This article is about why it's great to work in tech, _especially_ as a girl. Be prepared for some "omg why didn't someone tell me earlier....!!!" facts.
OK, nobody commented this up to now but I think is important: Among the many posts about this subject I've read on HN recently this was absolutely the best: Not only it approached the matter in a no-nonsense, practical matter without preaching from "the height of an unwritten book" or an axe to grind but it also gives excellent advice to young girls who want to venture into the field.
With posts like this I wish there was a mega-upvote option on HN, e.g. for 500 points of karma you upvote 10 points.
While and rather excellent article on why the IT field is a suitable career, good grief, the sexism politics has really entrenched itself into people mindset.
It almost boggles my mind. Here some supposedly sexist snippets from "scenarios you may occasionally find yourself in when working as a girl in tech".
Colleague: “So...you are the new designer?"
(As if "so...you are the new Foobar" would not be said to any new hire. if I got a new boss, my first word might be "so...you the new boss? hi my name is so and so!". How and in what way would that be sexist remark, and does it matter if the new boss would be female or male? would it matter if the position is boss, developer, designer, sysadmin, or sales?)
Useless male developer has written some crappy code that he doesn’t even understand himself anymore. Now he needs to extend it with new features and asks you to do it.
(As if female developers get exclusively dumped with fixing bad code. Especially if its a new hire/consultant/out sourced, how does this surprise anyone? its even a saying that "the new guy gets all the work no one else want". Does it matter if its a female or male?
so for mega-upvote, the article has some issues. Its better than the normal articles we see, but its not 10 times better.
The clearest reason for this, AFAICT, is because she's speaking primarily to women and trying to convince them to come on board. It's not at all about sexism; it merely acknowledges it in passing and hurries on quickly because it's a touchy subject.
"This is a bit of a delicate topic. Quite often I am the only female person in the team and have to be careful not to take advantage of the perks that come with it. Guys are fascinated and scared by girls who roll up their sleeves and take on a job that society labels as “men’s work”. If you’ve ever drilled a hole, skinned a rabbit, or changed a tyre you know what I mean.
As I mentioned earlier, guys will definitely put you to the test and as a girl it will be hard to get their respect. On the other hand, you can get away with a lot of things just by fluttering your eyelashes and being a bit cheeky, which is a habit that is so easy to get into. I have to confess I’ve done it myself because if you are surrounded by guys all day you quickly feel powerful. However, with great power comes great responsibility so don’t take (too much, hehe) advantage of the nerds treating you like a princess just because they finally get to work with a girl."
Never experienced this. Sounds like an alternate reality. All the so called nerds I worked with had girlfriends or wives and didn't wear pocket protectors and stutter around females when talking to them.
Articles like this are what are going to get girls into computing. They need to know that there are other normal girls, just like them, that do this for a living.
I got my ex-girlfriend into software development. She comes off as a very stereotypical girly girl. She likes clothes, shopping, and top 40 pop music. I convinced her to take an intro programming class her sophomore year of college. Now she's a software engineer at Amazon.
All it took her was a little convincing that she could do it, and that normal people (I suppose I seemed normal to her) do it too.
> All it took her was a little convincing that she could do it
I don't know if it's society or what, but it seems a lot of girls suffer from this (conscious or not) line of thinking.
I'm versed in science (esp. math and physics) and like to talk about such subjects so I've been regularly asked for help, and every single time I helped a girl the cause of their demise was lack of confidence. Contrary to guys (which seem to have confidence in excess but need some form of support), telling them upfront is useless because it's so ingrained that I have to take a more subtle route. I explain her something complex, and keep going deeper until (usually takes about ten minutes) there's a a-ha, not about the subject at hand but about herself, a moment where she realizes that at every step she got everything I said, and now she gets a glimpse something so complex that ten minutes ago she thought it would forever be unfathomable to her, when I did not actually explain so much as pragmatically but subtly demonstrate that yes, she can do it. Subsequent results at school, even in unrelated disciplines and without more training, are off the charts.
It seems the "mens do the real stuff" society thing is so pervasive that it permeates through and makes them lose the confidence required, and they just need to be bootstrapped out of it so that they can finally say "This is within my reach".
For real. This girl is obviously being honest and sounds really level-headed/normal. Everything in this article is exactly what I would tell my little sister.
I (100% female) work as a web developer and are not sure if the lack of female colleagues bothers me or not. Political correctness dictates that it should
Political correctness isn't really about groupthink or how you should feel. It's about not making other people feel shitty because you're too lazy to use inclusive language. It's simply an extension of 'manners', and gets demonised when it shouldn't be.
Political Correctness is about hypersensitivity to possible insult to the point that using direct and clear communication is frowned upon in the public discourse.
Political Correctness is an extraordinarily sad advance of style over substance that has attempted to address the language used to describe problems in our society over actually addressing the problems themselves.
Ultimately, Political Correctness is yet another societal/political power grab in an attempt to control the very words that come out of everyones' mouths. Free speech is just too much individual power for many Utopians in society, but they've had so much trouble trying to legislate against the First Amendment[or other country's free speech protection]. Political Correctness is the next best thing for them, I guess.
There's a fine line between someone feeling "shitty" and groupthink / often naive & distant.
A friend of mine says that anytime a person refers to him as "African-American" he sees them as totally distant and that "they usually don't talk to black people" - so I can see this working both ways.
Political correctness (what the 'polis' sees as correct) isn't always what those who may 'feel shitty' think is correct - so I share her feelings.
Why is it that people group IT and software development together? To me, they are two completely different fields.
For example, I see an IT person as a mail server administrator in a large company, and a developer as the person who would write the mail server software.
I'm not saying that an IT professional never writes code, or a developer won't ever touch a Nginx config file. I just mean they are two different types of work.
It's something I have noticed for a while now, not only with your article.
"This is a bit of a delicate topic. Quite often I am the only female person in the team and have to be careful not to take advantage of the perks that come with it."
"you can get away with a lot of things just by fluttering your eyelashes and being a bit cheeky, which is a habit that is so easy to get into. I have to confess I’ve done it myself because if you are surrounded by guys all day you quickly feel powerful."
"Technical directors are really keen to hire girls because we boost the morale."
"If a male and a female developer with a similar skill level apply for a job, I bet that in 99.9% of the cases the girl will get the job."
These are all very sexist remarks. If the equivalent has been written from a male's perspective it would have been an outrage.
I'd love to use this opportunity to do a little promotion. My sister and I just launched a site to connect women in industry with girls taking math and science called Girls Love Math (http://www.glmclub.org).
It would make my day if women like nerdess became mentors. I have a feeling that lots of girls are looking up to them.
There are several definitions of sexism, one is essentially "taking someone's sex or gender into account when making a decision". This appears to be the definition you're using. It's a very simple, easy to understand, easy to identify definiton. It also means that in many cases (e.g. hiring in an IT company), men can be the victims of sexism.
There's another definition, which is actions that's designed to maintain & reinforce the institutionalised power structure among sexist. Right now, if modern UK life was a video game, "male" would be an easier difficulty level than "female". There are statistically less problems for the "male" group. Sexist actions are actions that re-enforced that imbalance. This definition is harder for some people to accept because it means that you need to look at yourself and think about what power imbalances you might be benefiting from, and it means you can't just do s/female/male/g and make it just as sexist.
(There are some cases where there's an inbalance in favour of women, any men here ever took up knitting & crochet? Try getting involved in that, you'll see things from the other side)
Too hypothetical anyway. Skill level, or more precisely the interviewers' opinion of it, is never precisely equal between candidates. It includes soft skills besides programming.
You say that as if letting someone's gender affect your decisions is somehow, magically, inherently always ALWAYS wrong. It isn't. Some situations it is. Some situations it is not.
I sincerely hope that I've never been a pity/diversity hire. I want to be evaluated on my qualifications as a well-rounded developer and compensated appropriately for my work.
It's only sexism if it uses sex as a criteria to disadvantage someone who isn't male, in the same way that it's only racism if it uses race as a criteria to disadvantage someone who isn't caucasian.
"Computer languages and “real” languages are actually very similar."
I really couldn't disagree with that more. Sure, some languages' syntax borrow English words (Python, Pascal, VB, etc), but that's such a minor similarity. Those words are completely arbitrary and the syntax could have been in Klingon for all the difference it would make to the compiler.
Computer languages are a maths language; albeit a very very dumbed down dialect of maths, but maths all the same.
I think the trap many web developers fall in is that PHP teaches some terrible programming practices (no variable declarations nor types, etc) and ANSI SQL isn't Turing complete, so feel that all other languages by extension are equally easy to grasp. However if you look at a number of other languages -particularly the ones with C-derived syntax- then it becomes painfully obvious that any similarities to human languages are just skin deep (which is lucky for me as I majorly suck at writing yet can code proficiently in around a dozen different computer languages).
Don't know why you felt it was necessary to take a dig at PHP, as if PHP is the cause of all bad web programming practices. Nowadays, PHP is very much evolved, and the abundance of mature frameworks have completely removed the most of the inconsistency issues.There are in fact variable declarations and types in PHP, there's even type-hinting to enforce types.
The fact of the matter is that many web developers fall into bad practices via laziness, copy & paste syndrome, regardless of whether the language they're using has strict types or not.
Natural-language likeness, with all its weirdness and power, was an explicit design goal of Larry Wall's perl, a language which was instrumental in creating the WWW as we know it.
Am I the only one that thought that while most of the points made in the article were generally true, the follow-up and examples were lackluster.
Comments like these:
"you can get away with a lot of things just by fluttering your eyelashes and being a bit cheeky ... so don’t take (too much, hehe) advantage of the nerds treating you like a princess just because they finally get to work with a girl."
are insulting to both genders, as well as being grossly overstated.
This is a weird subject. I think, as a social group, we're on a hinging point where women will be making equal footing in the tech industry, but haven't yet. Its coming.
Women are going to get disproportionate treatment during this transition in one or two different ways, and it depends on who they're interacting with. Should they land themselves alongside the stereotypical basement dweller they'll be cast aside and thought less of. They'll first need to prove themselves in an uphill battle. This will take great self confidence because there is a lot of misogyny still in the tech workplace. Too many tech gurus grew up being shunned socially and still have those emotional barriers preventing them from being rational and fair.
On the other swing of things though we have the opposite treatment: "A girl? Oooo!" I feel jealous sometimes of my female friends in the industry because of just how easy getting face to face for new jobs comes for them. I fight to keep myself in check because they're damn good professionals who deserve it but the thought remains: what sets them apart from me? Directly out of university I was competing locally with a lot of them for jobs and the treatment of women in the profession was quite apparent. I still see it a bit in my jobs now and its slightly disheartening.
Ultimately I think this problem will solve itself in time. Tech jobs aren't about the basement dweller anymore, they haven't been for years. The natural transition where everyone in the workforce has been part of it for the years where equal woman representation has been around and the awkward or preferential treatment is happening. We need vocal women to encourage more to join. Those classes in university will definitely be unsettling when 20 slobbering unkempt males are trying to wrestle their way to the only female group partner but to push through is going to be tough.
Breaking News A man doesn't understand why women do/think something that he doesn't, but still has some thoughts about why those women are wrong!
Here's a tip: if someone says "this is hard for me" don't respond with "no it's not." In fact, even if they get a little presumptive and forget to add the "for me," give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they are describing the world as it exists for them and not necessarily making an empirical claim.
After reading all of this again, it strikes me that she works with a LOT of sexually frustrated nerds. She says she has to be careful not using her appearant super power of girlyness too much to manipulate the nerds and such stuff.
Is this seriously the reality somewhere, that coders are 99% sexually frustrated super nerds? I always considered that to be a old stereotype :P
yeah well of course it's wrong to get a job just because of the gender. though if HR departments and CTO's want to hire us girls so badly then wohoooo.........i would be stupid to not use this to my advantage :D
[+] [-] Jun8|13 years ago|reply
With posts like this I wish there was a mega-upvote option on HN, e.g. for 500 points of karma you upvote 10 points.
[+] [-] belorn|13 years ago|reply
It almost boggles my mind. Here some supposedly sexist snippets from "scenarios you may occasionally find yourself in when working as a girl in tech".
Colleague: “So...you are the new designer?" (As if "so...you are the new Foobar" would not be said to any new hire. if I got a new boss, my first word might be "so...you the new boss? hi my name is so and so!". How and in what way would that be sexist remark, and does it matter if the new boss would be female or male? would it matter if the position is boss, developer, designer, sysadmin, or sales?)
Useless male developer has written some crappy code that he doesn’t even understand himself anymore. Now he needs to extend it with new features and asks you to do it. (As if female developers get exclusively dumped with fixing bad code. Especially if its a new hire/consultant/out sourced, how does this surprise anyone? its even a saying that "the new guy gets all the work no one else want". Does it matter if its a female or male?
so for mega-upvote, the article has some issues. Its better than the normal articles we see, but its not 10 times better.
[+] [-] saraid216|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tankbot|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] groby_b|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atomical|13 years ago|reply
As I mentioned earlier, guys will definitely put you to the test and as a girl it will be hard to get their respect. On the other hand, you can get away with a lot of things just by fluttering your eyelashes and being a bit cheeky, which is a habit that is so easy to get into. I have to confess I’ve done it myself because if you are surrounded by guys all day you quickly feel powerful. However, with great power comes great responsibility so don’t take (too much, hehe) advantage of the nerds treating you like a princess just because they finally get to work with a girl."
Never experienced this. Sounds like an alternate reality. All the so called nerds I worked with had girlfriends or wives and didn't wear pocket protectors and stutter around females when talking to them.
[+] [-] RandallBrown|13 years ago|reply
I got my ex-girlfriend into software development. She comes off as a very stereotypical girly girl. She likes clothes, shopping, and top 40 pop music. I convinced her to take an intro programming class her sophomore year of college. Now she's a software engineer at Amazon.
All it took her was a little convincing that she could do it, and that normal people (I suppose I seemed normal to her) do it too.
[+] [-] lloeki|13 years ago|reply
I don't know if it's society or what, but it seems a lot of girls suffer from this (conscious or not) line of thinking.
I'm versed in science (esp. math and physics) and like to talk about such subjects so I've been regularly asked for help, and every single time I helped a girl the cause of their demise was lack of confidence. Contrary to guys (which seem to have confidence in excess but need some form of support), telling them upfront is useless because it's so ingrained that I have to take a more subtle route. I explain her something complex, and keep going deeper until (usually takes about ten minutes) there's a a-ha, not about the subject at hand but about herself, a moment where she realizes that at every step she got everything I said, and now she gets a glimpse something so complex that ten minutes ago she thought it would forever be unfathomable to her, when I did not actually explain so much as pragmatically but subtly demonstrate that yes, she can do it. Subsequent results at school, even in unrelated disciplines and without more training, are off the charts.
It seems the "mens do the real stuff" society thing is so pervasive that it permeates through and makes them lose the confidence required, and they just need to be bootstrapped out of it so that they can finally say "This is within my reach".
[+] [-] annableker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerdess|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandollars|13 years ago|reply
This happened in a talk at a programming/web/tech event two weeks ago: http://i.imgur.com/4hL6X.jpg
[+] [-] vacri|13 years ago|reply
Political correctness isn't really about groupthink or how you should feel. It's about not making other people feel shitty because you're too lazy to use inclusive language. It's simply an extension of 'manners', and gets demonised when it shouldn't be.
[+] [-] crusso|13 years ago|reply
Political Correctness is an extraordinarily sad advance of style over substance that has attempted to address the language used to describe problems in our society over actually addressing the problems themselves.
Ultimately, Political Correctness is yet another societal/political power grab in an attempt to control the very words that come out of everyones' mouths. Free speech is just too much individual power for many Utopians in society, but they've had so much trouble trying to legislate against the First Amendment[or other country's free speech protection]. Political Correctness is the next best thing for them, I guess.
[+] [-] nickpinkston|13 years ago|reply
A friend of mine says that anytime a person refers to him as "African-American" he sees them as totally distant and that "they usually don't talk to black people" - so I can see this working both ways.
Political correctness (what the 'polis' sees as correct) isn't always what those who may 'feel shitty' think is correct - so I share her feelings.
[+] [-] nickporter|13 years ago|reply
For example, I see an IT person as a mail server administrator in a large company, and a developer as the person who would write the mail server software.
I'm not saying that an IT professional never writes code, or a developer won't ever touch a Nginx config file. I just mean they are two different types of work.
It's something I have noticed for a while now, not only with your article.
[+] [-] minamea|13 years ago|reply
"you can get away with a lot of things just by fluttering your eyelashes and being a bit cheeky, which is a habit that is so easy to get into. I have to confess I’ve done it myself because if you are surrounded by guys all day you quickly feel powerful."
"Technical directors are really keen to hire girls because we boost the morale."
"If a male and a female developer with a similar skill level apply for a job, I bet that in 99.9% of the cases the girl will get the job."
These are all very sexist remarks. If the equivalent has been written from a male's perspective it would have been an outrage.
[+] [-] physcab|13 years ago|reply
It would make my day if women like nerdess became mentors. I have a feeling that lots of girls are looking up to them.
[+] [-] LiveFanChat|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] victorhn|13 years ago|reply
That looks like sexism to me.
[+] [-] rmc|13 years ago|reply
There's another definition, which is actions that's designed to maintain & reinforce the institutionalised power structure among sexist. Right now, if modern UK life was a video game, "male" would be an easier difficulty level than "female". There are statistically less problems for the "male" group. Sexist actions are actions that re-enforced that imbalance. This definition is harder for some people to accept because it means that you need to look at yourself and think about what power imbalances you might be benefiting from, and it means you can't just do s/female/male/g and make it just as sexist.
(There are some cases where there's an inbalance in favour of women, any men here ever took up knitting & crochet? Try getting involved in that, you'll see things from the other side)
[+] [-] arbuge|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arrrg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reso|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EliRivers|13 years ago|reply
You say that as if letting someone's gender affect your decisions is somehow, magically, inherently always ALWAYS wrong. It isn't. Some situations it is. Some situations it is not.
[+] [-] electrozoic|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|13 years ago|reply
It might take a little while to perform that experiment...
[+] [-] CrankyPants|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sahat|13 years ago|reply
That's reality.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] seabornlee|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] laumars|13 years ago|reply
I really couldn't disagree with that more. Sure, some languages' syntax borrow English words (Python, Pascal, VB, etc), but that's such a minor similarity. Those words are completely arbitrary and the syntax could have been in Klingon for all the difference it would make to the compiler.
Computer languages are a maths language; albeit a very very dumbed down dialect of maths, but maths all the same.
I think the trap many web developers fall in is that PHP teaches some terrible programming practices (no variable declarations nor types, etc) and ANSI SQL isn't Turing complete, so feel that all other languages by extension are equally easy to grasp. However if you look at a number of other languages -particularly the ones with C-derived syntax- then it becomes painfully obvious that any similarities to human languages are just skin deep (which is lucky for me as I majorly suck at writing yet can code proficiently in around a dozen different computer languages).
[+] [-] asnyder|13 years ago|reply
The fact of the matter is that many web developers fall into bad practices via laziness, copy & paste syndrome, regardless of whether the language they're using has strict types or not.
[+] [-] lurker14|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zandomatter|13 years ago|reply
Comments like these:
"you can get away with a lot of things just by fluttering your eyelashes and being a bit cheeky ... so don’t take (too much, hehe) advantage of the nerds treating you like a princess just because they finally get to work with a girl."
are insulting to both genders, as well as being grossly overstated.
[+] [-] cbsmith|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebcat|13 years ago|reply
Actually, I'm fascinated and scared by all IT people who roll up their sleeves and do manual labour.
[+] [-] dschiptsov|13 years ago|reply
http://sachachua.com/blog/
She wrote org-mode for Emacs. Now she is at IBM Research.
[+] [-] sjm|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lurker14|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crusso|13 years ago|reply
Having gone to an engineering school, I know full well the power that women can exert in an environment full of socially-hapless geeky guys.
[+] [-] unimpressive|13 years ago|reply
EDIT: That was supposed to be a subtle compliment; I want more.
[+] [-] chanux|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheCapn|13 years ago|reply
Women are going to get disproportionate treatment during this transition in one or two different ways, and it depends on who they're interacting with. Should they land themselves alongside the stereotypical basement dweller they'll be cast aside and thought less of. They'll first need to prove themselves in an uphill battle. This will take great self confidence because there is a lot of misogyny still in the tech workplace. Too many tech gurus grew up being shunned socially and still have those emotional barriers preventing them from being rational and fair.
On the other swing of things though we have the opposite treatment: "A girl? Oooo!" I feel jealous sometimes of my female friends in the industry because of just how easy getting face to face for new jobs comes for them. I fight to keep myself in check because they're damn good professionals who deserve it but the thought remains: what sets them apart from me? Directly out of university I was competing locally with a lot of them for jobs and the treatment of women in the profession was quite apparent. I still see it a bit in my jobs now and its slightly disheartening.
Ultimately I think this problem will solve itself in time. Tech jobs aren't about the basement dweller anymore, they haven't been for years. The natural transition where everyone in the workforce has been part of it for the years where equal woman representation has been around and the awkward or preferential treatment is happening. We need vocal women to encourage more to join. Those classes in university will definitely be unsettling when 20 slobbering unkempt males are trying to wrestle their way to the only female group partner but to push through is going to be tough.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jessedhillon|13 years ago|reply
Here's a tip: if someone says "this is hard for me" don't respond with "no it's not." In fact, even if they get a little presumptive and forget to add the "for me," give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they are describing the world as it exists for them and not necessarily making an empirical claim.
[+] [-] talmir|13 years ago|reply
"If a male and a female developer with a similar skill level apply for a job, I bet that in 99.9% of the cases the girl will get the job."
This is a problem.
[+] [-] talmir|13 years ago|reply
Is this seriously the reality somewhere, that coders are 99% sexually frustrated super nerds? I always considered that to be a old stereotype :P
[+] [-] nerdess|13 years ago|reply