LinkedIn announces Global Women's hackday event in Mountain View and New Delhi | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn announces Global Women's hackday event in Mountain View and New Delhi

blog.linkedin.com

28 pointsiag16 comments

If we keep telling women that they need a "women's hack day", a such and such women's event, etc, all we are doing is creating a bigger gender disparity.

I start to think of these events as pure PR stunts, rather than Linkedin et al. tackling any underlying gender issues.

I totally get what you're saying, and of course companies do things for PR, but typically events like these are not only about the competition, but also about raising awareness, showing women in male dominated areas "hey look, women do this too. It's perfectly acceptable to be interested in it!"

Now, if that's the message that's taken from this? That's open to discussion. And a discussion I'm not much of a part of, being a guy.

correct, and LinkedIn needs tons of positive PR now like never before!!

I think you need to back up your reasoning for how this creates a bigger gender gap. The aim of this event is not to create cliques of female programmers who only work at 100% female companies and only attend womens' events, which would do as you say, but to try and encourage more females to enter/stay in the industry, which would reduce gender disparity by moving the proportion of male to female members towards 0.5.

gender disparity isn't about equaling ratios (i.e. volume), it's about aptitude and ability. That is exactly what I mean by "bigger gender gap".

Awareness should focus on abilities and not about "lets get a 50/50 gender balance for the sake of equality". Creating a gender biased event only promotes the wrong reasons why women should go into software development (or any other industry).

You're assuming that the only reason that women do not enter the industry is because they do not have the aptitude or ability, which is just plain false. This event isn't about saying, girls do this because we need more of you, it's saying, girls do this, because society suffers as a result of gender stereotypes. Having an event to counter society's flaws is not the same as having an event to artificially manipulate the perceived quality of the attendees.

Also, your second paragraph makes little to no sense. The event is not going to persuade women to enter the software development industry because of some irrational reason (maybe you could actually say what reasons you think the event promotes?), it's there to reduce the effect of our culture on people who want to get into software development. No one is handing people who attend this a free pass to getting a job in the industry; ability does still matter.

And also, I did not say that .5 is the goal, but moving towards that would be a step in the right direction. I looked up the male to female ratio of a random university course (UCL Computer Science). The ratio there was 77:23 male:female. That's quite a long way off 0.5. And before you say I am putting equality before ability, ability doesn't come from nowhere. While software development continues to be so male dominated, or at least, seen as a male career by society at large, we will exclude god knows how many brilliant people from the youngest ages. Having outreach programs is _not_ a bad thing, and to think otherwise is to be ignorant of one's privilege.

no, that is not what I'm saying. do not imply that i'm being sexist in any way, which i'm not.

the labour market, when it comes to comparing gender ratios, is a zero sum game. there are dozens of other well respected industries which are female dominated, and as far as i know, there are no men groups organizing men only events in those female dominated industries/jobs.

you are right on one thing: "Having outreach programs is _not_ a bad thing" what is morally wrong and ironic is the fact that an outreach effort excludes 50% of the population.

>what is morally wrong and ironic is the fact that an outreach effort excludes 50% of the population.

Pure nonsense. In the (apparently) hostile to women environment that is tech, it makes perfect sense to have women-centric meetups so that women can feel comfortable exploring technology and develop bonds with other women that can help them counteract bias.

What you should be questioning is why there is a need for a women centric event. Dismissing these issues and turning it around to ask why its excluding you (lets be honest here, this is exactly what you're doing) is the only thing morally wrong here.

>Dismissing these issues and turning it around to ask why its excluding you (lets be honest here, this is exactly what you're doing)

No, it is excluding part of the problem.

But hey, if your approach is to teach women "don't get raped" rather than tell society "don't rape", be my guest.

Your response has absolutely no connection to anything I said. It's rather impressive in its unrelatedness, actually.

Just wondering, if there was an Men's hackday, would that be look upon as a sexist event?

Probably. Because men make up the majority of the software industry, it would be a little pointless to have a Men's hackerday, and so would be seen as excluding women for the sake of excluding women. This hacker day on the other hand targets women, who are a minority, and thus has a purpose for excluding men other than misandry.

I would hope the readership around here could elevate the discussion beyond trite little quips such as this. Again I come away disappointed.

For future reference: these "reverse the roles" arguments are about as shallow and ignorant as one can get. The context is completely different for the "reversed" roles, rendering the comparison not even meaningless, but downright hostile.

Really excited to see what comes out of this!

I believe this is the first of its kind. Both women-centric and international. Props to the Slideshare team for coming up with the idea and putting it together!

awesome. looking forward to this and more in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com