If it’s a dudebro culture, of course women won’t be a “culture fit”

Remember Dave Winer’s speculation that women were biologically unfit for the tech industry? He should have just asked the women why they were avoiding the field — it turns out when you do that, they don’t say “Math is hard” or “I just like shopping”. Instead, they point to abusive, denigrating policies and a culture of self-congratulatory dudebros.

I have another peeve in the comments. There are complaints about the industry being reluctant to hire women of child-bearing age, and the defense from some women is “I’m not going to have children!” or “I’m a lesbian!” That’s nice. Do you think women who want to have children should suffer a career penalty for that? Isn’t it more than a little unfair that no one complains about men of that age, because the assumption is that they won’t have any obligations to participate in parenting? Maybe industry and academia should recognize that their workers are human beings, men and women, and that they will have desires and needs outside of the cubicle that you must respect.

It’s depressing stuff to read when you have a daughter with an aspirations of a career in technology. I think she can kick all the dumb dudes’ asses, but she shouldn’t have to.

Let’s all celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. with gunshots!

Is Laura Ingraham the worst person in the world, or what? She had a show to dismiss racism as something in the past, and she featured a clip of Rep. John Lewis speaking…which she interrupted with a gun-shot sound effect. What was she thinking? Here’s the clip:

That’s not all. While denying that millions of black people are oppressed by racism, her guest was flagrant racist Patrick Buchanan…and tell me, does this commentary sound at all familiar to you?

While Ingraham’s gunshot interruption was emotionally destructive, the remainder of her show’s segments on the 50th anniversary events was intellectually destructive. Ingraham complained that speakers at the rally discussed the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, but, "No one talked about the black crime rate at the rally."

Ingraham’s guest Buchanan recently appeared on Fox News to distort black-on-white crime rates and imply that African Americans are an inherently violent race. On the radio, the two bemoaned the idea that, in Buchanan’s words, "white males are the only group … against whom it’s legitimate to discriminate against."

Just a hint to JT: I like you, man, and I think you’ve got great promise…but when you make it easy to draw comparisons with Laura Ingraham and Pat Buchanan, you done screwed up.

You should always ignore some old guy opining on women’s abilities

I had this vague impression that Dave Winer was one of the good guy pundits of the computer culture, but this column in which he asks “Why are there so few women programmers?” is gakworthy and stupid.

Now, I’m sure there is sexism, probably a lot of sexism. But I also think there’s something about programming that makes many women not want to do it. Here’s a theory why that might be.

Programming is a very modal activity. To be any good at it you have to focus. And be very patient. I imagine it’s a lot like sitting in a blind waiting for a rabbit to show up so you can grab it and bring it home for dinner.

There is specialization in our species. It seems pretty clear that programming as it exists today is a mostly male thing. Which also raises the obvious question that perhaps we can make it so that it can better-use the abilities of the other half of our species?

Let’s blame it on biology! Let’s pretend that there’s some intrinsic biological difference that makes discriminating against women in computer science perfectly natural!

It’s a beautiful example of letting your bias dictate your explanation, though. Most psychological studies show men are more impulsive than women (although I’m not a fan of characterizing a whole gender that way, either) — it’s women who have the cultural stereotype of being more patient. It also ignores historical data: 80% of the calculators at Bletchley Park in WWII were women.

Yet now, when it’s time for convenient excuse-making, we get the claim that men are more patient than women. Convenient, isn’t it, how biology is always dragged in to justify the status quo?

I also have to say…who hunts rabbits from a blind?

There isn’t that much specialization in our species, either — it’s not as if men evolved to fit the niche of sitting at a desk for long hours doing the fine motor work of typing, while women were shaped by nature to…sit at a desk for hours doing the fine motor work of sewing.

I also recommend this simple, clean, short presentation on women’s math skills. The difference (if there is any; the presentation acknowledges a very slight statistical difference, while I’m not so sure it’s valid) is not sufficient to account for any difference in aptitude for computer science.

P.S. See the bit in Winer’s comment that is struck out? He acknowledged that he might be off-base later, but that was the bit he thought he might be wrong on. I don’t get it.

Fake rape?

Isn’t it fascinating how many men are absolutely certain that most rape accusations are completely false, that it’s just wicked women conspiring to bring men down? Yet when you look at the numbers, you know that data that skeptics are supposed to care about, the frequency of false rape accusations is low, about 6-8%.

And then you hear the stories about how rape is handled by the police and by society at large, and you realize that even those numbers are grossly inflated (warning about that link: detailed description of how police treat a rape victim. Very unsettling).

Melissa speaks out

I presume you’ve all been following the Doonesbury story line this past week? If not, you can start here, with Sgt. Melissa giving a career day presentation to her former school:

Yeah, she’s tearing heads off now. With facts.



The two old guys at the end look familiar…or at least their behavior is. Quick, let’s silence the unpleasant truth!

Don’t be those guys.

I just donated to The Ada Initiative

Since my daughter works in and is a student of computer science, I figured I’d better do what I can to make that field a better environment for women.

You can also donate now. It’s a good cause!

P.S. Matching funds! Your donation is worth twice as much if you give now!

I just got a comment on twitter about this post:

@Miserere22: @pzmyers hopefully she gets raped. no offense.

Hopefully their account gets reported by people all over the world. No offense.

That kind of asshole is what we oppose — you might also donate to the Ada Initiative to spite him and all of his fellow misogynists.

Last refuge of the scoundrel

There is a facebook page called The Patriot Nation, and it’s exactly what you’d expect: people raging against an America that isn’t white. And it is on facebook, so hell no, it’s never going to get taken down, even when it lies.

This is how it lies. The photo on the left, below, is the original, of a woman protesting the Trayvon Martin verdict. It didn’t fit the racist narrative of the goddamn Patriot Nation, though, so they had to do a little blatant photoshop tweaking, and produced the faked photo on the right.

racistphotoshop

These scum are the people who defile the good name of my country, who make me gag and recoil when someone calls anyone a “patriot”. That woman on the left? I’d be proud to call her my fellow American.

Say, I’ve seen this strategy in action before…

A damaging, irrational pack of nonsense is rebuked by politicians and slapped down by the courts. Proponents of the idiocy then step back and start surreptitiously (and sometimes openly) smuggling it into the classroom — if they can’t get their way now, they figure, by corrupting the next generation and keeping them ignorant, maybe they’ll be able to get their way later.

That’s straight from the creationist playbook. That’s what they’ve been up to for decades. So I’m completely unsurprised by what’s going on in the UK, where anti-gay policies perpetrated by that awful person, Margaret Thatcher, were defeated years ago…and now they’re being reinvigorated by injecting them into the schools.

Ministers, Opposition MPs and gay rights activists united to express anger and alarm over the disclosure that academies across the country had adopted policy statements that echoed the notorious Section 28 brought in by Margaret Thatcher 25 years ago.

The legislation, which was overturned by the Blair government, banned teachers in lessons from “intentionally promoting” homosexuality, a form of words that critics denounced for discriminating against gay pupils.

Campaigners have identified more than 40 schools across the country that stress in their sex-education guidelines that governors will not allow teachers to “promote” homosexuality, or are ambiguous on the issue.

So familiar…we’re on the right side of history, but the good guys all naively cheer when the right laws are enacted or overturned, thinking that now the problems will go away. That’s never true. Laws don’t change people’s minds, and our opposition knows that — and they’ve got these potent institutions, the churches, that they can use to promote extra-legal policies and attitudes and try to steer the populace back into the Middle Ages.