Boys will be boys will be sociopaths

A recurring theme on computer science blogs is what might be done to encourage more women to enter (or remain in) the field, and to promote more diversity in general. For example, a recent post at On being a scientist and a woman talks about why women leave the academic career path (this is for science generally, but I'm sure it applies equally well to comp sci). As difficult as the academic world may be, however, it appears that things can be much worse for women working on the 'nuts and bolts' side of the aisle. Blogger and author Kathy Sierra writes about how email and blog sexual harassment and death threats have caused her to cancel a public appearance and step back from blogging. (Warning, that linked post contains material that is not appropriate for kids.) There are by now hundreds of posts by others providing commentary on this; some background information on the people involved is given by Doc Searls.

One weird thing about the whole situation is that the harassment grew out of a couple of websites set up by peers of Kathy Sierra, specifically for the purpose of being critical of, and generally nasty about, other technology authors. (The actual death threats appear to be from an interloper who hacked the identity of one of the participants.) Death threats and misogyny aside, why does the internet seem to spawn such general nastiness? Okay, that's a naive question. More to the point, does the anything-goes atmosphere encourage misogyny and racism and other bad stuff, or is that something totally apart from general snarkiness found on the internet? For example, on a site like ScienceBlogs, more than a bit of gratuitous obscenity and sarcasm can be found mixed in with the science and analysis, but it is a very progressive site where any hint of sexism or racism is liable to get smacked down hard.

Still, sexism does seem to be a particular problem within the tech community. Robert Scoble writes in response to Kathy Sierra's problems,

It’s this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop. I really don’t care if you attack me. I take those attacks in stride. But, whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn’t happen if the interviewee were a man.

It makes me realize just how ascerbic this industry and culture are toward women. This just makes me ill.

Update

Well, the response on the blogosphere to Kathy Sierra's post has been, as you might imagine, enormous. I get the impression that Sierra would, with the benefit of hindsight, have responded to the threats a bit differently. However, some good might come out of all the brouhaha. Publisher Tim O'Reilly is calling for a blogger code of conduct that would help maintain a certain level of civility in web discussions. I think that could be a tough sell, but just raising people's consciousness about the problem may help.

It looks like Kathy Sierra and one of the other involved bloggers, Chris Locke, will be on CNN Monday morning. Should be an interesting segment a couple of minutes of soundbites with little content.

The End of Blogging?

Late last year the IT consulting firm Gartner issued its 'top ten predictions' for 2007, and among them was the claim that blogging would level off as the number of people quitting their blogs equaled the number of new bloggers.

I didn't think much of it at the time, but now 3 different 'mathy' blogs have abruptly ceased operation this month. Foremost was Lance Fortnow's Computational Complexity, the premier blog for theoretical computer science. The other two blogs, more political but with math as a sideline, were Alon Levy's Abstract Nonsense, and Tyler DiPietro's Growth Rate O(n lg n).

If you click on that link for Tyler's blog, you'll find that it does not even exist anymore; evidently he felt the temptation to blog would be too strong if he didn't just chuck the whole thing. While I can certainly sympathize with that sentiment, I feel obligated to mention for the benefit of anyone else who might be considering this, Bora Zivkovic's plea for the Proper Procedure For Shutting Down A Blog.

Although I wouldn't attempt to compare these blogs, one thing that they shared was a high output. For me, writing is a slow, tedious, and sometimes downright painful process, so I am always amazed by people who are able to write with such apparent ease. Unfortunately, it would also appear that they have simply burned themselves out in the process (at least as far as blogging is concerned). Of course, there is no need to worry about that happening here. At the rate of an entry per month, it would be almost superfluous for me to ever quit.

Finally, by way of balancing the karmic blogging equation, last month the mathematician Terence Tao started his own blog, What's new. Tao is a recipient of both a Fields medal and a MacArthur fellowship, and his blog should be of great interest to mathematically-minded readers.