Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbcowans | Hacker News Reader

The questions and answers here aren't necessarily specific to women. The idea of the series is just to ask women engineers questions and see what they say.

View on HN

But it seems rather stereotyping to start out with kids and relationships for a series about female engineers. Or do "Ask a male or non-gender specific engineer" series also start with those questions?

I mean, they're important questions, but the stereotype seems rather blatant here.

I think it's hilarious that there are so many comments like this one that make it clear that people are criticizing this article without actually reading it.

[As others have pointed out, it's the 4th article in a series so they are not "starting out" with stereotypical questions]

Even before I read this, I expected the comment section to be full of comments being like "why can't it be ask an engineer" or "why are they asking questions about kids, men have kids too". I've noticed a pattern where if there's any social issue on hacker news that is politically polarized (i.e. women's issues in tech, BLM, diversity in hiring, etc.) you can expect a a huge wave of comments that criticize the article from authors who don't actually read it.

The funny thing is that when you get into social issues that are not that polarizing (i.e. living wages, ethical issues of AI, privacy) the community tends to have a much more intelligent, civil discussion.

Well the problem of our world is that such article's actually support the gender/race/whatever split. I mean they basically want to solve it, but they create a paradoxon by treating these special. if people would just stop caring about differences we might start to actually have a better world, but I guess we are far far away from it.

well I mean when I search people for a job I mostly look at their performance and if they actually can't meet my requirements I need to say no. Well now guess what happens if I have 20 canidates and I now pick the canidate with the highest performance, the chance is pretty high that I also indirectly support the split, it's just because a minority will sometimes stay a minority which doesn't actually happen because you treat them differently, but because they either don't have the chance to get better or because some jobs are just not attractive for them. So the only way to solve the problem is just to stop treating people differently. Discussion is good, but overly discuss it is not, yeah there was a problem in the past, but I think it actually got better, while the last years somehow made it worse by unnecessary discussions or by people who actually seeked attention and actually put even more salt into the wounds. And the internet made it worse since it makes it hard to differentiate between attention seekers and truly suppressed people.

So you believe that by singling out women we may be adding to the problem because we are reinforcing the culture of treating people differently instead of judging them equally? That's a really fair point; it's exactly why I'm uncomfortable with policy solutions like affirmative action because I think they fight discrimination with discrimination.

This is exactly the type of discussion I'd like to have more of on Hacker News, I'm just making a broader call for us to do better as a community (and try to read the article if you are going to comment).

I think your point is interesting, but what do you propose to do regarding the injustices of the past in women and minority groups? You can't just unilaterally declare that the field is level, and ignore history.

Are you concerned about the women in the past and the injustices that they faced (in which case you're going to need a time machine to fix it) or are you worried about injustice faced by women in the present?

You're basically talking about reparations to a gender.

People of the present come from the people of the past. If society does terrible things to one person's grandparents and good things to another person's grandparents, one of those people is going to have more difficulties growing up. If this was condoned by society, perhaps society should take steps to fix it, otherwise the cycle may continue.

This only applies for segregated societies, though. I can see an argument for reparations to the grandchildren of slaves, for example, because their whole economic structure was impacted in a heritable way. The same doesn't apply across generations for women - if your mother was discriminated against, you suffer equally for it whether you're male or female.

Dude, if your mother was discriminated based on her gender, and you share that gender, you know that her story of discrimination (in the workplace, say) likely applies to you. If you're a man, you know that scare story doesn't apply to you.

> her story of discrimination (in the workplace, say) likely applies to you

Why?

This series isn't supportive of gender based discrimination, it simply acknowledges the physical fact that men and women exists as two separable groups, and then asks question to a small sample of the underrepresented group.

There are undeniable differences between women and men, and pretending that they don't exists, as you suggest, doesn't make them go away. It merely means that one of the groups will not have their specific requirements considered.

I think it's hilarious that you assume we who are criticizing the article haven't fully read it.

To be fair - if these questions were asked to a male engineer, I would criticize the article too.

The funny thing is that these questions are not asked to male engineers.

I'm assuming people haven't read it because the comment (and a several others in the thread) starts complaining that the series "starts" by asking stereotypical questions to women. The first line in the article is talking about this is a series and that it's not the first post (it links to the first one). So I'm making this assumption because people are making a claim directly disproved in the first line of the article.

I do agree that every question in this article is just as relevant to men.

Why?

> why are they asking questions about kids, men have kids too

Rather, why are they asking questions about kids. This is "ask female engineers" not "Ask Mommy Engineers."

This is the fourth post in the series, not the start.

http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/introducing-ask-a-femal...

http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/ask-a-female-engineer-2...

http://themacro.com/articles/2016/10/ask-a-female-engineer-3...

> But it seems rather stereotyping to start out with kids and relationships for a series about female engineers

Except they didn't "start out" with this post. I believe this is the 4th of the series.

If you want people to improve, you must promote curiosity and indulge their questions. Even when those questions are stupid (in some fashion). Just about the easiest way to shut people up and send them back into their heads, with their patriarchal stereotypes unchallenged, is to tell them that the questions they're asking are wrong.

The industry is crawling. We'd like it to be running, but we need to be patient and allow it to walk first. You cannot build mutual understanding without patience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com