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As infuriating it is to read your comment, because it showcases immense lack of understanding on the topic only thing I can say is that from your end of the table what you write seems logical - but reality is much different. I cannot blame you for not experiencing a walk of a woman, a life of a woman and the journey of women in this world for the last (at least) 200 years - across different countries and cultures. Only thing I can ask you is to look at relevant research and reports that constantly show women are being discriminated against and looked over. Yes, in tech. Yes, in construction. Yes, at home with families. It's not about our choice only. It's about a clear existent barrier that is perpetuated over and over. Think of Saudi Arabia and position of the women in that society. Think of Sweden on the flip-side. Our lives might be very different, but if you dig below the surface you will find many commonalities - one being that women till this day do not have ownership over their bodies, let alone their journeys.

I hope one day you will listen to some experiences of women around you and read necessary literature. And I hope you develop empathy for the journey, but also understanding why highlighting women who are doing something in predominately male industry should be lifted to visibility - especially if its people of color, immigrants and other groups that have it even harder.

Have a great day.

> Hence , I will never get why tech industry believes so much it must be so « inclusive ».

Perhaps, if many people in a community complain, you should assume that they have a reason to do so? And you might listen, in order to learn the source of the upset and what can be done to fix it?

Do you take the same attitude with your customers, clients, and users? It's an example of "It works on my computer:" "I don't see why they think the software is slow. So I'm not going to investigate to learn why they say the application isn't working, and I certainly am not going to try to improve its performance."

Ok, I'll bite.

Because men fundamentally suck at writing code and creating great software products.

Women put rocketships on the moon, cracked code (WWII), oh yes and invented programming languages. The algorithm Google's built on? Discovered by a woman.

Men gave us Ad based platforms and a bunch of cheesy bro products to rate hot chicks. Wow. So not impressed.

Software is a pink collar profession. If you want male-dominated to the roots, go into hardware.

By the way, male nurses and teachers get affirmative action and there are female trade groups.

I'm not sure why there's a problem with inviting a bunch of women to get together and talk about their areas of expertise. Given the history, we'll likely solve some interesting problems.

So I heard about this comment thread in one of my forums for women in tech. I think the main gist was sigh. We think you are either trolling for dollars or stupid.

Factually, historically, and socially you're incorrect. So I took one for the team and corrected the record.

After many years of discouraging women and other underrepresented minorities in tech, those groups have a clear disadvantage and creating groups and other ways to help them catch up is what we need to balance things out.

You are right about one thing, this isn’t only a problem within tech, there are many other industries and careers where women and other underrepresented minorities haven’t been given a chance to succeed and show their capabilities. But it has to start somewhere and with tech being so important for everything we do in our lives everyday, it just makes sense to be louder about this in this community to pledge for a change.

Experts become experts after years of experience, coaching, support, and having people who approve of them and their knowledge all of the time. Women and minorities lack that support, like I said, we are just playing catch up now.

Your assumption that these women aren't being invited right now because they are less qualified than the men who are is not supported by any evidence you've offered.

How is it you think event organizers build the list of people to invite? Do you imagine they start with a list of all 7.5 billion people and then sort by presentation skill? You are just being a defensive ass when it is pointed out that the current lists are all affirmative action towards men. Your belief that men can't compete if compared to women does men a disservice: surely men would like to know that they are being selected from a list of all the most qualified speakers, not that they got their slot only because no women were considered.

> Hence , I will never get why tech industry believes so much it must be so « inclusive ».

Because being exclusive on the grounds of race, gender or age is against the law? All of those are illegal in the UK where the speakers are based.

More diversity in the workplace also makes them more enjoyable places to work. They may also bring different experiences and points of view in how a site or piece of software may be most useful, leading to more success in the market. A market where women occasionally buy things too.

Same for conference speakers. I want to hear perspectives that I cannot have had. There'd be no point going if everyone had my white middle aged male point of view. I want to understand and see the opportunities I'd otherwise miss, the UX, marketing or expectation differences between generations, gender or regions.

I'm surprised we still have this conversation, sadly.

Got any proof on that market success? I still haven’t seen any. There are plenty of fields that do just fine without explicitly encouraging a balance of women while still being inclusive to women who show merit.

Yeah you know what is not a great body of objective evidence? 40 years of women being told we have an equal chance of success at anything we want to do, and yet, in October 2017 discovering that actually the vast majority of us have encountered some gross shit from men we work with.

Please, for a moment, imagine the time and energy it might take to fend that off. How it might make you timid about taking meetings, asking for more, it might just wear you out.

TLDR I’d like to see the study that controls for sexual harassment, that many male partners expect women who work to also be the primary caregiver for children when home, the fact that being incompetent but confident is not viewed kindly in women as it is in men, etc.

Sexual harassment and having babies are separate issues, so please don’t try to discredit what I said with something completely unrelated. In any case, women aren’t alone in having to deal with arseholes on a daily basis. It’s a fact of life. No one seems to be making anywhere near the same amount of fuss over the number of boys and men who have their penises mutilated against their will or are bullied or raped in schools, prisons and work on a daily basis.

What I said is that I have still to see any proof that the encouragement of gender balance in any field, and in particular in programming, contributes to market success in that field.

It is contradictory for a woman to say that she wants to be treated equally to men, and then say that she expects to be given an advantage in hiring based on her gender. It is a very feminine point of view to believe that one has intrinsic, objective value.

By definition, the current state of the market at least in programming implies that gender balance does not provide any benefit. Given that the merit is a game of language and is completely subjective, if a woman believes that most randomly chosen companies would benefit either from increasing gender balance or hiring solely based on her own definition of merit, then it is up to her to show this through her actions, such as starting, or participating in the management of a company following that spirit, rather than lobbying the government to enforce her own or others’ subjective beliefs around hiring or merit.

" It is a very feminine point of view to believe that one has intrinsic, objective value."

I think you need to take a while and consider why you believe that statement is true, and how it might be impacting the rest of your view on this topic.

Have you contemplated that you might be in the wrong here, and that your approach on this topic is very, very heavily based on your first person view?

It's extremely hard to control for the success of corporations vs. any single factor, much less "gender balance". For example, more male-founded startups get funded - but it's been shown that's in large part because they're male (not to mention their investors usually are), not because of any inherent merit of their business. Similarly, consumer startups often have an easier time getting funded because they're easier for partners to explain the rest of their firm, but it doesn't actually mean they're better investments than an niche enterprise play that's harder to explain to a layman.

More starts = more exits, more role models => more male founders and more all-male startups. Nothing in that cycle actually proves that that men are better at founding or running tech startups, and say "show me the data" is a poor response, given that we don't have an alternate universe where there's no gender bias feeding into those patterns.

I’ll assume that you agree that objective value is not possible to define and that therefore no one has objective value. Are you taking issue with my view that women are conditioned to believe that they have inherent, objective value? Why do you think Instagram is so popular with them, where it is sufficient just to post a photo of oneself to be valued?

Also what do you mean by inherent merit? It doesn’t exist, just like objective value. It doesn’t matter that a study has shown that men are hired or receive funding because they’re male over inherent merit, when the study has already necessarily failed at defining inherent merit.

You’re either being intellectually dishonest, or you need to read what I wrote again.

Yes, I completly disagree with your sweeping characterizations of entire genders, on both sides of that discussion.

A key part of the problem is that society often propogates such sweeping generalizations to children, reinforcing existing biases based on stereotypes rather than individual merit. This is part of what diversity policies are intended to address.

Language and the market are generalisations. These are the only ways in which humans can interact. The market is neither right nor wrong. It is the status quo. Women put more selfies on Instagram than men. It's a generalisation and also a fact.

You're still propagating the idea that individual merit exists and can be defined. It can't. If you think that hiring based on your subjective, generalised idea of merit would lead to grater gains, it's up to you to show it with real results. You clearly stand to make a lot of money. Until then, the status quo remains.

I'm not surprised you don't think you've seen any evidence...because women AREN'T AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS OF BUSINESS IN ANYWHERE NEAR A NUMBER THAT IS REPRESENTATIONAL OF THE POPULATION!!!!!

This is like Trump saying climate change isn't happening because it's really cold in the United States.

Also re: being contradictory...I am beyond asking for equality. The fact that that was even a debate at one point speaks to how fucked up things truly were.

What I am yelling about is that people like you need to stop for a second and consider that even though the world has slowly awoken over the past 30-40 years to the idea that women can be smart and have careers and might want to do things beyond take care of your home/kids, we still have nowhere near the number of women achieving at the highest levels of business. A good scientist would wonder why that is.

If you just think it's because women aren't smart enough or aren't trying hard enough...you are being lazy.

Lastly on the topic of femininity and intrinsic value, please take that up with Thomas Jefferson:

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness….”

you are assuming that women must be in perfect ratio without considering that they may not choose those roles for many reasons

if they were qualified and competent and chose to do those jobs then they would already have those jobs because businesses like to make money

Even the simplest Google search would answer this for you. But here's a recent example https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/business-et...

“McKinsey’s research found that diversity has the most obvious impact on financial performance when it is found in executive teams and roles that are directly in charge of generating revenue.”

Here are the ratios of men to women in the boards of directors in the top three companies by market cap in the world:

Apple: 3/15

Amazon: 2/9

Alphabet: 2/11

Just imagine how much better those companies could be if they had more diversity.

If you want to hear a perspectives that you do not have, find a person that is furthest from your social economic class. Stop and talk to a homeless person on the street.

Whilst I would occasionally do that when my commute often walked past some, it's rather ridiculous to suggest in a technical conference or work context, unless they also happen to understand the project we're working, or were booked to speak at the conference.

If a conference want to invite speakers that has different social economical backgrounds then they can just as easily do so as with different genders. The article is about people conferences could invite.

There are people here on HN that has been homeless. Its far from "ridiculous", and suspect some of them would feel a bit offended with that suggestion.

Okay how about this needmoretea: Close your eyes. Now imagine every male coworker you have is actually female. They are used to only working with mostly women, so you are an oddity. Kind of entertaining. They just hope you can be cool and be “one of the girls”, you know?

Does that help expand your universe?

I think you misunderstood me here.

I was advocating for more diversity and equality in the workplace if you read my grandparent post, which got the absurd response of "if you want diversity go and talk to a homeless person", I responded to as ridiculous.

I'm in favour of any increasing in workplace diversity and am thankful the UK workplace is very different to the HN zeitgeist that's more akin to UK attitudes of late 70s or 80s when these discussions crop up. I'm also in favour of the root post's idea of getting more women speaking at conferences. So as ever those views were downvoted here.

The thing is that nurses, for example, don't defend their field so actively and loudly like, for example, you do. And that's the reason why fighting sexism in IT is so important.