Where da women at?

[MrBump]

It seems like if you look at many of the Asian videos a lot of EUC riders are female, but I don't think a single prolific poster on this site is a woman.

What hap?

 

[Gimlet]

They're all frightened off by people saying "Where da women at?"

Edited October 8, 2015 by Gimlet

[dmethvin]

It's hard to tell by just the names and profile pics. For example is Gimlet a dog? OK I'll give you that one.

The Asian videos made by the manufacturer feature women most likely because they think that will get them more views. I would be interested to know the ratio of actual buyers.

I've been trying to convince my daughter to learn to ride, she's a lot more coordinated than me and I have that 14-inch wheel just sitting around. No dice so far. You do see a few Youtube videos of fathers teaching their daughters to ride, so maybe in a few years we'll have more.

[Chrisxr2]

They're all frightened off by people saying "Where da women at?"

 Damn beat me to it.

Edited October 8, 2015 by Gimlet

[MrBump]

Maybe if the men on here think women are so easily frightened they're looking at the forum and thinking 'nah, won't bother'.

[edwin_rm]

http://youtu.be/DhKDjUlWZRs 

[MrBump]

http://youtu.be/DhKDjUlWZRs 

Good point - I expect this kind of shit is very offputting to women too.

[dmethvin]

Oh man, those heels seem even more impractical than the ones in this old SoloWheel video! Good footwear is essential IMO, and although those heels may look nice while you're walking they're not a good idea for riding an EUC. 

[Kroy]

When it comes to selling things, the world knows that women will happily buy things advertised by men or women.  However, men are much more likely to buy anything endorsed by women.

I think the lack of female electric unicyclists, is more down to the reduced number of women prepared to do physical activity.
I don't really know what can be done, I've never seen anything on this forum that should put females off - I've even sold my previous wheel to a female registered on this forum but never heard from her since!

I got my wife on my wheel, she took to it better than me at the start but as soon as she had her first 'forced dismount, that was it - wasn't interested anymore!

[Cloud]

I think women are in general just more mature and novelty personal transportation devices are better suited to be boy's toys rather than girl's. Right now eucs are still perceived more like toys by the society, their practical application has not yet been recognized , and as such, attract male audience first. After all, when was the last time you saw a girl playing with toy trucks and motocycles? 

Another reason along the same lines - men have a natural desire to be ( or appear) great and popular. Women too, but while men have figured out that eucs are making them look " cool" , women have not conciously accepted euc as an accessory that buff up their girly image. - men look attractive overcoming strenuous activity. Women, not so much, many still want to appear fragile and needing protection. No matter how feminist they are - its there in the genes.

Women will listen to reasonable arguments presented by their male counterparts though, and many will eventually adopt euc . They already are..

Edited October 9, 2015 by Cloud

[Colestien]

  In time they will.  I`ve seen a video.  Title was something like rockwheel vs. something.  Don't know where they were, they were not speaking English.   There was several wheels out riding.   It showed a lady riding a wheel.  She was elegant.  Just enjoying a ride. Nothing like the heels girl. She reminded me a someone's logo, Solo wheel?  Enough ladies see videos like that???

[MrBump]

Some of these arguments are rather patronising and seem to be from a different universe to mine, where about half of cyclists seem to women and a good many I know are into stuff like roller derby, kickboxing, those "tough mudder" competitions etc.

My ex-girlfriend saw my euc and *had* to have a go right away.

Not saying there is nothing in *any* of the arguments made here, but you'd expect *some* women on the forum, wouldn't you?

Edited October 9, 2015 by MrBump

[Paddylaz]

Not saying there is nothing in *any* of the arguments made here, but you'd expect *some* women on the forum, wouldn't you?

I think a big thing is, this is new technology (relatively speaking.) 

And as with phones and any other tech, 'early adopters' tend to be universally men. You could probably put that down to some evolutionary arguments about exploration/adventure/aggression or whatever....it seems to be true. 

Before Google/mobile apps/Facebook/ became mainstream.....how many women were into IT and computer coding?

The reason why I make the comparison is because that what eucs are.....computers on wheels. It's not just a feat of mechanical engineering.

[MrBump]

When the first computer program was written it was 100% women who were into coding.  And there were many, many women coding before Google - COBOL was invented and poineered by a woman (not that I like it as a language).

I've never seen an evolutionary argument relating to this sort of thing that wasn't reliant on unfalsifiable hypotheses - it's usually just a matter of making up a 'just so' story for any disparity you care to mention.  I could make up a story for why pink stuff is targeted at girls and women that plenty of people would accept, especially if I threw in a few sciencey words - it would still be nonsense I'd just made up, though.

 It's probably uncharitable of me to wonder what kind of arguments we would be having if I had been pondering why in the West it seems to be almost universally *white* men riding these things.

Edited October 9, 2015 by MrBump

[Paddylaz]

100% of women were into computer coding? 100%?? That's obviously not true.

IT has always been a male-dominated and male-driven industry. To deny that would be intellectual bankruptcy. 

Yes, there's no solid evidence for evolutionary arguments - but why would there be. Evolutionary psychology is an impossible area of science to 'measure.' It can't be tested in a laboratory. It doesn't mean it's truth value is zero.

As far as girls liking pink - that's simply a cultural thing. Pink has only been a 'feminine' colour since the 1940s

[MrBump]

I said 100% of computer coders were women when the first program was written.  And a woman invented the language on which most code today runs.  Still, it's all about dem menz...

Well done for spotting that the truth value of evolutionary psychology is (for the most part), is equivalent to the truth value of the claim that there are pixies at the bottom of my garden, though.  Sure, there's no evidence for them but I'm sure they're there.  I think they must be good at hiding their tracks and turning invisible whenever I'm looking.

But yeah, about pink's gender-specifity being a cultural artefact - I wonder what other things might be cultural artefacts too...

 

[esaj]

The first ever "programmer" was a woman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace 

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Because of this, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer.^[1][2][3]

 

 And a woman invented the language on which most code today runs.

Really, which language is that? My guess would be that most code in use today is written with C, C++ or Java, Cobol has mostly died out (except from banking mainframes, where it's being replaced by Java). None of those were invented by women, C was designed by Dennis Ritchie, C++ by Bjarne Straustrup and Java by James Gosling.

Edit: Apparently 2 out of the 6 members in the design team of Cobol were women.

Edited October 9, 2015 by esaj

[Paddylaz]

I didn't say there were no women in programming, and that's fascinating to learn a woman wrote the first program. But until (and perhaps, including) the present day, it is a male dominated and had been a male dominated area.

Comparing evolutionary psychology to 'pixies' is disingenuous. One is a fascinating area of science - that is based on the not unreasonable assertion that the male and female mind are different, and that these differences may well be related to the biological roles that each gender plays. That's hardly comparable to pixies - a childish mythology that has traceable cultural roots.

The bottom line is - you've created this thread expressing surprise/curiosity as to the absence of women. I knew as soon as I heard of this forum that it would have an EXTREME majority of men even before I got here. And I'm willing to bet most others would've sub-consciously made that assumption. If you can't explain that via cultural reasoning....

what's left but psychological?

[MrBump]

Really, which language is that? My guess would be that most code in use today is written with C, C++ or Java, Cobol has mostly died out (except from banking mainframes, where it's being replaced by Java). None of those were invented by women, C was designed by Dennis Ritchie, C++ by Bjarne Straustrup and Java by James Gosling

 

COBOL - practically all of the behind-the-scenes mainframe-based batch programming.  Details are easily Googlable since it had its 50th birthday recently .

[esaj]

COBOL - practically all of the behind-the-scenes mainframe-based batch programming.  Details are easily Googlable since it had its 50th birthday recently .

Interesting, couldn't find a source for that though (not that I spent much time trying to find it ). TIOBE lists COBOL as 21. most common as of late: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html  And in the 30 year period, it doesn't show up in the list at all (but that list doesn't contain most languages), although Lisp & Fortran do of the older languages (Scroll down into "Very Long Term History"). Not sure how accurate that is anyway, but I don't think that many new systems are done in COBOL, and there are millions and millions of rows of new code written weekly (or daily?) all over the world, so I'd expect both in the number of programs and code lines written, COBOL has dropped from the top a long, long time ago... Maybe in a narrow field of mainframe batch computing (ie. nightly bank transfers and such), it can still be the most common. As for running amounts of applications, I doubt that COBOL is any more common there either, as there are HUGE databases run on more modern technologies all over the world, think the size of Facebook (4000 MySQL-nodes just for basic data + other tehcnologies), NSA (who knows what and how many? A lot), or Apple's 75000-node Apache Cassandra-set up.

One of the largest production deployments is Apple's, with over 75,000 nodes storing over 10 PB of data. Other large Cassandra installations include Netflix (2,500 nodes, 420 TB, over 1 trillion requests per day), Chinese search engine Easou (270 nodes, 300 TB, over 800 million reqests per day), and eBay (over 100 nodes, 250 TB).

Typically, 1 node = 1 server (although they could be virtualized).

Edited October 9, 2015 by esaj

[MrBump]

I didn't say there were no women in programming, and that's fascinating to learn a woman wrote the first program. But until (and perhaps, including) the present day, it is a male dominated and had been a male dominated area.

Comparing evolutionary psychology to 'pixies' is disingenuous. One is a fascinating area of science - that is based on the not unreasonable assertion that the male and female mind are different, and that these differences may well be related to the biological roles that each gender plays. That's hardly comparable to pixies - a childish mythology that has traceable cultural roots.

The bottom line is - you've created this thread expressing surprise/curiosity as to the absence of women. I knew as soon as I heard of this forum that it would have an EXTREME majority of men even before I got here. And I'm willing to bet most others would've sub-consciously made that assumption. If you can't explain that via cultural reasoning....

what's left but psychological?

It's been a male-dominated area since it became an 'industry' and the groups with the money and power became interested. 

Here's an interesting link on a small part of computing history before there was any "industry".:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/women-were-key-code-breaking-bletchley-park-180954044/?no-ist

It's all a red herring anyway, comparing the (rising) number of women currently employed in computing to the small number of euc riders as some kind of explanation is like comparing the tiny number of women cyclists to the number of women employed as mechanical engineers as an explanation.  Except there are lots of female cyclists so no spurious explanation is necessary.  If you start with your conclusion you can make up whatever you like, just like with evo-psych - it keeps a few writers in business but evolutionary psychology is not taken seriously as "science" by any evolutionary scientists I know or know of - it's more like a niche media area in my opinion.

My evo-psych explanation for the male preponderance of euc riders (extrapolating from this site's membership, so already a little iffy) is that men like euc's because it leaves their hands free to throw a spear at a mammoth.   Of course this is all ancestral subconscious stuff... Ug. 

If you know of any evo-psych work that is based on more then pre-supposition and storytelling I'd be interested to hear about it, though we might want to make another thread for it.

One thing we can relate to cyclists is that while there are lots of women cycling, there are comparatively few on cycling forums on the internet.

Also, euc's are expensive and white men are the group with the most money...

 

I wasn't terribly surprised to find a male-skewed forum - I was quite surprised to find no women given the number of members though.  You make a good point about subconscious assumptions - it was a while before the lack of women occurred to me, but then I wasn't too sure of the gender of posters in many cases.  I still half-expecting a few posters to have pointed out they were female at this point.

 

Edited October 9, 2015 by MrBump
clarity

[MrBump]

Interesting, couldn't find a source for that though (not that I spent much time trying to find it )...

I think the stat was relating to code being *run* rather than new code being written, though I'd have to look it up.

As for dying out, I thought it was going that way when a friend of mine got a job a a COBOL programmer nearly 20 years ago - she's still doing COBOL stuff...  There's a lot more of it about than you'd think.  Things get embedded - GM have a massive assembly line in the States that still uses punch cards iirc.

I should point out I'm not trying to blame anyone here for a particular culture or anything - I think this forum is an extremely welcoming place.

 

[Chrisxr2]

Show an ad about an euc  toning your bod with little or no Effort and the ladies would be on it like a tramp on chips, as an enjoyment device or transport, no. How many skateboarders scooter riders over about 9 do you see that are female?? About 0.

[Villac]

Has a woman joined this discussion yet? I assume no, but it is hard to tell from usernames.

[MrBump]

Has a woman joined this discussion yet? I assume no, but it is hard to tell from usernames.

I think we'd have been able to tell.

Show an ad about an euc  toning your bod with little or no Effort and the ladies would be on it like a tramp on chips, as an enjoyment device or transport, no. How many skateboarders scooter riders over about 9 do you see that are female?? About 0.

Yet you see plenty on bicycles without any "tone your butt, ask me how" adverts plastering the ad space.

And oddly, when it comes to horses, they seem to become a majority* (though only within a very class-bound minority).

And horses are both expensive and dangerous.  And they don't come in pink....

* - judging from the numbers I see on the roads, which is obv a subset as they're generally not used on roads**

** - for clarity, I should point out that I am talking about woman and girls riding horses - not horses riding electric unicycles.  That would be ridiculous.  They have no disposable income and they'd need to buy one for their front feet and one for the back ones.

Edited October 10, 2015 by MrBump