what indeed

[metaphortunate]

A female name online means taking 25x as much abuse as a man + real names policy + forced identity integration + Google ubiquity that forces me to have a G+ account to comment on Youtube, comment on apps, or SEE MY WORK CALENDAR = Google to women: "Get off the internet!"

but whyyyyyy are there no female Mark Zuckerbergs I FUCKING WONDER. "God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers", indeed.

Comments

[norah]

UGH. I love that you have the ability to see and synthesize this for me. You say it like this and instantly it makes PERFECT SENSE.

Put it on Facebook or Twitter and I will share/RT the shit out of it.

[troisroyaumes]

I also have no idea why he assumes that no 13-year old girls are already programming and hacking. S.'s coworker is teaching his 7-year old daughter Python with great success. Heck, my father gave me an introduction to Java text when I was 13! (I did not then proceed to become a hacker, it's true, but the basic principles I learned then are exactly what enabled me to pick up Perl within a month during my first year in grad school, much to the surprise of the senior grad student supervising my rotation.) I mean, before you even touch the fact that our sexist society works on so many levels to discourage girls and women from tech-related interests, how do you deal with the completely unsupported assumption that none exist in the first place?!

[karenbynight]

This, this, this. The whole theory that the gender problem in computer science is a pipelining problem requires ignoring lots of facts. In the late 80s, around 30% of computer science students were women, before the percentage at most schools dropped precipitously in the mid 90s. CS degree in the early 90s is where most of my VP of engineering / CTOs / senior architects seem to come from; why aren't anywhere near 1 in 3 of them women? Because it's not a pipelining problem.

[wordweaverlynn]

Yes! My eldest nieces grew up with computers, and now my eldest great-niece is a hacker. She's only 12, though, so maybe she doesn't count. /sarcasm

[cyprinella]

When Youtube wanted me force me to a G+ account in order to even moderate my comments, I just turned all comments off. It's not worth it for me to be exposed that much more for all the reasons you linked.

I'm sort of glad these days that they killed GReader because it gave me a reason to use their services even less.

[alanj]

Yeah, that viral shitstorm over Paul Graham pisses me off, because it's pretty clear what he was trying to say and it's none of the strawmen that have been set up on his behalf. "You can't fix underrepresentation in tech by providing crash courses at the startup-founder level, you need to address it far earlier in school and childhood, and I haven't thought extensively about how to do that because I am a venture capitalist, not an educator."

Can you argue against his actual statements? Sure. Does Nitasha Tiku's disingenuous paraphrasing make her a pageview-whoring borderline-libelous hack of a "journalist"? OH FUCK YES.

[copracat]

So, I have nothing to add. My icon just wanted to hang with your icon.

[kaberett]

[is good post am appreciative.]

Google names policy

[jrtom]

There are limits to what I can say about that policy, but I can say this:

"We do require that you have a name on your account, but this isn't required to be your name. You can also use initials for your first or last name if you want. It's better if you pick a name that your friends know you by, so that they can find you, but that's entirely up to you."

This is of course only a small part of what is (quite justifiably!) bugging you, but I thought it might be of some small use to know that policy has in fact been getting better...if not announced as such.


I'm not sure why you need a G+ account to see your work calendar; I'm not aware of any such restriction. (Not sure about the other commenting stuff.)