it's funny how grown women are referred to as girls, yet it's less common that grown men are referred to as boys - in my experience.
In other ways, to be a boy is to be like a girl, as in "the hardships in this remote camp separate the men from the boys" (i.e. the hardy and able from the weak and effeminate).
"Woman" is stuffy and formal, and it makes me feel old. When I hear the word "woman", I think either Hillary Clinton or somebody's grandma, neither of which I have any desire to be.
I only use the word "woman" in formal contexts.
Lady and Ladies is another set of words that could be used.
It's interesting that "Woman" is seen as stuffy and formal, whereas "man" is often used like "be a man" or "man up".
You usually have to put an adjective on "man" to give it a negative connotation, in my experience.
anecdotally my girlfriend (Russian if that makes any difference) absolutely hates when I refer to her as a young woman, or use the word "woman" at all. She much prefers to be referred to as a girl.
I have no issues with being called a man.. not saying that this pattern is everywhere but it's very apparent with her and her family.
Just my penny.
Once? It's naive to think that these attitudes do not persist, albeit in somewhat disguised forms, perhaps.
At some universities, for instance, engineers regard CS majors as "wimps". Engineering is hard, CS is soft.
Moreover, think about how there is an attitude that some "softer" or "easier" programming is lower on the pecking order. While programming as a broad category may not be "women's work", web design (even with client and server scripting) is "for girls" and, say, writing drivers for a network switch is for "real men".
Oh, the hard/soft stereotyping in digital tech is alive and kicking!
The vast majority of the recruiter spam I get, as a female, is front end web development or UI/UX work. I removed all mention of "HTML/CSS" type skills from LinkedIn, but that hasn't stopped it. I'm beginning to suspect that removing my photo from public profiles would probably do more to stop the inappropriate job spam than anything I could actually change in LinkedIn, however...
I'm transgender, and I can tell you that I got that kind of spam both before and after I transitioned. In fact, most recruiter spam I've ever gotten is wholly irrelevant to my skills.
You're getting that spam because the positions are in high demand, so there are a lot of them, and recruiters will spam all their positions to every single email address in their database.
They just plain have no respect for other human beings. Half the recruiter spam I get uses my old name, even though I legally changed it almost a year ago and changed it on my resume (which I posted to all job sites) a few months before that. I also list on every job site that I cannot relocate and I'm only seeking full-time work. Most of the recruiter spam I get is for positions out of town and for contract jobs. They never get it. I've written scathing emails to recruiters lambasting them for suggesting I uproot my life and move out of state for a shitty 6-month contract. I usually don't get a reply.
One recruiter took the cake. He emailed me about one such position, then called me the next day after I ignored his email, and I told him I wasn't interested in any contract work and that I don't ever want to do business with him. A few days later, he emails me again about the same position. I replied with a Cease & Desist notice making it clear that he is to have no contact with me from now on, and then he calls me again to try and convince me to take the job. I spent the next few minutes shouting at him and berating him for harassment. I planned to contact his firm's HR department about his conduct, but I never got around to it, sadly.
I see a few reasons for this (at least where I went to university).
First, CS required less math classes. Harder than most sciences, but still not as much as the default for engineers. There was a correlation between who math a STE major required and how hard it was viewed. Psychology which didn't require calculus and had a watered down stats course was considered the weakest. Physics and Engineering was at the top.
Second, professors in engineering were far less forgiving (I took a few classes). They were stricter and while their work wasn't harder, they were far more likely to just give a 0 for doing something wrong. Also their tests had more chain problems (answer to question 1 is input to question 2), and every one I had always insisted you had to have the right answer (so if you had the right answer to question 2 using the wrong answer from question 1, you got a 0).
Third, there were easy computer degrees. Name a degree in Information Management, while not CS, was often associated and it did not require the most complex CS classes. There were not easy engineering degrees.
Social construction of gender will seep into dynamics at any point where something can be argued as "weaker" than another thing.
Specifically, programming itself was often considered secretarial work and, as such, was generally given to women.
Men tended to participate as engineers or mathematicians.
I don't think anyone would contend that CS is a female-dominated field although I take your point that some may consider it somewhat lower on the testosterone chart than traditional engineering.
What do they think about electrical engineers? Circuit board sewers...?
The general opinion was:
ME was harder than CS.
Math majors were unlikely to get a job.
Electrical and Chemical engineering were harder than ME (especially chemical)
Civil engineering was a joke. (Probably because our statics and mechanics of materials classes were so easy in comparison with ME classes).
These aren't my opinions just some observations of general opinions of undergrads.
Sidenote: Disclaimer: I was heavily influenced by my Biology professors. I don't think society evolved in vacuum separate from genetic evolution. So while I don't appreciate insulting people by gender. I do however think there are gender differences.
Another person on HN linked me to this documentary, which opened my mind. https://vimeo.com/19707588
That would pretty much mean the death of almost every open source project that depends on unpaid amateurs.
Because we put our heart in it - so we code like amateurs. The best professionals are amateurs who just happen to be paid.
I dunno, this feels off. Did I misunderstand the analogy ?
However as I'm usually short on time, I'd prefer to just read the scientific articles for myself.
Do you have any notable scientific articles from the book references to recommend ?
What does that mean? Suit and tie? Clean shaven, short back and sides?
Ex.I might expect a professional python programmer to follow PEP8 code style.
I think rather than coding like boy or coding like girl, we should be aspiring to be professional or at least competent . That's the far bigger and inclusive problem.
Most human beings need protection and help. Programming is hard. Learning to program is hard. Leaving happily in these crazy times is hard.
Just be empathetic, dont be condescending and bam, your help will be greatly appreciated by men and women. That's what I think one should treat anyone else in this particular regard.
I'm in the military and there are only a few women I know who would hold their own in a fight against a similarly fit man. I can think of maybe 1 off the top of my head.
Years of evolution made us this way, it can't just be undone by an egalitarian sentiment.
Then I stop smiling and remind myself that, even in praise, it's not relevant.
Remembering some of these women, and the early history like this, is very relevant today to show that that's nonsense.
I interviewed at a company a week or so ago and was very happy to see their lead developer was a woman. I didn't dare bring up the topic in the interview, but I'd have loved to hear if she was aiming for CTO at a later point in her career instead of escaping tech work.
The shame of it is, almost any dev team I've been on is better with at least one capable woman on it, yet so few stay.
Modern women are statisticaly less interested in programming. That's because boys 20 years ago got c-64 or PC because they wanted to play games, and girls 20 years ago got barbies.
Turns out barbie doesn't have the same side effects.
And you know what - on an aggregate, societal level - it might actually be: men and women are not the same, and that's OK. But this is a statistical observation that only applies to the population as a whole and is completely invalid at the individual level. If you feel yourself reaching for this knowledge at that level then evidently you don't have enough good information about the individual in front of you - that is the problem you need to fix.
If we took away all the contextual stuff we know about our founding mothers and fathers and referred to them only with asexual codenames like 'Person X', absolutely nothing would change. If one's aim is achieving equality, the only way to truly do that is to strip away all the bullshit: gender - just like hair colour, accent, and anything else you care to name - shouldn't even register. It's a non-thought.
If that's what feminism is about then I'm a feminist; but I'd never actually call myself that because 90% of the feminism I see today is most definitely not like this, it seems instead to be about making gender register in a very big way - and that's just as misguided and self-destructive as misogyny.
Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Because of this, she is often described as the world's first computer programmer.
Given that, as someone has already mentioned in the comments, there are people that hold the view that women are always at least second best to a man in regards to ability in computing because they are female, the fact that the first 'programmer' did so without documentation on a machine that existed in theory was a woman is very much central to the subject.
* Lynn Conway, who co-launched the Mead & Conway revolution that made VLSI feasible for the first time
* Sophie Wilson, who developed the ARM architecture
Sophie Wilson was "born Roger Wilson" (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson).
"While struggling with life in a male role, Conway had been married to a woman and had two children." (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway)
Given that anyone with even a basic understanding of history would be awed by some of the women in the industry (ada and grace anyone), you would have to pretty stupid to come to the conclusion that women cant code.
Recently, there has been an effort to "take the phrase back" and turn "... like a girl" into a good thing - instead of being considered an insult - Like the commercials that tout "Running like a girl".
I've never heard "coding... like a girl" either, so you have to frame it as part of this movement.
Y'know how some film might have "hackers trying to break the FBI's firewall key"? And we all laugh because those film makers are so stupid about technology? Or how a newspaper will tell you how magnets and cabbage will cure your brain age?
Find some forums for historians[1], and you'll see historians laugh at how bad common understanding of history is.
Many people don't have an understand of basic history.
[1] e.g. http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/
Who gets the credit for e.g. iPhone? Chinese workers? That person who was tweaking the icons to look pixel-perfect (pre-iOS7)? CEO?
If as the article says the ENIAC news reports were along the lines of 'here is a machine that can calculate trajectories, and these are the men who designed it', who's to know that maybe half of the effort was undertaken by others not mentioned?
> "Software design and programming were considered clerical work."
But it seems to me that the vast amount of code written is still, in fact, "clerical work". Whether it's gluing together enterpriseBeanBuilderExpressionListMochaBusinessLogicAuditingFactories, or hooking up your node.js to your express.js to your bootstrap.js to transfer JSON over REST into your DOM, or even converting your 4000 character, 50 pipe bash one-liners into nicely polished scripts that properly account for exit codes, handle non-standard locations for sysfs, and work on a multitude of platforms, at the end of the day, a lot of this really does come down to clerical-style work. The difference is that the language, terminology, abstractions, and platforms are more obtuse than the previous generation's clerical work. The nouns are different and strange, but the predicates are all the same.
There are indeed wondrous areas in computer science and software engineering, but I think for most of us, we're just doing fairly menial work. We feel smart doing it, because it's still new enough that the objects and content of it are still uncustomary for most folks, and in fact the best of secretaries and clerks have indeed possessed great intelligence. But at the end of the day, we need to recognize that most of what we do is mere clerical work, glorified only by the odd shapes of the more obscure symbol keys on our keyboards.
ducks
"I swear, by clerical, I meant the clergy!"
ducks again
And this is actually what you don't want to do. You don't want to ignore gender, age, race, or creed. You want people to understand it, be open to the value it brings, connect with others outside their comfort zone, and embrace the differences. Doing things 'regardless' is how we've got here in the first place. We are all different. Ignoring those differences is not helping the problem.
I don't know squat about CSS or how to fix this for real, but I've bumbled around enough to be able to override this crap when it makes an article physically uncomfortable to read.