
Catch-22: Tech Blogging As a Woman - aiiane
http://codingkilledthecat.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/catch-22-tech-blogging-as-a-woman/
======
HarrietTubgirl
You're not going to change this. Yes, virtually every great programmer or
computer scientist is a male. So much so that we're all going to assume
they're male, and when we see a female name (like "Leslie Lamport") we double-
check to see if it's actually a female. This is just a normal tendency. We
assume basketball players are over 6'3", we assume nurses are female.

There are many stories of people overcoming discrimination (say, Indian
immigrants being thought to be unfit for executive positions in Silicon
Valley), and they make the current hot topic of women in tech look incredibly
dumb. We're talking overt discrimination, not occasional pronoun misuse.

Indians in Silicon Valley started a group called TiE to help establish a
presence. Does it hurt for them to have labeled themselves as "Indus
Entrepreneurs" and try to help each other? Doesn't seem so.

So maybe the right way to overcome this "oppression" you feel is just to quit
fucking bitching, put your head down and code, and maybe help a few other
women out along the way when you achieve success.

~~~
mkaltenecker
This is how your comment reads to me: Misogyny is totally cool and you should
never do anything to change it, not even write a harmless and polite blogpost.
No, see, that's bitching. Mentioning a very clear and obvious problem is
totally not cool.

~~~
HarrietTubgirl
I don't see how this has anything to do with misogyny? Perhaps you mean
something else, like stereotyping.

------
iamdave
_Where are the technical articles written by women? There are plenty of
contributions complaining about oppression, while attacking men and claiming
absurd stereotypes. Where are the technical contributions?_

I think the author does a great job starting out by highlighting her own
contributions via the linked write-up on Git submodules, but beyond the first
couple of sentences on the topic nothing, and spends the rest of the article
on a tear about the he/she dichotomy in comments.

While I can certainly understand the frustration when people get gender wrong,
that seems to be the _wrong_ place to focus on in this topic of women in tech.
Is it possibly an indicator of the problem at large? Sure. Does it answer the
question "Where are the tech articles written by women"? No.

It does play right into the exact same mold the commenter was talking about,
that set this entire entry into motion:

 _There are plenty of contributions complaining about oppression...where are
the technical contributions?_

Instead of highlighting great articles from the women in tech, or linking to
other women in the industry with well trafficked blogs and talking about their
contributions, the author fell right into the category that perpetuates this
problem.

Mind you, I agree that there is a rift that rises when people make the wrong
assumption, but that's nil imo.

~~~
wickedchicken
> the author fell right into the category that perpetuates this problem.

You're missing the point of the article. The point is that if she _does_
'highlight great articles from the women in tech,' then she would be labeled a
"female developer" instead of just a "developer." If she _doesn't_ do this,
then she gets labeled a _male_ developer. She would like to be labeled
"developer," but the two options she can see lead to undesirable outcomes.

This has been said before, but the key thing to take away is the concept of
"othering." The author would like to be seen as a developer, not a subcategory
of a developer that is somehow different from the norm. Perhaps a better way
to demonstrate is to take this to the extreme:

"Instead of highlighting great articles from brown-eyed people in tech, or
linking to other brown-eyed people in the industry with well trafficked blogs
and talking about their contributions, the author fell right into the category
that perpetuates this problem."

Sounds pretty absurd right? Who cares what their eye color is. On the other
hand, imagine if everyone got it wrong. Imagine if you had brown eyes but
there was a 'default assumption' that everyone had blue eyes. You wouldn't
want to make a fuss every time people got it wrong, for fear of being "that
person" who is annoying and pedantic, and "hey, it shouldn't matter!
Technology is eye-color blind!" But if you _don't_ do it, it gets a little
grating when EVERYONE assumes you are something that you're not. It's a
catch-22.

The solution is to remove the default assumption that developers are male.
That is something that _you_ , not the author, have to do.

~~~
clockstrikesten
No. What's absurd is that Amber Yust reaped all the benefits of having blue
eyes in her profession for most of her life, and then proceeded to author this
article about how it's wrong to assume that people in her profession have blue
eyes, written with all the fury of someone who had brown eyes for their entire
life.

I say this because she has a Y chromosome and only updated her driver's
license to read Female one year ago.

~~~
param
This has to be one of the most mind blowing Ad Hominem arguments I have ever
seen. Not because it is insulting or anything, but it is just unexpected!

~~~
clockstrikesten
I was not making an argument; I was stating a fact. Refraining from addressing
someone's statement other than to label it "ad hominem" is itself an ad
hominem argument, however.

The major thrust of her article is where she presents herself as the typical
specimen proving that women both exist in the tech world in large numbers and
are oppressed by pronouns in comments on the internet. Unfortunately, her
chromosomes, as well as the male privilege she spent the majority of her life
reaping the benefits from, make her the ultimate antithesis of her own point,
and she does the opposite of dispelling any stereotypes people may harbor.

~~~
param
Ok, its been about 10 hrs, so maybe you would be able to read this comment
objectively:

1\. An Ad-Hominem argument is one where you attack the other based on their
credentials to have an opinion on an issue without commenting on the argument
itself. That's specifically what you did.

2\. >>"Refraining from addressing someone's statement other than to label it
"ad hominem" is itself an ad hominem argument, however." \-- this is a weird
piece of logic I must say. See definition of ad hominem above. Where did I
challenge your "statement" by saying that you are not un-biased enough to have
an opinion. If you still disagree, see <http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html>
and let me know what I am missing

3\. Let me respond to your main argument as well - you say that the fact she
was a guy "does the opposite of dispelling any stereotypes people may harbor"
- ONE - not everyone knows she was a guy. Therefore, most people would take
the argument for what it is and think about it. TWO - even if people know she
was a guy, why do you assume that other readers are primitive enough that they
will let that be a factor? Note - they aren't seeing her in real life - they
are just reading an article at their leisure.

~~~
true_religion
They are saying that the author is a _counter-example_ to their own argument.

It's not an attack on their credentials to have an argument.

------
verroq
Most of the time people use "he" when they don't know the gender of the
author. It's not assuming the author is a man. It's a place-holder word in
English.

~~~
roguecoder
"He" is not gender-neutral, no matter how hard the Latin-obsessed grammarians
tried [citation:
[http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12...](http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1288&context=theses)]

If you want a gender-neutral pronoun, "they" works perfectly well. It doesn't
matter what you intend when you type "he", everyone reading it will interpret
it as male.

~~~
strictfp
We've had the same pronoun situation here in Sweden. Recently, however, a new
pronoun started to become common in everyday speech: 'hen'. It's a mix of
'han' ('he') and 'hon'('her'). It's picked up in popularity fast since it
solves the specific problems highlighted by this article.

~~~
mkl
Many people have tried similar things in English[1], but unfortunately none
have caught on yet outside relatively small subcultures.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-
neutral_pronoun#Invented...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-
neutral_pronoun#Invented_pronouns)

~~~
sliverstorm
I'm not sure I'd say "unfortunately"- most of those invented words are, in my
eyes, terrible! "Co"? "Zhim"?

~~~
greyfade
And some are, unfortunately, hard to pronounce. ( _I.e.,_ Sie and Zhe.)

------
RegEx
> Furthermore, doing so results in harassment and having my writing
> dismissed/trivialized/tokenized because of my gender. Hence why I don’t (or
> at least, hadn’t until this post).

I'd like to understand the severity of this issue. Can you provide examples of
technical articles written by women that were dismissed due to their gender?

------
wccrawford
It's not actually a catch-22, it's just a shitty situation.

Catch-22 means you can't do something without doing another thing first, but
you can't do that first either because it relies on the thing you wanted to do
in the first place. It's a closed circle with no way in.

This, however, it's just painful. Women can't emphasize their gender without
being ridiculed by assholes, but they can't hide it because they would then be
helping prolong the ridicule for others.

"You're either part of the problem, or part of the solution." Sitting back and
doing nothing allows the problem to continue. I'm as guilty of doing nothing
as anyone.

I really don't care who wrote the article, only that it's a good article. If I
see something techie don't by a woman, I generally think "Good for her" and
then continue on with life. I don't assign any special weight to her words at
all. They still stand on their own.

On the other hand, my experience is that closed communities are a lot better
about not discriminating. If someone says, "the op is a She", everyone
apologizes, switches, and continues on.

Open communities, where any asshole with a keyboard can leave a comment, tend
to be slums. Assholes know they can post their opinions without censorship, so
they do. Constantly. There's repercussions, either.

As much as I like finding random stuff on the net, the only communities worth
joining are the private ones. And there's precious few of those any more.

------
RegEx
> The catch-22 here is that if I choose to blend in, then people like the
> commenters above assume that everything they see was written by men, and use
> that as an excuse to dismiss the concerns of women in the tech industry

Couldn't this be solved by a little 'about the author' section at the end of
your articles? Pull in your gravatar and add a couple of sentences about
yourself. Now everyone knows you are a woman, and you didn't have to change
your background to hot-pink to do so! :)

~~~
thetabyte
Did you read the article at all? Her whole point is that women should not have
to do this, that they face discrimination if they do do this, and that we
should refrain from assuming that if we don't see one of these, it's by a man.
The problem isn't that they don't know she's a girl. It's that they assume she
isn't one.

~~~
verroq
>Her whole point is that women should not have to do this, that they face
discrimination if they do do this

I don't think this point is correct. The technical nature of computer
science/technology makes it easier to judge a work by its technical merits,
not by authorship.

~~~
thetabyte
Yes, that's very true, it _can_ be more easily judged by technical merits, but
that doesn't necessarily mean it will be. Not to mention it invites less-than-
appropriate or nice messages.

------
Tichy
Interesting, but a bit of a strawman: one comment dismisses complaints of
women because he accuses them of not contributing anything of merit. That is
of course flawed in itself, but it is just one person's comment, not a general
attitude towards female bloggers.

I also don't think that for example on HN it should be possible to "pay" with
technical contributions for non-technical contributions, like, for every x
relevant articles you would be allowed an irrelevant article. Ideally, every
article should stand on it's own (probably not realistic, but an ideal to
attain to).

------
clockstrikesten
This was written by Amber Yust, who was born a man.

~~~
rcfox
You say this as if it were relevant...

~~~
clockstrikesten
I fail to see how it's irrelevant. In this article, someone who was a man
until a year or two ago used herself as the perfect example of a woman who
succeeds in the tech world.

~~~
rcfox
Amber is A) a woman B) working in the tech world C) successful.

Chromosomes have nothing to do with it.

Obviously, you know that what you're saying is hateful or you wouldn't have
created a burner account in order to post it.

~~~
clockstrikesten
Chromosomes are directly responsible for most developmental differences
between living creatures. If someone uses this fact to convince themselves
it's why women aren't seen in the tech world, Amber has done nothing to
disprove it.

Amber has benefitted from male privilege for most of her life. If people
believe male privilege, brogrammer environments, etc. are why women aren't
seen in the tech world, Amber has done nothing to disprove it.

She is literally the worst possible piece of evidence to use to disprove the
stereotype.

This is not a burner account and I am not transphobic.

~~~
Jaye
Addressing only this part: "Chromosomes are directly responsible for most
developmental differences between living creatures."

Chromosomes are only part of sex differentiation in utero. Many of the
developing embryo's/fetus' sex characteristics, both neurological and
physiological, are the result of how it responds to the particular mix of
hormones it is exposed to at different developmental stages. Sometimes the
levels of androgens and estrogens are not consistent throughout the entire
development process so the baby can be born with neurological characteristics
of one sex but physiological characteristics of the other.

