47% of applications for our Hacker Retreat were women. Here is how we did it
medium.com
medium.com
When did we become so concerned with awesome vacation getaways with code happening and less with, you know, programming?
I think it's awesome that there are people who have the free money/time/resources/independence to go spend 12 weeks hacking in the tropics, but unless we see some baller results I can't help but shake the feeling this is an experience for trendy kids and not for the hardworking, overweight, overscheduled neckbeard.
I hope you folks are able to publicize a bunch of cool stuff that comes out of this! That might give it a bit more street cred.
"Neckbeard" is definitely a pejorative term, but that's not in itself a huge problem.
Is there a female version of neckbeard? Or a gender-neutral word with the same connotations?
I fear the obvious wordplay is offensive for the wrong reasons: neckbroad?
Their website says that they encourage people to work mainly on open-source or fun projects but that would seem to rule out anyone with a family, a full time job or who wasn't already reasonably wealthy.
It wouldn't surprise me if their demographics skewed weird for that reason alone. The age breakdown might be interesting, is this mainly retirees? Gap year students? People taking sabbaticals?
> It should be noted that this is NOT A VACATION. Participants are expected to work hard during "school hours," Monday - Thursday.
> You are free to choose any project you like, ideally something you think will help you improve as a programmer. Participants are encouraged to work on open-source code and 'for-fun' projects, but they are also allowed to work on commercial projects, such as freelance work or startups. We also encourage participants to spend as much time as possible pair programming and collaborating with other people.
> All included, we think participants could live frugally and get by on $3,500 for the three month period. However, a participant would have more flexibility with a budget of $4,000 - $5,000.
Will anything "cool" come out of this? Who knows. But $5,000 for a three month trip hardly represents an expensive excursion to the tropics, and it appears that the intent is to put in place a structure that participants are expected to adhere to. What's the problem with that? It's not like the hackathons and "schools" in the United States are consistently churning out masterful feats of engineering.
On another note, since when did you have to be overweight, unshaven and overworked to be considered a legitimate programmer? I didn't get that email.
Anyone else out there with similar or conflicting experiences?
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_25369262/jesse-jackso...
Call me when there is concern about gender ratio among garbage collectors.
Are you hacking or are you retreating and obtaining social justice? Because meanwhile, real hackers are really hacking and they generally don't care about gender ratio nor group retreats to Costa Rica.
Don't think this is a dig just at this conference either. I get irate when I see fireman in uniform out collecting for charity and things like cowboy or biker churches. Fireman should be fighting fires. Churches shouldn't have anything to do with cowboys nor bikers (not a church attender...just something personally annoying I noticed).
Separate your concerns and you won't lose sight of the proper function of each component. Just my opinion. Others may feel differently.
Again, just my opinion.
And to respond to above post, yes, they are often being paid while doing this http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/may/01/charity-taxpayer....
But the point is not about receiving payment. The point is, they are representing themselves as fireman out doing something other than fighting fires. And this irkes me.
I'd love to go to Costa Rica and plan to at some point in the future. But when I go to Costa Rica I'm going to surf and drink beer and eat a lot of seafood and lie in a hammock and do some shopping. I certainly don't plan to waste time in front of a computer writing code during this period. I do that here every day and I don't dream about Costa Rica nor worry about how many women nor minorities are in cubes next to me while I'm doing it.
There may be a word for this. Possibly several.
There are words for people who make comments with implied insults. Passive aggressive is one of them.
And sorry if you thought I was being passive aggressive, I was aiming more for comedic sarcasm.
Disagree with our values or priorities? No worries - start your own flavor of community project and let's exchange notes. Ain't the free market grand.
I don't see it. But I'm in my 40's, have no tattoos, no fedora, a normal haircut and no beard so I don't know that diversity extends far enough for me anyway. For me, hacking is not about vacation nor social engineering and never the twain shall meet. But style preferences may vary. If it works for others, by all means disregard and carry on. I'm not intending to start a community. There are already plenty of those that grew organically over the decades where I live. I generally turn up my nose at them as well, so don't take it personally. Making a better living space is a laudable goal.
One of the things that makes it a poor choice is that one of the people is probably female but she's been cropped almost out of the image.
(genuinely curious, clearly still learning here)
While citations are preferred wherever
possible, we do not require them. Much
of our wiki is primary source material,
sometimes added anonymously in order to
avoid backlash against the whistleblower.
Original research is welcome.
You can see this in the list of out-of-scope items. For example, no "apologia for misogynist, anti-feminist, oppressive, or other harmful actions or ideas" is allowed - in practice this tends to include stuff like having an unfeminine attitude to sex and sexuality, doing sex work, being friends with anyone who does, opposing bans on it, being kinky, or complaining about any bad experiences you've had with other mainstream feminist women including systematic online and offline harassment (which is a serious problem for some groups of women).
If you think about the guidelines it's easy to tell they exclude some women's feelings and lived experiences, but there's no way to tell which. The linked page makes it sound like the policy affects oppressors when it's mostly those who are worst off that get screwed.
Am I misunderstanding you? If your point of view is against sex work and "unfeminine" attitudes towards sex (wtf does that even mean anyway), it seems to me that you are being misogynist and quite possibly oppressive. I don't doubt those people exist, I've met quite a few of them, but that doesn't say anything directly about what the geek feminism wiki does and represents.
> If you think about the guidelines it's easy to tell they exclude some women's feelings and lived experiences, but there's no way to tell which. The linked page makes it sound like the policy affects oppressors when it's mostly those who are worst off that get screwed.
Is there any evidence to suggest that geek feminism wiki does that? Are viewpoints on sex work or sexuality skewed towards one point of view, or are there many points of view about those subjects on the wiki?
No, that's just sex-negative feminism. It's pretty common. In fact, the two major opponents to pornography have always been the conservative right and the feminist left. Opinion on BDSM is usually a litmus test for sex-positivity or sex-negativity.
As a whole, GFW appears to be sex-positive, with a few caveats as to how it understands objectification.
What you are saying is very wishy washy. You say dubious and subjective gender politics, but what does that even mean? Also, how exactly does accepting someone's self-reporting about lived experiences lead to a single point of view and allow for misrepresentation? If we are excepting self reporting and lived experiences, we are by definition excepting quite a large set of points of view.
Well, in theory, yes. Not at all in practice. The vast majority of people who edit the wiki are part of a general postmodern feminist hivemind, and those who espouse more traditional feminist viewpoints about gender equality without the vast baggage of sociological theory that is taken for granted tend to be reverted. You can read the editorial guidelines, it's all in there.
Singling out one specific issue in a source in order to discredit it in its entirety is a rhetorical tactic that is both popular and disingenuous.
And who gets to determine if I'm doing any of these things? The conference organizers? If I attend this conference, how can they assure me that I won't be at the mercy of conference attendees that suddenly decide I'm harassing them simply because I say something within their vicinity they disagree with a la Adria Richards?
Although I guess Richards would have been taken to task for "harassing photography". Although by that point it would have been too late anyway.
The problem with these speech codes is that they're just as easily used as a way to silence and shame people who's views differ from those of organizations like geekfeminism (i.e. not radfem).
You don't have to be a feminist to treat women respectfully.
For those of you who read the comments before clicking through to the article: this one is a list of things an event organizer did to try to boost attendance among women. None of them appear at all controversial. The "code of conduct" section this commenter takes issue with is table stakes at most major conferences. But that doesn't mean rude commenters will miss an opportunity to beat a dead horse.
As usual, any submission concerning improving the ratio of women to men in our industry immediately becomes a coatrack for digs about "radfem".
Just because they don't appear controversial to you doesn't make it so. And am I not allowed to take issue with the "table stakes"?
Don't do it. Write a blog post or something. Call your mom.
Whether or not the mechanisms for doing so have sound philosophical and social underpinnings is quite beside the point--they did X, Y, Z, and it appears to have worked.
Go piss and moan about gender (in)equality elsewhere.
I don't understand your problem with people criticizing some of the things they did. It's just saying they wouldn't be attracted to the conference. It's a piece of information the organizers can ignore or not, it's their conference.
I suppose in economic terms it will work out because having more women will attract more men. What mix of people they'll have is another issue.
There happen to be people who disagree with radfem, so they will be demotivated from attending.
Of course this might be their intention - perhaps they want a feminist conference. Their call.
At a professional conference, it should not be that hard to control your behavior. Just pretend your grandparents are with you. Adults routinely modulate their behavior based on the setting and it really is not a burden.
You can come up with all kinds of theoretical scenarios where you're a conference martyr. But I would really like to hear some specific, shocking examples of this happening to anyone. Because I've heard a lot of specific, shocking examples of women being verbally and physically harrassed.
You mean besides the Adria Richard's example?
At a professional conference, it should not be that hard to control your behavior.
The conference organizers seem to disagree with you in this case.
a conference martyr good one.
> Both parties were met with, in private. The comments that were made were in poor taste, and individuals involved agreed, apologized and no further actions were taken by the staff of PyCon 2013. No individuals were removed from the conference, no sanctions were levied.
But let's grant for argument's sake that this was an example of public shaming that cries out to the very heavens for justice. What are some others? Just to balance out the huge number of reported harassment incidents from tech conferences, and the bigger number that must go unreported.
Why is the one example not enough to prove my point? I could name a hundred and you still wouldn't be happy. Why bother.
That's an assertion of fact, which you can disprove by giving examples. Maybe I'm wrong and all kinds of men are being kept from conferences, and shamed into silence, by harrassment codes. Tell me their stories!
Your question is of course also absurd because you ask for examples of the absence of something. It doesn't create much publicy if somebody decides to skip a conference. I personally would think twice about going to a conference with such policies because I consider them insulting.
I could support what I'm saying, but that's too hard. The reality is there aren't many examples of someone being unjustly sanctioned by a code of conduct.
I think at the last Chaos Computing Congress there were a huge number of incidents and feminist campaigners threatening people with self-made "red cards". Just to mention one example that might be easily googleable.
This is in line with the standard "reverse *ism categorically can't exist" claim. Discrimination is only bad when it favors the more powerful group, or so the claim goes. So a person might be rejected by a conference solely beause he is a white male, but because the system of power is (on balance) in favor of white males, that is not racism or sexism and not prohibited.
The claim is not (or shouldn't be) that such discrimination can't be hurtful, can't be problematic, or isn't a legitimate target of criticism under some circumstances. The claim is that bigotry and bias in the "other" direction do not constitute structural "*ism."
What's the context of someone being rejected from a conference solely because he's a white male? If someone is rejected because the conference is trying to get broader representation then the rejection isn't just because he's a white male, it's because he's a white male AND white males were overrepresented.
It's unfortunate from a rhetorical standpoint that sexism easily seems like it could mean "any sex discrimination" but is also used to mean "the structural oppression of women."
I welcome the day when the objection is genuinely only about the arguable linguistic inconsistency, but I can't help but thinking the concept is the big hangup, not the word for it.
We're still thinking through this - one month to go until the retreat begins - and would love to get HN's input. Has anybody tried anything similar? As an organizer for a ~15-person group and a white dude, I realize and acknowledge that some inherent bias exists. We want to address it as effectively as possible.
I'm glad we both think it's an important issue in spite of what some other commenters have said.
A) Codes of conduct are best enforced by example. So be very, very mindful of your own behavior and that will do a lot to deter problems.
B) When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, harassment got reported to HR. HR interviewed people separately. So that might be sort of a vote for a neutral third party to turn to.
(I got interviewed after I emailed a male on my team and copied our boss and told him in no uncertain terms "don't you ever speak to me that way again in a meeting." I was never told the outcome but my suspicion is that he was probably sent to sensitivity training. So, presumably, they decided in my favor. He avoided me and was angry for a time. I spent some months winning his trust again. I eventually smoothed things over. But, no, he never spoke inappropriately to me again.)
Best of luck.
Best of luck.