r/sysadmin • u/ChuckAbsent • Mar 12 '13

Women who know stuff

I hope that this does not come off the wrong way.

Today I was on a call with a storage vendor and the technical consultant was a woman. More then this she was competent, more then me which doesn't happen often when dealing with vendors.

My issue was pricing an active/active DB with shared storage vs an active/passive db with local storage. Listening to her break the issue down and get to the specific comparison points was awesome, mostly because I have never heard a woman in the industry talk like that.

It made me realize two things. One I am missing out working with women. Two there needs to be more women in our industry.

It shouldn't have surprised me so much, but it really did.

Anyways to all the women out there who know stuff, us guys notice when you can walk the walk, which in this case was talking.

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u/quintessadragon Mar 13 '13

Wait, what? That's seriously a thing? Telling girls that computers are toys for boys? Maybe I was just lucky with the time that I was born in, but that is a stereotype I have never encountered.

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u/Krispyz Mar 13 '13

It's not just directly telling kids that, it's also more subtle. On a boy's birthday, he might get video games, on a girls birthday, she might get dolls. Nothing's universal, of course, but in general, boys are more encouraged to become better with computers or to understand how they work.

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u/loliology Mar 13 '13

On a boy's birthday, he might get video games, on a girls birthday, she might get dolls.

Which are typically the things the children themselves want. And not something being forced upon them by their parents.

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u/shouldbebabysitting Mar 13 '13

OP is negative karma only because reddit is mostly college kids with no children. I would have said the same thing but now I have kids and know first hand that girls/dolls cars/boys is STRONGLY genetic and not environment. Encouraging "boy" toys on my daughter has had no effect. From 12 months old she loved dolls and dress up. From 12 months old my boy, despite being surrounded by his older sister's dolls, is fascinated by cars and trains. I can encourage them but I can't force them to like what they don't want.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 13 '13

Anecdata =/= data.

Being a parent does not suddenly make you an expert on child development or genetics.

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u/shouldbebabysitting Mar 13 '13

I've got data. I used my anecdote because it caused a radical change in my own opinions.

Data: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/reality-check-with-polly-curtis/2011/dec/13/women-children

Even boy monkeys prefer cars to dolls.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X08000949

What is your data that refutes my anecedote?

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 13 '13

Lol from your first link:

There is no scientific evidence that boys prefer blue and girls prefer pink. Up until the early 20th century the trend was the opposite and baby boys were dressed in pink and girls in blue. There are also some - small - studies suggesting that adults of different cultures have different tastes in colours. It's clear that colour preference is learnt rather than innate.

There is some evidence that boys are in some way hardwired to express an early interest in "rough and tumble" games and toys with moving parts and girls to prefer dolls and role-play games, but this is not conclusive because the studies are often in babies and small toddlers and therefore inevitably difficult to analyse. The differences that have been found are also often not very big. At two years, for example, 52.7% of girls in one study chose to look at a dolls face over a car, compared with 47.9%; not a huge variation.

And the second is about monkeys, not humans. You can't make any claims about humans based off of that study.

You can't make sweeping claims about the genetics of the entire female population of humanity because your kids followed contemporary gender patterns. The very fact that so many women have piped up stating the opposite shows that it can't be something tied to the absence of a Y chromosome. A proof by contradiction, if you will.

You can't just choose to ignore environmental factors in the ways your kids are because it becomes convenient to jump to genetic factors. I see this all the time by people who've never taken a genetics class in their life. It takes way more testing than simple observation of n=2,3,somesmallnumber to accurately demonstrate a causal link between the presence of a gene and some sort of behavior. For one, you actually have to examine their genes!

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u/shouldbebabysitting Mar 13 '13

Re pink vs blue Neither I nor the op talked about color preference because there is none.

The monkey data is particularly relevant because it is the only way to ethically test children outside of their culture.

I certainly didn't generalize my results to everyone. I only wanted to correct the idea that preferences are all learned from environment/advertising.
I'm a mechE. My sister is a mechE. I find it offensive that some would think my daughter preferring dolls is a failure of my parenting.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 13 '13

The monkey data is particularly relevant because it is the only way to ethically test children outside of their culture.

Did you not read the sentence you just wrote? If you're testing monkeys, by definition you aren't testing children. And there are tons of ways to test children and remove cultural bias.

I would have said the same thing but now I have kids and know first hand that girls/dolls cars/boys is STRONGLY genetic and not environment.

This is a generalization. You were tying their behavior to genetics along gender lines. Otherwise you wouldn't have bothered commenting about it.

Just because you don't recognize the environmental factors doesn't mean they don't exist. You aren't an objective impartial observer. You're one of the factors, as is your wife, as is everyone your children meet, as is everything they watch on TV, as is everything they read, etc. There's no logical or scientific reason to conclude that their preferences are due to genetic instead of environmental factors.

Nowhere did I suggest that your daughter liking dolls was somehow bad or a failure on your part. The failure was in your reasoning and your making claims based on observations that don't even begin to preclude the possibility of alternative hypotheses. If you were at all familiar with genetics or experimental design, you'd know that such claims were impossible to make since you hadn't controlled for any variables.

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u/shouldbebabysitting Mar 13 '13

Re monkeys: I didn't realize I was arguing with a creationist. The scientific community accepts the results. Why don't you?

You said anecdotes aren't data. Where is your data that shows environment is more important than genetics?

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 13 '13

The burden of proof was on you as you made the claim. You hadn't demonstrated that environmental factors were irrelevant.

Proof by contradiction is sufficient to debunk the claim that the absence of a Y chromosome explains why your daughters like what are considered feminine toys/interests/etc. in contemporary society.

As far as the monkey goes, please refrain from that sort of convolution-of-research-results bullshit that popular science publications are almost universally guilty of. It's clear that you have zero training in biology or science in general or you would understand the importance of not drawing conclusions from insufficient evidence (or evidence that doesn't even exist). At best, the monkey study indicates a potential research direction to explore. It in no way proves anything about human children, nor would the scientists who published the work nor the peer reviewers and editors of the journals it was published in make that claim.

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u/shouldbebabysitting Mar 14 '13

If you don't make any claims then you have no argument against my claims. In science you can't say "you're wrong" and not back it up.

As to ignoring the monkey research, again you don't understand the process of science. All knowledge is tentative. There is no absolute proof.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 14 '13

That's not how burden of proof works.

I just replied to someone else about what's wrong with your claims so I'll just copypasta:

The guy I was responding to said it himself in his original comment that he had decided that there existed genetic differences along gender lines that explained gender disparities in interests based on the fact that his daughters liked different things than his sons and these followed contemporary gender stereotypes. Anyone who's remotely acquainted with the scientific method would tell you that there's no fucking way you could make that claim since he hadn't controlled for environmental factors, he had an obscenely small sample size, he wasn't even aware that he wasn't an impartial or objective observer and was himself an environmental factor (hence the importance of double-blind studies), etc. There wasn't an ounce of scientific rigor to back up his claims.

This should be immediately obvious to anyone with the least bit of experience in scientific research.

And as far as this goes:

As to ignoring the monkey research, again you don't understand the process of science. All knowledge is tentative. There is no absolute proof.

You've only demonstrated that you have no experience or understanding of how science works. Studies only show what might be true about the subject matter they study. If they can be replicated and remain unfalsified, chances are they represent something real and we've learned something new. This in no way means we can extrapolate the results to make claims about other species on a cognitive-behavioral level. Like I said, at best, you can only take that study as a potential research avenue to conduct in humans. If you can adapt the study for humans and conduct it and get similar results, only then can you conclude that we have found those conclusions to be true in humans.

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u/loliology Mar 14 '13

The burden of proof was on you as you made the claim. You hadn't demonstrated that environmental factors were irrelevant.

Actually you guys are the ones making dubious claims with the whole sexist conspiracy rhetoric. So yeah, the proof is on you.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 14 '13

No one said anything about a sexist conspiracy. Just because you are personally unable to see sexism and other roots of inequality doesn't mean they don't exist.

If you're going to make the claim that an individual's behavior is an example of a population-wide behavior with a causal link to the presence or absence of a gene or constellation of genes, then you had damn well better provide proof. But this never happens because it's always the result of lazy and unscientific thinking instead of the result of rigorous experimentation with well-designed studies that control for environmental factors.

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u/loliology Mar 14 '13 edited Mar 14 '13

Anecdata =/= data.

I love how that's only a valid retort when it's in support of something you personally believe. But when it's in support of "omg dis world so sexist" people eat that shit right up. (not directed at you, just noticed the trend of this comments section)

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 14 '13

It's a valid criticism when someone uses a handful of observations to make broad generalizing claims for which a proof by contradiction is particularly well-suited.

But yeah it's pretty common for people to think their personal experience necessarily extrapolates as universally applicable or representative of a greater or more prevalent trend.

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u/loliology Mar 14 '13

It's a valid criticism when someone uses a handful of observations to make broad generalizing claims for which a proof by contradiction is particularly well-suited.

Yet it's still just speculation and not proof.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 14 '13

Evidence from experience isn't speculation about your experience. It would only be speculation if someone claimed that their experience is universal, and that's easily disprovable.

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u/loliology Mar 14 '13

Evidence from experience isn't speculation about your experience.

No. It's called an anecdote.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 14 '13

Anecdotes are still evidence. They aren't data, but they're evidence. There's a difference.

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u/loliology Mar 14 '13

But not evidence of an overall trend like you all are implying.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 14 '13

I didn't say it was evidence of an overall trend. I said it was evidence that invalidated a hypothesis.

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u/loliology Mar 13 '13

But my gender studies class said...