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The Ada Initiative takes a different approachThe Ada Initiative takes a different approachPosted Feb 17, 2011 12:44 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)Parent article: The Ada Initiative takes a different approach
Privoxy blocks the adainitiative.org URL, but that's just a minor issue. I'm really interested in that "How bad is the problem" question. The FAQ mentions that the "industry standard" is 20-30% of the workforce is female. However, since primary school I haven't seen more than 10% in "computer environment". Maybe if accountants, assistants, secretaries, managers, cleaners, etc. are counted, then this figure is higher, but then the statistics is not that useful. The mentioned 2-5% of open source developers is still lower then the 10% I see, but in order to increase it to the "ideal" around 50%, one have to work on nursery schools to let girls play with "boy toys" instead of restricting them to dolls. This, of course, would mean confrontation with other women...
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The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 17, 2011 13:16 UTC (Thu) by jondkent (subscriber, #19595) [Link]
I'm also interested in the "How bad is the problem" question. Having a daughter gives this question the edge, but also makes me wonder if there really is a problem at all, or whether this is simply an case of limited interest?
With very little statistics that is hard to quantify. I honestly doubt there will ever be 50/50 (though great if this did occur). There have been so many of these initiatives in the past, but I just can't help thinking that they all fail because its a problem that just doesn't really exist (by which I mean the ratio will not increase that much).
Good luck and all thank, but somehow I can't help feeling this'll just go the way of the rest.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 17, 2011 14:48 UTC (Thu) by mrjk (subscriber, #48482) [Link]
My anecdotal evidence is that we have regressed. I taught assembly language and architecture in the early 1990's and had 20 to 30% of classes being female in an urban university. Maybe we were just an outlier, but there sure seems to be less women in my nephew's classes the last couple years.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 17, 2011 16:20 UTC (Thu) by eean (guest, #50420) [Link]
No, this is in line with other statistics I've heard.
I graduated a few years ago and have never worked with a female programmer on a project. (and to be clear, I'm no in a position to really pick who I work with heh). It's easy to see how it might be intimidating to often be the first female programmer your co-workers have ever worked with.
and there also seems to be a sieve: very few females in Comp Sci programs but then even less as open source developers.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 17, 2011 21:56 UTC (Thu) by maco (guest, #53641) [Link]
Absolutely. Remember, 70 years ago, programming was women's work.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 18, 2011 10:12 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]
One of our computer science teachers said that back in the 70s the computer science classes were full of women. Of course, at that time they didn't actually use computers very much... Then came the generation that grew up playing (and coding) on C-64 and the gender ratio changed drastically.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 17, 2011 22:03 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] one [would] have to work on nursery schools to let girls play with "boy toys" instead of restricting them to dolls. I suspect one would have to do more than let girls play with boy toys; one would have to require it. I think girls play with dolls when given the choice.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 17, 2011 22:07 UTC (Thu) by maco (guest, #53641) [Link]
Well when the only toys your parents buy you for the first 2-3 years of your life are dolls, it's no surprise that they're all you know how to play with by the time you're able to pick out toys on your own.
Gender role indoctrination starts at birth. What's the first thing asked of any new baby? "Is it a boy or a girl?" That way they know how to treat it to turn it into whatever stereotype they think it should be. And that way they know whether it needs pink & lace or blue & dinosaurs.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 19, 2011 22:17 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I suspect 'is it a boy or a girl' is a very early question because we have no non-gender-specific pronouns in English, and it sounds disrespectful (and vaguely creepy) to ask about 'it'. (I checked: it was the first question asked about me, but only so that my mother knew the right pronoun to use in the second question, 'will he live?': but that doesn't mean that, had I been female, she would have been happy to see me die!)
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 20, 2011 17:44 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
"are they a boy or a girl?" - long-standing & perfectly acceptable practice in english.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 20, 2011 18:12 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Actually it sounds a bit odd if you're asking that about a single definite person. When the number is unknown, or you could be referring to people over a span of time, that usage is perfectly normal.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 20, 2011 18:46 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
The gender however isn't definite. You have multiple possibilities, thus singular they is still quite appropriate. As an unscientific test, google shows 94 results for "are they a boy or a girl" v 480 for "is it a boy or a girl".
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 21, 2011 0:40 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]
In general, I think, "is it a boy or a girl" is the only question in which that usage is acceptable, and likely only because "it" is elliptical for "your new baby". (Yes, I spend too much time on Language Log.
I spend a lot of time in a *lot* of geeky technical environments, and I have since 1983, when I joined Usenet. I tend to concur with those people who suggest that there is, in fact, just some facet of sex-linked development that makes females less inclined towards such pursuits then males.
Let me take a moment and make a preemptive strike on the strawman arguments which *do not* represent correctly what I've just asserted:
1) Women aren't as good as... Nope. Just said fewer were interested in bothering.
10) Women aren't allowed to... These days? We're at least 2 full generations past women's lib; if not, then it isn't the fault of men. :-)
11) Men chase the women off... Well, this one may have a small amount of currency to it, but I don't think it's any organized movement or anything; it's merely the same sex-linked differences that you'll see if you examine same-sex relationships as a whole, frex, as compared to cross-sex relationships; women and men *are different*, and anyone who will tell you that they aren't Has An Agenda.
100) Men scare the women off... This one's slightly different from 11, above, and we've already discussed it here at length. It amounts to Some Men Are Assholes, and since men are a much higher percentage of the audience we're talking about, of course the fact that just as high a percentage of Women Are Assholes is going to be immaterial. The geekiness and the assholiness are generally not linked all that tightly, IMO, so the proportion isn't disproportionate... but it's unreasonable to expect the overall behavior of a significantly sized subset to be that much different from that of the entire set.
101) Look at SF Cons: Women have made great strides there; why not in tech/OSS/geekiness? I'll catch the most shit for this one: look at what the women are *doing*. The overall numbers in panels and such haven't changed all that much in my experience; they're 70/30 to 50/50 male. But cosplay and related things seem to skew wildly female, from what I see, which levels out the numbers here in a fashion which isn't applicable to the topic we're really on about here.
I heartily encourage the Initiative, and I hope they accomplish something useful. I'm just not sure how much they're fighting human nature, and whether it would even be a good thing if they won.
Gedankenexperiment: you can stomp out every form and degree of autism, tomorrow, by snapping your fingers. Does society benefit?
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 21, 2011 8:31 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Autism and sexism are not comparable. People afflicted by milder forms of autism may consider it beneficial (I know I do, and certainly wiping it out would change my personality so much that I wouldn't be *me* anymore).
I don't know any women who are against wiping out sexism, certainly not on the grounds that not being discriminated against would change their lives so much that they wouldn't be *them* anymore. It's an unadulterated Bad for the discriminated-against.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 21, 2011 11:52 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]
It's not about sexism, it's about the human nature (or very early social conditioning) that boys go after toy cars and girls go after dolls even before their 2nd birthday.
By the way, I heard about an example where "wiping out sexism" was bad. The German Navy let women join (in order to avoid sexism). They also lowered some physical acceptance tests for them, because women are generally weaker/smaller than man. The consequence was that some 158 cm tall women got to climb masts, then consequently fall off, because they didn't have the reach to grab some pole or something.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 21, 2011 19:12 UTC (Mon) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link]
> It's not about sexism, it's about the human nature (or very early social
> conditioning) that boys go after toy cars and girls go after dolls even > before their 2nd birthday.
Early social conditioning appears to be the thing, there was a few studies going on about how tone of voice and facial expressions when giving children their items lead them to vastly different behaviours.
Basically, small children are pattern-matching information sponges, and they do cross-channel absorption of information to the point where they decide how to act based on sub-channels that "adults" have stopped noticing to the same degree.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 20, 2011 18:33 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] "are they a boy or a girl?" - long-standing & perfectly acceptable practice in english.Acceptable to some. Some speakers of English don't accept this at all.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 20, 2011 19:30 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Well, then those speakers'll need to avoid Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, etc...
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 20, 2011 19:52 UTC (Sun) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
Well, they would be fighting against a long and distinguished history of using plurals as a more formal / honorific variant of the corresponding singular pronouns. For example, consider the royal use of "we" in place of "I", or the use of "thou" when referring to an individual. ("Thou" was the plural form of "you" before it fell into disuse.) Substituting "they" for "he" or "she" is just another variant on the same pattern.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 20, 2011 20:23 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
No, the plural form of "you" is "ye", and it's still in regular use (in wide parts of the British isles, by geography - northern england, some scottish dialects, Ireland). An equivalent modern corruption is also in use in places: "yous". Plural "you" is perhaps one of the few simplifications of english grammar that is clamouring to be undone.
"Thou" and "thee" are also still in daily use, though restricted to parts of northern england.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 20, 2011 21:01 UTC (Sun) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
Thanks for the correction. Here in the U.S. we don't hear "ye" or "thee" or "thou" very much, so it's easy to get them wrong. To add to the confusion, "ye" is more often used (mistakenly) in place of "the" in names like "Ye Olde Towne Square" simply because an older version of the alphabet used a symbol for "th" which looks rather like a modern "y".
Wikipedia has a table of English personal pronoun forms, including "thou"/"ye" and "thee"/"you", for those who, like myself, tend to mix them up: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou#Declension>.
Anyway, it's nice to know that these older forms are still in use elsewhere in the world. I thought they'd died out long ago.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 25, 2011 21:19 UTC (Fri) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link]
I lived in the NW and NE England (Leeds and Manchester) from 2002 to 2010 (including sharing a flat/house with people from e.g. Widnes, Bradford, Huddersfield and Sheffield) and I have never heard or seen "ye", "thou" or "thee" except in pub names, bible references/quotes and similiar contexts. Maybe it's still used in villages, but they're certainly not in daily use in the cities.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 20, 2011 21:25 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] I don't think the fact that formal and plural pronouns are identical has any bearing on whether gender neutral and plural pronouns are identical.I also don't think people use Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Austen as their standard for modern English. What people accept is determined mostly by what they hear in the street, which means lots of people accept singular they. But for some, it is determined more by what they were taught and read in style manuals, and for some, logic. Those things tend to make people not accept singular they.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 20, 2011 21:49 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
The original complaint was for the want of a singular, gender-indefinite pronoun. The logic of the response is that such things *do* exist in english, & have both long history of *and* continuing modern use.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 20, 2011 22:25 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] I don't know about the logic of the response, but the response literally said "are they a boy or a girl" is "perfectly acceptable." On the contrary, it is imperfectly acceptable, as a significant number of people do not accept it. Anyone considering using that sentence should bear that in mind.
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 19, 2011 22:26 UTC (Sat) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link]
>I suspect one would have to do more than let girls play with boy toys; one would have to require it. I think girls play with dolls when given the choice.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1266364/Wh...
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 19, 2011 23:16 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
That link is to the Daily Mail, which is filled with what linguists call 'bullshit' (yes, really): i.e., they do not care about the truth value of what they publish and will make things up, falsify quotes, and generally lie brazenly for any reason at all, or for no reason whatsoever. Distrust it completely. It is almost certainly misquoted and is probably entirely inverted from the truth (since the results are suspiciously close to what the Daily Mail's Little Englander readership would prefer to read).
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 19, 2011 23:49 UTC (Sat) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link]
The Ada Initiative takes a different approach Posted Feb 19, 2011 23:51 UTC (Sat) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link]
another discussion of studies, from a year prior:
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/06/six-month-... http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2009/06/even_at_si...
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