What Do Feminist Hackers Do? | Hacker News Reader

What Do Feminist Hackers Do?

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11 pointsroguecoder10 comments

I don't think efforts to create "the X for women" (e.g. X=reddit, anonymous, etc.) would be effective or productive: as such they will always be wanna-be or follower type efforts. What is much better is to build on unique strengths/problems/concerns that women have, e.g. I really liked the nameyourrapist.com mentioned (although, of course, with a better name), e.g. women can tell stories of harassment, inequality they faced in companies (naming the company or not) and how they dealt with it. There were many examples of such blog posts on HN recently, collecting them in a central, searchable location would be very useful, I think.

On a different note, the hacker society is very meritocratic (as it should be, since it is based on doing stuff, as opposed to talking about it), so all the ideas in the OP has to be prefaced with the effort to create more hacker women with killer creds and skills. The Etsy-Hacker School effort is a great step in this direction.

On still another tangent, read the story Houston, Houston, Do You Read by James Tiptree Jr. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston,_Houston,_Do_You_Read%3...) if you have the time, to see a provocative take on what technical and social developments a world of women will produce (you should buy the collected stories book, if you want to be cheap, you can read it here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/20608868/Houston-Houston-Do-You-Re...).

  "Thank you." He takes the small, pink bulb. "Just tell me," he says to Lady Blue,who is looking at the bullet gashes, "what do you call yourselves? Women's World? Liberation? Amazonia?"

  "Why, we call ourselves human beings." Her eyes twinkle absently at him, go backto the bullet marks. "Humanity, mankind." She shrugs. "The human race."

The name your rapist idea is terrible in the form the author lays out as there's no requirement for evidence. It would be relatively easy to game such a site to discredit people, which in turn would discredit the site. To be fair, an anonymous at both ends site could be a force for good. The author of an article highlighting harassment could verify the story to a mod team, but by not having the naming and shaming we can focus on the problems existence (which seemed to be the problem the article author faced with 28c3) rather than the inevitable backlash in the naming and shaming. I think this is much more constructive, less high risk and overall has a better chance to influence in a positive manner than naming and shaming alone.

Right, because 4chan and the like care so much about evidence and proof before they start sending around rape threats and changing Wikipedia pages to porn.

Part of the point is imagining what the world would look like if women stopped holding themselves to a higher standard than men do. I find it funny that some men seem terrified by the idea: now you know how we feel all the time

> Right, because 4chan and the like care so much about evidence and proof before they start sending around rape threats and changing Wikipedia pages to porn.

But 4chan isn't a site deliberately set up to 'name and shame', nor does it redefine the scope of rape to include sexual harrassment, which is not the same thing. If a site is set up to name and shame rapists, it needs to have some weight to back it up otherwise it'll be crushed in libel suits, not to mention that it'll be abused as a tool to destroy people's lives, both men and women.

> Part of the point is imagining what the world would look like if women stopped holding themselves to a higher standard than men do.

I wasn't aware that women were holding themselves to a higher standard than men. I wasn't aware that anyone was holding themselves to any standard at all. Please, do tell me what this standard is that women hold them to that is so much higher than the one men hold themselves to. If you could point me to a copy of the male standard I'd love to see it, so that I can make sure that I meet it.

> I find it funny that some men seem terrified by the idea: now you know how we feel all the time

As for some men seeming terrified by the idea, I honestly can't say (as unlike you, I can't claim to speak for all, or indeed some my gender on this matter). I can say that I'm not terrified by the idea, I just think that as the author proposed it, it's a terrible idea. I will ask my wife if she feels terrified all the time, but I think aside from occasional concerns about spiders (and to be fair the spiders have more to fear than her) the answer will be no.

The author, Liz Henry, conflates Hacking with Anonymous.

At a couple of conferences lately, Hackmeet and She’s Geeky, as well as at the feminist science fiction convention WisCon, I hosted a discussion of feminist hackers and feminist hacking. I wanted to put the idea out into the world and see what other women had to say about it. Though women are involved with Anonymous and other instances of hacker activism, they aren’t part of the story, of the myth of the hacker. If there were a particularly feminist or womanist Anonymous, women working together, what would they be doing? What or who would their targets be? What social justice or mischief making aims would they have? What would our griefing and trolling look like or what does it currently look like? What do hacker feminists do for lulz?

But to many people Hacking and Anonymous have only the barest of intersections. The article mainly seems to focus on how to get back at the man, and the author expresses surprise and anger that in a different nation and a different cultural context others were not sympathetic to her message.

The answers the author relays are mainly focused at getting back at the man, a series of mostly negative societal inputs and few positive society building inputs.

Few of the answers are about what most people at Hacker News would consider to be Hacking, even as the author's post is titled "Feminist Hacker News" and is supposedly about Feminist Hacking.

A better title for Mz. Henry's post might be Feminist MonkeyWrenching or Feminist Anonymous.

What might feminist hackers do?

    - create code
    - teach coding
    - support STEM education through code, outreach, ....
    - websites that discuss issues of discrimination similar to "name your rapist" but that adhere to fair/just rules of law
    - create APIs into gov't databases / sources of gender/wage information
    - create websites that discuss negotiation of salaries
    -    how to ensure your salary is competitive
    -    how to ensure your rights are protected
    -    how to hire and behired
    - create awesome websites regarding feminist issues: sexuality, rights, domestic violence, changing roles of marriage, etc.
    - create websites that create dialogue around these issues and are inclusive, not exclusive

That bullet pointed list for some reason doesn't render properly in the comments, but is brilliant and far more insightful than the article itself. This is precisely the sort of positive constructive feminism that we need in the hacker community, instead of destructive anger-fuelled negativity.

Institutions that call themselves meritocratic are actually less meritocratic than institutions that admit to the prejudices they display: http://www.women2.com/debunking-the-myth-of-meritocracy-in-b...

Basically research found that when people think they are part of a meritocracy they believe they are justified in making decisions based on biased subjective opinions.

I liked her point that fan_wank was one of these spaces already, and it's why I submitted the article. I think it can be hard to recognize nerdy activity when it doesn't happen in our own spaces, and it's cool to note how many places nerds exist.

Plus, there are probably a half-dozen good ideas for a company in there. I'm kind of intrigued by the idea of enforced-anonymous github, for example...

I'm fairly appalled by the bulk of this article and frankly surprised to see it on the front page of HN. There are some potentially good ideas that with some smoothing out could fly, but there's a lot of stuff that's scummy, if not illegal.

The biggest problem I have with this is that this post's intent seems not to be to advance equality, or even the role of women through the hacker community but to drive a wedge and almost treat the gender gap as some sort of war. In her post, men only seem to be referred to in negative terms (as with the 28c3 panel and references to naming and shaming men who may or may not have done bad things, as no burden of evidence appears to be needed), something that I find deeply unsettling. When someone puts something like this forward as an example of feminism, I see it not as feminism but as a form of misandry. If we want to do good things for women that's fine as long as we can do good things for men and accept our differences. But really, as hackers whenever we can we should be doing good things for everyone.

Love it. Where's Fem Anon?

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