Why aren't there more women in programming? Siren of Shame makes it obvious.
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To Christian: I woke up to a reply to my reply to your reply to my initial post. I wanted to continue the conversation because you raised some interesting points but your reply seems to have disappeared. I will make my comments hear. Hopefully, you don't mind.
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we have interviews in the past days, and *we* did select 2 boys and 1 girl for internship. The selection was done by merit alone, so ... supposing I am biased (read: sexist swine) is not correct IMHO. If there were 4 girls with top scores, I'd voted for get all 4.
I think you and I have different definitions of what it means to be sexist. You seem to have the view that if I'm not doing something overt like telling a women to her face that she is a stupid piece of trash or demanding that all women stay home cooking and cleaning for their husbands then I am not a sexist. Basically for me, being sexist means assuming a perceived difference between a man and a woman is caused by the presence or absence of a Y chromosome even when there is no credible evidence to support this. The test for whether or not someone exhibits sexist behavior is not simply whether or not they offer a woman a job. Just because in this instance you did the right thing and hired a woman based on objective criteria does not guarantee you are not a sexist. It doesn't suggest you are one either but tomorrow when the female new hire makes her first mistake and you say to yourself, "See, I told you, women are too stupid to be programmers." I will have reason to believe you at least think like a sexist.
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I'm making a major logic error every few lines: again, you're entitled to your views, sure, but what I have done was mostly describing situations I have witnessed (and no, not singular incidents involving single persons, but more than one AND in multiple occasions). You may not agree with my post - and I feel that this is a polite characterization of what you really think :) - but describing a situation, singular or not, does not represent a logical error.
My claim that you were making major logical errors was based solely on your point 1, where you claim the vast majority of women don't know their left from their right so how can we expect them to write an if-then-else. I see two logic errors here. First you treat a premise that is false as true. Second, you draw a conclusion from that premise which is not implied by it. Look I'll give you the benef
Well, it's quite an essay you wrote here. Some clarifications: - I have deleted the posts because I do not want to start a flame war. I don't particularly like to get caught in flames, and my posts were not major contributions - judging from your replies, quite the opposite. - Sexist characterization based on chromosomes alone: I don't consider such things (although differences exists, I hope you won't deny that). I have mentioned facts/data alone, not judgement, yet you imply, I think, I am considering other kind of arguments (logical or not) by making the original statements. Look on Allan Pease speech here: Men and Women[^] about left/right and orientation. It's something I discovered for myself and analyzed by others. - On why I did not mentioned men stupidities as well: it's simple; the thread was about women in programming. I was simply following the topic. Anyways, again statistically, I was witnessed far more gory things done by men - simply because there are more men than women in programming. One can wonder how many brutalities done on a soccer field are done by men and women, no? The question seems logical, yet is a nonsense since 99.9% people playing soccer are men. - left/right if-then-else; you are missing the point. Women *do* have troubles differentiating left to right not because they are direction crippled or something; they cannot do this instinctively most of the time as men do. Again, watch Allan Pease explanation at 1:39 - "you don't know the right from left, Sheryl !" - or read about it here[^]. - statistics validating my claims: again, these are observations, I didn't wrote them as a some form of lemma. - MFC vs WTL and the goal of winning: women see winning as a waste of time; true, most of the time. Competing for the same resources, however, brings the better potential and evolution. Did you hear women talking about men watching a soccer game "what I waste of time, 22 guys running after a leather ball, how stupid". I know I did. What does this tells? Bottom line on MFC v WTL - most of programmers do not care about this, since they are