Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?

17 comments

• shailynn

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  6 years ago

  Men have always been better at video games.
• JohnSmith69

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  6 years ago

  Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women? Because of the sleepy time rapist.
• san_jose_guy

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  6 years ago

  Actually, there are some video games which have had more appeal to women. And as far as sleepytime, they don't call it rape, they love it. But one has to use judgement, and I always give them some hint. What to you think of a job applicant who won't even talk with two women interviewers, even though they are part of the decision team, may be intended to be his direct supervisor, and presumably are as competent as he is? I have thought about this and discussed it f2f, but I also now want to continue reading the article. SJG
• Warrior15

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  6 years ago

  I spent 20 years working for Wall Street firms. In the 90's, all the MBAs wanted to work on Wall Street. Not so much now. I worked my way into management after a few years. I remember very open quotas for needing to hire more women. The problem was that very few women wanted the jobs. We got 20 male applicants for every one female. The same thing now in the tech industry. Girls just aren't as interested so there aren't that many.
• JackScott

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  6 years ago

  I would have to agree with Warrior. Last Christmas I saw one of the coolest tech toys that was designed for girls. So I bought a few of them to give as gifts and none of the girls that I gave it to liked it. It's not that they hated the toy but they just weren't interested in it.
• orionsmith

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  6 years ago

  I don't believe it's fair to have quotas. I feel like a minority that's ok to be discriminated against now if you are male and not any special interest group.
• orionsmith

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  6 years ago

  Hmmm, iPad messed up and erased my message. It was like watching a hacker erase stuff on my screen. Weird. Might need to call a tech guru. Would I care want sex they are? Nope.
• rattdog

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  6 years ago

  "Last Christmas I saw one of the coolest tech toys that was designed for girls." im guessing but it was a tech toy designed by a dude who thought the gadget would appeal to girls. if that's the case then yeah an epic fail. anyway i've met women here and there in nyc that were working in tech. they all did that for a while before quitting to pursue something else.
• yahtzee74

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  6 years ago

  I don't see what's the news here? That a nerd has a problem talking to women? Most of the bad tech stories I hear involving women is usually software jobs. I've never noticed anything like that in engineering. I know there are quite a few engineers here, including Lopaw, what are your experiences with regarding opposite sex relations at work? Also, like someone else mentioned. Smart women seem much more interested in other fields like medicine and law rather than engineering and software.
• skibum609

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  6 years ago

  Silicon Valley is very progressive so its ok for them to be bigots.
• san_jose_guy

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  6 years ago

  I didn't get to ready the article yet. But in my view there are many dimensions to this. In most work places and most societies, the people who actually have the skills and do the work, are underpaid and get jacked around and stepped on. ( My organization will be the opposite of this. ) So if a guy is trying to pick up on a girl, and starts talking about the finer points of object oriented computer languages, she will look down on him. She will see him as a screw tightener and nerd. If she appreciates him at all, it will be just because of the size of his paycheck. The people who are valued are the people who manipulate other people. Its those who do the selling and the boosting. These people are completely hollow, but they tend to be more highly paid and women admire them as they see them as leaders of the social grouping. So of this guy interviewing for a job, it may be that just too many time he was the dog that got hit in the face with the newspaper, so he won't talk about what he does with women. No matter that these women are presumably qualified to interview him, and may even be his would be supervisors. He just wants to play it safe. 90% of the women I have ever known have zero interest in anything which involves technical details. They aren't willing to try and change a car's tire, or fix a bicycle flat. I was once called upon to help a GF of my wife's who wanted a different job position because she was working in a clean room and they did not allow her to wear makeup. So she wanted this other position because they she could wear makeup. I read her resume and it seemed to me like she had made many job changes, and that they probably were not for reasons of greater pay or greater responsibility, they were just for social reasons. For my wife, she often in interviewing ran into women who seem to have appointed themselves as bimbo screener, trying to nix out all the women trying to get in there for reasons which were primarily social. She did not understand this at first, but after she explained it to me, then I figured out what it was, and explained it back to her. Then she knew how to deal with it. Just need to show real career building reasons for making every job change. But so it you try to talk to most women about much, then its all just like you were trying to get them to memorize how many threads per inch various bolt sizes use. For myself, I do know how many threads per inch. And I can usually pick the tire sizes for vehicles ranging from Smart Cars to 18 wheelers. Such stuff is just normal for me. People who are good at programming are people who have learned, and there is only one way to learn, that is to try and write difficult programs and then to spend the long hours actually making them work. You learn how to do it, and you learn about yourself to as you learn to write things in ways which are less likely to include mistakes. If a guy does that, he will earn respect, some respect, not as much as the sales guys, but still some respect. But most women are not this way. Not interested in doing things like that or in earning that kind of respect. Now, I have to introduce some caveats. There are outstanding women medical doctors and attorneys. Also when you find women political activists, often attorneys, they are brilliant. Their logic and ways of formulating arguments are compelling. Also, I have known excellent women programmers, sometimes project leaders and supervisors. They were really good. And many have noted that there were more women programmers decades ago. Back then programming was of lower social status and pay. But with the Internet, it has obtained more status and pay, and so it seems that men have taken over, and forced the women out. Also, most men want status and decision making authority. For most women, any kind of employment puts her in a status higher than her mother, so some women are actually very good at doing things like driving UPS trucks or the County Transit Buses, and they do assembly line work. And often women executives and professionals are very attached to dressing the part, as in their minds that puts them way above most women. Conversation with my wife, while fixing a car. She said that women can't do such things. We discussed this and I disagreed. I said they actually could, but they feel that they shouldn't, that they would lose something if they started to try. So as they never learn, they feel that they would not be able to. She was someone with a great interest in video games, but when in school she had to do some programming, it came very hard for her. On the other hand, math was not easy for her, but when pressed to she did apply herself to it and she did learn. This impressed me about her. But it never became something she really like or would be able to apply outside of that school context. Never a point of pride for her. Most women have a difficult time reading maps. They seem just not to be used to thinking that way. But if they really need to, they do seem to be able to shift gears and do it. Many dimensions to this, as it seems to me. SJG
• san_jose_guy

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  6 years ago

  Do you go along with this? [view link] SJG
• san_jose_guy

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  6 years ago

  So I read a little bit more. This is the article by Liza Mundy [view link] She shows the opening example, and then goes to some background: " When Silicon Valley was emerging, after World War II, software programming was considered rote and unglamorous, somewhat secretarial—and therefore suitable for women. The glittering future, it was thought, lay in hardware. But once software revealed its potential—and profitability—the guys flooded in and coding became a male realm. The advent of the home computer may have hastened this shift. Early models like the Commodore 64 and the Apple IIc were often marketed as toys. According to Jane Margolis, a researcher at UCLA, families bought them and put them in their sons’ rooms, even when they had technologically inclined daughters. By the time the children of the ’80s and ’90s reached college, many of the boys already knew how to code. Fewer girls did. But that was a long time ago. Consider where we are today. More than half of college and university students are women, and the percentage of women entering many stem fields has risen. Computer science is a glaring exception: The percentage of female computer- and information-science majors peaked in 1984, at about 37 percent. It has declined, more or less steadily, ever since. Today it stands at 18 percent. Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist, told me that tech would seem to be an attractive field for women, since many companies promise the same advantages—flexibility and reasonable hours—that have drawn women in droves to other professions that were once nearly all male. The big tech companies also offer family-friendly perks like generous paid parental leave; new moms at Google, for instance, get 22 paid weeks. “These should be the best jobs for people who want predictability and flexibility,” Goldin said. “So what’s happening?” A report by the Center for Talent Innovation found that when women drop out of tech, it’s usually not for family reasons. Nor do they drop out because they dislike the work—to the contrary, they enjoy it and in many cases take new jobs in sectors where they can use their technical skills. Rather, the report concludes that “workplace conditions, a lack of access to key creative roles, and a sense of feeling stalled in one’s career” are the main reasons women leave. “Undermining behavior from managers” is a major factor. " My own view is that yes there is a problem, but no it is not of they type they are perceiving. I still think they are talking about "Silicon Valley" in terms of completely worthless stereotypes. The media has always been that way. And so when they try to look it in gendered terms, they are just completely off base. SJG
• san_jose_guy

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  6 years ago

  I finished reading the article. I agree that there is a problem. But I also take some exception to some of their ideas. They talk about finding your built in bias. So they do exercises and most people associate men with work, and with science. And they associate women with family and with the social. They call this bias and discrimination. I don't really see it this way. It is just lived experience. What kinds of things do men talk about? What kinds of things do women talk about? Now is this immutable and unchanging? I say no that it is not. There have always been exceptions, and roles are changing today. I know there are some good women programmers. But there are a couple of things the author and all those others talking about this arena miss. 1. These high tech firms are always horrible work environments, and for everyone. They turn into Lord of the Flies situations. And this does impact the quality of the work and profitability. Many men learn to do well in them, but that is because of the social imperative to earn a living without complaint. Most everyone dreams of getting out and applying their skills in some other venue. 2. The stuff they talk about is to me only 'tech' in the very softest of definitions. Really it is consumer media. It depends upon computers, but that is just a form of literacy. Far less women in 'real tech'. They talk about the cubicles being a negative, anyone can always come up to you and interrupt you and confront you. Well, we have a local asshole billionaire real estate developer John Sobrato, who is building Santa Clara University a new STEM building, and according to him it is to have cubicles just like the 'tech' industries do. He is taking one of the most negative aspects, one of the things which make it most prone to bullying, and replicating it in academia. Sobrato has been involved in other dick head stuff before. Intel was built on an ideology of 'constructive confrontation', in other words bullying. So that women find this all a problem does not surprise me. And when people can bully, they can also sexually harass. Now, there is also some talk about some party put on by Microsoft pertaining to computer gaming, and having girls in school uniforms dancing on little go-go platforms. Sounds great, but you can't do that in the work place, and today everywhere is a co-ed work place. Guy I worked for before started saying all sorts of sexist stuff about his secretary. If he said it about his wife I wouldn't care. But the secretary has to work there, just like the rest of us. He is encouraging a negative view of her. Should not do this. Also, I think now a lot of guys in 'tech', the harder core forms of 'tech', are actually there because they want to do things which women either cannot do, or just do not do. I think there is in boyhood a desire to get beyond the world of appearances, the female, and instead get to the world of real stuff, men's stuff. Men's stuff is very demanding, competitive, and sometimes even dangerous. I for one look down upon men who are people pleasers, male versions of Oprah Winfrey, etc. And I look down on these ladies men actors. But if women want to enter a field, that is their right. That is a principle which our society is based on. It is how our democracy works. Interviewed zillions of men for harder core 'tech' positions. I ask them to explain to me what they did, and why they did it that way. And starting from their resume. 90% are just putting buzz words on their resume. They aren't good for much. 10% though are really good, and its those that I have hired. Not interviewed that many women. One could not talk much about what it said on her resume. But she conceded that the resume, written by a head hunter, was not really representative of what she had done, and that she would not be good for the position. I then proceeded to get that head hunter black balled. With one startup, a very negative Lord of the Flies place, it was not uncommon for women candidates to just be shown around, or just waiting for the person who was to interview them, and then they just split. They'd seen enough, and they were not going to stay or go thru any interviewing. Well, in the organization I am building it will never be like this. But how technical will women be getting? I say it depends on them. And how do we separate their technical role from their sex pot role? We will see. I remember one stripper who as also the Human Resources Manager for a video game start up. Another was a tech start up's Accounts Payable manager, and she wanted to be Controller for such a start up. But serious hard core 'tech', and willing to put in long hours making very complex but critical things work, and willing to think in many many levels of abstraction simultaneously? To often, in my view, women are found employed doing things which are mainly about the social and about appearances and stereotypes. In my view such persons are a problem, and often better if they can just be laid off. Still I think much is being missed in the article and the others who write in this field, and to think that 'tech' is these consumer media people like Google and Facebook is a huge mistake. SJG Any youtube which shows a woman without any under panties has got to be worth listening to: [view link]
• ime

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  6 years ago

  Silicon Valley on HBO is funny as fuck. Lets totally derail SJG's thread into a HBO Silicon Valley thread, since he likes to derail everyone elses threads. [view link] [view link]
• san_jose_guy

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  6 years ago

  When this Adam Lambert sings, there is never any kind of a competition. [view link] But Lambert is completely straight about the matter. He is gay. For most heterosexual men, as I see it, going too far into the purely aesthetic or people pleasing realm would be dishonorable, and even emasculating. So let me construct a hypothetical example, Brad. He grew up in a home with a father he came to disrespect, mostly because the mother really dominated everything. So Brad, to avoid his mother's sphere and domination, avoided the aesthetic realm. But to do this he had to armor himself against female type communication ploys and hooks. Today very dangerous, as he could end up a target for the Autism / Asperger's doctors. He would need to know how to always come out on top when dealing with them, never allowing them to harm him, and doing that could entail the need for administering severe bodily harm. But eventually Brad ends up as a computer programmer. Maybe he implements the Fast Fourier transform in real time on sonar signals used by mobile robots to navigate. But little by little real tech work starts to be minimized or done elsewhere. So he has no choice but to end up working for Facebook. And he finds that this realm is run by women who only look at appearances and people pleasing, and tend to worship money and power. So his career had been seriously compromised, but also his legitimacy as a human being is called into question because the women do not really accept him. But in compromising his career they have also been able to take over. And so he resents this and does often come across as non-cooperative and sexist. Really he just wants his dignity and does not like this soft tech stuff or the feminized flavor of communications or of value determination. But because of the Internet and the money which flows with it, the kind of work he used to do will no longer pay the high costs of living. I feel that my analysis does explain what this Lisa Mundy article misses. [view link] SJG Whataya Want From Me [view link] Born To Be Wild [view link] Cryin' [view link] Killer Queen [view link] [view link] Curious Title On This Book [view link]
• san_jose_guy

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  6 years ago

  So the issue is not really women in the tech sector, rather it is the complete neutralization of the tech sector with stuff like consumer media. Jerry Brown is certainly one of the most inspiring people to ever have held public office. SJG [view link] UBI ( Universal Basic Income ) [view link] The Vietnam War PBS Episode 3: The River Styx (January 1964-December 1965) [view link]