graduated CS, 75% of the students graduating were male. The CS program has all kinds of incentives, grants, scholarships, programs, and other things to try and get more female students. They consider it a "problem" that needs fixing that its slanted.
Right in front of me was the nursing graduates. 97% female. They have no such programs for males, and nobody considers this a "problem". They consider it a choice of men to not go into nursing.
Oddly, nobody questions that, while people constantly question women in CS. Go around ask them. I work with lots of women all the time, none of them want to be programmers. They're doing what they actually want to do, which is something else.
This isn't a real problem. This is stats not lining up in a way some people think they should, so they create a problem out of it.
Re:Yeah right (Score:3, Insightful)
There are also more women in HR, Payroll and Marketing. These are female dominated areas of business. There's a 50/50 split (roughly) in accounting and similar.
I don't know why people have this unrealistic view of equality meaning "everybody is equally distributed amongst everything", whether it's wealth, skill, or employment.
It's completely unrealistic and when they attempt to achieve these goals through policies (communism, no child left behind, equal opportunity laws, respectively), they fail dismally.
Don't worry about when or how it will change, since it doesn't matter if it doesn't. Sure, it means we MIGHT subjectively operate sub-optimally however, we needn't worry about that, and any attempt to change that would likely have us directing our energy at something which won't benefit us much and may cost us heaps.
So instead, be content with the fact that you're right. Use this information to exploit opportunities, build a network of people who understand this, and use this network to further your thought and progress.
This is what I find I have done instinctively.
Overall, nothing really matters, so do what you want.
This is the problem with relativistic and economic policy thinking, you inevitably find yourself dealing with matters of philosophy.
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the feminists who are making excuses
I'm not sure I agree with your whole post, but I have to give you props for this quote here. I'm a women in computer engineering and honestly, the place I feel the most uncomfortable is around so-called feminists. In university I avoided the women's center like the plague because every time I went in there with my eng books or wearing an engineering sweater or anything I always got the LOOK and a lecture about how I was just as bad as all the rest of those engineers and why are our songs so disgusting and blah blah blah.
There's sort of a delicious irony about someone claiming they are this huge feminist and then going into women's studies, the MOST un-evenly gender balanced and stereotypically female subject available and then having the gall to give me shit for singing stupid songs and drinking too much beer. You want to fix the gender balance in computer engineering? Well, the computer is right over there, stop doing stupid sociology studies and learn to code.
Re:It's not the same. (Score:3, Insightful)
You could just have socialized support structures vest over time rather than reducing them entirely.
Re:It's not the same. (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that what gave the States its huge (but diminishing) lead in science and tech was encouraging immigration. Closing the border is only going to cause all the smart people to aggregate elsewhere.
I have worked on that basis all my working life. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with people in IT is that they don't know how to say NO.
I do know how, and that has ensured a long career while having a fulfilling life outside work.
What a stupid excuse. (Score:3, Insightful)
"it's just saying a male dominated environment turns off women"
That would have been the situation with most jobs during most of human history.
It is the typical "blame the victim" mentality, putting the onus of improvement on the oppressed part rather than the oppressor. Truly despicable frankly.
Any men worth the name should be doing soul searching instead of trying to find excuses for the unacceptable low amount of women in certain careers.
.
Re:Cue The Moral Outrage (Score:3, Insightful)
If the university you received a CS/CE degree from didn't bother to make sure you learned C or C++ or a similarly low level language to a reasonable degree of competency, taught you what is necessary to write a device driver or other system code, basic assembly language, and how to implement a compiler, (among other things) your degree is probably not worth the paper it is printed on - assuming you want a job in the real world, that is.
This is a *big* problem.
Re:It's not the same. (Score:1, Insightful)
Not entirely true. A business can move from one country to the next almost trivially. The workers at the business can't; they are held by national borders in a way corporations are not.
Nationalism is being used to control the workforce. If the work force had the same freedom of movement as corporations, then the market would be free(er).
As it is now, corporations use national borders as a way to control workers. The world won't be interesting until people can move around the world as easily as they can around the US. I'm not saying countries have to be, in any way the same. Just that people can move if they want.
Re:Another one of these?? (Score:5, Insightful)
No one is going to go out of their way to make women feel all warm and cozy.
Noone does it for men either. Men generally treat each other like crap, and all men get ignored, talked over, dismissed etc. until they prove themselves. Women often mistake 'equal treatment' for sexism.
Re:Yeah right (Score:1, Insightful)
Life isn't fair. I will never be a champion marathon runner but I don't suppose rampant racism because the Kenyans always win.
Re:Hypocritical (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually there are programs to encourage men to go into nursing. Men don't though, do you know why? Same reason women don't get into computer science: cultural conditioning.
On a subtle and not so subtle level men and women are taught from a very early age that certain things are "boy things" and certain things are "girl things"
"Hey there son, what do you want to be when you grow up?"
"I wanna be a nurse"
"Wouldn't you rather be a pilot, fireman or engineer? Nursing's for women."
Re:Coming Right Up (Score:3, Insightful)
To return to the topic, my own personal opinion is that the amount of women in computer science has more to do with cultural reasons than biological ones. My undergraduate mathematics course has a gender ratio of about 50/50, and indeed has for several years. Given that computer science is mathematics, I'm then inclined to believe that there are others factors than biology at play.
I think there are two separate and very distinct questions here:
1. Are women avoiding CS solely (or primarily) for cultural reasons ("conditioning")?
2. Is it something that actually needs fixing?
My answer to #1 would be "yes". My answer to #2 is "not by itself". To expand, any discrimination on any factor in learning and employment should definitely be rooted out, and discriminating on gender is no exception. But voluntary choice (even under "conditioning" by the culture we're all raised in) should be respected. If the latter yields superficially non-politically-correct results, then so be it.
Re:Yeah right (Score:1, Insightful)
Indeed. You want to look at the last place institutional discrimination is tolerated by society, go ask a man in a 'working with young children' profession.
My girlfriend works in early childcare. There are almost no males in her workplace and those that do always get dirty looks from some parents and have had parents mention to the manager they do not want their kids left alone with them. This is even though there is absolutely nothing these guys have done wrong and from what I hear they are quite OK at their job. How about some studies into the blatant discrimination in these areas? Of course not - by definition of these PC loonies a man can't be discriminated against.
Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Insightful)
Ditto what Bolthole said. There are female soldiers, sailors, police, electricians, you name it. A programmer has the advantage that they can mostly remain anonymous, if they don't want their bodies and/or personalities put on public display. Anything a man can do, a woman can do, with VERY few exceptions, and often enough, better. That is, IF they just decide to do it.
Truck driving, for instance. It's a tough job, it takes you into some dangerous places, and it is dangerous in and of itself. Women have been driving for YEARS - and fleet controllers will readily tell you that they LIKE women drivers. Their equipment requires much less maintenance than male drivers, and they tend to get into fewer accidents.
Female cops have an advantage over their male counterparts. I got into an altercation in Chicago years ago. This lady cop was trying to calm me down, and put her hand on my upper arm, and chatted away. Some DUDE putting his hands on me would have made me more defensive - but when SHE did that, I started realizing how attractive she was, and LISTENED to her. Sexist? Yeah - but it works, and she knew how to make it work.
Ehhh. Whatever a person wants to do, they just need to get off their ass, and DO IT!!!
Re:Hypocritical (Score:1, Insightful)
The hypocricy here is delicious. I agree a person has every right to change their sex if they so choose. However that does not give anyone the right to demand that men be attracted to her just because she is now female. I personally have no interest in someone who has changed sexes. It is entirely my right not to be attracted in any way to them. As usual with the PC brigade the rights are only one way - their rights take precedence over everybody elses.
Re:Cue The Moral Outrage (Score:1, Insightful)
Sadly, in most parts of the world becoming an engineer--one of the people who actually builds things that society uses--means you are at the top of the social hierarchy, and being a lawyer means you have a boring bureaucratic job shuffling paper work all day. In the US you have patent lawyers who get paid more money to patent things than the people who actually made the product being patented. Why did becoming a lawyer become so prestigious in the US? Perhaps it's because lawsuits have so much control of people's lives these days. I use the think the analogies of the USA being the new Roman Empire nearing the end of its days was a bunch of pseudo-intellectual bullshit, but the older I get, the more I start to reconsider... You have to wonder how it is that our society has come to value things like lawyers so much. Up until 1900s all the science and engineering was considered a past time for wealthy aristocrats. Now our rich and powerful do law and politics...
Do you have children? I do... (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact is, more young boys than girls will treat any kind of toy or stick or whatever they can find as a weapon, and more young girls than boys will treat any kind of toy or stick or whatever they can find as a doll, and I think most people who are parents and truly think about it realize that this happened at an extremely young age for their kids. If there is a "nurture" side to how this works, it is exerted very early and in a round-about way.
Re:From a phsychological point of view... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Another one of these?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't kid yourself - that has nothing, or at least very little, to do with being a woman. Techies do that to each other - whether you're a man or a woman, it's how you're treated. Maybe it's because it's male-dominated, but it applies to everyone. Why should I care what someone thinks, unless they've convinced (or forced) me to respect them?
I think it's similar with men in most every field. Guys don't tend to play games, or screw around, with people they don't respect. Respect is something to be earned, and not granted by default - short of basic human respect. Guys tend to take no heed of people they don't respect.
Why should it be any different? If anyone - regardless of gender - wants anyone to care about their opinion, why shouldn't they need to earn the respect of their audience?
In my experience, women are less bothered by the idea of maneuvering through the minefield of everybody's concerns and opinions. Frankly, the thought sickens me and most male acquaintances - so we limit our pool of "everybody" to the people who we respect.
Re:Blah, blah , blah. (Score:5, Insightful)
And as a woman in a computer discipline, I can say:
1) There can be some vicious treatment sometimes, but it's not terribly often. Most of it is a immature junior-high remark, or getting excluded from a group. I have yet to encounter anything physically threatening, though (unlike my last job, which wasn't computing related). I can tell there are some people who don't know how to react to my presence, or get embarrassed if they technically slip on a PC issue. If the intent is well-meant, or if they're generally polite, I don't take offence.
2) It's up to me to deal with it. In general, acting like a professional, keeping your cool, and politely letting people know where your boundaries are goes a long way. Picking your fights helps too - don't get uppity at the smallest thing - everyone, male or female, has pinches at their workplace. Nasty stuff like a company that hires you to do tech work and instead makes you their coffee bitch gets an immediate vote of new job hunting and my feet out the door ASAP. Actually, something like that happened to a coworker, and it was a big factor to me leaving... I'm not about to argue with several members of an old boys' club. What's the point, for any of us, if I stay there?
The summary basically is: crap happens, deal with it. Get a backbone, treat yourself with self-worth, quit acting like a victim, and you won't be as one.
(My favorite incident was a guy who told me I shouldn't go back to school because it would be difficult, and I was approaching 30, so I had better have children while I can because all women want children when they're around 30, and I'll regret it if I don't. This coming from a fat, balding, divorced, childless middle-aged guy. This could have "scarred me for life", but instead I decide to spend time with people other than him. Problem solved. n.b. - Taking a MCSE & CCNA college program starting in January. I guess I had better drop out now, because of some nasty things four people have said to me in the last few years.)
Re:Are women pushing men out of nursing? (Score:1, Insightful)
I've seen what computer programmers do, and I'm sorry, but it is so not worth it.
I quite enjoy taking care of humans (and other animals), whether that is helping them get better, assisting with a chronic problem, or easing them in the last months of their lives. As long as I try my best to understand the needs of whoever I am helping, it is direct, fulfilling, and pure.
Is it frustrating when people don't display gratitude? Not unless they are abusive (far outweighed by the number who are not), because I am not doing it for gratitude. Is it annoying to clean faeces? No. Squeamishness is the product of inexperience and childhood inculcation. Shit happens.
The indirect nature of programming - and I've been there for a decade - holds comparatively little appeal. Am I really helping anyone, or am I just writing some pointless toy to fleece someone of their money? Why do I have to waste so much time dealing with the shortcomings of this fashionable platform when we'd be much better off working with something more integrated? It is said that Unix and C evolved, but the human body works more like VMS and thinks more like Lisp.
Re:Yeah right (Score:3, Insightful)
Education or work environment? (Score:3, Insightful)
I admit, my data is a little stale - I graduated HS/College in 95/99.
I work at a defense contractor. There's a little bit of sexism that seems to be primarily from older former military types, where I think it's less that I'm a female programmer than I'm a female programmer working on artillery software. And the one time that I overheard a co-worker who got passed over for promotion in favor of me comment that to get his promotion he would have to change his gender.
In college, I was in the first class of women that they admitted. (It was an all engineering and science university.) To placate people, they accepted additional students equal to the number of women so that no one would whine that they could have gotten in, if it weren't for those girls. The most sexism I had to put up with was actually from my Psych prof, of all people. Other than that, I think the divide was more between the merely-geeky-enough-to-go-there and the ubergeek types. Anyway, they opened up their pool of applicants and the average GPA went up quite a bit.
I was very lucky; we had conversations about this in college, given our environment. I knew someone who's own father didn't want her to go to college because "you'll just get married and waste all that learning". We all had to deal with teasing in high school, etc, but it's difficult to tell if it's the same as what other geeks went through, or worse for women. Personal experiences are difficult to compare.
Re:Education or work environment? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah right (Score:1, Insightful)
I would like to add support to men around young children. In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that I was only 18 when my daughter was born.
At her day care, I was singled out multiple times for why I spent so much time there. They had dance class and soccer during day care, so some time I would get off early and show up 15 min or so early so that I could watch a bit. They encouraged parents to show up and watch the activities, so I wasn't doing anything unusual or unexpected in order to be singled out. The only difference was I was the only father who would do that.
I used to take my daughter to the park frequently as we lived in an apartment, the parents would all huddle together and talk about me. It would start out well maybe he's just the older brother etc, but they would invariable ask me to leave and if I refused they would all leave. Typically I would be pushing my daughter on the swings so I can't see that my behavior would merit such attention.
The university I attended had a program where college students would mentor high school students. I participated and enjoyed the program, but one day when I took out my wallet to pay for lunch, a parent noticed that I had a picture of my daughter and I. She thought the picture was too intimate for a brother/sister and assumed I was either a pedophile or a parent (and she knew I wasn't married). She went as far as telling me she knew I was high (the only connection she could make was sex outside of marriage and being high are both wrong in her book and being high is something I could get in trouble for) and saying if I showed up again she would report me to the university. I called the adviser cell phone immediately and told him what was going on; luckily his reaction was if I wanted to get high I would stay home and get high and not spend hours on a Saturday trying to mentor students.
The best example was when I initially enrolled my daughter in school her school insisted the custody papers were not legal. They refused to enroll my daughter in school and threatened to call the police for kidnapping (even picking up the phone). I told them I would happily co-operate with the police, while we waited for them was there some one else I could speak with. I was referred to their lawyer. While we waited for the police and an appointment with their lawyer, they admitted if I was a woman they would have accepted the papers even if I wasn't the mother (so you can't use the excuse that most states have de facto custody by mothers). To their credit, meeting with the lawyer was a godsend; we didn't even go back to her office she quickly glanced at my documents and wrote me a note telling the school to accept them and promised to talk to the school personnel.
These are just examples off the top of my head. I moved recently from a decently wealthy area (I lived in a small isthmus of the major city and not the suburbs so rent was cheap ($500 a month) but yet the children still attended the better schools of the suburbs) to a poorer part of the city (so I could afford a house even though I pay $500+ a month in child support) and its been noticeable the attitude difference. The school told me how proud they were that a single father would care so much about his child to be that involved, I've been told several times how impressed people are that I am able to provide private insurance for my daughter (I'm a state employee, so its only $300 a month). So there is some hope at least.
Re:Yeah right (Score:3, Insightful)
Anything a man can do, a woman can do, with VERY few exceptions, and often enough, better.
That's a nice bit of sexism right there.
Re:From a phsychological point of view... (Score:3, Insightful)