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Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

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Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#281

Post by runeks »

beevai142 wrote: post #263
runeks wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are a member of a disadvantaged group, you often do > not have the ability to identify as a professional first and > a group member second. That is the effect of being disadvantaged. > Other people will make your life seem primarily about being a group > member. The only power other people have over you is the ability to alter your thoughts. Thoughts, however, can be ignored. Some thoughts are just harder to…

Other people have power to not hire you, fire you, not offer you opportunities to advance, not invite you to the "old boys club" to network etc. Add to that your caveat, and good luck with that.

Every human being has the ability to not hire someone else, thankfully. How difficult life would be if we had to hire everyone we met.

With regards to having the right to fire people you've previously hired, I think that's justified. In places like Italy, where they make it hard to fire someone once hired, youth unemployment is abnormally high, because it's quite natural to shy away from entering into a contract you can't get out of.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#282

Post by dang »

skylan_q wrote: post #188

If there is no gender parity, there is a problem. No, there isn't. We don't have a "gender parity problem" in nursing, pre-k education, garbage collection, nor boilermaking. Just because it isn't 50/50 doesn't mean it's a problem.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12131077 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#283

Post by RGamma »

goshx wrote: post #246
someone7x wrote: post #15

I went to ngconf this year and two of the talks that stood out to me were given by women. One was the angular materials talk / demo and it was amazing. The presenter was exuding tech prowess, I was blown away by how easy she made it look to make a dog adoption website. One of the best talks. The other was by the CEO of girl scouts giving a patronizing 5 minute talk about how we need all help women in tech succeed and…

I had to look for the best talk you've mentioned. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRiV_b3WsoY Very good talk indeed.

What's that? "Hey, this is how we quickly engineer simple, yet inaccessible, websites whose drop-down menus break without Javascript? Look!: Your browser only needs 500MB of RAM and 2 seconds of CPU time of your laptop executing the jumbled piece of Javascript that outputs this otherwise trivial HTML and CSS without regard to what these standards actually are intended for!" "Loading..."

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#284

Post by mundo »

onetwotree wrote: post #144
Snargorf wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If women are disadvantaged Except they're not. In fact, in tech, they're advantaged. Female names on resumes get more callback than male names. This has been studied. The reason there are fewer of them is because fewer of them are interested.

Fewer women are interested because they don't want to work, go to school, and socialize in sexist environments. While I'm sure that not all "tech environments" are sexist, enough of them are to convince women not to pursue careers in this field. That's a disadvantage, especially because tech careers are luxury careers these days.

> Fewer women are interested because they don't want to work, go to school, and socialize in sexist environments

This is preposterous. The field of law was exclusively male not long ago, and is around parity now. Same with medicine. You think the first women in law school and med school were welcomed and supported? Do you think female doctors and lawyers a generation ago encountered less sexism than women in tech today?

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#286

Post by busterarm »

pmiller2 wrote: post #259
noir_lord wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add me to that list. All I want from a workplace is a good computer, somewhere quiet to work (preferably with a door but I don't want to spark that debate, it's tiresome), an efficient manager who ensures a) everyone knows what they should be doing b) communicates a) effectively c) clears obstacles. I never found it so I started a company (of which I'm one of two employees), it's not without challenges but it largely…

What are these "doors" that you speak of? I've seen them on the entrances to conference rooms and, of course, to get in the office itself, but I can't imagine why anyone would want one for themselves. ;) Are you hiring? (I'm only somewhat joking there. I'd practically kill for a small office of my own.)

My office cheated and made the doors glass.

Massive sliding glass things that are cumbersome to open and close and very noisy. They might as well not even be there.

Also the walls are glass, so you can see and hear everything in the adjacent offices.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#287

Post by jonnybgood »

ajkjk wrote: post #138
jonnybgood wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That falls under the purview of the organizers.

But it's well within the public's right to criticize them for doing a bad job at.. 'purviewing'.

I said nothing contrary to that.

The choice of who speaks at a tech conference is at the discretion of the organizers. So, criticize the organizers, not the speaker.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#288

Post by busterarm »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #193
jonnybgood wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I don't think it's the goal of a CEO of a social organization to give a talk on tech issues. Their focus is on social issues, so I don't see this as a good example.

What would you expect a male CEO of a social organization to talk about at a tech conference? I suspect that while social issues might come up, the expected talk would be the male CEO focusing the talk on running his organization and the tech that is involved. Perhaps the importance of competent tech or something or another. The actual social issues would merely be highlights, and he'd probably skip talking about the…

I wouldn't expect the male CEO of a social organization to be giving a talk at a tech conference.

I would expect the CTO/CIO to be giving a talk at a tech conference.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#289

Post by onetwotree »

mundo wrote: post #284
onetwotree wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fewer women are interested because they don't want to work, go to school, and socialize in sexist environments. While I'm sure that not all "tech environments" are sexist, enough of them are to convince women not to pursue careers in this field. That's a disadvantage, especially because tech careers are luxury careers these days.

> Fewer women are interested because they don't want to work, go to school, and socialize in sexist environments This is preposterous. The field of law was exclusively male not long ago, and is around parity now. Same with medicine. You think the first women in law school and med school were welcomed and supported? Do you think female doctors and lawyers a generation ago encountered less sexism than women in tech tod…

The field of technology is undergoing exactly the same growing pains that law and medicine did some time ago.

I think in the next decade or two I think we will see women achieving the same kind of representation in tech that they have in law and medicine. And as this process takes place, haters will hate, pretend there isn't a problem, and spew various kinds of sexist nonsense, just like they did when women were entering the fields of law and medicine. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be doing the actual work to make it happen.

* edit: made it nicer.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#290

Post by [deleted] »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #193
jonnybgood wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I don't think it's the goal of a CEO of a social organization to give a talk on tech issues. Their focus is on social issues, so I don't see this as a good example.

What would you expect a male CEO of a social organization to talk about at a tech conference? I suspect that while social issues might come up, the expected talk would be the male CEO focusing the talk on running his organization and the tech that is involved. Perhaps the importance of competent tech or something or another. The actual social issues would merely be highlights, and he'd probably skip talking about the…

[deleted]
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