I was watching the "Silicon Valley" TV show and was surprised how women are presented. Whether they are coders or non-tech, the theme went like this:
Women who Code: always ask fellow men for help with their coding skills or just appear to not know what they were doing. Present them as sex objects, where men are thinking of them just for sex
Women who can't code: generally presented either as stupid, dumb or as assistants of men who knew better.
It seem that Hollywood is also complicit in presenting women as sex object. But I wasn't sure if this really is the truth about the culture in general in SV.
> Women who Code: always ask fellow men for help with their coding skills or just appear to not know what they were doing. Present them as sex objects, where men are thinking of them just for sex
In many government jobs, the criteria for moving a task forward is the ability to check off a tick box. So you do not admit you do not know the answer; you give a plausible answer that lets the officer check the box. That's the case for most govt questions. Very little depth is required in the answers as not everything can be validated in the timespan of an interview. So admit you know what a binary tree is and talk about it in high level terms. Unless the officer was a previous programmer, the checkbox gets checked.
When you say you do not know or answer a different question, it makes it harder to check that box off. Most officials just want to check a box and move you (and themselves) on. Don't make it difficult for them.
You assume that the box says next to it "can answer questions about his career specialism correctly". It probably doesn't. More likely it says "does not appear nervous when asked about his career specialism, and appears to know topics he claims to know" or something more like that.
I did not understand what the website is about. You could put a summary at the top of what the website does, that would be very helpful. I browsed for 10 seconds and left.
I actually had the opposite experience. Whereby, I as a non-native english speaker was surprised at the level of english of born and bred english speakers. It was disastrous at times.
Most did not go over a single sentence without using auto-correct or other tools. I've seen some copy text from the internet and put it through an article spinner, then paste it to their assignments. Not just because of laziness or the desire to cheat, but because they couldn't spell or form appropriate sentences.
Additionally, just because your english isn't so good doesn't mean you don't know the subject you are writing about. Unless your thesis is about English Literature, then I agree with the article.
I had a colleague who could barely write anything, but he was so outstanding in Math, that the professor asked him politely not to attend the classes anymore. His thesis was impossible to read but he still got the best marks.
Your intelligence and abilities to understand and master a subject have nothing to do with how well you write/speak.
It is however crucial to learn to write and speak properly in the longterm, especially if you decide to work/live in that country.
There's still a strong myth that there is a causal effect between how well you can write, and how well you can think, conduct a logical reasoning or w/e... And of course most people who say that believe to know better than linguists/psychology researchers on the matter.
