Here's another good read. This is one of the most thoughtful of the pieces on this theme that have appeared in the past few weeks. It's Ann Friedman's:
And I thought "Wow! She's got it!" None of the men I'd taught at Cambridge ever seemed to think this was even worth mentioning. But for me it was the reason I liked to learn: to see how the ideas fit together. But what I always found was that in the end the ideas didn't match up properly. If you chase up the foundations of the theory of probability you either end up in an undisciplined mud-slinging of the "debate" between frequentists and Bayesians, or you follow the "pure" theory into analysis and end up having to learn about Lebesgue measure. So the intuitive sense women have of the ultimate unity of these ideas is belied by the extremely unintuitive way in which the theory has been developed into extremely abstruse corners where only a few macho alpha-male types dare to claim they understand it. And it's like this everywhere you look for the foundations of theory: where one would expect some sort of convergence, there is only divergence, and where one would expect clarity there is smoke.
And this is all the result of the male dominance of these fields. This is the ultimate reason, I think, why women don't do well in science and technology: it's all bull-shit made up by agressive little boys who are more concerned about appearing to be clever than they are about understanding anything.
And something similar happens with money. Those little men who aren't smart enough to talk convincing bull-shit want money because that's how they know they're really somebody. Of course, they end up talking bull-shit about money too!
So Ladies, don't worry about not being paid as much, or about not doing as well as little boys. None of them know what they're talking about, and furthermore, they're all wrong. And this is what we are about to see. These rich little pricks are going to wake up stone cold sober one day soon, and realize that (a) they're stone broke too, and (b) while they were out of it, they signed-up to a ninety-nine-year contract as, not even a bit-part, but an extra, in a 24/7 reality TV show called "The Grapes of Wrath."
Ian Fried Man
https://medium.com/matter/this-is-the-last-thing-youll-ever-need-to-read-about-sexism-in-tech-56b9a3a77af0I was privileged to have tutored some women undergraduate computer science students at Cambridge. At the end of the second year, one of them said to me "It's really good to see how everything fits together. You have this probability theory of Markov chains, with non-deterministic state machines, and that fits together with the quantum computing stuff on the one hand and with the regular languages and grammars on the other hand. Then the same ideas of eigenvectors and what-not come up in signal processing and graphics, and also in AI and inference, and then you have the fixpoints in the theory of computing ..."
And I thought "Wow! She's got it!" None of the men I'd taught at Cambridge ever seemed to think this was even worth mentioning. But for me it was the reason I liked to learn: to see how the ideas fit together. But what I always found was that in the end the ideas didn't match up properly. If you chase up the foundations of the theory of probability you either end up in an undisciplined mud-slinging of the "debate" between frequentists and Bayesians, or you follow the "pure" theory into analysis and end up having to learn about Lebesgue measure. So the intuitive sense women have of the ultimate unity of these ideas is belied by the extremely unintuitive way in which the theory has been developed into extremely abstruse corners where only a few macho alpha-male types dare to claim they understand it. And it's like this everywhere you look for the foundations of theory: where one would expect some sort of convergence, there is only divergence, and where one would expect clarity there is smoke.
And this is all the result of the male dominance of these fields. This is the ultimate reason, I think, why women don't do well in science and technology: it's all bull-shit made up by agressive little boys who are more concerned about appearing to be clever than they are about understanding anything.
And something similar happens with money. Those little men who aren't smart enough to talk convincing bull-shit want money because that's how they know they're really somebody. Of course, they end up talking bull-shit about money too!
So Ladies, don't worry about not being paid as much, or about not doing as well as little boys. None of them know what they're talking about, and furthermore, they're all wrong. And this is what we are about to see. These rich little pricks are going to wake up stone cold sober one day soon, and realize that (a) they're stone broke too, and (b) while they were out of it, they signed-up to a ninety-nine-year contract as, not even a bit-part, but an extra, in a 24/7 reality TV show called "The Grapes of Wrath."
Ian Fried Man
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