Comment by kaitai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaitai | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Thanks for the comment. Sorry your hope at the bottom of your post is a pipe dream :)

I am a woman. I am thinking of being a founder. I guess I'm a founder of something since I'm working on selling products (ebooks) online. (Huh. A realization.) I am totally interested in this Female Founders conference because I might see people "like me" who have succeeded. How exciting to learn from them what worked!

Some guy will read that paragraph and tell me I should just learn from guys. I already do -- I read HN, pg's stuff, books on iOS, tutorials on python, lifehacker stuff, coding stuff, math stuff. I learn from guys all the time about many important things.

But not one of these guys is going to show me by example how a short woman can come across as authoritative but not (too) bitchy or how a woman can negotiate for VC funding effectively without bringing a guy along or how a woman can manage a public or pseudonymous online identity through the shoals of denigrating emails or sexually explicit snarking.

I want to see how women do it, because that's what I'm going to have to do.

Curious to know what you think of BGC (and others like it)?

http://blackgirlscode.org/

From a previous comment I made,

"It's attempting to do successful intervention & marketing, essentially, by focusing on a specific demographic. As we all should know, focusing on a specific demographic is a fine way to produce a product targeted to that demographic's needs. Young black women have different pain points in tech than Zuckalikes or male first-born children of Chinese immigrants. It is obvious that other organizations with mainly white or male constituents are not effectively serving the market and it's no surprise that something better for this target group has come along."

Mini-story: I went to Caltech for undergrad. A "Men's Trip" started in my hovse in response to a women's dessert night or something. They had one men's-only weekend trip and realized they were bored without girls. The next "Men's Trip" was women-welcome. It was a lot of fun to go along, shoot guns, whip shitties in the desert, make Molotov cocktails out of a disputed load of boys underwear (the guys could not remember whose they were and neither wanted them). Great stuff. But I still found the women's dessert night valuable.

"whip shitties in the desert"

As a European, I am unfamiliar with this term, can you explain?

Doing doughnuts and other unproductive driving for the hell of it.

>But not one of these guys is going to show me by example how a short woman can come across as authoritative but not (too) bitchy or how a woman can negotiate for VC funding effectively without bringing a guy along

How about doing it the same thing a man does? Why should you have to do it differently? Do you think women have to bat their eyelashes or wear skimpy outfits? I am not following why you need to learn this from women? To me this is like saying your public speaking professor has to be a women or you won't be able to learn from them.

>or how a woman can manage a public or pseudonymous online identity through the shoals of denigrating emails or sexually explicit snarking.

This isn't likely to happen in the first place, but just be professional and use your head. There is no particular trick to it. Just think about what you are doing (make wise choices). Don't post pictures of yourself in a bikini on your open permission Facebook page or Post your phone number online ETC. It isn't rocket science. Again, why do you need a women only convention to learn this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com