[theorique]

I fucking hate all of this talk about "manchildren" and "brogrammers" and whatever else. Stop essentializing the problem. Stop the man hate. Fucking hell.

If you're experiencing this pushback from women in the profession as 'man hate' that's certainly your right. I view it more as listening to a professional colleague telling a story from her perspective. I'm not experiencing it as hate, more as hearing from a woman 'this is my perspective'.

Do you really think the man who said: "Oop, Katie's got the low cut dress on today! I know where I'm sitting!" is a happy, mentally-healthy, well-adjusted human being? Hmmm? Where's the compassion for him?

Perhaps he's a victim too - none of us know the full story and we can speculate until we're blue in the face. But wouldn't you agree that his actions are highly unprofessional, creepy, and personally discouraging to one particular woman, and part of a broader pattern of discouragement toward women in technology overall?

I'm at a loss for words, this whole clusterfuck makes me so angry.

So what do you recommend to fix the problem? Where will you direct all that energy that your anger has activated?

[Strallus]

Maybe the problem can't be fixed. As long as techies remain predominately male, this problem will persist.

And why are they predominately male? Either- A: Men, for some unknown reason, like programming better. B: The sexist environment drives women away.

Whichever one it is, the problem will not resolve itself. For A, as long as men like it better, and there are more of them, women will be seen as outsiders. For B, as long there are more men, some of whom are sexist, the women will be driven away and the ratio of m/f will stay the same.

[cellularmitosis]

A or B?

Consider this thought experiment: if it is the case that there is a ton of interest by women in programming, but that interest is frustrated by the "star wars" factor, that would imply that there's a huge pool of untapped female programming power. Why hasn't an enterprising business person realized this and created the next facebook-killer or google-killer by assembling a team of all-female ninjas?

My first reaction to this experiment would be "Because they were frustrated before they had the chance to graduate with a CS degree".

And the response to that would be to examine what the rate of CS enrollment is at all-female universities, if such things (still) exist. (I don't know that data looks like yet. lazyweb, can you answer this for me?)

[msbarnett]

> My first reaction to this experiment would be "Because they were frustrated before they had the chance to graduate with a CS degree".

Well, there's more to it than that. Female participation was fairly high in the 70s, dropped precipitously through the 80s, 90s, and early 00s, and is only now kinda-sorta-maybe starting to recover.

The hidden factor in there is the Personal Computer revolution. Prior to it, men and women entered college on roughly even footing w.r.t. computer exposure in their life-to-date. Once the personal computer took off, though, a big gender (and race) disparity cropped up.

Boys who had their very own computer to play with in their formative pre-college years received it, on average, around the age of 14 (IIRC, I'll try to hunt the exact stats down later).

Girls and minorities didn't receive a computer of their own to use until much later (19 as recently as the early 00s, which is, critically, after most people decide what to major in).

Intro CS classes turned into highly intimidating environments where the males had significant computer experience and may well have spent several years programming already; girls were at a significant disadvantage and enrolment fell off fast as they switched to majors where they weren't starting off at a several year disadvantage versus their peers.

[ordinary]

Intro CS classes turned into highly intimidating environments where the males had significant computer experience and may well have spent several years programming already

When I started my first year of CS at uni, I had almost no experience programming and I definitely felt intimidated by the (many) fellow students who already had 5+ years of experience.

During one of my first labs, I was told to write a toString method for a Java class. I could not understand why the signature had to say "String" twice. A TA spent half an hour trying to explain it to me and eventually gave up in desperation.

[cellularmitosis]

ah, that's very interesting.

actually, my personal experience corroborates with that data. I'm a bit of an outlier, having switched to CS in my second year and never having written a line of code before then (my (male) classmates and coworkers are always shocked to learn of this, because they had all started programming at a much younger age).

[yelsgib]

Good questions!

Sure, the guy's actions are unprofessional (though I hate the term), and discouraging. I wouldn't say creepy. I really hate the term "creepy" because probably (and yeah, here I'm speculating) the guy has been called a creep his whole life. Probably he's even creepy. But shouldn't we feel sorry for such a person?

(United States) society has a really bad habit of locating blame on male citizens and not looking further for causes of their behavior. There are lots of examples of this, but a really blatant one is the current incarceration rate. We like to say "this person acted badly and they suck - I'm sure they have reasons - but they suck!" and stop the conversation there.

Like I said, I'm really sad that one of the effects of this big pile of sad men is that women are discouraged. But I'm also sad that they're sad - and that they engage in behaviors which make them more sad. For instance: unhealthy eating patterns, drug/alcohol abuse, gaming addictions, porn addictions, etc. I'm also sad that they're mean to other men - e.g. flamewars. I'm sad about a whole big bucket of things.

---

You're asking whether I'd classify his actions in a particular way (unprofessional, creepy, discouraging) and, for the most part, I would. The question (as you point out) is where to go from here? What do I do with all this anger?

One thing I'd like to do is fight back against the conditions that make the world shit for nerdy teenage boys. I'll take myself as a prototype here, but as a nerdy teenage boy:

1. Other teenage boys are mean to you 2. Other teenage girls are mean to you 3. Your teachers more or less hate you for being better than them at the subjects they teach 4. Your parents think of you as a failure because you're not dating/doing normal things 5. Society at large is disgusted with you (media portrays you as a creepy pervert, etc.)

I mean, let's keep things in perspective, here. This woman had a shitty run of things, but was she suffering? Really? I (and a lot of people I know) had to put up with 100x more intolerance and aggression on a daily basis from the time I was 10 until I was 18. From both genders. I was bullied. I was laughed at. I was scorned by family and teachers. Sorry if we came out a little malformed.

Hell, I'm not even bad at interacting with women, since my skin normalized and I had the luck of working at a big retail store where I had to interact with them a lot. I had girlfriends and such and now I'm married. Shit has more or less fixed itself, but it's not really my fault as such.

Yeah, so what to do? Let's create art which actively portrays the sex-starved teenage nerd boy as heroic, in his own way? Let's give him some love, as a society? Let's extol his virtues, maybe once? What support is given to these people, really?

The sick thing is that for every such nerdy guy I know who became successful (mostly the smart ones, and mostly as programmers) I know 5 who were pretty much crushed by the stress of all this and have never really recovered.

[theorique]

I hear that. I think it's a positive step to have compassion for both sides in this workplace disagreement. And I sure don't mean to paint low-cut-shirt-comment-guy (LCSCG) as irredeemably evil.

The reality is, in the situation under immediate discussion he's in the role of the victimizer and he's crossed the lines in the workplace. Is what he did illegal or even fireable? No to the first, and probably not to the second. Does it mean he should never be allowed to work in his field again? Hardly.

But is it reasonable for him to be required have a talk with HR about what's 'OK' and what's 'not OK' when dealing with colleagues? I think so. Gaining a better understanding of the way your communication lands on people is a very important step in maturity and growth. Better he should learn such a thing later, in the workplace, rather than not at all.

And you're right - maybe he has a past history that drives him to behave the way he did / does. Perhaps earlier in his life LCSCG was victimized too. Perhaps he has anger or resentment against the popular girls who laughed at him or the football players who dropped his books in the mud and pushed his face in it. I don't know. None of us do.

Maybe LCSCG, and others in similar situation, can get some kind of help - coaching or therapy or socialization - that helps him interact with others in a way that's more resourceful. I think that's a result that almost anyone would support.

[bmj]

I started to reply to the grandparent, then came across this and realized you've summed up my thoughts nicely. The key here is that living in a society, there is some level of civility (respect, really) that you should try to attain. I'm fairly certain that many of us here have been put down (or worse) at some point in our lives. And I'm sure, at some point in my life, I made some poor choices because of those experiences. But, the point is, you absolutely do have to learn that acting out in kind to someone else isn't a solution. The solution is to treat others as you wish to be treated.