Title, I’m sick of online tech communities that clearly are casually of the opinion that women are stupider than men or stupid outright. Funny how the example of a tech incompetent person is always your grandma never your grandpa—have recently been seeing this archetypal person mutate into your mom now, not even your grandma. I know so many women my mom’s generation who have been programming for decades… The assumption that anyone in online tech communities must be a guy because women are too stupid or uninterested in tech, etc.
The thing that annoys me the most is that these men don’t think of themselves as anti-woke gamergaters or anything. They probably think of themselves as “progressive” #resist libs IME. It’s sad that growing up I had to deal with the attitudes towards me being the only girl who chose to do IT classes at my school (and like, not to blow my own trumpet but clearly the most competent kid in the class by far too—I don’t think that’s too much of a brag considering I’m talking about a group of like 20 children) and nothing’s changed when I’m in online communities of my own choosing as an adult years later.
It’s so detached from reality when people think that misogyny is an oppression that’s been “overcome” when clearly the majority of men still have as a base unchallenged assumption that women are stupider than men.
Your communities are only going to have fewer and fewer women over time because of these attitudes. And then the men in them will wonder why there’s so few women in techy communities. Must be because our feeble female brains are too dumb to understand tech.
i wouldn’t find out till after her death that my grandmother had a PhD in computer science. she became a housewife and pretended her whole life to be tech illiterate because she was ashamed of being a technical woman, apparently because of the hatred she got during her studies.
Yeah it’s really sad. When I was working retail I met an older woman who, when I mentioned I wanted to go to uni for CS, she told me she had done CS at uni but had to drop out because she got pregnant and then she just never got back into it, and now she’s working minimum wage at a supermarket. A lot of the issues around the lack of women in STEM is to do with the division of reproductive labour and the inability for women to pursue STEM interests and careers alongside their expected duty of homemaking/child-rearing.
I fucking hate that shit too. Some of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with were women. When I was in Amazon after college (lol) the only competent teammate I had was a woman. And the best manager I had? Also a woman. get wrecked nerds.
There’s an xkcd for it - https://xkcd.com/385/
The worst part of this is the flip side where dudes in tech are constantly fronting and overestimating their skills. So the whole field suffers from a disconnect between confidence and ability.
there is so much misogyny baked into “nerd culture” despite computing itself being so heavily influenced and developed by women. It ended up being self selecting. And the smugness and contempt has baked into it too. Someone shared a really great article here recently (that I will share once more: https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture/) which points out how this contempt can often occur along gendered lines (or others) reinforcing oppression. And just generally being toxic.
despite computing itself being so heavily influenced and developed by women.
Computer science as a field of study was created by a woman, Ada Lovelace. Grace Hopper was one of the first programmers to use the Harvard Mk. I, the state-of-the-art computer used as a targeting system by battleships during WWII (anyone who thinks the Axis had better tech is full of shit).
Programming was seen as women’s work until it started paying ludicrous amounts of money, causing an influx of men who then pushed women out. It was turned into a prestigious career choice at that point, after the women were all gone. This was during the postwar period and you don’t see women coming back to tech until the '90s during the Dot Com Boom where companies were hiring anyone with any computer skills.
Part of that is coming from a serious disconnect between the “tech community” and the people who actually work professionally with technology.
That’s true, but I’m not a professional myself and hobbyist/enthusiast communities also need a better culture.
remembering this one time we had a woman speaker for a tech class I was taking and this one techbro starts asking her about “primal” biological differences that make women inferior or something lol I couldnt believe what I was hearing. The professor was a woman too, she shut that shit down fast thankfully
