[babadabada]

I'm a young woman in tech. I am happy to confirm that

"since most young women aren't exactly excited to talk about code"

is in fact some sexist bullshit.

[SkyBelow]

How?

Most people don't want to talk code. Thus, given a demographic breakdown that relates neither positively nor negatively with talking code, one can assume the general pattern applies.

Most old people don't want to talk code.

Most young people don't want to talk code.

Most left handed people don't want to talk code.

None of these are discriminating. They are stating that a pattern true of the general population also applies to a demographic partition of the population.

[babadabada]

How?

Because making broad assumptions about 50% of the population isn't a cool thing to do. Especially given the excessive amount of nonsense women in tech (and not in tech) have to deal with on a daily basis. Talk like this leads to women feeling excluded from the tech community.

Also, specifically calling out "young women" as not being interested in tech really makes a lot of assumptions. Generally, people will talk about most topics - even if they aren't passionate about those topics themselves. Most women I know will happily talk about tech stuff with me, so maybe your approach is wrong.

[SolaceQuantum]

I actually think most people do want to talk code. Specifically, how coding might work, or might not work. Whenever I bring up my software dev job, at least one person asks me what my day to day looks like, am I familiar with ML, do I know what blockchain is, etc. And then when I explain it, it comes off almost like revealing the man behind the curtain.

Technology touches everyone. Of course they want to know about how it works!

[mcguire]

Why did the original comment specifically mention "most young women" rather than "most people"?

[drno_]

While most people are not programmers, most programmers are not women. It's a subset of a subset, seems pretty accurate. It's worth noting though that most men aren't interested in discussing programming either. People in our field are few and far between :(

[magashna]

> most young women

I dare you to go to an average bar or club and try to talk about code with most young women. It's not happening. Most people don't code, and most coders are male.

[uwuhn]

Even in certain parts of SF, which I'd argue is the most engineer-dense part of the US, you can go into an average bar or club and discover that most of the men aren't interested in talking about code either.

[crustacean]

But why talk shop on a date at all though?

- A shared niche interest is not sufficient basis for a good relationship.

- I’m a woman in tech and I don’t necessarily wanna talk code on a first or second date, I’ve got professional development figured out on my own time.

[babadabada]

> I dare you to go to an average bar or club and try to talk about code with most young women.

I dare you to go to an average bar or club and try to talk about code to literally any person.

[cocomittens]

Same. Though I do have to admit the gender ratio is skewed a bit at my company you can count on one hand the amount of female engineers while there is 100+ male ones. They even changed the female bathroom to be 2 male ones but left us a couple fancy individual ones which I'm fine with.

[leetcrew]

the wording was sort of clumsy, but this is not a very charitable take. most people (men and women) really don't want to talk in depth about code or any other of your specific interests.

[larnmar]

Does being sexist make it untrue?

Are truth and sexistness orthogonal axes?

If you had to choose between saying something true but sexist and non-sexist but untrue, which would you pick?