Since you're presumably not a woman, and they are, they object to your seeming to be taking it upon yourself to tell them what a woman is.
It's not unlikely that most women don't want to be in software. Most men don't want to be in software! But hundreds of thousands of women are, in fact, working as programmers. Whenever tech news talks about hiring women, presumably, they're talking about hiring these women. Why pretend they don't exist?
That idea is complete poison. In a debate where you're both completely uninformed, the anecdotal evidence of experience is relevant. In any discussion where reason, numbers, research are involved, the gender/race of the person making the argument is irrelevant to the argument. This current idea that only women can talk about female issues, only X about X is pre-enlightenment tribalism.
It presupposes conflict between the tribes too. If in my philosophy I believe that through reason and evidence I can understand your point of view and experiences,there's the possibility of agreement. If you really believe that I can never talk about issues affecting your tribe, or arrive at reason to an underlying truth, there's no point in talking. We might as well just fight to see whose tribe can impose power on whose.
Arguments being inflammatory does not make them invalid. It is fine to have conversations that include inflammatory arguments, if they are made politely, which parent did. But ignoring that the argument is inflammatory, and/or that the group the argument refers to are in fact intelligent people involved in the discussion that may have themselves an opinion, is lacking in empathy. Rhetoric is founded in empathy; that is why it is an art, and not merely a technique.
woah what? no that is not at all what he's saying. If someone tells me "most american men like the NFL" and I don't like the NFL, I would be insane to take that as someone telling me "you're not a real man" and think they're trying to "tell me what a real man is." I can see how someone who is perpetually trying to be a victim might take such a hardline stance, though.
The conversational equivalent using the NFL example would go something like this:
"Why are there no Americans at my favorite chess forum?"
"Americans like the NFL. They're just more into brute force and camaraderie, especially American men. Chess can't really appeal to them. I mean, back in the Neolithic, a modern day chess grandmaster, if he managed to not burn in the sun and see an angry cougar 15 meters away, would probably have died. American men are just closer to their nature. I have this cousin who's American, I have attempted for years to get him to play chess and no dice. Not during the season, anyway."
"I mean sure but there are American chess clubs? Some Americans like chess? Surely the cougar thing is not relevant to my original scope?"
Now, you're a chess loving American. You're not at the first poster's forum because you can't be on all the forums in the world, and it's true love of chess is not exactly common in the US. However, how would you feel reading the description of how apparently literally everyone else in America loves the NFL? Would you feel proud to be American? Would you feel like the poster who made the NFL comment is likely to be an American man? Would you be more, or less likely to read his further arguments on different or related topics, for example, his opinion on American politics?
While I'm sure that there are plenty of women who don't mind those arguments being made, and I think to an extent this forum would select for those women anyway, it remains an argument that is, in essence, 1) prone to being misinterpreted and 2) a little blind to your audience. (the subject is chess - you are talking to a chess fan - for all you know the chess fan also loves the NFL)
And those arguments are less effective than other arguments, for example, the kinds that 1) don't make assumptions of their audience and 2) are closely related to the topic.
(I realise this digression itself is totally off-topic and I'm sorry. I'm not interested in monologuing or haranguing the poster or anything. I hope it, and the little NFL parable, showed you and the people who usually make that argument without thinking about who reads it, a slightly different side, and that you may consider it if in the future you should have longer debates on relevant subjects with people whose opinion and background you don't know a priori. And thank you to anyone who read it.)
Let me play the same game: I know a black guy who is president. Does that mean all black men are political? What about the one who just wants to play sports. Will we now call him an athletic black man, instead of just a black man...
You can generate endless arguments like this depending on your choice of anecdote and label.
Dirlewanger: group X have property Y arandr0x: members of group X without property Y might be offended by "group X have property Y" courir: as a member of group X without property Y I'm not offended by "most members of group X have property Y" arandr0x: <a reiteration of the previous comment> ramblerman: <rhetorically> does saying a member of group X has property Y mean all members of group X have property Y?
I think you (ramblerman) have logically inverted the main claim, which is why it doesn't seem to make sense. Behaviour in line with arandr0x' comment seems perfectly reasonable to me - few people take well to poorly fitting generalisations.
But nobody has ever said that. They say that women are more likely to be.
Single-generation changes in behavior aren't genetic. They're social.
That's not true. Firstly, it's more like 40-50 years ago.
Secondly, there are far more women doing software development, but the gender ratio is dramatically different.
Thirdly, that's because male interest exploded with the advent of personal computing the 80s.
Lastly, "programming" as a profession used to be regarded as an offshot of secretarial work, which was dominated by women.
The facts around women in STEM are polluted with a lot of bizarre narratives.
"'programming' as a profession used to be regarded as an offshoot of secretarial work, which was dominated by women". Which begs the question of why women dominated secretarial work (and still do), while as programming became a more respected and better paying profession, it became male-dominated.
It really doesn't. Unless you seriously think punch card programming is the same as modern programming, or that the fact that only women were secretaries that did programming somehow provides data on the relative strengths and inclinations of women and men for programming work at that time.
Look, it's clear that you have no idea of the breadth and depth of data available on this subject, and a trite "sexism/oppression" narrative explains hardly any of it. For instance, the fact that as a nation becomes more egalitarian, the gender disparities in STEM increase, ie. Nordic countries have worse gender disparities than here, despite having less sexism, and oppressive countries like Iran actually have gender parity in STEM fields.
If you want to actually learn about this subject, I suggest reading: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018...
The fact is, there's good evidence that women are naturally less interested in STEM-like fields due to a well known psychological attitude on things vs. people. That attitude explains facts like why medicine and law have achieved approximate gender parity overall, but surgery is still dominated by men, pediatrics and family law is dominated by women.
I do find it interesting and noteworthy that gender disparities have grown in STEM while shrinking in other fields. But I believe my explanation accounts for that - that STEM has become more prestigious, which draws men, which forces out women.
The "well known psychological attitude" is begging the question, which seems par for the course on responses here. Is this psychological attitude biological, or social? And if it's biological, how do we explain significant changes in professional proportions that have happened over a mere one or two generations? It seems like a very poor explanation for what you're asserting, contradicting your own stated facts.
If it's social, however, we're back to my explanation - as the prestige of formerly female-dominated careers rises, they become more attractive to men, to the point where men dominate them. It's a much simpler explanation, with no contradictions.
Because you're throwing out wild, unsupported speculation to salvage your narrative, and the original post of yours to which I replied had at least 4 elementary factual errors.
> But I believe my explanation accounts for that - that STEM has become more prestigious, which draws men, which forces out women.
That's not an explanation at all. Why would prestige drive away women? Just because there are men there? Or you think men drawn to prestige don't want women around? Or you think men just flood into any field that has some form of prestige thus drowning out women? So then why aren't the careers they left suddenly dominated by women because all the men left for more prestige? And where are all these men coming from since we have rough equal numbers of men and women? Why are janitors and dangerous jobs dominated by men since those aren't prestigious?
The fact that you think this explains anything or is free of contradictions is frankly bizarre, and just reinforces my point that if you're really interested in this field, you need to more read more and speculate less.
> The "well known psychological attitude" is begging the question, which seems par for the course on responses here. Is this psychological attitude biological, or social?
Likely both, since there's plenty of evidence of things vs. people in toddlers, and this innate preference no doubt gets reinforced and magnified.
In the end, your scoffing at the original poster and "subtly" implying that he's sexist for a remark that is actually well grounded in facts is exactly the problem with debating people on this subject.
Yes, there is sexism in STEM, just like there is in most other fields, but sexism didn't keep women out of medicine or law, they just pushed through and staked their claim. The fact that women haven't done this for STEM which is far less of an old boys' club already suggests something else is at play, and the fact that the same trends are seen across disparate cultures already suggests strongly there's a universal component.
I do think there's a universal component, though, as sexism is seen across virtually all cultures.
You're equivocating. You know very well that the type of sexism that kept women from working in virtually all professions, including law and medicine, is not the type of sexism we're discussing now.
Have you noticed how this is inconsistent with your prestige argument?
Is it competition that is forcing women out, or men ?
> as the prestige of formerly female-dominated careers rises, they become more attractive to men, to the point where men dominate them
What do you mean by dominated, is it the number of people, or is it something else ?
Are you trying to say that once a career path becomes female dominated, men should stay out ?
If tomorrow we say that you have to do 30 chinups to be a waitress, and the job will involve regular fistfights then we count the number of waitresses by gender and say "it must be cultural", we're kind of missing the point. Or if we say "OK now waitresses make 200k and are respected" and watch the numbers shift.
What, pray tell, has changed that made the job more attractive to men, and less attractive to women? You need to be able to answer that question if you're going to make a causal assertion.
Not the parent and I wasn't around either, but I think accessibility of education counters your point, not supports it.
More egalitarianism should in theory be more favorable to women.
Back then I imagine it was much harder to program without access to university computers and education materials.
More women get higher education than men compared to 35 years ago.
More incentives (monetary and otherwise), combined with lower barriers to entry should also be favoring the supposedly disadvantaged.
And yet the drop in F-M ratio since late 1980s has not been overcome last time I checked.
If you assume that there are underlying differences in interests and aptitude, more egalitarianism allows these differences to be expressed more since women are more free to eg. choose a career working with people, like medicine or law. http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girl... It also raises the bar for inherent aptitude to get into/(the top of) a career, since you're competing against a much wider pool of talent.
The point I was making to the parent was that his point "cross-generation drop in ratio proves it's cultural" doesn't hold up, because there have been many changes across those generations, you're comparing apples to oranges.
I first learned to program 35 years ago. It wasn't fundamentally different then. Hell, we still use programming languages that were in wide use 35 years ago, like C and the unix shell. The kind of thinking required hasn't changed.
So, based on my 35 years of experience, the conditions and the job are basically the same. So again, I challenge you - how is the job different now?
how is the job different? The pay is much higher and so are the entry requirements, that's the biggest difference. You don't get assigned to program punch cards as part of your secretarial role, you have to actively get educated and good to choose it as a career.
I think there's far more places now expecting crazy hours but that's anecdotal I don't have numbers on it. But the languages are different (mostly), the tooling is different, the deployment is different, the scale is different.
One very likely explanation is that many women who wanted to be independently financially successful had few choices other than tech back decades ago. Now they have many other choices.
But are they really ?, do you have any data/reference to back it up, I was under the assumption that there are more people, both men and women, working as programmers, than 30 years ago.
My father got me into programming, and my colleagues who are women also have a backstory with someone supporting their interest in development.
Just teach kids to code, boy or girl. Not all of them will like it, not all of them will be good at it. But I think a lot more girls would be into it and good at it if they were introduced to it before college.
Tailor it to the kid's interests. My first programs were more socially oriented. When I was 5-6 years old, all my programs were made-up conversations with the computer, where your answers were stored and parroted back by the computer to show that it was "listening". Maybe a boy would have been less into that and more into something mathier, like LOGO instead of BASIC, but it was what was interesting to me at that age. The computer was a form of imaginary friend for an introverted kid like me.