Comment by srl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by srl | Hacker News Reader

Ugh... the reactions to these idiotic, misogynistic statements always feel overblown. Yes, sexism is a pretty big problem in the industry (and adjacent ones). But you're not going to fix it by griping about a horny 20-something saying something stupid about women (surprise!). You're not even going to help. You're just going to walk away with a "there I helped" endorphin rush and go back to not really caring for the vast majority of your life.

The response to funkah's "garden-variety moron" objection has brought out the excuse of, "well, this was an official flier, so it's a big deal". IMO, the fact that this happened on something "official" is less an indication of rampant misogyny (not that I'm denying it exists!), and more an indication of our ridiculously informal, fast-and-loose culture. (The poor quality of the rest of the flier bears this interpretation out.) So what it comes down to is, someone decided to turn a massive brain-fart into an "official" flier, and part of that brain fart was a stupid, misogynistic comment. Surprise, surprise.

I'm sure everybody's real proud that they've managed to detect and criticize blatant, overbearing misogyny, but I don't see many submissions focusing on the persistent discouragement of young girls from participating in science - a very real, and ultimately more fundamental problem. Lets have some. And lets give them more attention than this "moronic person is moronic" stuff.

Disagree. I think today made it very clear that anyone organizing this kind of event is going to lose all of their sponsors and their event space within six hours if they try to pull this crap, which feels new and powerful to me. I've never seen a backlash quite this fast and successful before. They've canceled the event altogether now, it seems.

Honestly, I wouldn't even be surprised if it kills Sqoot as a company -- that's an incredibly powerful warning sign in the only language many people understand how to interpret: your funders telling you they no longer want to have anything to do with you.

Fixing stupid mistakes like this is a lot more straight-forward than figuring out how to encourage young girls to participate in science - it's a completely different order of complexity and the former can be acted upon immediately and effectively whilst the latter cannot. It's the difference between having a recycling bin in your house and changing the idealization of suburbia and car-culture in North America.

It does help. From the perspective of a female, this sort of "overblown" reaction makes it clear that this sort of mentality is not considered acceptable by the community as a whole. If it was a case of people shrugging it off, if this sort of thing could occur without anyone batting an eyelash... I'd have a lot more second-thoughts about my career path for one, and I'd have turned away from the start-up community on top of that.

> If it was a case of people shrugging it off, if this sort of thing could occur without anyone batting an eyelash... I'd have a lot more second-thoughts about my career path for one, and I'd have turned away from the start-up community on top of that.

I'm not suggesting we shrug it off, not batting an eyelash. It's completely idiotic and should be mocked appropriately. But I'm guessing (with high confidence) that if the frequent posts about this brand of stupidity were replaced by articles discussing the actual roots of the "science/technology is for men" prejudice, and blog posts from, say, the khan academy, on how they're working to fight those conceptions, you'd feel a heck of a lot more welcome, and the many, many women who are just on the "no" side of getting involved in the tech industry would be much more likely to get involved.

I'm not trying to replace criticizing language with fixing deep problems. I'm trying to replace criticizing language with discussing, directly, deep social problems. They're the same order of complexity, and one helps much, much more.

You won't get to that discussion without calling out the problems at hand. I believe we are much closer to being able to taking that step than we were even a few years ago - I recall quite a few conferences were open misogyny was 'cool' - but we need to keep calling out this nonsense.

There are strangely still quite a few people who believe that sexism is not an issue.

> You won't get to that discussion without calling out the problems at hand.

Exactly! And my claim is that the larger, more subtle "women just aren't good at science/technology" problem, is now more pressing than the blatant misogyny, and furthermore that the larger problem cannot be solved simply by calling out misogyny. It is a distinct problem - the two may influence each other, but the one will not go away just because we all know about and hate the other.

I guess that's actually really my main gripe with most of the talk here - people are conflating what to me are two very separate problems, and, as far as I can see, not doing anything to solve the bigger one. And it makes me mad.

I know a great many people who would be instantly disgusted at the sort of thing this moron put on the flier, as you all were, and yet have subtly and not-so-subtly showed the bias that women can simply never be as good as programming as men can. (In one particular case, fairly openly, to the person's face - and that person, one of the best programmers I know, is no longer planning to go into computer science, despite my best efforts to convince her otherwise.) So I'm convinced that open misogyny and "women belong in the kitchen" are, at least in the tech community, separate problems, and the latter needs to be attacked directly.

You're guessing wrong. I wouldn't feel more welcome (nor do I understand why I should feel more welcome as a result of that sort of discussion) but I don't speak for all women. I want it to be a given that a woman can be in an engineering/tech environment, and that it's No Big Deal. Making a big deal out of prejudice and fighting societal conceptions just puts me off -- if I was into that sort of thing, I'd be browsing some sort of sociology site or attending conferences on the matter.

While I'd love a deep, interesting discussion on the matter... I love deep, interesting discussions. Just because it's about my gender doesn't mean it's more welcoming to me. That aside, I fail to see how women would be much more likely to get involved as a result of discussion on HN -- the issues run a lot deeper than a lack of conversation on the matter.

In response to your later comments, I absolutely agree that the subtle prejudice is a huge problem -- but I don't know if this is the right venue to attack it, or if there even exists a correct venue or method. (Perhaps it's just a matter of time.) I do know that a sudden influx of articles on "making women feel welcome" and "breaking prejudice against women in STEM" would alienate me for one, and most certainly cause me to leave if they became of regular prominence on the front page.

EDIT: A good explanation of my negative feelings towards bringing more attention to the matter is the current top comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3732078

I imagine "Don't make women feel unwelcome." would go a long way towards reducing the need for "Make women feel welcome."

Why do you think this is taking away from other efforts? I think calling out asshats is important and it doesn’t take all that much effort. It doesn't take away from anything else.

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