OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering

Posted Sep 8, 2009 12:02 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

Why is it so difficult for you to parse expressions? I'm not marginalizing anybody, I'm just making a generalized statement (would you like it better if I write "70% women hate 70% of the geeks" or whatever figures there actually are?). Most women are non-geek, just as most men are non-geek. Most women "hate" female geeks as much as male geeks (or even more, because they directly compete with this "knows-all-better" but badly dressed, w/o makeup girl). We geeks all are marginalized! The society is pretty anti-geek and pro mediocracy as such! And of course most women approach men (and professions) with "mate selection mode" applied. If you don't - I'm fine with that. But to explain "why are there so few xxx" (e.g. xxx=properly shaved, without ponytail) geeks, then generalization works. Those few who are there are the exceptions. If you fail to understand that you are an exception, please learn more about yourself. And if you don't accept your own exception-state, you are marginalizing yourself.

I just came out of a conference full of geeks. The only woman was the wife of one participant, and she was only there for the social activities (the geek parties). There was an obvious separation between groups, which became visible when we started discussing about foreign language interfaces (to C and other languages). The left side of the U-shaped table was the side of Windows users who didn't see the problem with their approach, because it works for them - basically one OS, two processor architectures, of which they mostly support only one (32 bit x86). It didn't work for the other side of the table, where the weird, bearded, pony-tailed Unix guys where sitting (in fact, only one of us was actually bearded and pony-tailed, but it is completely sufficient if you have one of those in your group ;-), who have lots of different architectures and OSes, and know of problems the other side never has heard of - and therefore propose to use the C compiler (which is not available to Windows users... typically).

And even though discussions like this bring up personal things, we can get along with each others well. Technical discussions have to be hard, it's about not giving in when you know that the other side is wrong. There's a time where you are nice to your peers and there's a time where you are rude. And sometimes, discussions like this bring up your beard+ponytail state. Or your gender, if it differs. So what? If the results are worth the hard discussions, it's apropriate. The occasional women in this sort of meetings often is said to "have hairs on her teeth", i.e. she masters this sort of discussion style perfectly.

And after all, as geeks, we won't compromise on a process that's working just for having more girls in that field. Or other complaints, like occasional sexual harassments: Come on, girls who go to a club are more than occasionally harassed, yet the places are packed full with girls. This is just a crazy argument. Unless, of course, you really hate the male geeks, and therefore their sexuall harassment is much worse than the ones of the guys in the club.