Why I won't speak at women-only events
guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk
1. I'm basically not allowed to voice an opinion that isn't completely aligned with the feminist status quo (I believe in equality, fuck me right).
2. I'd rather learn how to build a better emberjs app. Or learn more about thorium.
3. Unlike the vast majority of problems, there are few concrete steps to be taken to correct the imbalances that do exist.
Edit:
I can't believe I had to self sensor, just to hit the post button.
On a side note: considering he's frustrated at self-sensoring himself from saying something he knew was wrong to say in some manner, I'd contend that in an environment where you do not have a chance to review what you say before saying it out loud, he's at least partially responsible for reactions he receives.
I didn't suggest he never attend one. In fact, I was careful to avoid suggesting that at all.
My question has nothing to do with what happened in the past, but rather, his assumption that everything he doesn't attend is a certain way.
> I'm amused at how many assumptions people are making about this guy.
Casting stones, pots and kettles, and all that jazz.
What do you mean?
I assume you mean "I don't listen to 'women in tech' presentations", rather than, "I don't listen to women, in tech presentations". The former is a political stance, the latter is excluding an entire sex for unknown reason, even if they are talking of emberjs or thorium.
A piece of advice from my father: If you have two ways to take something, take it the nice way.
I try to follow it in my life.
Why is your null hypothesis that women shouldn't be treated as equals?
The article, on the other hand, seems to be pushing more for indistinguishability rather than equality. E.g.: "That depressing statistic about there being only three female CEOs in the FTSE 100..." It is only depressing if you think men and women being created equal means that they should have a perfect 50/50 split representation across every endeavor.
I mean women-in-tech presentations.
Edit: My fault for not explaining further: Pasted just below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6045814
This doesn't make sense. Most movements that are composed of many different groups with different interests never reach a status quo. Mass movements are rare and usually are not as mass as they are made out to be. Acting like feminism is a monolith and that all feminists act or think a certain way is one of the most common stereotype out there.
That being said, the largest factions don't exactly cover all sides of an issue, to put it mildly, so the existence of factions doesn't make anything better.
For example, the argument over transsexuals (mentioned by @rmc) has two main factions within modern western feminism:
1. "Transsexual women aren't real women; they're just men who are co-opting the brutal oppression real western women face, drowning out real women's voices."
2. "If you feel that you are a woman, then you are a woman. You do not need to present yourself as a woman, you do not need to be a woman every day, and you do not need to chose between being a man and being a woman at any given moment—you can be both. Anyone who questions your womanhood is a misogynist, because they are oppressively forcing their definition of womanhood onto a woman."
Would it be ok if we could discuss this without the profanity?
That's simply exercising a choice in what sort of conversation is worth your time.
Sentence 2 is again speaking specifically about "women in tech" event, not about talking about the subject.
Sentence 3, is admittedly a defeatist attitude. However if there is nothing we can do about it, then why should we waste our time talking about it. In this case it is more of, if the people who are heavilly invested in this have not come up with something we can do about it yet, why should I waste my time unless I want to be a major activist. And, based on point 1, the movement is already hostile to what I have to say, so forget about it.
Admitadly, I am probably projecting my own thoughts on sentence 3.
notice how there isn't any actual content in the rebuttal and how it is completely infalsifiable and indefensible. it's the equivalent of dropping the c-word in an argument against a woman.
shaming language against males:
* grow up, be a man, man up
* you're a virgin / inexperienced
* "issues with women"
* you're bitter
* you're scary
* you're a rapist
* you must be gay (not sure why people use this one)
* you hate women
* you have psychological issuesPeople use that because they think a man acting like a woman (by having sex with men, by being the receptive partner in sex, by being penetrated, etc.) is a terrible thing for a man to do. Some homophobia is a form of misogyny, hating men who act woman-like.
You're not going to get very far towards any kind of understanding by taking the least worthwhile arguments made by a group of people and projecting that belief on everyone else. That dog won't hunt and it just looks silly.
(e.g. the large reddit subcommunity dedicated to feminism & social justice "ShitRedditSay"/"SRS"/"the Fempire" has a large discussion (SRSDiscussion) with Rule #1 being: "SRSD is a progressive, feminist, antiracist, GSRM-positive, antiableist community", GSRM = gender, sexual & relationship minorities, i.e. anyone not a cis straight monoagomous person. Homophobic language would fall afoul of that)
"misandry" as an institutualised hatred against men for being men and hatred and degeration of masculine things and activity doesn't really exist in the same was people view feminine as weak & not as good exists.
There is also a lot of gender roles that people break, which feminism is attempting to break down.
Yes, because there is actually a single, unified, globally agreed upon feminist status quo who tries to silence the voices of brave dissenters...
Feminists see themselves as permanent underdogs, like the USA, but it just ain't true.
> Chances are your HR bureaucracy is radically feminist.
Ah, the good old feminist conspiracy. Do you really believe what you said ? I will stand by my words. There is no feminist conspiracy.
This is not a debate in good faith. If you come to the table with no previous knowledge about anything and demand to be heard, why should people waste time with bringing you up to speed? The vast majority of the times this happens it ends up in moving the goal posts.
This point of view you harbor is WHY there can be no debate in good faith.
I'm just saying that feminists come in all shapes and colors, and, lo and behold, there are a wide range of opinions among them, and (unsurprisingly) many of these opinions are contradictory, just like in any other group of people sharing some basic ideas.
I'm also saying that you should not base your opinion of social movement around the views of a kernel of extremists. Specifically, if you think that, as soon as someone introduces herself as a feminist, you think that she will stand by extreme opinions and that your differences are irreconcilable, and therefore is not worth talking to, then perhaps you should try to review your judgements.
And I'm also saying that there is a problem with gender equality in our modern societies. Even if you disagree with the methods and propaganda of extremist groups, you should recognize that there is a big problem. And the easiest way to eradicate those extreme opinions is to eradicate the problem that gives a voice to these groups.
Many people not involved with feminist groups often think feminists think the same about everything. Which shows they know nothing about actual disagreements within feminists groups. Just look up transexual issues & feminism. That's a big source of disagreement right there.
Regardless of the existence of the patriarchy as a phenomena - and there are many critics of the theory, from the right and the left -, it makes no sense to dismiss it as a conspiracy theory.
What you described is a conspiracy. Of course feminists don't describe their own conspiracy theories as conspiracy theories, they want them to appear legitimate.
Ultimately patriarchy as a social force and concept is totally provable has statistical and philosophical evidence that shows it exists. Every basic women's studies or feminist book goes over this to some extent.
>totally provable has statistical and philosophical evidence that shows it exists.
Except that alternative explanations are dismissed. If the "evidence" supports many possible conclusions, then it is not proof of a single specific conclusion like "patriarchy".
It seems like you are saying that is there is indeed a real conspiracy of institutions created and/or controlled by men, in which case I totally agree. We have well documented cases, historically and in the present, of institutions and systems that are dominated by men.
> Except that alternative explanations are dismissed. If the "evidence" supports many possible conclusions, then it is not proof of a single specific conclusion like "patriarchy".
I've yet to see convincing alternative explanations. All of the evidence points to existence of patriarchy as a social institution.
It seems like you are deliberately choosing to respond with non-sequiturs and strawmen because you don't want to have an honest conversation.
>I've yet to see convincing alternative explanations. All of the evidence points to existence of patriarchy as a social institution.
Just as creationists view all evidence as pointing to the existence of god. If you start with a conclusion, and twist everything to suit that end, you can't reasonably expect people who didn't start with the same bias to agree with your conclusions.
Patriarchy as it is commonly understood in feminist circles is more nuanced than your straw-man. It's bottom-up, not top-down. You'd have to stretch the definition of "conspiracy" awfully far to cover an emergent property of a set of principles and societal norms.
Anti-feminists would tend to view it as a conspiracy, or no longer existing ("women can vote, so it's all OK now, right?"). Sadly this sort of attitude/meme does exist....
Nope. And neither are the societal structures that privilege women.
Western women have always been among the safest, most privileged human beings on the planet. Predictably, and unfortunately, modern western feminists never compare the plight of the average man with the plight of the average woman when determining who wins the Oppression Olympics; instead, they look jealously toward men at the top of society and declare that because women aren't a part of that, they're more oppressed.
And sadly, it gets more ridiculous than that. I've seen people on this forum actually say, with similar words:
Institutionalized misandry cannot exist, because most people at the top of society are men. Women don't have the institutional power to oppress men. Any oppression men face is a result of The Patriarchy.
Ignoring the fact that oppression can come from outside of congress (university policies, for example), those people are defining patriarchy to simply mean "Oppressive policies written by people with penises, even if feminists support those policies".
And that's what makes it dogma.
You are of course entitled to your opinion, but I think you'd be better served by engaging with a more nuanced and complex version of these views. What you describe here is caricature. And in all I think it says more about you than feminism.
A common refrain in feminist circles is that patriarchy hurts everyone. A good example is parental leave as it applies to men. Paternity leave in the US is absurdly bad, suggesting that we as a society do not value the time a father spends with his child. Along those lines, men are typically graded on a patronizingly terrible curve when it comes to childcare. And so on.
Note that these aren't just laws, but societal norms, especially the latter where people praise you for doing basic shit like picking up your kids from work or whatever. If you view patriarchy as an emergent property, then the idea that "laws written by men" are a sufficient description of the concept is just absurd. You could of course take the least coherent out of any group which espouses a belief and engage with that, but that's not an honest way to have a discussion.
So like I said maybe don't engage with the most ridiculous possible presentation of feminism.
That's like saying that because there is a significant amount of shared ideas in US politics (e.g.: "US Independence was a good thing"), that US politics is now some sort of group think where dissent is not allowed and everyone thinks the same!
Nobody made that claim, that is my point. Responding to strawmen is not productive, respond to the actual conversation.
I don't oppress women. Women oppress me. And pointing that out makes me the asshole.
But is there a thing, let's call it "pop feminism", which is widespread enough and whose adherents share enough basic ideas and positions, that we can usefully predicate things of it? Absolutely. And, well, that's the problem.
For example, when I see people use terms like "patriarchy" in earnest, I tend to grimace a bit. Not because I think they're crazy radical idiots, but because I think they're dangerously behind the times. The concept of unilateral patriarchy (i.e., a system in which most/all advantages based on gender accrue to men while most/all disadvantages based on gender accrue to women) is something like thirty years out of date at this point. We know now that the enemy is gender essentialism, which rigid, constrained roles and systemic advantages/disadvantages emerge from. We also know now that it's not a unidirectional oppression -- the resulting roles have aspects which harm people of all genders, and give at least some advantages to people of all genders.
But for every one person who gets this there are a thousand, or more, who just read sites like Jezebel, or feminism-related tags on Tumblr/Facebook, and end up imbibing pop-feminism ideas that are woefully out of touch with what we now actually know about gender in our society. What's worse, those ideas tend to reinforce essentialist gender roles rather than seek to overturn them.
The wage gap, currently being argued in the usual stupid way in another front-page thread, is actually a wonderful example of this. Research has shown, time and again, that much of the gap results from women being assigned, by society as a whole, a "childbearer/caregiver" role. And the consequences are clear. Women are more likely to work part-time, women who work full-time work fewer hours and less overtime, women actively seek out "child-friendly" workplaces, women start out with relative earning parity but it falls off a cliff once they have or start thinking about having children, a whole raft of stuff that adds up really really quickly.
A real solution to this would be to throw out the essentialism and the notion that child-rearing is "women's work". A real solution would seek to push women out of automatically assuming that bearing and raising children is a vitally important life goal, and would seek to push men out of automatically assuming their role doesn't involve caring for kids. A real solution would question basic ideas about what a successful life looks like and throw out any and all assumptions about "I am of this gender, therefore I should desire that"
But pop feminism doesn't do any of that. Instead it assumes that being a woman is mostly identical with wanting to have children and be their primary caregiver. So pop-feminist articles focus on how to "have it all", how to "balance" raising two kids with working 80-hour weeks at a law firm or running your own business, and argue that the important thing is to provide things like on-site day-care and generous maternal-leave policies to ensure women can keep right on performing the same rigid role they've had imposed on them for centuries.
What's more, we know these policies really don't work. There are countries which have implemented them, and they still see drastic drop-offs of women's lifetime earnings post-childbirth. What those policies do really well is make it easier to slide back into that role of "raising children is what I'm really supposed to do with my life".
But rather than attack the real problem, and ask the real, really hard questions about gender roles and how to overturn them, most people who identify as "feminist" just forward and share and retweet the same old pop-feminism drivel. And if you believe there isn't a relatively large group of people who identify that way and do exactly that, with relative ideological unity in terms of underlying assumptions, then I just don't know what Internet you're spending time on.
If bearing and raising children is not a vitally important life goal I don't know what is. The failure to do so would literally spell the end of civilization. Perhaps this view accounts for birth rates declining below sustainable levels in developed nations.
> [...] and would seek to push men out of automatically assuming their role doesn't involve caring for kids.
Of course no father should assume this.
But I feel this entire argument is pushing for indistinguishability more than equality. There will never be indistinguishability between men and women. Equality doesn't mean eliminating all differences.
Gender roles are pervasive, but are more obvious for women, who tend to get defined in terms of their wombs rather than any individual characteristics. Essentialists who hold traditional/conservative views don't really go much beyond that -- bearing and raising children is what women are for. Essentialists who hold progressive/liberal views try to hide this, but are still basically assuming that all women really want, deep-down inside, to be mothers above all other goals, so the discourse is all about how to do other things at the same time as that.
And that's a problem regardless of who's doing it or why. A developed civilization can remain viable without needing every woman to be a baby factory first and foremost, so why do we still push that attitude from basically all sides?
And although there probably always will be some life paths that are incompatible with having children, most of the ones that are incompatible today are not necessarily incompatible; they're only contingently incompatible as a consequence of how our society is structured (with its focus on career advancement and measuring one's worth in terms of titles and raw dollar values, and the resulting need to work insane hours). We could tear down all those assumptions, and have a society where everyone has the option of multiple ways to lead a fulfilling life, with raising children being one of those. But we don't do that, and even the popular incarnations of movements which claim to advocate for real equality of opportunity don't try.
We could tear down all those assumptions, and have a society where everyone has the option of multiple ways to lead a fulfilling life, with raising children being one of those.
Yep, that's what feminists are doing, smashing the patriarchy.
But we don't do that, and even the popular incarnations of movements which claim to advocate for real equality of opportunity don't try.
Feminism is doing this.
When people now use words like "patriarchy" now, they don't mean "all and any man opressing all women", they mean what you talk about, rigid gender roles. You post basically describes the patriarchy and how it's bad. The idea that women should so some work (e.g. nursing) and men shouldn't do some work (e.g. nursing), is patriarchy.
I can't find any FAQ on Jezebel (since I don't read it much), so I can't find their definition, but there are definitions on http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com, a Feminist 101 site.
Feminists recogise that patriarchy does affect men negatively. (e.g. reddit's SRS Fempire on just that: http://www.reddit.com/r/SRSDiscussion/comments/1a0bef/xpost_... )
Imagine a patient with appendicitis who goes to a doctor, and the doctor just hands over a prescription for pain medication and says "no worries, this will make you feel better right away".
The pain meds will make the patient feel better for a bit, but really they're just masking a symptom of the underlying disease, which is still there. And sooner or later that appendix must be treated or got rid of, or the patient's going to die.
The pop-feminism practised in places like SRS, Jezebel, Tumblr, etc. is the social-justice equivalent of giving the appendicitis patient pain meds. "Smashing the patriarchy" will still leave the underlying disease of which it's a symptom (essentialism and roles assigned on the basis of gender) untreated.
Of course, that's an oversimplification, since the popular conception of "patriarchy" is deeply flawed in other ways (it lacks the explanatory power to say anything more glib than a 101-style "of course it hurts you too, sweetie" to men who are also being harmed by the deeper disease of essentialism, to take one example).
But I've long since given up trying to get this through to most people on internet boards, which is why I now do it under throwaway accounts.
Now I'm confused. I'm an SRSer, and "the patriachy" is gender roles. "smashing the patriachy" means ending gender roles & essentialism.
* the popular conception of "patriarchy" is deeply flawed in other ways (it lacks the explanatory power to say anything more glib than a 101-style "of course it hurts you too, sweetie" to men who are also being harmed by the deeper disease of essentialism, to take one example).*
Here's a thread on SRS talking about how the patriachy hurts men: http://www.reddit.com/r/SRSDiscussion/comments/1a0bef/xpost_...
Believe me, us social justice/feminist/SRS people do have serious conversations about lots of things, including men.
Firstly, the fact that you continue to use and insist on an overladen (with decades' worth of baggage) term that obscures what you're talking about, rather than just say what you claim to mean, is not an encouraging sign to me.
Secondly, if SRS is really a place where "serious conversations", as you put it, take place, then they certainly were adept at hiding it from me back when I frequented. After a while, one gets rather tired of the LOL DILDZ and LOL MRAS and wants to actually accomplish some good. Perhaps it's now a better place, but given how toxic the culture was I very much doubt it.
Lazy asshole.
I obviously was not reaching "everyone," but so what? I reached 300 people, and the politics of why a conference was put together to appeal to Spaniards (is that a word?) is of no consequence to me.
If I were a politician I'd attend Church pancake breakfasts and lunch with the Greek Business Chamber. Humans clump and cluster for all sorts of reasons. I support some, am indifferent to others, and frown at a few more.
But in the end, if the people in attendance are people I want to reach, I'll go. If their politics don't appeal to me, I'll avoid discussing the subject.
JM2C, I can't tell anyone else what to do.
I'm not particularly sure the OP has had much of an epiphany either. She could've entitled it 'Priest won't be preaching to the choir, anymore'. And it would've had a similar message, but perhaps not reached the top of HN.
Edit: Spaniard is indeed a lovely word: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Spaniard.
The danger with women-only events is that they become perceived as a ghetto. By opening the doors to all, the entire community has a voice, which is as it needs to be if women are to be full, mainstream members of tech communities.
There's a place for "safe spaces" if people are sharing extremely personal stories (e.g. sexual assault, legal issues), but those tend to be done best as small groups anyway - it's a lot harder for a 1000 person auditorium to be a true "safe space".
That said, I don't think the article is about intentionally women-only events. I think she was planning to talk to men as well, and the men though she wasn't talking to them.
Instinctively, it raises my hackles, because positive discrimination is still discrimination, but I've seen it work really well in stand up comedy.
Women standups only events have a very different feel, but you are also more likely to see women do standup that is normally male territory. So you might see an angry female political shock comic, whereas mainstream female comics tend to do observational humor about life.
I'd suggest that there is value in creating a situation where vacuum causes people to fill roles they normally feel they don't fit the expectation for.
The boss interrupts the HR person. "You know, I've had it with all this affirmative action and diversity crap. It's a waste of time. Let's just stop all this. I just want to interview the best qualified person."
The HR person says "Ok, boss." The next day Jane shows up for the interview.
Stereotypically, females tend to do the front-end, QA, and design aspects (not saying this is always true or that it should be true, just that this is the common stereotype). So I would find it cool to have more women speaking about "hardcore" stuff like language and compiler implementation in C, low-level optimization, and so forth.
The issue here is that she got some notoriety exploiting the gender issue, and now she's burned out because of the gender issue and she doesn't want that.
Typical case of wanting to have the cake and eating it too.
Arguments about fairness quickly fall apart because (I believe) the vast majority agrees with tenets of fairness, but they don't see how it effects their bottom line.
Her goal is to change society by introducing new ideas about how society works. In order to be most effective in doing this, she wants to talk to as many people as possible. In particular, if she does not go to all-inclusive events, she'll eliminate the very people who are in the best position to do something about it.
Women-only tech events have the goal of encouraging individual women to engage in technology. Their hypothesis is that there is something about society (either at-large, or localized to technology) itself that discourages women from engaging. So, instead of changing society as a whole, they create a new space which operates in a way that they think is more conducive to engaging women in technology.
I think that both approaches are valid and commendable. I think it's a mistake to confuse the two, or to say that having one means the other is not useful.
My limited personal observation at real world events is when you go to a con where they strongly encourage female attendance like the HOPE cons a couple years back (even if just "bring your SO; because its a cheap date") has dramatically better behavior than "if it happens in Vegas it stays in Vegas" class of behavior. I'm sure contrary anecdotes also exist, although probably not many.
Another observation is that brogrammer events aren't really tech events... a different clique of morons doing keg stands doesn't really change anything.
Finally I've noticed that once event attendance exceeds 1/3 or so journalists, it stops being a tech event and turns into the usual journalist boozing and schmoozing and related unsavory activity, but anything negative will of course be blamed on the techs, as if its still a techie event. You get 1/3 journalists, and 2/3 marketing and management drones at an event where they talk about techies but none are actually there, and anything bad will get blamed on the techie culture despite being practically no representation present. It would be very much like if things got out of hand at an SCA event, then blame it all on the historical figure Richard the Lionhearted even if he didn't attend. After all, the problem can't be the people who were actually there; they're the people who are in charge therefore they don't make the mistakes.
I go to plenty of mainstream tech events. But I also go to a gay geek event every month. Is that "ghettoing"? No. It's a fun night out with people who share both interests and sexual orientation.
I don't see why this is such a big deal.
As a straight guy, I probably wouldn't attend, seeing as it's not intended to be an event for me (although I would if I were invited by a friend).
I was mainly referring to "women only" of conference scale. I'm sure they are useful for networking and comparing notes (e.g. which companies are sexist, which companies promote women into leadership).
But since most of the most distinguished / known people in tech still tend to be male, if women want to reach the top of the profession, they will also need the support and endorsement of men. So female-only events are fine, but they don't boost women's careers all on their own.
Incidentally, the original Girl Geek Dinners in London was created precisely after Sarah Blow, the woman who started it, went to a mainstream geek event and had someone just flat out presume that she was a marketing/PR girl rather than a developer because she was young, blonde and female. The point of them was to have a place to grump and grumble and have a night out where that was pretty much guaranteed not to happen. It was always hoped that it would be in addition to mainstream rather than gender-specific events.
I don't think it's a choice between women going only to women-only events and women avoiding them as "ghettoising". As I said, I go to gay geeks one (or sometimes two) nights a month. There's plenty of other days for other events.
That makes sense.
Special events for specific sub-communities is good. And participating in the broader community culture (and criticizing / opposing it when necessary) is also good.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that there are certain categories of behavior that you would be far less likely to see at an all-female convention than one with men and women. Sexual assault isn't the only thing women worry about— there's a lot more subtle stuff out there that flies right over the head of regular, non-terrible dudes. See some of the stuff Cherie Priest and other ladies in the SF community have posted about lately.
Even if I disagree with the majority opinion, it's better to turn up and ask one polite awkward question than to just leave it to people who wouldn't question their own ideas there (making it a less interesting session).
How is an invitation for guests to bring their partners make an event a private club?
Show, don't tell!
Parmer's column is accurate but not perplexing given what she said about being the CEO of Lady Geek. Her choice of target market (explained fairly well in its name) defines the context of her target audience.
Terrible examples. I was motivated enough to wikipedia them to gather the following data. Whitman and Fiorina have no tech background at all and have never worked tech jobs, pure management material all the way. Fiorina is legendary for destroying HP not exactly a glowing endorsement for women in anything. Mayer and Rometty went to school for tech but between the two of them they've only got about 5 years experience in tech/engineering before succumbing to the dark side of management.
If anything the message to young women with a list like that is women should get out of tech and into mgmt/marketing/beancounting ASAP because tech is a dead end for women.
Now, rather than 1%er management crooks, why not an example of a techie like Limor Fried? There's a real engineer, who happens to be female, someone who would make a good hero for young women in engineering / tech / programming. If you don't know who she is, you should look her up on wikipedia. There are of course a zillion other good techies who happen to be female, but an EE-chauvinist like myself is going to promote another EE. I can think of a relatively famous FPGA dev and many others.
I pointed them out mostly because these are "celebrities" in the tech world that you could easily find giving talks at various venues. Real people who get real work done tend to not have time for such nonsense :)
I could/should have noted Mayer only because I consider her to be one of the most influential people in the (FTSE equivalent mentioned by Parmer) NASDAQ. While the jury is still out on her tenure at Yahoo!, several of Google's recent missteps _could_ be attributed to her absence at Big G.
There's an impedance mismatch. It would be like sending me as a missionary to encourage young black men to enter the religious seminary, and then being surprised at my remarkable ineffectiveness. Why, VLM has a lot of karma on HN, how could he not have been effective?
I think without engineers or at the very least representatives that can be the true voice of the engineers any company is doomed to produce waste and a disconnect between what is, what can be, and what isn't.
My point is management drones love to talk, and techies by a large majority are much more comfortable staying out of the executive suite and staying in the labs. Until a balance occurs, the mismatch will always be present.
I think this is more of a cultural divide issue than a gender one, however.
Women Techies dream team version 0.001:
Limor Fried, Jeri Ellsworth, Radia Perlman (noobs probably don't know who she is... hint... Spanning Tree Protocol and a epic 90s book titled "Interconnections"). "the table" needs techies like those three women, not some famous bean counters.
I would much rather have my daughter look up to those three (or about a bazillion others) than, say, "Job Destroyer Carly"
The second issue is an implementation of the first. Women only events are one of many contributing solutions to the gender gap. A woman only event ending with an invitation to a larger general event will likely do more to bring women into that event than sitting on a panel with a 95% male audience lamenting the fact that women seems to be missing.
Here is an example of women being passive in engineering: An engineering club at my college had 30% to 50% women at almost every meeting. Most of the time, the women didn't do anything for the club's project - they stood nearby, talked, and sometimes cut foam or got something for a guy. This was in a machine shop.
If they had put themselves forward and tried to get involved, they would have learned a lot and had more respect from the guys in the process . As it is, I'm afraid their behavior only reinforced the stereotype of "women engineering majors aren't serious" and left them with fewer practical skills than the guys.
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I don't know how effective having a women-only audience and speaker would be at reversing situations like this. If the talk was on "be more assertive" and "here are the potential problems you might face", it might be helpful. men-are-evil and similar lines are not.
In the example given, having women-only clubs might help more - if the focus is primarily on building things, learning new tools, or completing some major project. It would increase womens' confidence and their assertiveness, as well as giving them an opportunitity to learn stuff a lot of the guys in the regular engineering club already know - without feeling awkward/stupid/embarassed.
Regardless, though, any women-only group opens up the door to women who might be uncomfortable speaking out and asking questions otherwise.
Edit: fixing some italics :/