This topic is radioactive. No matter how kind and understanding you are, many people on many sides will misinterpret your statements and demonize you. The only way to win is not to play.
And yet, because I want to further the discussion, I will play...
I think the most effective way to reduce discrimination in tech is to go underground. Do not think of yourself as a crusader for (insert topic here). Keep your identity small[1] and simply attack bad ideas no matter where they come from[2]. Blind yourself when evaluating candidates. Make sure that you do not know the name of the person applying for a position, since that information highly correlates with their race and gender. Musicians figured this out long ago: all that matters the sound. Likewise, with programmers all that matters is the code. If your code is good, you are good. If it's not good, be glad: you get to learn something new. Appreciate it, because until recently, learning new things was a rare event.
I think this mentality can help us not only with this specific problem, but with similar problems that we will encounter in the future. We owe it to each other and ourselves. We need to advance our field and pursue excellence no matter where it comes from, no matter where it leads to.
Broadly speaking, that's all true, but I have to take a little exception with this:
Likewise, with programmers all that matters is the code. If it's good, you are good.
There's a bit more to it in my experience; I've met some developers who were good at producing code, but less effective at understanding requirements, or working within teams, or accepting that they might have to spend time on tasks they don't want to.
In that sense, it's difficult to hire without getting to know someone at least a little, which implicitly means knowing their gender and race. I think the better approach is to just "not be biased" in the first place. Harder than it sounds, no doubt.
I can certainly get behind what you say. I don't have the time/willpower to spell out my position in detail, but I do agree that there are practicalities that need to be ameliorated. Thank you for elucidating them.
I agree, a properly blinded selection process is a very good idea.
This doesn’t really do anything about information asymmetries and existing networks. Also, it doesn’t change anything about that part of the selection process where you actually have to meet in person or at least talk.
Blinding can necessarily only ever be a tiny part of any any solution.
I would argue that specifically seeking out certain groups and advertising to them that a position is open and that they would be the perfect candidates would be a good idea. (Please note that I’m not arguing for ads in pink to specifically target women or some bullshit like that. If you already have ads they should already work irrespective of gender, race, etc.)
Often it’s a problem that people do not know that they can apply or they might think applying is not for them. They might also not be aware that someone is looking because they are not part of existing networks.
Despite all of that it will inevitably always be easier to hire people you know and those people will tend to be very similar to each other. This is not even intentionally sexist, but the consequences are icky.
This means that even targeted advertising for open positions and a completely blind selection process will not solve this. Both of those things would still be excellent if implemented, though.
(This is a common misunderstanding so I should address it right away: Please note that when I talk about targeted advertising I do not mean that the selection process itself should give an advantage to those who are targeted by the advertising. Sometimes even that might be worthwhile strategy, but I’m arguing that candidates, once they apply, should all be treated exactly the same and that the selection process should be blind to name, age, race insofar as that is possible. Targeted advertising is just the acknowledgement that the process by which potential candidates get to know about open positions right now is far from random and fair and it attempts to correct that.)
> Don't attempt romantic relationships at work. (...)The women usually get the rough end of this deal, too, because men aren't good at handling the inevitable rejection. Just don't do it. Have all the romantic relationships you want outside work, but do not bring it to work.
I find this incredibly childish - the idea that men (not some men, just men) are childish and cannot behave like grown ups, up to the point in which the company has to step in and tell them how to behave.
I'm not sold up either on the idea that I'm not allowed to date anyone in the one place where I spend most of my day, where I'm surrounded by people who share my interests and where I met most of my friends.
I'm all in for bringing in more women, but this points sounds too much like "let's protect this delicate, defenseless flower" to me.
Joking aside, I think you are misunderstanding me.
I don't suggest anybody should be fired for asking someone for a date. I'm saying that company policy can give you an easy way to say "no" to a date: "Sorry, I don't want to jeopardize my career, you know company policy.". Ideally, the person asking you out will accept your rejection, and there's no need to fire anyone.
That excuse becomes unusable quickly as the number of office couples grows. A policy on the books won't let you off the hook when everyone knows it's not an actual policy.
Not just "ideally"; I would go so far as to say that the situation where the rejected person does not gracefully accept it is the point at which anyone in that situation has first done something "bad". (We have a term for further retribution against the rejector in a professional context: "sexual harassment". In an ordinary personal context, we would simply say it makes the person an asshole.)
If the woman is attracted to you then she expects you to make a romantic gesture. If you don't she's hurt. If she's not attracted then such a gesture could hurt her. Policies like no dating is a lot to do with protecting women in the workplace from having to go out of their way expressing themselves. A much better policy could be everyone has to make their intentions clear.
> A much better policy could be everyone has to make their intentions clear.
Easily said, but impossible to put into practice. Have you ever tried to get a woman to make her intentions clear? Apart from being seen as insulting, it's an impossible condition to place on social interactions between men and women, where a woman's inalienable right to be vague and ambiguous is an essential component of the dating game.
I thought you were going to go a different direction with that. All joking aside I really feel like the policies outlined in the op wreak of "apparently nobody in this company is mature enough to engage in what all adults engage in and we selfishly don't want to have to let people go due to their emotional unpreparedness."
Which is possible given that a lot of the most promising developers are young, I still don't agree with it. People need to be able to make mistakes and corporate culture is strangling them.
It is interesting that you cast this idea in this way, because while I can see your point that he's talking about women getting the "rough end" of a deal, specifically, it isn't telling _only_ men how to behave.
And while I don't want to "sell" you on the idea, I can say that my ex, who dated three different coworkers (one while she was married to me :D ) probably should have taken that advice, not that she would have... people will do what they do.
But I agree with the larger point of making it a specific policy... if just because it gives graceful outs all around.
I think it's very good advice; just overly specific.
It should be "have a dating policy," or have explicit guidelines on how to handle intra-office relationships.
I'd say it doesn't matter whether it's a 'no-dating', 'no propositions in the office', or a 'one goes, both go' policy in case of problems... just as long as you're explicitly addressing the issue.
I was mostly speaking about myself there, but yes, I believe it is true of most men. Tell them they can't have something, and they will suddenly want it more than they've ever wanted anything in their entire lives.
I don't think anyone has a complete picture of what really happened at GitHub. But even assuming the worst, it's an anecdote, just as valuable as any of the relationships we have seen flourish in our workplaces, which don't make headlines because they are simply, boringly successful and wonderful.
You're right. Part of the problem here is that the only people really talking about fairness, office conduct or working conditions in the industry are people coming from a feminist perspective, which leads people to think that these are "women's issues" rather than more general ones. Plenty of men in the industry are taken advantage of, but we haven't worked out how to talk about this properly yet. Likewise, most of the recommendations about treating people decently and standing up against abuse of power would benefit men too. How many men want to work in toxic environments? I'd imagine it's very few.
For my part I'd rather see a bit more discussion about what good workplaces look like, and what might be best practices, and a bit less cod psychology and gender mysticism.
The problem is that (in anecdotal experience) men and women simply handle it differently - men might get angry, offensive, even aggressive, while women might cry, gossip and manipulate. Different people might evaluate the negative effect of different behaviours differently, but that doesn't mean that any sex is handling rejection any better.
I honestly think no drinking, no dating should not be on that list. This sounds like a married 40+ year old who's forgotten what it's like to be 20-30 (and I must admit I'm starting to forget!). It's so easy to forget that's simply not how the world works at that age and this debate is not the place to start proselytizing middle-aged parent morality that you definitely didn't have when you were 25.
You even mention university. Is college sexist then? Do we need to protect women at university from all those drunk, lecherous men? Enforce a no dating rule at university?
Women can't be equals if you refuse to treat them as equals.
> Do we need to protect women at university from all those drunk, lecherous men?
Perhaps this is not your point, but the answer to this question is emphatically:
Yes, women (and men) everywhere have a right to personal safety.
I agree that a no-dating rule does not achieve this, but drinking culture at a workplace is just not a good idea. You can drink on your own time, with the money you get paid to make your own decisions with, without dressing that up as a work social event which employees feel obliged to attend.
So it's a horrible inequality that more programmers are men, and code would be so much better with more women.
In Sweden, 57 percent of judges are women[1]. Where do I hear the feminists shouting that judgements would be so much better with more men? Again in Sweden, 52% of women gets accepted to University, but only 36% of men[2]. Where do I hear the feminists shouting that University would be so much better with more men?
The feminist agenda is "more women, more women" and is one way - much more sexist than any other ideology out there.
".. If you want to drink, be my guest. Drink. You're a grown up. I'm not the boss of you. But don't drink in a situation or event that is officially connected with work in any way."
I think this idea is due to the over consumption of alcohol that seems to be the norm in the U.S. now. Europeans, on the other hand, seem to have much more mature attitudes around alcohol.
I have to agree that the sentiment seems strange to me. All my employers have had multiple receptions, celebratory drinks or lunches where alcohol was served and consumed. No one ever got drunk or misbehaved because of it. People are smart enough to be moderate in their alcohol consumption.
Note that in my country (Belgium), alcohol consumption at work is illegal, so these events were always after work hours or during lunch breaks. Technically, people had to badge out before consuming alcohol.
I'm not aware of drinking being a huge problem in Australia either, but that may be the particular places I happen to have worked. Certainly "goin' out 'n gettin' pissed" is an important part of weekly (even daily) social interactions for a lot of Aussies, though we don't have the wowser/puritan history to muddy the waters like the US does.
If you're not careful your shop can become a drinking fraternity first, dev team second. What happens when someone who does not drink wants to join the team ? Well just the fact that he doesn't drink can make the rest of the team feel like they're having less fun and that they "can't have as much fun drinking now" so they might (subconsciously) decide that the highly qualified non-drinker is not a cultural fit. That's fine in an environment where new qualified recruits are easy to come by.. but is that the world we live in ?
I'd say it's a "Drink responsibly" thing. Possibly refers to college culture and by extension hip cool startup culture, where (if I am to believe popular media etc) things can get rather excessive, with drinking games and trying to out-drink each other and just get pissed.
We have the occasional drinkup, where we just enjoy a few drinks without things going in full party mode. It's just behaving like an adult, imo.
It doesn't matter how many women there are in the field. If men and women are of equal worth, then why are you looking to get more women in? The men there aren't good enough for you?
Now, I understand that some women avoid working developer jobs because they get mistreated by some men. That is an issue. But it's not an issue limited to developers, and it's not an issue limited to women. If anyone is treating anyone else like shit, then they should be fired. Sex doesn't come into question -- being a decent human being does. If you're afraid to work a job because someone might mistreat you, then you're afraid of working every job.
Even if we eliminate cases like those of Github/Hovarth, it doesn't necessarily mean there will be a 50/50 split. And it doesn't matter. It's not important how many people of a certain gender there are -- what's important is that people are judged on their skills and character alone. If that means there is a gender divide, then so be it.
Equal opportunity does not necessarily mean equal interest. A complete lack of sexism does not necessarily mean equal interest. You are following the assumption that there would be 50/50 proportions of interest (and therefore skill, and therefore employment) just because a field meets all your criteria of "not sexist". This is an unfounded assumption. No matter what the situation, there is never a guarantee that equal amounts of men and women will be interested in a particular field -- and this is not necessarily a product of a flaw in the field, but could be indicative of societal inertia (things go in and out of fashion with different groups), biological differences, or just random variation.
The first question we must ask is -- if there is a gender divide, why is there a gender divide? The second question we must ask is, is the reason for it actually problematic? do we have evidence that it is sexism? If it is a problem, we must ask can we solve it without causing bigger problems?
It seems we have missed most of these questions, assuming the reasons for the gender divide, assuming that it is sexism, and not considering if our solutions will just cause more problems. This is simply irresponsible. It makes us prone to unnecessary disruption, and our inclination to jump to sides -- either side -- doesn't help.
>You are following the assumption that there would be 50/50 proportions of interest (and therefore skill, and therefore employment)
No I'm not. I never said any such thing. Perhaps a non-sexist distribution would be 80:20 male:female. You can still compare that to the actual distribution and see how they compare.
Your first question is: "if there is a gender divide" but how can you possibly answer that if you don't look at the actual numbers?
Why is it that every time one want to compare programming to other professions, we look at professions with low social status like car mechanic, nurses, metal worker, secretary and so on.
Instead, I suggest that we compare high education professions with other high education professions. Psychotherapy for example is a highly preferred female profession with about 80% female to male ratio. Veterinaries are 90% female to male. Both is similar to programming in that they are heavily sought of, has high competitive path to employment, and both require years of higher education.
So turning to this article, I wonder, is the advice the article has actually sexist? Would they work in equal manner to get more male therapist or veterinaries, or is the comic strip in the middle of the article much more relevant in actually getting a change in the ratio of profession male and female programmers.
I don't understand this post. The first part seems to be justifying why there are more men in the computer field with some pseudo-science. But then he goes on to amend himself and proposes solutions to the problem. All this is very ambiguous to me.
I don't see the connection between the first and the second part. What's the point of establishing a baseline if it's not going to be used to find a solution ?
> In an earlier post I noted that many software developers I've known have traits of Aspergers. Aspergers is a spectrum disorder ...
No it isn't. After an epidemic of overdiagnoses about ten years ago that forced psychologists to accept that they had no way to reliably identify it, it was voted out of existence by the editors of DSM-5, the current diagnostic manual. Before you object that Asperger's exists whether or not psychologists believe in it any more, think about what you're saying about psychology's scientific standing.
Psychologists rarely abandon established diagnoses, in fact it's happened only once before. Can you name the behavior, now regarded as a civil right and defended by a number of federal laws, that was branded a treatable mental illness until the 1970s?
Psychologists abandon established diagnoses with every revision of the DSM. For instance sexual aversion disorder was also removed in the latest DSM [1].
I'm sure there's an Autism spectrum upon which Asperger's syndrome lies, and I'm sure that psychology (as distinct from psychiatry) is a scientific discipline, so logic dictates that the weak link is your statement that "it was voted out of existence".
> Researchers found that these separate diagnoses were not consistently applied across different clinics and treatment centers. Anyone diagnosed with one of the four pervasive
developmental disorders (PDD) from DSM-IV should still meet the criteria for ASD in DSM-5 or another,
more accurate DSM-5 diagnosis.
The DSM-V fact sheet indicates that, indeed, rather than being voted out of existence, Aspergers Syndrome was reclassified to help reduce misdiagnoses from varying application of DSM-IV criteria, not because it doesn't exist.
> The DSM-V fact sheet indicates that, indeed, rather than being voted out of existence, Aspergers Syndrome was reclassified to help reduce misdiagnoses from varying application of DSM-IV criteria, not because it doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist. All this reclassification talk is simply psychologists saving face. At their most candid, they say, "It's not an evidence-based term." (source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/health/03asperger.html?pag...). Saying something isn't evidence-based is how a scientist says "it's not real."
Remember that, in science, the null hypothesis precept dictates that claims lacking evidence are assumed to be false. Indeed, the fact that people continue to insist that Asperger's is real in spite of a complete lack of evidence, is an accurate measure of the unscientific nature of psychology.
> I'm sure there's an Autism spectrum upon which Asperger's syndrome lies ...
If voting can create or destroy a mental illness, then everything lies on the autism spectrum -- it's just a matter of talking psychologists into it. Asperger's was voted into existence, and voted out of existence. There was and is no objective scientific evidence for its existence.
> I'm sure that psychology (as distinct from psychiatry) is a scientific discipline ...
If psychology were a scientific discipline, then psychologists would be able to use their research results to dictate what psychiatrists and clinical psychologists can and cannot do in a clinical setting, in the same way that medical research dictates what can and cannot be done in a medical clinic.
But that is not so, and the reason is that psychology isn't a science -- it has no central defining theories, no tests of those theories, and no basis for falsification of those nonexistent theories, all required properties of science.
> so logic dictates that the weak link is your statement that "it was voted out of existence".
That's an uncontroversial fact -- Asperger's was voted into existence, then it was voted out of existence, and science played no part.
It is for these and other reasons that the NIMH recently ruled that the DSM, psychology's "Bible", can no longer be used as the basis for scientific research proposals, for the simple reason that it has no scientific content:
Quote: "The goal of this new manual, as with all previous editions, is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology. While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity.
Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better."
Generally this is nice and balanced, but there are a couple of things that I don't agree with:
Do you run a company? Institute a no-dating rule as policy.
I don't really thing that's wise. On a personal level, it's great advice — I'd imagine that's something most people would take into consideration on a personal. We've got a "try not to get into a relationship at work, but if you do, don't be a dick, and make sure we know about it so we can deal with the fallout if required" policy, and that's more than enough. We're adults, not children, after all.
Also, this:
No drinking at work events.
Okay, work events shouldn't be focused around alcohol, and heavy-drinking macho culture is bad. But it's exceptionally difficult to construct an enjoyable and realistic working culture when you're making an effort to exclude an activity that lots of people (a majority, maybe?) partake in and enjoy.
So have some wine and cocktails at company events; don't feel ashamed to go for a couple of drinks with colleagues after work on a Friday. Just make sure that your culture is sensitive enough that you have a diversity of events so that individuals who don't want to drink aren't excluded, and don't focus your events around alcohol (c.f. github's infamous drink-ups).
But I guess what terrifies me most is stuff like this:
I like to refer to the anecdotal story of the Apple Store glass stairs. While visually appealing, there was one unforeseen consequence to their design: the large groups of strange men that spend hours each day standing under them looking up. As a woman, the first time I saw them I thought “thank god I’m not wearing a skirt today.”
I find it really understandable that stuff like this rubs men up the wrong way. It shouldn't, but my immediate reaction to that is "wtf, we shouldn't be compromising things that we want to do because there are people around who would do that kind of thing!" - I guess is naïveté in some ways, because I can't imagine doing that, or being aware of somebody who was doing it without tackling them on the issue.
It's easy to feel like it's a personal or biased attack on "all men," and I think that's probably the biggest barrier to overcome. When someone complains about sexist activity, it's rarely a personal attack, but it can be hard to remember that sometimes.
I don't really see any problem with alcohol at work events in general, but I think it heavily depends on your company culture.
The (~40 person) company I worked at before had beer fridays occasionally and pretty much everyone would join in. We'd all have a beer or two in the afternoon and call it a day. Nobody got inebriated, weird or uncomfortable. Our company was ~25% women (scientists, admin) and they all participated.
I think one difference from our situation versus the audience of this article was that a lot of people in the company had families or were otherwise "mature". I could see how that sort of could be a problem in companies with more of a young male-dominated atmosphere.
I could see how that sort of could be a problem in companies with more of a young male-dominated atmosphere.
That's a good point that I hadn't considered. I'm used to working with a pretty diverse bunch of people already, quite a few with kids; I expect in an environment which is much more 'college-like' the outcome could be very different.
So, here's how I imagine these rules were created.
1. Collect a large number of stories of harassment or toxic work environments that drive away women.
2. Look for common elements.
3. Make a list of rules to avoid those common elements.
It's hard to balance competing needs.. it's inevitable that rules constructed in this way are going to protect against more behavior than is actually necessary. The question is whether it's more like a seatbelt (I've never gotten in a car accident, but I still always wear mine) or more like the snowsuit from A Christmas Story.
I, like you, am not a misogynistic jerk. However, I can imagine such a jerk, and that jerk is much worse when they've had a bit to drink. They can also be really mean when rejected in a relationship. I can also imagine it being really hard to tell if that is the case ahead of time.
These rules would lead to some changes.. if it didn't, then you wouldn't expect a different result. That includes some changes which would not have been necessary. It's a matter of balance, but if you really want change, then it can make sense to overcompensate.
I think it is partly a case of being more determined.
Many people drift into what they end up studying (even today with it costing so much: the amount of people getting into a mountain of debt working towards a degree they ended up in "just because" always surprises me), and with the social pressures of the past women have been far less likely to coast into sciency courses then men.
That means more of the one who are in those courses are there because the specifically want to follow that path, and have the brass ones to help fight the subconscious (and sometimes more open) sexism that exists in many people on the matter, rather than just because they need to do something and it seemed a reasonable choice at the time. The people who have planned out their path this way (men and women) are more likely to end up following it into a successful career, the others (of which most are men) are more likely then the former set to eventually decide on (or otherwise end up in) something else.
This should fade over time - I don't know about other sciency/engineering areas but the "not a place for women" thing seems to be rapidly falling away in the techie circles I inhabit (though as I'm not a women and not the most observant person on the planet, there might still be stuff there that I'm not at all concious of).
Or, women who don't study computer science are more likely to end up programming.
I have no idea where those statistics came from, but it's worth remembering that a lot of people who write software in their day job didn't study computer science. People with science and engineering backgrounds often end up software developers through necessity.
I've heard it argued - convincingly I might add - that the autism male/female skew is actually a lot less than this, but we (as a society) are bad at spotting autism in females.
This book also has some interesting passages on the topic: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Aspergirls-Empowering-Females-Asperg....
I should emphasise that I am in no way qualified to say if this is true or not - but I personally found the arguments presented to be plausible and interesting.
1 & 2 => 3 smells an awful lot like equating correlation and causation.
Additionally:
4. "In an earlier post I noted that many software developers I've known have traits of Aspergers."
Looks like unquantified extrapolation and using anecdotes as evidence.
I don't think Jeff is claiming it to be anything but. There are some obvious correlations there that should make observers go "Hmm, that's interesting!"
There's no 1&2 => 3 it's more like 2&3 => 1, where there is a probable casual relationship between 2 and 3 (attributes of a good hacker and of a person diagnosed with Aspergers overlap quite a bit (4)).
> Looks like unquantified extrapolation and using anecdotes as evidence.
Yes, along with perpetuating the myth of Asperger's, which has been abandoned as a diagnosis by people who had every reason to defend its continued existence (clinical psychologists), but who realized they could only do so by sacrificing more public credibility.
Actually, what happened is that it ended up bundled into high functioning autism in the DSM. That only means that the term "Asperger's" was deprecated in the context of the DSM.
> Actually, what happened is that it ended up bundled into high functioning autism in the DSM.
Yes, that's the psychological version of politics. Did you really think psychologists would come out and say, "We made a mistake and there's no such thing as Asperger's"? That would be like the Catholic church saying Galileo was right.
The proof that there's no such thing as Asperger's (as a mental illness) has two parts. One, anyone could get the diagnosis through the simple expedient of visiting a psychologist and saying, "I think I have Asperger's". Two, the number of wildly successful people who were said to have Asperger's, including Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, and Bill Gates, which means if Asperger's is real, then wealth and fame are reliable diagnostic indicators for the condition. That would give "mental illness" a whole new meaning.
Apropos nothing, but the Catholic Church not only acknowledges Galileo but also apologized for its treatment of him (which is a bit weird, given that it involved people in 1992 apologizing for the actions of people in 1610; let he who is without a culpable relative in the last four hundred years cast the first stone).
In 12 years of Catholic school I never once heard a priest, nun, deacon, or teacher aver to any deficiency in Galileo's work. He was presented to students as a hero of science, as one would expect.
> ... the Catholic Church not only acknowledges Galileo but also apologized for its treatment of him ...
Yes, hundreds of years later, in carefully crafted language meant to excuse the Church's behavior as understandable under the circumstances. It's not quite the same thing as acknowledging an error of judgment on the part of a living Pope.
> In 12 years of Catholic school I never once heard a priest, nun, deacon, or teacher aver to any deficiency in Galileo's work. He was presented to students as a hero of science, as one would expect.
Yes, and 350 years from now, someone within the Church who today advocates free access to birth control will be hailed as ahead of his or her time, but as with Galileo, the praise and forgiveness will come far too late.
I want to emphasize that I think the Catholic church is a fascinating entity with very many well-intentioned followers, but the thinly veiled intolerance for ideas outside the canon is a constant irritation.
I'm not remotely interested in litigating most of this. Anyone who tries to rationalize the legitimacy of the United States is in a similarly tricky rhetorical position vis a vis slavery and genocide, and within a much shorter historical timespan. If you cast your net several centuries back, it would be hard to find any group of people who don't have something truly appalling to excuse themselves for.
The important point is: I was repeatedly taught about Galileo in Catholic grade school and Jesuit high school, and those lessons were invariably centered on the genius of Galileo.
There are militantly anti-science flavors of Christianity, but urban Catholicism isn't one of them. Guess who taught the first lesson I can remember about evolution? A nun.
Your comment created the perception that Galileo is a divisive issue amongst Catholics, or the Catholic church. He is not. Galileo is recognized as a hero of science by the Catholic church, which I assure you has long (as in, for hundreds of years) since embraced heliocentrism.
Later, full disclosure: I polled Catholic school students in my office and found one person who had a Christian Brother teacher who believed Galileo to be a heretic. Shows to go you, you can find nutballs anywhere you look for them.
"Evolution" is a hot button issue for some evangelican christians and is a big deal in the USA, leading some to think the only sort of science vs. religion topic is evolution. As you point out, RCC is fine with evolution.
But RCC are not very scientific when it comes to matters of sex or sexuality. They oppose teaching about contraception, and often spread lies and misinformation about condoms, abortion, homosexuality, etc.
> I'm not remotely interested in litigating most of this.
This reminds me of the character in "Five Easy Pieces" who repeatedly says, "I don't want to talk about this," while talking about it nonstop.
> Anyone who tries to rationalize the legitimacy of the United States is in a similarly tricky rhetorical position ...
Wait, did you just compare a government to a church? Governments aren't religions -- they don't posture as morally superior gateways to heaven.
> If you cast your net several centuries back, it would be hard to find any group of people who don't have something truly appalling to excuse themselves for.
Yes, true, which is why religions are in the impossible logical position of posturing about a moral superiority they can never substantiate.
> Your comment created the perception that Galileo is a divisive issue amongst Catholics, or the Catholic church.
I did nothing of the kind. Prove me wrong -- locate the quote in which I say that modern Catholics don't think Galileo is a hero of the scientific revolution. The word "is" in the above sentence is your choice -- by contrast, I took the position that Galileo was an issue for the church, until 1992 when he was rehabilitated.
It's a simple matter of reading the words. And your reply completely vindicates the views in the post you replied to, a post in which I say, "I want to emphasize that I think the Catholic church is a fascinating entity with very many well-intentioned followers, but the thinly veiled intolerance for ideas outside the canon is a constant irritation."
> Later, full disclosure: I polled Catholic school students in my office and found one person who had a Christian Brother teacher who believed Galileo to be a heretic. Shows to go you, you can find nutballs anywhere you look for them.
There's a lot of rationalization in your prose. You do see this, yes?
Nope. Also, you've moved the goalposts, from defending the validity of a comparison that had nothing to do with "moral superiority" to litigating a "moral superiority" that I have nowhere invoked or relied on rhetorically. We can probably stop debating now; you're entitled to have problems and concerns about Catholicism.
> Two, the number of wildly successful people who were said to have Asperger's, including Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, and Bill Gates, which means if Asperger's is real, then wealth and fame are reliable diagnostic indicators for the condition. That would give "mental illness" a whole new meaning.
If three successful people are said by some to have showed signs of Asperger's, how many non-Asperger's successful people are needed to make "wild success" an unreliable indicator? I'll lead off with Oprah, Dale Carnegie, and Bill Clinton.
Sorry, that makes no sense. Mentally ill people aren't expected to become famous billionaires -- it's just not part of the social expectation. The fact that there are similarly successful people without a mental illness diagnosis only adds to the perception that the diagnosis has no meaning.
> In 1947, after his near-fatal aircraft crash in 1946, [Howard] Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. Hughes stayed in the studio's darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He subsisted exclusively on chocolate bars, chicken, and milk, and relieved himself in the empty bottles and containers. He was surrounded by dozens of Kleenex boxes, which he continuously stacked and re-arranged. He wrote detailed memos to his aides on yellow legal pads giving them explicit instructions not to look at him, or speak to him unless spoken to. Throughout this period, Hughes sat fixated in his chair, often naked, continually watching movies. When he finally emerged in the spring of 1948, his hygiene was terrible, as he had not bathed or cut his hair and nails for weeks
> Mentally ill people aren't expected to become famous billionaires -- it's just not part of the social expectation.
Mental illness basically means durable patterns of behavior well outside of those expected of the majority of the population that causes adverse impacts in some areas of life. Honestly, I'd be pretty surprised if there weren't particular forms of it that were disproportionately common at the high as well as low end of the social heirarchy, though the adverse impact at the high end probably would be in areas that don't relate to social status.
> I'd be pretty surprised if there weren't particular forms of it that were disproportionately common at the high as well as low end of the social heirarchy ...
Yes -- and my point is there's some serious logical shortcomings in labeling such behaviors as mental illnesses meriting treatment.
There's certainly something wrong with externally compelling treatment if there is no harm to others, OTOH, if the person involved wants to address the dysfunction in other areas of life -- even if the source of the dysfunction also helps them attain high social status -- why shouldn't treatment be available?
> even if the source of the dysfunction also helps them attain high social status -- why shouldn't treatment be available?
The answer is, or should be, obvious. Doctors regularly rise from their microscopes and Petri dishes to announce the existence of real diseases, and get public support for treatments and cures.
Psychologists would like to posture as doctors (which is why there are psychiatrists, who are psychologists with M.D. degrees), so they can rise from their notebooks and therapy sessions and announce the existence of new mental illnesses and get public support for treatments (there are no cures).
But psychologists are not doctors, and the majority of conditions that psychologists treat are hopelessly subjective conditions on which different practitioners cannot agree. The public doesn't understand this -- they don't understand that mind diseases don't have the standing of body diseases, and the reason this is true is because of a largely successful public relations campaign waged by psychologists to make themselves appear as doctors who treat objective medical conditions.
But "sluggish cognitive tempo", this week's illness du jour, is not a disease, it's a way for psychologists to feather their nests. Asperger Syndrome was in the same position ten years ago, but has been retired by a vote of the DSM-5 editorial committee after a public relations debacle of overdiagnosis.
Ok. It appears I wasn't clear enough in what I wrote.
Psychologists, unlike laypeople, don't treat the DSM as some kind of bible. It's a collection of rules of thumb used for helping diagnose various mental disorders. The fact that DSM 5 did away with a specific disorder is nothing like your example and says nothing whatsoever about whether a particular disorder exists or not. All they did was the equivalent of saying, "OK, we've got these grades from A1 to A5, and this other grade NG; maybe we should just call it A6 so it fits into the same general scale".
When they say "it's not an evidence based term", they simply mean it's not worth distinguishing from the spectrum as a whole. Let me quote from the very article you quoted:
> If these experts have their way, _Asperger's syndrome and another mild form of autism_, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (P.D.D.-N.O.S. for short), _will be folded into a single broad diagnosis_, autism spectrum disorder - a category that encompasses autism's entire range, or spectrum, from high-functioning to profoundly disabling.
(Emphasis mine)
Now, I'm not arguing whether it's a real thing or not. I leave that to people more knowledgeable in the field than I am. I'm arguing simply that your characterization of the term is incorrect and also doesn't agree with how psychologists view the term.
> The proof that there's no such thing as Asperger's (as a mental illness) has two parts. One, anyone could get the diagnosis through the simple expedient of visiting a psychologist and saying, "I think I have Asperger's".
I'm not sure how that "proves" anything? You've made a statement that something happens, but haven't actually provided any proof of anything.
> Two, the number of wildly successful people who were said to have Asperger's, including Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, and Bill Gates, which means if Asperger's is real, then wealth and fame are reliable diagnostic indicators for the condition.
You appear not to understand the difference between correlation and causation, nor do you have a good grasp of probability distributions.
> Two, the number of wildly successful people who were said to have Asperger's, including Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, and Bill Gates, which means if Asperger's is real, then wealth and fame are reliable diagnostic indicators for the condition. That would give "mental illness" a whole new meaning.
Why could "wealth and fame" not be a diagnostic indicator for not being "normal"? I think that's the point the people who argued that "hacker mindset" and Asperger's are more-less the same thing were really trying to make. Do we have a label for "uncommon mental traits that have positive impact on cognition"? As a society we do seem to automatically treat everything that is not average to be a bad thing.
> Why could "wealth and fame" not be a diagnostic indicator for not being "normal"?
Fair enough, but I find that a bit of a stretch for a mental illness diagnosis.
> As a society we do seem to automatically treat everything that is not average to be a bad thing.
Yes, and that's one of the commonly heard criticisms of the field of psychology -- over time it seems to be narrowing the definition of normal in a self-serving way.
On that topic, when tested, clinically depressed people turn out to have a more accurate perception of reality than their more "normal" peers. That means we're treating people with accurate perceptions, trying to turn them into people who are less rational but more happy. :)
A while ago the law changed in the UK to allow women to do the official book signing bit at weddings. Nowadays, if you go to a wedding, it is almost certain that the person in the role of registrar/vicar is female. For whatever reason a once exclusive male shop is now dominated by women.
If we look back at the time before the internet, in the days when Wordperfect was king, you could find that the typical office had more computers in the hands of women than men. In those days plenty of women went from secretarial jobs to more technical roles in computing. IT was far from what you might call a closed shop, women barred from entering. Far from it.
The internet, or rather the www, has created plenty of new opportunities in programming, design and content creation. Everyone had a fair crack of the whip, no universities barred women from doing Comp. Sci. degrees and many, many employers would prefer to take on a female candidate for a programming role to a male candidate given key criteria of skills are met. Yet here we are in our gender stereo-typed roles. The die has been cast.
A lot of commenters disagree with the "no dating" and "no alcohol" recommendations. But how many of these commenters are men and how many are women? For men to reject a recommendation put forth in the interest of women might be self-serving and establishmentarian.
A tally of both the ayes and nays to those recommendations from women would be most interesting to me.
For the record, I'm male and I'd be fine with those rules even if they didn't make the workplace more supportive of women. I don't pick my job based on whether I can date at work or drink at work (as long as there's no policy against pursuing those things with colleagues outside of work). But perhaps I'm an oddball because I prefer my relationship with coworkers to be strictly professional by default, and only override that on an individual basis; however, the norm in tech companies seems to be shifting away from this (even outside SV).
> "No well-actuallys. "Well, actually, you can do that without a regular expression.""
I don't think that's quite what is meant by "well-actually". In Miguel's blog, he gives the example of someone injecting a non-sequitur well-actually to shift attention to themselves and their superior intellect.
The reg-ex example given isn't (necessarily) an example of that. I can easily imagine a situation where I'm discussing some code with someone and if they're using a regex for something that's easily achieved without one, it's almost universally a good idea to do the other thing and I should point that out. That's not "showcasing my superior intellect", it's teaching.
From my experience (in North West England) having worked many contracts in both the private and public sector, I'd say there are far fewer than one in five computer programmers is female; I'd guess it was closer to 1/15.
Of course, and this is all completely anecdotal, but at my first job after university (at a medical data company), there was only one woman in the 'software' section, and about 70 men.
The Rule of Steves says that, in any workplace, the number of female programmers will never exceed the number of programmers named Steve. I worked one place where that wasn't true, but only because it was overrun with Johns rather than Steves.
We all agree that building a better internet is important, but do the suggested policies actually lead to better products? Will the diversity gained from a "no well-actually" policy outweigh the quality lost from people being unwilling to suggest improvements? Are the gains from a team drinking together bigger or smaller than those from having people who wouldn't join such a team?
So I think the no "well-actually" policy is because people saying "well actually" prevents people suggesting improvements because they don't want to say something that might sound stupid. The hacker school manual goes into greater detail.
Having teambuilding events around drinking increases homogeneity, because that kind of event is most attractive to your average 20-something white male, and least attractive to a lot of other groups (e.g. people who don't drink from preference or religion, people who don't want to hang around with drunk people for various reasons etc). So the gains from diversifying team building should far outweigh the loss of this one narrow kind of event.
>> "Are the gains from a team drinking together bigger or smaller than those from having people who wouldn't join such a team?"
Why does the team have to drink together? Why not go out for dinner, play pool, have an office BBQ? I like to drink but I've never wanted to do it with my superiors. The risks involved if it goes wrong (i.e. you get too drunk and say something stupid) are too high.
Drinking together builds trust in a way that sober events don't, precisely because of those "risks". Doing it regularly creates an environment where it's much harder for parts of the team to lie (maybe not even intentionally) or keep secrets from each other, and it adds a channel of communication where criticism is more welcome or at least excusable/deniable. When I've seen companies fail it's largely been because communication broke down and the people on one end knew what the people on the other end were doing wrong but had no way to tell them.
I thought the same thing. When I first started work a couple of drinks at lunchtime was considered normal. At my first employers (Borland UK) back in the late 80s we would go out as a team every 2-3 weeks and get drunk at the companies expense (slightly unusual but boozy "work" lunches and not going back to the office was still a possibility then).
These days I can't cope with that (my code turns to crap and I want to have a quick nap) but I do like offices were there is a culture of the company paying for a few drinks (Friday afternoons?)
That's a US-centric article. I think those rules will have to be relaxed slightly here in London. Still, leave the heavy drinking for those who want to go on the the pub, which is not strictly a "work event". If your London workplace has much diversity, you may have several co-workers who don't drink at all.
Indeed, although there are extremes here I feel are quite detrimental.
I am not a fan of the "Liquid Lunch" culture I've seen from contractors working for some crown-owned banks who can't pay 200% bonuses this year, nor am I 100% sold on the mandatory company pub-quizz for new media agencies, feels too much like mandatory fun.
Beer trolley OTOH, I'm in :) IIRC the German SAP dev team breakroom is garnished with beer taps. Might explain a lot about ABAP.
Equality is not the answer. There is no equality in nature. We have a discrimination problem, but the opposite of that is not equality, it's respect. Somewhere along the way, people started assuming that if women are equal to men, they would be respected. No. You don't want to be respected because you are equal to other respected people. You should be respected for who you are. If you are a woman, great. Make sure people appreciate that. But don't try to be equal.
Gender equality is a dirty term. Let's end this and stop using it. Gender collaboration and respect is what we need.
Next an article on religion, maybe race or maybe politics.
I feel compassion for anyone who tries to share their thoughts on topics like these. Because whatever your opinions are you will be shouted down.
As @chroma says it's 'radioactive'; but that doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about it.
It would be nice not to see so much vitriol but hey, a lot of us are good with computers because we are/were rubbish with people. So it's probably to be expected, but something we can all try to work on.
women bought into stereotypes 10 or so years ago which prevented them from learning the key skills. Quite recently geek has become sheek so those stereotypes are no longer a barrier to entry, but never the less the belief in those old stereotypes already skewed the numbers heavily in the favor of men. Programming just has not been "cool" long enough for enough women to have learned the skills... it takes years, perhaps decades to become a strong developer
Social constructivism again. Including, as usual: 1) cherry-picked statistics, 2) made-up anecdotal explanations without any scientific base, 3) a couple of dogmas about how it can and should be, and 4) a made-up solution wihout any scientific base.
I don't think there are two real strong reasons for wanting to see representative distribution in a profession: distributing power & vestiges. Power is the important one.
1. Power - Near equal representation in some professions is more important that in others is because these are positions of power. Law, medicine, journalism, film etc. Are expressions and sources of power and status/
The central component of discrimination against woman or minorities was always disempowerment. Most things stem from that. Under representation in positions of power is a way that disempowerment is expressed.
There's a self re-enforcing dynamic to these things. Under/over representation in certain professions also create and enforce the power dynamic.
Women becoming lawyers, journalists & politicians was both a cause and an effect of a more equal distribution of power. This leaks into other areas. A housewife in a world of female ministers and lawyers is more powerful within her family.
So, is programming a position of power? Does the profession have that kind of importance. In my opinion, it is. Technology is the agent of change in our times. Programming & engineering are the root and stem of technology. It's not a traditionally important profession, but I think it is one now.
2. Killing off vestiges of the old discriminatory world.
A male dominant profession can be hard for women to penetrate just because of momentum. Take a simple example from the list of female dominated professions: maternity nursing or child care. Maternity leave, career breaks & part time are probably more common and therefore tolerated in these fields than in construction or truck driving.
OTOH, many variants of political correctness are awful and dehumanizing. Sometimes they're a price we need to pay for just social change, but IMO it is a price. (3)If you see bad behavior from other men, speak up. (4)Don't attempt romantic relationships. (5) No drinking
This is one of the things which leads to (and has led to) a neutered, reserved and false work culture. It encourages trolls who find ways to misinterpret intentions and "take offense." It creates this dualism where people must discipline their work avatar. I don't want to single out female inclusions. This is a complicated issue and I don't have all my thoughts on it straight. There are a lot of casualties in honesty. Part of this forced reservedness is just the need to be diplomatic and reserved in general.
For me, this falseness of the "corporate me" people play is what makes work unpleasant. So, when I here someone cheerfully suggest some simple rules like Jeff has, I see a cost.
Basically, with rule (1, hacker school rules) they are asking to lower the standards. That's not how things work. Would it be OK if this was about Medicine, not programming? Would it be OK that your colleague does not know where the bladder is? Have a surgery without anesthesia? Sometimes you can't change the culture without substantially changing the standards, and it is NOT OK to hold women to lower standards of rigorousness.
This is where the debate goes wrong. Being a decent person to women isn't some kind of personal sacrifice you need to make, it's a strict subset of being a decent person in general. If someone knows less than you about something, you should not mock that person or make them feel inferior, you should help them. That is the right thing to do, irrespective of the gender of the person you're dealing with.
We should think of programming as a large fellowship (the word 'community' is overused, but it would also work here). You meet another person who is interested enough in programming to get started, then that person is your brother or sister. You want to help them, partly because it's the right thing to do and partly because it is in our collective interest to do so. We don't need bad programmers out there, screwing up because nobody helped them, and we don't need to scare off the beginners before they've even had a chance to learn much. Sure, people should have their mistakes corrected just as a journalist might expect to have their typos corrected by a sub-editor, but there's no reason to do it in a harsh or critical way. Just be a nice person about it, it's really not so complicated.
> If someone knows less than you about something, you should not mock that person or make them feel inferior, you should help them. That is the right thing to do, irrespective of the gender of the person you're dealing with.
Why do you assume that merely telling someone that they are not qualified is the same as mocking them ? Sometimes the best way to help someone is to let them know that they're going to need a year or more of disciplined study in a particular area before they'll be capable of contributing in a meaningful way to the given project. It's better to tell them that up front than to string them along under the false pretense that they'll be able to "pick up" what is needed along the way
That would be good advice in that situation. Certainly, allowing people to believe that they can "pick up" programming knowledge without working hard at it would be irresponsible. Telling someone the truth about their work is generally a good idea. You can easily do this in a helpful, non-mocking way, so I don't really see the conflict here.
The OP linked to the Hacker School Rules, which state that people should not be humiliated for their lack of knowledge. These rules say that the following responses to encountering an inexperienced person would be wrong:
"omg, you call yourself a programmer but you don't know how to write a thread-safe hash map?"
"well, actually, if you knew how to use git properly you would have done a rebase there"
"you're using MegaTest? everyone knows SuperDuperTest is the best testing framework, use that instead"
Those are all unprofessional and unhelpful things to say. In contrast:
"that's OK, concurrency is pretty hard. if you want to learn more about it, I can give you some pointers but you probably want to build up your knowledge a bit more before attempting this."
"ok, let's take a look at the git log now. you see how the history has some of your 'figuring stuff out' commits in there? well, there's a way of tidying up your commit history before merging it in - there's this thing called rebasing, which we can use to make our history easier to understand. here's a good tutorial on it - give me a shout if you need some help"
"the MegaTest library is OK, but it's not that well-maintained any more and quite a few people have migrated to SuperDuperTest. there's a really good post about the differences here, and you might want to pick that up for your next project"
Obviously, these are caricatures to some extent. But the point is not that people who are getting stuff wrong should not be corrected, the point is that there's a good way and a bad way to correct them, and choosing the good way makes the world a better place for everyone.
This is one of the reasons why I like remote work so much. If most of the work conversation is happening in a basecamp or hipchat which is logged then if a particular team member is phrasing his communication in a demeaning way or doing anything else to discourage others from group-learning then that behavior pattern will be discerned by everyone else relatively quickly and it can be dealt with. In an office team people can get away with being a dick for years without anyone being able to call them on it to correct the situation.
Some things are thrilling because they are hard. Software development has the amazing quality that everything that is not-hard is automated immediately, leaving little need for humans doing "easy" work. Highly competent developers are sought after because companies know that they cannot be replaced with a group of average developers. What you say has nothing to do with women, it's obvious advice for good manners. I 'll take it, it's polite to stop being dorky around women, but, on work matters, there should be no rounded edges.
My peers have been obsessed since puberty. They don't have to be lured into the industry because they never could have stayed away. Their 10,000 hours thoroughly shaped them because it came at the expense of a normal social life. Someone who starts at 20 is interested in paychecks, not programming. I would drum today's bottom half out of the industry, not swell their ranks.
You're kinda right. I started programming on BBC Micros when I was 9, and there's really no way around the fact that the only way you can know as much as I do about programming at my age is by having that kind of experience.
However, software is an industry. We need more people, and we can't travel back in time to teach the 10-year-olds of 2004 how to code. It's perverse, but part of the reason for the shitty nature of most software projects is the imbalance between demand for good software and supply of people capable of providing it. This is what leads to over-work, death-marches, time pressure and the attempt to prevent programmers getting involved in "distractions" like talking to customers, figuring out what the software should really be doing and so on.
Currently, the best way for employers to maximise the amount of software they produce is to get their best coders to focus on writing code, stripping away any other aspect of the job. Management, analysis, design, testing, all of these get shifted on to non-technical (read: easier/cheaper to hire) people who then fuck it up because they don't know anything about how software works, or at least how the software we need right now should work. Sure, it can be a good thing for developers that demand for their services is so much higher than the supply, but the long-term effects really aren't good. I'd rather work in a world where the obsessive programming-before-they-could-legally-drink people get to be lead developers, but the rest of the team can also program decently. And that means training the latecomers properly. (I appreciate that some of this may seem condescending to the latecomers - in all honesty, I think many people have the potential to be excellent developers given time and encouragement, but I'm trying to stick within the premise of the parent comment).
I don't think that the Hacker School rules have a goal of lowering standards, but rather of preventing the one-upmanship which is so common among (usually male) programmers. To someone who may be feeling overwhelmed by the learning curve inherent with transitioning from small academic or recreational coding projects to real-world environments such dynamics could be very demoralizing. Anecdotally, men who stay in tech tend to have a high tolerance for it, but it's secondary to the actual practice of coding and people who are feeling less confident don't need to worry about competing in these games. Of course if someone is working on a real-world codebase they have to know what they're doing, but learning from peers does not need to alienate anyone, at least in principle.
So there are a lot of (1)'s in the artlcle. Are you talking about "Diversity leads to better results" or "Abide by the Hacker School Rules" or "No feigning surprise" ?
I'd like to address your Medicine analogy, but it'd be more appropriate if I knew what you were referring to :)
And yet, because I want to further the discussion, I will play...
I think the most effective way to reduce discrimination in tech is to go underground. Do not think of yourself as a crusader for (insert topic here). Keep your identity small[1] and simply attack bad ideas no matter where they come from[2]. Blind yourself when evaluating candidates. Make sure that you do not know the name of the person applying for a position, since that information highly correlates with their race and gender. Musicians figured this out long ago: all that matters the sound. Likewise, with programmers all that matters is the code. If your code is good, you are good. If it's not good, be glad: you get to learn something new. Appreciate it, because until recently, learning new things was a rare event.
I think this mentality can help us not only with this specific problem, but with similar problems that we will encounter in the future. We owe it to each other and ourselves. We need to advance our field and pursue excellence no matter where it comes from, no matter where it leads to.
1. http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
2. Likewise, endorse good ideas no matter where they come from. If it helps your ego, think of it as taking advantage of your enemies.