Women in Tech: How Anonymity Contributes to the Problem | Hacker News Reader

Women in Tech: How Anonymity Contributes to the Problem

33bits.org

12 pointsrandomwalker9 comments

You are conflating anonymity with accountability. Accountability can be improved without revealing someone's identity and revealing someone's identity will not necessarily improve their behavior. (There is plenty of bad behavior on Facebook, for example.)

Your (and Schmit's and Zuckerberg's) solution to this social problem will have more negative unintended consequences then I think we realize.

See the following for better reasoning and analysis than I can offer:

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securityma...

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/06/12/for-the...

It's darkly amusing how people pretend this is about anonymity. As if there had never been a sexist jerk who had a name.

The first-order answer - the word that belongs in this headline - is moderation; reputation and identity are just tools to make the moderation slightly easier. But people try to avoid facing up to this. Moderation is a tedious task that we all really wish could be done by a machine. It can't.

You're getting all wound up over nothing :) I write a blog about anonymity, so I'm pointing out that anonymity is part of the problem here.

Your point that moderation is the larger goal and reputation/identity is only a tool is certainly valid. I guess we disagree about how effective a tool it is. For a visceral, deeply depressing account of how different the same person's behavior can be depending on whether or not they're anonymous, check out the story of the harassment of two female Yale Law students on AutoAdmit: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfoli...

If there weren't anonymous comments, then we wouldn't know that some men in tech are in fact prejudiced against women in tech.

That said, I'm officially sick of this back-and-forth. It crops up every few months on the blogosphere, and we never get anywhere. It's both, guys. It's both. It may be relevant how much of it is one thing and how much of it is the other, but until you can walk up to me with a nice cold glass of data and tell me it's 23% biological and 23% prejudice and the other 54% is due to solar flares you're not going to convince me of anything at all.

Truce?

I thought this blog would be about how women being anonymous / not presenting as female (in order to avoid prejudice against them) means that it appears there are fewer women in the tech community then there actually are.

For the record I'm female.

I had the same thought, specifically women who work in FOSS communities anonymously and do independent consulting not being counted as much as those at random tech firms.

I don't know, at least in a FOSS community, revealing yourself as a woman seems like a good way to get plenty of help, swift replies, and votes for positions of power. I've seen it before ("Jill for list moderator! She's the greatest!"), but of course that's also a good reason for a woman to remain anonymous--not everybody is cut out for the fawning adoration of 15-year-old GNOME coders.

Certainly, it would stand to reason that anonymity would skirt much of the issue of bigotry of any kind, at least bigotry targeting other anonymous contributors. Maybe the tech community needs to simply stop being so self-conscious about its demographic makeup.

How it is always about the [presumably hostile] environment? how about a bit of personal responsibility? For example, if i try to practice law or medicine i'd also find myself in a hostile environment... Yep, i don't have a license.

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