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Comment by makmanalp | Hacker News Reader

Let's try this in reverse:

"Women are welcome at our events, and we have had a few women attend each workshop. The name was designed to be a specific invitation to men, but we don't exclude women. (That being said, I personally support the idea of separate women's groups and men's groups in general, so I encourage someone to start "Women Learning Code" if they are so inclined."

I'd just like to point out, without opinion one way or the other, that I believe the above paragraph would cause major outrage and claims of sexism and separatism, along with "this is why there are so few women in software".

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I have to point out that this exercise makes no sense (at least not to me).

Taking a minority empowerment effort and turning the tables around will obviously emulate a majority empowerment effort which is matter of fact an empowerment of prejudice.

If a minority group is not biased, then they have failed and will not have an effect in the status quo.

Ok, now make it a nursing seminar, or an education seminar directed toward men. No outcry of sexism. See how that works?

I actually hadn't thought of this. So it's okay to do this because of the idea that most men are not interested in nursing, and most women are not interested in programming?

I think it's more along the lines of:

It's ok to discriminate when you're trying to target/encourage a specific minority (i.e. women in software), but it's not ok when you're targetting a majority, because it looks like you're trying to encourage the majority while discouraging the minority

Whether or not people say this out loud, or think it consciously is a different question.

"Ladies Learning Code" is discriminatory towards men, but it's less of an issue because it is in the furtherance of encouraging a minority (women) into the field. On the other hand, "Men Learning Code" seemingly discourages women, who are already in the minority.

This is very close to my feeling too. The "principled irate male" demographic tends to get upset over the double standard. But it's all a big case of a bad optimization metric.

The point to organiations like this isn't to eliminate "discrimination" in the abstract. It's to eliminate the inequality of opportunity. There is a very large practical and moral difference between being excluded from a single meeting of techincal people and being excluded from (or have limited access to) an entire career path. Spending a few "discrimination" points on the former to reduce the cases of the latter seems like a good idea to me.

Thank you, ajross and pyre, for clearly and reasonably explaining why this sort of targeted marketing is not also discrimination (the bad kind).

(Yes, upvotes say this too, but now that votes are not public, I wanted there to be a visible commendation. These sorts of things set the tone of the thread.)

That sounds implicitly like most other programming / software / engineering workgroups out there, to be honest. With the exception of hackerspaces, which in my city seem to successfully remain relatively gender-neutral and respectful.

Yes, I think you're right that the default expectation is the modified paragraph - which is why it's necessary to create organizations like Ladies Learning Code that explicitly contradict that.

I would submit that events restricted to members of a certain class are not in and of themselves evil. If someone sets up a workshop for “Right-Handed People Learning Code”, I as a left-handed person would not react with outrage.

But when members of one class are systematically excluded from some role in society, exclusionary events are a problem if they contribute to that system. A workshop for “Men Learning Code” is a bad idea... and so is a workshop for “Women Learning To Teach Preschool”.

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