as before, posting my response here because I’ve handed off my reddit account to a friend so I can’t keep trying to fix the internet. I’ll re-post to reddit when I get access again in a week.

In response to “he said she said” comment, as replicated below:

I’m sure an arrest would satisfy your desire for truth [/sarcasm].

The fact that there are laws against something is evidence that it happens (so we make a law against it, e.g. no one is seriously making laws against murdering unicorns), not that it doesn’t happen. For instance, there’s laws against speeding and jaywalking, and they definitely still happen. Another example, rape is illegal and people do get arrested for rape, yet people still doubt it happens. Therefore, nothing you read on the internet will convince you, especially if you start from “everyone is lying to me / people are all liars” and the thought is on the tip of your tongue ready to leap out the second you read something contrary to your beliefs.

So seriously, just go talk to people in real life—everyone will be much happier, you and I included. In real life, you will have to look people in face and stare them in the eye and deal with the fact that you could end up feeling sh***y about yourself when you call your friends a liar to their face.

I tell my friends in real life when they are being wittingly or unwittingly sexist, and I feel sh***y as f**k all when I do so. But I deal with it, I deal with their anger and resentment and backlash, I deal with them saying “bulls**t” to my face, I deal with them saying “I’m too busy dealing with my own life and issues to listen to you”, I deal with them saying “I only care about hardcore technical issues and I’m proud of that”, I accept they will tell me “I don’t care about your pet cause, stop talking about it”, I listen to why they are feeling the way they do—I do all this so that we can grow together, and because I’m a grown-up woman and I’m their friend. Because I accept that, if I want them to listen to me, I need to listen to them too.

I listen to them, because I know what it feels like to not be listened to.

I’m far from perfect at listening instead of reacting in anger, because I’m human. But at least I try.

I’m challenging you to do the same. Get off the internet and go talk to people in person. Woman up, like I did, and confront them in real life. Engage with people in order to grow your empathy and understanding of why other people believe what they do, instead of trying to prove to yourself what you already believe. And don’t sleep easy until you do.

It will take effort and time away from honing your technical skills. You will have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable and distressed. You will have to accept people’s anger and distrust and hurt and discomfort and apathy and backlash at you. You will have to work to seek out opposing opinions instead of shutting them down. You will have to work to gracefully accept criticism when you inevitably get angry, fail at listening, and fail to hold yourself up to your own standards.You will have to acknowledge the limitations of statistics and the limitations of your knowledge—you will have to put all your opinions aside so that you can fully be there when your friend is asking you to listen to her. You will have to work to broaden your circle of real friends, not just token friends, so that you can talk to people with diverse life experiences with whom you have a history of doing things for in return, instead of just demanding their knowledge and opinion and attention in a one-way relationship—you will have to ask for their trust in you, instead of asking them to lay their painful life stories before your skeptical eyes for you to tear apart while you call them liars “who have zero issue lying” and give them no trust nor respect in return.

And this is the effort you have to put in to be a grown-up woman.

tl;dr Woman up and talk to people in real life. Don’t sleep easy until you are better at listening than at arguing, until you are comfortable doing to your friends in person the things you do to strangers on the internet.

i haven’t posted this response since I swore off reddit for a bit — but thought this might be interesting to other folks.

Let’s take a step back. I find it really dangerous to assume there’s a causal link or 1:1 correlation between [people who spend all their time studying a field] and [people who are extremely competent at a field].

For one, this leads to a culture of “all work, all the time.” For instance, professors are expected to work essentially all the time by default. Another example: In programming, there’s this growing trend of using contributions (often unpaid) to open-source projects as a benchmark for competency.

This becomes problematic when, for various reasons, people cannot devote their spare time to the study of a field. Maybe it is financial: they don’t have time to spare to make unpaid contributions to OSS. Maybe it is life-related: a small child or family is taking up a lot of their spare time.

The overly-simplistic thinking you outlined leads to people in positions of power / employers discriminating against or manipulating young women in the field because they might get pregnant and have less spare time to study the field for a while (there are other issues at play here, for instance maternal / significant other leave, and the expectation that women do most of the child-rearing work). Another possible result is systematic exclusion of lower-income people from the field, because they can afford less unpaid work relative to high-income people.

Secondly, I think it’s absolutely true that people (whether for nurture, e.g. previous exposure, learning styles, presence of mentors, presence with curricula that matches their learning style, enjoying studying instead of thinking about family members getting shot up, etc. or nature) will pick up a new field at different rates. Thus, it is definitely possible for motivated people new to a field to catch up very fast with people who have been studying the field for a while (not to mention bringing in fresh perspectives and new ideas). I don’t know any names off the top of my head, but I can look around for examples if you would like. [1]

This could, fortunately or unfortunately, mean there exists

• an extremely intelligent and motivated 9 to 5 brogrammer who has officially been in the field for 10 years

who is as technically competent as

• someone who toils night and day and has been officially in the field for 30 years

Whether this actually happens, or if so the frequency with which it happens, I have no idea.

Conclusion

Therefore, I find it much less problematic to assume something along the lines of

• “people who enjoy a field so much they would study it in their spare time if they could, or who study it whenever possible, tend to be the ones who persevere and become extremely competent at it”

rather than

• “only people who study the field in their spare time are extremely competent at it”.

FOOTNOTES

[0] I apologize for the bad syntax. I meant 10x, not O(n). I think my brain went “abbreviate Order of magNitude” and shat out O(n). I find it no more rude than correcting usage of “I could care less” or “should of”, which some people may find rude, but which I tend to appreciate.

[1] Perhaps Einstein is an example of someone who caught up in a field rapidly without officially studying it full time, although now I feel obligated to pull up examples of non-dead-white-men, since someone on the Internet will make the wrong conclusion otherwise.

Sadly, so far in my life most of my curriculum has given me biopsies of white male geniuses, so I can’t say for sure as I don’t know the life history of many non-white-male people (also, I don’t know the life histories of many not-famous people).

Technical people I could try to vet to see whether they could be considered “examples”:

• Non-male: Emmy Noether, Marie Curie, Dr. Grace Murray Hopper, Hedy Lamarr, Émilie du Châtelet, Laura Deming (living). (thanks quora). Sufiah Yusof [2], Kathleen Holtz
• Non-white: Srinivasa Ramanujan, Kim Ung-Yong (still living), Akrit Jaswal (err… reportedly not at all humble), Jaylen Bledsoe (living)
• Non-male non-white (black): Rochelle Ballantyne (living), Brittney Exline (living)

[2] (now that was sad to read about, but happy update: http://inquiringfeminist.com/2015/02/13/neil-tweedie-of-the-daily-telegraph/)

APPENDIX

• http://www.quora.com/Who-are-the-most-notable-female-geniuses
• http://www.businessinsider.com/child-prodigies-2011-5
• http://womenshistory.about.com/od/sciencemath1/ss/Women-in-Mathematics-History_12.htm
• http://atlantablackstar.com/2013/09/24/15-black-child-proteges-mainstream-media-doesnt-talk
• http://newsone.com/2064927/black-geniuses/
• http://www.livescience.com/49473-gender-gap-genius.html