You're not going to change this. Yes, virtually every great programmer or computer scientist is a male. So much so that we're all going to assume they're male, and when we see a female name (like "Leslie Lamport") we double-check to see if it's actually a female. This is just a normal tendency. We assume basketball players are over 6'3", we assume nurses are female.
There are many stories of people overcoming discrimination (say, Indian immigrants being thought to be unfit for executive positions in Silicon Valley), and they make the current hot topic of women in tech look incredibly dumb. We're talking overt discrimination, not occasional pronoun misuse.
Indians in Silicon Valley started a group called TiE to help establish a presence. Does it hurt for them to have labeled themselves as "Indus Entrepreneurs" and try to help each other? Doesn't seem so.
So maybe the right way to overcome this "oppression" you feel is just to quit fucking bitching, put your head down and code, and maybe help a few other women out along the way when you achieve success.
Careful: Computer science got big in the 50s and 60s, a time when "women and technology" was a topic consisting largely of the kitchen stove and the radio. Gender equality has come a long way since the 60s, especially in education, technology, and business (I'm not saying it's come all the way.)
Add to that, today's tech environment doesn't make your gender necessarily obvious, except if you choose to shove it into your readers' face. Take the linked blog, for example. It's indistinguishable from any other blog; the name "Amber" might as well be a male's pseudonym, and in any case, it's such low contrast and so small it's almost invisible. I know I skipped over it — also because I'm not typically interested in who wrote an article, but in the article itself.
So we have a population of males traditionally assuming everybody of relevance to technology is a man, and not many non-obnoxious ways for women to establish their gender in their postings (to be honest, I want it to stay that way. Your gender has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm interested in.)
Men need to stop whining and finally end the idiotic assumption that it is fine to use the default 'he'. English has a particularly elegant way out of the dilemma (just use 'they' whenever you'd use 'he') contrary to other languages where you will also need to adjust the inflection of verbs or nouns throughout the sentence.
It's a simple change. Nobody is going to get hurt, and it would do a lot to make women feel more welcome in the (formerly) manly sociotope 'technology'. Why is it such a problem for men to just make such a simple change?
(PS: please don't take my above post about women and their penetration into the technological sphere in the 50s and 60s all too literally. I meant the general population and the accepted role of women in society; I meant not to exclude the extraordinary achievements by some (few enough, unfortunately) women already accomplished in those times.)
Your misogynist default behavior isn't the fault of the OP and kinda your own failing to overcome.
The onus isn't on the oppressed group to overcome discrimination, it's on the privileged group to cut it out.
And downplaying everyday casual sexism just because it's not literally witch burning anymore is a really privileged thing to do!
This is how your comment reads to me: Misogyny is totally cool and you should never do anything to change it, not even write a harmless and polite blogpost. No, see, that's bitching. Mentioning a very clear and obvious problem is totally not cool.
dilettantism is way easier than work. And recently may be as effective. Heck i usually get hundreds of upvotes just by pretending i have some knowledge.
This one will skyrocket because i may be a woman. And maybe Indian.
Where are the technical articles written by women? There are plenty of contributions complaining about oppression, while attacking men and claiming absurd stereotypes. Where are the technical contributions?
I think the author does a great job starting out by highlighting her own contributions via the linked write-up on Git submodules, but beyond the first couple of sentences on the topic nothing, and spends the rest of the article on a tear about the he/she dichotomy in comments.
While I can certainly understand the frustration when people get gender wrong, that seems to be the wrong place to focus on in this topic of women in tech. Is it possibly an indicator of the problem at large? Sure. Does it answer the question "Where are the tech articles written by women"? No.
It does play right into the exact same mold the commenter was talking about, that set this entire entry into motion:
There are plenty of contributions complaining about oppression...where are the technical contributions?
Instead of highlighting great articles from the women in tech, or linking to other women in the industry with well trafficked blogs and talking about their contributions, the author fell right into the category that perpetuates this problem.
Mind you, I agree that there is a rift that rises when people make the wrong assumption, but that's nil imo.
> the author fell right into the category that perpetuates this problem.
You're missing the point of the article. The point is that if she does 'highlight great articles from the women in tech,' then she would be labeled a "female developer" instead of just a "developer." If she doesn't do this, then she gets labeled a male developer. She would like to be labeled "developer," but the two options she can see lead to undesirable outcomes.
This has been said before, but the key thing to take away is the concept of "othering." The author would like to be seen as a developer, not a subcategory of a developer that is somehow different from the norm. Perhaps a better way to demonstrate is to take this to the extreme:
"Instead of highlighting great articles from brown-eyed people in tech, or linking to other brown-eyed people in the industry with well trafficked blogs and talking about their contributions, the author fell right into the category that perpetuates this problem."
Sounds pretty absurd right? Who cares what their eye color is. On the other hand, imagine if everyone got it wrong. Imagine if you had brown eyes but there was a 'default assumption' that everyone had blue eyes. You wouldn't want to make a fuss every time people got it wrong, for fear of being "that person" who is annoying and pedantic, and "hey, it shouldn't matter! Technology is eye-color blind!" But if you don't do it, it gets a little grating when EVERYONE assumes you are something that you're not. It's a catch-22.
The solution is to remove the default assumption that developers are male. That is something that you, not the author, have to do.
The author falls into no such category, having clearly made a considerable contribution already.
You've missed the point of the article. It doesn't set out to answer your quoted question with some faux-positive ra-ra laundry list of women's writing. Instead it unasks the question.
On the other hand, you've exhibited a classic indicator of unconscious bias by assuming that a woman was complaining. Especially when, as in this case, she clearly isn't.
The point is that she shouldn't need to point out individual contributions by women. Because you'd hopefully understand that women don't go out of the way and say "hey, btw, I'm a girl!". So you'd understand technical articles by women are plenty, but they're not immediately obvious. Because women are not trying to make it immediately obvious. Because the internet is supposed to be gender neutral.
And hopefully, if you understand all that, you won't ask be asking "where are the technical contributions from women?" in the first place. So the question is mute, which is why she didn't answer.
This article is not one of them. Just because it doesn't answer the question the way you want it to be answered doesn't mean it's "perpetuating the problem".
In fact, one of the indirect points of this article is that demanding lists of female bloggers in the first place is silly - who demands lists of male bloggers?
> Mind you, I agree that there is a rift that rises when people make the wrong assumption, but that's nil imo.
It's possible you are very open minded in such a way that even though you don't "see" a group, and its accomplishments, you still consciously afford them the same benefit of doubt as you do for the majority group. Unfortunately, this is not a trait shared by societies and social groups at large.
Most of the time people use "he" when they don't know the gender of the author. It's not assuming the author is a man. It's a place-holder word in English.
If you want a gender-neutral pronoun, "they" works perfectly well. It doesn't matter what you intend when you type "he", everyone reading it will interpret it as male.
I think you are right about using "he" in a non-gender-specific way, but I think there are ramifications. It becomes obvious that all articles are written by men, since you see so many he's writing them.
Perhaps English needs a truly gender-neutral pronoun.
And you don't see how that leads people to unconsciously bias themselves towards thinking of the author as male, even if they don't actively decide to think of them that way?
> Furthermore, doing so results in harassment and having my writing dismissed/trivialized/tokenized because of my gender. Hence why I don’t (or at least, hadn’t until this post).
I'd like to understand the severity of this issue. Can you provide examples of technical articles written by women that were dismissed due to their gender?
It's not actually a catch-22, it's just a shitty situation.
Catch-22 means you can't do something without doing another thing first, but you can't do that first either because it relies on the thing you wanted to do in the first place. It's a closed circle with no way in.
This, however, it's just painful. Women can't emphasize their gender without being ridiculed by assholes, but they can't hide it because they would then be helping prolong the ridicule for others.
"You're either part of the problem, or part of the solution." Sitting back and doing nothing allows the problem to continue. I'm as guilty of doing nothing as anyone.
I really don't care who wrote the article, only that it's a good article. If I see something techie don't by a woman, I generally think "Good for her" and then continue on with life. I don't assign any special weight to her words at all. They still stand on their own.
On the other hand, my experience is that closed communities are a lot better about not discriminating. If someone says, "the op is a She", everyone apologizes, switches, and continues on.
Open communities, where any asshole with a keyboard can leave a comment, tend to be slums. Assholes know they can post their opinions without censorship, so they do. Constantly. There's repercussions, either.
As much as I like finding random stuff on the net, the only communities worth joining are the private ones. And there's precious few of those any more.
> The catch-22 here is that if I choose to blend in, then people like the commenters above assume that everything they see was written by men, and use that as an excuse to dismiss the concerns of women in the tech industry
Couldn't this be solved by a little 'about the author' section at the end of your articles? Pull in your gravatar and add a couple of sentences about yourself. Now everyone knows you are a woman, and you didn't have to change your background to hot-pink to do so! :)
Did you read the article at all? Her whole point is that women should not have to do this, that they face discrimination if they do do this, and that we should refrain from assuming that if we don't see one of these, it's by a man. The problem isn't that they don't know she's a girl. It's that they assume she isn't one.
Interesting, but a bit of a strawman: one comment dismisses complaints of women because he accuses them of not contributing anything of merit. That is of course flawed in itself, but it is just one person's comment, not a general attitude towards female bloggers.
I also don't think that for example on HN it should be possible to "pay" with technical contributions for non-technical contributions, like, for every x relevant
articles you would be allowed an irrelevant article. Ideally, every article should stand on it's own (probably not realistic, but an ideal to attain to).
Who are you telling to remember? Because if I was the author, who had shown she was creating things and trying to be known for that, I would be hugely offended at that kind of gender-stereotyped patronizing remark.
[+] [-] HarrietTubgirl|13 years ago|reply
There are many stories of people overcoming discrimination (say, Indian immigrants being thought to be unfit for executive positions in Silicon Valley), and they make the current hot topic of women in tech look incredibly dumb. We're talking overt discrimination, not occasional pronoun misuse.
Indians in Silicon Valley started a group called TiE to help establish a presence. Does it hurt for them to have labeled themselves as "Indus Entrepreneurs" and try to help each other? Doesn't seem so.
So maybe the right way to overcome this "oppression" you feel is just to quit fucking bitching, put your head down and code, and maybe help a few other women out along the way when you achieve success.
[+] [-] adimitrov|13 years ago|reply
Add to that, today's tech environment doesn't make your gender necessarily obvious, except if you choose to shove it into your readers' face. Take the linked blog, for example. It's indistinguishable from any other blog; the name "Amber" might as well be a male's pseudonym, and in any case, it's such low contrast and so small it's almost invisible. I know I skipped over it — also because I'm not typically interested in who wrote an article, but in the article itself.
So we have a population of males traditionally assuming everybody of relevance to technology is a man, and not many non-obnoxious ways for women to establish their gender in their postings (to be honest, I want it to stay that way. Your gender has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm interested in.)
Men need to stop whining and finally end the idiotic assumption that it is fine to use the default 'he'. English has a particularly elegant way out of the dilemma (just use 'they' whenever you'd use 'he') contrary to other languages where you will also need to adjust the inflection of verbs or nouns throughout the sentence.
It's a simple change. Nobody is going to get hurt, and it would do a lot to make women feel more welcome in the (formerly) manly sociotope 'technology'. Why is it such a problem for men to just make such a simple change?
(PS: please don't take my above post about women and their penetration into the technological sphere in the 50s and 60s all too literally. I meant the general population and the accepted role of women in society; I meant not to exclude the extraordinary achievements by some (few enough, unfortunately) women already accomplished in those times.)
[+] [-] ben0x539|13 years ago|reply
Your misogynist default behavior isn't the fault of the OP and kinda your own failing to overcome.
The onus isn't on the oppressed group to overcome discrimination, it's on the privileged group to cut it out. And downplaying everyday casual sexism just because it's not literally witch burning anymore is a really privileged thing to do!
[+] [-] mkaltenecker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcb|13 years ago|reply
This one will skyrocket because i may be a woman. And maybe Indian.
[+] [-] iamdave|13 years ago|reply
I think the author does a great job starting out by highlighting her own contributions via the linked write-up on Git submodules, but beyond the first couple of sentences on the topic nothing, and spends the rest of the article on a tear about the he/she dichotomy in comments.
While I can certainly understand the frustration when people get gender wrong, that seems to be the wrong place to focus on in this topic of women in tech. Is it possibly an indicator of the problem at large? Sure. Does it answer the question "Where are the tech articles written by women"? No.
It does play right into the exact same mold the commenter was talking about, that set this entire entry into motion:
There are plenty of contributions complaining about oppression...where are the technical contributions?
Instead of highlighting great articles from the women in tech, or linking to other women in the industry with well trafficked blogs and talking about their contributions, the author fell right into the category that perpetuates this problem.
Mind you, I agree that there is a rift that rises when people make the wrong assumption, but that's nil imo.
[+] [-] wickedchicken|13 years ago|reply
You're missing the point of the article. The point is that if she does 'highlight great articles from the women in tech,' then she would be labeled a "female developer" instead of just a "developer." If she doesn't do this, then she gets labeled a male developer. She would like to be labeled "developer," but the two options she can see lead to undesirable outcomes.
This has been said before, but the key thing to take away is the concept of "othering." The author would like to be seen as a developer, not a subcategory of a developer that is somehow different from the norm. Perhaps a better way to demonstrate is to take this to the extreme:
"Instead of highlighting great articles from brown-eyed people in tech, or linking to other brown-eyed people in the industry with well trafficked blogs and talking about their contributions, the author fell right into the category that perpetuates this problem."
Sounds pretty absurd right? Who cares what their eye color is. On the other hand, imagine if everyone got it wrong. Imagine if you had brown eyes but there was a 'default assumption' that everyone had blue eyes. You wouldn't want to make a fuss every time people got it wrong, for fear of being "that person" who is annoying and pedantic, and "hey, it shouldn't matter! Technology is eye-color blind!" But if you don't do it, it gets a little grating when EVERYONE assumes you are something that you're not. It's a catch-22.
The solution is to remove the default assumption that developers are male. That is something that you, not the author, have to do.
[+] [-] inopinatus|13 years ago|reply
You've missed the point of the article. It doesn't set out to answer your quoted question with some faux-positive ra-ra laundry list of women's writing. Instead it unasks the question.
On the other hand, you've exhibited a classic indicator of unconscious bias by assuming that a woman was complaining. Especially when, as in this case, she clearly isn't.
[+] [-] vibrunazo|13 years ago|reply
And hopefully, if you understand all that, you won't ask be asking "where are the technical contributions from women?" in the first place. So the question is mute, which is why she didn't answer.
[+] [-] aiiane|13 years ago|reply
http://www.javaworld.com/community/node/3512/ http://www.webteacher.ws/2010/07/06/10-terrific-tech-blogs-b...
This article is not one of them. Just because it doesn't answer the question the way you want it to be answered doesn't mean it's "perpetuating the problem".
In fact, one of the indirect points of this article is that demanding lists of female bloggers in the first place is silly - who demands lists of male bloggers?
[+] [-] danso|13 years ago|reply
It's possible you are very open minded in such a way that even though you don't "see" a group, and its accomplishments, you still consciously afford them the same benefit of doubt as you do for the majority group. Unfortunately, this is not a trait shared by societies and social groups at large.
[+] [-] verroq|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roguecoder|13 years ago|reply
If you want a gender-neutral pronoun, "they" works perfectly well. It doesn't matter what you intend when you type "he", everyone reading it will interpret it as male.
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|13 years ago|reply
Perhaps English needs a truly gender-neutral pronoun.
[+] [-] aiiane|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RegEx|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] undantag|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RegEx|13 years ago|reply
I'd like to understand the severity of this issue. Can you provide examples of technical articles written by women that were dismissed due to their gender?
[+] [-] wccrawford|13 years ago|reply
Catch-22 means you can't do something without doing another thing first, but you can't do that first either because it relies on the thing you wanted to do in the first place. It's a closed circle with no way in.
This, however, it's just painful. Women can't emphasize their gender without being ridiculed by assholes, but they can't hide it because they would then be helping prolong the ridicule for others.
"You're either part of the problem, or part of the solution." Sitting back and doing nothing allows the problem to continue. I'm as guilty of doing nothing as anyone.
I really don't care who wrote the article, only that it's a good article. If I see something techie don't by a woman, I generally think "Good for her" and then continue on with life. I don't assign any special weight to her words at all. They still stand on their own.
On the other hand, my experience is that closed communities are a lot better about not discriminating. If someone says, "the op is a She", everyone apologizes, switches, and continues on.
Open communities, where any asshole with a keyboard can leave a comment, tend to be slums. Assholes know they can post their opinions without censorship, so they do. Constantly. There's repercussions, either.
As much as I like finding random stuff on the net, the only communities worth joining are the private ones. And there's precious few of those any more.
[+] [-] RegEx|13 years ago|reply
Couldn't this be solved by a little 'about the author' section at the end of your articles? Pull in your gravatar and add a couple of sentences about yourself. Now everyone knows you are a woman, and you didn't have to change your background to hot-pink to do so! :)
[+] [-] thetabyte|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tichy|13 years ago|reply
I also don't think that for example on HN it should be possible to "pay" with technical contributions for non-technical contributions, like, for every x relevant articles you would be allowed an irrelevant article. Ideally, every article should stand on it's own (probably not realistic, but an ideal to attain to).
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] clockstrikesten|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcfox|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aiiane|13 years ago|reply