This is easier than you think: white men won. When you're the majority you get to set the baseline. Your behavior is "normal" behavior. That's the very definition of privilege: my house, my rules. In America, for now, white men are the baseline. Therefore, anything a "normal" white man does can't be deviant. Sociopolitically speaking, white men will continue to define the norm well past the point where we're a minority. We've run things for so long our entrenched power structure will kick along for generations. As a result, the gains of any minority must either be granted by the majority or taken from them. Pity the poor white man. His great grandmother probably didn't expect to vote when she grew up. His great great grandfather may have owned people. Now here he is, surrounded by signs in spanish, men kissing men, female CEOs and doctors with Indian accents. His star is on the wane. Are you surprised that he lashes out like a cornered animal? I grew up with "fags" and "niggers" and "gooks" and "chinks" and now we've got gay congressmen, a black president and Bruce Jenner's a girl. I think it's fuckin' awesome... But if I weren't evolved, I'd be terrified at the rate of social progress.
And that, right there, is why I'm such a hellcat about getting more women in stem. Tech is our communications platform, it's the way we interact, it's vital in shaping the modern world. Yet once again, we are building a platform by white men, biased toward white men. I want to shorten the cycle. Let's not do another hundred years of this.
And hey - as a general rule of thumb, women have better attention to detail. My wife graduated magna cum laude with a degree in Math. She was a software architect for a major multinational insurance firm. But she bailed on that and went into medicine 'cuz she wanted to, you know, help people. Are you saying the platform itself is inherently biased toward white men? Or are you saying that the presence of entitled white men creates a bias?
I don't think it's biased toward men inherintly. It's what I love about programming, the absolute simplicity of binary, the beauty of the baud. Ones and zeros can't be evil :) But I think people are much better at thinking of scenarios relevant to them, so the products tech companies make tend to have a bias toward men. It wasn't built to be that way, we used to have 30% women, hell the first programmer was a woman. But today those numbers are a lot worse, and I don't want that bias to cement. If we get enough representation for women and minorities soon we can avoid creating a more permanent heirarchy. It's interesting you mention why your wife left. Tech has a bit of an image problem in that regard. I've done lots of work with young girls and the idea that tech is a selfish profession is probably one of the top reasons they avoid it. Of course that becomes circular, the more people who see tech as selfish, the more it attracts money grubbing brogrammers, who then perpetuate that idea. It's one of the many things we need to change if we want to close the gender gap.
I don't know if it's even as complicated as a race/gender difference. It's really just a "tech-oriented" vs "non-tech-oriented" problem. I'm on computers 80% of my day, and I have been and will continue to be; I grew up on them and my job revolves around them. My girlfriend is an art major, she only uses computers when she has to. We can look at the same piece of software and I intuitively have ideas about how to use it and how to access the settings and features I need. This "makes sense" to me and seems like the only "right way" to organize information. She disagrees and explains why and that makes sense too. But that software was designed by people like me without a thought to people not like them because it's hard to comprehend how someone wouldn't just get it, why it wouldn't just be intuitive to them.But I think people are much better at thinking of scenarios relevant to them
When you have an industry with as little diversity as tech, it decidedly is a race / gender difference.
I completely agree that techies have trouble understanding scenarios for non techies, but the discussion was about the lack of women in tech and contributing factors (unless you think women are non-tech-oriented, but I don't think that's what you meant).I don't know if it's even as complicated as a race/gender difference. It's really just a "tech-oriented" vs "non-tech-oriented" problem.
And not just better attention to detail, but a wholly different perspective. I'm working on forming a company right now, and we needed some help with a particular aspect. One of the guys suggested a woman he knows who had expertise in the particular area (nothing related to any gender specific knowledge), so we consulted her. She was into our idea, so we brought her in as a partner. I never considered her "a woman", but rather "an expert" (which I still figure is a decent default in business). But then we were having dinner the other day, and discussing marketing strategies. We were discussing potential customers, and our limited capacity to imagine things beyond our experience was laser focusing the few of us dudes on guys just like us. She spoke up and said, "Wow, I have a totally different idea of who would be interested," and proceeded to expand our potential customer base by an order of magnitude, specifically because she was thinking from a woman's perspective. Big lesson on my end.
http://obdc.com/diverse-companies-make-more-money/ In my experience, companies with a diverse workforce tend to be the best places to work. Gender is an easy metric to measure, as is race. But there are others too. My favorite teams have been ones that don't expect men to all behave the same. They allow room for something other then the hyper-aggressive self promoting type, and as a result people are happier and more confident in their work. I really believe there is financial value in creating that type of place.
I sometimes forget these things, because I'm a scientist, which is one of the few fields that really doesn't seem to care about race and gender (yes I'm aware of the gender disparities in the highest levels of leadership). My wife, on the other hand, is reminded all too often that she's "a girl" in a man's world, as she works in the car business. It's messed up. You know how many women design cars for GM (exteriors, that is)? One. (There were two but one just got bumped to management). And GM is the progressive one of the Big Three. As far as I'm aware the number is zero at the other two. Women are close to half their market, and they include functionally no women in design, which is one of the most important aspects for selling cars. (It made the news this year at the Detroit auto show that Nissan was showing a car for which the lead designer was a woman--that's how backward the industry is.) If any of the companies could get past the idea that cars are for boys and minivans are for girls (although they're still designed by men), they could make a fuckload of cash. But that's not how it works. I don't know how she does it.
What was the car? cuz all the ones on this list are reasonably cool.
I think that these types of cars are not much more than showpieces for the companies. Is anyone in their right mind going to buy the new Ford GT? I've seen exactly one on the road and I live in the area of the world where there are more expensive American cars than anywhere. I think the company thinks there's some cache in showing that they can put something on the race track and compete. I don't know if they're money makers even at that price, but even if they are building one has to be about more than per car profit like the average car is.
Well, they do a few things. Brand recognition and cache for one. They're also a great way of showing off developmental technologies that eventually trickle down to luxury and then every day cars. If you're going to spend years and millions of dollars in R&D, you gotta show it off from time to time. Right?
I've seen three, and a friend of a friend had one. They exist, they're just tricky to find. Shit, I've seen Lexus LF-A's in traffic 'round here. Fiskers in the parking lot. F'n Audi R8s parked on the street. But then, I live in a stupid place. The original NSX wasn't a crazy thing. I'd see them semi-regularly. Of course, for the money you could buy two of them for the price of the new one, even accounting for inflation. That said, it's definitely a halo car.
Yes you do. I used to think that an M6 was a rare beauty to ogle over until the first time I visited LA. They're like cockroaches there. I had the pleasure of riding around the English Midlands in a DB9 a few weeks ago. That was fuckin' fun. I can't see the pleasure in driving a car like that in LA. I think it would piss me off more than anything, knowing that I get to use like 100 of the 600 hp the car offers. Just makes you look lie a douche....I live in a stupid place.
True story. Was over at CBS Studio Center to do some filling-in on X Factor. And we all pile into a 15 passenger van ("pass van" in the lingo) and we're waiting to leave, and there's a guy in a Ferrari California pulling in. And he's not holding us up, and he's not making us wait, and he's abiding by all the rules, and he's just fucking parking, fer chrissake, and the camera guy next to me says "douche." And we all thought it. All 10 of us. We didn't know this guy and for all we know he got the Ferrari as an award for everything he'd done for Habitat for Humanity. But the fact of the matter was, he was a middle-aged dude, in a Ferrari, and he was a douche. An irredeemable douche. He had spent upwards of $200k in order to create a visceral negative reaction from total strangers. And I think that's not the way it's supposed to work. Hollywood has cured me of my love of exotics. The fact that I can hop on my bicycle and go rent a Gallardo for $150/hr (from three different shops!) isn't liberating, it's discouraging. 'cuz what the fuck are you going to do with a Lamborghini for four hours in Los Angeles other than front?
I guess you can put a weirdly optimistic spin on it. If you corner a rat it will turn around and fight like hell. Maybe this surge of bigotry is the rat knowing it's cornered. But we'll see. The political policies have tangible outcomes. The race back to the middle ages is going to fuck up women's lives. Getting murdered by militant police ends lives, but it also influences how other people live their lives. I don't think we really know yet what abuse on the internet does to people. What effects do toxic internet communities have on people and culture? I guess we'll find out eventually, but I don't suspect we'll like what we find out.
Is there a surge of bigotry right now? There's certainly more video evidence of bigotry, which is welcome sunlight on the bacteria, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that bigotry is at an all time low in the US. Go watch The 40 Year Old Virgin. There's a scene where Paul Rudd and Seth Rogan are insulting each other back and forth with gay jokes. That was a mere 10 years ago, and I doubt the same joke would be funny today. The default insults when I was in school in the 90s were "fag" and "retard". I don't know how kids pick on each other today, but based on the frequency I hear those words now--and the scorn they normally draw--I have to assume that times have changed. There's certainly a long way to go, especially with racism against black people specifically, but I think there's an awakening to their plight, not a surge of bigotry. We see a lot more of it, because people care more now, so it makes the news. I would say that things look bad, because they are, but heightened awareness can only make it better.Maybe this surge of bigotry is the rat knowing it's cornered.
I think with some things it's really hard to tell. Has police brutality hit a new local maximum? I think so. I also think that that local maximum is a lot better than the global maximum. So there are two different things going on; the long term trend has been good and the short term trend has been bad. A lot of people say that police brutality has always been a reality for black people, and video evidence is simply bring it out into the open. I'm inclined to believe that this is true, but I think additionally things like stop and frisk and similar policies in the last 2 decades have made these problems even worse. Basically 2 decades of politicians gunning for Tough on Crime policies has given us exactly what you'd expect. So it's both. Long term things have gotten better, but we've taken a bad turn. As far as the rest of the surge in bigotry, I'm not confident one way or the other. With respect to gay rights, I think you have to think of things in terms of separate domains: policy, public opinion, and religious ostracization. In terms of policy, gay rights has made absolutely staggering progress. In terms of public opinion gays have a small majority in support of civil rights. The religious right is absolutely boiling over with hatred, but I don't know that that is any different than it was since christianity came into existence. So, overall, there isn't a surge here, so much as a sustained religious ostracization in particular religious circles. Within Christianity, broadly, your garden variety christian has moved pretty far in the direction of acceptance, but I wouldn't want to be gay in Alabama. As rinx and tla have pointed out, women haven't fared well in recent years, but we'd do well to remember the historical context; things have been shitty for women... forever. That notwithstanding, the last decade has seen a rise in anti-woman sentiment, and I don't think this is as isolated as in the case of gay rights. The far right has always had religiously derived disdain for women, but now we're seeing that disdain take shape as an actual rape apologist movement. I would be curious to query someone that is a little more knowledgeable about women's rights to determine if this is a recurring theme, or if this is a novelty. I'm really not sure. I feel pretty confident in saying that Gamergate and things like it do not exist in my memory outside of the last 5 years. The psychotics gunning down women in public places also seems unprecedented, although there have been serial killers that have targeted women all throughout history. I don't know. If you dig into each one of these issues I think you see a general pattern of long term historical progress with a short term turn for the worst. A lot of that might be tied to economic issues and the effects that those have on social climate, but some of these narratives are very troubling. I wouldn't say we should be pessimistic, but these recent developments don't seem encouraging, either. Are we going to turn the corner sooner or later, or not at all? I'm really not sure.
There's a definite surge against certain people. I agree with progress across the board, on average. But gamergate is a pretty big surge, chasing out some of the few women in tech with death threats. And with BLM backlash and reddit idiocy it seems like this year in particular is pretty bad for black people online.
Radicalization of the political right,
Stormfront,
Reddit,
Gamergate... Yeah, it's not gone, or going. It's evolving. Thinking that it's on the down and saying that one should stop bothering to deal with it because it's going to go away is a dangerous way to think. There lies normalization.