[JDiculous]

Can someone explain to me why this is so horrific? When 95+% of music producers are male, of course men are going to assume that you're not a producer if you're female. When 90+% of developers are men, of course men are going to assume you're not a developer if you're a female. If I saw an extremely tall, handsome, well-dressed, and sociable man at a tech conference, I wouldn't take him to be a developer either. If you're a short white guy at an NBA event, people are going to assume you're not a pro basketball player. I'd imagine that the same thing holds true for men in female-dominated fields.

Whenever there's a tiny minority, people will make assumptions. As long as you're not overly zealous about your assumptions and willing to admit that you're wrong when told so, I don't see the problem. Realistically, there's nothing that will ever prevent people from making assumptions until the tiny minority stops being such a minority.

[zeendo]

Forget the connotation 'horrific'.

Are you asking why we should work to stop this behavior?

Pardon me for assuming but here are my thoughts -

Because it's literally systematically oppressive. This behavior makes an entire gender less likely to participate in our field. That's bad for the gender and it's bad for the field.

Isn't that enough reason to work to fix it?

So what if there are non-malicious explanations for an individual to behave this way....that doesn't mean we shouldn't stop it.

[JDiculous]

I'm saying that it's impossible to fix. If you're a short white guy, people will always initially assume that you're not a pro basketball player.

Again, as long as you're not overly zealous about your assumptions and willing to accept when they're wrong, it's not discrimination or "systematic oppression". Feminists try to turn this into a gender war, but it's really not. It's the circumstance of any minority in any heavily majority-dominated field.

[rfrey]

Being short is a natural impediment to playing professional basketball.

Being female is not a natural impediment to programming. So, even if you're correct that gender assumptions are valid (and apparently OK) because of the prevailing gender makeup, it is not impossible to fix - you fix it by changing the prevailing gender makeup. (I don't agree with that assumption, but let's grant it for the sake of exploring the other point.)

If part of the reason for the prevailing gender split is the attitudes that are caused by the prevailing gender split, then sure, you have a chicken-and-egg problem. But it's far from impossible. You can, for example, change one half of the equation by social expectation manipulation. Or change the other half by affirmative action measures. You may think the cost is greater than the benefit, but it's not impossible.

[JDiculous]

> you fix it by changing the prevailing gender makeup

Yes. This is the only way to stop men from making assumptions. That's what I said in my original post ("there's nothing that will ever prevent people from making assumptions until the tiny minority stops being such a minority"). To get more women in tech, more women have to pursue tech. Unlike what this article touts, telling men to assume feminine women are developers isn't going do much if anything until more feminine women become developers (which would be awesome!).

Women already get affirmative action and special groups/scholarships, yet they're still not choosing to pursue tech from an early age. I think this means two possible things: (1) girls naturally are less interested in tech, (2) parents, teachers, and the environment steer girls away from tech. Maybe (2) causes (1), or maybe it's biology.

I'd like to see more articles discussing (2) rather than seeing yet another article lamenting the fact that women commonly get mistaken for designers/recruiters at tech conferences. That's not the reason women aren't studying CS in high school (just like I'd imagine that's not the reason why men don't pursue nursing), the issue is much deeper than that.

[lmz]

> Being short is a natural impediment to playing professional basketball.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muggsy_Bogues

[dkuntz2]

Impediment doesn't mean you can't work around it, it just means it's more difficult.

[zeendo]

I'm sorry that you think it's impossible to fix. I think it is possible to fix by getting some balance in our numbers. Getting more women around, basically. If we see more women in software then we'll start to get rid of our stereotypes.

When I say systematically oppressive I mean that there are few women programmers and because of that we have stereotypes that women don't program and when we express those stereotypes it drives women out of programming in many ways. Thus the system reinforces itself.

Again, this sucks for both women and our field.

Let's work together to fix it.

How do we do that? By making fewer assumptions about people. And asking each other to do the same.

I do not believe this is a big ask but I do believe the potential benefit is huge.

I sincerely hope that you're wrong about it being impossible to fix. I would hope that you'd at least think it's worth trying given the stakes.

[Bahamut]

Saying it is "impossible to fix" is a bad attitude - difficult may be accurate, but declaring impossibility is a display of laziness/lack of creativity or knowledge of history. It denigrates the efforts of those who believe it possible to change the course of history.

[JDiculous]

When I said it's impossible to fix, I was referring to the majority making assumptions about someone who doesn't fit their mold. Telling people to be politically correct about it isn't going to fix it.

[zeendo]

You say politically correct and I say treating people with respect.

[jwoah12]

> Realistically, there's nothing that will ever prevent people from making assumptions until the tiny minority stops being such a minority.

These kinds of assumptions create an environment in the field that can make it uncomfortable for these "tiny minorities" to enter and become less of a minority. It serves to perpetuate the imbalance. You are 100% correct that it is natural human behavior to make these kinds of assumptions, but that's why we must try to make a conscious effort not to do so if we want to try to balance the demographics.

[spiffyman]

I don't think this is about whether it's natural to have assumptions. It's that the "tiny minority" (although I think your numbers are wrong) are consistently saying that those assumptions are offensive, exclusionary, off-putting, etc. So, natural or not, it behooves us to try to set them aside.

[wongarsu]

>When 90+% of developers are men, of course men are going to assume you're not a developer if you're a female

For one, that's a crime against statistics and formal logic itself. "90% of RAM is not fault tolerant, of course men are going to assume it's not RAM if it's fault tolerant" would be a ridiculous thing to say, because you just can't reason that way.

The kind of reasoning you want to do works like this: 90% of developers are male. Given that there are about as many men as there are woman, a randomly chosen woman has a 10% chance of being a developer. That's valid statistics. The problem is that this works relatively good while speaking to people in a subway, but at a tech conference you don't have a fair sample of either males or females. You aren't choosing at random but from an extremely skewed sample.

Of course there's instances where these kind of assumptions are valid, but most often (and with most stereotypes) it's just people applying statistics wrong.

[alexmat]

>"90% of RAM is not fault tolerant, of course men are going to assume it's not RAM if it's fault tolerant" would be a ridiculous thing to say, because you just can't reason that way.

If you had to make an assumption, and all you knew about an item was that it was fault tolerant, ruling out RAM is not a terrible strategy if 90% of all RAM is not fault tolerant.

Likewise, if all you know about someone is they are a developer, assuming they are male is not a terrible strategy since you are correct 90% of the time! I'll take those odds of being right without having to gather facts in most circumstances.

Obviously in a social setting (especially a tech conference) being wrong even once can be painful to the other party, so we should avoid making our assumptions known until we've verified them when trying to be civil.

But in most matters it's not unreasonable to prejudge and then verify, otherwise we'd spend too much time being uncertain. And in some cases, choosing to act on certain assumptions leads to a higher payoff than waiting to act on facts (which can be expensive to procure).

Until passing over women for developers costs more than assuming they're not developers, this will continue. The strategy being used by disgruntled female developers seems to be to inflate the social cost of not assuming all women are equally likely to be developers. In some circles that will matter, in others it won't. I don't blame women for using guilt to gain leverage. I'd do the same thing in their place.

[wongarsu]

>Likewise, if all you know about someone is they are a developer, assuming they are male is not a terrible strategy since you are correct 90% of the time!

Yes, and I'm not questioning that. The problem is that that same statistic says nothing about the likelihood that a given female is a developer.

[alexmat]

But if about half the people in the world are female and there are more male than female developers, then isn't it safe to assume that the likelihood of a random male being a developer is going to be higher than that of a random female?

[wongarsu]

When picking a random person from a phone book, yes. But that's not what this whole discussion is about. In virtually any real situation you don't have a completely random female. In most relevant situations you don't even have even close to equal amounts of men and woman in your sample.