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Comment by azeirah | Hacker News Reader

That is not what this is about. It's about being treated as non-technical because you happen to be a woman in tech.

The reality of being a woman in tech comes with serious problems, and how we're treated is one of the biggest contributors to those problems.

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This point is so obvious and self-evident that I'm really amazed that anybody is acting as if that's not the central thesis of the essay. One of the first links is to a PDF with a title by Mar Hicks called "Sexism is a feature, not a bug." Every single time someone argues sincerely or otherwise that sexism is no longer a problem in software development communities, please think back to the time that all these self described hackers couldn't read an essay spelling out in detail that the "technical" designation is socially constructed by everyone else without your permission and often is along gendered lines - they all read that, missing the point, and said "sure you can!" How many of these same commenters have described and will go on to describe a colleague with more mathematical, statistical, and scientific rigor than they and be like "oh, she's not that technical"? Will it be all of them?

I just don’t get why it matters. So, redefine and reclaim whatever you want technical to mean! The term is constructed, SO CONSTRUCT IT THEN.

Every single human is excluded from some club they might otherwise want to be a part of. Exclusion and inclusion, in some proportion, is the human condition.

The author is a psychologist. Okay. I am a high school dropout who studies and uses psychology and sociology in my work. I am never going to be called a sociologist or a psychologist. I accept that. But I am those things, in some real and practical sense. I am a scientist and a philosopher and I am not swayed by anyone claiming those identities who tells me I’m not. They don’t have to include me in their reindeer games and I won’t waste an erg of my energy asking them to.

I am technical. I am a man. I judge whether other people are technical, or for that matter whether they are men. My judgements may or may not influence other people. So what?

I read the essay because I was trying to understand what her motivation is. What is her project? I’m still not sure. I don’t buy that exclusion and othering and lacking “full humanity” should or do matter (they are facts of our existence… now what? complaining about them mostly creates hostility because power is real and powerful people will act to defend themselves.)

Still I found it thought provoking and endearing in a weird way. It was a usefully irritating essay by someone very different from myself.

Maybe people are acting that way because the article explicitly states that gender is not the main point. But of course that wouldn't make for nearly as good of a reactionary commentary.

Their own examples are constantly bringing up gender instead of any other relevant point. It reads to me like someone who has heavy bias in that area but is trying to deflect instead of address it.

No, those look like an obvious honeypot for catching anyone willing to see it as a gender thing.

The author wants to move the boundaries of technical to include her skill set. But her skill set could be compared to the business class (who also consume numerical research), and those people are not considered technical either, regardless of gender or race or anything else.

Business class skills are generally considered a tier above... all of society.

I did not think this was what was going on for most of the piece (which is part of why I spent most of it not following WTF it was about) but by the end I think this is accurate: the author's complaint is that scientific and number-y workers from non-computing disciplines aren't paid like SV programmers. (Which, neither are the vast majority of programmers, so, you know...)

Like, I think (it's still not entirely clear to me) that's the actual point. It's made fairly clear (relatively clear—again, still hard to follow, at least for me) toward the end.

On the other side, the lack of the human skills she champions is a boundary often drawn to sieve technical people out of leadership.

Her clients seem like extra successful people, so yeah, if she wants to be like them then maybe she's not technical yet. But if she's focusing on the money part then stepping into the business domain is a step above technical.

Yeah, I earn well over US median, and just going from evidence in the essay I'm pretty sure the author makes more than I do, but that we both earn less than her sense of "Technical" (US coastal big-tech workers that get programmer-scale salaries) which makes the attempts to connect this to struggles due to sex and gender identity and race and SES background fall pretty damn flat for me.

Incidentally, the photo at the top of the piece would make for really good "rich coastal tech worker" in-group signaling.

The article isn't about gender specifically, the author explicitly calls that out.

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