Skip to content

Comment on Notes from UPenn's Forum on Brogramming and Sexism in Computer Science

Comments

It is interesting watching this discussion play out.

I've been wondering whether people are put off becoming musicians/writers/artists due to others having sexist stereotypes in their material. We don't seem to see the same widespread demands for apologies and desistance in those fields (consider the amount of songs talking about "bi^ches" and the like) - or do we? But then I realized that we have seen racism (and homophobia) become taboo in pop culture and the arts, thankfully, yet sexism is still a free for all. Why?

As idiotic as "brogramming" is (IMHO) and as much as I think software development should be a semi-academic, tight-knit discipline with progressive and respectful norms, many of these things causing offense seem to be misjudged attempts at injecting pop culture. "Brogramming" is on par with the group "LMFAO" in terms of stupidity and tact, yet LMFAO are not called upon to apologize or up their game to stop offending people. Why? (Differing standards for pop culture celebrities vs professionals, maybe? But are some developers also pop culture celebrities? Tricky.)

Bear in mind this is just armchair sociological analysis, and no opinion of mine can be derived from these questions (well, other than that brogramming is a bit silly and that I think we should all treat each other with the respect we'd also want to receive) :-)

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.