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Comment by patzerhacker | Hacker News Reader

Before I compose this reply I want to mention that I'm a woman of color in case anybody needs to do a privilege check to see if it's okay for me to speak on this issue or whether it's acceptable to silence me because I'm "obviously" a white cis het male.

>The gender inequality is already staggering in favour of boys.

Serious question: Do you think this is a conscious choice made by those in the tech field?

I ask because my lived experience is different than that, and yes, it's a serious question even though my response may have been flippant above.

>Having a tiny programme with 40 students allowed instead of the hundreds (thousands?) of GSoC does not mean that the horrible women are out to destroy all manhood.

That's not what I said at all. I'm asking why champions of gender equality seem to favor the tactic of exclusion.

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> Serious question: Do you think this is a conscious choice made by those in the tech field?

I don't think it's conscious, but I do think it's something that can be consciously averted and I don't think it's okay in 2015 to be ignorant of how aggressively people want to hire people like them. It's not just male/female, it's white/nonwhite, American/non-American. If you have a shop of white American dudes, then virtually everybody, under what I would call "pretty average" management, will be within one step of that.

I don't get why this is being downvoted. There's substantial research to indicate the strong hiring biases at play in standard American hiring practices. Study after study after study. I get why we would all like to think ourselves virtuous. But the problem here isn't a lack of virtue, it's the zillion cognitive biases that creep in unless we take active countermeasures.

> Serious question: Do you think this is a conscious choice made by those in the tech field?

I personally find it to be similar to racism:

- Some are willfully ignorant

- Some don't care and want to keep the status quo

- Some don't care but try to appear to care for social reasons

- Some care, but are quiet for social reasons

- Some would care if they understood

- plus many others, but I think the above are most popular.

(Completely stereotypical middle-aged white dude speaking here; consider my privilege checked.)

> Serious question: Do you think this is a conscious choice made by those in the tech field?

I've always been more inclined to believe what Philip Greenspun wrote a long time ago:

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

He's talking about professors, but his point that 'men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"' still applies. Women are a majority of undergrads now; they're more socially and emotionally mature in the critical late teenage years, and it's starting to show as discrimination fades.

In any case, complaining about a lack of women in tech is an easy way to appear to care about women's pay now, during the "dot-io bubble." Much harder would be looking at actually important fields that are majority-female, e.g. "Healthcare practitioner and technical occupations," "Education, training, and library occupations," and trying to get them to pay better:

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat09.htm

>I'm asking why champions of gender equality seem to favor the tactic of exclusion.

The link the person you replied to posted seems to explain just that.

The position taken in that link is completely and utterly sexist, and here's why.

There are many in the hacker community with varying forms of social anxiety who are not comfortable around anybody of the opposite sex. Does that mean that segregation for the comfort of everybody is the solution, or the "hack" to get us to a better place? We'll never get to a better place if we exclude those things that make us uncomfortable. I dare you suggest a men-only hacker convention because women make some men feel uncomfortable. Let me know how that goes.

Before it's brought up, yes, we should exclude from our lives things that are dangerous, but just discomfort is a terrible reason to exclude something from your life.

> Serious question: Do you think this is a conscious choice made by those in the tech field?

Why does the fact of it being a conscious choice matter? Institutional discrimination is in fact a thing.

Institutional discrimination is a thing, but segregation (either voluntarily or by force) only makes that problem worse, not better.

At the risk of going all hn on you — citation?

In what way does a program for women to get involved in open-source software even slightly resemble "segregation"?

In these comments I'm specifically addressing the currently "in" movement of having gender segregated events (but apparently only no-men events) as a way to paradoxically increase diversity, not of segregation as a systematic policy of dividing groups as a form of control as in the Jim Crow regime in the American South from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era. Sorry if that was not clear.

Obviously, if women-only events encourage women to get into the larger tech scene as a whole, then that increases diversity. There's nothing "paradoxical" about it. It's very straightforward.

The idea isn't that we create a bunch of events so that women can program/hack without ever interacting with men. That should be obvious.

As a guy who attended an AdaCamp, which was a women-only main event with a small side event for guys, I say this is horseshit.

For the first time in my life, I was the visible minority at a tech event. And it was fucking intimidating. Even though everybody was perfectly nice and tried to be inclusive, I felt the odd person out.

But despite my personal discomfort, I could see how amazing this event was for the women involved. Suddenly they were in the majority. They felt safe: nobody was going to hit on them, stalk them, or stare awkwardly at their breasts. They were no longer women in tech, they were people in tech talking with other people in tech. From the Ada Initiative's reports and from talking with attendees later, it's clear the events make a huge difference.

After that experience, I am a huge supporter of events that are exclusively for minority groups. I think it's a great way to increase diversity in tech.

Oh, and as to your analogy to Jim Crow: you're trying to frame yourself as a virtuous anti-racist. But by trying to prevent minorities from meeting and organizing, you are replicating the behavior of the white people who helped build and maintain the Jim Crow regime. E.g., the slave patrols, a main job of which was keep blacks from revolting by breaking up meetings.

It doesn't even resemble that in the slightest. Jim Crow was meant to oppress, not empower. That's like saying white pride and black pride are the same thing.

Yeah, your writing is unclear, but that's not why people are disagreeing with you.

> Serious question: Do you think this is a conscious choice made by those in the tech field?

Every time I see people on HN discussing feminism, my answer leans more and more towards, "Yes." Without HN, I would never have realized the sheer depths of the deliberate sexism in tech on top of the unintentional and unconscious bits.

Really, I mostly hope that HN is non-representative.

> Every time I see people on HN discussing feminism, my answer leans more and more towards, "Yes."

Anecdotally speaking I've found HN to be much better than say Reddit or other popular tech communities.

>Serious question: Do you think this is a conscious choice made by those in the tech field?

>I ask because my lived experience is different than that, and yes, it's a serious question even though my response may have been flippant above.

Your anecdote is not data.

> I'm asking why champions of gender equality seem to favor the tactic of exclusion.

b0rk addresses this in the post above.

In the case of GSoC, I expect it's not so much about harrassment but intimidation. When there's nothing but boys doing something, many girls think to themselves, "this is not something a girl like me should be doing."

Btw, why do you consider yourself such a patzer? I do hope it has nothing to do with your gender or skin tone, and that it's just a harmless joke.

>b0rk addresses this in the post above.

And makes a completely sexist hash of it. Just suggest that because there are some male hackers that are uncomfortable around women that there should be man-only events. Let me know how that goes for you.

>When there's nothing but boys doing something, many girls think to themselves, "this is not something a girl like me should be doing."

It's not just boys and men in the tech community, as anybody who would expend five seconds looking at the subject would see. We champion people like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper.

>Btw, why do you consider yourself such a patzer? I do hope it has nothing to do with your gender or skin tone, and that it's just a harmless joke.

Do me a favor next time you want to make a comment like this - Google the term you're referring to. A patzer is somebody who lacks skill at chess. It's not a racist or sexist term. I just happen to be awful at chess (and much better at Go).

> Just suggest that because there are some male hackers that are uncomfortable around women that there should be man-only events. Let me know how that goes for you.

Either you completely misunderstand the issue and/or this is a straw man. It has nothing to do with comfort. It is the case that, because of institutional discrimination, women have a much higher mountain to climb as it were, to achieve success in the tech field. (If you dispute this, then you'll have to revise your reply to my other comment in which you acknowledge the existence of institutional discrimination.) Outreach to women, in this case, simply works towards helping them up that mountain a bit. The justification for that help is that for women the mountain is in fact higher than for men.

So, yeah, a man-only event doesn't make any sense. If you can demonstrate that men are at a net disadvantage in some way and could use help compared to other groups, then you could justify a man-only event.

>> Just suggest that because there are some male hackers that are uncomfortable around women that there should be man-only events. Let me know how that goes for you.

>Either you completely misunderstand the issue and/or this is a straw man.

It is neither me misunderstanding nor is it a strawman. For context, I'm responding to a post by @b0rk on medium that says, in part:

>If there are no men, nobody can get harassed by men. That’s it. That’s the entire hack. This has the unfortunate side effect of excluding all the delightful and wonderful men who would enrich an event. But it still makes people feel safer, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

>It has nothing to do with comfort. It is the case that, because of institutional discrimination, women have a much higher mountain to climb as it were, to achieve success in the tech field.

Except that this entire line of discussion does have to do with comfort...so I'm confused at to why you put it here (not that it's not worth discussing, mind you).

> A patzer is somebody who lacks skill at chess. It's not a racist or sexist term.

My apologies, I didn't express myself correctly. I know what the term means. It's the self-deprecating nature of it that got me curious. Have you ever felt unsuitable as a chess player because of your sex or skin tone? I didn't really expect you to say so, but I thought the possibility might exist; that you have somehow been excluded from chess by those factors, which could have made you internalise the term "patzer".

Of course, my armchair internet psychonanalysis was completely wrong, which makes me glad, and I feel humbled by you. :-)

>Have you ever felt unsuitable as a chess player because of your sex or skin tone?

No. I've never felt unsuitable as a chess player for any reason. I'm just not good at chess, but that's probably a function of not spending more of my time on it.

I have never seen myself as 'unsuitable' for any task due to who I am. Why would I? It's part of what makes exclusionary outreach programs infuriating to me. Yes, have a fund that tries to encourage engagement of an underrepresented crowd, but don't make it exclusionary to all others. Else the appearance (to me) is that you're saying that the only reason that the underrepresented group could ever make it is at the exclusion of all others.

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