Maybe a bit tagent, but a comment to the article claims that stackoverflow.com is a men favored place, and thus there is a need to have a female exclusive place where female coders can ask questions and get answers.
Could someone explain this to me? I know that stackoverflow actually has less female participants than software industry in general, but any causes is eluding me. Are there just a number of hidden stories out there about all the sexist comments being made (have not seen any story, or any such comment while using the site), or are question made by females being singled out and left unanswered? We hear constantly about the evils done in IRC rooms , and we hear about conferences/work places where females don't get respected when they got similar amount of experience as to their men co-workers. Do either of those exist on stackoverflow, and if not, why is stackoverflow not gender equal in participants?
Well, I know every time I answer a question on Stack I make sure to check the gender of the OP first. On the off chance they are female I just respond: "Software is like sex; it's better when it's free - Linus Torvalds". /s
In all seriousness there is no partiality to StackExchange - as one can remain completely anonymous. The only questions that consistently aren't answered the the ones that have been asked hundreds of times. Code is ignorant of whether it's programmer has a Y chromosome. This is simply oversensitivity for oversensitivity's sake... and I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds it a bit annoying.
Code is ignorant of gender. Coders are not. Code doesn't answer questions. Coders do. Code doesn't post on forums. Coders do. Code doesn't answer differently based on the perceived gender of the questioner. (Some) coders do.
Some people are happy hiding who they are so they can get a decent answer. Some people are not.
I don't understand how concealment comes into play. I no more conceal my gender on SO than I conceal my preference for cats or dogs, political stance, or my alcoholism. That is, those things are not mentioned because they are not relevant and don't even consider bringing them up, not because I am concealing anything.
"I don't understand how concealment comes into play"
Many people choose handles that make obvious their gender. Not deliberately so; people often choose handles based on their names and names are, as a general rule, indications of gender.
Many women go on to chose handles for themselves online that deliberately obscure their gender in such forums. Someone who would be, for example, JennyKibble in many places becomes JKibble. This is how concealment comes into play.
"I no more conceal my gender"
The vast majority of the world's population is not you.
> Many women go on to chose handles for themselves online that deliberately obscure their gender in such forums. Someone who would be, for example, JennyKibble in many places becomes JKibble. This is how concealment comes into play.
Fair enough, I suppose I have always considered such abridgement to just be general identity obfuscation, not sometimes specifically gender obfuscation.
> "I no more conceal my gender"
> The vast majority of the world's population is not you.
Yeah... that selective quoting alters the meaning of my words beyond recognition...
"Yeah... that selective quoting alters the meaning of my words beyond recognition..."
The point I was aiming at is that using yourself, as a sample size of one, and extending the conclusions you draw from your own behaviour to the behaviour of others is prone to error.
On a personal note, I thank you for, and congratulate you on, your civilised response and your amenability to considering beyond the knowledge and beliefs you have at the time; an attitude I hope to present myself. Either I'm getting too old, or internet discussion has gone downhill in recent months.
This area of an active study (which my wife studies), so I will make a comment, although any mistakes are my own, not my wife's or her research!
Many women doing computing at university have repeated bad experiences, with either asking or trying to answer questions in a vaguely public setting (that is, outside a small clique of friends).
I would guess (and this is where I am stretching) that this discourages them from taking part in the most public of Q&A sites.
I waffled on this when I created my account, but ultimately I want it associated with me and my name, not just a random name that anyone could claim as their own. That said, I've thought about having an anon account simply because I don't want to ask a stupid question and have someone bring gender into it (because, unfortunately, this happens). So I'm in this cycle of where I just browse StackOverflow and use my account to favorite things instead of taking the risk.
I did recently have someone in UXExchange comment on an old answer of mine (which had been upvoted a few times) to essentially tell me I was wrong about everything I said. The post was dated and no one else had replied to the thread in awhile. This same person had tweeted me around the same timeframe inviting me to join their chatroom. I hate assuming gender had anything to do with it, but it seemed odd that both of these would come out of nowhere, especially because telling someone they're wrong on a 2 year old post in this industry is like.. really?
That's an approach some women use successfully (including many of the techie women I know), but in aggregate it seems that either most women aren't trying it, or it doesn't work for them. One entirely speculative guess is that men and women might, on average, have different enough interaction patterns in asking/answer questions that an environment dominated by one gender feels like it, even if the participants' genders aren't disclosed. That doesn't even require any kind of hard biological differences; could be entirely a cultural effect. Thinking about my own online participation, lots of subtle cues go into whether a particular venue, even an anonymous one, feels like my kind of place.
I hope such research get traction, as it clearly is needed to move the discussion forward in regard to gender equality in the software industry/community. Its surely something I would read if published.
I wonder if the effect of public Q&A setting follow for every area of education, or if its worse in IT. Comparing my own knowledge of say history classes (place where gender equality is quite good) vs computer classes, my initial thought brings to mind that history classes puts Q&A and social discussion through out all the day, but in a computer class, all the Q&A is put to the end of the day where students compete to answers most and best. I could easily see how one of those settings would interact differently with current culture and social gender norms.
Before asking the question, I never posted on StackOverflow before, because I expected a mean answer, and that's exactly what happened. StackOverflow is not a very safe place for asking questions. It's a place where guys go to show off how much smarter they are than you. Most of StackOverflow questions start with "I'm a noob at this..." - that's because people, even guys, feel the need to pre-qualify the question by proving that they're not complete idiots despite not knowing the answer.
Asking a question is a vulnerable thing. You are admitting in public that you don't know something. It's really hard to participate when you know the very same public you're trying to get help from will turn around and critique you.
Learn to write Python code properly according to the style guide – PEP-8 filter highlights only bad code and in your case the whole file is badly written.
I am a male. This does not strike me as mean. I'm thinking now though... are you maybe just an emotionally sensitive person? The response is maybe bluntly put, but it is probably sincere and hastily said. Which makes it easier to construe it non-personally -- it's just a guy on the Internet who said it, he probably doesn't even know your gender. And you know what -- as weird as it may sound, I wish I had received this kind of criticism when I was younger. Too often I was showered with positive comments that I became afraid of non-positive criticism to the point that I stopped taking risks that would endanger my reputation or feelings. It took me some time to learn to just take all criticism and make the best of it: detach the person-element, and just take from it what is truly useful to me, but I'm glad I did.
Edit: I'm thinking 'are you maybe just an emotionally sensitive person' may have come off as offensive? Sorry if it did, I'm not sure how else to phrase it, you probably know what I mean here.
>Edit: I'm thinking 'are you maybe just an emotionally sensitive person' may have come off as offensive? Sorry if it did, I'm not sure how else to phrase it, you probably know what I mean here.
I think it is more to do with familiarity of the culture of compute Q/A sites. My dad recently was looking around the internet for a solution to his computers overheating problem . He remarked to me about how rude everyone on the internet forums he looked at was (he did not post, just read existing threads). As someone who has used this type of site for a long time, I look at the answers and see valuable information relevant to the question asked. But, I can see how someone not familiar with the culture would find it rude or offensive.
Looking at this case in particular, the question was
"Every time I save my code in Sublime Text 2, all of the lines end up highlighted as seen below. It's pretty annoying, and I would love to disable it, but I'm not sure what triggered it in the first place or what to Google. Any ideas?"
And the full response was:
"The cause is SublimeLinter plug-in and its PEP-8 filter
Learn to write Python code properly according to the style guide – PEP-8 filter highlights only bad code and in your case the whole file is badly written."
Looking at it as someone fammilar with the culture, I see:
A statement of the cause. Links to the technical resources relevent to the problem.
The 'mean' part of the answer starts "Learn to write Python code properly according to the style guide", Which I read as advice saying, you should learn to write Python code following the style guide (which is both good advice (in my opinion), and directly relevent to the problem being discussed).
The rest of the answer reads:
"PEP-8 filter highlights only bad code and in your case the whole file is badly written."
I read this answer as a concise description of the problem ' PEP-8 highlights bad code, and your whole file is bad by its standards [because it does not conform to the style guide]'
Again, this is all coming from the perspective of someone familiar with the culture. The problem isn't so much that SO (and simmilar sites) is unwelcoming to women, than it is that they are unwelcoming to new people. The problem is that we want consise answers, and writing consise, non-offensive answers is difficult and time consuming. So, as a culture, we evolved to view such answers as non-offensive.
EDIT: as an aside, the original answer has since be edited to be less offensive, and offer more explanation as to why learning PEP-8 style is a good idea. Personally, I would prefer getting the original answer as it is easier to read and parse out the important info.
Couple points. First of all, you being a women in this case seems completely irrelevant to both your question and the people who responded to you on SO. Was the injection of gender supposed to give us context for your response, or imply that you were responded to differently because of it?
Secondly, I guess we can disagree with what "mean" is. As you yourself pointed out, his response was super helpful to you -- and he isn't even paid to do it, just a friendly internet volunteer, helping you with your problem and linking you to more resources. As for what you called "mean" ... lets deconstruct that a bit...
"Learn to write Python code properly according to the style guide" -- not mean, a short and to the point recommendation, abrasive at worst.
"PEP-8 filter highlights only bad code" -- obviously as PEP-8 is a style guide, he means 'badly styled code', he could have made it more clear, but I think the context is obvious.
"and in your case the whole file is badly written." -- this is important, it explains why there is markup on every line, and again PEP-8 is a style guide, so he is saying your entire file is badly formatted by PEP-8 standards. Again, nothing hurtful in there.
I can see how the words "bad code" might be an emotional trigger, but in context, it makes perfect sense and since you didn't show any real code, just some boilerplate Poll/Choose -- I can't even fathom what there was to be defensive about, or hurt by.
Hmm. That comment is brash, and perhaps intimidating to a beginner, but I wouldn't call it mean. "It makes my eyes bleed" or "it looks like an idiot wrote it" vs "badly written" (it also seems like a communication problem - his answer was badly written you might say).
brash and intimidating communities is clearly a factor when factoring in how user friendly something is, and how easy it is to join a community. What one might not think of however, is how that effect gender equality for a community.
That for me is a interesting insight to draw (through studies would be nice to confirm it).
I tell all of my friends who program and sometimes talk about "oh, maybe I should do side project Y and.or learn technology X" and who happen to have young daughters - "Dude, you want an interesting challenge - I suggest teach your daughter how to code - use Squeak, Alice3D."
Usually - they are like "The IT industry is doomed.. or I don't want my daughter to be a coder.. or she doesn't want to learn how to code.. or (worse) my wife would never want that(!egads!)".
And I retort (as nicely as possible): "Even if they don't become coders, they will learn how to problem solve, how to better think, how to analyze. Make a game together! Don't even start with code, start with pieces of paper"
The goal is not for them to be coders but to bond with them and teach them a useful skill that isn't necessarily about a livelihood (like fathers teaching sons fishing)"
I'm worried that there could be a focus on compairing if stuff is less than three.
Just kidding, I think it's a great thing that females are getting a new role model in the tech field because talent should decide if you will become a programmer and not ancient role models.
Exactly, we should be way past the stereotypes that crippled society for ages. Programming is for everyone, initiatives like this one are a good step in that direction.
Could someone explain this to me? I know that stackoverflow actually has less female participants than software industry in general, but any causes is eluding me. Are there just a number of hidden stories out there about all the sexist comments being made (have not seen any story, or any such comment while using the site), or are question made by females being singled out and left unanswered? We hear constantly about the evils done in IRC rooms , and we hear about conferences/work places where females don't get respected when they got similar amount of experience as to their men co-workers. Do either of those exist on stackoverflow, and if not, why is stackoverflow not gender equal in participants?