[TriLUG] The biggest deterrent for women in tech

[Brandon Van Every]

On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 1:07 PM, Rob Rousseau <ki4bke at nc.rr.com> wrote:

>
> So already China has 1/3rd smarter people over the United States.
>

Yeah.  We tend to forget issues of scale like that.  Also, Chinese
immigration to the USA Is biased towards success factors like greater
intelligence, greater wealth, greater hardiness in the face of adversity,
etc.  Most of the "weaker" Chinese stay in China; the stronger ones swim to
foreign shores.  This is true of all immigrants everywhere: how much pluck
do you think it takes to escape a war zone or an oppressive regime?  Not
that good people don't stay in their own countries and try to do good
things, but if you've managed to escape, you've pretty much proven your
hardiness compared to the rest of your population.  So, the Chinese *we
experience* in the USA are often better at math, at least among recent
immigrants.

And, uh, my representative Chinese friend is a woman who works at SAS on
math package stuff.  She's much more of a mathematician / statistician than
a programmer.  In short, her hardcore math skills blow away mine.  I'm not
a slouch, my career area is 3D graphics after all, but the only essential
math in that is linear algebra.  Sure people throw gobs of calculus at
global rendering problems etc. but it's all fudge to impress other
academics, as the solvers are all going to count everything up by rote
anyways.  Didn't have to do the heavy math for any career reason, needed
all sorts of other skills, I tend towards jack of all trades master of a
few, etc. yadda yadda.  The math dept. in college was far more repugnant
than even the CS dept., if that can be believed, plus I was taking some
horrible class at 8 am.  I did have a "cool" math teacher my senior year,
who played cello in my Art dorm and convinced me to take his course senior
year, but by then it was too late to remediate my "heavy duty math"
potential.  Too much competition from the databases class that the cool
woman was teaching.  I knew my career priorities, got an "A" in my database
practicum and by rights would have flunked the math course, but he let me
off with a "C" for getting halfway through it.  I consider that to have
been a graduation gift.


Cheers,
Brandon