Recently, there has been a bout of eager linking and retweeting of a study that supposedly demonstrated that female coders were discriminated against because of their gender even when their code was good.
Of course, the actual study demonstrated absolutely nothing of the kind. It showed that coders were judged more harshly whenever they revealed any gender. In the multiple reposts, however, the results of the study were perverted beyond all recognition.
The gleeful reposting of this study was engaged in by people who loudly claim to oppose discrimination. In reality, though, they have such a profound need to inhabit the world where women are victimized that they will invent that world and service this fantasy by falsifying all information that comes their way.
This is the most pernicious kind of sexism because it’s entirely unconscious and masks behind what looks and feels like sincere concern for women. If you try to tell these folks that they are the source of the discrimination they so loudly decry, they will get extremely offended and never believe you.
Clarissa's Blog 
I agree.
Women have come a long way in many other high-paying fields like medicine and law. I wouldn’t say they have achieved complete parity, but I think it’s at the point where not many women would quit law school or medical school because of sexism.
What’s so special about the tech sector then? I have read SO many articles and blog posts to the tune of ‘I quit after my first year in a computer science major because of all the sexism’. I’m not saying tech departments aren’t sexist. It’s just that an earlier generation, which faced order of magnitudes more sexism, somehow managed to still pursue a career in a field that they loved. At a time when women were referred to as ‘broads’ and ‘skirts’ in the office. They also didn’t have any support groups the way we have now on school campuses.
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I am a woman academic in “technology” and I have been in the field several years now. Honestly my personal experience does not corroborate these sexism horror stories in tech that you constantly hear about on the internet.
This is not to say I have not seen any sexism. I continue to see mild amounts of sexism in my department and in my academic community; but still these are relatively minor incidents and nothing like what is described by these articles.
I feel as if the people who champion these articles tend to use them as an excuse for their own inaction and their own lack of success. It’s as if they are playing a game of “If It weren’t for Sexism”; in reality though sexism is the least of their problems.
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This is very good to know. Because from everything that is being written about the field, one gets an impression that it’s a horrible cesspool of vicious sexism.
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What’s so special about the tech sector then?
The tech sector is the current day hot market when everyone starts furiously yammering about good jobs, good pay and “practicality” and STEM. The law and medicine require professional degrees (more debt and time!) and accreditation and operate in quasi guild mode (the bar, medical boards). Plus there’s continuing education requirements.
The overall number of jobs in law has shrunken in the last eight years. A lot of jobs doctors used to do are being handled by nurses and physician assistants. In contrast, a lot of tech workers got there by actual coding experience (previously) and you maybe need a college degree and while you do need to keep up with languages there’s no “take these courses or the state will not allow you to code something”. IOW, there’s a lot less barriers to initial entry.
There’s a lot of ageism for workers that you don’t quite see with law or medicine in the same way. In addition, doctors and lawyers have confidentiality requirements (for patients, clients) that techies do not.
Thus, a perfect storm of “OMG, structural inequality in tech!” relative to law or medicine.
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If I’m reading the graphs correctly, the two graphs are for insiders to the team and outsiders.
Both graphs are broken up by gendered submissions and non gendered submissions. The male insiders have a slight advantage if the submissions are ungendered; female insiders have a slight advantage if gendered. The submission acceptance rate goes down dramatically for outsiders overall. It goes down even further if the submissions by outsiders are gendered regardless. The lowest acceptance rate is for gendered submissions by female outsiders.
What this suggests is that coders should not gender their submissions, especially if they’re women outside of a team and that it’s really important to be on the team versus outside of it.
Now I don’t know how hard it is for women to get on the team in relation to men. But this is more complex than just stating “Female name, bad. Male name good.”
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Compilers don’t even care about whether you’re hot or not. 🙂
The Open Source community does have a workable solution to any form of “discrimination”: you simply fork the code, allowing the better implementation to win over the longer haul.
What is so noxious about this made-up “discrimination” is that it completely ignores the essence of the technological imperative, which is a significant force within technology communities.
These people don’t have the time to care about crappy identity politics.
They’re too busy trying to get the future they’d like to happen to become stable enough for general use.
The “excluded” within these communities may be considered not in terms of their identity politics, but instead in terms of how awful they are as competitors.
If you have to make your case through argumentum ad baculum by presenting your identity as to a gate keeper, rather than making yourself known by your works within technology communities, you will most likely be regarded as a force of resistance and isolated as such.
This is not “discrimination” — this is damage control.
These people rightly sense the risk of a great amount of potential damage.
If you would like to see a case study in this sort of thing, look into how the GNOME project managed to deplete its funds despite having been the recipient of much financial goodwill in the past.
If you would like to see an organisational re-think about how an organisation engages with the public when it’s under threat from identity politics, look into the recent changes by the Linux Foundation in terms of how it regards members and their voting rights.
[BTW, when I buy influence with some of these people, we are agreed that this influence involves specific results that we may regard as “progress” toward technological goals, and as such we generally do not discuss these other tangential matters because they are not relevant …]
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