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Comment by liziwizi | Hacker News Reader

i hate this argument so much! it has been thrown in my face soooooooo many times... it's the go-to excuse managers and sales people use to tell a woman in IT that she's weird for doing what she does. even in teams with 90% men, it was almost never the men in the team that were the problem, but almost always those looking in on the team: managers, sales people, marketeers, project managers, journalists, ...

please, stop telling women they are weird for wanting to work in IT or for enjoying their IT job.

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Saying that the disparate representation between genders in technology industries is due to innate differences is not telling women they're weird for working in tech. It is not a statement about those women who go into tech, it's a statement about the aggregate choices of women in society as a whole.

I don't know what your intent was in writing this comment, but trying to frame any attribution of career choices to gender as a personal attack is a common tactic to try and shut down discussion on the topic.

80/20% isn't even very unusual gender split: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...

Woah there, the person you're replying to didn't once use the word "weird" or any synonyms thereof.

They said that men and women tend to have different broad interests. But that doesn't preclude women from having an interest in tech. He's making a statement on statistics, not making a value judgement about anybody.

Does the fact that you "hate that argument" invalidate it in any way?

I never said that, or claimed women have no place in IT or don't belong in IT or anything of the sort. I said men and women value things differently, so you will naturally get disparities in career paths. That doesn't make a male teacher weird because he's vastly outnumbered, nor does it make a woman weird for wanting to get into STEM or IT... It just means on the whole....men and women are different and -most- men and -most- women like different things than each other, completely detached from any societal norm, and there's nothing wrong with that.

We should tackle sexism where it exists, but we can't tackle it properly if we're trying to say everyone is the same...because they aren't.

I don't think that the comment above was speaking in hard and fast rules. They were more making the point that men and women may generally have different interests and that those interests will impact career choices. There wasn't any value judgement about women getting into IT being weird, but more a statement that a 50/50 split may not be feasible if the incoming pipeline is 70/30 due to the interests of those respective individuals.

If you have people telling you that you're weird for your interests, then they're likely either self-conscious or an ass. That goes for most generalizations that evaluate skill or ideas based on the attributes of the person vs. the merit of the idea itself... but that is a different discussion :)

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