It sucks to be female | Hacker News Reader

It sucks to be female

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35 pointszachinglis16 comments

I really think the author really draws the wrong message out of this. It sucks that, because there is really no objective way to determine "merit", your position in the social graph can be more important than your talents in terms of your career. Meaning a person with some amount of social power can affect your career negatively just because they don't like you. That applies to both men and women, and it happens an awful lot to both.

Anyway, there are quite a few advantages to being a woman in Western society. If she really hated this guy, she could have just married him and then took half his stuff.

I really don't think you are in a position to say what message the author should be getting out of her personal life. Your comment reeks of privilege.

I'm in a position to post my opinions, be they popular or not, on a discussion of an article I read on the internet. Your comment reeks of a worldview that I don't share.

> Meaning a person with some amount of social power can affect your career negatively just because they don't like you.

Right, but it should be based on something a little more tangible than a Twitter picture and denying sex after creepy DMs and fake client calls. This is the type of behavior that should be called out. I'm as on the fence as anyone else about naming names in these situations (because even if it is true, the fame of the accused could backfire on the victim), but this one seems pretty cut-and-dry. I personally don't know, based on her descriptions of him, who he is, but if these allegations are true and other women can come forward with similar stories, something should be said.

> If she really hated this guy, she could have just married him and then took half his stuff.

Oh for crying out loud; damned if you do, damned if you don't. He was married and lying to her and other women about it while going around conferences sleazing on them and then badmouthing them in front of his equally celebrity-status peers when they turned him down. If this was a story about a girl who was pressured to be with someone for all the wrong reasons, I can only imagine what the comments here would be like.

I'm not defending the guy at all. My point is that this general scenario -- upset some person with a certain amount of power, who then makes your life miserable -- happens quite frequently to men as well. The title of the post is that "it sucks to be female" and I don't agree that follows from the post.

The marriage comment was mostly a joke, but it does illustrate the point that Western women enjoy a lot of "priviledge" themselves. It shouldn't need to be said, but I'll add that this doesn't make sexual harassment acceptable.

I'd be interested in seeing this list of privileges.

For starters, women live about 6 years longer than men [0], and currently make up about 67% of college graduates [1] , which is partly due to affirmative action.

I can't find a great link, but I believe it's been projected that women are or will own a greater than 50% of total wealth in the Western world in the next decade or so.

Divorce court isn't too friendly to men either.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expec...

[1] http://www.womenmovingmillions.org/how-we-do-it/facts/

I questioned responding to this at all because privilege is a social aspect, not a biological one. An extra six years of life isn't exactly a benefit because those extra six years aren't added to my childhood or adulthood, but at the end of my life when I'm waning. But if we're going to talk about biology, we can talk about the wonderful stuff most women have the pleasure of dealing with on a monthly basis for the majority of their lives, we can talk about childbirth and the expectation of what constitutes 'a woman' (which is really a mix of both of these things) and we can talk about how it's more likely a girl will be judged/ridiculed based on her appearance.

Your second link also says that more women graduate high school than their male counterparts, and that 70% of college Valedictorians are women. Does that have anything to do with affirmative action, which was put in place to create equality to begin with?

It's projected we're going to own greater than 50% of the total wealth in the West for the first time in history? Fantastic, because we're greater than 50% of the population. I don't get this point at all.

You're reaching for statistics here, and I'm not even going to touch the divorce thing. I'll leave that for Reddit and Men's Rights, plus I'm biased because my father abandoned our family and three of my best friends growing up were equally raised by single mothers.

So would you agree that the current achievement gap between women and men in school is a social/cultural bias or privilege? Or would you argue instead that women are just smarter?

Sorry to hear about your father.

I don't want to make the statement that women are smarter as it may be more related to what each gender accomplishes with their education. Men are physically more capable at labor-intensive roles that don't necessarily need the type of education currently provided in K-12 outside of vocational schools and shop classes. That doesn't mean they're not smart, it just means they may know what they want out of life and know what it takes to do it (i.e. taking over his father's business).

I'd love to see our education system provide both academic- and career-oriented pathways that bring back apprenticeships. While I think women would still take more academic courses than their male counterparts, I believe it would really help alleviate gender-based assumptions about intelligence and capabilities.

We can agree to disagree. If you're going to put forward the view above though, you can't really complain if someone were to argue that the lack of women in tech is more due to their own interests and aptitude than it is widespread sexism and "male privilege".

I'm not arguing this subject, except to say that I don't think the OP makes a good argument that "it sucks to be female" in this industry.

Interests and aptitudes are relative to pre-determined ideas of capability and who is already in those fields, who we imagine when we think about those roles and who is therefore inspired the most by them. Women had no issue pulling their weight in manufacturing and computer engineering when we needed them to during times of crisis. Blog post after blog post show and surprise readers with images of women working on airplanes and doing technical work in factories. Somehow, even today, the idea of women not only taking these jobs, but doing so in mass numbers and enjoying the work impresses people.

I think the fact that we're having these conversations at all - and consistently so - signals that it can "suck to be a female in this industry".

To be honest, I think anyone who believes 67% of college graduates should or at least will naturally be women, will be having these conversations consistently anyway, regardless of the merit of the argument.

But I agree with your last point, in that it CAN suck to be anyone in any industry. So there's a point of agreement. :) And I'm finished with this thread.

To the author:

clapclap*

Beautiful. It's a shame great stuff like this falls through the cracks on HN.

I really do not know what to say, except that your story was very inspiring and I wish you the best with the future. I'm sorry about your losses, and I hope you continue doing what you love and put the past behind you. The world is a better place because of your achievements.

-kunai

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