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>I don't care about clothing styles, but if you dress very strangely, I'll judge you just the same.

That is a direct contradiction. You acknowledge as much right after. What's even the point of writing this and posting it?

>And right now, you are not focussing on technology, but on gender issues. So you're a hypocrite. You care enough about gender to voice an opinion, but only to lash out at others who dare to have an opinion?

You either ignored his point or completely misunderstood it. I can't tell which. Then you also made a strawman.

>People have different priorities from you. Some people want a safe, encouraging work/hobby community. Some people want role models. Who are you to say they shouldn't work to create those, and instead work to get what you want?

Ok, I'm wondering if maybe English isn't your first language and something is getting lost in translation here. Your points just...make absolutely no sense. It's like you're responding to a fictitious argument that you've constructed in your mind.

Anyways, responding to that bit: So different priorities means, to you, that it's fair to disenfranchise a group? You think that it's preferable to raise one group up at the expense of another, as opposed to striving for equality? I get very serious "your rights end where my feelings begin" vibes from your way of writing.

>Have you considered the possibility that you are actually wrong about what you believe?

Have you?

>That is a direct contradiction. You acknowledge as much right after. What's even the point of writing this and posting it?

Umm... to SHOW that it's a contradiction. To demonstrate the absurdity of making statements that betray one's behavior. It's easier to know how dumb you're being if you see someone else doing it.

Let me rephrase this for you.

I don't care about anime. When someone throws an anime conference, I don't care. I won't be going. What I'm not going to do is jump on the internet and start saying "I have a problem with anime conferences!"

I might have a problem with, say, a Nazi conference; their goals and premises are fundamentally objectionable to me. What is fundamentally objectionable about a women in tech conference? More women in tech?

> >Have you considered the possibility that you are actually wrong about what you believe? > Have you?

Yes. All the time. You see, I'm not complaining about people ostracizing me for my stupid ideas. They are free to do that, and I deserve it when it happens. That's how stupid ideas die.

>I don't care about anime. When someone throws an anime conference, I don't care. I won't be going. What I'm not going to do is jump on the internet and start saying "I have a problem with anime conferences!"

Apples and oranges, you're allowed to go to anime conferences.

This is literally what you think:

"You're opposed to gender-exclusive conferences, and you think that the prioritization of one gender over another is counter-intuitive in regards to attaining gender equality, that means that you object to women in tech".

There is something horribly wrong with your way of thinking if that is your interpretation.

A. I'm not talking about gender-exclusive conferences, nor was the person I responded to (as far as I can tell), nor have I ever heard of such a thing.

B. If you think my English is so poor that I'm unable to properly express myself, then maybe you shouldn't pretend to know what I'm thinking. You only have access to a few of my words, and you've already (actually, literally) indicated that you don't understand them.

So don't be an ass. And maybe take a step back and look at how your behavior supports your broader point.

You completely misunderstand what I am saying.

1. I care about people, and believe that they have unlimited potential. If anything, this fundamental belief is the core of all of my interactions with my students.

2. I do not believe in bias against someone else because of something they cannot control. We call that discrimination.

3. What, then, do we call bias in favor of someone, also because of something they cannot control? By definition, it is equally a bias against everyone else who does not have that same attribute (again, something that they cannot control). Therefore, it, too, is discrimination.

4. I abhor discrimination, because it invalidates the accomplishments of everyone involved. This is true both those whose achievements were marginalized by the discrimination, as well as those whose achievements were enhanced by it.

5. I do not argue that people come from unequal backgrounds. What I am arguing, however, is that CS is the equalizer, based on your accomplishments, and your accomplishments ARE NOT limited by your starting position. This is true regardless of gender, race, sexuality, disability, or familial history.

6. Any single-issue outreach (like gender) is insulting, in that it ignores the rest of the person. It reduces them to a number as it relates to that issue. It is demeaning to the individual, and I refuse to participate in it. It is not just that I dislike it, but that I fundamentally disagree with the nature of its being.

When I praise my students, it is because they earned it and they deserve it. If I were to suggest that perhaps CS is not right for them (which I have never done to any of the ~200 students that I have taught), it would also be because that was the right advice for that individual.

This is why I disagree with these types of conferences. And yet, still, I am perceived as the bad guy...

You're not the bad guy for expressing that discrimination is a problem, you're the bad guy for not doing so eloquently and revealingly.

But discrimination is not inherently a problem, it is only a problem when it leads to bad decision-making, especially in the long term. If I were very short (a factor I cannot control) and I was responsible for reaching high places, it would be discriminatory to deny me the position, but it wouldn't be a problem. There's no mistake reaching such a rational decision, if it is in fact, rational. Which in this case, would imply there is no access to height-boosting equipment or reach-extending tools.

>What I am arguing, however, is that CS is the equalizer, based on your accomplishments, and your accomplishments ARE NOT limited by your starting position.

CS can be an equalizer, but your accomplishments ARE limited by your starting position. Discrimination invalidates accomplishments precisely because it limits your starting position.

>Any single-issue outreach (like gender) is insulting, in that it ignores the rest of the person.

I don't see how that follows. If I build a ladder for short people, am I insulting tall people? Am I ignoring them? Am I reducing them to a number? Or would a tall person be reducing themselves to a number by objecting (needlessly) to the construction of ladders?

>If I build a ladder for short people, am I insulting tall people? Am I ignoring them? Am I reducing them to a number?

The problem is that, you're not just building a ladder. You're purposely not hiring the tall peoples. Instead, you purposely hire the short people, because you perceived the short people to have a disadvantage in height. Then after you hired them, you build each and everyone of them a ladder, to make them as tall the the tall people in the first place, who, you could have hired in the first place, and wouldn't have needed the ladder in the first place if you hired the tall peoples in the first place. And not only that, the short people understands that this job require reaching high places, so most of them have already decided to go for another job, a job that they love that doesn't required them to reach high places with their hands. And then you're wondering, why don't short people comes for hire? I must enforce quote and force all jobs that require tall peoples to hire short peoples, instead of just letting things fall where they fall, naturally.

If you came to me looking for a job, and we've had this exact conversation, here's what I'd want to say to you:

"My goal is to hire competent people. Technically competent and socially competent people. That means getting along with others and understanding their perspectives and priorities. I don't care how well you know some piece of software; you can learn that in a book. I can buy you a book. You can't learn basic human decency from a book.

As someone who presumably cares about this company, I'm aware that we do not only sell products, but also culture, and if you cannot produce valuable culture, then you will not serve this company well. I will not hire you. Not because I have some quota to meet, but because I have standards to meet, and you do not meet them. If you want to be so myopic as to ignore gender issues (or any other issue that actually matter to people in this world,) then go do that on your own time."

On the other hand, if you come to my company, and every decision you make, you make because of a person's specific gender, then that's sexist, and I would no hire you either.

All workers need to be treated the same (aka, professionally) no matter the gender. I don't need my workers to go around making decision based on whether the other work is male or female. That's sexist.

People need to stop treating people differently base on their gender, and need to start treating all people the same, no matter their gender. When you do something because of a specific gender, that's sexism.

> And right now, you are not focussing on technology, but on gender issues. So you're a hypocrite. You care enough about gender to voice an opinion, but only to lash out at others who dare to have an opinion?

When two unrelated fields clash (say science and religion to illustrate the point with different topics), you have to "take a stand" on both even if you want to care only about one of them.

In the specific case of the previous poster, I think that what he means is that he wants the most important criteria to be about technology. Inevitably, that means that gender ratios are only secondary considerations to those.

Maybe that stance is to focus on gender issues in your view. But in that case, what would a stance that focuses only on technology?

They're not really unrelated fields. No two fields are unrelated, especially to sociology and psychology.

HTTPS was invented to solve a security problem -- a completely social issue that wouldn't exist if people just could be trusted with your data. Unicode was invented to solve the problem that not everybody writes with the Latin alphabet, a problem caused only because people don't agree to fix it. Neither of those would have meant anything if someone didn't convince everybody to use them -- another purely social problem. In fact, almost all computer science issues are attempts to solve or make irrelevant certain classes of social problems. They're not unrelated fields at all. Communication and technology are practically the same thing.

>I think that what he means is that he wants the most important criteria to be about technology

The most important criteria for what? For what conferences people should have? For establishing what a given human wants out of life? For determining whether an industry is prejudiced?

The cases you give are good examples of places where technology was harnessed to solve social problems.

But it is possible to not "care" about these issues: either by working on solutions to other problems or by focusing only on making the technology better.

That is what I meant by "unrelated", maybe I should have used "independent".

> The most important criteria for what? For what conferences people should have? For establishing what a given human wants out of life? For determining whether an industry is prejudiced?

The most important criteria for technological pursuits, not social ones. People who disagree on political issues can still pursue technology progress together on issues that don't involve those political issues for example (not that this is the case here, I'm speaking generally).