Why am I not surprised to see the usual litany of sexist, condescending, dismissive and outright offensive HN comments on what is unquestionably a serious problem of gender imbalance in the tech industry?
Ugh.
Ugh.
It's not about fixating on a 50/50 ratio. It's about changing the climate and attitudes so it's a more welcoming environment, so they do want to be part of the communities. If more women go into tech, that doesn't automatically mean less men. My personal belief is that it would increase the amount of capable people in the respective communities.
What I find most surprising though, is the vehemence with which these attitudes are defended.
Isn't it possible that there are other factors which cause such a large gender disparity between choices that teenagers are making...?
Don't you think an IT community more friendly towards the female part of the population would be beneficial and could interest more young females than the status quo? Consider in todays age it is easy to lurk a community over the internet.
So, would you think being a teenage female trying to learn language $X and finding lots of sexism is an encouraging experience and would not be a factor in driving them away?
Why is gender imbalance a problem?
Do you have in mind: 1) Women have a distinct perspective that the tech industry would benefit from having more of. 2) Tech jobs are nice and women should get to have them too. 3) Gender imbalance proves discrimination is happening, knowingly or not. 4) Something else.
I'm curious.
It is evident to me that you can't optimize for two selection criteria at the same time. Eg, selecting the fastest vehicle is unlikely to also get you the most fuel efficient one. Hence, selecting women (or men) specifically is unlikely to optimize for speaking ability, technical knowledge, etc.
Do you believe that equally-qualified women are being discriminated against now, or do you accept that tradeoff in pursuit of correcting something else?
Its fair to point out that going out of your way to get a female speaker simply because she is female is not the way to go about things. I don't think this is what the article is proposing so much as making a valiant effort to have a more diverse panel.
Frankly, to all out boycott all male panels seems counter productive and a bit extreme. Some conferences have an open call for presenters, and sometimes women just don't apply. At what point is that the fault of the organizer? I can see invitations posing an issue, but not all conferences operate that way.
See, I can make blanket statements with no proof also.