After trying with the css suggested here on Google inside Chrome, the problametic characters don't have the top going across too high like originally, but it gets capped on the top of the first line of the paragraph, instead of the line the character is actually at.
Doh, you're right. For some reason I had it in my head that the block itself wrapped onto multiple lines but I must have been thinking of something else.
It seems like there isn't really any CSS only solution for this without wrapping every character in its own element like jQueryIsAwesome suggested.
It's a huge hammer and a considerably larger webpage footprint just so that a type of character isn't allowed to run amok, something that's not going to happen anyway in the vast majority of cases.
We have very different definitions of "huge hammer", in any decent modern browser (Chrome, Firefox, IE9) it takes less than 10ms to apply the mentioned code in 20 texts (using the linked 10 Google results as an example).
It also puts every single special character into its own span. That may negatively affect programs that trust HTML for copy-paste, for example Open Office, Microsoft Word (I think?), some IM clients, some text editors, etc. Doesn't seem worth it in the general case.
That said, if those sorts of things bother an individual, they could run that on the page themselves, I suppose, so it's good for that :)
10ms is a huge amount to spend for such an obscure fix. How many obscure corner cases do you think Google webpages have to account for? A lot more than 100, I would bet. So rough methods like these would be horrible for performance.
You're the one who made the 10ms claim, not me. If indeed it is faster than you claimed, then maybe it would be ok. Still probably not worth engineering time for a problem of this magnitude.
It corrupts Unicode data because it splits on code points instead of grapheme clusters. When performed on 'Spin̈al Tap', it splits the base character U+006E (LATIN SMALL LETTER N) from the combining character U+0308 (COMBINING DIAERESIS) and results in the string 'Spin<span class="s_char">̈</span>al Tap', which contains the valid Unicode grapheme cluster '>̈'! If you were to split on grapheme clusters instead, the result would be 'Spi<span class="s_char">n̈</span>al Tap'. However, I still wouldn't support that solution because it could negatively affect text segmentation used by search engine indexing and natural language processing tools.
Perhaps I will understand things a better as things move along. It is true that I have only had three jobs so far, which isn't many, compared to many of the people here.
This article is really about talking to males at work about geeky stuff and that we don't have to feel so special. Regarding childbearing, all women in other industries have to do it too, and there doesn't seem to be MathTeacherLadies or groups talking about this kind of things. We are sitting in front of a computer all day long, like many other office jobs, and those other industries have male and female workers working in the same office too, why is IT so strange and special?
Sexism is a problem in workplaces across all industries, and I do, as most others, hope the occurrences of such horrid incidents will gradually disappear over time.
All I wanted to say in the article was, in IT, being male or female does not, and should not matter. At work, as a female, one CAN join in nice conversations with males. A female geek does not have to talk to a female geek about geeky things. That's the only thing. I did not intend to refer to sexism. It was not the original intent of the article. If I have offended you with my article, I sincerely apologise.
Dear lorettahe, from your replies to some comments here I got a sense that you give in a bit too easily to (perceived) "authority". Look at you, you are (probably) young and already have three high profile jobs (as we see from your LinkeIn profile). I'm 40+ and have had only one job so far. So while making use of experiences and advice offered by other people also filter them: not everyone on HN is wiser or more experienced than you.
When other people offer "rules" like don't use this word, don't do this or that, think for yourself rather than taking hythloday's, clarevans' or my comments at face value: Why is it wrong to use girl, what are the causes of sexism in the workplace, what evidence or arguments do these people offer. For me, a big part of what separates hackers from the masses is this questioning of authority , curiosity, and thinking for ourselves. I wonderful book in this regard is Christopher Hitchens' Letters to a Contrarian.
</jedi_master_mode>
P.S. And do submit stories and comment more often on HN!
You didn't offend me at all. I just have a 2 year old daughter and I've seen first hand things that I never want her to have to experience. So, I'm selfish that way.
I'm specifically responding to the last paragraph in your post where you're characterizing PyLadies as a "strange female programmer group". I'm absolutely certain most members of PyLadies are quite comfortable "talking to guys". This isn't about inability of some women to work as a programmer in a male dominated hierarchy. This isn't about the vast majority of nerds in software development. It is about power dynamics that will impact your career.
Perhaps I.T. is "strange and special" for women because technologists, in general, tend to have more leverage with regard to management/owners than in other industries.
There does appear to be something new I learn every day. " it's that there is a minority of men are actively and aggressively misogynist and the majority of men who aren't refuse to call them on it" I really have seen none around, to be honest. As other guys on this post have been saying, they really would rather women bothering to talk to them. Speaking from a personal experience, I have not found any misogynists in the IT industry, but I have however worked with females who simply do not utter a word in the office, and these females have generated comments from my males colleagues to me, including 'She just does not like us'. I'm not trying to make a generalisation here. But I do think, in the IT industry, just like any other industries (such as teaching or even the finance industry), men and women can get along, because at the basics, developer roles and what they do aren't really that different to the other jobs.
I'm really glad you haven't had those experiences (and I'm glad you wrote a post about that, even though I didn't agree with your points). I do think it's something that's getting less acceptable over time, certainly I've seen it decrease over my decade or so at work, so I have high hopes that it's on the way out. I'm really glad you haven't had those experiences (and I'm glad you wrote a post about that, even though I didn't agree with your points). I do think it's something that's getting less acceptable over time, certainly I've seen it decrease over my decade or so at work, so I have high hopes that it's on the way out.
Here's an example of what I mean by misogyny: a previous manager at a company printed out an A3 picture of a woman in hotpants and a bra with the caption "Please update your Jira tickets before you go home". When I came in the next day to replace it with a picture of 4 (clothed but sexualized-I think it was a picture of a male stripper troupe) men, I received a disciplinary action from the company. The same manager, when he introduced me to the team, introduced the male programmers as "he works on ToolName" and the female programmers as "she makes things look pretty".
This is reasonable subtle stuff, but I am surprised (though happy) if you've genuinely never encountered it rather than cultivating obliviousness or growing a thick skin.
When chatting to your male coworkers, what happens when you don't know something or accidentally say something stupid? In my experience, a man may get a brief ribbing, whereas a woman gets a long, patronising or sarcastic lecture, and their mistake gets brought up for months afterwards as evidence that woman are ditsy and don't know the things that real geeks should know.
e.g. it was a running joke at my last job how women didn't know anything about hardware, but there was a male programmer there who repeatedly used "memory" to mean hard disk space and "hard disk" to mean the case, and nobody ever said anything. And a guy can banter back - this guy's comeback when anyone corrected him was "who'd want to know boring nerd stuff like that" - but a woman quickly gets pegged as sour, bitchy or snooty if she talks back.
And after a while of every dumb slip-up being jumped on, is it any wonder that some women don't leap gleefully into the conversation?
(Plus as female coder I am always happy to talk about programming, retro computing, science fiction or other "geek" topics, but 80% of the Man Chat in my office is about cars and Top Gear, which don't interest me at all.)
Don't get me wrong: very few of the male IT professionals I've known have been openly hostile. But there have been those who have seemed slightly confused by my presence and ignored everything I said, those who regularly met up outside work without asking me and months later said "we would have asked you, but we didn't think you'd be interested", those who say nothing when someone louder insults women...
...and the ones who rush to applaud when a woman insults another woman, which to be honest I found your post rather close to with its implication that any woman who's had a harder time in IT is whiny, antisocial or doesn't "know their shit". (Apologies if this reply just seems to continue that trend. I'm grateful to you for starting this topic, which I've found interesting, at any rate.)
There are many good female scientists/engineers/mathematicians. Back in Cambridge University, to start off with, there are many female mathematics students. Considering achievement by people such as Grace Hopper, I don't think we can blame the domination of men down to sex differences. I would rather girls stand up and bravely join the science community regardless whether these communities are male dominated or not.
I studied mathematics at Cambridge University. While there were some very good female students on the course, it's worth recording that the better colleges had smaller proportions of women; New Hall (all-female) had possibly the worst academic reputation, while Trinity (probably best academically) had two girls among my year of 42.
FWIW, lorettahe, this is exactly the kind of ad-hominem idiocy/misogyny that women encounter[0] and men never do[1]. There's no one big issue keeping women out of programming, it's just the drip-drip-drip of "you're different from us and we don't want you here" that 50% (then 65%, then 80%, then 95%...) of the candidate pool simply never hear or see unless they make an effort to.
[0] This moron got downvoted because downvoting is not socially awkward; how many times do you see a social smack-on-the-wrist in a face-to-face conversation?
[1] I'll donate £5 to a charity of your choice for every time someone comes up with an attributed accusation of using "man logic" in a discussion related to programming.
The idea of encouraging the term of "man logic" is man logic. Misogyny is clearly a problem, but saying, "oh but men are dumb too" is not the right way to go about fixing it.
I definitely wasn't encouraging the invention of the term "man logic"--I was pointing out that no-one even thinks about calling things "man logic". That's the dichotomy at play here.
Perhaps I have been really fortunate, as I haven't really seen/noticed women not getting promoted/paid less just because they are women. Maybe it's because I'm in the UK where we don't have much of those issues. I do apologise if I have been rather ignorant and appearing cold-blooded when it comes to the unfortunate female workers who do come across gender inequalities caused by bad management and company culture.
"Perhaps I have been really fortunate, as I haven't really seen/noticed women not getting promoted/paid less just because they are women."
Well, you can't see it. The only people who know someones salary (generally speaking) are the bosses doing the paying, and the employee herself. You must be another employee, because otherwise you'd know for certain.
It seems obvious to say it, but these problems persist because they're largely hidden from view, unless you are the target.
The sad thing is, I can't really do anything about it. I don't know the salaries of any of the women at my work, and even if I did I can't request more money on their behalf, only stand behind them if they are the instigator and they're unfairly refused.
Instead, I decided to just drop my salary amount into conversations sometimes (it's probably middle of the road for developers at my company), so anyone can compare and make their own evaluations based on that. I don't know if thats good idea or not at the moment.
I apologise if I missed something here, but the GP said:
"I haven't really seen/noticed women not getting promoted/paid less just because they are women"
You have provided statistics that show women get paid less than men in technology. But this does not show that women are not getting promoted, or are getting paid less, just because they are women.
Is it not also another plausible hypothesis that they are getting paid less, because, (for example) they make work/life balance choices that focus less on career advancement?
This of course, might indicate that there are other issues to be addressed, with how society structures work/life balance, gender roles etc and this is well trodden ground; but statistics that show women get a lower average (or median) pay do not necessarily show they are getting paid less, "just because they are women".
Is it not also another plausible hypothesis that they are getting paid less, because, (for example) they make work/life balance choices that focus less on career advancement?
If "work/life balance choices" is code for "making babies", then yes, but you made have noticed that it's mainly women who have babies. :)
Pay rates until primigravidity are lower for women than men in most industries and (less) low for men than women in a few. After that the "male bonus" increases more than the fertility rates would suggest they ought to. There are lots of conclusions that can be drawn from that, but I think the most obvious one is that employers haggle down women returning to work from childcare, and that from that age women pay a penalty "because they might go and make babies". There's some evidence (comparison with other countries with different patterns of childcare) that this is the case.
I definitely feel like many employers look for young men. There seems to be a particular mindset associated with being young and male that employers look for: the earnest young coder who'd rather spend his evening in front of a screen than go out (I can relate to that part!) and is happy to stay late in the office doing unpaid overtime in exchange for feeling like part of a gang.
I believe women and older candidates get less of a chance at interview because they are seen as less likely to be interested in putting up with that and may disrupt the clubhouse feel of all lads together.
Obviously it's not absolute proof but I know plenty of fellow programmers who've been expected to work 60+ hour weeks on 37.5-hour contracts, where anyone who's reluctant gets shunned by coworkers for not getting into the company spirit and is let go quickly. And those places have been almost all male and mostly under 35.
This is of course not just to the detriment of women, older men and anyone with a family, but also the young men who get manipulated into working hours they're not being paid for.
Its endemic in big companies I know one big tech employer which has major problems compounded by older males at the top of the scale who joined when there where regular increments and women where forced to resign when they got married.
http://i.imgur.com/698dzMo.png
After trying with the css suggested here on Google inside Chrome, the problametic characters don't have the top going across too high like originally, but it gets capped on the top of the first line of the paragraph, instead of the line the character is actually at.
That said, I'm not sure how to solve this though.