Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by swayvil | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

swayvil

The subtext being : "So very impressive. And she was a woman!"

Is this patronizing?

We see it a lot. Racially and genderly. You know what I mean.

If I was the subject of this kind of focus I might wince a bit. I wince a bit anyway.

View on HN

Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents and especially not with flamebait material. It leads to much less interesting, and usually nastier, discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

It's a story of someone less-known, yet who invented an iconic product of an era, despite ordinary circumstances, built a business around it, and even survived aggressive business moves by more traditional actors.

Part of the ordinary circumstances -- but not the only achievement -- were due to being a woman in that time and place, when business mostly saw women as doing only certain kinds of jobs, and reserved much of the more prestigious jobs for men. (Sounds worse than today, but there's obviously still biases and inertia.)

Here's another point of this story: it seems it was because of the diversity of experience that she brought to the problem&solution space (i.e., working as a secretary at the time, understanding the costs and difficulties there, having also worked in painting) that she was able to invent this, and then to bootstrap a business from zero.

Whether or not you want to look at the part about her being a woman then (which I think makes the story more interesting), it still seems an interesting story, maybe inspiring, and maybe causes us to reflect on all sorts of changes since then.

I don't interpret it the same as you. I know this is probably obvious, women faced and continue to face different challenges in the workplace and in business than men do. I feel the writer is simply attempting to acknowledge that fact.

More cringe-worthy, in my opinion, is the trend for people to attempt to create victims of others. Not everything is an attack or laced with some subtext begging for analysis and blame to be attributed. But, that is just me.

People in underrepresented groups benefit from being made aware of successful people from those groups. It shows them that the lack of representation is not the result of some inherent lack of ability, but rather other social factors, such as institutionalized bias, which is still discouraging, but not as much as feeling incapable.

I know what you mean. The forced positivity of "you will never believe what this <insert underrepresented group of the month> did!". However, when there's a story behind it, I don't mind. It's fine to show that people can achieve something noteworthy from a disadvantaged position. And in this case, it's interesting enough. I've used "liquid paper", or Typex as its successor was called here. Not an earth shattering invention, but a clever one, that has saved many people a lot of time, although at the expense of the swearing vocabulary. And apparently the inventor also had business sense. Not the most frequent combination.

The problem is it's very hard to tell whether it's actually interesting, or it's just standard female worship that crops up on here all the time. This is the main reason I argue against thing like quotas: it takes away the possibility of people being credited for their achievements. If I see a story of a successful woman at this point, I assume it's either unimpressive and only notable because of sex, or they are trans. I know I'm not the only one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com