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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 2,640 Likes: 2
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Joined: Feb 2010
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For what it's worth, as a materials engineer, I have encountered this kind of behavior professionally a couple of times, both from Japanese men. One guy when I was interning in Alabama ("You go to MIT? Is your daddy president of the university?"), and a student when I was TAing graduate thermodynamics (he never came to tutorials or talked to me about his poor grades, and I got the impression from him that my sex was the reason why not). Maybe a predisposition to believe that Japanese men are sexist can cause one to believe a Japanese man ignored you as a TA because you were female, when there other plausible explanations, such as his not being serious about the class or his being reluctant to get help from anyone, male or female. You are generalizing based on a sample size of two.
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Joined: Mar 2006
Posts: 26
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Please stay on topic here, as I'm not comfortable with the direction this is heading.
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Joined: Feb 2012
Posts: 1,390
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Joined: Feb 2012
Posts: 1,390 |
Oops, sorry, Melissa. (FWIW, I didn't mean to imply that someone ignored offered help because of an ethnic difference, and I agree that their could have been many reasons. My point was really the "[t]hose are the only egregious incidents I recall of the many, many men that I have interacted with professionally.")
Our girls need to be prepared to deal with sexism, no question. Probably gifted girls in particular, and particularly because imposter syndrome can make them uniquely vulnerable to it, and because they are uniquely qualified to combat it if they don't fall prey to imposter syndrome.
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Joined: Dec 2009
Posts: 553
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Joined: Dec 2009
Posts: 553 |
Well -- I talked to my daughter, and she thinks this student was a Russian grad student at a US university. I do think that many (not all!) American men have gotten the message that it is just inappropriate to act that way in the workplace, but a lot of the rest of the world may lag behind. My niece (from the US) is an engineer in Australia, and she says it is a tougher battle there than here. Wish it wasn't a battle anywhere... but the reality is that it is. I would love to have seen her professor not only correct the guy in the meeting, but follow up afterwards with his professor/mentor about it -- but no idea if that will happen. I will let you know if anything more comes of it!
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Joined: Oct 2011
Posts: 2,856
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Working here on the Gulf Coast, it's quite noticeable how few women are in upper management and in primarily technical positions. They're over-represented in areas like project management, quality assurance, and positions with the word "analyst" attached to them. Positions that have the word "engineer" attached to them (systems, network, security, etc.) are almost exclusively male, and software development is about 75% male.
My experience in California... not so much. My employer there had more women in management than men. On my first day my team lead, manager, and division manager were all women. I had female peers/team members throughout my time in engineering roles.
So, in my observation, sexism in IT in the US differs by region, and is expressed quite a bit differently than is seen from other countries/cultures, but it's still very much alive and well.
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Joined: Mar 2013
Posts: 1,453
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Well -- I talked to my daughter, and she thinks this student was a Russian grad student at a US university. Conjures up all manner of Big Bang Theory would be scenes in my mind LOL nerd dudes having zero clue about interacting with the opposite sex. maybe the reality of actually talking to an actual real live girl (over the phone admittedly) was too much for him and he had to blurt that out because he could hardly believe it was happening.
Become what you are
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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 2,640 Likes: 2
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Joined: Feb 2010
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I think different interests and aptitudes, not sexism, explain why there are more men than women in tech. Venture capitalist Paul Graham was asked why there are more tech startups founded by men. His answer was that more boys than girls are hacking from an early age. My 11yo boy installed Linux on his own onto a Windows PC. He thinks Linux is simpler than Windows because you can do stuff from the command line rather than dealing with a GUI. He has already programmed in Scratch, Basic, C, and Python. I bet far more 11yo boys than girls have done those things. When they get to college, more boys than girls will have programming and other tech experience, which affects their choices of majors. YC’s Paul Graham: The Complete Interview Does YC discriminate against female founders?
I'm almost certain that we don't discriminate against female founders because I would know from looking at the ones we missed. You could argue that we should do more, that we should encourage women to start startups.
The problem with that is I think, at least with technology companies, the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology. In fact, I've heard startups say that they did not like to hire people who had only started programming when they became CS majors in college.
If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now.
It's already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that. God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers. I would have to stop and think about that.
How can you tell whether you are discriminating against women?
You can tell what the pool of potential startup founders looks like. There's a bunch of ways you can do it. You can go on Google and search for audience photos of PyCon, for example, which is this big Python conference.
That's a self-selected group of people. Anybody who wants to apply can go to that thing. They're not discriminating for or against anyone. If you want to see what a cross section of programmers looks like, just go look at that or any other conference, doesn't have to be PyCon specifically.
Or you could look at commits in open source projects. Once again self-selected, these people don't even meet in person. It's all by email, no one can be intimidated by or feel like an outcast for something like that.
Ok, yes, women aren't set up to be startup founders at the level we want. What would be lost if Y Combinator was more proactive about it?
No, the problem is these women are not by the time get to 23...Like Mark Zuckerberg starts programming, starts messing about with computers when he's like 10 or whatever. By the time he's starting Facebook he's a hacker, and so he looks at the world through hacker eyes. That's what causes him to start Facebook. We can't make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years.
It is changing a bit because it's no longer so critical to be a hacker. The nature of startups is changing. It used to be that all startups were mostly technology companies. Now you have things like the Gilt Groupe where they're really retailers, and that's what they have to be good at because the technology is more commoditized.
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Joined: Mar 2013
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Which is exactly why my 10 year old daughter has her own Raspberry Pi and Arduini Uno board.
She has taken to Python like a duck to water.
I now have to get her more competent in Linux because it comes with gcc...
I want her to have the self confidence of ElizabethN when she grows up.
Loved that last sentence, Elizabeth :-)
Become what you are
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Joined: Oct 2011
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I think different interests and aptitudes, not sexism, explain why there are more men than women in tech. Why the difference in interests and (apparent) aptitudes, though? Because they're told at an early age that those things are not for them. This'll do for an illustration: https://gma.yahoo.com/parents-organ...-cant-193601986--abc-news-parenting.htmlFurthermore, the stark difference between different regions of the same country shows it must be a social construct, not a genetic one.
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Joined: Feb 2010
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Furthermore, the stark difference between different regions of the same country shows it must be a social construct, not a genetic one. You wrote that there is less sexism in the California tech industry, but Silicon Valley firms have also been criticized for a lack of ethnic and gender diversity.
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