
I knew exactly how she felt - joshguthrie
http://trishkhoo.com/2013/04/i-knew-exactly-how-she-felt/
======
memset
I will offer an experience which is the inverse of this!

I am a male software engineer who works in fashion (and before this I worked
in wine.) I knew nothing about wine when I started, and my fashion sense is
prototypically, well, male-software-centric.

People in the wine industry are palpably aware that people view it as "hoity-
toity". Professionals I've worked with are usually very gracious in explaining
what it means when you say a wine is "dark" or "buttery" because that
pretentious image is something we want to overcome.

Fashion is a bit different. "I like that chambray shirt!" What? "Erm, that's,
uh, that denim material you're wearing." Oh.

Or "I saw someone next door with an Hermes bag; it was gorgeous." Everyone had
quite a laugh when I asked who Hermes was. Or expressed surprise that the
Vogue Spring edition is the one where they show off new styles, which is why
it's so thick and has so few ads. Or the difference between hair paste and
hair gel.

I feel like there is a bigger lesson in this story: I've got to stop making
people feel silly for not getting my Star Wars references, and they've got to
understand that there's no logical reason I'd know anything about the big
names in fashion. I occasionally meet people who get this - you know your
domain and I know mine, and we can still talk to each other without othering.

And that skill - of being able to get along with your PM even though they
"clearly don't know anything about code" - is one worth developing.

~~~
seivan
The problem isn't PM's know jack about code. The problem is the set where a PM
would even be required. That means there's a structural flaw in your process.

The idea of having a project manager is ridiculous. People _should_ manage
themselves and take ownership of the project. Making the PM useless.

~~~
xyzzy123
That's probably why, when building a skyscraper, modern construction practices
dictate that all the subcontractors just "do their own thing" and sort out
with each other when it's OK to put in walls, pipes, wiring and structural
alterations.

The N^2 communication overhead is OK, because PMs are just useless overhead
anyway.

I heard sometimes building projects fail because the PM only understood what
was supposed to be happening and who was responsible for what, as opposed to
having advanced plumbing, HVAC, electrical and structural engineering
knowledge.

</sarcasm> (I don't usually resort to it... promise...)

~~~
pekk
That would be great if software were exactly analogous to building
skyscrapers, and developers were idiot construction workers who do nothing but
put the sheetrock and nails where they are asked.

(Note: I am not saying that construction workers are idiots, I am saying that
programmers are not idiot-construction-workers.)

There is not just one way to organize a project.

~~~
jbooth
Construction workers and programmers are both tradesmen, for most values of
the word. I know you added a disclaimer already but I figured I'd just
emphasize the point.

------
s_baby
I see plenty of insightful comments here but no one acknowledging the
conclusion.

>It’s funny because the evening started out with a lady giving a speech about
how the IT industry is alienating women. But for some girls, it feels like
women are alienating the girls who want to be in IT.

How many of these articles/talks put the impetus on changing women alienating
women from tech? How likely are you to see some twitter post about girls like
this acting "not cool" even though it's a widespread problem? Feminist
discourse is usually 1 dimensional. More often than not it's only interested
in black and white narratives where women are victims and men are
perpetrators. In the few cases where other women are shown as the problem they
are framed as victims of patriarchal socialization not responsible for their
behavior.

~~~
eightpersimmons
Absolutely - women sometimes internalize and participate in misogynistic and
cruel behavior, and it can be hard to talk about.

I've seen this happen with the "fake geek girl" phenomenon - some women who
feel that they are legitimate parts of the community participate in this kind
of destructive policing because they've bought into the cultural misogyny and
are often rewarded and have their status reinforced in their community.

On a much more damaging level, this happens with slut-shaming and sexual
policing. One of the major factors in the recent suicides of teen rape victims
was the rejection and shaming by their female peers.

~~~
philwelch
Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? When women bully other women, it's
because they're agents of the patriarchy?

~~~
eightpersimmons
I'm honestly not sure what seems ridiculous to you. In these instances, the
female bullies are acting out misogynistic discourses. Can you clarify what
your sticking point is?

~~~
philwelch
And what do you call it when boys bully each other to enforce arbitrary social
norms? Because I don't see a substantial difference between the two cases.

~~~
shardling
If you accept that our society suppresses women, it's pretty obvious what the
difference is. One type of behavior directly reinforces the status quo, the
other doesn't.[1]

And if you want to talk about societal problems, that's pretty bloody
important! Yeah, both types of bullying feel just as shitty to the individual,
but the broader ramifications are definitely different. Nothing is isolated.

If you disagree with the fundamental premise (society is sexist) that's a
whole other issue, but you should be at least able to see why others see a
distinction.

1\. Keeping in mind that you seem to want to compare arbitrary bullying to the
more specific type persimmons references.

~~~
philwelch
It still doesn't follow from the premise that "society suppresses women to the
benefit of men" that "any time an individual woman is suppressed, it is to the
benefit of men". How do men even benefit from social taboos enforced my women
against other women being geeky, or for that matter, slutty? That's probably
the opposite of what would benefit men.

Society is more complicated than that. There are more forces swirling around
than patriarchy. Any insular group will eventually enforce arbitrary social
norms on each other, and since people tend to socialize with those of the same
sex, both genders form insular groups in our society.

------
noonespecial
I'm not sure the author quite understood the seeing Star Wars thing was a
super low bar fitness test. Once long ago my new wife asked me why geeks
always wear tshirts with obscure references that no one gets. I was slightly
put out by the question until I figured it out. They're a uniform. It's how we
id the friendlies on the battlefield.

~~~
geoka9
> I figured it out. They're a uniform.

I think it's just a way of showing off. Case in point:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12532552/what-part-of-
mil...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12532552/what-part-of-milner-
hindley-do-you-not-understand)

The guy has no idea what the notation means by still wants to wear the
t-shirt.

~~~
smacktoward
You're both right. It's social signaling:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory>

Your Star Wars or Hindley-Milner t-shirt tells people who see it that you're a
particular kind of person. This encourages people who are like you to approach
you, because it signals that you're safe -- you're "one of us." Likewise, it
discourages those who are unlike you from doing the same, sparing you from
having conversations with people you find boring.

If you work in a community where high intelligence is seen as socially
valuable -- i.e., where a way the high-status individuals distinguish
themselves from the rest is by highlighting their intelligence -- like tech,
it's not surprising that you'd want clothing that would signal that you are a
high-intelligence person, even if you aren't one. It's an attempt to get your
foot in the door of social groups that would otherwise be closed to you, by
camouflaging yourself as "one of us."

~~~
michaelt
Let's say you started a company and named it after a technical concept from
computer science (for example a higher order function that computes the fixed
point of other functions in lambda calculus) would that be an example of this
signalling?

------
narrator
I'm going to annoyingly meta on this one because I'm feeling really
philosophical today.

There is a constant dissonance in the western world between assumptions about
"ideal" or "moral" statistical probability distributions and actual
statistical probability distributions over a large sample size when it comes
to any politically sensitive topics like the one implied in the article (i.e
women having an interest in science and technology).

This happens over and over again. There are thousands of articles a year on
this kind of thing and millions of human years spent mulling why the ideal
curve doesn't match the actual curve. It's the perfect topic for non-
productive rambling because it's always dissonant and it never goes anywhere.

The dear reader probably already knows this, but to the idealist, the ideal
always equals the actual in a just world and evidence of a mismatch is
evidence of injustice. Those who accept or tolerate the actual not matching
the ideal are presumed to support injustice.

These arguments are endlessly repeated. Nevertheless, seemingly endless
repetition is a very effective means of political discourse. I realized this
most profoundly when studying religious texts. Points that are intended to be
remembered are mentioned over and over again to the point of mind-numbing
boredom. Repetition is good for remembering and people only believe what they
can remember. Thus the most effective strategy of any activist is to repeat
their message over and over again and have the adherents do the same and
approve the same and ostracise those who criticize and those who don't care,
thus spreading the idea through the society via social psychological
principles and the pure intellectual brute force of repetition.

~~~
newnewnew
What we are experiencing is a particular flavor of secular religion called
"cultural Marxism". Marxists believe that social forces are best understood
through a model of _class conflict_.

Economic Marxists explained the ills of society through the conflict between
rich capitalists and the poor working proletariat. The rise of the middle
class threw it a curve ball that it couldn't explain and it fell out of favor
(outside of the Soviet union and American academia).

Cultural Marxism uses the same conflict between dominant class and under class
to explain social pathologies in the under class. Thus, we all hear about
statistics where under classes are not meeting the same performance as the
upper class, with the implication that it is the upper class's fault. This is
called "oppression".

So we know that women make less than men, but we don't hear much about how men
are falling behind in college degrees and high-school education because this
does not fit the Marxist narrative.

Furthermore, when there is an underrepresentation of an underclass in some
desirable area, we take that to be de facto evidence of oppression (nobody
cares that there are no female garbage collectors or miners). We all except
the collective guilt for the sins of our class and nobody questions whether or
not the Marxist narrative might just be fundamentally flawed.

Modern academic feminism and racial theories are based on Marxist models,
which causes them to make many errors of reasoning IMO. There is also a lot of
data that they can not explain. For example, racial Marxists have no problem
explaining why some minority races do worse in school than white children
(oppression!). But I've yet to hear an explanation from a Marxist as to how
other minority groups (Asians) do way better than white children.

~~~
AlexandrB
> nobody cares that there are no female garbage collectors or miners

Just like nobody cares that there are very-few/no male prostitutes or
strippers.

The underclass you speak of is split along gender lines too - unfortunately.

~~~
philwelch
Prostitution and stripping can be very lucrative professions.

~~~
AlexandrB
So can mining.

------
jerrya
_I said that’s what happens when we hold events for women in IT when there
aren’t that many women in this industry – we tend to broaden the definition of
women in IT._

I can't really speak to this point, but I am curious, when did computer
science and software engineering get rolled into IT?

15 years ago, I would not have said software developers, software engineers,
or test engineers were part of IT. IT was that department that kept the
corporate computers working and worked for the CFO, not part of the department
that shipped products and worked for the VP Engineering.

In the past 5 years, it's become much more inclusive (or so it seems to me.)

~~~
rdouble
Outside of Silicon Valley anything that has to do with a computer has always
been called IT.

~~~
mynewwork
This is entirely wrong. I've always thought one of the peculiarities about the
UK is that they refer to all things computer as "IT" while the rest of the
english-speaking world differentiates.

I don't work in IT and I never will, it's a different job with a different
skill set. I'm not tech support, a dba, or 'the network guy'. I'm a software
engineer and I work in R&D.

~~~
lostlogin
I'm not sure it is - in the same way the battle for the word >hacker< has been
lost, I know that in New Zealand >IT< is a catch all that means someone does
computer stuff.

------
katherineparker
I understand the author as a fellow woman in I.T. (programmer). I never fit in
with the gossipy fashionista crowd either. I was a total geek in the library.
I don't wear the geeky t-shirts though. I like to wear pencil skirts and kick
my high heels off under my desk. Only downside, like noonespecial mentioned,
is that nobody just assumes I'm a programmer since I lack the "uniform".
Anyways, that girl she spoke to in the article seems very smart and ambitious.
I wish her the best of luck in her future career :) Be who you want to be

------
qzxt
I read this about 2 hours ago and I haven't been able to stop thinking about
it. Growing up in a Latino/Black community and being of mixed heritage, it was
never socially easy. My parents divorced, so I'd spend half the year with my
dad - who was Jamaican - in Patterson, NJ, and I'd spend the other half with
my mom - who was Italian - up in Canada.

I always found it interesting how I felt more comfortable in white-as-the-
clouds Ontario, than in Patterson, where there weren't just more black people,
but a lot more mixed race people. I didn't quite like Star Wars or Dr Who, but
I did read a lot of Tolkien, and science, tech, philosophy, or anything,
really, wasn't just something I learned in school so I could do homework; they
were actual things that I engaged with - not that school was any less boring
for me; believe me, it was. It wasn't enough to read Catcher in the Rye, I had
to find out about Salinger, the times he lived in. I liked to talk about
things. What was mostly just school stuff to people were things I actually
liked to think about or talk about or even do. This never really fit very well
into Hip-Hop and girls, and "looking cool" Patterson - though I did rock this
sweet leather jacket once, but I drew some blanks when I channeled my inner
James Dean. Brampton, OTOH, was interesting. It wasn't that people were any
more like I was, or that people automatically liked me any better - though
there was a weird fascination with my hair - but the fact that I liked the
things I liked wasn't something I had to hide. It wasn't that they understood
everything I said, or that they were even all that interested, but very rarely
did anyone ever alienate me for dropping a Hume quote, no one ever told me to
"shove that nerd shit up my ass" when I mentioned the possibility of planting
a radio in someone's skull; no one ever tried to make me socially handicapped
for being interested in any intellectual development.

Reading this, I felt like this girl had just touched my mind. If only I could
touch hers. The feelings of isolation when people who are physically like you
aren't just behaviorally unlike you, but very actively alienating to you. The
feeling of shame when the teacher calls you to give the answer and you don't
know what to do - give the right answer, contribute to the stigma; give the
wrong answer and have others spitefully mock you for "not being as smart as
you think". The absolute feeling of insecurity when innocently mentioning you
don't know something, a privilege available to everyone else, is met with
mocking comments about how they thought you knew everything. If only I could
meet this girl and let her know that it gets better in the end. Hopefully she
finds her own Brampton, ON - somewhere she can be herself with other people
without the feeling of being an artificial limb, rather than a part of a fully
functioning body.

------
stared
I have quite a few female friends who have mostly male friends (just because
of being interested in a particular technical field). And, to be honest, I
have never got idea why someone _needs_ to have friends mostly of the same
gender.

Once someone has interest beyond cliche "gossip, fashion, diet & nail
painting" or "football, cars, sports, binge drinking", well, then why to lock
contacts inside only one's own gender? And if it turns out that most of people
interested in X are of the opposite gender, is it wrong? (Unless it is them
who make a barrier.)

Especially as when there is a heated discussion between two people interested
in (say) the respiratory system of Drosophila melanogaster (a fruit fly, not
to intimidate anyone), then the simplest social characteristics (i.e. gender
and, to some extent, age) very often go away.

And, in fact, what I like _the most_ about people being passionate about their
interests, is that very, very often it goes beyond social status (sometimes
even if one is talking with a professor, who is 50 older than a teenage geek).

~~~
ianstormtaylor
Sorry, but you're arguing against no one. No one said she needed to make
friends with girls because she's a girl. She clearly _wants_ to become friends
with them. And it's unfortunate that she clearly wants to be friends with some
people of her own gender, and yet has such a hard time of it because she's
alienating the other girls and they're alienating her.

~~~
stared
It wasn't an argument, it was a side comment, supporting her approach (similar
to one of many of my friends) and to some extent mocking the (culturally
implicit) premise that one should align with one's own gender[1], see in e.g.
"[...] and how none of the other girls in her class understood anything she
was talking about".

Would ever a tall person said "but none of tall people at my high-school can
understand my jokes"?

[1] And to some extent supporting also:

"It’s funny because the evening started out with a lady giving a speech about
how the IT industry is alienating women. But for some girls, it feels like
women are alienating the girls who want to be in IT."

------
noamsml
I fundamentally disagree with the idea that consuming cultural artifacts that
happen to correlate with liking engineering has anything to do with liking
engineering. If you think liking Star Wars is necessary for being an engineer,
you're probably missing some pretty good people who just aren't that into Star
Wars.

~~~
claudius
Sure, you will miss people, and you will miss good people. But since there is
(according to you) some correlation, it might act as a heuristic, employed
when it is simply not feasible to implement better tests.

~~~
pessimizer
But what if it's a better heuristic for finding young men than engineers?

~~~
claudius
I would argue it is also a very good heuristic for finding Star Wars fans.
Your point being?

~~~
pessimizer
My point being that if 80% of programmers are young men, and knowledge of Star
Wars jokes (or whatever) can find young men at an 80% accuracy from a general
list, but good programmers at only a 64% accuracy from a list of programmers,
you should just cut out the rationalization and just hire based on sex and
race. You haven't discovered a heuristic for hiring good programmers, you've
discovered a heuristic for confirming your own preconceptions, and for
reenforcing stereotypes.

~~~
claudius
Take false positives into account – you will find more young men who are not
engineers than Star Wars fans who are not engineers (for suitable values of
engineers and personal experience). Since such false positives are extremely
annoying[0] when looking for interesting people in a party, you want to
minimise them first, not the false negatives.

[0] A false positive takes you n minutes to discover and abandon, whereas a
false negative ideally doesn’t concern you at all, assuming there are enough
interesting people.

------
coldtea
> _She then talked to me about robotics and physics and programming and how
> none of the other girls in her class understood anything she was talking
> about. They thought she wanted to build the next Terminator or hack into
> Government systems, when she just wanted to build self-driving cars. All the
> other girls would talk about fashion labels and gossip and she would be
> bored out of her mind, wondering why nobody else watched Doctor Who. None of
> them understood the joke on her Darth Vader t-shirt. One of them listened to
> her podcast and asked her what “Marvel” was. One of them told her to stop
> making them feel stupid all the time._

She sounds very cool.

And it goes to show that "sexism is the barrier" is not the whole story.

Those girls in the school never had any encounters with such sexism in the
tech workplace, but they still didn't like the thing even as a hobby.

Which reminds me of my university years (computer science). Those days (early
to mid-nineties) we didn't even have internet at home or any outlet to know
how a "tech workplace" even is. We expected to work in some bank, some big
company IT department or teach CS ourselves. How that work environment would
be, we had absolutely no idea.

Still, it was mostly men that preferred CompSci, whereas biology was mostly
women. Math and applied math also had more women.

(In actual university CS nobody cared if you were a woman or a man. And we had
the outmost respect for geek girls that were in the whole thing. There was
just no sexism of the kind people complain about in the US. If you could do
it, you could do it. And high school kids enrolling to the university had no
idea either -- they were the typical high school kids, having typical high
school relations).

That said, it was mostly boys who cared and nagged their parents to get them
computer systems and game consoles. Girls, being more socially mature earlier,
had a larger social life and could not care less about spending hours every
day in front of a screen.

It's like girls give up the "dolls" phase much earlier, for a more serious and
balanced social life, whereas boys extend the "toy guns/race cars" thing into
puberty and early adulthood even, substituting their toys for FPS shooters,
fantasy novels, superhero comics and RPGs. Which builds some ties to computers
early on...

~~~
rjknight
_And it goes to show that "sexism is the barrier" is not the whole story_

This is true but possibly not in the way that you think. I'm not sure that
girls are _choosing_ that different way of life quite so much as they're
conditioned to do so, and this is discriminatory. I think it's possible to
explain the phenomenon described in the OP via "intersectionality" - in other
words, there are multiple forms of discrimination and they overlap in ways
that sometimes confuse us and deflect us from the true course of treating
people equally. About the best intro I've seen to it is here:
[http://miriamdobson.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/intersectionali...](http://miriamdobson.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/intersectionality-
a-fun-guide/)

In this case, both geeks and women suffer from discrimination in different
contexts. Being a geek and a woman is doubly difficult because mainstream
society (both men and women) say "you're a woman, you shouldn't be a geek".

This ends up producing some pretty weird conclusions like this:
[http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/the-nerdy-
ge...](http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/the-nerdy-gendered-
situation-of-computer-science/) \- which argues that women can only be
encouraged into computer science if we make it less geeky, which basically
discriminates against those who got into computer science _because_ it's geeky
and that's what they like. A properly intersectional understanding would argue
for maximum freedom for both women and geeks and, especially, female geeks who
suffer from multiple discrimination.

~~~
coldtea
> _In this case, both geeks and women suffer from discrimination in different
> contexts. Being a geek and a woman is doubly difficult because mainstream
> society (both men and women) say "you're a woman, you shouldn't be a geek"._

Sure, but why should society like everything? In this case, geeks.

Now, I'm a geek myself. But I still find it OK that society can like some
things (and professions) more than it does others.

Especially since part of the geek essence is being "antisocial" it makes ever
more sense of the general population to not like geeks. So much sense, that
it's actually more like a tautology ("anti-social people are not liked by
society").

Not to mention that geeks themselves do the same distinctions all the time.
Who would waste a second's thought to think a McJob guy or a city cleaner as
somehow "inferior"? Or even people like "office drones" with their Excels and
such?

~~~
chii
why is it that being fans of a popular sport and wear you team s jersey is
cool, while being fans of more niche interests like geeky movies or tech
isn't, to such a degree that kid who like it gets teased? there is some thing
inherent in being more intellectual that provoke those who aren't.

~~~
coldtea
> _why is it that being fans of a popular sport and wear you team s jersey is
> cool, while being fans of more niche interests like geeky movies or tech
> isn't, to such a degree that kid who like it gets teased?_

Because one is "popular" (your words) and the other is "more niche" (also your
words).

So if the many want to tease the few (which is how teasing goes anyway), it
would be the people doing popular things to people doing more niche things.

> _there is some thing inherent in being more intellectual that provoke those
> who aren't._

Yes, that's it's a niche endeavor. Nothing anti-intellectual only about it.

People would equally tease the sole guy who collects stamps or the sole girl
who still listens to Milli Vanilli.

------
mwfunk
Lifelong geek here, and I can totally understand the appeal of this story.
Reading some of the comments is kinda depressing though. There's no "us" and
there's no "them". There are groups of people in the world with similar
clusters of interests, and I guess that one of those clusters corresponds to
traditionally geeky interests. But sometimes it seems like people internalize
the whole us and them thing way too much. I guess it makes social navigation
easier but it gets in the way of really understanding people (and yourself) if
taken too far.

~~~
csense
Thank you for pointing this out.

A bias toward viewing situations as "us vs. them" is part of humans' tribal
nature.

Any time someone points out that something _isn't_ an "us vs. them" situation
(or that a particular position is predicated on a situation being "us vs.
them"), you should really give weight to that criticism because it's a very
easy mistake to make. Look hard at whether it really _is_ an "us vs. them"
situation, and if it isn't, what are the consequences that flow from that?

In this particular example, the case is pretty clear: The parent's spot-on.

------
kobot
I am a girl studying computer science. I never understood the whole geek girl
mentality of "I don't get OTHER girls! They only like shopping! I like nerdy
things!"

I like shopping and makeup. I also like nerdy things like Lord of the Rings
and programming hackathons. I get along with girly girls AND geeks.

People are more complex than "I only like shopping" or "I only like Star
Wars". It's not hard to make friends with people who have different hobbies
than you - in fact it makes your social group more interesting, I find.

Why does there have to be a divide?

~~~
joshguthrie
Like someone posted right below your, because everyone wants to belong to a
Grandfalloon: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon>

It's easier to "belong to a club" by saying either "I like computers", "I like
sports" or "I like my nails painted" than by saying "I like computers, sports
and nails painted".

But didn't we learn that the world isn't binary? :)

------
lgleason
This was a great summary of what I have observed with some groups trying to
inspire women in tech. Lots of marginally technical to non-technical women in
events supposedly focused on women in tech. Instead of fostering the geek
culture the cocktail and sex in the city culture takes over. Gender
stereotypes are re-enforced and they inadvertently took the cause back a
notch.

What we need are more Rails Bridge, Black Girls Code and that sort of thing to
re-enforce feminist geekdom. When the critical mass of any group is slanted
towards non technical people it is tough to convey a message of tech being
cool and make it attractive for kids to want to enter. I would also love to
see a meetup that had a similar makeup and mission as the systers list. I am a
guy, but would actively do whatever I could to support that kind of effort
because the members of that list are great role models for women in tech.

------
nhebb
This actually explains why more women do not get into tech careers. In the
same way that this young woman felt alienated from her schoolmates, many women
who are not into geek culture would feel alienated by CS classmates and the
tech industry.

There's been a lot of talk about getting more women into this industry, and
it's often looked at as a failing of the industry itself. What's plainly
obvious to me is that many (most?) women just aren't interested in the field.

~~~
vec
> What's plainly obvious to me is that many (most?) women just aren't
> interested in the field.

Which is exactly the problem. There's no strong reason to suggest that this
difference is due to anything other than social pressure. Something in the way
we socialize children is convincing half the potential talent pool that they
shouldn't develop an interest in technology fields, almost certainly because
they see few if any adult role models.

It's not really a failing of the industry, in the sense that we're probably
not the ones who originally caused it. But it is a problem for the industry,
and one that industry insiders are in a unique position to solve.

~~~
lgieron
I've read about studies [1] which shown that boys and girls under 1 year old
already show preferences which we attribute with stereotypical gender roles
(boys were more appealed to mechanical objects while girls were more
interested in human faces (=>social interactions)).

[1] Since there are also studies which show that a nontrivial part of results
in social science papers are not replicable, it has to be taken with a tiny
grain of salt.

------
jimmyjazz14
I found the references to geek pop culture items odd, what does liking Star
Wars, Doctor Who or comics have to do with working in IT? I have nothing
against those things (nor would I consider myself of fan of them) but, I
certainly don't think someone who doesn't embrace geek culture is any less
intelligent or less able to fit into the IT industry as this story seems to
imply. I don't presume to know the entire situation for the girl in the story
but, to me it seems as if this she was dismissing her peers in much the same
way they where dismissing her.

------
mtkd
Isn't this just a density issue - like (for lack of a better analogy) being
gay in a small town?

I can understand it's difficult when you are too young to choose geographic
location - but once you can - the marginalisation is quickly solved by moving
somewhere with a higher density of like-minded people.

The challenge, I guess, is to advertise that these places do exist - but I see
so many 'Geek Girl Dinners' type events I can't believe that is really the
case any more.

~~~
djcapelis
> The challenge, I guess, is to advertise that these places do exist - but I
> see so many 'Geek Girl Dinners' type events I can't believe that is really
> the case any more.

I wish it was that simple and this was already solved, but even in the Bay
Area it can be frustratingly hard to connect with people who come from similar
perspectives. I was just at a women in tech event last night and three of us
went off for sushi afterward and we all talked about how frustrating it can be
to find people who feel like us and how nice it would be if it wasn't so
difficult.

I think the starkest variant of this I've seen was when one woman asked
another: "Why should we even bother trying to increase the number of women in
tech? Sometimes it's not even a good field, why should we be working so hard
to get women into it?"

The other woman's response was simple and to the point: "I do it because it'd
be nice to have someone to go to lunch with."

The truth of that statement isn't so much in that she couldn't have found
anyone to go to lunch with ever, but the relative truth that exists when you
feel less comfortable in a group because you're the one who is so different.
For many people, tech is a place where everyone is different and different is
cool and great. For women, different is often still just different.

------
ritchiea
How old is the young woman the author spoke with? Don't most smart, geeky
people in HS feel a bit out of place? There's a whole PG essay on that [1].

[1] <http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html>

~~~
claudius
You should take into account that schools in Europe are not necessarily the
same as schools in the US (it was an event in London). I felt quite at home in
my school’s physics and chemistry classes, and maths was sometimes boring, but
overall okay, too.

------
delinka
"But for some girls, it feels like women are alienating the girls who want to
be in IT."

For most children, up through high school, it feels like they're being
alienated by their peers for being "different."

------
pavel_lishin
> One of them told her to stop making them feel stupid all the time.

The world is full of idiots. What she experienced isn't unique to women, it
happens to anyone who ends up spending time with people who do not care about
knowledge.

~~~
pekk
You're glossing over something significant. Some subcultures (and
demographics) suffer more from norms against intellectualism. It is more
stigmatized as a woman, among the general population of other women in the US,
to be into technical stuff, than to be a man into the same things. It is
similar to how bookish black kids may be told to stop 'acting white'.

~~~
pessimizer
>It is similar to how bookish black kids may be told to stop 'acting white'.

As someone who was an absurdly bookish black kid (pre-edit: from a segregated
black neighborhood in Chicago, lower middle-class, never knew a white person
until I was 13) in the 80's I never heard this once except as a declaration by
white people about the pressure felt by black children not to achieve.

I agree with your overall point, though, just not the example.

~~~
NoPiece
It is good to hear that was your experience, because it is disheartening to
think that knowledge or education would be negatively stigmatized in any
community.

Interestingly, Barack Obama is one of the big propagators of that idea. I
think I heard from him first, and that's probably true of many others, when in
his 2004 DNC speech (where many Americans heard him for the first time), he
said, "Children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off
the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a
book is acting white.”

------
olgagalchenko
Ugh. "Our people"? This post is alienating me.

I am a female software engineer. I also cannot stand sci-fi and love fashion,
romantic comedies, painting my nails and all kinds of girly shit. I can gush
over a beautiful Hermes scarf or my favorite chambray shirt one moment, and
automate the fuck out of the iOS app testing process the next. (Just an
example that the author, because she's in testing, might be interested in.) If
nothing else, we share our love for programming. So, the next time you dismiss
a girl because she dare wear heels and has never seen Star Wars, you might be
missing out on a friend.

I totally get that it has been your experience that girls who are into
traditional girly shit are lame and not worth talking to, but maybe it's
because you're not giving them a chance. What happened to not judging a book
by its cover?

(Unless you don't like Arrested Development. Then I hate you. :)

~~~
joshguthrie
I second that emotion.

Though one could admire the issue moving away from "women in tech" to "non-
geek persons in tech" ;)

------
danso
Had a hard time understanding the OP's point...but mostly because I don't
understand what the event was about. Was it advertised explicitly as an
IT/engineering event? I guess you could assume that from "Women in IT", but I
think it's nice that such an event shows how information technology
encompasses a lot of different fields. Even on "Hacker News", there are a good
number of articles about marketing and law because geeks realize that being
successful is not strictly based on coding skills.

As someone already pointed out, "IT" is a nebulous term. In my day, while at
college, it was almost never used to refer to computer engineers, but was more
intended for MIS majors, which was considered to be the "computer science of
Excel". So it's kind of strange that the OP is calling for more elitism when
the event used a term that's extremely vague and inclusive.

------
xradionut
I've observed that most people allow themselves to go along with the social
norms gender wise, with a few exceptions. Then I realize what a wonderful
geeky outlier of a spouse that I have. My female coworkers are amazed by my
tales of my wife's exploits in auto repair, gaming, hunting and appliance
repair.

------
sev
I know there's a bunch of quotes out there that all basically the same thing:

 _The more you repeat something, the more you believe something to be true,
the more you will cause it to be true or real._

I suggest men, women, and everyone stop making this a bigger deal than it is
(however big it currently is, it can be made bigger), and let's start focusing
on real problems. Whoever has complaints about disrespect, belittling, or
whatever, should just self-study and create something AWESOME, and then prove
to the world by action, instead of blabbering off and causing pointless havoc
that won't get us anywhere, let alone possibly make us take steps backward.

------
lotsofcows
Depressing that neither of them seem to have heard of
<http://london.girlgeekdinners.com/>

------
navs
Feeling out of place, I can absolutely sympathise. I haven't quite found my
place yet. It's made worse with all this talk about star wars, geeky t-shirts
and other pop culture paraphernalia. We aren't all fans of star wars. We
aren't all jumping at the chance to make pop culture references in
conversation and we don't all own t-shirts with witty slogans concerning the
dark side (I do confess to owning 2 wolverine t-shirts though). Now shows like
the Big Bang Theory only help to reinforce this silly idea of what a 'nerd'
is.

I was very into Heavy Metal growing up. Just as I was into comics. I felt like
an outsider in the typical social circles at school and university and I felt
even worse when I found the 'nerd' or 'geek' or 'metal' circles. Liking
Metallica apparently didn't make me a true metalhead and so there you go,
denounced. I'm not into D&D so there goes my invitations to D&D sessions. What
about the girl in that conference that wasn't wearing a star wars t-shirt,
that was just as interested in that talk? I absolutely _hate_ how each sub-
culture tries to belittle the other and how its admission is dependent on
whether you all like the same things.

I know that wasn't the main focus of the OP's post and I'm somewhat incoherent
because I did just wake up, but I had to have my little rant. It's not just
the IT industry alienating based on gender but also hobbies and interests.

\--- Amateur developer in Auckland that would like to meet other developers
and not just to talk about star trek.

------
bluedino
She shouldn't feel bad. I've never seen more than a few minutes of Star Wars
or Star Trek. Never seen Dr. Who or any of the Monty Python stuff. I've never
seen a single Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter movie (or read the books).

But I keep telling myself that one day I'll binge through them all online.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Don't force yourself to sit through something you hate just to get an
imaginary badge. I can't stand Dr. Who, I'm often baffled by British humor,
and LotR is the geek equivalent of having read all of Dostoyevski's novels.

~~~
manish_gill
Heh. Even though I like fantasy very much (big Robert Jordan fan), I really
can't stand Lord of the Rings. It's just so utterly boring. :(

------
recursive
Marvel and Doctor Who and Darth Vader aren't really related to IT though. I'm
aware of all three, and seen a couple of the Star Wars movies, but that's it.
By her argument, Trish would be alienating to me, a male in IT as well. People
in all fields have hobbies and interests outside of work. I don't think this
is a sexism or even IT issue.

------
rikacomet
In India, the no of women that get outcasted for being a geek is phenomenal !
I mean really, I hate all those inferior girls who only aim to marry a
successful guy to live off his income, and adjust if it isn't much, instead of
going out there and doing something themselves, and if someone is doing so,
let them be, or support them. My own sister have faced this problem, quite a
no of times, when the girls in her class, come to know that she can play FIFA
13, they made fun of her! Can you imagine? Though she was strong enough to not
get effected from it, but still, it isn't having zero effect at all.

As someone who values intelligence, I tell her, that it may require her to do
more hardwork, but she can be actually beautiful+intelligent at the same time.
I'm thinking about taking her to some start up events with me,to meet other
women, so that she knows, and their is someone to look up to for her.

Thanks to this post, for making my decision firm.

------
kenko
> All the other girls would talk about fashion labels and gossip and she would
> be bored out of her mind, wondering why nobody else watched Doctor Who. None
> of them understood the joke on her Darth Vader t-shirt. One of them listened
> to her podcast and asked her what “Marvel” was. One of them told her to stop
> making them feel stupid all the time.

Believe it or not, you can be a good coder without knowing who Doctor Who and
Darth Vader are, or what Marvel is. Not even having seen Star Wars will make
you a good programmer!

(A friend of mine who saw the linked post was astounded at the idea that girls
are keeping other girls out of IT by not being enthusiastic about juvenile
comic books and juvenile sci-fi. That is just about the single stupidest thing
one could possibly think---unless, perhaps, the single stupidest thing one
could possibly think is that it's somehow daring or transgressive to be a fan
of Dr. Who. Come the fuck on.)

------
gfodor
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle."

If you want more geek women, you need more geek girls. (Girls, if you wait
long enough, turn into women, funnily enough.)

~~~
klipt
"Geek" is not synonymous with "programmer" though. There are plenty of girls
who are band geeks, or literature geeks, or even science geeks (especially in
biology). They're just not computer geeks.

~~~
gfodor
Yes, it was implied I meant computer geeks.

------
asperous
> "They thought she wanted to build the next Terminator or hack into
> Government systems, when she just wanted to build self-driving cars."

Maybe she doesn't see how this is similar in terms of amazing, but I would say
those other women weren't far off.

~~~
csense
The student was probably complaining about the unwashed masses' Hollywood-
fueled fantasy of the computer hacker: Anyone who can write a program longer
than 10 lines is capable of hacking into any computer system in five minutes
or less, using or fixing any piece of computer-y, electronic-y, or science-y
equipment, etc.

Hacking systems gets easier the younger the hacker is, the more important the
data being protected by the system is, and the more resources its owners have
to secure it.

All of these are of course ridiculous assumptions which suit narrative
purposes but have no basis in reality. A lot of people don't understand that,
and they can be really annoying to those who do.

------
copper-horse
I'm sorry, but if people don't get your Star Wars humour, that does not make
them stupid. May be they just didn't like Star Wars. And may be somehow they
thought that being "in marketing or law or something" is just as worthy an
occupation as writing spam filters for google.

I guess the reason they form a community in the short time of an IT event, and
"the nerds" are always on the fringe is this same dismissive attitude of
superiority that makes people fiercely unattractive and isolated. Men or
women.

~~~
vacri
Working in marketing and law for Google isn't working _in_ IT. It's working
_for_ IT, but it's working _in_ marketing and law. Would anyone seriously
think that the sysadmin for a law firm could seriously present at a 'women in
law' presentation?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Working in marketing and law for Google isn't working in IT.

It _is_ working in the IT industry. It _is not_ working in an IT profession.
"Working in IT" can mean either.

I suspect that there is a group of people who would be interested in a
presentation on issues facing "Women in the IT _industry_ " as well as one
with interest in issues facing "Women in the IT _profession_ ", and I suspect
that those groups overlap considerably. Though, I would also suspect that
there is a substantial subset of each group that is _not_ in the other.

~~~
vacri
It would seem pointless to have an education faire for an industry rather than
a profession. "Come and see what you can do working in the Water industry!" ->
you could be a hydrologist, a lawyer, a receptionist, a pipelayer, a sysadmin,
a farmer, a payroll officer... it's nonsensical, given the context. It'd
almost be easier to list the jobs that can't be shoehorned into such a broad
industry.

------
mosselman
I was recently in Russia and there about 50% in computer science studies were
women. We went to some IT companies like Yandex (biggest IT company in Europe
AND THE competitor of Google in Russia) and there, from walking around, my
estimate would be that about 50% was female as well!

This can be a tremendous advantage to companies in Russia I feel and it is
something that we in the west, be it Europe or the US, should strive for as
well.

------
tezka
well, maybe the big part of what kills women's interest in programming/CS is
the unnecessary nerdiness that comes attached with it. As if watching starwars
or Dr. who or reading marvel comics is essentially related to competency in
CS. Note that this is largely a US phenomena. I am not making a judgement
about the value of said material, just that they need not be bundled and
presented as part and parcel of computing.

~~~
ucee054
How fucking stupid is that?

"Because the other guy interested in the same field watches Star Wars, I'm
going to change career!"

Whether you like a field is supposed to be based on whether you like the
field, not how cool you find the other people in the field.

So you're not describing girls who are interested in CS, you're describing
girls _who want to get into a field full of cool people_.

Maybe if they are intolerant to having nerds as colleagues, said girls should
aim for Hollywood instead of CS

~~~
tezka
" you're describing girls who want to get into a field full of cool people."
No I am not. And you are grossly oversimplifying the process typically
involved in vocational decision making. Seldom people go to a field based on
pure passion, when most other things about it is at odds with their interest.

------
Myrmornis
I agree that female teenage culture has a lot to answer for in dissuading
girls from studying technical subjects. But this article is full of silly
stereotypes. I'm not particularly interested in science fiction or playing
video games, and I would not find software engineering very appealing if it
were full of darth vader t-shirt wearing nerds.

~~~
tezka
"I agree that female teenage culture has a lot to answer for in dissuading
girls from studying technical subjects" such as what? sounds like blaming the
victim. Female teenage culture may happen to be just fine, and the techie
culture is what alienates women from participation.

------
GigabyteCoin
It's not just the stigma that IT isn't womanly, it's the idea that a young
girl... already completely dejected by her peers, is forced to endure classes
made up of 100% high school boys.

Unless the teacher is incredible defensive of the girl's position in the
class, she will most likely drop it.

I am not surprised there are so few women in IT.

~~~
joshguthrie
It's not just the stigma that IT isn't womanly, it's the idea that a young
girl... already completely dejected by her peers (read "females"), couldn't
integrate herself better in classes made up of 100% high school boys (which
are her peers as much as the other girls). Unless this high school girl is
incredibly hard to get along with, she will most likely make friends, males or
females. I am surprised there are so few women in IT.

------
Skywing
I'm a male software engineer and I had the same experiences going through
school, too. Nobody else seemed to care about programming outside of school-
related assignments. Very boring few years in school, those were.

------
nayefc
I wish I could understand what the relationship between Star Wars and
technology/hacking/software engineering is, that everyone is talking about
here. (P.S: I'm a Software Engineer but never watched Star Wars).

~~~
coldtea
The relationship is that lots of people in the technology/hacking/software
community like Star Wars and Star Trek and science fiction in general.

To the point that you get references to said things all the time in
programming circles.

I'm sure you are aware of all this, but still wanted to make your point. But
the fact that you have some outlier experience ("engineer who never watched
Star Wars") should not come into the way of you researching the matter. It's
as if I, as a fat person, say "who are those all those fat people with
diabetes? I'm fat and I don't have diabetes".

~~~
nayefc
> I'm sure you are aware of all this.

I'm not sure how you're sure. I haven't. I've heard Star Wars references
before in general, but not particularly from the tech/software community. Your
second analogy doesn't really make sense to me.

------
webwright
One of my favorite concepts from Kurt Vonnegut was "Granfalloons" in Cats
Cradle ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon> )

The idea is that people love to be part of a club-- not only for the feeling
of belonging but for the feeling of being able to exclude others. Political
parties, churches, etc. It's so fundamentally human to do this, and it's
unsurprising that it should extend into the professional realm (though we
should keep trying to rise above it).

------
Tycho
Most articles on this topic take the starting position that 'most IT workers
are male, therefore the industry must be putting up barriers to female
candidates.' However, I wonder if it's not more accurate to say that _society_
puts barriers in front of _anyone_ who's interested in an IT career, and males
just find these barriers less difficult to circumvent. Nobody wants to be
called a 'geek' but it seems more catastrophic for girls and women.

------
hogfish
Hi, I'm the author and I've written a follow-up post on this topic - One
simple suggestion to encourage more women into IT
[http://trishkhoo.com/2013/05/one-simple-suggestion-to-
encour...](http://trishkhoo.com/2013/05/one-simple-suggestion-to-encourage-
more-women-into-it/)

\- Trish Khoo

------
oh_sigh
This sounds like the equivalent of a male nerd complaining about "brogrammers"

~~~
katherineparker
Is a bro equal to a drunk idiotic party boy? If so, female nerds don't like
them then either :)

~~~
oh_sigh
My point was that disparaging someone because they have different tastes from
you is stupid. Okay, so you don't like fashion or gossip, and you like star
wars. That fact alone doesn't make you better or more interesting than someone
who likes fashion and gossip, but not star wars.

~~~
katherineparker
It was hard for me to grasp your point from your previous post. Sorry, I just
didn't realize the tone of it and I took it as sarcasm (didn't mean to offend
you, if I did by chance).

------
rjknight
Obligatory Malcolm Tucker: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5iRmPBve80>

------
gcb0
> makes a event for women in IT

> does not understand why women does not participate in broader (i.e. non
> sexist) events in IT

sound logic.

------
monokrome
Sounds a lot like the way growing up as a software engineer in Utah felt... :D

------
kurd_debuggr
This was certainly a pleasing change to read. We need more women in tech!

------
abraininavat
I knew exactly how she felt? That's really the best title you can come up
with? This "use the original title" guideline is stupid, and makes for a
shittier site because there's absolutely no way to scan headlines and decide
which ones may be interesting.

Think about the difference between:

"I knew exactly how she felt" or "Is this what it's supposed to feel like?"

and

"Exoplanet discovery count by year" or "Earth's core far hotter than we
thought?"

------
Dewie
Sometimes I feel alienated both by the "normal" crowd and the "nerd" crowd -
it's like I am some hybrid that can't seem to feel a strong identity to either
group (normal/nerdy because that is a common dichotomy). It doesn't help that
being "nerdy" is now a hip/self-ironic thing, and people will flaunt how they
are the most geekiest person ever because <Star Trek, math, programming,
physics, geology, cosplay, [some incredibly specific interest]> \- and I can't
really relate to feeling such a strong identity with an archetype.

I've also never seen Star Wars, for some reason.

------
ahoyhere
> All the other girls would talk about fashion labels and gossip and she would
> be bored out of her mind, wondering why nobody else watched Doctor Who. None
> of them understood the joke on her Darth Vader t-shirt. One of them listened
> to her podcast and asked her what “Marvel” was. One of them told her to stop
> making them feel stupid all the time.

Anyone else read this paragraph and think: "Yup, I bet she really was making
them feel stupid"?

I was that judgmental dick of a teen and thank god I grew out of it. If I were
the adult she was talking to at a party, I would have warned her against
thinking that "different" meant "better." And told her that probably the best
friends she'd ever make were not the ones who were carbon copies of her
interests. If she would have the guts to leave aside the preferred pop culture
and meet other people where, and how, they truly are.

------
mehrzad
This post could have been a reddit comment.

~~~
oh_sigh
You're talking about your post in the comment thread, right?

~~~
asperous
Username relevant?

~~~
oh_sigh
Yes, actually. I made this user name after I got tired of numerous idiotic
posts on HN going un-rebutted and not downvoted.

