> Anything less than ‘real programming’ is now considered trivial, silly, artsy, female.
I am a very strong supporter of feminism, but this kind of reasoning needs to stop.
The idea of "as a man you're biased from your position of power, therefore your opinion is invalid/worthless" means that the opinion of any men can be shut off automatically just by finding a gender twist on any debate. It's incredibly condescending, and frustrating, since any rebuttal you might try will be dismissed as your inability to see the other side, no matter how tenuous the connection to gender is. I would even go as far as to say that it's a mirror of the old "these are men things, as a woman you wouldn't understand" that was sadly common in the past.
While I'm very happy to see women empowered and their perspective being taken into account more and more, I'm also worried about the rise of any system that leads to the opinion of a group not being listened to. That is never good, period.
And to be clear, I'm not equating the current trend of dismissing male ideas to the suffering of women under patriarchic societies. Just pointing out a worrying development.
There is a bias against the value of design in FOSS, the dismissive attitude described does exist, but I don't think that bias is gender based. The argument draws from outdated principles about gender division where "female" = "artistic/emotional/right-brain" and "male" = "scientific/rational/left-brain", concluding that HTML and CSS being "layout" makes them "design" and therefore more "feminine."
But HTML and CSS aren't art, nor is layout a "creative" activity. HTML and CSS are configuration. They're no more feminine than JSON or a Lua table. I don't think there's ever been a time where, even if the gender bias described existed, it was ever applied in the way described.
Graphic designers tend to be pretty well respected, even though they are also very underrepresented and needed in the FOSS community. People that mainly work with HTML and CSS are less valued because they're seen as mere "transcribers" of the design made elsewhere, or at least that's my perception.
>I am a very strong supporter of feminism, but this kind of reasoning needs to stop.
Yes, and insofar as feminists continue to use this reasoning, we should reduce our support. It may seem like a sad case of a few bad actors poisoning the well, but the lack of outcry by other feminists implies, to me, that the movement has gone rotten, no matter how I wish it weren't so. If you keep poking your allies in the eye, you can't expect them to remain allies for long!
Well, feminism is about freeing people from gender based discrimination, so it also includes freeing men from those societal expectations (like being the only ones to be conscripted / go to war).
But at least in the specific issue addressed in my message (someone's opinions and talent being ignored due to their gender) I think it's hard to argue that women have historically gotten the short end of the stick.
Feminism is about women's rights. Whenever men rights groups(or egalitarian groups for the matter) fight for men's rights - like increased domestic abuse shelters, parental rights, custody rights etc. - they find feminists lobbying in the opposition.
I agree that women have historically gotten the shorter end of the stick in this area. But that's hardly classified under suffering - especially in an era where the barrier of entry for women in everything they feel marginalised in has been lowered artificially to accommodate them.
Feminism means many different things to many different people.
The reductionist statement made is usually "Feminism is just about equality" — a claim quickly invalidated when you consider the Swedish Feminist Initiative political party had as official policy in 2014 that men and women will earn the same money for the same work, but men must now pay more income tax than women to address historical imbalances.
Well, my answer would be that such a measure would not be feminist - it can't even be classified as positive discrimination since gender, unlike race, is not hereditary.
I guess you could chalk that to a "no true Scotsman" fallacy, but I'm fairly certain that the majority of people who self identify as feminist would not support such a measure - I have no numbers to support that claim, as I wasn't even aware of that party's existence.
Not surprising from Brad. Every once in a while one of his articles show up on hacker news. He's good at creating debate, mostly because what he writes is always a bunch of BS wrapped in this kind of comments that make people want to comment.
I yet have to find an article from him about engineering that makes any sense. He's able to write a few lines of jQuery this seems to make him feel like he knows so much about things he has no experience on.
Why do you feel compelled to defend Frost's "programming chops"?
Frost can publish his ideas about JavaScript being intimidating because the naming convention is camelCase and not kebab-case, and it's fair game for any other programmer to point out that Frost doesn't know what he's talking about.
He's quoting someone else though he is agreeing with them. The full quote is:
> We need to address the undervaluing of HTML and CSS for what it is: gender bias. Even though we wouldn’t have computer science without pioneering women, interloping men have claimed it for themselves. Anything less than ‘real programming’ is now considered trivial, silly, artsy, female. That attitude needs to eat a poisoned ass.
I admit I don't understand the point. I haven't experienced this perception of HTML/CSS as something "trivial, silly, artsy, female". It's possible though that this does exist? In some places? I mean people do have a tendency to think of what they're good at as superior to the things they're bad at...and loads of programmers are really bad at HTML/CSS.
More obnoxious than the "gender bias" claim is the idea that because computer science as a field owes its entire existence to female pioneers (leaving aside whether there's any sane sense in which that's true), men who now participate in it today are "interlopers". This is the first instance I've seen of the logic of "cultural appropriation" being applied to genders instead of races; women invented this, so it's immoral for men to participate! Uh, no it isn't, and fuck you.
> women invented this, so it's immoral for men to participate
I don't necessarily agree with argument in its entirety, but it isn't about the mere participation of men. It is about the exclusion of women. Very different things.
I was looking at the phrase "claim for themselves", which I took to mean excluding women.
I see what you mean by "interlope", that is a good point. That is a rather poor word choice from the quoted article (by Hayden). I find it hard to believe that Brad, being a man himself, would argue that men can't participate in the field.
Sure, it's obvious madness, and it's hard to believe that anyone who says it (or quotes it approvingly) could really believe it. But that's basically what I expect out of any feminist commentary on any topic. The entire space is littered with claims like this - ones so patently false or morally outrageous that one thinks that surely, surely, the author doesn't really believe what they're saying. Stuff like that there exist no innate biological differences in ability between the genders, or that pro-lifers are motivated by a desire to exert control of women's bodies, or that being falsely accused of rape is less likely than being struck by lightning, or that Otto Warmbier deserves no public sympathy for being tortured to disablement and death by North Korea because he was a beneficiary of white privilege.
I've long since given up hope of trying to parse the madness. I sincerely don't understand what motivates people to say these ridiculous things, and as a consequence I sincerely can't tell when somebody means what they say to be figurative and when they are expressing a genuinely-held (but mad) belief completely literally. Given the alarming frequency with which these sorts of claims in fact become accepted truths among feminists that get repeated over and over, I err on the side of assuming the latter.
Hayden used the word, and did so in a context where there was no obvious way to interpret it as hyperbole or metaphor. In the absence of any other possible interpretation, I'm going to assume that he means exactly what he said.
I would understand it if any actual examples of men dismissing HTML and CSS as artsy or female were given, but they aren't, instead this association of them with femininity is being straw-personed into being as an excuse for ranting against an imagined bias.
Pioneering women were crucial in the development of CS as claimed, but HTML and CSS were both created by men so the author's accusation of denigrating the contribution of women is simply not a factor in this issue. Characterizing HTML and CSS as feminine in this way is promoting exactly the sort of gender stereotyping these rants are claiming to oppose.
I'm afraid this is what gender wars activism has come to - fabricating and promoting fake gender stereotypes and associations so they can keep fighting the good fight for it's own sake.
I currently work with women (and men) who feel their roles as front end devs are considered less than our back end devs within our company. We also have the worst front end "big ol' ball of Javascript" spaghetti mess I've ever seen from people trivializing not just HTML & CSS but also JS. I didn't see it as a gendered issue until it was brought to my attention by female co-workers who had experienced the same thing at multiple companies.
> ...women (and men) who feel their roles as front end devs are considered less...
> I didn't see it as a gendered issue until it was brought to my attention by female co-workers...
Female co-workers bringing an issue to your attention doesn't make it a gendered issue and you literally refer to it as a non-gendered issue, though parenthesising men.
As a full-stack JS dev, having come from a .NET background, through a pure frontend job, to a full-stack position, I regularly have to shoulder banter from Scala colleagues' (both male and female) snark at Javascript - primarily because it's existed for a long time and been a barely justifiable mess for most of that time.
If however only or predominately females encounter attitude and males dont, then it is likely gendered issue. And vice versa.
People tend to assume that I do frontend and try tu push me toward ui design side of things, despite me being completely crappy at that. It was real problem only once, normally I can easily negotiate different position. But, it requires me to often explain that I really cant design - I dont have to explain I dont do any other technology to avoid position, ever. People dont assume me to know sql, databases, server, java, but they do tend to assume me to be good at design.
> If however only or predominately females encounter attitude and males dont, then it is likely gendered issue. And vice versa.
Every frontend dev I've ever worked with has received this same treatment, so I would find it difficult to believe it's even predominantly females; but maybe I've met a lot of exceptions.
Oh, I absolutely know that frontend is undervalued. I am even one of those who undervalued it too.
But, I am not even frontend developer and get the assumption that I am one. When I was nearby frontend, people made further assumptions about which part of it I do - they expected me to do aesthetic work altrough I am really bad at it and were sometimes oddly awkward when I wanted to talk about architecture or algorithms. I don't think male frontend developers are not undervalued, but the assumption about which part of it they do is on average a bit different.
There is a perception of front end/user experience being easier than logic programming, in the same way that STEM degrees are considered harder/superior to other degrees. The implication of trivial -> female is quite unwarranted and unjustified IMO.
For whatever it is worth, I personally perceived HTML and CSS as less then programming and primary artsy/aesthetic. It was not real to me and I did not seen HTML/CSS as equal achievement. I don't recall where and how exactly I picked that attitude, it was years ago. I picked it by osmosis as "of course" attitude along with other attitudes I was reconsidering lately.
I honestly think it is less, speaking as someone who does it day in and day out. That HTML/CSS is so complicated to require specialized positions to handle the intricacies of these broken technologies, instead of having well though-out systems and visual design tools, speaks volumes about the rotten state of the web and and web development as a discipline. In this day and age we should not need a small army of so called developers to maintain a single marketing website.
Considering the other comments here, this isn't going to be a popular opinion, but we should probably being talking about the data rather than how ridiculous/insecure it seems.
What's at issue here is that coding is a combination of EQ and IQ, and when we create environments that favor "rightness" over common empathy and effective communication, we turn our backs on the people who favor thinking that way (no matter their gender) and we make worse products as a result.
We're not writing code for machines, we're writing code for people.
It seemed like a normal discussion until this random buzz topic popped up; albeit, sure we need to solve the ills of this, treat all types of people normally. ~ Wtf does Gender Bias have to do with React not being good because if you like/write css and dont know js you're fucked?
You can build a scary amount of social capital (which usually translates to financial capital) in this industry by just pushing the narrative accepted by a certain clique.
- Everything bad in the world is because of straight white men, and capitalism.
- Coding is not part of a coding job. Culture is more important.
- Making people feel happy is more important than building something that works.
- Truth is subjective, i.e. post-modernism.
Parrot the above talking points with an air of self-importance and you'll be well on your way to a highly-paid do-nothing job.
The 4th one about truth is perhaps an exception, unfortunately some people might agree to that. Although, it's a bit abstract for most useful discussions.
1. If you haven't seen the demonization of white, "cisgendered" men in the tech scene and culture in general, I don't know what to tell you. Maybe you're not in the US (and specifically, West-Coast) tech scene.
Edit: I had to add quotes, as I really dislike that word.
2. A more subtle point, but I've seen enough articles written by members of the tech scene to be convinced this may be a genuine issue. Articles claiming that demanding merit-based software development is bigoted/racist/sexist, others saying that if there isn't equality of outcome for all software devs, then the issue is the stated goals of software development.
3. Similar to 2
4. Again, very US-centric. There is a definite movement towards a person's "lived experience" and feelings (of being "safe" or whatever) is more important than objective facts.
The points above are true to the extent that I decided the West-Coast US tech scene was not for me, and returned to my home country.
I know what you refer to, as I worked in SF recently for several years. I don't think it is true that white men are unilaterally demonized by any significant group in American culture today. There is obviously some of that occurring, and occasionally the behavior is a bit troubling, but I don't there is any major problem to worry about. The behavior you are concerned will go away naturally as the recent social movements mature and are able to see some of the progress they are making. In general, most people don't support the extreme behavior, so there is only limited space for it to survive.
I do think patient and healthy pushback can be appropriate in the right circumstances. It is a tricky issue though. There are some very legitimate (and some less so) reasons motivating such behavior, even if, occasionally, some of the specific actions themselves are troubling. Anyone claiming rigid, simplistic absolute statements here seems wrong to me.
Perhaps I'm biased towards (and privileged enough to do so) being patient with what I see as some temporary flare ups that are side effects of attempting to process and rectify some of the results of absolutely terrible historical occurrences over the past several hundred years. I don't know. We will see how the next 10 or 20 years go.
I have to go so I won't address the other issues. These topics are tricky and hard to discuss with a short comment.
I will say that the way you are discussing them is preferable to the person I accused of straw-manning. You seem more capable of considering nuance, which I appreciate.
The author didn't write it, nor did he attempt to support it. I think the author made the mistake of quoting too heavily such that it's easy to mistake another author's words for his.
I didn't think I'd need to quote his actual words, but that's where we are:
> Whether it’s explicit gender bias or not, it’s important to recognize that people are afraid to speak up about how they feel for fear of getting dog-piled on by a bunch of “real” developers. That needs to change.
While I might not agree with everything he says, the gender bias lawsuit against Google revolved around women being siloed in front-end development (as well as starting at lower ranks/pay, etc.). So it doesn't seem all that far-fetched and there may be a kernel of truth there, depending on where you are and what your environment is like.
"Logic programming is considered superior to HTML/CSS even though it isn't. Just like one gender thinks that they are superior to others even though they aren't."
I've seen the claim made elsewhere that the server-side web architecture is sexist, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was meant to be taken literally (although I was astonished the first time I saw it).
> We need to address the undervaluing of HTML and CSS for what it is: gender bias.
I find it baffling how some people can make such ridiculous statements to fit their narrative and insecurities.