Thanks a lot for the advice everyone, I feel a little less overwhelmed now.
119 karma · joined December 14, 2011
Are there any protective steps I should take before doing that? I mean stuff like licenses / patents / trademarks / company formation etc.
I like seeing labor of love side projects actually turn into something cool and useful.
Prediction before clicking: Half of the thread, or more, will not be about what he says, but about his tone and "professionalism."
Never change HN. Never change.
I've made peace with that knowledge.
I don't see a ton of sexism here though. A developer removing her code because she didn't want to date him isn't sexism. It's unprofessional as hell and possibly a fireable offense depending on the circumstances, but it's not about a generalized animosity toward women.
The hula hoop thing too seems dumb. Maybe you had to be there? Were the male developers' tongues out? Were they making obscene comments? Two ladies hula hooping in the middle of an office is likely to attract attention. Are men supposed to immediately duck and cover and avert their eyes? Seems like she's over-reacting.
Still, assuming everything stated in the article is true, it does raise questions about the founders' judgment. I really like Github and this situation certainly is disappointing.
</Lebowski>
All joking aside, that rug thing is pretty silly. "Meritocracy" is not code for "Straight White Males only." Nevertheless Horvath being feminist does not invalidate any unfair treatment she may have experienced should her claims be substantiated.
If possibly perhaps the best thing is to keep your company small? We don't all have to try to be Facebook. I like to dream about starting a small company that offers a simple product that just does one thing well so that me a handful of others can just run the thing.
"PyLadies also aims to provide a friendly support network for women"
"Anyone with an interest in Python is encouraged to participate," toward the goals described above. The goals described above are discriminatory in a way with which I do not agree, hence my lack of support.
If you believe that a character who's gender is the opposite of its creator is somehow invalid or cannot be a role model then I don't know what to say other than I don't agree. It's a subjective point and not particularly interesting to debate in my opinion.
I'm speaking very generally when I say "political purpose". I don't mean that he is advancing an ideology, but rather he is addressing a gripe he has with society, specifically the lack of female heroes. He is addressing this issue by changing a text. I don't agree with this, though I assume the father's intent was purely to help his daughter and not to push his politics on anyone.
For one, as an author, I disagree with altering a text for a political purpose. To be sure, this instance is fairly innocuous, and parents frequently change bedtime stories on the fly to suit their kids. Nevertheless I consider the Legend of Zelda to be a text with its own mythology and themes, and just as I wouldn't rewrite Hamlet as a girl for my daughter, I wouldn't do it to Link.
Secondly I think it is important to teach kids to have role-models of BOTH genders. Two of my brother's biggest fictional role-models growing up were Wonderwoman and Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell. In the same way, girls can learn leadership and toughness from male protagonists and heroes. I'm not accusing this father of not knowing this, but it would be my approach were I playing Zelda with my daughter.
I don't know that there ever will be parity and I don't know that that is a problem.
Proportional representation is not always desirable or natural. Different groups do things in different proportions. Such is true of men and women; in aggregate, they do things in different amounts. This is not de facto evidence of insidious discrimination; we don't seem to assume so in the case of men not being in female-dominated industries like education.
Ultimately the lack of proportional representation is mostly the result of real differences between men and women. To try to create proportional representation would either demand hiring tokens or heavy duty social engineering to reduce gender differences. I don't like either option.
The first is the premise that that which a father does for his family outside of the home does not count toward "caregiving". Being successful in a career puts a roof over a child's head, provides him with material comforts, creates educational opportunities, and establishes a positive role-model. It may not be a romantic sentiment, but I wouldn't exchange all that my father provided for me growing up (nice home, good schools, help with tuition, good example of professionalism, etc) for him changing my diapers or playing catch with me a few more times than he did.
In many ways, a man does right by his family by focusing on his career. The same can be true of a woman. Ultimately, there is a set of requirements for raising a child - among these, physical proximity with a caregiver, instruction, affection, socialization, and all of the material necessities, such as housing, food, and health care. How parents divvy up the provisioning of these things is up to each couple, however in my experience, a division of labor (as opposed to doing everything 50-50) is often more practical.
This whole conversation is sort of silly since no gender and no individual can ever "have it all". Life requires compromise - saying no to some things we want in exchange for a higher value. No man or woman can put in 100 hours of work as a CEO captain of industry, and simultaneously spend 8 hours a day reading to their kids. Both spheres of life demand time, a finite resource, and thus it is up to parents to strike a balance.
The other issue I have with the author's analysis is the "ought." The "ought" is the idea that 50-50 (fathers and mothers having an equal focus on child-rearing and career) is a thing to aspire to for our society. This relies on the assumption that there is no meaningful difference between men and women that should allow for this, or at least the assumption that if such a difference exists, it ought to be resisted. I disagree. There are benefits to many of our biologically and culturally based gender norms, and we should embrace the productive ones that relate to child-rearing.
Furthermore, I would argue that when you compare equivalent sentences in English and Japanese, the Japanese sentence often conveys MORE information. Take the English sentence "You did not eat." 4 syllables. There are many ways to say this in Japanese.
A formal translation would be "Anata wa tabemasen deshita." Somewhere between 9 and 12 syllables depending on pronunciation. This sentence conveys a lot of information that the English does not. For example, the use of "anata" instead of a more rough word for "you" suggests that the speaker has a certain type of relationship with the subject. The same is true of "tabemasen deshita", which could have been "kutta" meaning "did not eat", but much less polite.
In myriad ways the Japanese language allows for speakers to be explicit about their relationships with others and their sense of place. English by contrast requires listeners to be more attentive to tone of voice, body language, and word connotations.