The Ada Initiative takes a different approach

Posted Feb 21, 2011 0:40 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755)
In reply to: The Ada Initiative takes a different approach by paulj
Parent article: The Ada Initiative takes a different approach

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] (2 responses)

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] (1 responses)

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.