These threads on HN are always extremely rough to read. I wonder what would need to happen for a more productive conversation around this topic to be possible? More participation, more moderation, better understanding, what would it take?
I for one am too scared that I might blurt out something offensive inadvertently and get labeled a 'misogynist' which can pretty damning to one's career and something you cannot defend yourself against. All it takes is one person with an agenda to tarnish your reputation forever. I don't want someone tweeting at my employer with "are you ok with this .."
thanks but No thanks. I am going stay far far away from "women in tech" business .
What are some of your thoughts around how to achieve this.
So, I would like to see events that are more focused on bringing people together.
So instead of talking about and examining my/our own prejudices, i have to pretend to be a morally infallible saint who is incapable of thinking "wrong" thoughts.
If you, as a writer, want someone to focus on a particular topic, you should generally avoid distracting your readers with ridiculous statements such as "entrepeneurs are an entirely different breed of human beings".
We've had plenty of those, they still usually devolve into a shitshow.
What a ridiculous situation to even be considering talking about, yet here we are.
Any entrepreneur has to decide if an investor is a good fit, I have decided that misogynists are not a good fit.
Is it perhaps because the blog reads like as if it was written by a some freshman in sociology class?
Apparently, even dumbing it down doesn't make it idiot proof.
But make no mistake -- that those who moderate and administrate choose not to act does not absolve them of responsibility for the bigoted, status-quo-loving noise that dominates here and more than justifies the reputation HN has across the web.
I'll do some soul searching in this space since it's clear that few others will.
It took a long time for me to get to the root of sexism in myself and others. Gender is very core to identity and it's perceived as an attack on one's masculinity to be accused of sexism.
To rise past this deep urge is very difficult. To see females as people instead of objects is easy to do intellectually, very hard to internalize to the point to where you can look at a female programmer and actually see a programmer instead of a woman.
I think there is a certain level of ingrained social awkwardness in the tech community that exacerbates this. In other milieus, you'd never see things like codes of conduct becoming actual bones of contention. Everywhere else, guys might have their beliefs about the necessity of codes of conduct or otherwise, but know better than to actually express them. In tech, every idiot with an opinion thinks it's important enough to mouth off about.