I'm dying to know how you did WFH in the 1960s though? That's well before the pc/modem generation ?? I'm tempted to say it was probably still the punch card era ... Did they punch the code onto cards at home, and mail the stacks to the client ?
Before my time, but my understanding is that in ye olden days you'd write out your programs by hand, transcribe it to machine code on punch cards, and then submit the stack of cards for batch processing.
Code was usually written out by hand (and code-reviewed) first before being sent off for compilation. If there was no terminal at home, the first part of that could be done over fax/telephone.
My dad switched into IT in the late 80’s, via community college. So being a community college, they still had a machine that ran on card readers.
As I recall they had a machine that took the “scantron” cards and spit out punched ones.
And I don’t remember if they had it or I just read about it later, but someone did eventually invent a punchcard sorter. You had to number the cards, and then you could stuff a dropped deck into the machine and it would save your bacon.
Initially that company didn't even have their own computer and mailed programs to a bureaux with a two day turnaround (I read previously on her website). So being in the office didn't noticeable speed things up.
The bureaux was a third party, I think their clients didn't have a computer either but I don't know.
I can barely comprehend a build-test-compile cycle that involved standing in line to use a machine. Sending them through the postal service is mind boggling. I don’t think anywhere near this many neurodivergent people could have worked in IT back then. It would have been too much.
It would have required a different mindset, more like the degree of manual checking needed to write a mathematics paper. Plenty of mathematicians seem to be neurodivergent, but maybe not the kind of neurodivergence you are thinking of?
I think it helps to remember that programming was "secretarial" work back then. Essentially, most programmers were women, and working from home meant they were also able to keep up their home duties and child-care.
Back then you'd program in punch cards, so if you have the punch-card equipment you could do this near anywhere. So there wasn't a big difference between being at home or the office. It also allowed managers to hire low-wage women easier.
It wasn't later that IT became a more profitable and less niche field that these women were pushed out and replaced with men. Programming stopped being 'pink collar' due to this dynamic.
As far as modems go, we didnt really see that get big until the 1980s with speeds like 1200-2400 baud being groundbreakingly fast compared to 300 baud. You could receive or send text almost as fast as you could read it or type it, so it was not that different than using a green screen terminal at work or at university.
The cost of a 8 hours phone call would be huge, at least in my country. Of course if the company is paying for it, great! They would have to install a separate phone line not only to ease billing but also because you'd be unreachable all day long. I remember that the fixed costs were not negligible but again, if the company is paying for it out of the money they make selling your work, that's OK.
I think in the old, old days you'd do a batch job. So you'd connect, then upload/download at whatever baud speed was accepted. Your modem would only connect for x amount of minutes.
Later, more 'always on' was possible. In the US, the phone system was setup in a way that local calls, defined by geographic rings based on switching stations, were 0 cents a minute after the initial first minute. So that allowed things like BBS culture to thrive.
in the 60s time on the machine was really really expensive. You'd never code online as that would waste loads of time that could be sold to other people.
So you would need to write out your program manually. You'd need to explain in clear english what you were doing and why. Then you'd transcribe into machine language (or an intermediary if you were using something fancy like assembly) you can see part of the process here: http://ict1301.co.uk/13010310.htm
Then you'd put them onto card or tape, but that might be done by someone else. Typist were a specialised and often exclusively feminine profession, often seen as something not done by "programmers".
byt the mid 60s though, it was much more common to have programmers type their own shit.
Then once thats done, you'd deliver the media (card desk or paper tape, later on other things) to the operator, who would run the programme and return the results. You'd stack your programmes in queues. (hence where we get that name from)
I actually started my career as a system operator for an old IBM 4341 and some Prime systems (couple with front panel toggles for IPL address :-) ). We were all mag-tape though, aside from the paper tape forms control on the IBM printer.
In the 90’s some French coders were claiming that American coders were being made complacent by the instant gratification of workstation class computers and that our code quality was suffering.
It was definitely suffering, and I found that thesis interesting, but I don’t think I ever agreed with it. It was a mismanagement problem not a workflow one.
A Texas Instruments (IIRC) terminal with a telephone handset cradle and a thermal printer for output. So yes, the extreme terseness of "ed" and other Unix CLI utilities was a feature not a bug.
The earliest teletypes were practically ticker tape weren’t they?
You couldn’t redraw the “screen”, just reprint the command line every time you hit backspace. Which is also why CTRL-U and CTRL-W are commands that date back to teletype machines. Much quicker and cheaper to drop the entire input or a word and try again.
yeah - I worked on ASR-35 teletypes, with a punch tape reader/writer and an acoustic couple modem ... I thought they came much later though like mid 70s/80s?
Which they? I did a deep dive on CTRL-U once when someone gave me a good breadcrumb to start with, and those control codes were way, way older than I suspected.
SO + Wikipedia seem to think it was the ASR-33, which was originally 1963. I had this notion that it was about 5 years before that. But it's clear the ASR-32 does not have a CTRL or a SHIFT key, and I'm not sure who they could have possibly stolen the idea from.
Reading a little more reminded me of another fact: the ASR33 was the first commercial use of the ASCII character format, which was developed in parallel.
There's a short book that covers this period of British computing history: Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, by Mar Hicks.
It's more history than sociology, though the title suggests otherwise. There are interesting anecdotes from women who worked from the 1940s-1970s for British intelligence, the General Post Office, and, yes, Dame Steve Shirley.
My guess is most of them, like Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton in the US, had math or physics backgrounds. Even assembly is comparatively easier than, say, formal logic or partial differential equations.
> assembly is comparatively easier than, say, formal logic or partial differential equations
Can you explain how, exactly, one compares the ease of assembly to the ease of formal logic, such that one can then make a definitive and sweeping statement about that comparison?
It is perhaps an opinion more than a fact, but an opinion that is likely widely shared by people who have done both. Computer assembly languages are not conceptually complex in the same way that higher level math is. The difficulty of assembly comes from its relative obscurity, the proliferation of instructions and architecture variants, and the process of analyzing a problem into the required steps. These are things that can be overcome with patience and reference manuals. At its heart, assembly instructions are doing simple things.
At the risk of an analogy, I would describe assembly programming as memory-intensive, and math as compute-intensive.
Code is math. Variables, functions, and expressions are all mathematical terms.
The main difference is the time between feedback on your code. Back then, you'd only know if there was an error in your code when it failed to run. Now we get it almost instantaneously. But that's not how it always was.
Where I've studied abstract algebra, TFCV, partial diff. equations and quantum mechanics were mandatory courses, normally passed by everyone. Not all of them were cut to follow code paths, recursion etc (although a large fraction thrived with coding and are now in the industry, much larger than that of the general population). I don't think you could grab a random 60's mathematics BSc's and have them punch in business-ready code, male or female.
One more example the early spaceflight guidance computers were completely designed / engineered on paper in graph form, with mathematicians and engineers doing all the hard math work.
Assembly programmers would then turn the graphs into assembly using the best technique at the time, at moments having to use NOPs to cool down the ram.
For these people the source of truth was the graphs and the actual assembly was throwaway.
Even as late as the 1970s, it was not uncommon for women to automatically get fired once they got married. Some jobs, like secretary, nurse or teacher, were deemed suitable for unmarried women, but married women had to stay home, raise kids, and run the household. This left a lot of highly capable women outside the workforce.
A company specifically created to hire those women was a brilliant idea.
that 45% was to a significant extent poor women doing unskilled labor: maids, factory workers, cooks. not office workers
however, shirley did not found her company 'freelance programmers' in 01975
she founded it in 01959
the ensuing 20 years were among the most successful years in history for feminism in the usa and uk, marked by, among other things, rapidly growing female participation in the labor force
if you were a computer programmer, high school teacher, or secretary before you got married, it might be the case that the only jobs open to you after marriage were factory worker and maid, both involving a substantial risk of sexual abuse and resulting marital rupture. even as a programmer, shirley reported experiencing 'being fondled, being pushed against the wall'
also, if you had a baby, usually you got fired because you couldn't come to work for months or even years (unless you could afford a nanny), and then you had to start your career again from the beginning at a new job
underrepresentation in upper-class jobs was a real issue, but far from the only one
To those who haven't visited the Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA), it is SO AMAZING!!! If you ever happen to be in the US/California, go spend a few hours in there. It is a wonderful place!
I really enjoyed my visit with my (then) 4yo son, but I agree. It's warmingly reverential but almost everything is behind glass. They're computers, they're machines, they can do amazing things just with a screen!
The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge (UK) explains as you go in that says unless there's a sign, you can play with anything you see. There's clearly an expert for each machine, so they are set up with who has games, word processors, educational software, a banking back-office (??), typewriters... so much more exciting. The star exhibit is the megaprocessor https://www.megaprocessor.com/progress.html - which has Tetris hooked up.
I highly recommend following Ken Shirriff on Twitter, some great threads on the work he does to keep machines running at the Computer History Museum. https://twitter.com/kenshirriff
Video from 1979 about F International (Dame Shirley's company) - working from home, as a computer a programmer, is the greatest revolution for working women since the pill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6URa-PTqfA&t=295s
Shirley founded, with a capital of £6, the software company Freelance Programmers, (later F International, then Xansa, since acquired in 2001 by Steria and now part of the Sopra Steria Group).
“not only for building a $3 billion tech empire in 1960s England, but for doing it with an all-female, work-from-home staff of professionally qualified women who had left the work force after marrying and having children.”
Tangentially, this part brought up an early thought that I had: tapping into a qualified workforce that for some reason got removed from work standard work opportunities. One such large group the one mentioned (at the time in the UK, probably less applicable now).
Another one that I usually think about is all the people with high levels of manufacturing expertise that got laid off in the US in the past decades, living in smaller towns. Would it be possible to tap into their knowledge remotely?
There was a company maybe about 15 years ago that was looking to design solar panel array structures using automotive construction techniques. They essentially wanted to hire “surplus” autoworkers.
I would think these days you’d be looking for the automation people as well.
Interestingly enough this thought was what made western europe (but various other parts of the world had something similar) transition from the guild system to the centralised factory system, essentially laying the foundation for industrialisation.
Basically merchants realized there was a huge workforce outside the cities, families where wives and children had time left. So they purchased and place the worktools and resources with the individual families to later buy back the products they made and resell it in the markets. This was called the putting-out system if you want to look into it more.
That the gender of names matters in correspondence reminds me of an anecdote I heard about two people, a man and a woman, doing the same job supporting clients or customers of the company. Their boss was unhappy with the woman's performance, because she took much longer to do the same work as the man.
Then, one day, the woman suddenly worked much faster and everything went much easier. At the same time, the man had a much harder time and customers were weirdly stubborn and obstructive. Turns out they were accidentally mailing under each other's name: the woman used the man's name, making customers much more willing to accept her expertise, while the man used the woman's name, making customers question everything he said.
There's a lot of that kind of subtle sexism in our society that goes way deeper than mere equal rights. How can you possibly control customers taking you seriously or not based on your name? Should all women (and possibly people with non-western names, who can run into similar issues) work under fake names?
Sounds like the kind of perfect anecdote that is made up to make some point. "accidentally mailing under each other's name" doesn't sound like a thing.
Incidentally, this kind of thing is easy to test, and indeed such studies have been done - I lent my name & image to such a study when I was a student, that was testing racial bias in resume applications.
In the place I work at at some point a customer support analysis was done and female agents got way more abuse, drive-by curse words, etc. It was like a different job compared to the men.
This wasn't because they had low opinion of women in tech. It's because some other speakers refused to attend if there weren't a specific percentage of women speakers but the organizers couldn't find enough to meet that quota. Still scummy to fake women speakers, but the motivation was not simply a low opinion of women.
> Hanselman confirmed that he was "duped" by seeing the bill including at least one fake female speaker. He also confirmed that speakers like him have rules for participating in conferences, including only joining inclusive speaker lineups.
> This wasn't because they had low opinion of women in tech. It's
because some other speakers refused to attend if there weren't a
specific percentage of women speakers
You raise a good, fair objection.
Maybe I shouldn't have said "low opinion". I don't know these chaps
and what their opinion is.
"Quotas" and suchlike certainly do those of us that advocate for
diversity - but confront reality - a great disservice.
> Still scummy to fake women speakers, but the motivation was not
simply a low opinion of women.
What I think happened (and maybe watch our video, please because Mercy
and Helen say things a little bit different - and why pay attention to
my words, written by a man, when you can see and hear what the women
actually have to say):
> but the organizers couldn't find enough to meet that quota.
Where I disagree is over "the organisers couldn't find enough". No
way, they could have "found enough". There's no shortage of smart,
confident women who have plenty to say about working in digital tech.
I've been in that situation myself as a conference organiser and had
to work extra hard to convince them that they would be taken seriously
and given equal voice - and could say what they want.
I strongly suspect what these organisers couldn't find were women who
would say the things they wanted.
> Where I disagree is over "the organisers couldn't find enough". No way, they could have "found enough".
It depends at lot on what the definition of "inclusive" Hanselman and other speakers were using. There are indeed situations where people are expected to have female participation that's well above their rate of participation.
This tracks well with what women in tech have told me: they're constantly bombarded with requests for them to speak. But they're quite reluctant because they feel (often correctly) that they're primarily being invited on account of inclusivity quotas like Hanselman's.
Sounds like a chicken and egg problem: those women don't want to speak because of the quotas, but the quotas exist because not enough women speak at those conferences.
"yes i turned my life upside down, opened myself up to discrimination, and took a cocktail of drugs that will actively make me dysphoric and also cause my muscles to atrophy, just so i can beat women in sport, despite the fact that the hormones i have been on for the last year have actually normalised my performance with women"
do people seriously think people transition to win at sports?
Doesn't matter what the original motivation is. Women's sports are not a venue for making males feel better about themselves, they're to celebrate female excellence and female competition.
a trans woman who had been on HRT for 5 years managed to qualify for and come second in an event, and later won some others, yes that is most certainly evidence that she had an unfair advantage /s
she was also in the ballpark with the other competitors, not the sort of far and away difference that you make it out to be.
Putting aside the fact that this is a convenient "and then they all stood up and clapped"-esque anecdote, scammers and poor quality outsourced customer support people working under names that are blatantly fake is such a popular meme, that doing it unironically is certainly not how you would improve customer interactions.
They do worse because they're constantly questioned. It's a vicious cycle that needs to be broken, and using male names seems to do that to some degree. Though not completely, obviously.
Oh really? We massively value women in cybersecurity because generally
their security model is better [0] - more diligent, more attuned...
but anyway, mixed teams are always stronger.
Hence "mixed teams are always stronger", because we can positively
celebrate differences and use them to our advantage. In the end,
winning against the enemy is all that counts.
That's not what I mean though. You make a sweeping generalisation based on the sex. For me, that's not far off saying 'women do worse on the same job'.
FWiW I was educated in the 1980s by a lot of talented people, a large number of whom were women, just to throw that on the table for fun.
Nonetheless, "We massively value women in cybersecurity because generally their security model is better" is an interesting quote, and within your link on page 18 comes the question of "what threats do you see online?" - good question as from threat comes the evolution of security model.
Obvious ever present threats are: (eg)
* Zoom meeting was hacked by immature boys in masks showing silly things they thought were disturbing.
* etc. (ever present threat of real or manufactured revenge porn, etc).
But this one I loved:
* The presence of my Chinese aunties online is pretty terrifying...
Being wached over by hyper smart(?) Mah Jong playing family members, the "chinese aunties" that are behind every major family social networking move and financial investment is seen as a "threat" - a limitation on what you can do.
You cannot disappear from sight - absence will be noted, actions must be masked by acceptable falsehoods that withstand scrutiny .. etc.
> The presence of my Chinese aunties online is pretty terrifying
Yeah that was the line that puzzled me. I see your point better
now. Thanks for that.
Indeed, some of the things raised from that PDF maybe seem "silly" to
me too. But then that's the point. "To me". What I'm championing here
is diversity of worldviews.
To parody my own (male) mind I might say "Ah, cmon, threats to an
actual gas pipeline are more 'important' than feeling gaslighted
online". But then, maybe I'd miss that the cumulative effect on 100
million people not feeling safe to participate online is actually a
massive blow to the vibrancy of national life and democracy.
With this hybrid-vigour (Rebel Ideas [0]) kind of thinking, I want to
hear all views on what security means. So far I've found that it's the
women in the room who seem way ahead in moving from the traditional
military metaphor, of perimeters and offence, and we're actually
seeing that percolating through to mainstream thinking that is slowly
focusing more on "Trust" and relational cybersecurity, as with the new
NIST report this week.
A classic early example of "Chinese aunties" online - eyes that watch everything and miss nothing would be the women of Bletchley Park during WWII.
Every known move of the Germans logged, every reported move was logged, every transmission (encyrpted or not, cracked or not) was logged. Cross references meta data filing was created on the fly to summarise and condences the known knowns, known unknowns, etc.
It was a master class in traffic analysis .. and with it comes the notion that to make it (in world affairs) you need to "fake it" enough that when you actually do something you have the traffic to hide behind.
I would also add that the largest group of sharp analytical minds that I've lost track off from my years in mathematics has been women ... and for the most part they've not been gravitating to kitchens they've been heading towards the five eyes groups, naval signal intelligence, etc - complex, security related, not overly well paid roles that provide national stability.
Appearances are important. But so is substance. I don't hang out with
girls that are all fur coat and no knickers, as we say round here :)
Regarding BP, as a Brit I'd love to do an episode [0] on Mavis Batey
sometime. Have you visited? One of the surprising facts is about the
extraordinary physical working conditions in the huts... it's
summer, the roofs are painted in dark green tar and camouflage, the
machines are kicking out tens of kilowatts...
I've not visited BP, I've been in the vicinity but otherwise engaged and don't live in the UK.
I did interview Bill Tutte in Canada in the 1980s when I was passing through though. I was getting a lot of referrals from my mentors when I was doing some work on the early Cayley, now Magma system in Australia.
In my wife's experience, men are generally less friendly to women in the corporate environment. In fact, as she climbs the ladder, she finds that the men are more aggressive and hositle toward her.
For her, she just wants to get the same pay and recognition as the rest of her group. For instance, she was the #1 seller of new work in 2023 in her 80-person group. Yet, she got a $10k bonus, while her male peers got promotions. (She's in the building industry, and there are only 8 women in her group).
Yes, this is surely the case. The more money and power at stake, the greater the likelihood that those remaining in the competition will be especially aggressive, as this is the trait that has gotten them so far.
They're sides of the same coin; both examples of people[0] not taking women seriously, not treating them as equals. The fact that there are cases where women can benefit from this inequality doesn't change the root issue: that a lot of people[0] still don't take women seriously in various ways. But especially having your professionality and expertise questioned constantly in the work you do every day must be extremely tiring and potentially harmful to your career. Does getting out of the occasional traffic ticket really make up for that?
Edit:
[0] I used to have "men" instead of "people" here, but it's also possible for women to take women less seriously than men in a professional setting. It is in fact also possible to take men less seriously than women in some situations, though that seems to happen more in cases involving raising children. In most professional settings, the common prejudice tends to favour men.
Unintentionally. I should probably have said "people" instead of "men" in that comment, because it's definitely possible also for women to take men more seriously than women in such situations.
I've also read about research that shows that when hiring, the people doing the hiring tend to be biased towards people who look like the people already doing the job. When they're white men, people tend to hire more white men, even when the person doing the hiring is not a white man and even when they're aware of this bias and of the need to hire with more diversity. And no, it wasn't because men were naturally better at that job, it was merely that the current demographic working that job create the bias, the prejudice, that they'd be better at that job. So clearly more diverse hiring is necessary merely to ensure that candidates can be judged in an unbiased way. Which is a bit contradictory, but that's the minefield that needs to be navigated to ensure everybody gets a fair chance.
You're missing the point of what I'm saying I think. The idea of 'equal' is a false one because things aren't equal, can never be equal. It sounds good to say 'equal' but its just not the way humans are. Neither men nor women are perfect. No individual is perfect.
Now you can force and harass people to do this or that.. but what you are doing is making everyone unhappy - people will be unable to act naturally and will never never be themselves. I personally think it is better to to let individuals be natural and a/ allow making of mistakes and b/ allowing for the opportunity of learning from those mistakes.
The idea that there is some known perfect state 'equal' is a nonsense - no one knows what this is - we are not gods in fact. Forcing others to adopt such an idea is certainly wrong though - we can say that much. Manipulating others, indoctrinating them will surely make people unhappy - men and women - for who can say what is right for others?
> I personally think it is better to to let individuals be natural
I challenge you to consider what you're assuming to be "natural." It seems you're implying not taking women seriously to be "natural," but that's simply an indoctrination you've had since childhood, apparently so effectively you're not even aware of it?
This is not natural in many cultures now and throughout history.
Ok: how would you have interpreted the comment? Rereading the thread, it seems they're implying that pushing back on gender stereotypes is to force people to not "be natural."
Here's how I interpret it (but note that I am not the author; I am guessing):
Let's say that I am a university-attending female, but even though I am attending university, what I really want to be is a wife and mother. (Such people do in fact exist.) Universities can "push back on gender stereotypes" so strongly that I feel like it's not OK for me to be who I want to be.
That is, you can push back on gender stereotypes so hard that those who fit the stereotypes feel like they "shouldn't" be who they are. Opposing stereotypes is fine; going that far to do so is less fine.
You're doing the same thing, presenting one thing as "natural" when there's no evidence for this belief that passes rigorous evaluation.
I don't think there's any reason "pushing back on gender stereotypes" should or would make someone feel uncomfortable expressing their gender however they choose - the whole point is to give people the choice to express their gender as they see fit. If that means by being a tradwife and mom, great, the important thing is that they get to choose that role of their own free will.
i'm missing how this is relevant like, at all? what with the context of the entire rest of the conversation, i struggle to see how you reached that interpretation
Obviously everybody is different. No two people are the same. No two men are the same either. But that doesn't mean that in normal social interaction, and especially professional interaction, people do deserve the same level of upfront respect and trust. At least until those are squandered by their own actual actions. But instead, it's, even now, still too common that some people get denied that respect based on prejudice about gender or race, rather than their own actions.
> Now you can force and harass people to do this or that.
You can set certain professional standards within a company, community, field or industry, but the issue in this example is that the difference in performance was caused by the prejudice from the customers, and that's not something you can control.
> I personally think it is better to to let individuals be natural and a/ allow making of mistakes and b/ allowing for the opportunity of learning from those mistakes.
But how can you do that when people are being held back from being their natural selves by unfair prejudice? And educating customers is hard to do when it might be a completely different customer every time.
> The idea that there is some known perfect state 'equal' is a nonsense
Which is why nobody is talking about that. I'm talking about obstacles that are needlessly holding people back, and about what can be done to remove those obstacles. Using fake names is an ugly fix; one that appears dishonest and doesn't really address the underlying prejudice, but it does mitigate the immediate symptoms of that prejudice.
I totally agree that forcing and indoctrinating is wrong, but what do you do if people have already been indoctrinated, and as a result are forcing other people in a way that restricts them both?
I can't really reply fully here, as my comment is flagged, and I'm accused of starting a flame war by even replying to this already charged story. It doesn't matter that the academic that who did the initial research is clearly an active and political academic figure - as I showed. That is fine apparently, but it is suggested that my comment here is wrong and I should simply not comment. It feels like only one side (not mine) is acceptable for a public airing.
> I totally agree that forcing and indoctrinating is wrong, but what do you do if people have already been indoctrinated, and as a result are forcing other people in a way that restricts them both?
Just on this point - can the right answer to dealing with indoctrinated people be even more indoctrination? Surely the answer to stop telling people what to do, live by example rather than endlessly judging and trying to change others for their own good, despite themselves.
> Just on this point - can the right answer to dealing with indoctrinated people be even more indoctrination?
What is doctrine? Wikipedia says,
> Doctrine (from Latin: doctrina, meaning "teaching, instruction") is a codification of beliefs or a body of teachings or instructions, taught principles or positions, as the essence of teachings in a given branch of knowledge or in a belief system.
Can people be educated without being indoctrinated? I say no, indoctrination is synonymous with education. Much like the word "agenda," this is a word that is being used to instill fear and distrust in the reader. I keep hearing politicians saying they don't want kids to get "indoctrinated" but if you read between the lines, what they actually want is for kids to receive a different doctrine.
Here's a list of observations I've made over the years that make this such a difficult thing to talk about:
1. People love to rank things. The moment you say two things are unequal, their brain is busy trying to rank them. Things are either the same, or one is "better" than the other. A lot of people really do see everything as totally ordered sets,
2. If your selection criterion is "person who is good at X" and your pool is a fair sample of society, the person you find is more likely to be male (because you'll get an outlier). But this doesn't mean if you were to take a man and a woman at random from the same pool the man is likely to perform better at X, nor does it mean the same person would be picked given (even very slightly) broader criteria,
3. If you tell people "you will suffer prejudices etc. due to Y" then they will attribute every misfortune, every unsuccessful endeavour and, yes, downright unfair, but unrelated, treatment (e.g. nepotism etc.) to Y and are less likely to think "maybe I should just try again".
I just find it really tiring to have these discussions now because you try to be reasoned and then find you're talking to someone who thinks we all fit into some neat hierarchy and can't see the massively multi-faceted nature of human beings. I also find that almost everyone is sexist (and everything else -ist) to some degree, especially a certain type of feminist. So when people talk about what we should be doing everyone is talking about a different thing (see equal opportunity vs equal outcome).
She talks with typical British reserve about doing things that must have taken incredible will and courage. People today often don’t realize just how constrained gender roles were…and still are in some places.
In some instances the role becomes much harder instead of easier - for example Margaret Thatcher (love her or loathe her!) demonstrated a woman can hold powerful positions in a traditionally male-dominated environment.
Liz Truss then took the title of second female PM in UK history and promptly tanked the economy in spectacular fashion! She was beaten by an iceberg lettuce [0]
The next female MP who is aiming for the PM role has an enormous uphill battle against them and it could be decades before "the old boys club" vote for a woman.
I can't even begin to fathom how difficult it was for "Steve" to battle against the odds.
You _want_ a forgetttable politician. I don't really agree with Theresa May's general politics, but she's a competent politician who knows what the job entails.
they are both a memes, not noteworthy for anything but making UK slightly worse than when they started (like all tories). 'I voted against brexit so here I come to implementing it' Theresa, and 'I did not last longer than lettuce' Liz.
Maggie fucked UKs middle and lower class so spectacularly that she is actually remembered.
Employed over time, and reading between the lines, lots of part-time and probably temporary workers given how they were hiring and the pressures on those women's time. Normally even co-ownership structures have earn-in periods, so this isn't a huge surprise. In a time where only capital-rich folks could invest in businesses (still the norm outside our contemporary VC tech bubble where vesting and cliffs etc are commonplace terms in employment negotiations) this was pretty radical.
Had the author presented her as, say, a socialist who started a workers cooperative, that criticism would be justified. But the author did not. It's perfectly valid to talk about "profit-sharing and company co-ownership" even if she didn't share the ownership evenly.
