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Comment by babadabada | Hacker News Reader

How?

Because making broad assumptions about 50% of the population isn't a cool thing to do. Especially given the excessive amount of nonsense women in tech (and not in tech) have to deal with on a daily basis. Talk like this leads to women feeling excluded from the tech community.

Also, specifically calling out "young women" as not being interested in tech really makes a lot of assumptions. Generally, people will talk about most topics - even if they aren't passionate about those topics themselves. Most women I know will happily talk about tech stuff with me, so maybe your approach is wrong.

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>Because making broad assumptions about 50% of the population isn't a cool thing to do.

Is it that those assumptions are not cool to make about 100% of the population either? Is it wrong of me to assume that the average person does not want to talk about code?

Because if it isn't wrong to make the assumption about the average person, but it is wrong to make it about some subset, then isn't that, at its very core, treating that demographic different than the average?

>Generally, people will talk about most topics - even if they aren't passionate about those topics themselves.

Yes, most people will engage in enough conversation to be polite. But there is a significant difference between talking about something a person cares about and them politely carrying on a conversation they aren't interested in. These are not the same behavior and do not generally result in the same outcome . And none of this has to do with gender as I notice this when talking with friends of either gender.

> Because if it isn't wrong to make the assumption about the average person, but it is wrong to make it about some subset, then isn't that, at its very core, treating that demographic different than the average?

No it is not in any meaningful way since the statement is true about both subsets as well as the average person set. The claim is no meaningful distinction is made by specifying the subset of women from all people. In fact I've found every generalization I have ever made about women or men on second thought has been true, and more meaningfully true, for all people (though it may apply differently to men or women).

Anyway all the women I've met in tech are exceptional though I guess it's caused by them being exceptions in a system that treats them as exceptions amongst exceptions. Which is the real reason to minimize talking about women as a subset since whatever causes anyone in a subset to identify with a group is roughly the same cause as the majority in the group.

>The claim is no meaningful distinction is made by specifying the subset of women from all people.

Unless the person was making the claim because that was the subset they were interested in dating, which is how I read the original statement. It was a generalization of all people, but in this case they were only concerned with how it applied to the subset of people they were interested in dating.

They could have avoided the whole problem by instead specifying "people I'm interested in dating", but one has to wonder the cost of having to take that level of care with one's words and the effect of this level of care being discriminatory in where it has to be applied.

Do you never make generalizations or broad assumptions?

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