Nvidia CEO tells female raffle winner: “You don’t even know what a GPU is, huh?” | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia CEO tells female raffle winner: “You don’t even know what a GPU is, huh?”

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39 pointsblackhole31 comments

I watched the video linked below, I honestly don't see how his remark is linked to gender at all.

The lottery was going badly with many ticket holders not being in the room so they are calling out numbers with no response. Huang comments on how it is going right before he makes his remark. When the winner is on stage, and the 2nd female winner too, he shows interest and appears impressed by what they do.

Where's the drama? I don't see it.

I agree, if anything I think the remark looks more like a joke targeted to her young age than her gender in the context of the video.

I thought it was because she was moving slowly.

"time limit"

"hurry up"

"are you sure you know what you won!, I'd be running"

but I didn't attribute it to malice so I might be biased. :x

What's always the interesting to me about these kinds of unfortunate interactions is how amplified they become as they are reported. The title of the post is "Dumb Widdle Girls in Tech." A quote from the author: "It’s impressive that you overcame the intellectually debilitating condition of being female to understand the nuances of deep learning." To be fair, much of the post was balanced, but those 2 things stood out to me.

I'm not defending what Huang said at all, but I do think that it's unfortunate that the worst possible extreme sexism is always assumed at the slightest off-color remark. Should remarks like these be career or position-ending? Let's see what happens.

> I'm not defending what Huang said at all, but I do think that it's unfortunate that the worst possible extreme sexism is always assumed at the slightest off-color remark.

I've almost always been opposed to the forced cultural changes that our industry has dealt with in the past few years - but come one. This wasn't an "off-color remark", it was offensive and I can see no way it could have been intended otherwise.

If that's not an off-color remark, tell me an actual sex-related off-color remark.

How about: "Oh, I am surprised a girl won the raffle." That's off color (I.e. why put emphasis on the fact that they are underrepresented) but not offensive (I.e. there's no questioning the girls knowledge).

Not trying to be pedantic here, but that's not off-color at all. There's nothing in poor taste about saying women are under-represented.

I'm sure Huang didn't consciously intend to be sexist, but unfortunately a culture of "off-color remarks" is what enables sexism. Senior, highly visible professionals should be particularly aware even of their off-hand remarks, as they have a disproportionate influence over the culture of their company and sector.

The article doesn't actually say this, but the comment starts around 42:30 in the video [1]. It's as amazingly bad as you can expect.

[1] http://www.ustream.tv/channel/fWbQyaEMfbh

Oh come on, if you watched the whole event there were TONS of low key, prejudice jokes at the expense of everyone. The "deep learning" community was insulted, the other speaker "can only count in binary", there was a Star Trek speech. There was so much banter, you could get horribly offended and sick to your stomach at least once per minute if you felt like it.

If you see her getting called on stage, the very next line was about their age (the group of people she belonged to?), them having to do homework.

Is there any response from the women in the video herself? How did she interpret it?

I watched the stream. Definitely not a sensitive remark and frankly the guy came off as a jackass across the board, from brushing off the research group's description of their work just before the raffle, to this insensitive-or-worse joke, to holding onto the second woman to win's hand for a creepy-long time.

Cool that both raffle winners were women and it was nice to see quite a few women in the audience!

I haven't seen any statements from her, but you can see her body language following the remark (~42:53). Suddenly she stops walking, turns in his direction, her mouth opens wider, she stays frozen there for a brief moment, and then continues walking.

I usually don't think too highly of PC in general, but this was simply uncalled for. Why say anything, man?

I think it was an off the cuff attempt at humor, and just wasn't good. Some people shouldn't improvise. It was definitely offensive, though I also think some of the reactions are over the top.

> Some people shouldn't improvise.

Are you saying that only improvisation-privileged people should be allowed to improvise?

yes.

As always people being oversensitive about practically nothing. I think I will not open again articles mentioning such incidents.

Commentary starts at 62:20 here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/fWbQyaEMfbh

> “I am literally sick to my stomach,” wrote group member Carolyn Farino.

It was a stupid comment, how can a stupid comment like that induce sickness in another human being?

Make a joke about typical male stereotypes, nobody bats an eye, make a bad joke involving females, the feminist lynch mob goes into action.

Let's assume in a fashion show a women CEO would have made a similar stupid comment to a male, would we see such a male outrage? No.

Ok cool so Huang can tell women what they know, and you can tell them how to feel.

She's claiming a physical reaction, not an emotional one. While we can't know if she's feeling nauseous, it's perfectly reasonable to doubt her conclusion that this is caused by Huang's statement.

Do we know better than her how she feels and why?

Whenever you ask a question, I feel physically sick. Please stop asking questions. And don't question me.

> would we see such a male outrage?

Pretty much the whole Internet consists of male outrage. That and cats.

> Make a joke about typical male stereotypes, nobody bats an eye

I'm starting to think that maybe this is a problem. Maybe we should stop tolerating male stereotypes.

Edit: typo.

It's not a great thing, sure. But how about a different power imbalance situation. You go to a doctor. The doctor makes a joke "you patients have no idea..." Or similar. The power imbalance there is obvious to anyone. You making a joke about the doctor is different. Power imbalance makes some things less acceptable when its to your advantage. Power imbalance due to gender is generally harder to detect when male.

Totally agree about power imbalance; stereotyping (and belittling in general) someone from a position of more perceived power is of course worse, no doubt about that. But parent's point was along the lines of: women can't take jokes as men do, men are such sports! The most important objection is of course that stereotypes about men don't actually harm men, while stereotypes about women do often harm women, but I also wanted to point out that men being such sports is not necessarily a great thing.

It was a stupid comment, how can a stupid comment like that induce sickness in another human being?

It's called the sympathetic nervous system[1]. Enough deeply-felt outrage will do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_nervous_system

> I am literally sick to my stomach

> I feel like I was just stabbed in the chest.

Placing this particular incident aside, this kind of hyperbolic speech seems pretty common in comment threads across the internet. It's a lot more dramatic and antagonizing than simply saying "I'm outraged!", and it certainly isn't unique to "the feminist lynch mob".

This observation very well just be confirmation bias on my part.

what a daft remark, but let's not forget Hanlon's razor here.

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