Every HN thread including any discussion of demographics eventually reaches a man insisting women are biologically programmed for certain roles. When specified those roles are invariably service based ones and never engineering innovative products, leading teams, or conducting research.
Relative to the breadth of human history with little to no gender equality, there is no country with a long history of gender equality. And throughout the history of gradually increasing gender equality in human society, there are numerous examples of men structuring the rules of engagement to restrict access for the women attempting to break in. When the Royal Society commissioned a bust of mathematician Mary Somerville, they still refused to admit her.[0]
If women are biologically ill suited to compete with men in these fields, it seems it would be unnecessary to prevent them from trying, like med schools rigging their exams.[1]
Aside, I think this is it for me, I’m changing my HN password to something I can’t guess or remember. This is one part of tech culture I am just sick of responding to. There is more than enough of it in real life and I will always feel obliged to respond. Especially on HN where so many voices are leaders in the real world, the disappointment of seeing it over and over again is just crushing.
Please…if you won’t alter this attitude, don’t bring it to work. For the sake of the women in this field.
Previous commenter mentioned career choices, not biological programming and certainly not anything about anyone being ill suited for a job. Men and women in aggregate often have different career preferences - is that controversial?
Guessing you had that comment loaded in the chamber ready to pull the trigger at the first mention of any gender differences, because it doesn't seem relevant to the claims in that comment and it seems like it's not giving the previous commenter a fair go.
You should go to a play store. Also if you ever saw parents interacting with their kids, you should know that there is no point in almost every kids life when they are not affected by gender inequality which parents learned the same way as they teach to their kids.
Stating that there are inherent career preferences by gender is not controversial in scientific sense, it’s in the same realm as god existence. It’s untestable at large in the current society, and there are a ton of things indicating otherwise. Like a single exception who chose against the perceived career preference by gender is more than what can be shown for the inherent nature of it, because we know that that’s the status quo everywhere. It’s controversial because some people politically make it so.
>Previous commenter mentioned career choices, not biological programming and certainly not anything about anyone being ill suited for a job. Men and women in aggregate often have different career preferences - is that controversial?
The OP commenter seemed to be implying that Men and Women have natural career choices because even countries with long histories of "gender equality" see women and men aggregate in different careers.
The real reasons for much of these discrepancies, legal and social pressures/conditioning (If a father won't buy his daughter(s) computers to tinker with at a young age like he might his sons, how much less interest do you imagine daughters would have in CS?) are not natural.
Yours is a well-meaning, but ultimately insulting view. You argue that women don’t know what they really want, and only make choices due to “social conditioning.” You also center everything back on the decisions of men, claiming that the father needs to be buying computers for his daughters.
It’s a pretty insulting view of women that eliminates female agency. Instead I think we should let women make their own decisions. If they sometimes differ in aggregate than men’s, that’s ok.
(And it should go without saying that all genders should feel welcome in all careers. That’s a different topic entirely.)
I don't think there's anything insulting about it and the bit with the father is just an example. Women can also enforce this conditioning on both boys and girls.
If a father is buying computers for his son then he damn well should buy for his daughters as well. You don't get to do anything else and go Pikachu face when she isn't as interested in those things.
Interest isn't magic. It's not spawned from the ether. Who you are today is in extremely large part, a result of what you have experienced right from childhood. Your upbringing especially will influence you for the rest of your life. You're not special. Neither am I. How much agency do you think children have or can have ?
The point is that gender equality or equality of any kind doesn't end with, "Oh it's law that women can do this now"- That's just Step 1. It's never that simple. Many countries still deal with blatant sexism and racism to this day.
Many women enter university to pursue STEM, get a degree, start work and ultimately exit the STEM workforce because the workplace is too toxic with coworkers that won't give them due respect and enormous uphill battle for career mobility.
These are the people with the interest, with the intelligence, with the competence. What do you think these women have to say? How do you think the resulting enthusiasm(or rather, lack thereof) affects the future generation of women?
Great comment. I'll bet the the poster you replied to likely also works in software engineering (based on them being on this site) - a role dominated by women only a few decades ago.
I sometimes feel that Hacker News embodies the idea of having an 18 in INT and about a 4 in WIS.
Yes, this user grotesquely underrepresented the scale of chattel slavery in America at the peak of the American slave economy. The original commenter is still completely wrong if you look at the 1860 census.
The first user made a wild, incorrect guess, and the rest of this subthread shows just how badly that can spoil discussion quality on a forum like this. Fortunately, someone linked an earlier discussion up at the top.
The 1860 census counted just over 4 million enslaved African Americans in the South, out of a population of about 31.4 million.[0][1]
There are about 1.9 million people incarcerated in jail or prison in the United States today.[2]
The scale of incarceration in the US today is mind-boggling, but is itself under half the number of people enslaved at the height of the Southern slave economy.
The oddness of referring to the "slave trade" is the height of the "Atlantic Slave Trade" far predated the peak of slavery in the US and contributed directly far more to the Caribbean and Brazil than to the rest of the Americas. US chattel slavery, particularly the form that exploded post cotton-gin, was a system of directly controlling the reproductive capacity of enslaved black and native Americans.
But a dumpster is a complete and functional item. I think that's a key distinction. This is an incomplete high rise blighting the landscape until it's taken down.
What if you like your job, your area, and a developer shows up one day and installs 2/3rds of a dumpster in the parking lot. There is a partially completed trash enclosure there, clearly unfinished, blighting the view from your office.
If someone drives past, they're not going to get a positive impression whether it's painted or not.
If someone paints the wreckage of the incomplete dumpster, how do you feel about it? It seems to me the disrespect here is really from the people who built a pile of garbage in your parking lot.
I actually essentially do that, I have a reusable bag that folds up into itself with a zipper into a package about the size of a wallet. Fits well in a purse or jacket pocket and is more pleasant to carry when full than a plastic bag anyhow.
So really, there’s not even a small sacrifice involved for me, just a little bit of planning, to avoid making that waste.
And isn’t this kind of ingenious gadget based solution much more in the hacker spirit than throwing up our hands and saying, give me back the old traditional way regardless of the flaws?
Same. My bag's the size of half a wallet when folded, so it's not really a bother to carry a couple, let alone one. I tend to keep at least a couple in my car's glove box as well.
I'm not sure my plastic usage has decreased though, since I used to recycle the thin plastic bags to line my trash bins. Now I buy oversized white plastic trash bags to line my bins. I just can't wrap my head around e.g. having a bathroom trash bin without a bag protecting it. It feels incredibly gross, though I do know one family that does that. I guess/hope they wash their bins very regularly.
Where are you before you go into a shop? Surely some times it's at work or home, or the car. Might help to keep a couple of fold-up bags in each of those spots. Usually habits lag these phased changes by a couple of years, but you get better at being prepared or anticipating times you'll need them.
I’ll give you an example from today. I was out for coffee and wasn’t expecting to go shopping. I walked to a book store and bought some books. They have me a plastic bag. I’d normally turn it down and just carry the books, but it was raining a little bit.
If it was important, I’d remember. I don’t think this is important so I don’t care enough to always carry a bag with me.
I'm not saying there are never situations where it's useful, just that they're uncommon and collateral damage in trying to change broader behaviour (whether by charging for bags or changing the bags on offer).
In your example where I live, they'd offer a paper bag which would cover the little bit of rain. If there was enough rain to cause trouble, people would have an umbrella.
I'm a little surprised you don't bring a wallet or money into a store. I'm not being pedantic, but folded it's around the same size. A good reusable bag carries about what two to three plastic bags do. Plus, you only have to carry a bag when you're actually going into the store, anywhere else you can keep it in your vehicle.
In particular because Appin Training Centers was only incorporated several months after being named the plaintiff in the lawsuit, and appears to exist in order to facilitate these suits.
One of my favorite aspects of pinball is finding and playing those odd machines tucked away here and there, thanks to some enthusiast at a local business, or because it’s always been there. Fond memories of an old laundromat in CNY that had a machine of similar vintage..and an equally old coke vending machine.
Relative to the breadth of human history with little to no gender equality, there is no country with a long history of gender equality. And throughout the history of gradually increasing gender equality in human society, there are numerous examples of men structuring the rules of engagement to restrict access for the women attempting to break in. When the Royal Society commissioned a bust of mathematician Mary Somerville, they still refused to admit her.[0]
If women are biologically ill suited to compete with men in these fields, it seems it would be unnecessary to prevent them from trying, like med schools rigging their exams.[1]
[0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2010.004...
[1]https://apnews.com/general-news-1c2a635e9faa44daa1225a804288...
Aside, I think this is it for me, I’m changing my HN password to something I can’t guess or remember. This is one part of tech culture I am just sick of responding to. There is more than enough of it in real life and I will always feel obliged to respond. Especially on HN where so many voices are leaders in the real world, the disappointment of seeing it over and over again is just crushing.
Please…if you won’t alter this attitude, don’t bring it to work. For the sake of the women in this field.