Apparently he's now becoming an alt-right, red-pill hero. Great.



In before "BUT DID YOU LISTEN TO THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW".

I was a kid in the 80's, so yeah, I remember these things. But times have changed. Women are now dominating education. They receive 60% of bachelors degrees. Even in stereo-typically alpha-male fields like law, business and medicine we see women dominate.

Yet somehow the meek little nerds in comp.sci. are too much for them to handle?

Something seems off there for the narrative to fit.

Consider how Comp.sci is popular with a certain personality type that is somewhere on the asperger spectrum, i.e. "nerds". Males are 4x more likely to be on the asperger spectrum (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4164392/). Obviously this wouldn't be the only factor to explain the underrepresentation of women, but pretending like the science is settled and its only societal injustice and nothing else isn't very helpful.

Comp sci classes have very little to do with the makeup of most technology companies or technology departments.

Ok, I'm legitimately confused by that statement. Can you explain?

When I say Comp. Sci I mean a bachelors degree in comp. sci. Tech companies hire tech grads, no?

Possibly...

I wish I could find it, but there was a long tweet storm I read a few months back. Some woman was writing about her friend who left marketing to enter into computer programming. The bullets, from memory:

Marketing has massive sexism, but at least the guys wear suits and polish their shoes. These guys may be sexist, but they also are fountains of knowledge and she learned a TON from them.

The CS guys are hobos who are basically all idiots, don't know anything, don't listen, and her job felt more like babysitting a bunch of over-aged children who are too distracted from work playing ping pong and video games (and now extended hours to keep up). Didn't learn anything at all.

Think of that. You are a girl considering a career in CS. You read some hacker news, follow a bunch of women on Twitter calling computer programming a career of "a thousand cuts," read about the incredibly high attrition rate for women in tech**, and basically can't find anything worthwhile for women in the field. Imagine trying to find a community that isn't totally strange and toxic.

A doctor, lawyer, etc, has women who stick around. In the back of your mind, you know sexism exists, but at least these women aren't leaving the field to too much.

Attrition is a terrible thing, for anything. You can bring in 500 people a day, but if 250 people are leaving a day, that's a drain. I wonder what the current m/f ratio would be if the attrition rate wasn't 50% (as some studies show).

I fail to see the misogyny here. Sounds more like there is a culture that is unappealing to females, not a culture that is hostile to them.

They'd rather be around sexist *******s that display attractive traits, than passive geeks that do not.

Oh, did I forget that she was talking about the abhorent sexism she was recieving from the programmer coworkers? That was a long part of the screed. She was talking specifically about what she got along with the sexism, comparing the cost / benefit of each profession.

For a lot of disciplines within tech, if you take that graph back a few more decades the results may be surprising to you.

In my experience in the tech industry there are as many if not more developers with non-comp sci backgrounds as with them.

from that post...

So you could say that she found sexism everywhere and therefore used other factors to make her decision to avoid tech?

I think my statement generalizes to all tech backgrounds. My bad for picking a too narrow discipline.

Most of the engineering and maths/physics disciplines are split 20/80 to 30/70 female vs male. Almost every other discipline in higher education is 60/40 or higher female vs male.

I.e. the nerd disciplines are full of nerds and men are more likely to be nerds (on the autism spectrum). And nerds have more interest in software dev than non-nerds so they are more likely to pursue that as a profession.

I think when you make generalizations about that; men like math more than women in particular, you gloss over how society has treated women for generations. I'm not saying it isn't correct, I'm saying that those numbers need a big asterisk next to them. They also seem descriptive to me and not prescriptive. Because that is the way the field is now does not mean it is the way the field would be if the playing field was entirely level.

I see no reason women can't be as good or better developers than men even if there are particular women who aren't as good at it as some particular men. There are current programs in place to try and drive more girls into STEM fields earlier in life and we may have to wait a generation for those kids to grow up for real change to happen.

Fair enough -- and I apologize.

I didn't have the heart to keep reading to learn why marketing campaigns in the 80s proved that women were biologically unsuited for programming.

But I guess I find the whole topic tedious enough at this point, that I can just unsubscribe.

you said the amount of women techies at google is no big deal bc they make up 19%.

my point/argument was that 19% is such a low number that it does actually indicate a problem. I am not sure where or why the problem exists, or how to overcome it.

really not sure what you are getting it. it has nothing to do with gates mills. its about 4chan, reddit, mens rights activists, alt right, the red pill and hell, half of youtube. this crap is everywhere on the internet.

I didnt really know much about nor believe it until I wandered over to the politics forum here and started paying attention to that stuff and then ofc witnessed the most recent election.

I'm pointing out that women were underrepresented in higher education in all fields. Now they are only underrepresented in these very narrow interest fields. Given the general trend they should be much closer to parity, but in fact the gap is widening, even since the 90's. Maybe that's worth investigating further. I don't think its because nerds are some sort of super-misogynists that trump all other misogynists.

I don't think it has anything to do with women being better/worse at it. I work with women that are extremely good developers. I think it is mostly that women on average are less interested in it, therefore you see an 80/20 split.

Yup, and those programs are great. Anything that increases awareness and interest and reduces stigma towards the field is great.

But I'm vehemently against any unjust programs that give people preferential hiring/promoting purely based on their genitalia/skin color, especially when we don't have hard evidence what ratio of the under-representation of their group is based on prejudice and what is based on choice or traits.

Remove all barriers of entry. Educate and inform young people. But don't use "positive" discrimination. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Are there people out there really under the impression that there are these legions of super intelligent, super qualified tech gals out there with awesome credentials that all these big tech companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) are passing over for less qualified males?

This is an absurd fairy tale.

The only reason there are less women in high tech jobs is because there are simply much, much fewer of them in the labor pool.

Demanding tech companies just "hire more women" while blindly ignoring that changing this fact is the only actual 'solution' to this imaginary problem.

And it's an imaginary problem because every single profession on earth not being split 50/50 is not a problem.

But unfortunately there is systemic preferential treatment for men and caucasian men specifically.

You can't eliminate cultural bias overnight.

I have heard studies that show 2 resume's with the exact same credentials just different sounding names (one traditionally caucasian sounding and one more traditionally black American sounding) almost always show a strong bias towards the caucasian name. So to counter act that I think it does sometimes warrant programs that are preferential in the opposite direction.

Now, if one candidate is clearly more qualified than the other then no, obviously other factors shouldn't play a role. But all things being equal if it's happening in one direction then there has to be an effort somewhere to make it happen for the other side as well and people are obviously terrible at policing themselves because we wouldn't have a problem if they weren't.


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I think more of us have moved on to why the absence in the labor pool and what can people already in tech do to promote more interest to people not currently in the labor pool.

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It's also pretty hilariously sad that you can't have any discussion whatsoever about biological differences between the sexes, even if your arguments are based 100% on hard science and even if you're in a scientific industry.

People rejecting science that rattles their preferred world view isn't just for religious nut cases.

Promoting interest in your field is great, especially for important fields like math and science. However having some sort of weird predetermined social agenda in the promotion is inherently warped and shows your leading off your crusade with a possibly flawed assumption.

However as this incident shows, questioning these assumptions is heresy.

Neither can you accurately gauge it.

Yes, people are terrible at policing themselves, and in general act more on based feelings than rationality. So why do you trust people to accurately and fairly use discrimination to fix a societal problem? At what point do you stop? Take for instance higher education. There was a huge push for women in higher ed. Now we have a 60/40 split in their favour. Does that seem fair? Or is that symptom of a runaway systematic positive prejudice?

I for one much prefer that we ensure that people are free to make their own choices without any barriers, and society will naturally evolve towards a just one.

If you only let that other stuff drip in and pay attention to reality, you'd recognize how much of it is simply selling lies to create drama.

A simple example... poor, uneducated, angry, white males pushed Trump in and rich, educated, affluent people couldn't overcome the groundswell of the impoverished masses. Ooops, Clinton won the poor vote and Trump destroyed her with the affluent people.

Go on to the next narrative and wait for the data to smash that, recursively create more drama, but make sure you make sure your lies go viral and you get $$$ from stupid people, but long-tail on the lies you told years back because hey, you get paid for views.

Take that OP letter, for example...

He claims that conservatives are "help yourself" and liberals are help the poor. Okay, if you have a job interview tomorrow and needed clothes, food, and bus fair, where would you go first? Oh right, a church; you would ask those horrible people that run homeless shelters, soup kitchens, gang-remission programs,prisoner reintegration programs, and so on. What a load of *******s, those ****ing conservatives.

Wanna know what I never saw outside of San Francisco? Programmers walking out of a well-known tech company and kicking homeless people. Not figuratively, like actually beating the **** out of them.

Of course women are neurotic and can't handle high stress jobs. Being an ER nurse is an absolute cakewalk compared to programming... WTF?

So, no, I'll never understand the thinking process of being utterly oblivious to reality. It's amusing to me that they totally don't get that they are parroting lies to uphold their mythical world-views. I'm also guessing said author isn't like some swamp critter because he could go to Harvard and be a PhD candidate. It's a generalization, but he certainly didn't go to Cleveland Public Schools (no one from CPS ever went to Ivy League).

The people who gain off the ignorance of others are ****ty people with ****ty agendas, and by even acknowledging their faux ignorance (they know full well what they are doing), you are giving credence to their work, so no, I would never bother writing a rebuttal.

Many men wouldn't dare go into education for fear of being labled a perv and pedophile. The pendulum swings in all sorts of directions, and it isn't always fair to any particular gender. I wouldn't be surprised if male applicants are passed up simply because HR doesn't want the extra scrutiny.