How To Exclude Women From Your Technical Community: A Tutorial | Hacker News Reader

How To Exclude Women From Your Technical Community: A Tutorial

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14 pointsKototama17 comments

There's no tutorial in there. That's a whole post about one sentence said once on one symposium streched onto an "universal lession" how it was sexist.

I'm not saying that there are many people who are jerks to women (and jerks in general) in the community, but this example is just not really a good one, nor is this post really insightful. There are plenty posts like that.

The article wasn't even explain why the sentence-fragment was sexist. And I don't see how it was. Yes, meetings would be more attractive if there attendants were more evenly distributed across the spectrum of the human population.

Otherwise some of the advice was really good for most kinds of confrontations.

There was some good discussion about it on Reddit, and Twitter. I recommend checking out the reddit thread to better understand this point of view.

However, even though reading this stuff made me think the blogger is probably right - it's a little off-putting that he doesn't seem to think his speech code should apply to him: https://mobile.twitter.com/eassumption/status/24663647380006...

Makes you question the whole credibility of the radical feminist ethic, if they can't even follow their own rules. Or as I like to think of it after seeing that tweet, the "radical feminist reality distortion field".

I came here to post the same comment. Very poor tutorial.

I had to look up "cissexual".

Here ya go: "In gender studies, cisgender and cissexual gender identities are two related types of gender identity where an individual's self-perception and presentation of their gender matches the behaviors and roles considered appropriate for one's sex." "Antonyms: transgender, transsexual."

There's something satisfying about the fact that, despite four years of Latin and possession of all the other tools I needed to get there on my own, the field of Gender Studies caught me off my game with a word that means "normal".

"Normal" is a perfectly good word. I don't advocate the being of it, but I'm not afraid to say it...

And somehow I'm sure this makes me an awful person.

The author is clearly not "normal" him/herself, so it's not surprising that he/she might have a problem using the word.

Not that there's anything wrong with not being normal, but this person seems to be rather obsessed with gender issues and sexism.

Right. The error is in conflating "normal" with "good", or "proper".

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, sometimes there's no such thing.

In fairness, if you spend a lot of time thinking about these sorts of things, you do need a specific word for "normal in exactly the way I mean", and "non-transsexual" is a piece of work.

I was just having fun, and I know that's not really allowed.

To replace the word cissexual with the word normal in that sentence would have changed the meaning of the sentence, so the two words are not synonymous in that context. Also, the author is a man who started out physically as a woman. He is not cissexual, and is aware of the terminology and uses it, and I don't think that using a wide vocabulary indicates some fear of other words.

Yes. I know, and I agree.

I was just taking pleasure in the long definition couched in the opposite framing. I really do love language, and I think everyone should have their own.

"Normal" is indeed a perfectly good word, but not when you're talking about human beings.

The fact that a majority of people is in a certain way does not make those that aren't that way abnormal. Just different in that particular aspect. Would you use normal as synonymous for heterosexual? That would have been totally acceptable 30-40 years ago, but not today.

You could go as far as calling the women in tech abnormal, as the overwhelming majority is male ('We have 3 women and 30 normal programmers in our company').

Normal is purposefully vague, all-encompassing and uncommunicative. If I'm describing my home setup I don't say "I run a normal server" I say "I run an Apache server". The first could be referring to hardware, software or a total lack of clue on my part. The second is actually descriptive.

So let me get this straight... If you say that women are attractive then the only possible reason you could be doing that is because you're secretly insulting their intelligence?

Insecure much? Why is this nonsense on HN.

"We need more Macs in this room; it'll pretty it right up" certainly implies that we don't need Macs because they are good machines. It's not "secretly insulting their intelligence", it is explicitly and overtly discounting the professional capabilities of the people he supposedly wanted to recruit.

You seem to be being purposefully obtus to me. If it weren't a sexist joke people wouldn't have laughed at it.

You make it seem like he was completely serious when it appears from the video that he was making a joke. I understand the joke would probably put off women from their conference, but what he said after that is the woman in his classes have liked using Haskell so more woman should be encouraged to try Haskell because they will likely do well. I think you are overstating the sexist nature of his comment.

This line from the article is brilliant -

Everyone who's ever written code knows that the compiler doesn't care about your intent; extend that to your interactions with other people, and you might find yourself behaving more fairly.

Perhaps, but "other people" are not compilers. Having real interactions with them requires a lot of nonverbal communication and interpretation of intent.

The point was not that intent doesn't matter. The point was that intent is not enough when your language (verbal and physical) do not properly convey it.

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