I suppose it varies with culture, but I can't imagine any of the women I know getting upset about that line.
So a genuine question, are we getting to a point where you need to think so much before actually saying anything? Personally, even if I were the butt of a mildly racist joke I would probably enjoy the joke than be offended.
"Women" are being presented in a list of "great perks" -- along with "food trucks", "top shelf booze", and "dark chocolate". This is pretty much a textbook example of objectification.
This sort of objectification and othering is part of what keeps women out of tech, and that's a loss to everyone. More women joining our community means more people in our community, and that's a win for everyone.
>I can't imagine any of the women I know getting upset about that line.
Have you actually asked any women who work in tech about what it's like? Spending just a little time listening to what women in our industry think about the culture can be an eye-opening experience.
I'm not doubting that you can find women who aren't offended by this, but that's quite beside the point. It's essentially the "I have black friends so how can I be racist!?" defense — so laughable that Colbert uses it as a running gag on his program.
> So a genuine question, are we getting to a point where you need to think so much before actually saying anything? Personally, even if I were the butt of a mildly racist joke I would probably enjoy the joke than be offended.
If you think sexist and racist jokes are acceptable then yes, you probably should think twice before making jokes.
Without the context of the list above, I kept reading "Women:" not as a perk in a list, but as a declarative. I kept wondering why people could be offended by them saying that women were permitted beer.
Now, I see.
I would have probably written the whole thing off as a troll (high level of promised services, amateur spelling, unknown startup, and overt sexism. Maybe one of those things could get a slight pass)
It bothers me that the organisers assume the attendees will all be straight males and therefore interested in the fact that the servers are women. It bothers me that it plays on the antiquated notion that "women are there to serve". It bothers me that women are being treated as a 'perk', full stop.
From the perspective of wanting women around, this "perk" basically says that they've given up on getting women in the field to want to come to their conference, and the only way to get them there is to hire them. It's pretty lame.
I'm a man, a mostly hetero-normative one, who disagrees.
The idea that there is something undesirable about a situation that gets it called a sausage fest is not about being male per se, it's part of a very large set of assumptions about gender and sexuality that are fairly pervasive and ingrained and present enough that they are part of identity for a lot of people.
The idea that the term sausage fest, and the idea that it implies -- that there too many penises in the room and not enough vaginas, and that this is making the penises sad, in the context of a hackathon is sexist. It has a sexist nature. It makes crass and sweeping assumptions about a group of people who are passionate about a topic on the basis of their genitalia, when there are plenty of people with other sets of it that share a passion for the topic, and no ones genitalia is relevant whatsoever to the purpose of the event.
If we can get some women in the context of our passions, that is awesome.
You sound like someone who is apologetic about their manhood, to be honest. It's unfortunate. Look up Bill Maher's rant about the feminizing of America.
I don't work all day with "a bunch of other men". From a literal standpoint, my workplace is about 1/3 female. It's a small shop, but out of the 4 people writing code there, one of them is female. Even if that wasn't the case, it wouldn't be something I even thought about too much, because when I deal with people I tend to view them as people, not as points on a gender scale.
Maybe I'm just much more left-brained than most people I know. I get absorbed in my work, and I get absorbed in discussing it with peers, regardless of their ... well, anything. A large part of the time, I don't know if the people I'm talking to in those discussions are male or female or whatnot. Their sex is, frankly irrelevant when it comes to the stuff we're doing. Variety and diversity are good to have, but I don't think humans are so static as to be boring because of a ratio skew. Because they're people. Not genders or sexes.
I'm not "apologetic about my manhood". I'm "someone who treats humans in the same manner unless they give me reason not to, and calls out pointless things when he sees them". I also do not happen to fall very much in line with western male stereotypes. I never have. I was not raised in anything near a home that thought that feminism, particularly the more recent waves of feminism, had any sort of legitimacy, I know about that school of thought, and others that have had influence on me because I read a lot of books as a kid.
Something being sexist doesn't mean that someone is necessarily consciously or purposefully stomping on or belittling some other group of people. It means that there are needless disparities about something based on sex. Thinking that a conference would be better just because it had more women or less women or more men or less men or more hot vapid men or women or more people of sex B for no reason other than because there aren't any there is sexist. "Sausage fest" has pejorative terms. It's normally used to refer to keggers, not hackathons. People who go to keggers at least can know that part of the reason people go to alchohol-fueled parties is to find sexual partners, giving at least a reason for the term. Not hackathons.
There's nothing intrinsic about having a penis and testicles that makes me less of a person if I don't fit into the behavioral profile of the ideal western male. There are 7 billion people, even assuming biological trends in behavior directly linked to sex that are unaffected by cultural pressure, that's more than enough for it to be ridiculous to try to shove all of any group of people into an absolutist box, and tell them they sound like they feel sorry about some intrinsic thing about them.
If you're getting bored just because someone with different jibbly bits isn't around, I would suggest finding something that isn't so boring to do. The world's a fascinating place.
I see what you mean though. Increasingly, there are a lot of professional women in these things. Might be a tad insulting.
Eventually, they'll have to start hiring stud muffins to compensate I guess!
Sure, that's being (heterosexual) male, but you are making the same assumption as the original event-planners did: all of our attendees will be male. There is nothing in the subject material of the event (their API discussion or whatever) that would interest a female.
This is the thinking that strikes me as sexist: all developers are male, so we only need to appeal to males to make our events appealing.
Just don't do things that explicitly cater to "FOO" if your intentions are not to explicitly cater to group "FOO", particularly if those things include offering up people of group "BAR" as an incentive to come.
Should you do things to make your hackathon appealing to programmers? Yes. These things are food, drinks, subject matter/activities and socialization with other programmers. Food and drinks appeal to humans, and you don't want a bunch of people having heatstrokes or diabetic comas. Subject matter/activities and other programmers being there to socialize with appeal to programmers. Pretty much all programmers who would want to attend a hackathon.
... right up until the line where they suggest that having female serving staff bring you beer while you code is another perk, on the same level as those others. At which point you reassess the massages and gym-passes in the context of this new information and realise that there might be a totally different vibe to this event than the cupcakes-and-chocolate-with-access-to-a-gym-to-burn-off-the-excess-calories-and-a-nice-massage-at-the-end-of-the-day a female coder might have, up until that point, been imagining...
Seriously, take out the sexism, and I think they were well on their way to figuring out the recipe for creating an event with cross-gender appeal.
This made it clearer: that line is not addressing women, it's addressing the event attendees and listing "Women" as one of the perks, because "friendly (female) event staff" get beers for the attendees. It's difficult to believe how a company can offer up "women" as a 'perk', and not expect the reaction that followed.
On a completely different note: it's extremely annoying having to hunt down links when they have exactly the same styling as the surrounding text, like in the Cloudmine blog. [3]
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3733914
[2] https://img.skitch.com/20120320-fmsc5mciy8e7n3nxhakmegxxg9.p...
[3] http://blog.cloudmine.me/post/19639692371/sexism-in-tech
Yes - and many people are going to see this as a good thing (and some won't). I think the best route is to never include any references to gender, (or race, or any hot button issue) in any of your promotional material, slides, talks or whatever. Even if it's intended as light-hearted humor.
In many (most?) cultures, sexist comments are still _far_ more socially acceptable than racist comments. Look at dumb blonde jokes; distasteful and offensive, but many people are willing to make them in public; substitute an ethnic minority for the 'dumb blonde' and you'd find that far, far fewer people would be willing to make them.
You see the same with casual homophobia; it's not socially acceptable, but it's far, far less shocking than racism.
Just because you wouldn't be offended by something doesn't mean lots of other people aren't, or that your harmless and thoughtless jokes aren't deeply offensive and repugnant for historical reasons you possibly haven't considered.