NYT: “MEN invented the internet”

[redqueen]

http://boingboing.net/2012/06/03/nyt-men-invented-the-inter.html

By Xeni Jardin at 8:43 am Sunday, Jun 3


What a steaming turd of an opening line in David Streitfeld's otherwise serviceable New York Times piece about the Ellen Pao/Kleiner Perkins sexual harassment lawsuit, and gender discrimination in Silicon Valley.

Here's the opening graf (bold-ing, mine):

MEN invented the Internet. And not just any men. Men with pocket protectors. Men who idolized Mr. Spock and cried when Steve Jobs died. Nerds. Geeks. Give them their due. Without men, we would never know what our friends were doing five minutes ago.

You guys, ladies suck at technology and the New York Times is ON IT.

Radia "Mother of the Internet" Perlman and the ghosts of RADM Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace and every woman who worked in technology for the past 150 years frown upon you, sir. Women may have been invisible, but the work we did laid the groundwork for more visible advancements now credited to more famous men.

"Men are credited with inventing the internet." There. Fixed it for you.


...

The twitter commentary shown at the bottom is worth reading, too.

[kestrel91316]

1. Only because women were excluded from education and the workplace due to

lack of teh holy peeeenis.

[patrice]

3. he, he, he! "teh holy peeeeeeenis" !! I'm gonna use that!

[patrice]

2. Yeah, but in my ed-tech master's program I heard more than once that, apparently, the men need

women to tell them what to do with it.

There were jokes about being able to make computers do cart-wheels across the screens in order to turn on the lights and leaving us wondering why.

[ProfessionalLeftist]

4. Men have always needed women to tell them what to do with it...

....http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1997/05/3711

Just like that big ol ENIAC computer, it took WOMEN mathematicians to program it for them. Without the programming, it's just a damn boat anchor.

[patrice]

7. boat anchor! What a picture!

Sometimes I wonder if we all would not have been better off if that had been what we did with them . . . not really. Having a discussion over in FB today with friends talking about good coming out of bad. Seems a little too idealistic when I think of things like all of the INNOCENT people killed by Bush's War, . . . but we can hope for the internet anyway and we do NEED more women in powerful positions, to help fix things.

[patrice]

8. Thanks for the link. Will share.

[ProfessionalLeftist]

13. Women have to show men what to do with airplanes, too

See...

Sort of off-topic but I never miss an opportunity to brag on my girl Patty Wagstaff.

[patrice]

14. I don't know very much about it, but HOW is that even possible?

About the only thing I do know is that it is the difference in the higher air pressure on the bottom side of the wing that holds the thing up, while the engine driven propeller pulls it forward, so how does that work when the "bottom" side of the wing keeps changing in a spin, let alone when the darn thing is so close to the ground that you'd think there wouldn't be enough air "under" it to hold it up. And then there's the little problem of the pilot's orientation when the airplane is upside down; visual cues are the opposite and all normal actions would have to be reversed, or something like that . . . I can't even imagine how that works!

[laconicsax]

15. Unless I'm mistaken (and I may well be)...

Lift is a very complex property and can't be described just with the Bernoulli principle. There are several competing and complementary hypotheses and no one knows which are correct.

[ProfessionalLeftist]

17. I think that about sums it up

from my nifty little bit of training I had, the thing that makes an airplane turn is the "horizontal component of lift". No doubt lots of physics theories involved in stuff like what Ms. Patty does. In fact I'd like to hear a physics professor (a woman) explain the physics involved in each of Patty's maneuvers. To me, that would be fascinating!

[eridani]

16. Remember the haiku computer error messages?

A crash reduces
your expensive computer
to a simple stone.

[ProfessionalLeftist]

19. And that's the truth! n/t

[napoleon_in_rags]

5. Ada was one of the first visionaries who saw where it was going.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
She and Babbage, ALONE in the world in their level of vision at the time. It wasn't till way later that the WWII guys, Shannon Turing and the rest laid down the foundations for real, but they did so with their work divided: The women were being deployed to crack the math problems:
http://www.topsecretrosies.com/Top_Secret_Rosies/Home.html
For the same reason they were given the job of telephone operators: They were seen as better at it. This left in the men in the realm of more abstract maths, where the breakthroughs came from.

[Betsy Ross]

6. Yes, there has always been sexism in Silicon Valley.

I first used ARPANET in 1976. Went to work in Silicon Valley in 1977. I was the only woman engineer in a company of over 1000. Got screwed so badly on my starting pay that over two reviews my boss gave a total of a 33% raise. Thirty-five years later, still very few women in engineering; women still get paid less; sexism is alive and well.

[Little Star]

26. Yep!

[DonCoquixote]

10. er...

This fellow would probably get ripped to shreds by one Ada Lovelace. Men, if that name means nothing, I am sure the fine ladies that run this forum can direct you to her. Suffice it to say, not only would there be no computers without her, but if we listened to her, we might very well be a few centuries ahead of the game. Technology is NOT a male game, despite what men like to think.

[Scootaloo]

11. And yet, I don't get any royalties?

What gives?

[L. Coyote]

12. Last year about 13% of website visits in America were pornographic in nature

I'm betting that is about 12.9% for the MEN, and 0.01 % for women!

[jeff47]

18. So how do we get more women in IT?

I'm a male geek, and spent the last two decades writing software.

I can count on one hand the number of female coworkers I've had who were actually in a "geek" profession. The vast majority were in the HR, marketing, management and finance divisions. AFAIK, the geeky women were treated well - no sexism in my presence. (Doesn't mean it didn't happen behind closed doors, but I saw no evidence of that.)

I've been conducting interviews for a while now, and the vast majority of the resumes we receive have male names. So it's not "women's resumes get cylindrical-filed". (And HR usually does such a poor job filtering resumes that we've asked them to send on any that aren't written in crayon, so they aren't filtering out the women).

So it appears that women are generally not choosing to go into IT fields. What do we do to fix that?

[redqueen]

20. Perhaps it's due to the stuff discussed in the linked piece?

I highly doubt such behavior only starts after these men graduate. The toxic atmosphere starts very early indeed.

[MadrasT]

21. I was in IT for nearly two decades (a pure geek job, not a peripheral position)

And what you said is what I experienced.

a) I almost never felt like I was treated any differently by my male coworkers because I was female. I did get shitty sexist treatment from *vendors*, but not employers or coworkers. (Funny how long it took them to figure out that they were not getting my business because they were sexist pigs... I finally did have to tell one that was the reason to his face when he kept hounding me for a half million dollar order after he treated me like I didn't have an actual brain.)

b) There are indeed very few female applicants for jobs. About 10%-20% of my hires were women and most of them didn't work out. But there are just not many women applying for those gigs.

I don't know how to fix it.

You have to be a strong woman to feel comfortable being continually surrounded by men, though. It is a freaky dynamic. I have a lot of strong "masculine" traits (very assertive and direct and I do not suffer fools) and could easily hold my own. But after behaving that way at work all day every day, it takes a toll on your personal life. Men are not attracted to women that they perceive are "masculinized". And women in geek professions frequently have to downplay their femininity to survive. (Dress & behavior wise.) After the guys think you are "one of the guys"... you hear their real opinions about other women coming out of their mouths. It isn't pretty. If you don't want to be the target of that kind of locker room chatter ("Did you see so-and-so's sweater? Her tits are hanging out all over the place!" "Check out J's skirt! OMG I would like to get under that...&quot you learn to neutralize your gender to fit in and not be the target of *that*.

Unless you like being objectified like that, which I personally don't.

[redqueen]

22. Many women would be uncomfortable hearing such talk...

even if they're not treated that way, just being subjected to hearing such crap would be intolerable.

[snooper2]

23. In 1993 there was 1 girl out of around 24 our telecom classes..

and she didn't follow up the next year to get an associate degree...

[laconicsax]

25. Make IT pink.

I kid, I kid.

[TNLib]

24. I'm a women working in the deep south in the IT field for over 10 years

I've experienced my fair share of misogynistic bullshit.