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Comment by cbradshaw | Hacker News Reader

Is CS really “lauded as a haven for antisocial people?” Ouch. Some of the evidence in this article is anecdotal (female friend at a hackathon gets excluded by males, etc.).

Has no one else seen the plethora of “Women in Tech” meet ups, events and hiring fairs? Anecdotally, I have several female friends that have interviewed and been hired at companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon. I understand this isn’t statistically significant but does the cause have to be the fault of men (being less social, being perceived as weird, not welcoming women to the industry)?

Maybe there are less women in tech because women (generally) are less interested in the field?

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"Women in tech" events are a good example of how women exclude themselves. A typical event has the following attributes:

- Men strongly discouraged or banned from participating.

- Many of the attendees are "women in tech" but not "technical women", it's common to see women who describe themselves as co-founders, activists, HR staff and so on but relatively rare to find someone who actually spends all day banging out code.

- As a consequence of the above most of the talk at these events revolves around gender politics, not tech.

Source: girlfriend has learned to code and attended one or two meetup events advertised as being for women in tech, also from reading agendas or blog posts about such events.

Meanwhile the men are creating inclusive events that focus on knowledge sharing about hard tech topics. They use what they learn to build new things, they scope out each others talent and form professional relationships that can be used to build companies. True geek girls go to these events and are in the minority. The rest self-select out and create the exclusion they then blame men for. I have no sympathy.

That's an interesting theory, but do you have any evidence that most of these events are more political in nature than actually talking about programming and technology? Your girlfriend's one or two anecdotes aren't really sufficient to make a generalization like that.

It's not a theory, it's a description of my observations.

I've presented my sources. Why not go find counter-examples? I bet you'll find it's harder than you expect. But OK, I'll make my case more strongly.

Here's a simple exercise. Pick a buzzword, say blockchain, search for "women in X" and let's look at some of the top results.

https://www.womenontheblock.io/ - check out the speakers. The first is a PhD student in cryptography, not a bad start. But then there's a co-founder, another co-founder, another founder (of "Investing in Women" i.e. an activist), a lawyer, an actual software engineer! Sort of - in 2011 she was an intern, she spent two years doing support tickets and is now a PM, but hey, that's at least something. Then we're back to a lobbyist, another founder (of a foundation), another lawyer, "Chief Discovery Officer" whatever that is, lawyer, digital content lead, shareholder (?), co-founder, business development executive, CFO, lawyer, CTO of the World Bank Group whose background is actually management consulting and "thought leadership", sales, "human capital officer" etc etc.

You get the picture. I just worked down the list and of all the people listed, only two appeared to do anything actually related to writing software: a cryptography student and someone who spent a couple of years as a support engineer but then quickly moved into product management.

Notice the pre-ponderance of women calling themselves founders and co-founders. That's very common. They are not what HN readers would recognise as a startup founder. Often they've founded entities that don't do anything, or are just organising more "women in X" meetups, or in the rare case where they're making software, have partnered with men / outsourcing shops to do so.

Here's another example: https://www.blockchainbeach.com/live-2018-women-in-blockchai...

Look at the agenda. It starts with a basic intro to blockchain, ok, slightly technical but nothing you can't find on YouTube. But then we're right into a discussion of "her time in the middle east and dispelling misconceptions about women in that region" i.e. about general women's issues, not tech. Then a panel whose first listed topic is "social impact" and one of the members is a musician (at least two of the women do appear to be at least somewhat technical). Then a marketing pitch for some random alt-coin whose relevance appears to be mostly that the marketing person for NEM is a woman. Then a keynote on "diversity in blockchain" - women's issues/feminism again. Then a panel on "women empowerment and inclusion". Useful observations like "42% of all the women in the world do not have a bank account" (men's problems of course don't count). And so on.

Really, if you have never investigated these events before - don't bother. They are mostly just non-technical feminists complaining about men, engaging in outrageous sexism and generally making the whole feminist cause look bad.

Such anecdotes are also exemplary of how a lot of women(meaning not all) fail to question why it is they are being excluded. I think much of that comes down to how a lot of women don't understand just how intimidating they can be to men.

Women who are reading this should understand that you are undoubtedly intimidating at some level to some men out there. This is because we are not only frequently perceived as being "creepy", or trying to court women, but the perception is that society is asking a lot of specific treatment of women from men(one wrong word and we might have offended you somehow). Unless a man is attractive, it's much easier to avoid women all together.

I'm not saying it's a perfect system. It's mostly flawed. But I just wish that women would have a little more compassion and understanding to the male perspective. This article and others like it come off as externalizing that's basically concluding that men are being themselves too much because of ignorance and therefore need to change their behavior to comply with the wants of women, even though the reverse isn't being demanded of women; not often will you hear a man in tech say that women just need to toughen up. (by the way, I'm not even implying that)

Anecdotally as well, of the (few) women in the graduating class of my CS department all of them were hired almost instantly from a "Women in Tech" conference..Furthermore, I see anytime something become "glamorous" liking the idea of living in Marin and programming all day, there will be those who use any tactic into something they didn't start.

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