Because of my name I get occasional contacts from journalists who write for magazines with names like "Latino Business" and "Technology California Latino". At first I felt the same as you, but one of the journalists explained it to me quite well:
The point is not to mindlessly cheerlead because a person has some attribute, whether it's two X chromosomes, or a last name ending in a vowel, etc. The point is to aggregate the accomplishments of people with that attribute, so they don't always feel so damned alone.
My wife was working at a large tech company on an automated translation system. She needed some more native Spanish speakers to help vet the output. The call went out to the regular employees, thousands of people, and she got nothing. Hindi, Chinese, OK. But no Spanish. She ended up going down to the cafeteria (!) and asking the workers there to help out.
Maybe, someday, a woman programmer will be as unremarkable as a woman lawyer. Until then, well, keep remarking on it.
I am rather apprehensive about something of the opposite effect. I'm a chick and I'll be attending Google I/O this year . It'll be my first tech conference. I looked at the pictures from last year and it appears men are the majority by a long shot. Trouble is, I'm a sufficiently plain looking chick that I imagine it'll be "There's a girl... aw."
Maybe this sort of apprehension is part of the issue for women in tech. Maybe it comes from those awful "Hottest Geek Girl" articles the "booth babes" or such. Not only am I not as geeky and successful as them, but by comparison I look like a stick recently fetched out of a swamp, even on good days. sigh
I am not sure what your complaint is. But, fwiw, being beautiful is not all up side. I was raped at age twelve and given the message it was my fault for being too beautiful to resist. I am 47 and have a serious health issue. I am not as pretty as I once was. It has been a relief to go more unnoticed.
I'd upvote you a thousand times if I could. You've just modeled the kind of humility and maturity that can actually make the world a better place. Thank you for this..it hasn't gone unnoticed.
Almost every "peopleandtech.com" blog ends up being "men come talk about tech and very very occasionally we get a woman on to talk about women in tech."
Plus, there are lots of those around. Why would we need one more?
Well, granted there is not enough women talking, but I don't want to hear about women talking about women in tech. I want to hear different the different perspectives of people in tech talking about whatever which could very well be a female perspective.
I don't want to hear about women talking about women in tech
Is there a reason why you think that your desires are generally held, or why they're particularly important to the creators of the site? I'm assuming by your username that you're a man and the site isn't aimed at men who don't want to hear women talking about women in tech. (I could be wrong on either or both assumptions, of course.)
That'd be cool too, but this site is probably trying, at least partially, to encourage women and girls who may aspire to enter a tech field but are discouraged by being unaware of the many admirable women who have succeeded against the odds before them.
In a perfect world, peopleandtech.com would be all that's required, but unfortunately we're not quite there yet.
> In a perfect world, peopleandtech.com would be all that's required, but unfortunately we're not quite there yet.
At the risk of being controversial, we will never be there, and nor should we desire to be. Women like different things to men. We're hard wired to have different tastes, desires, strengths and weaknesses.
Even with that viewpoint, you could see this site as a positive and necessary thing. There really are girls who are deeply interested in STEM fields, but are discouraged by the apparent lack of female role models. In your view, they are biological outliers, I suppose... but surely they still deserve to have potential heroes highlighted for them?
After all, I assume you don't believe that the women who are successful and passionate about STEM fields are fighting their every instinct, right? So, even if you think they are biologically less likely interests for a woman, it'd be good to encourage the ones who are interested that they can be successes.
I'm not convinced. If you need a role model (Of the same sex) to do something, you probably don't 'love' it enough or find it intellectually stimulating enough to do it for yourself.
Personally, I think this just throws up an issue where there is none.
Any woman can get into tech, learn technology, setup websites, make apps, do a startup etc etc. I'm not really sure what barriers there are for anyone, apart from the barriers they impose on themselves.
Also I'm not a fan of sexism even when it's "reverse" - this website is "women only". It'd be much better to just share stories from everyone...
> I'm not really sure what barriers there are for anyone, apart from the barriers they impose on themselves.
So this is a really hard idea to get out to someone, and is the core of a lot of the issues here: a lot of issues women face in technology are issues that men have never experienced. They usually aren't aware that these issues even exist, and probably couldn't brainstorm them if prodded.
Here is a thought experiment. You're writing a unit test framework, and the output of your test is like so: http://i.imgur.com/jIsR8.png (sorry for the non-terminalness)
You pass this off to your friend to see what he thinks. "How do you tell if the test passed?" he asks. "What do you mean?" "I can't see if a test passed or failed. I don't get it." "What? All the information you need is right there!"
Turns out your friend is colorblind. Chances are, you didn't intentionally make this hard for colorblind people. It simply wasn't on your radar. Assuming you aren't colorblind, you go through your whole life discerning the difference between green and red and simply assume everyone else does too! The difference is that when someone brings this up, you don't go "nuh uh! We all see exactly the same way! I don't see what barriers there are for anyone to tell the difference between red and green." Yet this is exactly the response you gave above. (Don't worry, we all do this to a degree).
The point is, there are lots of subtle differences that people with different backgrounds view the world through. It's unrealistic to accommodate all of them, but in order to be a better human being you have to stop and listen when someone tells you something that is outside of your experience. So when you say you're 'not really sure what barriers there are for anyone,' well, there are a lot. Especially for women. That's why we need sites like this.
> "So when you say you're 'not really sure what barriers there are for anyone,' well, there are a lot. Especially for women. That's why we need sites like this."
FWIW, I said it because I learnt to program alone. Sitting in front of a computer. With books. I didn't 'network', or attend gatherings of other people. I don't see the need for it... So that's perhaps why I'm not seeing any hurdles.
The key with finding a role model that inspires you is often times finding someone you can relate to. I don't think its an exaggeration that in the STEM fields, its much easier to find examples of male role models than female ones. Which is fine seeing as there are a lot more males in the fields. But I don't think its an issue highlighting some women, so young females have someone to look up to when they run into gender issues in their own careers.
As a woman in high school and college in the stem fields (computer science, physics and biochem), while I can't point to any example of explicit sexism I faced, there was definitely this feeling of a "boy's club" at times, and at least personally, there was times I felt excluded and looked down upon by some individuals within the field. And even from individuals outside the field there was times that I got this feeling that people thought it was "weird" that I liked this stuff. Don't get me wrong, I loved it wholeheartedly, never once did I consider switching to something more "feminine". That doesn't mean that it didn't get me down at times. I had the benefit of having some strong female professors, who definitely inspired me.
> "The key with finding a role model that inspires you"...
I'm still not sure why anyone feels they need a role model. IMHO we should be teaching our kids to be confident about themselves, and trying what they want to try. If they're confident about exploring the world themselves, then role models probably matter far less.
My personal experience was that I found out about computers, saw they could do cool stuff, and wanted to play with them. "Role models" have never been part of the equation for me. Perhaps it's more necessary for Women to have role models, as they're more 'social' and communicate far more than men?
Just anecdotally, isn't the biochem industry pretty even, if not slightly female dominated?
The point is not to mindlessly cheerlead because a person has some attribute, whether it's two X chromosomes, or a last name ending in a vowel, etc. The point is to aggregate the accomplishments of people with that attribute, so they don't always feel so damned alone.
My wife was working at a large tech company on an automated translation system. She needed some more native Spanish speakers to help vet the output. The call went out to the regular employees, thousands of people, and she got nothing. Hindi, Chinese, OK. But no Spanish. She ended up going down to the cafeteria (!) and asking the workers there to help out.
Maybe, someday, a woman programmer will be as unremarkable as a woman lawyer. Until then, well, keep remarking on it.