Because they can't code. The ones that can just code don't need to constantly raise the fact that they are women to distract everyone else from incompetence.
When ever I hear "But, I'm a <insert victim group here>" I immediately assume they have sour grapes about the lack of achievement in their life. Everyone faces adversity, it's part of life, get on with it. The adversity you faced probably didn't make you a better coder and thus I don't care. I'm not running a welfare shop, if you want to sell you sob story go there. If you want to work, then let me know.
Look at the woman who optimizes Facebook's CSS, the article isn't about how she is a woman, it's about how to optimize your CSS. Why? Because she knows a lot about CSS.
Guess what? She has no problem getting work or respect!
> Look at the woman who optimizes Facebook's CSS, ...Guess what? She has no problem getting work or respect!
Have you asked her? Something like half of the highly competent women I know in tech have some real horror stories to share, mostly about not getting respect. (When you don't get work, you usually don't know it even happened, let alone why.)
When a white guy gets treated poorly, he assumes that the perp is an asshole.
When a woman gets treated badly, she assumes that the perp is a sexist. But the perp is not. The perp is just as asshole. The world is full of assholes. Ask any white guy.
The other day the headline on HN was that most people quit their jobs because they don't get respect. It's not as if being a male programmer is heaven on earth.
Well, if we're talking about the way women are treated in tech workplaces, then I think there is a real issue to be discussed there.
But I have a hard time working up any sympathy on the magazine cover issue, because it's unclear to what extent Wired actually shapes culture as opposed to simply reflecting it, and are we going to start dredging up statistics on covers to show every possible issue that they aren't on the right side of?
Yup. Cindy here really isn't in technology. I know plenty of women who actually do work in real technology and the few that have public blogs rarely write about women's issues.
The gender balance in the tech industry skews heavy to male,
which engenders sexist bias,
which makes it inhospitable to women,
in which only the more confident, braver, resilient women will survive without quitting.
Those types of women are more prone to be overtly feminist than average.
(I have no data. Wild supposition. IANAWSM [women's studies major].)
Answer: It's just as (more?) often people in gender/women's studies making technology the focus of their work. That's the case here.
And the reason for that is blindingly obvious: The tech field not only has a gigantic gender disparity, but has actually grown the size of the gap, unlike most other fields.
Others have said it more eloquently, but it's simply that some women have a bone to pick and prefer to offload the burden of actually being good at their jobs, instead acquiring this sense of entitlement and superiority.
There are more men 'featured' in tech because women make a small part of the tech industry in general. Last time I checked women accounted to around 7% of of important roles in the tech industry and the number of female students of computer science was something close of 16/17%.
I've worked with women before on two occasions. The first one was a Php developer that was just plain awful, her code sucked, her attitude sucked, and whenever you tried to get her to mend her wrongdoings, the boss would come and ask you to just leave her alone because she loves to make claims of sex based discrimination. The second one was recently and she was one of the most amazing Java developers I've ever met, far better than most men. She was as geeky as could be, could joke with the boys all day (and freaking outdrink half of the men at night!), and she believed that "women play the sex discrimination card when they're so bad they could be replaced by a monkey". Honestly, it's the exact same thing as the just graduated mediocre programmer (not saying all recent graduates are mediocre, I'm targeting a specific group). They complain and complain about the unfairness of X and Y, but are seldom any good anyways.
It's simple stuff really. Since women are such a small part of the tech community, it's exponentially more probable that more men than women will stand out. On the bright side tough, the women that do stand out, stand out immensely. Oh and the kicker for my story in the past paragraph. The bad developer was really average looking (creeping into not good looking at all territory), while the good one was a stunning blond which would melt your heart in a second. C'est la vie.
Interesting question, and similarly related I think are groups like IEEE's Women In Engineering (WIE) and Society of Women Engineers (SWE). I don't perceive any particularly radical feminist spin with regard to these groups. And the goals seem very commendable.
Because it's easy to manipulate people like that. Have you ever been the subject of a sexual harassment lawsuit? Even though I haven't either, it's mighty ugly. And women always come on top, no matter what the final scenes of 'Disclosure' showed you.
http://cindyroyal.com/