Google's Diversity Chief: Mamas Don't Let Their Baby Girls Grow Up To Be Coders 446
theodp writes: Explaining the reasons for its less-than-diverse tech workforce, Google fingered bad parenting for its lack of women techies. From the interview with Google Director of Diversity and Inclusion Nancy Lee: "Q. What explains the drop [since 1984] in women studying computer science? A. We commissioned original research that revealed it's primarily parents' encouragement, and perception and access. Parents don't see their young girls as wanting to pursue computer science and don't steer them in that direction. There's this perception that coding and computer science is ... a 'brogrammer' culture for boys, for games, for competition. There hasn't been enough emphasis on the power computing has in achieving social impact. That's what girls are interested in. They want to do things that matter." While scant on details, the Google study's charts appear to show that, overall, fathers encourage young women to study CS more than mothers. Google feels that reeducation is necessary. "Outreach programs," advises Google, "should include a parent education component, so that parents learn how to actively encourage their daughters."
what boys/girls want (Score:4, Insightful)
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Can't blame silicon valley when 19 kids and counting is on the home TV every night.
Don't know where you have been hiding the last week, but that show has been pulled due to various allegations.
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Um, yeah. About that: http://boingboing.net/2015/05/... [boingboing.net]
Re:what boys/girls want (Score:5, Insightful)
little boys want a place to 'perform', while little girls want a place to 'relate'.
That's BS. The prevalence of girls/women in theater disproves it.
Also, coding on computers hardly counts as "performing". It's something that socially awkward boys like to do because computers are highly predictable and won't make fun of you. Boys who like to perform go into sports and theater, not computers. Girls go into cheerleading, sports, and theater; they too like to perform.
no power (Score:5, Insightful)
there is no power in being a corporate droid programmer, what a load of bullshit. So corporate america wants to increase the number of coders and we should change our child rearing accordingly? And this STEM push is bullshit also, why are they not also having advanced classes in the fine arts and humanities? neither my son nor daughter are being encouraged to be coders, if they desire that on their own that's fine
Re:no power (Score:5, Insightful)
With the quickly deteriorating working conditions (increasing ageism, 24-hour availability, poorer long-term pay prospects, offshoring, etc) maybe mothers are just being smarter in not pushing the next generation into "careers" in computing that will have a shelf life of a decade before they have to find something else to do?
If you think it's bad that 40 is the new 60 in IT, just wait ...
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Yeah yeah yeah. It's so tough being a programmer.
Reality check: many, many other jobs are doing worse. You may think that programming is going down hill as a career* but would mothers rather that their daughters study Eng Lit and then become a Starbucks barista when making it as a journalist doesn't quite work out for them?
*though I don't see that, heck on the front page is a story about how much money is flooding into the industry from VC's right now
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If you swing for IT and miss, what are you going to do for a living? Phone support? Telemarketing?
If you swing for some real vocation and miss, like say smog tech or doctor, you can still fall back as something else, like a normal bolt-breaking mechanic, or a weed doc.
I don't know what the female equivalents are, it's probably sexist even to just suggest such a thing. Not a lot of women going into smog though
Re:no power (Score:4, Insightful)
If you swing for IT and miss, what are you going to do for a living? Phone support? Telemarketing?
If you don't make it as a software engineer developing big complicated systems.. .You can go work on web designs. maintaining old school php deployments, do QA, or work as a software engineer in a place with lower standards. It's true that some shops have high expectations, especially in the valley, but around the world there is also lots of places where you don't make 150k and don't have to work 40 hour weeks.
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No, addicts can survive for many years. Until you figure out some way of separating those who want lasting help and can be helped from those who just want their next fix, you'll never do much about the former problem; the latter will end up eating all your resources.
It yould be either that, (Score:2, Interesting)
or it could be the influnce of testosterone during early development of the child. Harald Eia made an excellent documentary on that topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE
That's it. (Score:2, Insightful)
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I call shenanigans... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would *anyone* encourage their child, regardless of gender, to spend a decade or more training for what is quickly becoming a minimum-wage job at best.
We should instead be encouraging kids to become investment bankers, hedge fund managers or politicians.
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Why would *anyone* encourage their child, regardless of gender, to spend a decade or more training for what is quickly becoming a minimum-wage job at best.
This.
Coding jobs can be easily outsourced to wherever the going rate for labor is cheapest. Google's "coder shortage" seems completely imaginary. They're an advertising company whose greatest trick was convincing the world they are a software company.
Re:I call shenanigans... (Score:4, Funny)
"Coding jobs can be easily outsourced to wherever the going rate for labor is cheapest. Google's "coder shortage" seems completely imaginary. They're an advertising company whose greatest trick was convincing the world they are a software company."
Wouldn't it be interesting if Google was really just a front for the NSA?
They did it in Argo.. why not make a company with irresistible tech that makes everyone give the company their secrets. Sounds easier to do then breaking cryptographic codes all day.
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Not imaginary - a concerted effort to drive down labor costs.
Re:I call shenanigans... (Score:4, Interesting)
Coding jobs can be easily outsourced to wherever the going rate for labor is cheapest. Google's "coder shortage" seems completely imaginary. They're an advertising company whose greatest trick was convincing the world they are a software company.
I'm a Google engineer, and both of these statements are incorrect.
Taking the second one first, Google is not an advertising company. It's a software engineering company whose primary products are most effectively monetized via advertising. Or, sometimes I think it might be more accurate to say that Google is a data center company, since building, operating and utilizing enormous data centers at extreme efficiency is Google's true core competency. If and when Google gets serious about competing with Amazon in that space Amazon will have a tough time keeping up.
Google is moving fairly quickly away from advertising, diversifying into products which are sold directly. Note that nearly all of the speculative new projects that have come out of "Google X" are built around goods and services, more than the sort of low-value (on a per transaction basis) information services that are Google's current big products. No big winners have emerged from that effort, yet, but if one or more of them do "hit", you can expect to see it quickly replace advertising as the primary revenue driver. About 10% of Google's revenues these days come from non-advertising products. 10% seems small, but keep in mind that represents $5B annually, and is up from basically 0% just a few years ago. Non-ad revenues are growing faster than the ad revenues, so the percentage of Google revenue derived from advertising will continue falling even without a massive new business.
Further, culturally, Google never has been an advertising company. It's a thoroughly engineering-focused company, top to bottom.
The shortage of engineers is not imaginary. Google legitimately has a hard time finding enough software engineers of the caliber it seeks. Money isn't the issue; few people who receive an offer from Google reject it. In the context of this article, though, the big problem is that the engineers Google can find are overwhelmingly male, and either white or Asian. Mostly white. Studies done by many organizations, including studies done internally by Google, show that diverse teams are more creative and more productive. In addition, Google's culture is surprisingly idealistic, and people in the company consider it a legitimate problem that the company -- especially eng -- is not representative of the population as a whole.
I think part of that latter point derives from the fact that Google engineers are, if anything, too well-paid. Estimates I've seen put the "1%" line at about $400K annual income, and most senior Googlers -- including engineers, not just execs and managers -- are above that line. Getting paid that much tends to make decent people wonder if they should feel guilty at their luck and their privilege. At the same time, it's not like anyone is going to agitate to get paid less. So a better option is to say "Well, the real problem here isn't that I make too much, it's that not enough people have the opportunity to do the same". In particular, women and minorities.
That last paragraph is purely personal speculation, mind you. Laszlo Bock may not agree at all.
Not bad parenting (Score:5, Insightful)
Google fingered bad parenting for its lack of women techies.
More like: Google disagrees with their parenting.
Just because their values as parents didn't agree with your values today, Or your general desire to have more people in computer science, in order to reduce wages, Or your desire to have more diversity among computer scientists to help you comply with arbitrary government-imposed regulations on your employee population : does not make them bad parents.
NO MORE GIRL-CODERS FUCKING STORIES... (Score:3, Informative)
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Nobody told this silly female: http://boingboing.net/2015/05/... [boingboing.net]
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There are female construction workers as well. Also male nurses. You're pedantically promoting the false assumption that it must be one hundred percent to be a masculine or feminine career which makes your discourse suspect.
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Funny, nobody told the woman who invented coding.
https://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWo... [sdsc.edu]
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You really don't know who Ada Lovelace is, do you?
Re:NO MORE GIRL-CODERS FUCKING STORIES... (Score:4, Interesting)
She is the daughter of a great MAN: Lord Byron, who we honor in Greece because
I honour him because he kept a bear in his room at university and ate a whole bunch of drugs (opium).
But, no matter how cool Byron was, his daughter still invented coding.
Story about a Female ChemEng major (Score:3)
males/boy choose masculine jobs/toys (e.g., coding... yes, its "masculine"!) while females/girls choose feminine jobs/toys (e.g., nurses... good for them!)
This is just an anecdote (and thus worthless as data), but I have a family friend -- a female -- who earned a B.S. in chemical engineering. Dad was an engineer, and I think mom was a scientist, so she was highly encouraged (well, pressured) to go in a STEM direction. And she did it, she managed to pass all the math courses and crunch all the equations, earned her degree. And as a newly-minted female Chemical Engineer, I"m guessing a lot of companies were interested in hiring her, as they have been making
When you're using words like "reeducation" (Score:5, Insightful)
It would seem to me that if you need to be "reeducating" kids about what they want, you're doing something wrong. Let's examine a few of these points in the summary.
Parents don't see their young girls as wanting to pursue computer science and don't steer them in that direction.
And... should they be? You seem to be coming at this from the perspective that it doesn't matter what the individuals want, there should be more women in tech because reasons.
There's this perception that coding and computer science is ... a 'brogrammer' culture for boys, for games, for competition.
A couple thoughts on this point. This retarded "brogrammer" media push has happened much more recently than 1984. I seriously doubt that people perceived it the same way back then. And even if they do now, you seem to gloss over the fact that it could simply be the result of this shrieking media push about the culture. In other words, it may be that this push has caused the results that you're looking at now.
There hasn't been enough emphasis on the power computing has in achieving social impact. That's what girls are interested in. They want to do things that matter.
Okay, you raging sexist. Let's take it down a notch for a second here. We'll just assume for a moment that you're right and that's what girls are interested in. How is it the case that "achieving social impact" and "things that matter" are the same? What a ridiculous conflation. First off, you assume that social impact is always good. Secondly, you assume that nothing else matters besides social impact. Could these be, I don't know, products of your bias?
Q. What explains the drop [since 1984] in women studying computer science? A. We commissioned original research that revealed it's primarily parents' encouragement, and perception and access.
And now for this point. I looked at the linked abstract and it only focuses on the individual's decision-making process without taking into account factors that the individual may use. For example, it doesn't even bother to look at hours worked. And then has the gall to call the perceptions of the field "flawed." It still blows my mind that every time this comes up, almost nobody talks about the elephant in the room: Women are smarter and value their time better than men in general.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/11/19/gifted-men-earn-more-than-gifted-women-and-they-value-time-differently-but-both-report-being-happy/
http://www.bentley.edu/centers/center-for-women-and-business/millennials-workplace
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/31/professional-women-time_n_1068291.html
There are more if you're curious about this phenomenon.
If we look at the numbers for women in CS, we see:
http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/10/21/womencoding-d463ab944849ed2fce2df3d7d27d2f1c4daa7689.jpg?s=1400
I looked pretty deep trying to find a graph of hours worked in the sector since the mid-1980s (or earlier too), but couldn't find anything. The closest thing I could find was "services" sector hours worked, which I assume includes things like restaurants and so on. Not very useful for this purpose. If hours being worked was a part of the discussion at all, you would think that information would be a bit easier to find. But it's not, despite the fact that it's probably kind of important. If anybody can wrangle that info somehow, I'd love to see it.
That said, if we look at when the Internet hit big (circa 1995), we see a lag time before the sharp dropoff. Once the Internet became popular, 24/7 on call became a common thing and hours worked went way up. If the industry is the input and schooling is the output of that industry, you would expect something like this.
Pissing and moaning about "the culture" doesn't seem all that useful, especially because it paints women as delicate beings that need everyone around them to give them big toothy smiles and pats on the head. I don't deny that there is likely to be a perception problem (or more than one perception problem), but the question is whose perception problem(s) it is/they are.
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Someone with mod points please mod this up - it's seemingly the only non-trolling post for this whole story. This is exactly the stuff we should be discussing here - agree or not with the conclusion, this is the rational topic at hand.
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LOL
Plank in your eye before speck in your brothers, etc.
Personal interests (Score:5, Interesting)
Disgusting straight white cishet male shitlord here.
My parents, particularly my dad, discouraged me from pursuing any kind of work with computers. He wanted me to go into trades (blue collar, not Wall Street) like he did, specifically to follow in his footsteps and continue his one-man business as a painter. Then you've got the whole NEEERRRRD thing from the jocks in schools. In short, many males aren't particularly pushed into STEM either. They take it upon themselves, under their own agency, to pursue those goals. I wonder how so many boys who got bullied for their STEM related interests throughout their young lives managed to stick to their interests and goals. It must be the penis.
Except that women who enter STEM (to actually WORK in a field) are in the same boat. They see past any discouragement from their families/pees, and they ignore all the "I deserve a free-ride into the field" rhetoric from gender ideologues, and they put in the time and effort to become proficient with whatever it is they want to do. Granted, there's fewer of them than men ...BUT DON'T YOU EVEN TALK ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY THAT EACH GENDER MIGHT HAVE DIFFERENT CAREER PROCLIVITIES.
Arrogant bastards (Score:2, Insightful)
Google presumes to know what is good for boys and girls. They presume to know better than the parents of those boys and girls. They presume to know more than the boys and girls themselves.
I'm sick of all this social engineering. I just want to barf.
What is WRONG with little girls who just want to be girls? Why does every girl have to grow up to compete with the boys for a job? What if she doesn't WANT a job?
Like Obama, Google doesn't WANT women to have the traditional occupation of "home maker". Like
Re:Arrogant bastards (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly.... Personally, I don't see the problem with the concept that some jobs are predominantly of interest to one sex over the other? Isn't this exactly why we had predominantly females in nursing for decades? There simply weren't as many guys interested in doing that particular job (though obviously, *some* do, and that's fine too).
What I do see is some blow-back from the fact that with mostly guys making video games, the games have catered mostly to guys. You do have more females interested in actually playing games now, instead of just watching the guys do it. So yeah, there's some understandable irritation that the games are almost all "guy-centric". But most people who play video games don't have an interest in WRITING them, just like most people who drive cars don't want to become auto mechanics or work in the auto industry.
Ultimately though, markets always follow the money, so even if it takes a bunch of male programmers to do it, they'll build more titles that appeal to females if that's an untapped market. No social manipulation required here.
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I don't think they presume.. they have more data on each of us than we have on ourselves!!
They probably know what you're doing right now!
(I'm safe, I have a tin foil hat)
Re:Arrogant bastards (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean social engineering like this?
http://www.strengthvillain.com... [strengthvillain.com]
https://jonathanturley.files.w... [wordpress.com]
http://thetoydetectives.com/co... [thetoydetectives.com]
https://alanabeeblog.files.wor... [wordpress.com]
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnne... [turner.com]
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The market is there. The market exists. It is here, now. The toy manufacturers are catering to an already demonstrated predilection. Mattel didn't create the tendency for little girls to like one kind of thing and little boys to like another. At most, they reinforce those tendencies. Mommies and daddies apparently approve of those tendencies, because they also reinforce them.
We have some rather vocal female member here at slashdot. Maybe you should take a survey, to see what the worst obstacles they
Backwards (Score:3)
He's just saying that making the choice to be home-maker should be just as valid for women as any other choice they could make. And he's right; it's not even close currently, as many look down on "homemaker" almost as much as they would "prostitute" or "stripper".
Why should choosing to be a home-maker be a choice any less honorable? And YES that also goes for Men, though if you think about it there's less of a societal stigma for men becoming a house maker than a woman!
This male : female false comparison is simplistic. (Score:5, Interesting)
You have to be intelligent to code well, and it is a very specific form of intelligence that often comes with weakness in other areas. So is it genetics or nurture that is responsible for that particular gift/curse? I say it is genetics and that it is also probably x-linked therefore more males are affected by it in the same way they are far more likely to suffer from x-linked disorders too. Why had this not ever occurred to people before I do not know but if you can have an x-linked disability there is the same chance that you can have x-linked abilities that are exceptional. Why are autism spectrum disorders correlated with programming skills and with being male, because they are both x-linked!
For the record my oldest girl can code like a kid twice her age can, sure I encourage her because it is a form of literacy that scientists need but she will never be somebody else's "programming slave", she will use the skill as just one facet of her projects.
Can I claim credit where others have received blame from Nancy Lee? No, my kid is just very intelligent and that is as much or more her mother's fault and if you say otherwise you are being (how ironic!) sexist.
Pick one (Score:5, Insightful)
Parents don't see their young girls as wanting to pursue computer science
OR
and don't steer them in that direction.
Which is it? I get the feeling it's that girls just aren't that interested. People like to point out that more girls were interested in the 80s but that was a very different era. Few people actually knew what was involved with "programming computers".
All of this effort reminds me of a similar misunderstanding that I came across years ago. In the 50s Lionel decided that girls didn't play with trains because they weren't "girly" enough. They were black and steel and perhaps too boyish. So the genius marketers came up with this:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadsh... [pbs.org]
http://www.lionel.com/Products... [lionel.com]
Should you wish to see one in person go to Holiday World and check out the old toy museum.
It flopped badly. The reason was simple: girls generally don't like trains, but those who do want an authentic train. Black, steel, menacing - a real train.
Every time I see people trying hard to make computer science appeal to girls I see the same thing. It simply doesn't appeal to most girls, and to those to whom it does appeal it will have that appeal without any sugar coating.
Ultimately, the SJW crowd needs to understand that men and women - and boys and girls - are very different creatures who aren't interested in the same sorts of things. The roots of this are genetic and stem from the social order tens of thousands of years ago. Nothing's going to "fix" it, but, then again, there's nothing to fix.
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but those who do want an authentic train. Black, steel, menacing - a real train.
My first instinct on reading this was to leap out of my chair and get a gift card from the hobby store, then go to the florist. Do you have her phone number?
Blame game (Score:5, Informative)
We're so busy trying to play the blame game that nobody has actually asked the young girls what they want to do with their lives.
sexist (Score:3)
The actual google study is worth a read (Score:5, Interesting)
(Full disclosure: I am neither female nor a parent; I'm a male who studies physics.)
There are too many links in the summary. The most relevant one is the google study [google.com], which has some interesting data and is fairly neutral. I don't think the study supports the flamebait headline, but instead paints a complicated picture. In particular, see the charts on page 5 of the study.
The story headline is in the same style as this [medium.com] interesting article titled "Papas, please let your babies grow up to be princesses". That article makes the case that interests in "girly" things are not mutually exclusive with interests in STEM fields. There are anecdotes in the above comments about girls being pressured by parents into STEM activities (like robotics clubs), and how it often doesn't work. Perhaps this is because some parents push STEM at the expense of "girly" things rather than simply encouraging STEM without taking a hostile stance towards "girly" things.
Just a thought.
BS (Score:3)
Nobody steered me. The opposite is true, i had strict times for pc usage. I learned the whole programming stuff by myself, using not more than some turbo pascal book.
I steered myself, because i knew what i liked.
So, nobody should steer anyone. People just need to open opportunities. The rest will come by itself.
Are you sure you're using 'diverse' correctly? (Score:2)
To ensure a statistically relevant study with a high level of confidence (95% or better) and a small margin of error (5% or less), 1000 women and 600 men were surveyed in partnership with the research firm Applied Marketing Science, in accordance with the following:
I guess diversity means different things to different people. Although, I should have gotten the hint from the first page:
Editor’s Note: Throughout this white paper we report findings ...
It's Friday already? (Score:2)
Stop this bullshit SJW slashdot. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why keep attempting social engineering? (Score:3)
Women don't want to program (Score:3)
"fathers encourage young women to study CS more than mothers"
In other words, *women* don't want to be programmers. But we already knew that because there is no grand conspiracy keeping them out of the field. The reason this is a "problem" is because there's money on the table. Nobody cares that garbage collectors are almost entirely men, or that daycare providers are almost entirely women. Nobody is shocked that most men would -- quite literally -- rather pick up other people's dirty diapers than deal with children all day, or vice versa. It's not a crisis that men don't want to go shoe shopping. But somehow it's a crisis that women don't want to stare at screens making sure implementations conform to interfaces and creating custom data structures.
And I'm the feminist deity (Score:2, Insightful)
Feminism is a belief system. The primary tenet of this belief system is that men and women have on average, exactly the same brains, interests, capacities, goals, desires and approaches to work.
This tenet is absurd and provably false. ...But logic and feminism have never mixed anyway.
Re:And I'm the feminist deity (Score:5, Informative)
This tenet is absurd and provably false.
I coach an after school program in robotics and programming at my local elementary school, and I agree that this is baloney. The parents are pushing hard for their girls to pursue tech, and it is the girls themselves that are disinterested. We have tried many things to keep girls in the program. I recruited an engineer mom as a co-coach to provide a role model. We let the girls form "all-girl" teams, so they can use more collaborative teamwork, and consensus decision making, which they feel more comfortable with, rather than the hierarchical teams that is natural to boys. But we still got only a few girls to sign up this year, and most of those only signed up because of parental pressure, and half of them dropped out when the try-outs for the school play were announced. It is very frustrating, and I don't know what the solution is, but blaming the parents is hogwash. I don't see that at all.
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The real takeaway from their research seemed to be the bit about promoting CS as a vehicle for social change / making a difference / getting noticed.
Out of curiosity, what is the goal of the after school program? Is it just to build neat things, or are their goals or competitions associated with it?
In your case, it's competing with the school play, which enables the girls to be the focus of an entire audience with much applause. It has weeks/months of buildup with ads in the school and community. It has
Re:And I'm the feminist deity (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, just maybe, we could teach children of both sexes that it's a harsh fucking world out there, and if you don't learn the skills needed for a good job, your life will suck forever. No? Well, the social pendulum will swing back that way eventually, from the opposite extreme we're at now, and once that happens you won't need much to get everyone interested in fields that pay really well, and won't be displaced by automation.
Re:And I'm the feminist deity (Score:5, Insightful)
...it's a harsh fucking world out there, and if you don't learn the skills needed for a good job, your life will suck forever...
There are vast differences between countries. North and South Korea are good examples for people who like to claim that the differences are all due to race, culture, religion, etc. But people in South Korea and other "successful" Asian countries aren't all that happy.
So better examples would be to compare the happiest countries in the world (e.g. the Scandinavian socialist countries) to countries countries that are clearly dysfunctional - but not in the middle of a civil war. Myself, I'm familiar with Southeast Asia, so Indonesia and the Philippines would be good examples. But there are lots of dysfunctional countries all over the world.
Anyway, the point is that someone growing up in, say, Denmark will be very likely to have a secure comfortable life even if they make some mistakes and don't try all that hard. On the other hand, someone growing up in, say, Indonesia, will be very likely to remain trapped in poverty even if they try really hard and don't make any mistakes. Life in Denmark is a positive sum game - most people are winners. While life in Indonesia is a negative sum game - most people are losers.
Obviously a person's individual effort and judgement do matter. But so do government policies. It's useful to think about what a person can do as an individual to increase their chances of having a secure comfortable life. But it's also useful to think about what governments can do to increase everyone's chances of having secure comfortable lives.
Good government matters.
Re:And I'm the feminist deity (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with this is that companies don't really pay that well for the labour, skills, experience, talent and education necessary to succeed in IT.
"IT" is a crap career no one should enter. Answering calls on the helpdesk? No thanks - well, better than starving, but so are a lot of things. But we were talking about software development
Why would girls want to sit in front of a computer for hours on end, sometimes, even evenings and work also on weekends in order to launch etc.?
Check out the hours lawyers work, or the oncall duties as a surgeon (or a vet - but dentists, that's the job!). It's not the hours that's the problem, it's the lack of dignity of the profession. When the field was doubling every few years, that meant most software developers were in their 20s, and management could get away with treating all of us like college students. My work environment is more like a dorm room or college lab than a professional office environment - that's what we need to push back against.
As far as pay, after your first 5 or so years in the field, jobs that pay well are there for the taking, though you may need to move to where the work is. If you're past your apprenticeship in the field and you're not making at least 1.5x the national median income, you're likely at a bottom-tier employer: shop around. While we may top out lower than the doctors and lawyers, they don't hit peak earning potential until later in life - a doctor or dentist is typically in his 40s before lifetime earnings net of school costs put him ahead of a plumber or other skilled tradesman.
Personally, I think many women are put off by the limited social interaction involved in the job, or at least that's my theory for why so many female software developers choose career advancement into management or product management over the dev tech track.
Re:And I'm the feminist deity (Score:4, Interesting)
software dev pays well, but compare the pay to those of the fields you compared it to. All of them make significantly more than software devs do. Friend of mine, his wife is a dentist, she's pulling in nearly 300k a year
Yes, dentists are well paid - eventually - but they start earning late, a few years after a software dev, they have a much larger school debt to pay off, and just like a software dev, the early years don't pay so well.
You can't just look at peak earning power, but at lifetime earnings at a given age, and it takes a long, long time for a dentist or doctor to pull ahead. BTW, you can certainly make $300k as a software dev at a big company - that's common for tech track paygrades equivalent to a second-level manager at the big names. Of course, there are far fewer such positions than there are dentists in America, and for someone capable of both I'd recommend dentistry, but the gap isn't as big as you might think.
Re:And I'm the feminist deity (Score:5, Interesting)
India has Bollywood, yes, but Indians seem to have a much more realistic grasp of what career paths are actually feasible and which aren't. Of course, there's also a huge number of middle-class (for India) Indians, since their population is enormous. Finally, I've never heard of sports being a big thing in India. They have cricket of course, but I don't think it's like the sports-mania we have here in the US.
China, having an authoritarian government, probably does things to strongly discourage too many people from wasting their time on dead-end career paths like acting. Here in the US, it's easy to get student loans or even scholarships to go to college for theater. I knew a girl who did this not that long ago; she had a full-ride scholarship, and what did she blow it on? Theater. Did she get a job in theater? Nope; she moved towards make-up and costumes in her senior year thinking that would be a more realistic career path, graduated, and ended up working at a hotel in customer service. A complete waste of a degree. I wouldn't be surprised to find that China doesn't allow silliness like this with student loans or other public funding.
As for Africa, that's hard to say, because Africa has no industry at all to speak of. I can't imagine that software engineering has much prestige there because people probably can't think much beyond life in a mud hut. Even if you go to South Africa or one of the Arabic northern countries, there's not much industry there either, and not much employment for programmers.
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This is only a meaningful data point if you can demonstrate that such families aren't already biased towards selecting for parents more interested in tech careers.
I rather think it's quite biased towards such parents. After all, why would you be hearing from parents not i
Re:And I'm the feminist deity (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is western society so obsessed with proving the idea that men and women are exactly alike? That doesn't even make evolutionary sense.
Re:And I'm the feminist deity (Score:4, Funny)
Because, about 60 years ago, Cornell had the brilliant idea to offer a degree in "Women's Studies", so that college could be both expensive *and* useless. The recipients thereof have since spent better than half a century driving the point that a vagina is a suitable substitute for competence.
Re:And I'm the feminist deity (Score:5, Insightful)
I coach an after school program in robotics and programming at my local elementary school, and I agree that this is baloney. The parents are pushing hard for their girls to pursue tech, and it is the girls themselves that are disinterested. We have tried many things to keep girls in the program. I recruited an engineer mom as a co-coach to provide a role model. We let the girls form "all-girl" teams, so they can use more collaborative teamwork, and consensus decision making, which they feel more comfortable with, rather than the hierarchical teams that is natural to boys. But we still got only a few girls to sign up this year, and most of those only signed up because of parental pressure, and half of them dropped out when the try-outs for the school play were announced. It is very frustrating, and I don't know what the solution is, but blaming the parents is hogwash. I don't see that at all.
Its been my experience also, although your's is much more in depth than mine. The young ladies by and large are not interested.
People seem to look at this as a situation where something is keeping women out of STEM. Yes, it's the young women themselves. They are not interested.
Any young lady that wishes to get into science and technology should be encouraged and supported.
Any young lady that wants to go into other career should also be encouraged and supported.
My experience, especially with the sons and daughters of STEM people, just teaches me that even in a seriously supportive environment, if those young ladies don't want to get into STEM, it's an impossible task, unless you start forcing them into it.
And last time I checked, gender equality was not about forcing women into living their life in a manner other than what they wished. Wasn't that what women were trying to escape from?
Re:And I'm the feminist deity (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously the only real solution is to force all children to be taken at birth to be raised and educated in government-run facilities until the age of majority, safe from bad parenting decisions and dangerous political/ideological ideas. /s
I felt the need for the '/s' sarc tag, as there are actually a number of people, some in positions of power, who would take the above as a given, that children belong to the State first and parents second.
Strat
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Women who can, do. Women who can't become feminists.
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There also aren't any feminists...in burning buildings.
If the universe's well-noted sense of irony holds out, there may soon be. [duckduckgo.com]
Re:females operate on emotion, not logic (Score:5, Funny)
Re:females operate on emotion, not logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Same as for males, actually.
Human beings in general aren't very rational, even though we may think we are. Those who have these grand notions of purpose behind their actions are usually merely very good at rationalising.
Re:females operate on emotion, not logic (Score:5, Funny)
The spokesperson at Google making these claims, is not a tech. She is a lawyer. So there is likely no connection between what she says, and what she actually believes. Anyway, since she is a lawyer, her parents clearly didn't raise her right, so she may just be projecting the failure of her own parents onto others.
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not that they are incapable of logic, but emotion is their fundamental mental underpinning
Really? And that must be why there are more battered husbands shelters than battered wives shelters ... oh wait ...
And why most murders are committed by women ... darn, again not true ...
How about most recipients of the darwin awards being women [bmj.com]? ... oops -
Sex differences in risk seeking behaviour, emergency hospital admissions, and mortality are well documented. However, little is known about sex differences in idiotic risk taking behaviour. This paper reviews the data on winners of the Darwin Award over a 20 year period (1995-2014). Winners of the Darwin Award must eliminate themselves from the gene pool in such an idiotic manner that their action ensures one less idiot will survive. This paper reports a marked sex difference in Darwin Award winners: males are significantly more likely to receive the award than females
So, women are more emotional and men are idiots?
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Actually, men do get raped far more often than women. Just clearing that one point up.
(Real rape, that is. Not this silly "new" rape concept).
And the rest of your points seem to assume that crime is inherently emotional. This is a highly questionable thesis.
And... I've never seen a man cry at work btw. ...Just saying.
Re:females operate on emotion, not logic (Score:4, Informative)
Not hard to find on Google.
But the "more male rapes" fact should say: More men than women are raped IN THE USA. ( Globally more women are raped. )
And the reason more men are raped in the USA is because the US has an absurdly large prison population.
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There's good studies that there are as many male victims of battering as there are female. Males are less likely to get hurt when battered by a female, obviously, and are less likely to report battering, so there is far less need for a 'battered male' shelter. Just remember it's not because females are any less likely to resort to violence than males are.
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Re:females operate on emotion, not logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Although GP is clearly a troll, you are attacking his point fallaciously.
1. Even if men were by far the most emotional irrational beings on earth, that would not disprove "emotion is [females'] fundamental mental underpinning"
2. Risk taking, murder and aggression are not necessarily driven by emotion. It's a fine line, but technically those behaviors can be (and might often be) about attaining social status or power.
3. There is evidence that there should be many more 'husband shelters' and that their lack is driven largely by a culture of (implicitly) shaming 'weak men', not by a lack of battered husbands.
Let me state clearly that I do not agree with the GP. The only thing I'm trying to do here is point out some logical fallacies in the hope that this will improve the quality of the discussion.
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I'm not doing this again with you. You consistently ignore my points and just change the subject.
Goodbye.
Re:females operate on emotion, not logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? And that must be why there are more battered husbands shelters than battered wives shelters ...
60-70% of domestic violence is initiated by women [nih.gov]. The reason we don't have "battered men" shelters is that it is socially acceptable for women to be violent, and that any man that "can't handle it" isn't a real man, and should be ashamed of himself. In the media, when women are depicted as violent toward their partners, it is almost always supposed to be funny.
Re:females operate on emotion, not logic (Score:5, Informative)
I've seen women call in false reports over and over and over and over. The police don't seem to care. I got to listen in on one first hand when I was voice chatting with a friend for almost 8 hours about how his wife was abusing him, when she suddenly came home, I could hear her screaming and yelling in the other room. She threatened to kill him several times, then she called the police on him, they showed up, and she immediately began crying and told the police how she was home all day and her husband just came home and started to beat her. Lucky for him, the police saw the bruises on him and she was fine. The police actually talked to us on mumble.
He wasn't so lucky the next week. she called the police, got a temporary restraining order just before the weekend, and the police kicked him out of his own house. He was homeless for the weekend, no money, no phone. Welcome to the USA.
Eventually we had to take him in to help him get back on his feet. We had her calling police on us, making false reports. Police refused to do anything about it. We were able to get a restraining order, but it took several months of constant harassment and a few death threats. Eventually what it took was my wife to call in and fake cry just like the other woman. That seems to get shit done.
Police do not respond well to yelling and they don't take being calm seriously. Wife calls police, talks to them in a pissed off tone, they think you're crazy. She calls the police and talks to them calmly, they don't think anything is really happening. Call them and be crying like your child died and you get somewhere. You need to be crying. How often do you see a man bawling his eyes out? A lot of women can do this on demand.
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You literally just made up the 95% number. How does it feel to be a victim of cognitive dissonance? To know that you're so scared of the truth you twist reality to fit your biases?
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That is total bullcrap. Instead of repeating the big lie, you could have just searched for it and found this study [theguardian.com]
While the vast majority of perpetrators of domestic violence are men, women are arrested in three of every 10 incidents and men in only one of 10, a study says
Men are responsible for most cases of domestic violence, but women are three times more likely to be arrested for incidents of abuse, research reveals today.
A report into domestic abuse and gender by Bristol University found that the majority of cases involved alcohol misuse, that women were more likely to use a weapon to protect themselves and that children were present in the majority of cases.
Previous research has shown that the vast majority of domestic violence perpetrators recorded by the police are men (92%) and their victims mainly female (91%), with many more repeat incidents recorded for male than female perpetrators. While the majority of incidents of domestic violence recorded by the police involve male-to-female abuse, little is known about the nature of incidents where men are recorded as victims and women as perpetrators, nor about the circumstances where both partners are recorded as perpetrators.
The new study, by professor Marianne Hester of the University of Bristol's school for policy studies and carried out on behalf of the Northern Rock Foundation, looked at 96 examples from 692 "perpetrator profiles" tracked from 2001 to 2007.
The research looked at 32 cases where women were the aggressors, 32 where men were in that role, and 32 where it was both partners.
It found that 48% of the cases were related to couples still in a relationship, 27% involved violence after separation and the rest involved couples in the process of splitting up.
Some 83% of men had at least two incidents recorded; one man had 52. In contrast, 62% of women recorded as perpetrators had only one incident recorded, and the highest number of repeat incidents for any woman was eight.
Men were significantly more likely than women to use physical violence, threats and harassment, and to damage the women's property; women were more likely to damage their own.
Men's violence tended to create a "context of fear and control", the researchers said, whereas women were more likely to use verbal abuse or some physical violence.
But women were more likely to use a weapon, although this was often to stop further violence from their partners.
All cases with seven or more incidents, most of which involved men, led to arrest
But in general, women were three times more likely to be arrested: during the six-year period, men were arrested once in every 10 incidents and women arrested once in every three.
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While I agree that domestic violence is a bigger problem for women and am not supported the grandparent poster, I think the higher arrest rates are likely to be a function of men only reporting the more severe incidents to the police due to the humiliation/emasculation factor. If men wait to only call the police when they have visible bruises/cuts, that makes it a lot more likely that the police visit will result in an arrest than when there's no readily obvious physical evidence. This is likely a factor in
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Research indicates women use tools and weapons far more than men, which make up for their physical limitations. They also carry grudges for far longer than the male partner and will re initiate the violence at a later date.
Re:females operate on emotion, not logic (Score:5, Insightful)
And that must be why there are more battered husbands shelters than battered wives shelters ... oh wait ...
Did you know most domestic violence in initiated by women? Did you know that by far lesbian relationships have more physical abuse than any other gender pairing? Abused men are just SOL - why do you need support or a shelter? Just man up! Perhaps not an argument for rationality, I'll grant you.
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So, women are more emotional and men are idiots?
Yes! But it's not our fault. Evolution has hardwired male brains such that we experience a 20-30 point drop in IQ whenever we see boobs.
In fact, we don't even have to see boobs to start drooling with stupidity...just thinking about them makes us dull-witted morons - albeit to a lesser extent that when we see a fully exposed rack in all its glory.
So you see, Evolution (in its infinite wisdom) has ordained that women have boobs, and men are thus rendered idiots for the majority of their lives.
Now if you'
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I thought this was true for all genders and species. I'm constantly pushing myself to be more logical and have more control over my emotions, but I'm nowhere near completely there. And some of that might also aid in social awkwardness.
For the record, in regards to the post, I didn't learn how to use Linux extensively through playing around with Gentoo or learn to program C and whatnot because my parents encouraged it. Having said that, my mother bought me an HTML book when I was young, and only after seein
Re:Weird... (Score:4, Funny)
Society forced her to like ponies. And conversely, society rewarded you for spending hours with computers.
This is *so* obviously true: Don't you remember in high school, all the computer-club guys getting all the girls and being invited to all the cool parties?
Oh wait...
Re:Weird... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:UNSUBSCRIBE SLASHDOT-FEMINISM (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm actually curious to know why that was modded down. It's a point that many have made.
Including women ... https://youtu.be/w__PJ8ymliw?t... [youtu.be]
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I'm actually curious to know why that was modded down. It's a point that many have made.
Because half of slashdotters lose their god damned minds as soon as the belief system that they put only shallow thought in proves to be completely irrational even at a shallow level.
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And since men are net contributors to social services via taxes, and women are net recipients of social services -- women now extract from men via legislation what they used to extract via marriage. ... And women wonder why men have picked up their ball and left the game
The reason that was modded down was *probably* because gross generalizations usually don't get much bonus points for being insightful. Especially when it's also a case of blaming the victim. Just look at the history of how women were forcibly removed from the labour force after WW2. I'm sure some didn't mind, but others did. Like my mother, who really wanted to hold her job, but was automatically fired when she married. And if you factor in the fact that women get paid less for the same work, the picture is
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1) Women tend to want to be rewarded and recognized for their achievements and hard work.
2) Men typically will make moving a pencil look like a 4 person task they did all by themselves.
3) Women do their jobs without advertising to the universe th
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Hmm I never thought of the social services argument. That's an interesting way of looking at it.
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Men make more money than women, so it would be reasonable to expect them to pay more taxes. One reason women tend to earn less is that they are more involved in bearing and raising children, which is essential and mostly unpaid work.
As far as social services, which ones are you referring to? I'd suspect that a lot of that is welfare for single mothers, and there's reasons for that. Typically, the father is a lot more likely to abandon the child than the mother is, and it's hard to earn a lot of money
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2. 1/3 of all Mexicans live the in US. Do you have the 1/3 poorest of a third world nation living in your country? You can't have socialism and open borders and we have both
3. You say you pay 49.6% of your income in taxes. After paying income tax, state income tax, property tax and sales tax I pay more than that. If you factor in the tax that my employer pays on all income he pays me, and the loss of corporate income due
Re: Guys aren't interested in social change? (Score:2)
I know a lot of women in non profits. Generally "being interested in social change" is code for "shit pay".
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and use a php project as prime example m(