

How to scare off female developers - pmjordan
http://rachelnabors.com/2012/02/how-to-scare-off-female-developers/

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notatoad
how is what he said a "sweeping and dismissive generalization"? he's
complaining about women with 'golden uterus complex', which is not a phrase
i've heard before but i know immediately what he means. some women derive a
sense of superiority from the existence of their reproductive organs, and it
can get pretty annoying. he is specifically complaining about those women, not
all women.

the tech community has a severe case of male guilt when it comes to things
like this. Mark has done nothing wrong, and there's no reason for other male
software developers to be apologising for his actions. he complained about
annoying people - there's nothing wrong with that, and there's no reason for
women in general to be getting up in arms about it.

~~~
dsr_
When you complain about annoying people by making their gender the primary
basis of identification, you are most definitely making a sweeping
generalization.

You are part of the problem.

You are correct that there's no reason for other people to apologize for him,
because he needs to do that himself, if he can be convinced that his sexism is
a problem. There is also no need for other people to be defending his sexism.

Here's a hint: a complaint about "annoying people" should aim to be more
specific than 50% of the population.

~~~
ramblerman
Oh please, this is so much brooha over nothing.

If I say guys who run out on their newborns are dicks, that doesn't imply
anything about the male gender as a whole.

When this guy categorizes women with a "golden uterus complex", whatever that
means, he's not grouping all women. Yes, all women do have a uterus, but that
isn't what he is saying.

As for apologizing... I'd be sad to see him do it, as a man, of course.

~~~
lomegor
You really can't use the word guys as they are not being discriminated in this
world (in the majority of cases). Copying and pasting from another comment of
mine.

Imagine if instead he said: "I hate black people who steal". Of course he
does! But he must also hate white people who steal, in fact, he hates people
who steal. There's no need for specifying race.

------
Drbble
Once we're debating the political correctness of a statement someone made of
_Twitter_ , we've already lost. Mark's comment shouldn't harm female
developers, because they should be busy working on something with other female
and male developers and not having fights on Twitter.

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Rembrand
She’s calling it like she sees it and even ignoring the right or wrong of it
for a minute, seeing the less than subtle mysogyny in some (if not most) of
these comments I’d say she’s right. In gender as wel as in race issues you
don’t go around telling people they’re wrong to feel they’re being singled
out. Instead of being dicks about it we should strive to build a friendlier
atmosphere for everybody so women, gay people or whoever else doesn’t feel
they’re being targeted as a group when conflict arises.

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markjaquith
Mark Jaquith here. Happy to clear some things up (and would appreciate it if
you could make this comment visible on the thread).

Here is the text of my tweet:

> Imagine if men talked like women with "Golden Uterus Complex" do… "Excuse
> me, but which one of us has a penis? That's what I thought."

First, the definition of "golden uterus complex". This phrase was brought to
my attention by Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, a doctor of Clinical Psychology. Dr.
Palmatier assigns a great many attributes to this personality, but the one
most related to my point is:

> the golden uterus believes that having birthed a child makes them better and
> more knowledgeable than others; e.g., the “Well you don’t have kids so how
> would you know anything?” woman

This phrase doesn't apply to "women". I wasn't making any kind of blanket
statement about women. I wasn't even making a blanket statement about mothers.
I was referring to women who have carried a pregnancy to term __and who
exhibit specific behavior characteristics __. I sure hope that __how people
behave __is an aspect upon which they can be judged.

Here's the specific thing that triggered my tweet:
<http://i.imgur.com/GxYf8.png>

For context, it is a picture on Facebook of a mother feeding her newborn baby
solid food — a seriously dangerous, ignorant, and irresponsible thing to do.
Someone in the comments tells her that you shouldn't feed a baby that little
solid food. The mother responds "Well it my kid not Yours so what I do with
him is none of your concern thanks" [sic].

It didn't matter to her that the commentator was correct, and that what she
was doing was potentially lethal to her baby. She gave birth to the baby, so
in her mind she's the expert and the ultimate arbiter of what is right for the
baby. I've even seen this complex be applied to matters other than child care,
as if the act of giving birth confers all manner of sagacious powers.

I'm not discounting the power of personal experience. I was present for the
births of both of my children, and even as a mostly-spectator, it was a
unimaginably transforming experience. What I am objecting to is the idea that
childbirth automatically makes a woman the ultimate authority on child care or
anything else. This is the sort of attitude that has contributed to the anti-
vaccine nonsense that has been plaguing some Western countries in recent
years.

My tweet contrasted the way that mothers with this behavioral complex openly
talk about the utilization of their reproductive organs for childbirth being
the source of their claimed superiority, and I pondered what it would be like
if men claimed and talked about their reproductive organs as the source of
their supposed superiority. It was a reductio ad absurdum, clearly. Men (well,
most men post high school) don't bring up the use of their sex organs in
polite conversation as a trump card. Some (nota bene: __SOME __) women do.
Sexist men usually exhibit a sexism that is much more closely tied to feelings
of mental superiority and greater physical strength. I find it to be an
interesting social sexual difference to how some women express a sense of
superiority over men.

People do reductio ad absurdum comparisons about social sexual imbalances all
the time. Like how it's weird to imagine women yelling things out of a car at
an attractive male jogger. Or making a joke about how if men could get
pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament in most religions. I guess I made the
assumption that my Twitter audience would get that (a) I was proposing a
ridiculous scenario, partly for comedic effect and (b) that I also did it to
provoke thought about quirky social sexual imbalances. Maybe that was too much
to assume for such a constricting medium such as Twitter.

But in any case, my intention and meaning could have been discovered by Ms.
Nabors by either asking me for clarification, or doing a simple web search for
the phrase, either of which would have immediately made it clear that the
phrase refers to a __behavior __exhibited by a subset of the subset of women
who have given birth, and it is not in any way a slur against women or mothers
(I will grant that it is a slur against people __who exhibit this behavior __,
behavior being an acceptable thing to criticize).

Instead of seeking out my meaning, Ms. Nabors quite publicly called me an
"ass", accused me of making "sweeping and dismissive generalizations" about
women, implied that I was socially inept (while also making her own sweeping
generalization about the social skills of developers), called me openly
hostile to women, and called my remarks a symptom of a boys-club attitude
within the developer community.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether she fairly judged my actions.

~~~
mst
Oh my.

The fascinating part here, to me, is that actually it's the "this is my child
therefore butt out" argument - which isn't even the golden uterus complex
thing - that would be "you haven't given birth to a child therefore butt out".

I can imagine a similarly stupid male saying exactly the same thing except
perhaps for saying 'our kid' rather than 'my kid'.

How you jumped from there to your Golden Uterus Complex joke, I don't know.

What I do know is, had you typed out the text of your tweet into one of many
of the private chat rooms of various sorts that I'm part of, I would probably
have laughed.

However, I don't believe it had any place in a public twitter feed that also
contains technical-related stuff and therefore may get followed by people who
don't know you personally. My public twitter account is somewhat restricted in
what topics I cover on it for pretty much precisely this reason.

~~~
markjaquith
> How you jumped from there to your Golden Uterus Complex joke, I don't know.

Someone else's comment on the photo bridged that gap. Don't recall the
comment. But you're right, there's a difference between "my child, butt out"
and "you haven't birthed a child, butt out". The former can definitely be done
by any parent. In practice, the latter is exclusive to mothers. And I can
somewhat relate to the former — people can be too nosy with other people's
kids. So that doesn't seem to bother me as much, as long as they aren't
endangering the child. But the latter is really arrogant and dismissive.
Furthermore, it perpetuates the idea that child care is the mother's job. If
we want to address the issue of women being underrepresented in the workplace,
we have to get away from that "Daddy works, Mommy is a mommy" vestigial 1950's
attitude. Male dominated workforces need to be friendly and more welcoming to
women, and at the same time female dominated parental arrangements need to be
more friendly and accommodating of other caregivers.

> However, I don't believe it had any place in a public twitter feed that also
> contains technical-related stuff and therefore may get followed by people
> who don't know you personally.

I don't want to play a persona on my Twitter account. It's not like there are
two people — WordPress me and personal me. It's just me. If you follow me on
Twitter, you get it all. May FSM have mercy on my followers if Rick Santorum
wins the GOP nomination, because it's going to be all "oh HELL no" all the
time on Twitter. :-)

------
cantastoria
That comment wouldn't scare off female developers just feminist developers
which isn't the same thing.

------
negelirelden
Imagine the kind of world we would be living in if people felt so entitled, by
their identities and the things they do and have, that they felt justified in
dismissing the needs and opinions of other people as unimportant by
comparison.

------
mst
I love how people seem to have trouble with the idea that Golden Uterus
Complex isn't an offensive term to use.

It's the genderedness. If he'd called it Golden Genitals Complex I might've
been less bothered.

But really, it's "argument that superior experience guarantees superior
knowledge", and whether that is on the basis of the ownership of a vagina, a
penis, a marriage license, a car, or really anything else, it's the same type
of stupidity, and I'd like to see it called out as that.

~~~
ramblerman
People say Obama has swagger.

Women have that motherly touch.

These are positive statements, one however has a racial implication, and the
other has a "genderedness" aspect.

It isn't offensive to realize they're are differences between us. Unless, of
course, we really want to bring the "smooth area" from kid's dolls into the
adult world.

------
fhwang
I've actually never heard the phrase "golden uterus complex", but I seriously
wonder if it's any different from calling a black person "uppity". Which is
also not cool.

------
Craiggybear
"Excuse me ... but which one of us has a penis".

I have in fact been in the room when someone has actually said this. It was
intended as a joke and the lady to whom he was addressing his query (who just
happened to be his boss) was also in fact highly amused by it.

All the other men just sat there with their mouths literally hanging open.

------
ThaddeusQuay2
"How to scare off female developers?"

Nail a huge, purple dildo to your office door, and enjoy the quiet solitude of
a nag-free, gossip-free, rage-free, single-gender work environment, where you
can get stuff done, and in which you may occasionally stroll without pants.
Seriously: Either you are qualified for the job, or you aren't. If you are,
then stop claiming offense over gender or race or whatever, because all that
does is create further division, and not the enlightenment which you expect.
What matters is not what the other person says, but rather, how you respond.
Every minute that you spend being negative, is a minute you could have spent
on a project that will get you that raise or promotion.

~~~
gensym
Clearly you've never worked at an all-male environment if you think that would
necessarily by nag-free, gossip-free and rage-free. In my experience, an
environment without women devolves into some "Lord of the Flies"-type shit
pretty quickly unless you're super careful about who you hire, personality-
wise.

Seriously, all research done on the matter indicates that women are just as
effective as software development as men, so the lack of women in software
development indicates it's far from the meritocracy you seem to imagine it is.

This "either you are qualified for the job, or you aren't so it's ok to act
like an asshole" bullshit has gotten pretty old in 2012. Here's a clue: if
you're a lead developer creating an environment that's hostile to a large pool
of potentially highly skilled developers, you're not fucking qualified,
regardless of your coding skills. Otherwise, what's the point of the word
"lead"?

~~~
ThaddeusQuay2
Not that it might matter to your reply, but FYI: I added a couple of sentences
just as you were posting.

Clearly, your experiential matrix is not the same as mine. I'm 45, and I've
worked in many different environments since I was about 15, when I was at a
boys-only school, which, by the way, functioned quite well without devolving
into anything resembling Lord of the Flies.

The lack of women in software development indicates that there aren't enough
women who can "take it like a man", so to speak. Whatever men dish out is
merely a social filter, designed to rid their environment of those (men and
women) who can't handle pressure. If you are much shorter than me, and I want
you gone, the first thing I'll do is to repeatedly call you "shorty", because
that's an easy way to start, as it's the low-hanging fruit in the insult
aisle.

Either you are qualified, or you aren't. That wasn't bullshit a hundred years
ago, and it shouldn't be today. You make the assumption that women can be
highly skilled. My experience is that, in general, they are not, and most of
the few who are, have a personality which clouds their judgment. Knowing how
to program is not enough for the job. You need to have non-related life
skills, such as dealing with people who don't like you, or who are otherwise
in your way.

~~~
hcayless
There were teachers at your all-boys school whose job it was to prevent the
Lord-of-the-Flies scenario and if yours was anything like mine, they expended
a lot of energy on that task :-).

You're attempting to rationalize the mostly-male situation you find yourself
in, but it's pure conjecture. Women are (in general) just as capable as men
(in general) at software development. My own belief is that there are a host
of poorly understood factors that tend to push women away from software
engineering careers. One of them is the fact that it's a "boys' club", but
it's mainly a boys' club because it's mostly boys—if there were more women,
cheerful misogyny like that exhibited in your "take it like a man" comment
would be less acceptable.

In other words, we can't fix the problem (and it _is_ a problem) of gender
imbalance in software engineering just by not being asses to women, but it's a
place to start.

