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Comment by edmccard | Hacker News Reader

>It's substantive and grounded in personal experience.

Yes, but it's the personal experience of someone who has never "had to defend their choice of or fight an uphill battle while selecting engineering as a career choice". Which makes it seem like more of an "argument by outlier" than the expression of some deep universal insight-- yes, maybe Mallika doesn't appreciate someone listening to her talk as "being supportive", but maybe women who have had to fight an uphill battle would appreciate the show of solidarity and the chance afterwards to swap war stories.

(I do agree that it was unfair to flag the article.)

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Indeed. When I visited India on a delegation to learn about these very issues, I was told that the local elementary schools didn't even have girls' bathrooms, that young women can't attend the entrance exam prep classes because they're held at night and it's too dangerous, and that when women do get into engineering schools, it's never the tier one schools.

Obviously I did not grow up in India so I can't say with certainty that the author is an outlier. But I have heard face-to-face from many, many, many Indian women who tell a very different story from the one we're reading here.

I hope anyone (including you and the author) talking about India is aware that it is a country of 1.3 billion people.

So you can find a Germany+Austria+Italy equivalent number of poor people in desolate conditions, but there also a UK+France+Spain+Nordic-countries equivalent number of people who are doing much better and have access to many resources.

So one's view of India totally depends on which European country equivalent you interfaced with, unless they have travelled to every region/state in India and lived there for a few months/years, without having a political/religious/NGO entity planning their itinerary.

In support of the author, I agree with what she says. Those women who do make it to engineering / tech / high-skilled professions tend to do so without having experienced the pink-elephant phenomena. In fact, I can totally empathize with what the author is saying in her post.

PS: I just made up the list of countries and equivalents, but I hope my analogy helps in understanding how vast India is, in terms of population, the demography, including the languages spoken, scripts written, religions / cultures followed by people.

Absolutely agree. India is a huge place. I may not have been strong enough in my caveats: this was a delegation with a specific purpose and fixed meetings; we visited two regions only; the use of the word "local"; and obviously none of us on the delegation are even from there, so what do we know, really? I just wanted to point out that I've heard stories from Indian women that are different than this one.

As a woman I can also empathize with the author and would of course prefer to have my work valued on its merits. I just don't think that's contradictory to having a robust diversity effort.

You wrote the very problem.

You don't agree with the thinking therefore the author is wrong and her experience and opinion isn't worth considering. This is the very antithesis of acceptance, inclusiveness, and diversity.

I think her message is very simple and powerful. Just be interested in what she is working on based on the merits or her work. I think that's an excellent model to strive for, and really, it's sad anyone has to even say it.

>You don't agree with the thinking therefore the author is wrong and her experience and opinion isn't worth considering.

No, I just don't agree that the author's experience generalizes to other women.

>Just be interested in what she is working on based on the merits or her work.

And what of people like the event manager in the article who are interested in other aspects of her career? Shouldn't we practice "acceptance, inclusiveness, and diversity" toward them also?

It is not an "argument by outlier", though. She describes a culture where her experience is normal. This culture results in both male and female engineers. Her critique is about a culture that feels compelled to pretense instead of compelled to change.

>She describes a culture where her experience is normal.

She describes having grown up in a culture where that experience is normal, but that is not necessarily the same culture that she is working in now.

This comment originated as a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15948126, but that subthread is penalized for being off topic. It doesn't seem fair for your comment to suffer that fate, so I've done something I don't think I ever did before, which is detach it from its parent and mark it on-topic. Sorry for the digression but your reply lacks context otherwise.

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