
Writer of "Of Geeks and Girls" responds to some HN comments  - araneae
http://likearadiotelescope.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/how-the-geek-stereotype-stunts-computer-science/
======
btilly
I can't believe the negative comments about this article. It seems to me to
make a rather obvious point fairly well. People tend to migrate towards
comfortable social environments, and creating a mess associated with a
particular stereotype will tend to attract people who fit that stereotype, and
repel people who don't.

Computer science stereotypes revolve around geek culture. That culture is very
male dominated, so will repel women a lot more strongly than it repels men. So
if you want to increase the number of women, you need to cut back on the
amount of geek culture in CS environments.

This seems to me to be obviously correct. But it seems that saying it makes a
lot of people upset. Why? Are you afraid that you won't be allowed to be a
geek? Do you look around you and get upset at the thought that someone might
want you to clean up? What is it?

Let me go farther. I've noticed that many geeks don't want non-geeks around
because they think non-geeks are less intelligent and would water down
programming. Well certainly there are a lot of dumb people out there. But I've
known lots of dumb geeks and smart non-geeks. In fact I'd guess that that
geeks are smarter on average than non-geeks, but geeks make up only a small
fraction of the really smart people out there. And furthermore I find the
average smart non-geek more interesting than the average geek.

So from my perspective broadening the base of people in CS would be a _good_
thing.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_So if you want to increase the number of women, you need to cut back on the
amount of geek culture in CS environments... But it seems that saying it makes
a lot of people upset. Why? Are you afraid that you won't be allowed to be a
geek?_

The implicit "we _should_ cut back on the amount of geek culture in CS" is
where the article gets some blowback.

The original article said that women avoid computing because they are
intolerant of geeks. The "solution" is to make computing less geeky, rather
than to make women more tolerant. Huh?

If white people avoided basketball because they don't like black culture, we'd
tell them (rightly) to suck it up. Yet somehow, the author of this article is
comparing geeks to racists.

~~~
joe_the_user
Not quite a fair comparison:

If basketball was a paid profession, like say, carpentry, that a large number
of folks thought of as a career path, _then_ effectively making players be
within black culture rightly wouldn't be acceptable.

~~~
charlesmarshall
Basketball is a paid profession. Just look how much money the NBA teams have.
Fewer people see it as their future but many children still grow up wanting to
the be next michael jordan..

~~~
joe_the_user
I think did say something like "an occupation that individuals can
_reasonably_ think of as a career path".

A _real_ profession is a self-supervising, self-educating specialty. The model
of the professional is the accountant, an individual who, hypothetically,
answers to both his supervisor and the strictures of independence imposed by
his professional association. Even union carpenters, electrician and plumbers
partially fit this description - a qualified contractor, for example, will
_should_ and sometimes actually will refuse work that involves not meeting the
building code.

Many specialties in this society have lost their professionalism, have lost
the independence that provides a lot of the value in their wages. This is
ultimately degrades our social relations - it results in people caring about
their bank accounts and not their personal achievements (the last bubbles were
furthered by the degradation of accountants and real estate appraisers).

I suspect that this process is related to children who would rather be like
the people they see on TV rather than being like their mothers and fathers.

Unfortunately, all this degradation seems to be a self-reinforcing process.

------
hugh_
The best way to be an interesting person is to have a broad range of interests
-- that way you can find an interest in common with just about anyone you
might talk to.

The best way to be an extremely boring person is to have only one interest and
obsess over it non-stop. I once worked next to a guy who only ever talked
about rock climbing; no matter what you tried to talk to him about he'd find a
way to bring the conversation back to his rock climbing hobby. To a fellow
climber he might have been at least slightly interesting, but to me he was so
memorably dull that here I am, five years later, using him as an example of
dullness.

If you put up a bust of Spock in your office, you're basically saying to the
world "Hey world! You know that TV show which maybe you used to like a bit
when you were a kid? I think that's one of the most interesting things in the
world!" This is generally a pretty good indicator of a fairly narrow range of
interests which will make you pretty boring to others.

Anyone who really thinks that a long-defunct TV show is interesting enough to
make it a significant part of their identity really needs to start developing
a few new interests.

------
trominos
"'Socially mainstream means leaving work at 5pm and going to the pub, that’s
what “normal” people do,' says one commenter.

Honestly, I fail to see how this sort of argument differs from asserting that
black people are lazy or Latinos are stupid."

It's different because, as far as I know, it's not actually true that black
people are lazy or that Latinos are stupid (on average). Whereas that comment
as quoted is technically (more-or-less) correct.

~~~
jacoblyles
Former investment banker here. I got the feeling that my ex-coworkers were at
the center of the social mainstream. But when I was at the office late on a
Sunday night, I could see that they were hard workers with a focus on getting
things done when it mattered.

The biggest difference between a banker and a computer geek is that the banker
drinks more and has a better looking girlfriend. Both of them work hard when
the success of a project depends on it.

~~~
trominos
Based on the stereotypes I've heard, I'd say that investment bankers are also
outside the "social mainstream" of workers.

EDIT: Okay, I sort of see your point. My feeling is that if you consistently
work long hours you definitionally put yourself outside of the "social
mainstream," because I was thinking of "social mainstream" as "the set of
people whose non-work lives are fairly similar to the median".

Whereas I think you're using a definition closer to "people who aren't
'weird'/'losers'". I don't think that's what the original commenter meant, but
it's possible. And if that's what he meant, I think you could be right.

[/EDIT]

For the record, I don't (necessarily) agree that geeky people are more likely
to do good computer work than non-geeky people. I just think that it's a valid
point of discussion, and that in particular comparing the quoted comment to
racism instead of addressing it is both incorrect and incredibly obnoxious.

~~~
jacoblyles
>"Based on the stereotypes I've heard, I'd say that investment bankers are
also outside the "social mainstream" of workers."

Well, they are far more likely to have season tickets for the local sports
team than four-day passes to Comicon. They do have a high-percentile ambitious
streak that is abnormal.

The idea that socially mainstream people can't work hard is ridiculous.
However, it is probably not helpful to bring up racism, as our modern culture
cannot handle discussion of racism rationally. "Racism" is substituted in
people's minds as "absolute evil", so it's good style to leave it out of
discussions except when absolutely necessary.

------
coffeemug
From my highly anecdotal experience, I think the proportion of interesting to
uninteresting people is equally low in any given profession. Most computer
people focus on crappy sci-fi, most medical people focus on crappy drama, and
most women tend to prefer crappy drama to crappy sci-fi.

I love computers, mathematics, and technology. I think I'm pretty good at it.
If I stumble on an interesting problem, I prefer to stay home and work on it
than to go out. But I can't stand being around most computer people. They
drive me nuts with their ridiculously limited interests and a moral pedestal
glorying their severely limited subculture. In most other professions people
are on average equally boring, but at least they're not on a high horse.

------
hugh_
"If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would
stand for it."

Plenty of fields have cultural barriers to entry. Frinstance, I wouldn't want
to be a car mechanic, cuz all they talk about is sport. I wouldn't want to be
a secretary, cuz all they talk about is American Idol. And I wouldn't want to
be a Wall St trader cuz all they talk about is... I dunno, golf and hookers.
Of course I'm exaggerating, but the point remains that these are three fields
where I'd be turned off by the culture even if I were interested in the actual
work.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I'm a little surprised by all your upvotes for this comment. I spend at least
as much -- and maybe more -- time with car mechanics, natural gas technicians,
secretaries, administrators, managers, electricians, and so on as I do with
"computer geeks".

While I tend to find that people from most of those other sectors enjoy
talking about a wide variety of subjects, "computer geeks" (those working in
the field as technicians or programmers especially) are far more likely to
conversationally hover around technical minutiae or other stereotypically geek
interests, like sci-fi.

Case in point: I recently attended a professionally-attired holiday dinner
party with a corporate client, where most of the employees are scientists or
engineers, and many of them are PhD'd in one subject or another. Conversation
wandered from ice climbing to traveling to diesel engines to raising kids, and
so on. Anything "tech" was strictly verboten.

On the other hand, whenever I meet my geekier climbing buddies, it's usually
only a matter of minutes before the conversation is about their latest gadget,
toy, or other interesting thing in the field.

~~~
hugh_
I should have added that I'm just as turned off by "geek" culture (which I see
as being characterized by a rather obesssive interest in a few pop-cultural
artifacts which are really only _slightly_ interesting) as I am by any of the
others. I'm a scientist, not a programmer, and this is part of the reason.

------
ax0n
I found my wife on a local dial-up Bulletin Board System and she's a fully
certified geek. She does WOW raids two nights per week, she digs Fringe, sci-
fi and fantasy fiction. She dual boots Ubuntu and Windows 7, and when I was
stranded without connectivity and one of my clients munged their IPTables
rules, she only needed to ask me the hostname, my username, my password, and
if sudo was installed in order to flush the rules.

I think maybe she's the one being discriminating, but she really doesn't want
to do geek work for a living. She'd be okay doing data entry (not that it's
geeky but it's the geekiest job she's had). She'd much rather do more
traditional jobs such as taking care of animals or dispatching emergency
responders.

~~~
cschep
your wife sounds rad.

~~~
ax0n
Thanks, she is!

------
Tichy
I really don't get it - for signing up for a computer science degree, you
first have to pass through a geek room? Or a picture of Spock will be staring
down on you from the wall while you make the check mark for CS? Or what is the
problem? I don't think many universities are decorated like that, so I don't
see the barrier.

One thing to complain about: maths and CS buildings are typically the most
ugly ones of a university (the ones I have seen anyway). Just like in later
jobs, where IT is often put into the basement... It's as if architects figure
that geeks don't care about their environment anyway, so they can just be
caged into concrete monstrosities. However, men like that just as little as
women.

~~~
aidenn0
You missed the point of the study. The things they put in the geek room are
things that college students associated with CS students.

Therefore, thinking about the "stereotypical geek" is virtually guaranteed
when being put in the geek room. The study doesn't say "are geeks really like
this or not" it is more about what an outsiders perception of geeks is.

~~~
Tichy
But then I am not sure what useful conclusion to draw from that research. Is
it even useful research? Without the study I could also have told you that few
women like Star Wars figurines. That is why they are associated with geeks...

Should there now be an ad campaign displaying normal looking geeks?

------
mcantor
Apparently one of the comments that the author took umbrage to: "Socially
mainstream means leaving work at 5pm and going to the pub, that’s what
'normal' people do."

When do "real" developers drink their beer?!

~~~
notauser
When I worked in software Engineering (big E, giant processes) the developers
left at 4:30pm every day except Fridays, when they left at 12:30. (Thanks to
flex-time and a 7:30 start.)

That environment was remarkably un-geeky. A median engineer was about 45,
university qualified, with a house, husband or wife and kids. They had very
little interest in programming but a quiet pride in Engineering.

If you want to write software in that kind of environment you don't even need
to mix with the comp sci geeks at university - you can get a masters in maths,
physics or any engineering field instead.

~~~
joe_the_user
Oddly enough or not,

It seems that this environment has had a mix of women whereas the "three-guys-
and-a-dog-startup" generally hasn't.

Make of it what you will.

~~~
notauser
But this isn't limited to software start ups, and I have a pretty big sample
set to look at.

The angel firm I'm advising is involved in or funding about 20 ventures, of
which only two are software related. Only one of those has a woman involved in
any capacity.

Overall there are an insignificant number of people of either sex who are
willing to take on the very real risk of bankruptcy however - to me the
male/female split seems much less remarkable than the 99.9%-0.1% split with
the general population.

------
pyre
> _the study singles out Star Trek memorabilia, comic books and energy drinks
> as examples_

Really? Women are repelled by energy drinks? I've known plenty of women that
are/where addicted to energy drinks... Or is it just that drinks like Bawls
isn't as 'mainstream' as something like Red Bull or Mountain Dew's AMP drinks.
If that's the case, then it's _women_ that are being too discriminating. "He's
drinking something that isn't a _name brand_! I totally wouldn't fit in here!"

~~~
substack
As a male, computer science major, and avid coffee drinker, I too am repelled
by energy drinks. That aside, in my experience I see two mostly-exclusive
classes of "geek": people who are much more fascinated with producing
technology and people who are much more interested in consuming it.
Departments should be targeting producers irrespective of gender issues
because they make better computer scientists. Increased diversity is a bonus.

~~~
blasdel
Bingo! The evaporation of the dot-com boom got a lot of status/wealth seeking
drones out of CS departments, but left a lot of the geek-culture asshats that
come in thinking that their meager IT helpdesk skills have something to do
with CS.

It's the worst with video games: there's the standard "I like playing games,
so obviously I'm a CS genius" type that my college friends called ' _gamer
scum_ '. At least with the way the big-budget games industry is going a lot of
these people are now headed into Art Production where they fit in.

~~~
hugh_
It seems to me that the fact that your friends referred to fellow students
that weren't as clever as them as " _scum_ " would seem to confirm another of
the unattractive stereotypes about geek culture.

~~~
anthonyb
It seems to me that he was railing more against the attitude

> "I like playing games, so obviously I'm a CS genius"

rather than their intelligence.

------
defen
> If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would
> stand for it.

I would consider the non-STEM academic fields to be prime examples of ones
with massive cultural barriers to entry. However, this does not fit into the
standard oppression script, so it tends to be systematically ignored.

~~~
unalone
I'm curious: What are their cultural barriers? I'm a Communications major, so
I'm non-STEM, and I'd like to know what you think the social barriers are.
Sports? Fashion?

~~~
defen
I'm talking about the extreme left-wing bias in the academy - if you want to
be a professor at an accredited university in the U.S., it's very difficult to
do so if you have anything resembling a conservative slant to your beliefs. To
be fair I also should have included professional schools such as law,
medicine, business, etc with STEM. It's also not impossible for a right-wing
person of exceptional ability to do well outside those fields - Robert George
is a famous example. On the whole, though, professors in the U.S. tend to be
on the far left of the political spectrum.

~~~
unalone
Hold on, now. Are we talking "far left" for _American_ standards, or far left
for the _real_ world? Because I've come to realize that in America, supporting
things like health care reform and gay marriage get me tagged as left-wing,
when in reality I suppose I'm closer to the right than I am to the left.

The right wing in America is batshit insane. I'm perfectly delighted to have
them stay away from education. But regarding an actual conservative viewpoint,
I find my professors tend to be pretty evenly mixed. I've got two or three
this semester who're all for the free market and capitalism, and I've got two
or three who'd prefer more government control over things. I don't think
people from either side think gays shouldn't be allowed to marry, or that
women shouldn't be permitted to abort, but again, I don't see that as left-
wing. That's just common sense.

Perhaps there's _some_ left wing bias, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it
extreme. Furthermore, you can be a right-wing _student_ in any of those fields
and face no enormous barrier whatsoever, and that's what this is a discussion
of. So I'd still argue that the computer science division has a more extreme
cultural gap. (Further: Have you tried being a right-wing _computer science_
major? I was talking to a guy at UMaryland and told him I was taking an
advertising class and he accused me of "raping and pillaging" America. That's
_way_ lefter than you'd find in any other field, except maybe English, and
English majors are mild-mannered.)

------
mattmanser
_> The entrance fee to a computer science career is membership in geek
culture, and that’s way too restrictive. If any other field had a cultural
barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it._

I find this almost bigoted and hateful. Like the author wants geeks to change
their behaviour, to enforce some sort of thought police. For us all to become
bland, souless replicas of average joe. So we've no place to fit in anymore.

No thanks.

I wonder if they'll ever do the same study of why there are so few male
hairdressers or nurses. Or perhaps so few female plumbers. Same conclusions I
imagine. And will the suggest forcing hairdressers to stop reading magazines
and talking makeup too?

~~~
unalone
Dude, have you _talked_ to hairdressers? I have. When I was younger I'd be
surprised at how much they were comfortable talking about. We'd talk about
cinema and literature and politics and they'd have an opinion about
everything. It struck me how these people, who I'd once thought were
emptyheaded, were actually smart, well-balanced people who just happened to
love their occupation. Then it made me realize that perhaps I was the
emptyheaded one for believing in the idea of the "average joe".

Now I am a little bit older — not much older, mind you — and I've learned how
stupid it is to believe that anybody could be at all considered average. In
various positions I've talked to a slew of people I'd once have dismissed for
their commonality. I don't think I've ever met somebody who I'd call stupid. A
lot of them you'd think are stupid until you talk to them and realize they've
just got a few stupid beliefs ingrained in them and beyond that are as bright
as anybody. The more people you meet, the more you realize how stupid it is to
sequester yourself away in an ivory tower or a dank basement, to assume that
you're somehow an elite being who other people simply cannot understand.

Hell, that's why I became a writer. I learned that to understand others, I had
to learn how others understood me.

~~~
aidenn0
It doesn't matter if hairdressers are smart well-balanced people for the point
of the original study to apply to them.

If most people think hairdressers are ditzes, then that will turn people off
from becoming a hairdresser.

Just like if most programmers are fairly normal, well-balanced people doesn't
matter. What matters is what a teenager trying to decide what to do with their
lives thinks a programmer/hairdresser/any other job "looks like"

~~~
prodigal_erik
If it's your true vocation, the thing you're so passionate about that you
_must_ do it, nothing so trivial as what strangers might think is going to
dissuade you. Anything else merely keeps a roof over your head while wasting
your time, so it doesn't really matter what you settle for.

~~~
Psyonic
While I agree, I can't for the life of me figure out where you stand in this
whole debate. What you said seems to suggest that you don't think geeks need
to change, because those who truly want to work in CS will anyway... but you
seemed to write that as some sort of rebuttal to someone who was asserting
that very thing.

~~~
prodigal_erik
I was arguing against

> What matters is what a teenager trying to decide what to do with their lives
> thinks a programmer/hairdresser/any other job "looks like"

because I think if that matters, they're making the wrong decision.

------
anonjon
There is more than one potential conclusion to draw from this.

The conclusion drawn here seems to be that geeks somehow exclude non-geeks
from certain fields.

Another conclusion would be that non-geeks self-select themselves out of
certain fields.

Another conclusion would be that being a geek is still looked down upon in our
society, and there is an unconscious effort to maintain status by not becoming
a geek. There is a certain air of superiority (and ignorance) conveyed in
saying that geeks don't shower.

Another conclusion would be that the traits exhibited by people who are
interested in geeky things are related to the traits exhibited by people who
want to go into geeky fields.

Geeks tend to be at very least obsessive about things. It follows that they
might be better about doing things which require obsessive traits, like
writing code. (Or maybe geeks are just better at everything...).

Also, I love the pub.

~~~
unalone
Can we try a thought experiment? Take the statements you just made and look
for generalizations.

"Nongeeks self-select themselves out of certain fields." "There is a certain
air of superiority (and ignorance) conveyed in saying that geeks don't
shower." "[T]he traits exhibited by people who are interested in geeky things
are related to the traits exhibited by people who want to go into geeky
fields." "It follows that they might be better about doing things which
require obsessive traits, like writing code. (Or maybe geeks are just better
at everything...)."

From reading these comments and knowing nothing about you, the attitude that I
get from these comments is twofold: You think that being a geek is a good
thing (or that geeks are inherently superior), and that there is somewhat of a
persecution of geeks going on. The message I read here (which might not at
_all_ be what you wanted to say, mind you!) is: "Nongeeks don't want to be
geeks because geeks are smarter."

Now, regardless of whether or not that's the case, or even whether or not you
believe that, that's the message that's coming out. It's somewhat off-putting
and exclusive. In your writing, you yourself are excluding so-called non-
geeks; the fact that you're willing to distinguish geeks as a distinct and
special category says something in and of itself. That all agrees with the
author's conclusion.

I agree with the author's conclusion myself, not because I'm in the field or
have done research about it but because it makes sense when you reason it out.
The community that's formed around this field has certain peculiarities. The
emphasis on comic books and graphic novels and Star Trek and energy drinks
that's mentioned, for instance. These are each odd things that lack a
distinguishing trait. It's not like the art in comic books is better than art
in other media forms, or that the story is better. It's not like Star Trek was
a geekier show than others; certainly it's not highbrow entertainment. And as
far as drugs of choice go, energy drinks are such a specific sort of
caffeinated beverage, designed to force a drug into the body rather than
following a so-called natural food flow.

If we were going to go from the assumption that the comp sci field had an even
distribution of interests, we'd be hard pressed to explain those certain
prominences. Why is there no vodka alongside the Red Bull, no cigarettes or
cigars? Why aren't other art forms represented as much as comic books? What's
the group fascination with Star Trek? When they're all presented together,
they're no longer idiosyncrasies. They have certain traits in common that
speak about the people who imbibe them. They're all things obtainable from
younger ages, they all have a certain visceral immediacy to them, they're all
to some degree static and unchanging. People who drink energy drinks tend to
stick with a single favorite; they'll spend years with one drink, unchanging.
I don't think I'm wrong in saying that there's a certain comfort in the
repetition, in knowing what you're going to get every time.

Furthermore, people with these specific interests tend to have other
characteristics. Am I right in thinking you value what people think more than
you do what they look like? Or even that you think people who judge others
based on looks are acting in a shallow fashion? Studies suggest you like
either classic or alternative rock or electronica. Perhaps I could place a bet
on your liking Monty Python, or enjoying Firefly? (This isn't you, anonjon,
this is the collective "you" of the geeks in the survey. I'm sure not _all_ of
this applies to you.)

Along with that, so-called "geeks" favor muted colors and t-shirts. They have
particular commonalities in fashion. And they certainly have similar
personality traits, which include introversion, arrogance, and short tempers.
Not every person has all these traits, but they're frequent _enough_ that we
can't just say they're common traits in all human beings. They're certainly
specific to this social clique.

The backlash against nerds is almost entirely one formed from individual
opinions forming. Perhaps it's unfair that people have decided comp sci majors
in black t-shirts who like Star Trek are less likely to be fun or friendly
than a random person from another sampling of society, but that's how it's
working, and that's the cause for a lot of "geek" bias. It also makes sense.
When you spend your time reading anime rather than following sports, certain
casual conversations become very difficult for both parties. I've got former
friends who're very stereotypical geeks, and I've forced them into social
gatherings, and when I listen to the conversations they get into it's cringe-
worthy. Either they don't realize how awkward they are, or they do it
deliberately in order to justify their social alienation.

So that's what the study is saying. It says, girls who have been shown these
standard set-ups see enough cues to make them think perhaps they'd be better
off somewhere else. That's entirely logical, isn't it? And the solution would
be for our culture to expand and embrace more things, to reflect "normal"
society in its diversity and lack of a hive mind. Until then, it will continue
to be treated like what it's perceived to be: A bright, socially retarded
group that's content with being largely outsiders.

~~~
randallsquared
_The message I read here (which might not at all be what you wanted to say,
mind you!) is: "Nongeeks don't want to be geeks because geeks are smarter."_

I think the truth is closer to: "Nongeeks don't want to be geeks because geeks
are perceived as lower status."

 _And the solution would be for our culture to expand and embrace more things,
to reflect "normal" society in its diversity and lack of a hive mind._

Of course, then we wouldn't be geeks, would we? The message I read here (which
might not at _all_ be what you wanted to say, mind you!) is: "Geeks should
stop liking what they like, and start liking what everyone else likes
instead." ;)

~~~
unalone
More like, "People should like what's good and keep an open mind to things,
even if it's outside their social sphere." That appeals to geeks and nongeeks
alike. But point taken.

