Girls and women are marginalised in the area of technology. This site in particular has hosted terabytes of discussion of this problem. If you look back at some of the stories about conferences and why codes of conduct have been set up, you will see at least part of the publicly visible part of this.
This is why it’s perfectly socially acceptable to set up a specific group to give women and girls a chance to learn skills in an environment where they feel safe from sneering, lewd comments, and other such behaviour which is not conducive to learning, or simply having a good time.
The article under discussion here is important, because boys and men face a great many difficulties in life, but the Venn diagram of difficulties faced by men and women has problems unique to each and problems shared by both.
Complaining about people getting help in areas where they face a disproportionate struggle just seems unkind.
I believe what's rubbing many the wrong way is the obvious bias towards 'girls'. The name of the programs, the focus of resources based on being VAR rather than a need someone could be (E.G. how I similarly take mild offense at programs that happen to target 'RACE' rather than 'the POOR' (anyone impoverished, even if that happens to strongly correlate to various races in sadly common cases due to past discrimination)).
So, hypothetically, what do you and others believe needs to change? How would a 'girls can code/tech/etc' look if it couldn't //market// towards girls or any other focus of discrimination? Other than perhaps types of being in the 'have nots' category which any body-type could qualify for?
> This is why it’s perfectly socially acceptable to set up a specific group to give women and girls a chance to learn skills in an environment where they feel safe from sneering, lewd comments, and other such behaviour which is not conducive to learning, or simply having a good time.
No. You just make it clear this is an environment where such behaviors are not tolerated.
Also, it's not true that women and girls are incapable of sneering and lewd comments.
You come across very much as the kind of person who believes boys are inherently deficient and deserve to fail, based on your assumptions about how boys will behave, and that they are incapable of behaving differently.
I think the culture that allows for the sexist torment that you see in conferences, in games, etc is disgusting and cannot be tolerated.
That’s a leadership and culture failure. When a female employee or student is marginalized or harassed, that’s an issue that needs to be dealt with unequivocally and swiftly.
In the school scenario I’m familiar with, my son is in 5th grade. There isn’t a gamergate environment there. We should be exposing kids to technology and coding, period. School clubs should be building that culture where the idea of bullying girls is both unacceptable and repugnant.
What does discussion on HN have to do with programs in schools? Really-- the tech industry may have issues but they are separate from how we raise and educate children, and the messaging we send those kids
Women marginalized in technology was mostly bullshit abuse of statistics. It is just being assumed that fewer women has to be the result of discrimination. It is not.
> Complaining about people getting help in areas where they face a disproportionate struggle just seems unkind.
Women don't face a disproportionate struggle in tech. They are given more opportunities in tech than men are. There are uncountable scholarships, fellowships, hiring initiatives, mentoring initiatives, and all kinds of programs for women in tech - while there are none for men. There are many positions that are explicitly advertised as for women or for underrepresented minorities only. Companies and universities give preference to hiring and admitting women, even overtly. And finally, multiple studies showed that women are given preference in hiring for STEM positions.
The first step to help men is for us to admit that men are discriminated against, and it is very counterproductive when people pretend that is not the case.
My CS lectures barely have any women. 1/10 students in a class of 200-300 are women. In more difficult/less mainstream classes (operating systems, networking, sometimes PL theory), it's 1/20. The game development club I'm in has 2 woman in it (including me) out of the ~20 people that regularly show up. This is in 2019-2022.
My school also hosts a hackathon for women and underrepresented gender minorities every year (organized by a student org that rents out a building from the school for it). The hackathon is also open to high school students. Many people I've talked to there talk about how they only went into CS because someone they knew invited them to the hackathon, or have made friends and feel less alone in CS because of it.
There's a real need for these groups. Whether men needs their own groups is a separate discussion that I have no real stance on.
> There's a real need for these groups. Whether men needs their own groups is a separate discussion that I have no real stance on.
That doesn't imply there is a need for women-only groups. There can be a CS group for all genders and we just teach girls to stop being sexist and be part of that group (if they want to).
This isn't "girls being sexist." Like other folks have explained[0][1][2][3][4], women often feel uncomfortable in spaces where they're the minority and might even have negative experiences in situations like that. And thus, they are put off by joining those groups in general. Groups that encourage women to join help women feel less intimidated by the idea of joining those groups.
> If I setup a boys club for computers at school or hosted a men’s IT society at work, that wouldn’t end well.
Maybe not, but nearly every <Subject> Users Group I've attended may as well have been a men's IT society for all the women I've seen attend, despite specific outreach efforts to get them there.
Probably. But why should small boys be punished and denied opportunities because of that?
Also, this has been even broader:
Around here, until recently girls got extra points even on studies were they were massively over-represented (in addition to being generally over-represented in higher education.)
Just recently boys started to get extra points when applying for Engineering degrees in Chemistry or in Nursing.)
I don't know where "around here" is or even what "girls got extra points even on studies where they were massively over-represented" means. Are you talking about grades? "points" towards college admissions?
At least in the US, most schools practice either explicitly or implicitly (through adjusted admissions criteria) affirmative action towards women for STEM subjects. That's the case even for subjects like Biology where the gender ratio is already balanced or tipped towards women.
One obvious example of this is the fact that CMU admits 50% women into its CS program, even though their applicant pool and similar caliber schools have around a 20-30% ratio. So if you believe that women and men in the applicant pool are equally qualified, women have a 2x higher chance of getting in. That's just basic statistics.
> One obvious example of this is the fact that CMU admits 50% women into its CS program, even though their applicant pool and similar caliber schools have around a 20-30% ratio. So if you believe that women and men in the applicant pool are equally qualified, women have a 2x higher chance of getting in. That's just basic statistics.
This is a reasonable initial assumption (candidates are equally qualified), and so there is evidence that something is happening (by examining the initial figures). But it may or may not be a bias in favor of women (that is, in this case, something like giving "points" to female applicants either explicitly or implicitly). You'd have to examine the actual applicant pool to determine what was happening other than being able to conclude that something is happening. It is also plausible that the female candidates are, as a group, more qualified than their male counterparts.
It would be plausible, but if you examine the historical enrollment numbers it's clear that CMU expanded their CS program around the exact time that their female representation went to 50%. In essence they created more spots reserved for women, but still admitted the same number of men each year.
You'd also have to ignore that similar caliber schools have the same 20-30% ratio so CMU would have to be doing something special that MIT, Stanford et. al aren't in its applicant recruiting/marketing - that's a tough one to believe.
While I share your first hand observations here, I'll note that (from my limited perspective) there was nothing obviously catering to non-females or any particular gender in these groups. Many of the groups I've attended also had 'professional standards'.
So what is the discrepancy? What has changed and what is being done differently between the groups where 'boys' can optionally attend and ones that 'girls' appear to self select against attendance? We should reach for a world that doesn't require discrimination.
1. Women aren't going to want to join a group where they're the minority
2. Given a brand new group with 0 members yet, it's still likely that women will avoid it, because of their past experiences with 1. putting them off joining groups in general
3. Women are less common than men in general in CS. Any group that accepts the average person will statistically end up with more men than women.
The groups that "advertise" to women avoid these problems, which is why they tend to work.
I agree that we shouldn't need specialized groups, but I haven't seen any other solution, at least in the immediate term. Likely society will improve simply due to the passing of time, and in 50 years from now and it won't be a problem anymore.
Maybe, just maybe, the point of those events for women has something to do with the fact that everything else in the tech world is a de-facto boys' club.
My current team at work: 6 men.
Previous team at a different company: 27 men, 3 women.
The team before that: 5 men.
The team before that: 10 men, 2 women.
I guess we can debate "marginalized", but women are unquestionably a minority in tech.
No, the teams weren't trying to exclude women. Not at all. They were representative of the company and the entire industry. There are very few women in tech.
So then the question is why are very few women in tech? If you really dive into this, it's a chicken-and-egg problem: The fact that so few women are in tech makes the whole scene into sort of a frat house, which is often not a welcoming or kind environment to women, so women avoid it. A feedback loop. And one way you can try to combat that is by encouraging entry into the field. Et voilà: "Girls who code".
I just realized that so many people always repeat that there aren’t many women in “tech.” But it’s really more like not many women in programming. In my experience, the majority of PMs, designer/artists, and tech writers, and about half of QA, have been women. Therefore only the programming team felt like a boys club, never the larger org or the company. The only place this wasn’t true was one tiny startup I worked at long ago.
> I have had several jobs in tech. None of those work environments resembled a frat house. Maybe a few startups resemble a frat house, but is it really indicative of the industry as a whole?
Are the jobs you've worked at indicative of the industry as a whole?
I believe it's reactionary attitudes like these (why can't we have a special club?) that make tech so hostile to women in the first place. If they feel better in a space that specifically caters to women, and if by them feeling better, they actually learn the skills, why should they not have those spaces?
In areas where men are the minority, there are spaces that cater to men.
For example, we have parent-child meetups here. Since it is almost exclusively mothers who show up (despite being open to all parents), they at some point introduced an extra meetup for fathers. This gives men an opportunity to take part in something with their kid where they aren't the only man in the room.
X-only spaces make sense when X is marginalized or a minority. If you start a kindergarten teacher group for men, noone is going to complain.
Not to be flippant, but have you seen somebody try this and fail or be stopped? What would be the purpose of the group? Why would it need to cater to men?
These aren't rhetorical questions. I'm genuinely asking.
> Not to be flippant, but have you seen somebody try this and fail or be stopped? What would be the purpose of the group?
I've not tried that exact thing but I have tried twice carefully to bring attention to mens day at work.
I stopped doing it and I probably won't do it again; it's just a simple way to get some mockery thrown at oneself even at the generally very civil place where I work.
>If they feel better in a space that specifically caters to women, and if by them feeling better, they actually learn the skills
This can't apply to men? I believe there were such clubs and they were considered sexist in the past. I don't see why it's so strange an idea that men might like a club where they can be catered to and taught in a way that works for them.
Making a support club for men probably has the same problem as trying to start a UFO or vaccines scepticism book club - since it is taboo you will have a hard time attracting sane members.
(throwaway for obvious reasons of the culture war. /sigh)
One example might be the Isbister v. Boys' Club of Santa Cruz case, in which the Supreme Court of California ruled that, according to civil rights laws, no space could be legally barred to women. (imagine that same justification banning women-only spaces; it simply wouldn't happen, because of course it wouldn't).
Or, more famously, Earl Silverman's attempt to open a shelter for male domestic abuse survivors in Canada, for which he was ridiculed and ostracised and eventually, when the government refused to fund such a thing (male domestic abuse victims? Perish the thought!) had to shut it down, ending his own life in despair. Erin Pizzey, who founded the first women's shelters in the UK, faced similar harassment (including bomb threats serious enough that the police decided that they needed to intercept all of her mail to check it for explosives) when she began discussing the same thing, and was eventually driven out of her home country.
In fact, the dearth of male-focused help in general, even in situations where men are the overwhelming majority of the at-risk population. See, for example, homeless shelters in the UK. Ironically, some women in need of assistance escaping their abusers sometimes get turned away from these places because they come with male children.
Generally speaking, most "assistance" actually primarily aimed at men treats them like shit. See, for example, the Duluth model, the most common batterer intervention program in use in the United States. It explicitly pre-concludes that any domestic dispute is caused by men trying to dominate women. Ellen Pence, its creator, has even gone on record stating, "By determining that the need or desire for power was the motivating force behind battering, we created a conceptual framework that, in fact, did not fit the lived experience of many of the men and women we were working with. [...] Speaking for myself, I found that many of the men I interviewed did not seem to articulate a desire for power over their partner. Although I relentlessly took every opportunity to point out to men in the groups that they were so motivated and merely in denial, the fact that few men ever articulated such a desire went unnoticed by me and many of my coworkers. Eventually, we realized that we were finding what we had already predetermined to find." (emphasis added) This has not lessened its popularity as an intervention mechanism for domestic disputes.
I mention this not as an example of a male-only space being destroyed, but as an example of why they may be needed. Many men, emotional illiteracy aside, do in fact realize when the chips are stacked against them. They do not learn to socialize with other men in school, nor in the manner that men have historically been socialized. They are allowed in the public forum, but most attempts to share their perspective, at least in the more woke circles, are met with hostility - after all, they are the historical beneficiaries of the social order, and therefore they cannot also be allowed to be even perceived as victims, especially when being a victim confers social status. No matter that "privilege" is not uniformly distributed.
Philosophically speaking, men ought to have a male-only space if only for the benefit of being able to calibrate themselves against other men, rather than having to constantly downplay their own difficulties and miseries by the standards of women; a man ought to be able to feel bad about losing his job without having to also remind everyone that he still has it better than a woman who would be jobless and also facing sexism. He ought to be able to exult in a promotion or other achievement without "checking his privilege" and feeling guilty about how his success closes the doors for others who have not had the opportunities he has.
If men should be more emotionally intelligent, they need a safe space where they can express their emotions. It has become abundantly clear to many of them that gender-integrated spaces are not safe, for the same reason that I'm posting this comment from a throwaway account.
Special "Help $Gender enter $Field_Where_Gender_Is_Rare" stuff makes sense, if (for whatever reason) it seems that having some fields highly gender-skewed is undesirable. And whatever the PC / ideological reaction, programs aimed the other way sound like a waste of resources.
Or maybe there are a bunch of "convince women that nursing is a career for them, too", "day care workers shouldn't all be men", "ladies can become receptionists", etc. programs that I'm not aware of.
The "Girls Who Code" program was created because of the discrimination and bias women face in the tech industry (not to mention other workplaces and areas of life). Also, the existence of woman managers doesn't suddenly mean that sexism doesn't exist in the industry. I'd imagine that many woman managers have faced a lot of prejudice throughout their careers. And there's probably a large amount of women who want to get into technology, but are intimidated by the space and fear potential sexism.
Also, the reason that running a "boys club for computers" or a "men's IT society" wouldn't end well is because men already make up a large portion of the tech space and, like I said, there's a lot of gender bias in the tech world. This comment comes off as you using anecdotal evidence to disprove the marginalization women face.
Men's teacher support groups exist. Men's nursing support groups exist. Men's breast cancer support groups exist. Men's support groups in general exist. If you find a place in society where men are underrepresented, there is probably a support group for men in that space.
I don't know if a men's teaching club would be accepted, but I can tell you I've been told by a female school teacher looking for work that it's much easier to get hired as a male because high school administrators are desperate for more male role models to help struggling male students given the lack of male staff in high schools.
It's easier to get hired as a male teacher because university and teaching school grads demographically skew female. There is less supply of male teachers ultimately which causes the high demand for male teachers is what I've heard.
The problems women face in male-dominated fields are well documented. Blog posts and articles describing the discrimination are occasionally posted on HN, and if you're a frequent reader you must have seen them.
There are obvious issues like sexual harassment. Almost every woman I know has been a victim of it at some point, but I don't know any man who has been sexually harassed at the workplace. For this reason men typically think that sexual harassment at the workplace is not a big issue.
But there's also more subtle things, that are hard to measure since companies aren't open about them, like women being made lower offers for the same job with the same qualifications, or women being less likely to be promoted, or women straight up being refused the job because "they might leave the job soon to have children".
Getting evidence for these things is hard, because companies rarely give a reason why they are hiring or promoting someone, and even if they give a reason it's very rarely something that can be objectively measured.
women have been marginalized for most of modern history, so it's not like it's a false assumption... I guess maybe you could make an argument for over-correction? but a lot of women would disagree.
>If I setup a boys club for computers at school or hosted a men’s IT society at work, that wouldn’t end well.
That's because most computer clubs and IT societies are already primarily men. It's kind of the default, which is why women-only groups are seen as transformative.
If you want to look at it in a different way, you probably wouldn't have a problem setting up a group that teaches miners IT
My son’s school has a “Girls Can Code” program. All collateral features women and girls. (Boys are welcome though)
I worked at a place where a C-level executive hosted company endorsed dinners at her home for female managers to mentor them for executive roles.
If I setup a boys club for computers at school or hosted a men’s IT society at work, that wouldn’t end well.