April 5, 2014

NYT: White male nerds - Can't live with 'em, can't get rich without 'em

"Glimpse is the most fun, private way to send disappearing photo and video messages."
From the New York Times, the story of a woman who shut down her MakeOut Labs startup to start a sexting app called Glimpse (modeled upon Snatchsnap).

But she quit because of all the sexists in the sexting biz. (Or at least she got the NYT to believe that.)

Stop snickering. It's a national crisis.
Technology’s Man Problem 
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER   APRIL 5, 2014

Elissa Shevinsky can pinpoint the moment when she felt that she no longer belonged. 
She was at a friend’s house last Sept. 8, watching the live stream of the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon on her laptop and iPhone. Entrepreneurs were showing off their products, and two young Australian men, David Boulton and Jethro Batts, stood behind the podium to give their presentation. “Titstare is an app where you take photos of yourself staring at tits,” Mr. Boulton began, as photographs of women’s chests on a cellphone flashed on the screen behind him. 
After some banter, Mr. Batts concluded, “This is the breast hack ever.” 
The crowd — overwhelmingly young, white, hoodie-wearing men — guffawed. 
Something in Ms. Shevinsky’s mind clicked. If ever there was proof that the tech industry needed more women, she thought, this was it. ...
Ms. Shevinsky felt pushed to the edge. Women who enter fields dominated by men often feel this way. They love the work and want to fit in. But then something happens — a slight or a major offense — and they suddenly feel like outsiders. The question for newcomers to a field has always been when to play along and when to push back. 

Uh, New York Times, in reality Ms. Shevinsky is not your maiden aunt, she's the CEO of Glimpse Labs. From her FAQ for her quasi-pornographic Glimpse App:
Q. "So, like, this is for pictures of my weenie?" 
A. "Um. Uh. Wut?" 
Q. "You know. SEXTING. I have this little dance I like to do...." 
A. "Oh, right. That. So, yeah - we’re great for photos and videos that you want to share with someone special. We’re excited about all the different things we can express to each other when we know we’re not being overheard. ..."

If I'd used Glimpse, I'd be Mayor!
As a commenter noted, although she may be getting tons of coverage in the New York Times for objecting to an app called TitStare, her own app could be called TitShow.

In other words, Ms. Shevinsky is a veteran promoter of semi-pornographic businesses who just exploited the clueless humorless feminism of the NYT to get a huge dose of free national publicity as the latest victim of the Rich White Man, Silicon Valley edition.

Well played, Ms. Shevinsky!

Back to the NYT's lamentation over the insensitivity shown to the blushing Ms. Shevinsky:
Today, even as so many barriers have fallen — whether at elite universities, where women outnumber men, or in running for the presidency, where polls show that fewer people think gender makes a difference — computer engineering, the most innovative sector of the economy, remains behind. Many women who want to be engineers encounter a field where they not only are significantly underrepresented but also feel pushed away. 
Tech executives often fault schools, parents or society in general for failing to encourage girls to pursue computer science. But something else is at play in the industry: Among the women who join the field, 52 percent leave by midcareer, a startling attrition rate that is double that for men, according to research from the Harvard Business School. 
A culprit, many people in the field say, is a sexist, alpha-male culture that can make women and other people who don’t fit the mold feel unwelcome, demeaned or even endangered.

And / or they quit the tech industry to be the wife and homemaker for one of those alpha males. It's like that giant hub-bub last year about how women students at Harvard Business School weren't getting as good grades as men, and it finally turned out to be because they were going out on so many dates with future captains of industry.
“It’s a thousand tiny paper cuts,” is how Ashe Dryden, a programmer who now consults on increasing diversity in technology, described working in tech. “I’ve been a programmer for 13 years, and I’ve always been one of the only women and queer people in the room. I’ve been harassed, I’ve had people make suggestive comments to me, I’ve had people basically dismiss my expertise. I’ve gotten rape and death threats just for speaking out about this stuff.” ...
Ms. Shevinsky never received death threats, but she experienced her share of come-ons and slights. A few days after Mr. Dickinson’s “It is not misogyny” tweet, she quit Glimpse. She had been aware of earlier cringe-making tweets in which her business partner had joked about rape or questioned even the most basic feminist precepts. (“Women’s suffrage and individual freedom are incompatible. How’s that for an unpopular truth?”) Still, she admired Mr. Dickinson’s technical skills and work ethic. Married and then 40, he was more experienced and serious about work than many other tech types she knew, and she said he always treated her with respect. 
But after the Twitter controversy, she decided that she just couldn’t work with him anymore. 
Ms. Shevinsky’s epiphany, however, wasn’t just about Mr. Dickinson or a couple of engineers. It was about computer-engineering culture and her relationship with it. She had enjoyed being “one of the bros” — throwing back whiskey and rubbing shoulders with M.I.T. graduates. And if that sometimes meant fake-laughing as her colleagues cracked jokes about porn, so be it. 

Uh, you're starting a sexting business ...
Two days after the TechCrunch show, Business Insider forced Mr. Dickinson to resign. The Australian entrepreneurs and TechCrunch each apologized. But incidents like these aren’t exceptional. 
“We see these stories, ‘Why aren’t there more women in computer science and engineering?’ and there’s all these complicated answers like, ‘School advisers don’t have them take math and physics,’ and it’s probably true,” said Lauren Weinstein, a man who has spent his four-decade career in tech working mostly with other men, and is currently a consultant for Google. 
“But I think there’s probably a simpler reason,” he said, “which is these guys are just jerks, and women know it.” 
The choice for people who are uncomfortable with the “bro” culture is to try to change it or to leave — and even women who are fed up don’t always agree on how to go about making a change. But leaving can be hard too. 
“There was only one thing I wanted to do,” Ms. Shevinsky said. “Be the C.E.O. of Glimpse.” 
When Ms. Shevinsky was introduced to engineering culture at Williams College, she got no hint of sexism. A political theory major, she learned to code from a boyfriend, and she described their engineer friends as “forward-thinking feminists.” 
She worked in product development for a number of start-ups and was a co-founder of a dating site.

MakeOut Labs
She settled in New York, where she got to know Mr. Dickinson at tech meet-ups. When she had a new business idea — a kind of Snapchat for adults that prevents people from taking screen shots of private pictures — she sought out his advice.

Last spring, they decided to build the app together. At first, they conceived it as a sexting product,

Uh ...
but later they shifted to a service that could be used by anyone concerned about keeping their messages safe from prying eyes. They called it Glimpse. 

That sounds totally non-sexting: "Glimpse."
By August, Ms. Shevinsky had closed her dating site to work on Glimpse. Mr. Dickinson, who had his full-time job at Business Insider, helped when he could. 
“I remember thinking just that I was so lucky that Pax was going to work with me,” Ms. Shevinsky said. “At the time I was still relatively unknown, and he was one of the best technologists I’d met.” 
Computer science wasn’t always dominated by men. “In the beginning, the word ‘computers’ meant ‘women,’ ” says Ruth Oldenziel, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands who studies history, gender and technology. Six women programmed one of the most famous computers in history — the 30-ton Eniac — for the United States Army during World War II. 
But as with many professions, Dr. Oldenziel said, once programming gained prestige, women were pushed out. Over the decades, the share of women in computing has continued to decline. In 2012, just 18 percent of computer-science college graduates were women, down from 37 percent in 1985, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology. ...
Tech’s biggest companies say that recruiting women is a priority. “If we do that, there’s no question we’ll more than double the rate of technology output in the world,” Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, said last spring. Yet at Google, less than a fifth of the engineers are women.

In other words, Larry's lying.
That’s a typical figure. Twenty percent of software developers are women, according to the Labor Department, and fewer than 6 percent of engineers are black or Hispanic. Comparatively, 56 percent of people in business and financial-operations jobs are women, as are 36 percent of physicians and surgeons and one-third of lawyers.
At tech start-ups, often considered the most desirable places to work, the number of women appears to be even lower. The companies generally don’t release these numbers publicly, but an engineer at Pinterest has collected data from people at 133 start-ups and found that an average of 12 percent of the engineers are women. 
Sexism exists in many places, but start-up companies have particular qualities that can allow problems to go unchecked. The lines between work and social life are often blurry, because people tend to be young and to work long hours, and the founders and first employees are often friends. And start-ups pride themselves on a lack of bureaucracy, forgoing big-company layers like human resources departments. They say they can move faster that way, without becoming bogged down in protocol. 
But a result can be an anything-goes atmosphere, said Julie Ann Horvath, a software designer and developer who publicly quit her job last month at GitHub, the coding website, saying that there was a culture of intimidation and disrespect of women. GitHub, founded in 2008, hired a senior H.R. executive only in January. 
“If there is no structure, that’s actually more harmful to marginalized people,” Ms. Horvath said in an interview while she still worked at GitHub. “It’s just unprofessional. Tech needs to grow up in a lot of ways.” ...
“In engineering, whoever owns the code, they have the power,” said Ana Redmond, a software engineer. When she worked as a senior engineer at a big company, Expedia, she said she was constantly underestimated by male colleagues and suffered because she was not willing to leave her children to work the hours needed to “own the code.”

Uh ...
Social media, where people carefully build their public personas, often become bullhorns for offensive comments. 
After the Titstare presentation, a commenter calling himself White_N_Nerdy wrote on Reddit, “I’m honestly trying to understand why anyone says that females are ‘needed’ in the tech industry.” He continued: “The tech community works fine without females, just like any other mostly male industry. Feminists probably just want women making more money.” 

Uh ...
That sense of being targeted as a minority happens at the office, too. That is part of the reason nearly a third of the women who leave technology jobs move to nontechnical ones, according to the Harvard study.

Or maybe because they discover they don't like technical jobs and shouldn't have listened to the feminist hype in the first place?

In summary, I'm shocked, shocked to hear of sexism in the sexting business. Have we no shame?

P.S. At the end of the article, Ms. Shevinsky gets a suitably chastened and sensitized Pax Dickinson back working for her, having gotten thousands of words of free publicity in the New York Times for their sexting app startup because it illustrates a grave societal crisis. Or something.

A cynic might wonder if the whole thing is a publicity stunt.

A general pattern is that as public discourse gets more bogged down by crimestop stupidity, it becomes easier for clever promoters like the amusing Ms. Shevinsky to put one over on even the bright people at the New York Times by pressing all the right ideological buttons.
   

84 comments:

Anonymous said...

""In summary, I'm shocked, shocked to hear of sexism in the sexting business. Have we no shame?""""


Um, yeah....

Exactly why is the NYT even covering this type of, what, 'popular culture' feature? Is it really a slow news cycle that this is what they're putting in their Sun. edition?

Invention of a sexting app.
This was deemed to be major news for NYT readers?

Really?
Seriously?

Well, guess there's one field that we don't need more H1B Visas for.

Doesn't have much to do with WWG, either. Its so 2000s then.


btw, Wisconsin v Kentucky's turning out to be the battle of the ages that fans hoped for. A true classic in every sense.

Bet lots of NBA scouts think so and are lining up for this one with blank contracts per lottery picks held high.

Anonymous said...

"Computer science wasn't always dominated by men. “In the beginning, the word ‘computers’ meant ‘women,...’ "

Right. During the Manhattan project, Richard Hamming, one of the greatest computer scientists,
compared his work on computers to the work done by the real men (Feynman, Oppenheimer, et al):

"Now, how did I come to do this study? At Los Alamos I was brought in to run the computing machines which other people had got going, so those scientists and physicists could get back to business. I saw I was a stooge. I saw that although physically I was the same, they were different. And to put the thing bluntly, I was envious. I wanted to know why they were so different from me. I saw Feynman up close. I saw Fermi and Teller. I saw Oppenheimer. I saw Hans Bethe: he was my boss. I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done."

Anonymous said...

12% women sounds high. No way is it 12% of coders. They're probably counting QA and system support too. Lots of girls doing good work in thise fields. Damned few competent women coders, though. The reason there are even fewer women coding at cool companies is that the vast majority of girl programmers want to do paint-by-numbers CRUD coding 37.5 hours a week, get promoted by time in grade, never take responsibility, never think, and never work late.

They're mostly useless apple polishing drones.

Typical chicks, they want to kill startups by ramming HR bullshit down our throats. Utter madness. Productive, creative people hate that stuff. We happily work at less stable jobs just to escape it. LEAVE US ALONE.

I do happen to know a deeply anarchic, creative lady coder who breaks every stereotype above, and works longer hours than anybody. She is, of course, valued and respected by all at exactly her (considerable) worth, in spite of major "personality issues". I like her. She's a trip. I just wear earplugs when she's in the room.

Anonymous said...

The early girls weren't doing computer science. Alan Turing was.

And Grace Hopper was the worst language designer in history, by far. Even tcl, the spawn of a syphillitic camel, is incomparably better than Cobol. Cobol is a rulesy, endlessly verbose and arbitrary women's language.

Anonymous said...

I recently watched a Frontline documentary about Robert Noyce and the rise of Intel and I couldn't help thinking how amazing it was they succeeded without any diversity.

hardly said...

alpha males? tech nerds are alpha males? computer science majors and grad students are alpha males? the weakest, softest, shyest men on every college campus are alpha males?
OTOH I can see that calling these weaklings alpha males and shaming them for it is easy, because they're betas and omegas who would never fight back anyway.
DIsclaimer-I'm a geeky nerd and I'm probably an omega. But at least I'm self aware.

albert magnus said...

I read some things about Horvath's problem with GitHub, which are mentioned in this NYTimes story, and, as far as I could tell, the real problem in that situation was with one of the founder's wife, who didn't even work there. The wife did seem to be an annoying person and was doing some strange harassment, but that does not seem to be a "man" problem and I'm not sure that issue was very well investigated. Horvath was able to get a lot twitter/blogger sympathy for a very confusing story.

Hunsdon said...

You know, this is turning out to be the little black dress of commenting for me: We are a fundamentally unserious people.

(I mean, you can take it out anywhere!)

carol said...

I have lately been reading California - a History by Kevin Starr, and it seems the gold mining claims were owned and worked almost exclusively by men! I don't know if they were Nerds, but it seems they were Gross.

Anononymous said...

“Titstare is an app where you take photos of yourself staring at tits,”

"If ever there was proof that the tech industry needed more women, she thought, this was it. ..."

"Last spring, they decided to build the app together. At first, they conceived it as a sexting product,"


She should name her app "Titshow".

If a cow-orker sends you a picture of her tits, and you stare at it, can you be fired for sexual harassment?

Anonymous said...

Then things got worse. The next day, Pax Dickinson, who was her business partner in a start-up called Glimpse Labs, as well as the chief technology officer of the news site Business Insider, took to Twitter to defend the Titstare pair against accusations of misogyny. “It is not misogyny to tell a sexist joke, or to fail to take a woman seriously, or to enjoy boobies,” he wrote.

I find it ironic that many of the Jews the Times interviewed, such as Shevinsky, have turned into the sexually repressed WASPs their ancestors spent decades ridiculing. If this article had appeared thirty years earlier, does anyone doubt that protagonist would have been a sexually-liberated Jewish woman “educating” backwards White Christian men (with names like Dickinson) that “boobies should be celebrated, not hidden?”

Themus Don said...

Off Topic:

If there was any doubt that our society has gone completely insane, this Daily Mail story has the final proof. I wish Larry Auster was still around to comment on it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2597884/Navy-embarks-mission-save-tiny-sailor-baby-girl-fell-seriously-ill-familys-attempt-sail-round-world.html

Anonymous said...

After some banter, Mr. Batts concluded, “This is the breast hack ever.”
The crowd — overwhelmingly young, white, hoodie-wearing men — guffawed.
Something in Ms. Shevinsky’s mind clicked. If ever there was proof that the tech industry needed more women, she thought, this was it.


So that's why the tech industry needed more women? To prevent young guys from making tit jokes? This is the vaunted, long anticipated female contribution to technology?

Anonymous said...

Here is the list of tweets that got Dickinson fired at Business Insider.

"at least if we end up getting into a nuclear standoff with Russia over gay rights we'll know this universe is just a satirical simulation

— Pax Dickinson (@paxdickinson) July 31, 2013
"

jody said...

so why don't all these disgruntled women get together and form a women only start up, and blow us away with their genius ideas?

this is like that thing where europeans are always at fault for every bad thing happening to africans. if only there were towns, cities, entire nations that were 100% african, with no europeans around to get in the way, screw things up. imagine how awesome everything would be. oh wait.

it's funny how european men have to voluntarily segregate themselves into small groups to go off and work on their projects, and then when something important comes out, every other group on earth comes running with their hands out, demanding a piece.

hand it over, that shiny thing you created, european men. while we were off doing NOTHING, you were off working hard for years on your shiny new thing. it's not fair that you get to keep the thing you did 100% of the work on. we must be allowed to take possession of your shiny new thing, and we'll bash you too, for 'not letting us' work on it (when in reality we rarely work on anything, and left to our own devices, would barely come up with anything in 1000 years).

remember what obama said. you didn't build that! except when you did build that, then we attack you for building that without any input from us (99% of which is useless).

JDG1980 said...

IT startup businesses are among the few white-collar organizations that are not completely dominated by "HR culture". As a result, people with high IQs and mediocre social skills gravitate to these jobs - and these individuals are almost always men.

Homogenizing the IT industry would result in a lot of disgruntled high-IQ men being thrown out of work. This would be bad for social stability. The truth is that not everyone is socially graceful, and there have to be decent jobs available where those who are not can still contribute productively.

Anonymous said...

""""hand it over, that shiny thing you created, european men. while we were off doing NOTHING, you were off working hard for years on your shiny new thing. it's not fair that you get to keep the thing you did 100% of the work on. we must be allowed to take possession of your shiny new thing, and we'll bash you too, for 'not letting us' work on it (when in reality we rarely work on anything, and left to our own devices, would barely come up with anything in 1000 years).

remember what obama said. you didn't build that! except when you did build that, then we attack you for building that without any input from us (99% of which is useless)."""""


Once more Jody, you've done it again. I'd like to borrow this as a reminder to remember whenever faced with hearing all the diverse peoples chattering on about, well...'you didn't build that'.

Oh, YES. WE. DID.

Thanks and good luck.

Shouting Thomas said...

Thank God, I'm a retired coder.

The dotcom era was great. No women at all. You were judged solely on competence and hard work.

As soon as women arrive on the scene, you know that the company has entered its cash cow phase, and that it's time for men with any self respect to leave.

Anonymous said...

I've been in the software industry for 20 years and in tech/science in general for ten years before that (including college, studying physics). I've worked in small startups, even started my own, as well as large companies.

In my experience, women and blacks are an almost vanishingly small percentage, so those numbers quoted are a very expansive definition of developer/coder.

I've never met a woman who was what I consider a full-fledged developer, the hale and hearty sort that doesn't shrink from any project, regardless of their personal experience/background. These are the sorts that know that if anyone is going to be able design/build something, that is themselves. In fairness, these are the minority of male developers as well, most of the male developers you run into, need, like all the women, well defined tasks/pathways spelled out for them, they seize up without this or go off on strange tangents.

But there are enough of the sort I describe and you need at least one of them in any startup team if you are going to succeed, these are the sorts that make anything possible for the whole team, much of whom will, at heart, execute tasks defined by others.

And these guys are always men, every single one I've ever encountered anywhere. I met one woman who came pretty close once, but wasn't quite there.

jody said...

"12% women sounds high. No way is it 12% of coders"

i've never encountered one real woman coder in the decade i spent in IT. i'm sure a few of them exist. there were 2 or 3 women at the CS department at college who were decent. but after college, there were 0 women doing any of the core programming on any serious project i've ever been familiar with. women exist in IT but in other capacities. no way 1 in 8 serious programmers is a woman. this is easily verified by anybody familiar with software. simply check the names of the primary developers. there's almost no women anywhere.

36% of surgeons are definitely not women. i don't know the exact numbers but i doubt it is more than 10% or so. 36% of physicians might be women, that's totally possible. people way overestimate the difficulty of becoming an average physician in some of the easier medical fields. it's not that hard, and being a good programmer is more difficult.

becoming an average doctor does require some of the stuff women are good at: a desire to help people, and the work ethic to dutifully do your homework every day for years. grind through it, and you can become an MD. it's not easy, but in no way is it hard becoming an average doctor. average doctors are not that good, and often are wrong when they diagnose you. there is a big range in performance between an average doctor and a great doctor who is at the top of their field.

shevinsky doesn't sound like a real programmer. not a CS major, and probably can just hack together amateur code for the most basic stuff. sounds like she had an idea, and needed dickinson to actually program anything for real. certainly i could be wrong. but if she was a real programmer, and driven, again the question becomes, why not hook up with other women to create that elusive sexism-free workplace where all the brilliant women programmers can work in a bro-free environment.

ashe dryden just sounds like a professional lesbian, or whatever we are calling operators in the professional victim industry which has sprung up in the US. consults on increasing diversity in technology? one of the only queer people in the room? come on. doesn't sound like a serious programmer. probably an average or below average programmer who fell out of programming because she wasn't that good at it and naturally fell into the professional victim industry. 'I was no great shakes at programming but I was employed professionally for some years, so that makes me an expert on the field, and specifically, how the field desperately needs more lesbians like me.'

Svigor said...

Wait, wut?

Dickinson was forced to resign. I thought the story's supposed to be about how the culture's hostile to Mz. Shevinsky. WTF?

‘Why aren’t there more women in computer science and engineering?’

The most PR-effective defense I've heard for the "not enough (non-white(/yellow)-male group here)" thing is just to demand names: "please name a (desired group here) I should hire. Give me some names. Who should I be hiring?" It's very effective, IMO, because it says that you'd like to hire one, but can't find any, and "neither can you," because there aren't any. It somewhat subtly steamrolls the stupid delusion that these idiots have that there are highly-qualified (desired group here) just waiting in the wings, but being turned away. Puts the ball in their court, and they can't return it.

“I remember thinking just that I was so lucky that Pax was going to work with me,” Ms. Shevinsky said. “At the time I was still relatively unknown, and he was one of the best technologists I’d met.”

I bet he remembered thinking, "lemme help this unknown tech chick, because PC" when she got him fired.

jody said...

"Computer science wasn’t always dominated by men."

well, it did used to mean women running punch cards through big vacuum tube computers built by men, to run jobs designed by men. once transistor computers became powerful enough to do serious computing and work on computationally difficult math and science problems, the women were steadily pushed aside by driven, super intelligent men who needed to write algorithms, create operating systems, program mainframes, build supercomputers.

the advent of personal computers, and especially the advent of the web and the HTML world, offered another window for women to get back into computing - but as always, they were not very interested. they have little interest in creating web sites even with all the tools and editors and huge amounts of RAM which make it easy today. this is one of the fields where you will find many of the women professionally employed in IT. working on a routine job for the web site for some decades ago established company. the occassional webmaster, DBA, graphic artist, marketing person, QA tester, or data entry robot. but they aren't doing much stuff out on their own.

once 5pm rolls around they are done, go home, and return to being normal women unconcerned with computer science. starting up their own IT company in their free time, or even quitting their job to do that, is one of the last things on their mind. women are biologically evolved to seek out safety and avoid risk. deliberately leaving the safety of their cush job to take the huge risk of trying to start their own company directly contradicts every one of their instincts.

remember, most women gladly trade freedom for safety. freedom doesn't offer them much - they aren't trying to do anything crazy - so why would they prioritize it. it's why this:

"Women’s suffrage and individual freedom are incompatible."

is pretty much true.

Watchmaker said...

Maybe after the Mozilla inquisition, the relative social status of tech has fallen. There's blood in the water.

Anonymous said...

One thing specifically worth pointing out here, for its own factual merit: the statement that 37% of computer science majors were female in 1985 is completely false. It was made up from like a typo in a faulty report.

This would be an interesting thing to see a top-level blog post on sometime, because it is becoming one of the favorite quotes of journalists who keep citing other popular press articles with no source.

jody said...

last post in a thread that i have now spammed: the same idea discussed in this NYT article also exists in the world of fitness. women would go to the gym more, the story goes, if the gym wasn't filled with men who are just going to oogle them the whole time, make them uncomfortable, and encourage them not to go the gym anymore.

enter: curves. a national chain of gyms just for women. now there is a place for women to go to work out and get fit, where it's only women in there. maybe what women need is the IT version of curves. perhaps we will call it cubes. short for cubicles. a safe place where endless rows of cubicles are filled only with the sound of female hands clicking mice.

we'll rent out cubes locations for a monthly fee, and all the computer science oriented women in the local area can work on their projects there.

Piper said...

'Ashe Dryden, a programmer who now consults on increasing diversity in technology, described working in tech. “I’ve been a programmer for 13 years, and I’ve always been one of the only women and queer people in the room.”'

Exactly-- a lesbian becomes a programmer because she's down with all that politically-correct "womyn in STEM" stuff and neither has nor wants children.

Then she moves from programming, where she was probably only modestly productive, to the purely parasitic pseudo-job of "consulting on increasing diversity in technology," a role having nothing to do with actual technology-- adding more quantum-well devices to lamps or anything like that-- but rather means "helping to burden the payrolls of technology firms with more low-productivity women and dark-skinned people as a prophylactic against anti-racist witch-hunts." Think of "diversity" as a type of payroll tax. For every ten good engineers a technology firm hires, it must also hire three or four politically-favored drones.

I'll bet Ms. Dryden earns more as a commissar than as a coder because coders are judged on results and commissars are judged on appearances.

Anonymous said...

Men are the future captains of industry and those who push for progress in the vast majority of hard-science fields. Women either follow-up as support, doing jobs that most men feel simple enough to delegate to others, or try those fields for a while, and then quit after being unable to keep up with the workload. 12% of programmers are women? Bullshit. They're either adding on to that number from other fields, or outright lying.

The faster these feminist diversity-hags and shrieking harpies are booted out of IT, and mercilessly mocked as the incompetent morons that they are, the better off we will all be.

Unix v7 was the best said...

So I was a Computer Science major at an important research university in the early 1980's and then got a job doing hard-core programming (Unix internals and device drivers). There were a fair number of women (25% maybe?) in my CS classes and in industry I worked with a few very capable woman coders, but the best of them-- and the only one driven to work through the night like the better male coders-- had a truly bizarre affect and unattractive appearance while the others, though competent, were simply not fascinated enough by the work (or willing to work hard enough) to do great things.

Most of the women who entered industry as coders ended up in QA or support or as librarians because they just could not hack it as real programmers, even though they had managed to pass their CS classes.* Junior male programmers aspired to become senior programmers and would work on tough technical problems to prove themselves worthy of promotion. With the one exception (the very strange woman mentioned above) I never saw a junior woman programmer who cared very much about the technical ladder-- women with ambition vied to enter management jobs where they would use their "people skills" rather than doing any coding.

Important to recognize, I think, is the fact that "computer science" was a young field in the 70's-80's time-frame and many college women went into it because it was both friendlier and easier than electrical engineering or applied mathematics, those being the university departments in which computer-related stuff had previously lived. CS degrees at that time often lead to nice 9-5 jobs at big firms taking care of accounting and HR systems. As the computer industry exploded two things drove the women out of CS-- the greatly increased pace of innovation and democratization of the tools (e.g., PC's instead of mainframes) opened a rich territory to obsessive work-all-night hackers who were nearly all male, and university CS faculties which had previously included many "practical" types, including many women, started to emphasize abstruse math as a way to limit competition for faculty jobs, much as university economics faculties did around that time. The "practical" types went into industry and were sorted by skill and/or fanaticism, the mathematical masturbators took over the university faculties, and the women left the field in droves since they disliked the mathematical hazing and didn't want to stay up late every night.

*It is well known that some people can program and some cannot, and the difference is not simply a matter of IQ. Many women can program but not so many find such work interesting, again, regardless of IQ.

Anonymous said...

You know, I work right now in tech support. Tech support, pretty basic, it's not even programming or anything too complex. And the proportion of women to men is like, 10%.

Women just like other stuff. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But let's be honest.

Anonymous said...

Let me add this from a non-CS field. Auditing. After 20 years experience, I've notice this about Females in "Auditing/accounting".

First, they are very good at following rules and instructions and doing "detailed" aka mindless repetitive work.

Second, they are very good at office politics, schmoozing with clients, and "getting along".

Third, they are extremely bad at WRITING the rules, assessing audit risk, knowing when to break the rules to get the job done, creative thinking, knowing where the bodies are buried, or persuading the clients to hire us or take a different approach.

stari_momak said...

I’m gonna assume the snatchsnap is a joke...though that term is pretty dated.

A technical (writing) point...when a key person is mentioned in a blockquote, context must be provided ahead of time by the quoter, esp. when it isn’t provided by the quote itself.

Finally, it just occurred to me that snapchat, which was bought for X gazillions, is easily defeatable via screenshot...indeed I ‘googled’ and there are already ‘apps’ out there for doing so automatically.

David said...

>If a cow-orker sends you a picture of her tits, and you stare at it, can you be fired for sexual harassment?<

Why are you giving them ideas.

Anonymous said...

I'm not getting 'titstare' .... I just checked it out cause it seemed a bit over the top. Not to mention that possibly boob oriented web sites are ubiquitous.

Anyway, typing in 'titstare.com' I got the 'go daddy' domain website.

Looks like titstare.com is taken (but not in use, otherwise I wouldn't have ended up at go daddy.

However, totstare.org titstare.net and titstare.info are available. FYI.

David said...

I worked for one of the "Big Four" and you're right. They are also good at taking over HR departments and either barring out or creating a hostile work environment for workers who have the traits you describe in your last paragraph.

The dumb of all sexes (a considered phrase, stay with me here) make life an unendurable hell for the smart, then come running to the smart for XBox repair.

CS field or not, this is emblematic of how corporations are run/crumble.

Hacienda said...

"Women’s suffrage and individual freedom are incompatible."

----------------

So it's true then. Bill Gates is living his mama's gamer life. America is a house of cards. And the three countries that matter know it- China, Russia, and India.

Well, at least there's some stunning basketball righteousness to look forward to. A 7th vs 8th seed, no less!

Anonymous said...

the queer people and Alan Turing have been mentioned. I would really be interested to know what is exactly the presence of homosexuals (especially homosexual men) in computer related professions. It is often mentioned that computing is a straight man's world. However, my own anectodal experience is, that almost all male homosexuals I know have professions that have something to do with computers. As far as I have understood, most of them also have some strange and kind of "technical" fetishes (bondage, gas masks etc.) I understand, that my life experience is probably not very representative of wider society, but still I find this question interesting.

ENIAC Coder said...

Six women programmed one of the most famous computers in history — the 30-ton Eniac — for the United States Army during World War II.

Five of which were shamefully discriminated against:

In 1997 Betty Holberton was the only woman of the original six who programmed the ENIAC to receive the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, the highest award given by the Association of Women in Computing.

Chicago said...

Feels like a story that originated in the Onion. Guys hoping to become rich through something like Titstare? Women hailed as feminist heros because they help pioneer electronic pimping? I believe these people secretly think that their customers are all morons, animals with disposable income.

Abe Fauxman said...

8:53 PM, the tragedy you mentioned moved me to tears and its hardly surprising Mr. Sailer's bigoted readership stoops to such hateful comments.

Would you rather of sailed a couple thousands miles to save this baby, who happens to be of the Jewish Faith, or dreadfully wait for my phone call?

Their is such a dramatic increase in the vicious Anti-Semitism of the american people that I might of to cancel my imminent retirement.

Luke Lea said...

Shevinsky, thy name is Chutzpah. Just another example.

Luke Lea said...

"Homogenizing the IT industry would result in a lot of disgruntled high-IQ men being thrown out of work. "

But as long as we have the Bill of Rights and freedom of association what is to prevent them from getting together and starting their own little company?

I second the seconding of Jody's comment. Pure gold.

Luke Lea said...

Reminds me of Riemann's quip about Emily Noether: Yes, she was a great physicist/mathematician. He wasn't sure she was a woman though.

Anonymous said...

"last post in a thread that i have now spammed: the same idea discussed in this NYT article also exists in the world of fitness. women would go to the gym more, the story goes, if the gym wasn't filled with men who are just going to oogle them the whole time, make them uncomfortable, and encourage them not to go the gym anymore."

What nonsense. My uni gym has a male weight room and a female weight room, and yet a constant trickle of females in tight spandex or cheeky shorts (shorts in which the butt hangs out) saunter in, have a look around, lift perhaps a 2kg dumbbell or two, continue "looking around," and then leave.

Males, however, never enter the female area. I would not dream of it.


Fernandinande said...

Ashe Dryden, ... “I’ve been a programmer for 13 years,

Apparently not, so she shutdown links to her bio, etc:
https://drupal.org/user/392906
https://github.com/ashedryden = a "theme", no software.

She's an agitator with pink hair, not a programmer.

Anywho, I did hardcore programming for many years (engineering and such, not "web design"), the few women were treated the same as everyone else, if not slightly better, especially in later years when "diversity" was rearing its pock-marked head, and they all eventually migrated to more human and less technical areas, like customer support or training.

Hey Skipper said...

Clearly none of you have heard about the the new feminist programming language.

Vico said...

jody said:

"hand it over, that shiny thing you created, european men. while we were off doing NOTHING, you were off working hard for years on your shiny new thing. it's not fair that you get to keep the thing you did 100% of the work on. we must be allowed to take possession of your shiny new thing, and we'll bash you too, for 'not letting us' work on it (when in reality we rarely work on anything, and left to our own devices, would barely come up with anything in 1000 years). "

You've just described the history of South Africa.

Anonymous said...

"Think of "diversity" as a type of payroll tax. For every ten good engineers a technology firm hires, it must also hire three or four politically-favored drones."

If that is as far as it went, I could tolerate "diversity" as sort of informal social welfare.

Where I drew the line was at diversity hires being promoted over the competent and being expected to be shored up by the underlings who rightfully should have gotten promoted and received the perks & payroll.

That is truly an injustice and on specific individual levels. It never happened to me, so this isn't a bitter rant. However, I did see it happen at the beginning of my career to others and immediately resolved that I wouldn't work anyplace where such a thing could happen to me.

Hence, to small startups. It won't ever happen to those while they are still small, not enough loot to attract lawyering. However, it is time to bail (ideally w/vested options/equity) around the time a startup gets big and successful enough to warrant a HR department.

Has worked pretty well for me the past 20 years.

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater said...

Seems like a pretty cunning stunt to me..

Chief Seattle said...

What percentage of H1-B in computer science are male? My guess is 80%+ (or 90%+). Why isn't the NYTimes reporting about that? That's something the government can control directly, without imposing new regulation or lawsuits on industry.

Gender equality in H1-B visas. Let's point out the hypocrisy.

Anonymous said...

Nearly all the translators at the European Union are women, and its a great, well paid, tax free job where more translators are employed than anywhere else in the world including the UN.

Maybe women are just better at being translators?

SFG said...

Shevinsky is probably a member of the tribe, but I can't tell by googling.

God I hate my relatives...

Anonymous said...

"Cobol is a rulesy, endlessly verbose and arbitrary women's language. " - How does it stack up to the Inherpreter?

Anonymous said...

And before anyone gets their hopes up, a bunch of white male nerds did that one as well, the kicker is that it took people a round of who-whom before they knew to denounce it.

Anonymous said...

SHEALWAYSVINSKY

ben tillman said...

Typical chicks, they want to kill startups by ramming HR bullshit down our throats.

Are they really typical? Three, if not all four, of the women programmers quoted in the article have an ethnic as well as a sexual ax to grind. Shevinsky and Horvath are obviously Jewish, and Redmond looks like some kind of mulatta or something. That leaves Ashe Dryden.

Not that long ago, I was surprised to learn that Spencer Dryden (drummer for the Jefferson Airplane) was Jewish. (His father, Wheeler Dryden, was Charlie Chaplin's half-brother.) So it's certainly possible that Ashe Dryden is another ethnic grievancemonger.

ben tillman said...

Shevinsky is probably a member of the tribe, but I can't tell by googling.

God I hate my relatives...


Googling for Elissa Shevinsky Jewish, I got the following from the first three search results:

First result is her Linked In page, which says she was a film director & actor for Jewish Impact Films and that she belongs to the following groups:

J Business Club (Jewish Business Club)
Jewish Leaders
Jewish Professional Networking Group (JPNG)
Jewish Professionals
Republican Jewish Coalition (LOL!!!!)
Young Orthodox Jewish Professionals

Second result is an article from the Daily News that says she is the founder of JoinJspot.com, for Jewish singles.

Third result is from meetup.com and says that she is a member of the "Jewish Geeks" group.

Still on the first page of results, you can find a tweet from her saying that she's "a nice Jewish girl from Queens".

E. Rekshun said...

@anon: Let me add this from a non-CS field. Auditing. After 20 years experience, I've notice this about Females in "Auditing/accounting".

Females have completely taken over government accounting and finance.

Not to mention HR everywhere. And 99% of all pharmaceutical reps are female.

Anonymous said...

shevinsky doesn't sound like a real programmer. not a CS major, and probably can just hack together amateur code for the most basic stuff. sounds like she had an idea, and needed dickinson to actually program anything for real.

A lot of founders and execs in tech actually can't code. Steve Jobs couldn't code and knew little about the science and tech behind computing.

Anonymous said...

So it's certainly possible that Ashe Dryden is another ethnic grievancemonger.

Why do you presume it's "ethnic grievancemongering" when Jewish men are overrepresented in tech?

Contemplationist said...

I know the inside truth here. This is a ruse for promotion. Elissa and Pax have been buddies for a few years. They just needed to use this angle to get over the Dickinson witch-burning last year.

Mr. Anon said...

It's pretty hypocritical of her to be so prudish when she is the founder of a company calle "MakeOut Labs".

"ben tillman said...

Second result is an article from the Daily News that says she is the founder of JoinJspot.com, for Jewish singles."

Interesting that there are so many jewish dating sites. Is there a dating site explicity set up for white gentiles - to allow white gentiles to meet one another? Would such a thing be permitted to exist? I rather think it would be summarily hounded out of existence.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

""So it's certainly possible that Ashe Dryden is another ethnic grievancemonger.""

Why do you presume it's "ethnic grievancemongering" when Jewish men are overrepresented in tech?"

You didn't read the exerpts from the article that Steve posted. Ashe Dryden is a woman - at least I presume she is, given that she refers to herself as a lesbian - not too many men do so. And she is not in the "tech" business (whatever that means - a lot of it has precious little to do with anything technical) - she is a "diversity consultant", i.e. - a grievance monger.

Harry Baldwin said...

A culprit, many people in the field say, is a sexist, alpha-male culture that can make women and other people who don’t fit the mold feel unwelcome, demeaned or even endangered.

From reading this, you'd never know that these alpha males do that to everyone, male, female, black, white. They want to see if you can take it. See any movie that shows SEAL training, like "Lone Survivor."

Chad Buffington said...

Ashe Dryden is a fine example of that diverse group known as the "People of [dyed hair] Color".

Rifleman said...

A culprit, many people in the field say, is a sexist, alpha-male culture that..

Wait, I thought it was the sexless, beta male culture that...turned off women and ran them out.

Technology’s Man Problem By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

I'm waiting for the NYTimes follow up article - "The Media's Jewish Problem".

It'll be a long wait.

Anonymous said...

"Think of "diversity" as a type of payroll tax. For every ten good engineers a technology firm hires, it must also hire three or four politically-favored drones."

It's more like the Soprano's scam where the Mafia shakedown gave them so many "no show" or "no work" positions if they wanted their project to go.

Anonymous said...

"I recently watched a Frontline documentary about Robert Noyce and the rise of Intel and I couldn't help thinking how amazing it was they succeeded without any diversity."

Yes, and an excellent show. A minor correction: it's American Experience, not Frontline.
Robert Hume

Gordon Bombay said...

I wonder how Mike Judge's new HBO show "Silicon Valley" will treat these race/gender issues the media is so obsessed with.

http://mashable.com/2014/04/06/hbo-silicon-valley-premiere-entourage/

Will it get slammed by reviewers for presenting a sociologically accurate picture of the place where the show is set, kind of like how HBO's "Girls" was accused of racism for accurately depicting hipster Brooklyn?

NYT has done a few pieces on racial and gender disparities in the tech world, but never seems to mention that these disparities exist despite the fact that the Bay Area is probably the most socially liberal environment in the world.

SFG said...

"Interesting that there are so many jewish dating sites. Is there a dating site explicity set up for white gentiles - to allow white gentiles to meet one another? Would such a thing be permitted to exist? I rather think it would be summarily hounded out of existence."

Oh, that one's easy. Just use ChristianMingle or other Christian sites. Or use Match and exclude 'Jewish' from your search results.

Ben: Knew it! What was I doing wrong?

Anonymous said...

You didn't read the exerpts from the article that Steve posted. Ashe Dryden is a woman - at least I presume she is, given that she refers to herself as a lesbian - not too many men do so.

You didn't read ben tillman's comment. He's insinuating that she's a Jewish "ethnic grievancemonger".

Dave Pinsen said...

"Will it get slammed by reviewers for presenting a sociologically accurate picture of the place where the show is set"

Reviews are already out (reviewers get advance copies of episodes) and they've been raves.

Anonymous said...

"Still on the first page of results, you can find a tweet from her saying that she's 'a nice Jewish girl from Queens'".

Someone tell lion.

Anonymous said...

Homogenizing the IT industry would result in a lot of disgruntled high-IQ men being thrown out of work

Short to medium term but eventually they will just go on and do whatever it is they do. Maybe more slowly and worse funded and working out of their garages. Until it starts to pay off and the poor excluded women and minorities must be cut in for a share again.

Anonymous said...

"Still on the first page of results, you can find a tweet from her saying that she's 'a nice Jewish girl from Queens'".

Someone tell lion.


Queens is a prole borough, and she works in a disreputable corner of the IT startup sector. Her degree from Williams College probably can't make up for that. Lion would only take a woman who would enhance his status.

Anonymous said...

Oh, that one's easy. Just use ChristianMingle or other Christian sites. Or use Match and exclude 'Jewish' from your search results.

Because Jewish dating sites are only for practicing, religious Jews? Right. In fact no other kind of Jew exists.

Anonymous said...

Lots of job openings for women once we purge the Christians. Talk about win-win.

Cail Corishev said...

Gender equality in H1-B visas.

Good idea. Require them to use 50% of their H-1Bs on women. You couldn't make them put them in real productive tech positions, but that's okay. They'd still have to pay their salaries (which would also have to make up 50% of the total, of course). Maybe they'd start pushing the white women out of HR to make room for them, and then that would finally wake them up to the harm of mass immigration.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

You didn't read ben tillman's comment. He's insinuating that she's a Jewish "ethnic grievancemonger"."

I did read it. He isn't "insinuating" it - he's saying that it is a possibility. That is much stronger than merely "insinuating" it.

By the way, is that particular kind of person - the jewish ethnic grievance monger - such a rare occurrence that to suggest it is even beyond the pale of rational discussion?

SFG said...

"Because Jewish dating sites are only for practicing, religious Jews? Right. In fact no other kind of Jew exists."

Sure, but he wanted to know (though I suspect it was a rhetorical question) how to meet gentiles, i.e. white people of non-Jewish ancestry.

If you want to do *that*, going Christian is a smart thing to do, as 'Christian' usually means 'evangelical Christian', and few Jews will convert to that--it's usually the mainline denominations or Catholicism that they convert into when they marry a non-Jewish spouse.

You're secular and want to protect yourself from Jew blood? Just ask. Honestly, given that Jews are about 3% of the general white-looking population, I don't feel too sorry for you, since odds are nine out of then white girls you meet won't even have partial Jewish ancestry outside of the Northeast.

Sorry. Media control bamboozling America into supporting Israel and feminist garbage attacking men I will gladly give you. But not being able to find a goyish girl? Really, that's not a problem anywhere outside of New York.

Anonymous said...

I wonder if the few guys at HR conferences feel degraded by all the cramping talk!

Anonymous said...

Because Jewish dating sites are only for practicing, religious Jews? Right. In fact no other kind of Jew exists.

Jewish dating sites exist for two different populations: Jews who prefer to date only other Jews and Jews who realize that they don't have a snowball's chance of establishing a successful relationship with anyone who isn't Jewish. I suspect that only a relatively small proportion of the better looking young female non-Orthodox Jews would turn down a white gentile of similar socioeconomic status and at least comparable male appearance. On the other hand, I suspect that a larger proportion of white gentile women would turn down a Jewish guy of equivalent socioeconomic status and at least comparable male looks, if only because religion is more important to most Christians than it is to most secular Jews. Ethnic preference for non-Jews might also be significant, but even without it, Jews are at a disadvantage in the dating game.

Anonymous said...

What about Armenian dating sites?

Anonymous said...

Because Jewish dating sites are only for practicing, religious Jews? Right. In fact no other kind of Jew exists.


The point is not whether gentiles might somehow accidently date a Jew. I believe that Jews can date amongst themselves and they get *gasp* to have it both ways. Religious or ethnic identity, they get to weed out non-Jews.

Larry from Texas said...

just had to post this here....

http://valleywag.gawker.com/respected-twitter-engineer-dana-mccallum-charged-with-r-1562193427