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Comment by nojvek | Hacker News Reader

I see this from another point of view.

Suppose a female new grad goes to Electronconf and sees all male speakers. Suppose she goes to other conferences and it's the same story.

She feels there's no way she'll be able to break ground and be recognized as successful. She slowly drops out and leaves the industry and goes somewhere where she can make friends like her.

Now suppose she sees plenty of female speakers and she thinks to herself "wow this is awesome, I wanna be like her, she was like me 5 years ago". She stays in industry, and possibly becomes a speaker on future.

Once the cycle of people being motivated and seeing others like you starts, you see a diverse set of candidates joining the industry.

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>Suppose a female new grad goes to Electronconf and sees all male speakers. Suppose she goes to other conferences and it's the same story.

>She feels there's no way she'll be able to break ground and be recognized as successful.

Does a person like that actually exist? Have you ever met a person that was so discouraged and distraught by the fact that many tech conferences have more white male speakers that she decided to leave the industry?!

Or are we just spinning a hypothetical person that does not actually exist?

>Once the cycle of people being motivated and seeing others like you starts, you see a diverse set of candidates joining the industry.

Again, is that actually based on reality??

This is line argument is so frustrating. I strongly suspect you're just making things up. You have a particular belief and you used a totally made-up scenario as validation for your belief.

This relies on some sort of implied theory that women require female role models in order to be encouraged to break into an industry(and vice versa, probably).

I don't know if it's true or not, but I find way more in common between me and the nerdy girl studying programming in my class than between me and the tall athlete playing football. I would have thought that our shared love for programming and geeky stuff would be a sign that this is a space with shared values, more than the gender of the speakers.

Of course, this may be a skewed perspective since there have always been men in the hobbies that I picked; but I would also think that a woman breaking into programming would be aware of the existing gender disparity, just like I am aware I would be a "gender minority" if I pursued teaching or psychology(things I was actually interested in due to great female role models in my youth!)

> Suppose a female new grad goes to Electronconf and sees all male speakers. Suppose she goes to other conferences and it's the same story.

How does cancelling the conference help anybody? The minority of women that may have otherwise met and inspired each other no will no longer meet. Everyone is worse off.

> Once the cycle of people being motivated and seeing others like you starts, you see a diverse set of candidates joining the industry.

Do you think this really applies in the computer industry? I've been doing this for a while, and at no point have I had - or cared to have - any heroes to emulate. I work with computers because I like computers - not because I like people!

You can generalize this in any way.

Height: Hey, all the conference speakers are really tall, there's no way I a 5'4" male be a conference speaker.

College: None of the conference speakers are from my university hence there's no way I from an unknown university can make it in the industry.

There are already a ton of female only events including conferences happening in the tech industry and if most cutting-edge stuff in a narrow field/tech (electron) is being done by male counterparts (or they are more interested in speaking about it) that shouldn't be a bad thing.

Wow, what a weak view of women.

Do you think Marie Curie or Ada Lovelace were motivated by the amount of women in science and engineering?

Is this a joke to perpetuate the "can't go alone to the bathroom" meme?

`Dweck, like many adults, had learned to hide her frustration and anger, to politely say “I’m not sure I want to play this anymore” instead of knocking over the board. She figured the successful kids would be the same — they’d have tactics for coping with failure instead of getting beaten down by it.

But what she found was radically different. The successful kids didn’t just live with failure, they loved it! When the going got tough, they didn’t start blaming themselves; they licked their lips and said “I love a challenge.” They’d say stuff like “The harder it gets the harder I need to try.”

Instead of complaining it wasn’t fun when the puzzles got harder, they’d psych themselves up, saying “I’ve almost got it now” or “I did it before, I can do it again.” One kid, upon being a given a really hard puzzle, one that was supposed to be obviously impossible to solve, just looked up at the experimenter with a smile and said, “You know, I was hoping this would be informative.”` - Aaron Swartz, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck

Another way to look at the scenario is to go "Oh cool I'll get to be the first woman presenter, instead of the millionth."

You've proposed a false choice - between a conference with male speakers and a conference with female speakers. As the article shows, the choice is between a conference with male speakers and no conference. In the first case, most attendees learn Electron and the community expands and maybe a small subset of people are turned off by the demographics of the speakers. In the second case, nobody learns Electron and the community doesn't grow. Everybody is turned off because the place to which they wanted to go to learn about a cool new technology is not available.

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