"Who are you here with?" might be indicating... what company are you here with? Are you with Google, or MS, or... whatever. "Who do you work for?" might be more appropriately direct.

I have a pink macbook. I wear pink headphones. You wouldn't believe the number of weird/sexist comments I get from time to time. Or maybe you would.

There was a piece floating around a couple weeks ago about women in tech leaving because they felt bullied out because they were women. While I don't doubt that can happen, the 'bullying' that was described in that article has happened to me - a male - at companies as well. It's more cliquish asshole group/hivemind behavior than it is sexist. I had multiple people chastise me that I was part of the problem because I was too blind to see it as sexism, and of course a male would simply ascribe this to asshole/politics in a company, vs sexism. Even though the exact same behavior (and outcomes) had been leveled at me, a male, apparently if the same behavior happens to a female, the motivation/intention must be sexism and dealt with through that filter.

That said, if the kind of behaviour you're describing affects women much more than men, can we still say there's sexism at work? Say I pull some statistics out of thin air: say 1 of 20 men get harassed like you describe, but 1 of 3 women experience it. Can we say there's sexism? If there is, can we address it or try?

You can say that women don't experience it more than men (that would be a surprising claim that would contradict a lot of evidence to the contrary, but it would be a valid criticism). Or you could say that they don't experience it to such a greater degree that justifies special attention. But I don't think it's a strong argument to say that men experience ass-hattery, therefore none of the ass-hattery directed at women is based on sexism.

(Edit: I don't mean to say the above arguments are your arguments - just that they would be legitimate arguments.)

Ahhh - you're talking about proportionality.

I'm still not sure, but would need to see concrete examples. The particular article I'd read, the 'examples' were "I wasn't promoted", "I felt bullied" and "my ideas weren't taken seriously". How about we just root out that sort of workplace psychopathy altogether, vs trying to have it affect fewer women?

FWIW, when I've seen that sort of psychopathy in person, it's been rather indiscriminate. The only reason it might have affected more women disproportionately is that there were fewer women to affect in the first place. 50% of women being affected vs 10% of men affected is somewhat leading statistic, when you realize that there are only 8 women but 40 men - same number of people are affected.

It's just easier to get to know people instead of assuming.

Also: environments that are unpleasant/hostile/uncomfortable for "people outside the norm" make it difficult for such people to distinguish between sexism/racism/discrimination and legitimate feedback.

For example, playing with one's hair during a presentation is often a sign of nervousness, but it is also a signal that conveys that nervousness to the audience. Is it distracting to some degree? Maybe, but more importantly, it detracts from her authority. Still, I can see why she responded as she did--if you are constantly undermined, under fire or criticized for no good reason, it becomes difficult to filter out which criticism/feedback is actually useful.

Edited to add: Loved the artwork in that article.

I hate to be the one to say it, but no, it's not easier. It's much more accurate, but it's not easier.

Getting to know someone involves overcoming biases, stereotypes, first impressions, and a lot of time. The payout from expending this effort is a much richer experience, but it comes at the cost of having fewer experiences.

I personally don't have the time or energy evaluate every person I meet with such scrutiny, and so I take shortcuts and evaluate them based on my experience with people superficially similar to them.

I'm not ashamed of that, it's part of being a human with a finite amount of time to devote to interpersonal relationships.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/01/21/bjork_pitchfo...

It's not even some malicious, deliberate assumption. People have been raised to expect that it is men who do the "real work", and pass over women without thinking about it.

Whenever there's a tiny minority, people will make assumptions. As long as you're not overly zealous about your assumptions and willing to admit that you're wrong when told so, I don't see the problem. Realistically, there's nothing that will ever prevent people from making assumptions until the tiny minority stops being such a minority.

Are you asking why we should work to stop this behavior?

Pardon me for assuming but here are my thoughts -

Because it's literally systematically oppressive. This behavior makes an entire gender less likely to participate in our field. That's bad for the gender and it's bad for the field.

Isn't that enough reason to work to fix it?

So what if there are non-malicious explanations for an individual to behave this way....that doesn't mean we shouldn't stop it.

Again, as long as you're not overly zealous about your assumptions and willing to accept when they're wrong, it's not discrimination or "systematic oppression". Feminists try to turn this into a gender war, but it's really not. It's the circumstance of any minority in any heavily majority-dominated field.

Being female is not a natural impediment to programming. So, even if you're correct that gender assumptions are valid (and apparently OK) because of the prevailing gender makeup, it is not impossible to fix - you fix it by changing the prevailing gender makeup. (I don't agree with that assumption, but let's grant it for the sake of exploring the other point.)

If part of the reason for the prevailing gender split is the attitudes that are caused by the prevailing gender split, then sure, you have a chicken-and-egg problem. But it's far from impossible. You can, for example, change one half of the equation by social expectation manipulation. Or change the other half by affirmative action measures. You may think the cost is greater than the benefit, but it's not impossible.

Yes. This is the only way to stop men from making assumptions. That's what I said in my original post ("there's nothing that will ever prevent people from making assumptions until the tiny minority stops being such a minority"). To get more women in tech, more women have to pursue tech. Unlike what this article touts, telling men to assume feminine women are developers isn't going do much if anything until more feminine women become developers (which would be awesome!).

Women already get affirmative action and special groups/scholarships, yet they're still not choosing to pursue tech from an early age. I think this means two possible things: (1) girls naturally are less interested in tech, (2) parents, teachers, and the environment steer girls away from tech. Maybe (2) causes (1), or maybe it's biology.

I'd like to see more articles discussing (2) rather than seeing yet another article lamenting the fact that women commonly get mistaken for designers/recruiters at tech conferences. That's not the reason women aren't studying CS in high school (just like I'd imagine that's not the reason why men don't pursue nursing), the issue is much deeper than that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muggsy_Bogues

When I say systematically oppressive I mean that there are few women programmers and because of that we have stereotypes that women don't program and when we express those stereotypes it drives women out of programming in many ways. Thus the system reinforces itself.

Again, this sucks for both women and our field.

Let's work together to fix it.

How do we do that? By making fewer assumptions about people. And asking each other to do the same.

I do not believe this is a big ask but I do believe the potential benefit is huge.

I sincerely hope that you're wrong about it being impossible to fix. I would hope that you'd at least think it's worth trying given the stakes.

These kinds of assumptions create an environment in the field that can make it uncomfortable for these "tiny minorities" to enter and become less of a minority. It serves to perpetuate the imbalance. You are 100% correct that it is natural human behavior to make these kinds of assumptions, but that's why we must try to make a conscious effort not to do so if we want to try to balance the demographics.

For one, that's a crime against statistics and formal logic itself. "90% of RAM is not fault tolerant, of course men are going to assume it's not RAM if it's fault tolerant" would be a ridiculous thing to say, because you just can't reason that way.

The kind of reasoning you want to do works like this: 90% of developers are male. Given that there are about as many men as there are woman, a randomly chosen woman has a 10% chance of being a developer. That's valid statistics. The problem is that this works relatively good while speaking to people in a subway, but at a tech conference you don't have a fair sample of either males or females. You aren't choosing at random but from an extremely skewed sample.

Of course there's instances where these kind of assumptions are valid, but most often (and with most stereotypes) it's just people applying statistics wrong.

If you had to make an assumption, and all you knew about an item was that it was fault tolerant, ruling out RAM is not a terrible strategy if 90% of all RAM is not fault tolerant.

Likewise, if all you know about someone is they are a developer, assuming they are male is not a terrible strategy since you are correct 90% of the time! I'll take those odds of being right without having to gather facts in most circumstances.

Obviously in a social setting (especially a tech conference) being wrong even once can be painful to the other party, so we should avoid making our assumptions known until we've verified them when trying to be civil.

But in most matters it's not unreasonable to prejudge and then verify, otherwise we'd spend too much time being uncertain. And in some cases, choosing to act on certain assumptions leads to a higher payoff than waiting to act on facts (which can be expensive to procure).

Until passing over women for developers costs more than assuming they're not developers, this will continue. The strategy being used by disgruntled female developers seems to be to inflate the social cost of not assuming all women are equally likely to be developers. In some circles that will matter, in others it won't. I don't blame women for using guilt to gain leverage. I'd do the same thing in their place.

I’ll admit I’m guilty of assuming Taylor Swift was merely a front for a pop machine, but that’s because I’d prefer to believe she’s a better person in real life than some of her songs would indicate.

Some people may call that political correctness or something, but I call it manners.

I'm not sure this really makes the case that its sexism at play. For example, if a guy wore a suit and tie to a conference, people might assume he's not a programmer.

Isn't this anecdote evidence that its the clothes, not the gender?

A dress is definitely more feminine, but it's also more professional. In the same vein, if you were a suit it would be more professional. My point is she was treated as less technical because people assumed she was. When she dressed in the "nerd uniform" people treated her like a technical member.

If that's the case then it isn't sexism, it's prejudice regarding professional appearance.

There is certainly sexism in the tech world but I don't think this is a great example personally.

When I dress up at programming events, by dress up I mean a button up and nice jeans I stick out. I have people assume I'm non technical.

My real point is that she was treated like a programmer when she dressed in a t shirt and jeans. It wasn't about her sex, it was about her clothing.

I'm all for abolishing the t shirt jeans combo personally, I like wearing adult clothing. But our industry is founded on t shirts, flip flops and ill fitting jeans. If you look substantially out of place, you'll be treated as out of place.

I delight in proving that I fit in despite my appearance. But that's a me thing. I don't expect everyone to act or feel that way.

She makes the same claim, but instead of accepting that she has to conform to style norms set by the opposite gender, she's trying to encourage more programmers to wear dresses and such, which should be perfectly respectable for a programmer at a conference.

http://dressforweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Korean-ver...

I can't speak for everyone, but something like this seems totally appropriate for the occasion and would not cause me to make any knee jerk assumption.

Obviously neither of us know exactly what the author was wearing since it isn't mentioned in the article, but this quote leads me to believe she may not have been exercising the most restrained judgement in this area:

"Once an ex-partner told me “You look better in jeans and a tshirt. Why do you wear dresses? Why do you wear make up? You don’t have to dress up to impress me.” That moment led me to so many realizations. It made me realize that most people think femininity is an act to impress men. It was then that I was 100% sure my dressing up wasn’t for him at all, I didn’t at all care if a partner disliked my dresses, or makeup. I was wearing them for me. And it was then, that I realized that continuing to wearing dresses just for myself was a totally valid way to say a big FUCK YOU to the patriarchy."

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to deny that sexism exists in this industry or the world. I think people should be able to wear whatever they want wherever they like, but the pragmatist in me thinks some of the responsibility for these issues would be easier solved by the individual than by expecting everyone else to modify their behavior.

As you can see, she is appropriately attired.

[1] http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/03/22/10814211-trayvon-...

“Why are your slides so pink? It’s very distracting.”

“Stop pushing your hair behind your ear when you present. It’s very distracting.”

“Your voice goes up after every sentence you say.”

I feel like this is all valid feedback. Back in university we would also get feedback on our behaviour during our presentations or the look of our slides.

I've done a huge amount of presenting and briefing and so has my wife. We have both received feedback like this. Personal appearance, bearing, manner, speech patterns, intonation, inflection and even breathing noise let alone a million other things have come up in feedback for both of us.

The underlying point is it's possible to be an annoying presenter as a male AND as a female.

Thinking about it, I suppose much of what this article says also applies simply to 'those who don't look like they fit', regardless of their gender, such that if the article was about 'age' it would still be entirely valid.

I'll sign off by saying that if you really want prejudice, try raising kids as a full time Dad. If you think men can be bad with 'those that don't fit' then you are in for a shock compared to what women can be like!

"This American Life" had a great segment about this, targeting "vocal fry" in particular: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/i...

Edit: Heck, in the segment you link they even comment on the fact that the guy does it too, and it was one of the first things i noticed. Those are just valley people, that's it.

If anything, it's an ageist thing, since only young people seem to do it. It makes people sound young, inexperienced, and unsure.

    > But even if women did uptalk more than men, we've all
    > heard enough uptalk to know that its rising intonation
    > doesn't indicate a question. No one's actually confused.

Should i read further? Does she at any point acknowledge that i might be saying the truth?

* It's the only thing too, i don't mind excessive "like" usage, high-pitched voices, gravely voices, rednecks.

If anyone is interested, I found this book very useful: http://www.amazon.com/Its-Way-You-Say-Well-spoken/dp/1609947...

I am blessed to have worked in places where I haven't been exposed to many people who speak this way. I am surrounded by women, to be sure, but they are worried more about doing a good job than by trying to sound like it by deepening their voices.

It's funny, my mom is a non-native english speaker, having been in the US for 30 years. She heard a few women talking the other day using a well practiced combination of up-talk and vocal fry. She later turned to my wife and asked "Why are they talking like that?".

I do think that you will find that different demographics are more likely to speak this way. It's not the blanket category of "WOMEN". It's likely, from my experience, to be white, younger, professional women, and then, as knock-on effect, women from other backgrounds who work with them. They are probably plugged into the monoculture, have a common vocabulary, and use their vocal affects and vocabulary to filter out people who are not of a similar mind.

It's like when the newscasters all started speaking the same way, emphasizing certain words, movements of the head, a unique cadence that would, in conversation, be considered bizarre.

Nowadays, you are likely to dismiss any newscaster who doesn't speak that way as an amateur or charlatan who is not to be trusted.

Just my two cents. Feel free to give back change.

Link?

I've found dislike for dialects spoken by poorer people (chavs for example), richer people (valley talk) and completely normal average people of a wide range (bavarian) in myself. In my experience how much i dislike a dialect has always been about how difficult it makes it for me to understand it, in both english and german, and there's literally no pattern to the social status in it.

Of course the claim is not that people's dislike will always be targeted at groups with a low socio-economic status. E.g. as a British person, I quite dislike "posh" dialects. And that is entirely my problem -- not the problem of people who happen to speak that way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o

It's an accent i hate not because it sounds different, but because i literally cannot understand what they are saying for over 2/3 of the words (using the term words loosely here, i have trouble distinguishing their words in the first place).

People speak in their native dialects, and there are a lot of different dialects in Britain. I'm sure it's frustrating a as a second language speaker sometimes. However, the idea that cockneys are simply refusing to speak in Received Pronunciation is just laughable to any British person. You might as well ask a Belgian to speak French with a Parisian accent, or an Australian to speak like an American news reader. People can modulate their dialect to an extent, but beyond a certain limit, people would feel as if they were doing a silly impression rather than speaking naturally.

Your attitude is shitty. If you are learning a second language, dealing with dialectal variation is part of that. I am learning Spanish and I find Mexicans, for example, easier to understand than Cubans. I don't blame that on Cubans.

Also, you are comparing apples and oranges. I am talking about people in their own country with dialects, you're talking about people in other countries speaking differently from the country where their language originated in.

Frankly, i would appreciate it if you wouldn't constantly assume that i am lying for the sake of my "internet cred".

>I am talking about people in their own country with dialects, you're talking about people in other countries speaking differently from the country where their language originated in.

I don't see why national boundaries are particularly significant here. Intranational dialectal variation can be as large as international variation. If your point is that it's not reasonable to expect a Cuban to put on a Mexican accent, then I'd point out that it's equally unreasonable to expect someone from the East End to speak like the Queen. In both cases, even if the person happened to be able to do a good impression of the accent in question, they'd feel as though they were doing an impression rather than having a normal conversation.

In general, there is no conspiracy here. If people want to communicate with you, and feel able to speak in a more standard dialect to help with this, then they will. If they don't, it's because they can't.

This may be an unconscious bias at play.

This is what the whole "like a girl" is about: if you express your femininity in the things you do and the way you look, people associate that with incompetence.

Visual ticks - wringing your hands, messing with your hair, licking your lips - make you appear less confident, and has nothing to do with gender.

The vocal tick - making every sentence sound like a question - is distracting no matter who presents it.

These aren't gender specific criticisms in any way. Regardless, unless you're addressing a gender specific topic, why bring your gender into it in the first place? I'm interested not in the person presenting about algorithms, but the algorithms themselves.

A man would be rightly chastised for presenting a de-duplicaton talk with bright pastel blue slides, pictures of beer, and rubbing his forehead while presenting, why shouldn't a woman?

EDIT: I must go to the wrong programming conferences, never see suits. Wish the down voters would just share their experiences!

I also do not penalize for dress during interviews either. It's a distraction from the important things, and irrelevant to the answers to the questions of coding ability and culture fit.

Aside: Atlassian is more interesting. H/P has better food.

And I think she finds it problematic because women are more often openly judged by how they look rather than what they do, and this fits the pattern.

I think this is a great rule to apply to your dealings with anyone of whatever appearance or gender - often our assumptions about people are wildly inaccurate (and we make hundreds before they've opened their mouth, and lots more after the first sentence). If they're not more qualified, they'll make it clear, and if they are more qualified/intelligent, maybe you'll learn something from them. You should always be prepared to learn from someone whoever they are, and never make assumptions about them based on gender, appearance, culture etc. it's not only rude, it's just ignorance. It is important to note though that just because this is a problem everyone faces in some small way on either side of interactions every day, it's one which women face to a radically different degree.

I recently had someone at work criticise a page as too girly to our team including women. The same thing has happened to women I know who are doctors, architects and lawyers - competence is questioned or undervalued simply because they're a woman. It's hard to know where to start in responding to comments like that, and it's still happening in 2015, so I find this #likeagirl campaign justified and timely. It's time for people to speak out whenever they see this sort of prejudice masked as concern or advice, and stop making the workplace such a hostile environment for women. I'd love to think that by the time my daughter grows up we'll be over this sort of thing.

It is really disturbing the number of dismissive and hostile comments we see on posts about women on HN. Most stories on this topic devolve into flamewars or at best are littered with negative responses saying this is a problem everyone faces or it's not really a problem at all. Good articles like this reporting personal experience widely shared deserve better. How can we change that?

I started a new job a few months ago. It took a while to get started on our new big project, but once we did, it was nice to see everybody on the team fall into a complementary niche. "Not same" != "not smart".

With regards to 'Assume people are as or more qualified than you', I think this is just basic courtesy. If there is no way of 'knowing' someone's knowledge or status eg by rank insignia, it always safer and much better received if you make a conscious effort to be wrong..in the right direction ie in the direction of more knowledge / status /experience. People are happy to correct you, but are often flattered: 'Are you the founder?'..'No, I'm actually the intern' , or 'are you the attending physician?'..,'No, I'm a med student' ends up being a much nicer interaction for all concerned than if you ask it the other way around, while still fulfilling the need to exchange useful information.

John Tukey almost always dressed very casually. He would go into an important office and it would take a long time before the other fellow realized that this is a first-class man and he had better listen.For a long time John has had to overcome this kind of hostility. It's wasted effort!

There are several paragraphs in that section, all worth reading (as is the entire essay).

[1] http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

John Tukey almost always dressed very casually. He would go into an important office and it would take a long time before the other fellow realized that this is a first-class man and he had better listen. For a long time John has had to overcome this kind of hostility. It's wasted effort! I didn't say you should conform; I said ``The appearance of conforming gets you a long way.'' If you chose to assert your ego in any number of ways, ``I am going to do it my way,'' you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble."

I think this article has some excellent advice - we should be considering what men & women say purely on merit, not who is most tireless in arguing a point, or emotional over a perspective - exploring the depths of what each person is suggesting is important. For those on the opposite end of a result, we need to show empathy towards them - they are still our co-workers. Otherwise, we are not putting them in the position to succeed, and are putting undue burden on other people's lives that often are not accounted for in performance reviews.

This one confuses me. I would expect that at these workshops all the TAs are introduced to each other before teaching begins, and so if the male TAs are trying to be funny, this would stop after the second one does this and is dismissed from the event (I'm presuming that after the first one does it, she tells him that she does not find it funny, and so the second one constitutes harassment). This should not be happening constantly, and I'd expect word to spread so it no longer happens at future events.

If the TAs are not introduced to each other, and are not wearing prominent tags or something that identifies them as TAs (and the students are not wearing anything that prominently identifies them as students), then given that women are are very underrepresented among programmers and that women are massively overrepresented among the students (it's a workshop to teach women to code), then the male TAs are doing nothing wrong. TAs should be proactively asking students if they are enjoying themselves. Note that if they first asked if the person was a student, they would be kind of committing the "you don't look like a programmer" offense.

I find the second case hard to believe, because I doubt these workshops would be so huge that the TAs would not all learn who all the other TAs are when setting up before the students arrive, so what the heck is going on?

Is it possible there's something more fundamental in society that this phenomenon is merely a symptom of, and that the fix is not going to be something like "just challenge yourself to detect and resist unconscious bias"? Could there be something inherent in the structure of our framework of social interaction that incentivizes this kind of behavior?

Humans are awesome at categorizing information and making assumptions. I'm sure the ability to recognize patterns helped us to survive up to this point, but this skill isn't needed when having a conversation with someone. For the majority of us, our decisions are not life and death ones, we can take the time to disregard assumptions and learn specifics. I don't think it's the framework of our social interactions more so than it is just us. It's something we need to work actively to overcome.

I have never encountered toxicity in this industry.

The only place I encounter true toxicity is on forums, message boards and comments, and in these mediums the toxicity not at all limited to the technology industry.

It's also worth noting that the toxicity, even in these mediums, is limited to a tiny (but vocal) minority, in ratios of which correspond to the larger population's percentage of mentally disturbed individuals.

Putting obnoxious pastel colors in a powerpoint is bad regardless of your gender. Fidgeting while presenting is bad regardless of gender.

People tell me I don't look like a programmer all the time, mostly because I hardly ever wear branded t-shirts and shorts.

If a man shows up to a tech conference dressed like the guys from Jersey Shore, he's going to be looked down on by everyone there. He'll be assumed to be part of the delivery people doing setup for the booths.

If he complains that he's a programmer and that he shouldn't be judged by his clothing, he will get mixed results.

It's true that if he turns out to be a nice guy, and a great programmer, then people will change their opinions of him.

But the one thing we cannot do is demand that the entire world see signals differently than they see them out on the street.

When someone dresses like the men on Jersey Shore, they do so because they are signaling certain things. They're signaling masculine power. Strength. Sexual prowess. Fighting ability. Etc.

Women who dress extremely femininely and girlishly are also sending signals that literally BILLIONS of people already know how to receive.

Don't be surprised when people interpret signals the way that is most beneficial to them in 99.9% of cases.

This is not a message that men from New Jersey or Women in general cannot be seen as programmers. It's a message that signaling matters, and we must be aware of what messages we're intentionally sending to others that we may need to overcome.

The OP said she wore a dress. Not "extremely femininely and girlishly". She wore a dress.

"But the one thing we cannot do is demand that the entire world see signals differently than they see them out on the street."

Apparently the entire world thinks wearing a dress is a signal that one cannot be a technical person. That's the point of the article.

We can work on it instead of trying to justify such a narrow conception of what a competent programmer looks like. We can and do make progress on how people interpret the appearances of others.

To be fair, I am a guy and no one believes I am a programmer either. Going through YC, it took maybe 3 or 4 times of pg telling me to talk to my technical co-founder followed by me reminding him that it was me before he caught on. In my opinion, it can be a real strength to be different. Some of the most intelligent programmers I have ever worked with have been girls and I have fought incredibly hard to hire them and others on to our tech team only to be beaten by a tech giant who offer big premiums or more security when securing a visa. I know I am not the only one in this boat.

The funny thing is: I am programming since I was 17, and spent most of my youth in full-geeky and nerdy outfits (aka, in "programmer" style). But after I come to my mid-20s I started to feel like "Oh, I didn't even wear a dress or a high-heel in my entire life!!!11". That's when I started to dress like a woman, and that's what happens :')

Here is a woman in a dress, something she might wear to convention about programming if she wanted to wear a dress: http://dressforweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Korean-ver...

It's fairly modest and not loudly styled. This is not the same style of dress as a man wearing a suit. The equivalent for a woman would be this:

http://www.acrdepos.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/06...

or this, if you wanted a dress:

http://juegoskizi2.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/skirt-suit...

I do not thing most women would have an issue about assuming they aren't a programmer (any more than a man in a suit) wearing either of those two last things I linked.

I was taught (and coached) that no matter what kind of job you're interviewing for, you should show up in a suit and tie. Not because you ever expect to wear that while working, but because it is considered a show of respect to the interviewers.

In any case, the point here is that men's reactions to women in dresses often cause distress and make women feel uncomfortable in technical settings. That's frankly ridiculous, since (as far as I understand) many women like to wear dresses and don't feel that they're formal. Maybe it's due to a misunderstanding? Men labor under the misapprehension that dresses are formal attire when they're not, and that causes the disconnect, etc. etc. Doesn't mean we should just accept it -- let's correct the misunderstanding. :)

Anyway. Maybe it's worth asking the women you know.

As the middle age father of two twenty-ish daughters, one of which is VERY bright, and somebody with decades of work experience, I have met a number of very bright women, and I don't think I would discriminate against female coworkers.

However, if your peer group is twenty-something men, good luck getting them not to think of you as a twenty-something woman as a potential mate, at least from time to time, rather than "just another coworker". They might want to complement your dress or appearance due to ulterior motives. Not that they shouldn't be polite.

Please be sure not to mistake desperation for discrimination :-)

Disclaimer: some people are just assholes, sorry.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-03-06

I'd prefer we all just disagree when someone says something is girly. Man up and stand up for men and women's rights to be judged as people not gender without whining when someone fails to do so.

This is no different from assumptions based on race, age, or sexual preferences. Assumptions, wrong or right, are the way our mind optimize/systemize knowledge, and removing all assumptions whatsoever - I don't think it is good idea (if it would be possible.) I am afraid, there is no quick hack and culturally we as a whole should steer our perception. This is hard work which will take time.

(1) Advantages.

As I recall from K-12, college, and more, in several respects of talent, interest, diligence, psychology, socialization, etc., the girls/women (girls here and below) are, on average, significantly better than the boys/men (boys here and below). So, the girls have some significant advantages.

Of course, coding, information technology, computing, etc. consist of "clean indoor work, no heavy lifting".

With those advantages and the nature of the work, it would appear that any girls who want to do well in coding, etc. have a good shot, often better than that of the boys.

(2) Evaluation.

How to evaluate the girls?

As in the OP, is it important for the girls to wear pretty, feminine clothes versus nerd wear of worn jeans and T-shirts?

No. The main issue is getting the work done.

When I was a student, it seemed that the girls got graded on their work, not their clothes; when I was a professor giving grades, again the only issue for a grade was the work. Thus, it seems to me that, in the world of work in information technology, the easy, natural, obvious approach is just to evaluate the work, ignoring clothing, gender, etc.

(3) Writing.

In computing, we need to build on the work of others, but to do so we need a good description of that work. That is, we need good documentation.

Thus, to me, currently the main bottleneck to progress in information technology is bad documentation from poor writing. Since in school on average the girls were better at writing than the boys, I have to believe that girls can be quite welcome and do well improving the quality of the writing and, thus, help alleviate the bottleneck.

If my startup works, then I will have to hire, and I will expect a person who does some work will also write the relevant documentation. Here the girls should have an advantage.

"I'm not trying to say the whole article is bad so stay with me here, but is it just me or does some of this just come off as negative thinking and negative assumptions? A few examples from the article.. I have been a TA for weekend workshops that teach women to code. My male co-TA’s constantly asked me throughout the workshop how I was enjoying learning to program. ... ....Apparently, presenting as feminine makes you look like a beginner. You were at an event to teach women to code. I don't know the specifics because I wasn't there however maybe the assumption should be that they just didn't realise you weren't a student? I can understand how that must be frustrating but why attribute it to what you were wearing? I feel like the author didn't go into detail here. In another section the author links to a photo on twitter[1] that makes it appear as a commenter is telling Casey Johnston to read her own article. Casey Johnston: So many “solutions” to the lack of women in tech don’t get at the actual problems… Tomas Sancio: @caseyjohnston read the full article. There's a chicken and egg problem w/ female tech role models. Men want to be the next Jobs/Gates/etc. When I first read this screenshot I took it for what it was. "read the article"... i.e. "I read the article" and that's exactly what it turned out to be when I found the tweets[2] . The author putting this screenshot of twitter in here I feel is simply misrepresenting the situation or hasn't researched into even looking at the full context? I have to admit i've only looked at this for 10 minutes, maybe I'm getting the wrong picture here, but from what i've seen it's a completely different story to the one shown on the author's page. I often read these gender inequality articles, however I am always constantly disappointed when things like the above are over dramatized, or I do additional research to only find out that the author is presenting an incredibly biased view of a situation. I don't want people to conclude that there is no gender inequality, however I feel that things like the above do not help get the point across. In fact I think they do the opposite."

http://paulgraham.com/speak.html

Person A says "X is happens and is bad". Person B responds "X happens, along with Y, Z, and W." What is the objective of the argument presented by person B?

It doesn't refute or disagree with Person A in any way. Is the point to minimize or trivialize X because Y, Z, and W also happen?

Does the presence of Y, Z, and W mean we shouldn't make progress on X?

  The only definition of Good vs Evil you really need:
  "Well that's just how the world is..."
  
  EVIL: "So there!"
  GOOD: "So let's change it"

It may simply acknowledge that some imperfection will always be present and the cost (not necessarily monetary) of changing that may outstrip the benefits.

For example an extreme divide between the rich and the poor is an issue that many people dislike and would like to see addressed. But at the same time it's a necessary part of capitalism to let people accumulate some wealth. If you couldn't accumulate wealth there would be no incentive to provide better products or services than others. There would be no way of winning the game.

Another example would be the freedom of speech. Defending free speech also means defending some levels of speech you find morally objectionable. Even hate speech to some point. The cost of preventing that hate speech would be payable in freedom.

Similarly some low levels of discrimination will always exist, simply because preventing that would amount to mandating how people must think and how to make decisions. I.e. it would make discrimination a thoughtcrime.

Of course the question is where to draw the line

> It was then that I was 100% sure my dressing up wasn’t for him at all, I didn’t at all care if a partner disliked my dresses, or makeup. I was wearing them for me. And it was then, that I realized that continuing to wearing dresses just for myself was a totally valid way to say a big FUCK YOU to the patriarchy.

If I wore a suit to work just to appear/feel "elite" (i.e. of higher social status) about myself, I would totally not be surprised if my behavior is met with animosity from my fellow developers who mostly dress down or just dress casually.

> But she did and wore a nerdy tshirt and jeans instead, and she had a better experience that day. People assumed she was technical and didn’t dilute their explanations to her.

So it's not about being a female developer, it's about the image you're presenting of yourself.

I understand there's a problem in our country, even in our whole world, but is forcing this down our throats the proper way to solve it? Is it solvable? Not to sound like an asshole myself, but with the route feminism is taking us, we're going to have people hand-feeding women who don't deserve to be in a specific role. I myself have specifically experienced such an event where my manager hired a woman because he said we need to hire one, not because she had experience that made her worthy. In fact she had far less experience compared to the other people interviewing. One of my best friends on the other hand is one of the most kickass programmers I have ever seen and everyone respects her for it. She works for her status, rather than feeding off of being a woman.

People shouldn't judge a book by its cover, as they say. That's what this is all about and I may have gone off-track. However, its also naive to forget or completely deny that people are inherently competitive. People like to boast about themselves, not others. Woman or man, work politics are something everyone has to deal with. It's wrong for someone to use a woman's gender against her competitively, but then again it's also wrong for a man to throw another man "under the bus" or take credit for someone else's work to get ahead. I hope that one day we can work towards being better to humans as a whole rather than better towards a specific gender or race. Maybe I'm an asshole, who knows. Maybe we are all assholes.