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Tech bros' attitude to female colleagues stuck in dark ages
(www.theregister.com)
worst time of my life was when i was in computer science. i'm a guy but still - that hyper competitive shit is horrilbly toxic. letters on a computer don't need to be boot camp toughen up bullshit.
Where was that? I found compsci to be an extremely supportive environment where almost everyone was trying to help each other.
Yea, I mostly remember trauma bonding with classmates at 3am working on a project due at 8am
Me too. That’s exactly what I remember.
Electrical engineering major here, and it was very much the same. Very helpful supportive
Same here! Most people were very supportive and we commiserated a lot about our majors. And the same was the case for the entire engineering department.
The only anecdote I know about which is similar to the hyper-competitiveness in the top comment is from a friend who was a CS major in a different university but with a heavy entrepreneurship/business slant.
There were a few hyper competitive people who were always trying to finish everything first to flex on everyone, they hated me because I finished projects earlier (I helped people that were having issues when I finished, they caught on and I got some snotty messages about being a try hard... I just had a lot of free time at work and the projects were easy to me). Along with a few of these in each class, I had some people that were just moochers that actually sucked and just copied other people and constantly did leetcode challenges or whatever, I ended up with 2 of them in my senior project and they did almost nothing even when asked.
That said, a very very large amount of the people I met were awesome supportive people, both in my comp sci classes and upper div math classes for my minor. We were remote for all but 1 semester of my degree and I lived an hour away from the university so I didn't end up making any lasting friends, but at least once a week I had study/help/hangout sessions with people I met in group projects, people they met, etc. A few people would show up to copy code and answers, but nearly everyone was great, and would pitch in to help others in the group if needed. There will always be snotty, lazy, and competitive people in every field, but they are (almost) always the extreme monority
Honestly, I fare even worse in blue collar type environments. YMMV depending on your upbringing and general tolerance, but a lot of the “playful banter” I witness is stuff that would have you expelled from student associations these days.
That’s not an endorsement of tech bros btw. They are toxic. The fact that other people are toxic in a different way does not exonerate them.
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"In the UK, they pay women 26 percent less than their male counterparts,"
Wow, I'm surprised the UK doesn't have laws preventing gender based pay discrimination.
Most of these studies are nonsensical and don't take into account things like whether the person works full or part time, or looks at average lifetime earnings. Both of which completely ignore that women very often either stop working or go part time when pregnant/raising children.
Anybody who actually thinks that for the same job a woman's wage is 26% less needs their head examined. It's not true and only gets pushed in media because it riles both sides up and gets clicks/engagement.
If governments actually wanted to do anything about the average lifetime earnings difference between men and women, they should make getting childcare cheaper, because it disproportionately affects women. But they don't.
As it stands, the UK has the second most expensive childcare costs in the world, according to OECD data. It's usually not worth it for mothers to get childcare and go back to the workforce. So they don't. That's what's fueling the gender "pay" gap - mothers in particular are pressured not to go back into work because of high costs.
E: apparently people don't understand that single mothers are a thing, pregnancy is a thing, and mothers are far more likely to look after children and lower their working hours than fathers.
I thought it takes a man and a woman to make a child. In addition, in many countries, both the man and woman can take leave when they have a child.
These sorta points greatly weaken your argument. You using child care as an alternative explanation towards why woman may make less is likely a symptom of the bias women face in the job market.
I'm well aware of biology, thank you.
It's an undeniable fact that there are more single mothers who look after their children than single fathers. I'll leave it to you to figure out why.
Women working fewer hours in their working lives is by far and away the biggest reason for the gap between the total lifetime earnings of men and total lifetime earnings of women. The biggest reason women take fewer hours is because of pregnancy and childcare. That's why I brought it up. I thought that was obvious, but apparently not.
Prove to me that women earn less for doing the same work. Find me a job listing that advertises a lower wage for women. You won't find one. Because that's not the issue here.
Find me a job listing that advertises a lower wage for women. You won’t find one.
That would be asking for trouble, duh.
It's illegal in my country to specify gender too, so all ads say "(m/f)", do you really think there won't be a hiring bias when hiring for a role where one gender is predominant?
Of course there sometimes is. Where did I say otherwise? What does that have to do with anything I said?
All I said was that by far far and away the biggest cause of the lifetime earnings gap between men and women being the way that it is is because women work fewer hours in their lives, mainly due to pregnancy and childcare.
In the UK at least, younger women actually earn more than their male counterparts due to higher university attendance, typically better grades, and ending up in better jobs.
It's when they reach an age where it's typical to take time off to have kids when they fall behind.
Put simply, work fewer hours = get fewer monies.
If governments want to close the gap, and I think they should, they need to make childcare more accessible. It helps both men and women, but moreso women, because they're the ones who take time off for pregnancy, and they're typically the ones who take more time off for looking after children after that.
It feels a but ridiculous that you are using "less work hours due to pregnancy and childcare" as your primary explanation for why women make less over multi-decades long career.
Women go on pregnancy leave for months. How can this explain less pay for years of working?
Women can be gone for just months (in most countries it's 1-2 years actually), but even beyond that many don't return to work or only return part time. Looking after children is hard and time consuming.
The Office for National Statistics (UK) found that 15% of men and 42% of women work part time (defined as fewer than 30 hours per week), data as of 2018.
Women demonstrably work fewer hours in their lives than men. We have extensive data on this.
I'm of the opinion that if we want to reverse that, more aid needs to be given to new parents especially in the form of free or discounted childcare - because pregnancy and looking after children is the single largest reason for women staying out of work/reducing their hours.
I genuinely don't see what's controversial in what I'm saying? The data backs me up.
I'm sure even anecdotally you know more women taking a greater duration of maternity leave than their partners take paternity leave, I'm sure anecdotally you know of more full-time single mothers than single fathers, and anecdotally you know more mothers who went part time after having kids than fathers.
They probably do, they just don't proactively enforce them.
It boils down to choice of career, work/life balance, experience level, and assertiveness.
>spend the first 20 years of their lives conditioning girls to be demure
>mfw when women are not as assertive as men
We live in a fuckin society
Discrimination is still a factor, but yeah, society corrals women into certain fields that don’t pay as much.
Is even better! When a field changes from male dominated to female dominated, incomes across the field plummet!
Source?
It's happened in education and the inverse happened in computing.
You've got to be kidding.
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I work a tech job at a corporate company that isn't a tech company. 9/10 males have been delightful. They have hired women as head of IT twice in a row now. But there was one coworker who immediately assumed and acted like I knew nothing. He may do that to everyone though to seem smarter and superior... very ambitious guy. I also suspected it may have also been influenced by the non-US culture he grew up in.
I also suspected it may have also been influenced by the non-US culture he grew up in.
How so?
I think the answer to that should be obvious, and you are only asking so you can argue and call me racist. So I will not engage.
Honestly, I have no idea what you are referring to either. Would you mind sending me a message if you don't want to go into detail in public?
You have no idea that some cultures prefer women barefoot, pregnant, and cleaning their house rather than in the workplace? You have no idea that many cultures are not used to having female bosses over male workers?
I mean "non-US" culture can be anything really, there are loads of cultures where the woman is supposed to look after the house.
Hell, it used to be pretty normal in Europe and the US not that long ago.
In order to avoid obnoxious replies, I intentionally chose not to name the particular country I had in mind. The point still stands -- there are going to be people in the workplace from cultures with more misogyny than others. And the culture they grew up in will have had an effect on their attitudes.
Not sure why you get immediately so confrontational. Of course I know those things exist and can be a problem but it wasn't at all clear to me that you were talking about those things. That's why I asked for clarification.
I get it, some people try to trigger other by asking obvious questions but don't assume the worst in all of us.
Non-US could mean Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany...
So? Please go find something productive to do.
Tech bros' attitude to female colleagues stuck in dark ages
Almost one in five [...]
Imagine if the article started with
Feminists attitude to men stuck in the dark ages
Almost one in five
Would you take it seriously?
20% is not good, but that title makes it seem like it's 80%.
The female IT colleagues I've had have been just like med: OK to stellar. The only absolute IT knobhead I've had the displeasure of dealing with was a dude, and the only non-IT dickhead colleague was a woman.
For the study, follow https://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/system-update-addressing-the-gender-gap-in-tech-report and scroll to the bottom.
They interviewed 21 women and had an online survey with
555 women and 523 men who currently or have recently left a tech role (less than 4 years ago), 360 women who have not worked in tech, but hold a qualification in a STEM subject at Level 3 or above
and these people were 90% from England. There were 1.7 million people in tech in the UK in July 2023. The US has 9.7M and I have no idea how many the EU has (too lazy to search). But to generalize the findings of a single country globally...
What a bad article.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It is still 2023, yet anyone familiar with the industry over the last 30 years may feel a sense of déjà vu when reading the findings of a report by The Fawcett Society charity and telecoms biz Virgin Media O2.
It claimed: "By seeing more female role models in tech, young girls will start to see IT as a realistic and attractive career option."
Those daring enough to delve deeper into history will find that far from women being "naturally less well suited" to the industry, they actually helped found it and provided the backbone of its early workforce.
Historian Mar Hicks, associate professor at Illinois Institute of Technology, has plotted how women staffed early IT departments during the 1950s because the work was seen as uninspiring and lacking in career cachet.
Among her employees was Ann Moffatt, who coded the black box recorder for the Anglo-French supersonic passenger jet Concorde.
The "move fast and break things" culture embodying post-millennium tech claims to be the great disruptor in everything – except the numbing predictability of sexism.
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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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