Berners-Lee Challenges 'Stupid' Male Geek Culture 693
ZDOne wrote with a link to a ZDNet article discussing some comments made by Tim Berners-Lee on the discrimination women face within 'stupid male geek culture'. The respected developer expressed frustration at a culture that would 'disregard the work of capable female engineers, and put others off entering the profession.' From the article: "'It's a complex problem -- we find bias against women by women. There are bits of male geek culture and engineer culture that are stupid. They should realize that they could be alienating people who are smarter and better engineers,' said Berners-Lee. Engineering research facilities that interview candidates based only on how many papers they have had published also risk adding to the problem, according to Berners-Lee, because of an apparent in-built bias against women."
Meh (Score:4, Interesting)
That doesn't make either right, obviously.
Biology or Bias? (Score:1, Interesting)
Males are naturally aggressive, looking for whatever advantage they can to get the upper-hand and conquer.
Woman are naturally passive, looking to nurture and keep the peace, often times at their own personal expense.
One style is no better or worse than the other.
Women entering any competitive environment need to realize that if they feel there is a bias against them it is because they allow there to be one not because they are being singled out and discriminated against as women.
Men treat all competitors equally; if they think they can dominate you then they will try to dominate. If they don't think they can dominate you, then they give you respect and work with you in a partnership. Unfortunately for women, navigating this kind of environment is often counter to their natural biology and inclinations so the common outcome is that women make easy targets to be competitively dominated. They aren't being singled out for being women; men treat other men the same.
On the flip side, men need to realize that most women don't enter a competitive environment with the same goals of domination and aggression like men do. Men assume that women compete just like men; to dominate and conquer their opponents. Men will often do things out of ego or to assert their authority regardless if that's beneficial for the task at hand whereas women work out of good faith and with the belief that everything they do is for the good of the group rather than the good of themselves.
Instead of pointing fingers and calling foul on one gender or the other, we need to start understanding and accepting the differences and motivations that influence each gender's actions.
I feel it all the time (Score:5, Interesting)
And then there's this whole thing all women have to deal with at work that being aggressive = bitch. And I feel like whenever I try to get other people's names detached from my work, my bosses don't take it seriously and have even gone as far to joke about it infront of other people!
And whenever I come to work dressed somewhat fashionably I get weird comments, not compliments, they are actually making fun of me I think. What the heck is that about. Sorry I'm not wearing wrinkled khakis and a wrinkled blue dress shirt like the rest of you slobs (we're corporate so don't do the jeans/t-shirts thing).
Yeah so the other day I was talking to a female in marketing at my company asking her what it's like there cause it's really not cool in IT.
Perhaps it's a deeper cultural issue... (Score:5, Interesting)
Our built-in selection criteria for "better" IT employees, which is cultural and psychological, is related to several factors. Dedication being one of the major ones that I used to look for. Because IT employees generally are exposed to so many concepts, ideas, and a breadth of knowledge that can be staggering, men, who are more likely (from a cultural and possibly genetic standpoint) to be willing to dedicate higher percentages of their lives to immersion in the culture end up being better employees. This isn't specific to the IT industry.
It also strikes me that being "adventurous" is definitely a plus in IT. The willingness to figure things out, to go way beyond the required knowledge, is something that lends itself to the male-stereotype of being adventurous and exploring. My old *nix admin used to "explore", by which I mean he build image after image, broke things, changed things, generally just messed with crap to see how it worked. This is a trait more in line with male psychology than female.
As someone who's responsibilities included help desk support, I was always looking for good female employees. Abusive users were far less likely to get beligerent with a woman than a man, and the problem I always faced was finding women with the skills, attitude and abilities to be a part of our group. We were a meritocracy. I had 11 people running an ISP, and there was no room for people who couldn't produce, who couldn't keep up, or needed to be directed. I never hired for experience (one of my best finds was a manager at a gas station who didn't own a computer the day he started; a month later he had build his own linux system (hardware and OS) from the ground up. I also had a woman who eventually became my help desk manager, as she was willing to learn, taught herself HTML, etc. She was good with customers and didn't have to be hand-held or babied.
While I understand what TBL was saying about publication issues, I think that the underlying factors in IT gender-bias are as much cultural and applicable to many industries, rather than just IT.
Bill
I think women are better than that (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a big difference between XX and XY (Score:5, Interesting)
Men and women are completely different in behavior. First realize that 80% of our ancestors collectively are women. Yes, 40% of males who ever lived died without producing an offspring. The Y chromosomes that survive today did so by using completely different strategy than the X chromosomes. No matter how successful, attractive, dominant, creative a woman is, she can't produce more than 5 or 10 offspring in her lifetime. Very dominant men typically marry more than one wife and produce easily more children. What it means, statistically is, the subdominant Y chromosome does not get to breed.
Upshot of it is, that Y chormosome takes more risk, it produces more variation. On both ends of the spectrum. It produces brilliant mathematicians and horrible criminals. TBL should ponder on the fact that 85% of our prison population and 85% of the combat troops are also men. XYs form shallow relationships over a very wide network. XXs form very intense relationships in a much smaller network. Men went out in expeditions and ships and joined the armies and 40% of them died without ever producing an offspring. Men form groups and their hostility is directed outside the group. Females form small cliques and their hostility is directed to other members of the clique. The X chromosome does not have to take that much risk to realize much of the potential maximum of 5 or 10 offspring.
So TBL might rave against unfairly denying opportunities to women or discrimination. But to expect 50% of the nerds to be women, it ain't gonna happen. Much as I would like my daughter to be a scientist or a programmer, she is likely to end up as an academic in a soft science.
Re:What about stupid fashinista culture? (Score:5, Interesting)
Geeks do the same thing, just in reverse. The larger a woman's breasts or the nicer she looks seems to imply that her intelligence has plunged proportionally. Both sides are welcome to be as extreme as they like, but there are plenty of us in the middle that try to not be so rigid in our expectations, although we all fall prey to stereotypes on occasion.
Re:What about stupid fashinista culture? (Score:3, Interesting)
But I never restricted it to the workplace. Nor did I insist on comparing it to Pasty male geeks. Who said I was a guy? I am saying that EVERYONE, make and female gets discriminated against. The pretty women do NOT have it bad. They get most of the perks in life.
That is like saying, Oh, the poor white man, he can't get into the black school unless he is acdameically better than all the black men.
Just as white men have NO buisness complaining about how difficult it is to get into a majority black college, pretty women have NO business complaining about how dificult it is to get into a geek business. Pretty women have the UNFAIR ADVANTAGE in most of the general envirionment, just as white people have an unfair advantage.
Neither has the right to complain about the rare circumstance when their advantage does not help them.
Re:I feel it all the time (Score:2, Interesting)
I think he meant 'sexist' (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:There is a big difference between XX and XY (Score:4, Interesting)
Talk to women who've taken testosterone in order to become trans-men. They take higher than natural doses in order to create the physical changes quickly and they find out that:
Testosterone is a strongly psychotropic hormone. Women who take it not only find themselves having an pornographic imagination (compared with what they were used to), but they find that heightened visual thinking makes mathematics and physics easier.
They also find that they start having the same emotional and social problems as men. I remember listening to this trans-woman talk about how testosterone turned her from a cool dyke into a very uncool male geek who couldn't help offending women by watching them too closely. But she got a degree in physics.
Re:There is a big difference between XX and XY (Score:4, Interesting)
It becomes clear that the discernible emotional and mental differences between men and women can be switched back and forth by changing hormones.
I suspect that all of the theories about brain structure differences are looking at unimportant things - the important differences are hormonal, period.
Geek Culture (Score:4, Interesting)
As to females in tech -- they are few and far between for sure. When I managed a development team, I got almost no resumes from females. But interestingly, the few that I interviewed were particularly good. Specifically, I'd say that 3 out of 4 tech males don't know what the hell they're talking about. But it's only 1 out of 5 tech females are similarly clueless. I suppose the rude exclusivity pushes all but the very best into another field.
I also notice that generally speaking, tech ladies survive _in_spite_ of the culture, not because they find a way to fit in. Which is an unfortunate way to have to live. But the friction is not so much because they're female, but because they don't fit in with the other aspects of geek culture, and as I mentioned earlier, geek culture is overly exclusive.
I think there are different natural tendencies for women and men, and I think that even without any culture problems there would probably be fewer tech ladies than tech guys. But I think the ratio we see today is way off from that, and everyone would benefit if geek culture was a little more open to different types of people.
Cheers.
Re:What about stupid fashinista culture? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, if you can do in 4 hours what other people take 10 hours to do, you'll probably be regarded as a lot better than them (and rightly so). But the second you end up next to someone who's abilities are the equal of yours and who is willing to put more time in, they're going to be the one getting rewarded. (And rightly so.)
Personally, I think this is quite liberating: on the whole, most engineers, and many other people in science-based disciplines, don't really care a lot about who you are. They're some of the most welcoming places for people of all genders and skin colors and lifestyles, in that everyone is on the same playing field. If you do good work, people respect you. If you don't, well, it sucks to be you. (And this is quite literally true: people whose work sucks tend to be more pitied than disliked, IMO, at least by those who don't have to clean it up.)
Does this perhaps lead to a monoculture in terms of the personality types it advances? Perhaps so. But I think it's worthwhile, even admirable, because it's inherently nondiscriminatory. Nobody gets special consideration, everyone's being judged basically according to the same rules.
It's not as though engineering is really unique here. Lots of other fields are similar. I've worked in consulting and found that it's basically the same, even more clear-cut. Most consultants are promoted and rewarded based on very straightforward metrics: billing and utilization rate. Basically, it's how much money they bring in. If you work hard and bill 60 hours per week, you'll be everyone's golden child. If you decide to make it a 9-5, take a lot of vacation time, or get pregnant, you won't be fired...but don't expect a nice bonus at Christmas. It's not personal, it's just that other people made sacrifices, and they're going to be rewarded for it. If you want the big bucks, you have to make a decision where your priorities are. There's no right or wrong answer, it's just a personal judgment call.
(And, interestingly, there are a lot of female consultants -- far more than there are engineers -- making me think that it's not the competitive, meritocratic workplace that's the turnoff, at least not initially.)
Re:What about stupid fashinista culture? (Score:4, Interesting)
An obsessive-compulsive who'll propably burn out and get a nervous breakdown soon, is likely suffering from severe sleep deprivation due to those sleepless nights (and might even use amphethamine or similar drugs to help him in extreme cases), and has a passion for his work, which means that he'll be unwilling to design what the marketing department wants if it happens to conflict with his personal vision ? Who, because he doesn't apparently have time for a social life and hasn't therefore developed any social skills and is suffering from sleep deprivation on top of that, is likely to be a nightmare to work with ? You can have him.
The guy who is smart and disciplined enough to not burn himself out ? Which propably also means that he's less likely to do something risky, like selling trade secrets to competitors, for short-term advantage ? And, since he has free time, is likely to develop a social life and social skills ? He's hired.
Women don't do geek becomes other women don't (Score:2, Interesting)
Women don't study engineering because other women don't study engineering.
Women don't like math because other women don't like math.
Its not true for all women - there are women engineers (I am one of them) but in general its a true statement - the biggest impediment to women in engineering is not having a peer group of other women engineers.
But its not what happens in college that matters - the problem starts in middle school and earlier.
Women and men are both heavily influenced by peer pressure. The difference with computers and engineering in general is while there are 10 year olds playing video games, hacking computers and building Lego Mindstorms. If you are a girl who likes computers - you're going to have a hard time finding any other girl in class to share that with.
And thats how it goes - the divide starts early, in the days when peer pressure matters way more than interests.
When I started college I had been coding since I was eight, I knew about 7 programming languages, and had a 720 on the math SAT. On paper, I was a well prepared freshman computer science major. But I was screwed when I got to college Computer Science courses because I hadn't taken and formal computer science classes in high school.
The bias starts early - girls don't do computers because other girls don't do computers. If I had taken AP Computer Science I would have become a social pariah among my female friends. At age 15, I wasn't really keen to be a pioneer. Most girls aren't. And if the roles were reversed - most high school boys wouldn't be that brave either. (How many men study Literature?)
If you want more female engineers, you fix the culture at age 10 - not age 20.
Re:There is a big difference between XX and XY (Score:3, Interesting)
An excellent question. When I entered college in 1974, female math and physics majors were very rare. Out of a student body of around 1000, the college would graduate 20-30 male math and physics majors each year. One woman might graduate in those subjects every other year. There were a lot of folks back then who wrote that asymmetry off as a natural sex-linked biological variation in mathematical aptitude. In 2001 I went back to school for an M.S. in Applied Math, and low and behold, a third of the students in my classes were women, and they didn't seem to be having any more trouble with the material then I was. I recently checked on my undergraduate college and over the last few years they are graduating 7-8 women in math and physics per year while continuing to produce 20-30 male math and physics graduates. I don't think female neuroanatomy or neurochemistry have changed much in the last four decades, so I have to take the "it's just sex-linked genetic variation" argument with several grains of salt.
Re:Culture is as culture does (Score:2, Interesting)
It really had less to do with discrimination (at least, not active discrimination) and more to do with the fact that CMU's CS program was just not structured in a way that interested me.