
I'm a Barbie Girl in a CS World - llimllib
http://www.scribd.com/doc/27710281/I%E2%80%99m-a-Barbie-Girl-in-a-CS-World
======
btilly
It would be nice to link to the original pdf rather than scribd. Their buggy
website wouldn't work under Chrome, so I had to fire up Firefox to read the
article. Which let me page forward through the article, but not backwards.

Yes, I know that scribd is a YC company, is what the cool kids use, etc. But.
It. Doesn't. Actually. Work. The pdf reader I have does.

That said, I liked the article. Once I actually managed to read it.

~~~
matrix
You know a product is bad when people prefer to PDF...

(apologies for going off-topic - I just couldn't resist this one)

~~~
jpablo
PDF is not that bad as long as you have an good enough reader (i.e. no
acrobat)

~~~
joe_the_user
_Evidence?_

I'm on Linix,

I've tried the default readers and they are all horrific.

What would you recommend, seriously. I have never found a pleasant PDF reader
on any platform but I'm open to the idea they might exist.

~~~
boucher
Preview is a pretty solid app. Unfortunately, I've never across anything
remotely well done on any other platform.

~~~
weaksauce
Preview is good but I like skim a bit more. It has the note taking features
and smooth zooming with trackpad pinch gestures. I cannot believe how fast it
is too! Great app. One thing I wish it had though is the pdf editing commands
that preview had to remove a page and concatenate different pdfs together.

Also: foxit reader is a great reader for window. Not quite as polished as skim
but still the best reader I have come into contact with on the windows side of
the fence.

------
chime
This was wonderful. I'm a guy but I can definitely relate to never fitting in
with the typical CS-crowd. I don't game, I don't play D&D or any RPGs, and I
don't watch/read Sci-Fi. All of this is completely orthogonal to my
skills/knowledge. I like reading celebrity gossip and watch cheesy movies that
geeks despise. Sure, I watched and liked Primer but I also liked Wanted.
People need to stop stereotyping. That's also kinda why I like HN and reddit
because there is such a huge amount of diversity on these sites that
transcending past stereotypes is an everyday occurrence.

~~~
randallsquared
Wanted is a terrible example, since it's a comic-book movie. :)

~~~
DannoHung
Wanted is a terrible example because it's a terrible movie. All that proves is
that you have bad taste in cinema.

At least go with an example like... Wedding Crashers or Old School, or Bad
Boys if it has to be an action movie.

ANYWAY, games are not a geek exclusive thing anymore (at least not if all of
the frat bros I used to know in college are any indication). Comic books still
are somewhat, but there is an ever growing independent movement that's causing
the interested parties to become more diverse. Science Fiction is clearly no
longer niche since like, 9 out of 10 of the top earning films are Science
Fiction or Fantasy.

------
shaddi
I remember reading a post similar to this on here recently... Ah yes:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1145648>

There is a woman in my CS department that I met in a Bollywood Cinema class I
was taking. She's totally non-geek; I see her in the lobby talking the fairly
standard social drama banter of college students, not about this week's ACM
programming problem. At first I was kind of dismissive about her, since I
didn't feel she was /really/ a CS student (I remember thinking once, "I wonder
if she's here to meet a boyfriend"; I'm really ashamed of that thought).
Reading Patrick's piece made me reconsider that view. Regardless of what her
motivations are for joining the department, I respect the fact that she's
here.

It also makes me wonder about our Women in CS initiatives. Here we have a
woman who, from all I can tell, does not define her identity primarily in
terms of her field of study (which is something I feel like many of us do).
She is not a CS woman, but rather a woman that happens to study computer
science, kind of like a man who happens to study pharmacy. I'm still
developing my thoughts on this, but meeting her and the discussion around this
new Barbie have ironically enough really challenged my existing beliefs.

~~~
swolchok
I wrote this post before reading the parent; I've moved it to be a reply to
the parent because it's clearly related.

I have some cognitive dissonance on this issue. I'm not sure what to conclude,
so I'll just air it.

On the one hand, I would love to see people in the field who are both high-
performing and high-functioning socially.

On the other hand, the degree to which undergraduates (and, by extension,
probably front-line programmers in general) "live and breathe CS" seems to be
a very good heuristic for their proficiency with the nitty technical details.
By "live and breathe" CS, I am not talking about passion for traditionally
geeky activities like video games, DND, and so on; I am referring to their
penchant for work as entertainment (not that we don't all need a break from
time to time). This seems to preclude being a social individual who happens to
do CS some of the time.

On the third hand, lots of researchers I've met seem to be better rounded.

~~~
ErrantX
> and, by extension, probably front-line programmers in general

> This seems to preclude being a social individual who happens to do CS some
> of the time.

The best programmers I know (and I tentatively include myself here; though Im
really an engineer) are highly social work hard/play hard type people.

~~~
roundsquare
Might this might be a result of the type of people you spend time with?

If I think about college, I would also have said that the best programmers I
know are the ones who I frequently see out doing other stuff. However, I
didn't spend that much time with the more introverted people (not being able
to relate to them as well) so its hard to say if they were better or worse.

~~~
ErrantX
This is in a work environment too though.

I was more interested by the use of "frontline" in the original posting. It's
not so much technical merit as your ability to, well, be a programmer (as a
career).

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lmkg
My first reaction (and I assume most people's) to the CS barbie was along the
lines of "... really?" but the more I think about it, the more I'm ok with it.
Let's be serious here, barbies aren't realistic. To expect the CS barbie to
give some sort of objective perspective of real computer engineers would be
delusional, and out of character.

The big idea was to get girls excited about something related to computers.
The execution was about as far off-base as you could get. The only redeeming
quality is just that initial idea... but it may be enough to have an impact on
its own. The point is, it helps break down the subliminal barrier that
computers are a "guy thing." That's what the article is talking about at
first, and then takes that point and goes even further.

Actually, that's the type of barrier-breaking that I would prefer more of. The
whole "we'll give you the help you need" type of barrier-breaking seem in
outreach programs implicitly reinforces that "you need the help." The implicit
message with the CS barbie is the exact opposite, and that's a good thing.

~~~
lena
But do people seriously think that computers are a guy thing nowadays? The CS
barbie looks just like a secretary or any other profession to me. All moms I
know (and my daughter is in the barbie demographic) have computers, most have
laptops or netbooks. They use them for e-mail, internet, they are on Twitter,
facebook, play online games, etc.

Now, I have no idea how a CS barbie should look. I totally agree with the
author of the presentation that it is a good thing that Mattel did not make
the CS barbie extra dorky. However, as it is now, I don't think girls will
make any connection with programming.

~~~
dusklight
Yeah they are using computers. but computers are increasingly like appliances,
and there is a huge gulf between clicking buttons in an UI and messing with
code in an editor.

I remember way back, when I had to learn all this stuff about DOS and RAM just
to get Ultima 7 to work on my computer. I had a friend who couldn't get sound
to work correctly on his PC in StarCon2, so he soldered together his own sound
card to get it to work. Nowdays you don't need to do that with modern
computers and most of time you can't even do that even if you wanted to,
because modern software and hardware are exponentially more complicated now.

------
jeff18
_"Once my CS friends realized I wasn't a "true geek", I wasn't invited to most
of their hangouts - D &D nights, sci-fi screenings, or gaming nights.
Eventually, I just wasn't invited to anything at all. I was sad, but busied
myself with extracurriculars."_

I hate to be that guy, but seriously? I have never witnessed this kind of
behavior before. In fact, from my experience at Cal, all of the student groups
are absolutely desperate for anyone to join, let alone a girl! If you just
walk across campus you will be aggressively flagged down and invited to all
sorts of things. If you are on Facebook, you will be shamelessly spammed with
invites to all sorts of events. I just can't picture someone getting shunned
from even an IEEE meeting or hardcore hackathon because they are "not a _true_
geek".

I'd like to think adults are more mature than kindergarten-level exclusion,
fellow hackers most of all.

She then goes on to say that she bought vintage gaming t-shirts and worked on
some video games and afterwards, all the geeks were "cool" with her again. I
don't really know what I'm trying to say here other than this seems totally
unbelievable.

~~~
llimllib
> I hate to be that guy, but seriously? I have never witnessed this kind of
> behavior before. In fact, from my experience at Cal, all of the student
> groups are absolutely desperate for anyone to join, let alone a girl!

Alright, I'm a dude, but I think I can say a few things on this. Here's my
biases: I train for and play sports for fun, I've never played D&D, I don't
watch or read sci-fi, and I don't really play video games (and if I do,
they're sports games).

In my college CS department, I was definitely not invited to anything that any
of the other students were doing. I'm not saying I wanted to be, but probably
greater than 90% of my CS classmates were in the D&D sci-fi crowd.

I think you underestimate the intimidation factor; I truly don't think that I
was mean or overbearing to them, and we worked together just fine on projects,
but we all kind of believed implicitly that we belonged to different speheres.

I suspect that a similar dynamic is often at work when women interact with
that kind of group.

(edited to add: except the Jordanians! I forgot, we had a small group of
Jordanians in the group that I got along with great, they taught me to smoke
houkah and we watched soccer together. They weren't involved with the CS kids
either.)

~~~
nzmsv
It's kind of eerie to read this. What you've described is exactly how the
nerds felt in your high school.

When they got to college, they found a social group that would accept them
without them having to pretend to like the things they don't care about.
Apparently that's a bad thing.

~~~
btilly
It is only a bad thing when they become exclusive about it. And that is bad
for all the same reasons that the way they were treated in high school is bad.

Speaking personally I grew up without a TV, get motion sick if I play first
person shooters, and don't like sushi. Despite being a stereotypical geek in
many ways I can't count the times when I've felt excluded by the fact that I
don't know Monty Python inside out, have avoided most games produced in the
last 15 years, and don't want to eat at certain restaurants.

I can only imagine how much worse it can be if I didn't catch and appreciate
other geek references.

------
ansostuhmieng
Questions for the author whom I presume is unavailable...

If it was clear to both parties that the other did not enjoy the same
activities... why would you expect to be invited to those activities? Why
would it bother you to not be invited to an activity you probably would not
enjoy?

The only answer seems to be that she was lonely, so she put on a mask to fit
in... not really surprising but seems a bit shallow and I can't imagine it
really being personally fulfilling. Would not her time have been better sent
seeking out those with whom she shares more common interests?

Hope I am not too badly missing the point.

~~~
pamelafox
Yeah, that's a good point.

I guess I think that I would have enjoyed some of the activities (e.g. I do
watch some Sci-fi flicks), but as they had a perception of me not being like
them, they assumed I wouldn't like anything at all.

But, right, ultimately, its about realizing that I am not as interested in
most of the things that my colleagues were interested in, and I am hoping that
the diversity of my colleagues increases so that would not be the case.

I seek out other stuff like dance lessons, art classes, etc, but it does take
time to meet the strangers at those activities. I still prefer that stuff
(even if its by myself) to going to the pub, which is the defacto activity
around here.

~~~
TheSOB88
I'm a very big video game nerd, but I'm also interested in stuff like dance
and the outdoors. Has it not been your experience that your D&D-playing
colleagues also do things completely unrelated to nerdom?

------
hristov
I do not get this stuff about women feeling lonely or ignored in CS. I studied
computer engineering (which had even more skewed gender ratios than CS), and
there the few women that we had had absolutely no problems being part of our
group. In fact if they had any issues, it was getting too much attention.

Of course everybody liked to be friends with the few girls in our classes.
Even if we were not attracted to them, it was nice to actually chat with a
girl once in a while.

~~~
smokey_the_bear
I studied computer engineering in college too, and I'm a woman. It wasn't a
huge deal, and there was some extra attention sometimes that was nice, and
other times was not nice. But there were also small things like that the
computer engineering dorm floor was male only or when I got a microsoft
internship and my lab partner said "must be nice being female" that made me
feel different.

------
dasil003
I love this presentation! It has a strong point and doesn't fail to entertain.
The best slide is #17.

 _You should be able to be a fashionable construction worker, a cross-dressing
politician, a preppy tattoo artist, or a sex-crazy golfer_

Instant classic.

~~~
protomyth
Construction workers dress for safety / function not for fashion. It's like
saying I will be a fashionable doctor in the ER.

~~~
zasz
Presumably she meant dressing fashionably when not at work.

------
jpablo
From my point of view the anti-cs view in many girls forms a few years after
they stop playing with Barbies.

So I wonder if this could really make a difference. I have seen my nieces
playing with barbies and I don't think they really notice if Barbie has a
computer, a bikini or a purse.

Could be reading things wrong tought

~~~
jasonlotito
I have a friend who likes to share his "Daughter with a Barbie" story.
However, we need a little back story first. A professor at McGill University,
he's an avid role player and war gamer, amongst other things. He raised his
children on that, and they had a grand old time. They have pictures, and all
sorts of things around the house from growing up playing D&D with dad. The
daughter is still very much into gaming, and is apart of our regular gaming
group (along with her dad). And she is still in high school.

So, onto the story.

Apparently, one day at McDonalds, she ordered a happy meal. She was rather
young, when McDonald happy meals with toys were awesome and fun. Anyways,
being who she was, she would normally pick the cards, or the other "Boy" toys.
However, this time, she asked to get the Barbie. Her father was shocked,
because this was unusual for her, but she got the Barbie. Anyways, they went
home, and she ran to her room with the Barbie. After some time, she came out,
and proudly displayed her barbie to her father. The barbie had been changed,
shortened hair, different clothes and other assorted accessories. She
explaimed proudly:

"Look dad! It's Lt. Ripley!"

I can only hope my kids and I have that kind of relationship when they grow
up.

~~~
eru
He watched Alien with his smallish kids?

~~~
protomyth
My Mom is a horror movie lover, and I saws JAWS when I was 5. Different kids
can deal with different things.

Although, I had some issues with our vacation to the Oregon beach that summer.

------
araneae
So CS compelled her to look like this?

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/johncarney/3515851216/>

I'm not really buying that she's a Barbie girl.

~~~
pamelafox
The title was more about mirroring the Aqua song, less about me being an
actual Barbie Girl. I'm personally a mix of alot of things. More a wannabe 80s
rock star than anything else.. if only I could sing. :)

~~~
araneae
Ok, but your look is classic geek. Short hair, dyed, eyebrow piercings,
barcode shirt? It's totally cute, I'm just saying that you don't seem to be as
far away from the stereotypical look as that the slideshow suggests.

Of course, you're welcome to camouflage as much as you like, I'm just sayin'

I think a better example of someone who's like that is Isis (she's in
research- but the same sort of thing applies in science too
<http://scienceblogs.com/isisthescientist/> Exhibit A:
<http://scienceblogs.com/isisthescientist/weekly_shoe/> Exhibit B:
[http://scienceblogs.com/isisthescientist/2008/11/on_the_need...](http://scienceblogs.com/isisthescientist/2008/11/on_the_need_for_women_to_defen.php)
)

------
dgallagher
This reminded me of the nerd/geek/dork method of categorization (or perhaps
stereotyping):

[http://www.goingthewongway.com/208/difference-between-
nerd-g...](http://www.goingthewongway.com/208/difference-between-nerd-geek-
and-dork/)

You can be an extreme of either, or more likely a custom mix of all three. The
thinking goes not all combinations necessary mesh perfectly with one another.

------
llimllib
Side note: why is this article (atm, 64 points 2 hours ago) below one on the
home page with 22 points submitted 3 hours ago?

~~~
allenbrunson
i believe there is also a 'velocity' aspect. like, a bunch of votes in a short
time is assumed to be a spike of interest, giving a particular article a
boost.

i'm just guessing, though. i haven't actually read the arc source code.

------
araneae
I'm sorry, girl geeks don't wear mini skirts?

She must know different geeks than I do.

