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Comment by this2shallPass | Hacker News Reader

There are two issues: 1) What is the nature of hackathons? Many are pitchathons. 2) Think about people's incentives. There's a tech climate, constantly perpetuated in media and many people's conversations, where women are under attack in technology. If you you don't show you care as a man, if you don't bend over backwards to make sure everyone feels extra welcome, you might be branded sexist. I think people are tired or being attacked, and wanted to encourage some people new to programming.

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> 1) What is the nature of hackathons? Many are pitchathons.

It's even more basic than that - What is hacking? Take a look at the MIT Gallery of Hacks for one perspective: http://hacks.mit.edu/

To me it means building something awesome, and it sounds entirely possible this team did that without writing a line of code.

Do you have evidence for someone being branded sexist for merely not bending over backwards to prove that they aren't?

Serious question. I have never seen it.

They usually don't call you out on it, but they respond as if they're defending the position of women should be in tech, which is not the issue.

I've experienced this personally.

>Do you have evidence for someone being branded sexist for merely not bending over backwards to prove that they aren't?

Maybe not a specific person or event, but would the constant demand for "diversity reports" from tech companies from the "tech media" not be an example of this? And the subsequent shaming by the same media of these same companies for having too many penises in the office, or too few vaginas?

I apologise for the vulgarity of the above, but that's what it is when it comes down to it.

And people say that women are too sensitive and just need to grow a thicker skin. You realize that there is a difference between saying there is a sexism problem and saying that everyone is a sexist, right?

Does Dr. Matt Taylor count? Or Brad Wardell? Or maybe that PyCon guy with the big dongle?

I'm with you on Dr.Taylor and the PyCon guy, but IMO, Brad Wardell is clearly an example of someone who created a hostile work environment for women, even if he doesn't fit the dictionary definition of sexist. The sexual harassment lawsuit and his counter-suit were both settled out of court, but reading the e-mail exchanges between himself and his employee shows that Wardell was nothing short of a creep.

I've seen conferences called out for having too few female speakers. They made talk choices based only on abstracts, not on speakers, and ended up with a higher percentage of female speakers than had submitted. When they informed the person who called them out, they were then effectively told they weren't doing enough, and directed to a web page that told them they need to do more to encourage female submitters, such as doing the things they were already doing. This occurred over Twitter, and I'm not going to dig up looking for it (it happened about a year ago).

I realize it's not exactly what you asked for, but it was a clear case of "guilty until proven innocent."

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