
'Too hot to be an engineer' – women mark Ada Lovelace Day - yitchelle
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34359936
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MelissaJawa
Why do people think this is a compliment?! "You're way too hot to be an
engineer," said a man in the lift of her block of flats when she wore a
T-shirt from program-sharing service Github. An awkward attempt at flattery,
perhaps? "It definitely was not a compliment," she countered. "I was
dumbfounded. What do you say to something like that?

~~~
tsotha
That's probably exactly what it was - an awkward attempt at flattery. An
expression of interest, in an attempt to see if the interest might be mutual.
After all, there's no logical reason attractive women can't be engineers.

Are women really so brittle they have to take offense at something like that?
Do they really think they're somehow Striking a Blow Against The Patriarchy by
humiliating some poor guy for not navigating the PC minefield?

~~~
pswilson14
"...not navigating the PC minefield"

I see variations on this phrase all over the place, and I don't understand it.
It really isn't that hard to avoid saying offensive and distasteful things to
women (or anyone else, actually). It's almost _always_ obvious that some
statements are pretty offensive or at the very least make people
uncomfortable, and it only takes the smallest modicum of common sense and tact
to avoid saying those things. "You're too hot to be an engineer" is an awkward
thing to say to a woman in an elevator, and if you're a woman in tech, you're
bombarded with those statements weekly. It's not about being brittle. It's
about letting people know when what they're saying is garbage. If anything,
the men complaining about how they don't like having to think before speaking
are brittle.

Speaking as a man that manages to "navigate the PC minefield" every day, it
really isn't difficult. I promise.

~~~
tsotha
>It really isn't that hard to avoid saying offensive and distasteful things to
women (or anyone else, actually).

No, actually, for some guys it _is_ hard. If it's not hard for you, well,
that's great. But the world is full of clumsy men.

~~~
pswilson14
Part of professional life is understanding how to communicate with others and
how to know before you say something how it will be taken. Some people aren't
good at this, and those people should work on it until they get better at it.
I wouldn't blame anyone who makes an honest effort. But many more people in my
experience simply aren't interested in learning how to communicate with people
that are different from them. In these cases, this mentality of blaming "PC
culture" is just allowing people to remain lazy and ignorant.

~~~
MelissaJawa
Thank you. Blaming "PC Culture" is people being on the ignorant defensive.

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OJFord

        > a T-shirt from program-sharing service Github
    

I love media trying to explain Github.

~~~
timbuckley
That's a fully adequate description of Github to a lay audience.

~~~
OJFord
Really? I would prefer 'code-sharing service' even if the point is to
emphasise the sharing over the version control - makes it clear that we're
talking about the program code, not about distributing binaries.

The lay audience understands the "code"/"program" distinction; to me, saying
"program-sharing service" suggests somewhere the layman can download a program
from (e.g. cnet) - Github sort of offers this now with releases, but that's
certainly not an intended or good mechanism to use for the lay downloader.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The lay audience understands the "code"/"program" distinction

In my experience, professional business people with a day to day involvement
as business SMEs on IT projects are quite likely not to really make the
distinction you insist the "lay audience" understands, and I doubt very much
that the general lay audience, with even _less_ awareness of computing, does.

~~~
OJFord
Sure they do. They think we all look like characters straight out of
_Hackers_, writing funny glyphs and doing crazy things really fast - and they
know sure as hell the programs they end up using don't look like that.

I guess what I'm driving at is that if you told my little brother that "Github
is a program-sharing service" he'd think be thinking it was an app store.

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klagermkii
I don't understand how this women is the main victim here. There is a person
who holds a prejudice of expecting people in nerdy fields to be ugly, and she
breaks that expectation. Is she the one who suffers from it, or is it all the
other people he interacts with and thinks "yeah, just another ugly nerd"?

This is anti-nerd more than anti-woman.

~~~
craigvn
While there may be an expectation from non-geeks that geeks are "ugly", it is
rarely something that mentioned to men.

