The intent of the post, sure. Women and men are equally capable of anything.
But absolutely nobody creating sewing patterns is sitting down and going "alright the integral of e to the x dx is...." Or remembering their laplace transformations.
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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I love over-complicating things... but Calculus in a sewing pattern sounds really strange.
Unless... it is like for a space suit where you need to be accurate? Or making something for a form fitting hard surface?
Quilters would like a word.
where you need to be accurate
Only if you want clothes that fit
Well there is a lot of calculus involved in making patterns like body ratios or wool to knot ratios if you put knitting into sewing.
I imagine people are using calculus to analyze knitting patterns and stuff. Not the knitters themselves, but mathematicians who are studying knots or whatever
Unless... it is like for a space suit
Fun fact, the space suits used in the Apollo program were made by Playtex
I'm not saying I couldn't see cases where I would seriously consider using calculus in a sewing pattern, but it's really not used in sewing pattern creation basically ever unless someone already knows it and has a very specific use case. I suspect the OP meant "calculations" or something similar and mis-typed.
Source: I still remember a fair amount of calculus and I sew
Of course they don’t mean women pull out a calculator, a notebook, and start doing calculations, anymore than when a person throws a ball at a target they pull out some graph paper and start calculating parabolic arcs and all that shit. They’re saying we do it instinctively, and if we’re good at doing it instinctively then we can do it intellectually.
Do you think "mental calculus" means people are doing derivatives in their heads?
It doesn't. It's also not what was meant by the author of this post when they used the word.
IIRC back when "computer" is a person rather than an object, it was a woman's job.
And even when computers started to come around, data entry was still largely female dominated. It wasn't until late ron that it became a male dominated space. Largely due to the takeover of video games, which were in America heavily marketed towards only boys and not often marketed towards girls.
So it was always an object?
it was OOP even back then
- as the title indicates, women have been there since the dawn of computing
- computer referred to a person that did calculations, and it was usually a woman.
- is sitting on your ass on a comfortable chair in front of a computer instead of running around caving in skulls really masculine or feminine?
The origins of computer programming are also intertwined with textiles, as the first punch card programs emerged as part of weaving in the early 1800s (Jacquard looms).
Also interesting: trans people in addition to cis women are historically associated with textile production in many cultures. Trans programmer socks = modern day trans weaver.
Hooray for the Lady who might have written the first algorithm! She needs more attention.
Other: Charles Babbage (sp?) and the Analytic Engine: perhaps our first real computer. Imagine a steampunk world where all our devices were powered by huge mechanical chunks and chonks.
I saw a video of a constructed Analytical Engine (they couldn't manufacture the parts to the specs required in Babbage's time) donated to a Computer History museum by an early Microsoft exec. Didn't find it on a quick search, but it's a huge thing driven by a physical crank.
This woman wrote computer programs while computers were still almost purely theoretical. Fucking mind-blowing.
I can't imagine a more advanced mind. I mean, maybe Einstein, but we have proof of her discoveries and they're not at all abstract in the contemporary world! (I mean, they kinda are, but you get what I mean.)
Lovelace
On the subject of lace, making it is very intricate and quite mathematical too
I can't help but feel that we aren't even close to matching the intelligence of women.
Well obviously for you if username checks out...
whats really funny to me is people make this claim, but any good study that looks for differences finds none or that women are very slightly better at math and spatial reasoning
Got a good link to read and share?
Someone passed this before; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-level_task
This finds the opposite and proves the original conjecture, that men perform better than women on spatial tasks
32% of college women failed the test, compared to 15% of college men
So both genders are fucking stupid?
Everybody is stupid, unless the CHOOSE not to be.
Don't be silly. I have an overcomplicated learning chart, and neither the time nor capacity to study.
My speech patterns are still stained with my earlier learnings, making me sound smarter than I am.
People just don't feel comfortable with the idea that their intelligence can simply be taken away.
Wait you're telling me that women are better? So that differences between the sexes exist?
No, the point is that there isn't, and experiments that do show a slight difference are probably due to experimental error, biases, sampling differences, etc.
Simply being either a man or woman does not make you better than another.
That is just wrong though. There have been plenty of reputable studies with good methodology that do show differences between the sexes at certain tasks.
That does not mean that one or the other is better in general, it means women and men complement each other.
It also doesn't mean that these innate advantages/disadvantages at certain tasks are significant enough so they are impossible to overcome, there are plenty of men good at communicating or whatever, even though women are generally slightly better at it, and so on.
Yes, because of hormone shenanigans, in some physical tasks, men tend to do slightly better than women. But as you said, these differences do not mean that men are inherently "better" than women. Additionally, the discussion was around mathematics and reasoning skills, in which there isn't too much of a difference between men and women.
That does not mean that one or the other is better in general, it means women and men complement each other.
This reads like you believe that "women are dependent on men" and that you are against same-sex relationships. I hope that's not your intention.
In my town the fact girls were worse than boys at maths was addressed, education of girls was improved
Now girls are better than boys at maths and no one seems to care
honestly, drawing patterns only uses "calculus" and "trig" because those are the arbitrary names given to the thought processes that blend the proper melding of mind to motion
Isn't that also true of the word "mathematics" as well?
Turns out she even caught the world's first bug and wrote its second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note_G?wprov=sfla1
Remember me to
A lot of math needed, more as for the pattern, to make clothes to fit on an irregular body
First computers are based on the input of sewing machines
Whenever I hear someone slopping that "adage" out, I silently note that they've no idea how many of the Apollo astronauts were able to return to Earth safely. (It rhymes with "female mathematicians", btw.)
All of them, the answer is all of them. Follow me for more English hacks!
(It rhymes with "female mathematicians", btw.)
...The male mathematicians? Retail statisticians?? Detailed staff positions???
I wonder if this is what they were referencing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-level_task
"...the finding that men perform [the water-level task] at a higher level has been robustly confirmed."
It goes on to say "One typical study from 1989 found that 32% of college women failed the test, compared to 15% of college men." A third of girls who made it into college couldn't do it.
I assume for the college level students it's who can mark the level of the water most accurately? I certainly hope all of them would at least mark the water line horizontal to the ground
Wikipedia suggests a common failure is to not change the angle of the water surface, leaving it parallel to the base of the tube rather than to gravity
Been seeing these shorts of a dude who does tie dye shirts, but he does hella math to know how fold the fabric up and get gnarly geometric shapes and mandalas. It's like damascus steel, but with trippy colors.
I love these pseudo intelectual arguments that try to explain human behavior. It's a fact that there are biological differences between men and women, that is obvious. But people love to pull sophisticated pseudo scientific arguments that rest in very weak premises, which often ignore the many other factors (for example social and political) that also influence the outcome this argument is trying to explain.
So, this women are bad at spatial awareness so they are bad at math. How do we objectively validate the premise in the first place, without taking into account biases that can influence that very premise, like social, nutritional and political factors? Are math skills only influenced by spatial awareness or are there other factors that influence math skills?
So this argument is actually a subjective prejudice but worded in a way that seems to be scientifically valid. One consequence of the enlightenment is that we started to try all the time to disguise a subjective prejudice with an objective truth. After that we had eugenics, (pseudo-) scientific race theory and all kinds bad justifications, but the truth is that people want to exploit other people, and they think that coming up with moral and scientific explanations for this exploitation makes them sleep better after making numerous atrocities during the day.