Your species is dumb and you should feel dumb

(Another post on the theme of hostile communities).

(I've been struggling to write this specific post).

(Edit: the comment thread for this post convinced me that the theory I suggest in this post is wrong and worse. I'm sorry about that. I'm leaving it as it is, for posterity, so that people can learn from my mistake, and to support the interesting discussion that this sparked).

Here's one thing that frustrates me about the software industry: it's really hard to find good software engineers.

Even though men and women are equally good at STEM disciplines, software engineering is very male-heavy.

We're losing women all along the way, though high school, through college, through interviews, through companies, through community behaviors. When I end up in a team a 10 men often struggling to get all the work done, I know that there are 10 women somewhere who could have been just as qualified but didn't end up as software engineers. As a result we've got to do with 10 people what we know 20 people would be smart enough for.

We've seen recently another well-publicized case of a solid female software engineer who expressed that the tone of an open discussion made her feel unnecessarily uncomfortable. Sadly, a common male response is that she should just ignore that, and that anyway she can leave the community at any time since nobody is forcing her to be there.

Are we, male software engineers, so dumb that we're driving people away from our profession that's in such deep need of more people?

Are we, male software engineers, so dumber than that that we continue doing so even when the evidence is right under our collective nose?

I think we're even dumber than that, that we're completely blind to the deeper situation.

Here's my theory:

We're a dumb species.

We're such a dumb species that we invented domestic violence before just about anything else.

Within our ancestors, women who could sense and avoid domestic violence had a better chance of surviving a confrontation, of protecting their children.

Input that into hundreds of generations of Darwinian evolution, and the result is predictable: women, by natural selection, get a strong emotional response at any hint of confrontation. Woman can't help it. Confrontation is likely to make them feel that they're in mortal danger. It's literally in their genes.

Because it's such a deep instinct, women themselves have a very hard time expressing the feeling when it triggers. It's in their proverbial gut, it's overwhelming them with fear. It's far beyond what can be controlled through reason.

And we, modern males, just look at that, befuddled, confused, oblivious to the reality that our dumb behaviors can be so incredibly painful to women.

What we men don't get, what we men can't get, is that women fear for their lives all the time.

So, if we males could open up our eyes just a tiny bit, if we did the effort to imagine any hint of confrontation as a death threat, maybe we'd manage to communicate better, maybe we'd just be a bit less dumb. And maybe we'd have enough software engineers to get the job done.

(Wheh. That's quite a rant. I'm afraid that's the best I can do on that subject).