That kind of gets to what I was trying to say, though. The 'just-so' story I hear often is that men in STEM fields are incredibly sexist and this is just how it is and certain policies are the only way to fix it. I'm willing to accept that might be true but I would like to know why.
I don't really buy the "computers were marketed towards men" argument that was mentioned a few child comments down. I also don't really buy into the idea that men are just inherently sexist and women aren't, especially since I've heard both mysogynist and mysandrist comments from women in my workplace...
Why are fields like law, medicine, and mathematics more receptive to women?
I regularly run Docker containers, VMs, IDEs, and two web browsers on both an Intel Mac Pro and an M3 Mac Pro. I believe they both have 16GB of RAM. I have never bothered to check my RAM usage because I've never had the computer slow down or stop working because it ran out of RAM. (Intel Mac certainly feels bottlenecked sometimes by CPU, though.)
I don't know. Why are we told that representation is important and we must have diversity along every axis throughout media?
Well, if you think about it for five seconds, it's because people in general (but especially children) identify with and look up to people who look like them and share their culture. That's just human nature.
At what point in history has the message "People like yourself are falling behind in a very serious way" ever been met with "Yay!" ?
Also, many Americans are taught that statistical gaps between different demographics are usually a result of some terrible injustice. (It's certainly been true in the past.) Whether or not this is true always or even in this case, I can't really say, but I do understand why the mostly American audience of HN would have a negative reaction...
The narrative that women don't succeed in computer science and cybersecurity because of discrimination never aligned with my experience whatsoever.
Sure, when I was in high school and college, there were significantly less women. And sure, women experience discrimination in many forms, many in ways that men don't understand or have to deal with. I get it, I'm speaking from a "position of privilege" as a man.
But I had numerous female teachers and college professors in my programming and math classes. The female students in my classes were smart, capable, and dedicated. Never once did I see them denied anything or treated differently. Female friends told me about negative experiences facing sexism, and they always came from people outside the school, or at the very least outside the CS program.
And yet literally everyone I talked to at this overwhelmingly left-leaning school assured me that being a female CS student was a form of torture. They could never explain why. Forget about the female-only scholarships, the conferences, the special clubs and interest groups. These middle-class college students living in one of the world's richest cities are suffering in this field, and we should be doing anything and everything to help them, we will not be satisfied until we have an exact 50%-50% split.
I'm not saying it's all rainbows and sunshine. Obviously sexism is still a systemic problem in many parts of American life. I have sisters, they have told some awful shit. I'm simply posing the questions - at what point does a minority group stop being disadvantaged? When do they stop being considered a minority? Who gets to decide when and how that happens? Why are there so many scholarships, interest groups, and initiatives designed to help women in STEM who are struggling, but the very real problem of men and boys struggling in other fields is largely ignored? How large does the gap between male and female education have to get before it reaches public consciousness?
It seems like we (the US) should be doing more across the board to help students and provide them opportunities, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. Constant culture war spats and identity politics aren't helping anyone. The vague impression from my social group is that Europeans have it figured out and we just don't, but I really don't know if that's true.
Making an alt account because I don't want to be misconstrued as 'supporting racism' or something. I did a quick search and it seems like 4chan is definitely not all white people. It may be majority white but I doubt it.
Using the 4chan JSON API, I looked at the /pol/ and /int/ boards to see the range of countries posted. /int/ has posts from 99 unique countries. /pol/ has posts from 100 unique countries, but many of the 'countries' are just labels naming a specific flag, for example "LGBT". (Note that "White Supremacist" is literally a flag/label you can choose... But so are "Tree Hugger", "Anarchist", "Facist", "Hippie", and "Black Lives Matter".) I tried to make a pastebin but their filters didn't like the word "white supremacist" so here's the code instead: https://pastebin.com/9FhDM8Ch
Given the list of countries, I'd say it is nearly impossible that most of these people are white. Some of these people are definitely using VPNs to change their country code, however it's also important to note that many VPNs are banned from posting without a 4chan Pass. They cannot all be VPNs.
Without spending too much time on it, I found two pictures of /pol/ meetups online:
(Trigger warning, the second picture shows Nazi symbolism.)
In both pictures people of color are present, and in one picture white people make up 50% of the crowd. This doesn't make what /pol/ says OK and that I don't condone racist speech online, but it does suggest many of the comments in this thread are incorrect about 4chan's demographics. Ultimately we do not know what 4chan's demographics are.
Why did I bother? For a few reasons: I like Chris Poole and to my knowledge, he's never supported bigotry directly, he just strongly believes in the value of online anonymity. It pains me to see people painting him as a racist. Nobody calls Jack Dorsey a racist when racist things are posted on Twitter. I also don't like it when people imply that people who post racist things must by default be white, or that white people are inherently racist, e.g. "4chan is a racist website so they must be all white". I also am quite interested in the topic of online moderation and how we can create spaces that allow for privacy/anonymity while curbing bad actors. For something else interesting on this topic, this paper is about white supremacy present on Twitter: https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2191/f/downloa... Note that the paper is from 2016 and white supremacy is still in full-force on Twitter, and really any popular social media site.
I don't really buy the "computers were marketed towards men" argument that was mentioned a few child comments down. I also don't really buy into the idea that men are just inherently sexist and women aren't, especially since I've heard both mysogynist and mysandrist comments from women in my workplace...
Why are fields like law, medicine, and mathematics more receptive to women?