I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room • Hacker News Board

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#51

Post by gkya » Mon, Dec 18, 2017, 1:25 AM UTC

hackinthebochs wrote: post #33

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #26

Something I've noticed after 10 years in tech/finance is that there are very, very few western women in engineering roles. I think I've only ever worked with 1 woman who wasn't an Eastern European or Asian immigrant (and yeah, I eventually married one of the immigrant ones). The gender gap is purely cultural, and we should be learning from what those cultures are doing that's different than us. This article really hi…

>The gender gap is purely cultural, and we should be learning from what those cultures are doing that's different than us. The countries with low gender gap in science/tech are also the countries that measure low on general measures of gender equality. It turns out there isn't anything to learn from these cases. In regions with low gender equality and weak social safety nets, technology is seen as the means to econom…

Maybe one day people are going to learn to not treat "the other" as a homogenous invariant being. Your comment blindly factors out for example the possibility that the social class the science and tech folk originate from is different from a more ample and lower class suffering more gender-related inequalities which when factored in skews the picture dramatically. Many of the regions you refer have largely multifaceted and mostly multi-ethnical demograpic structures.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#52

Post by Veelox » Mon, Dec 18, 2017, 1:27 AM UTC

oculusthrift wrote: post #47

Veelox wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op but since you asked, I will draw the conclusion. Given that we observe a larger gender gap in countries that are more gender equality we can conclude that when men and women feel more equal their choice of profession diverge.

i don't think you're allowed to speak that heresy in polite society.

Which is a shame, because even though it makes sense, I am not sure it is true because it isn't debated.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#53

Post by aalleavitch » Mon, Dec 18, 2017, 1:30 AM UTC

oculusthrift wrote: post #47

Veelox wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op but since you asked, I will draw the conclusion. Given that we observe a larger gender gap in countries that are more gender equality we can conclude that when men and women feel more equal their choice of profession diverge.

i don't think you're allowed to speak that heresy in polite society.

You can say it as much as you want. That won't make you any less wrong, of course.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#54

Post by dang » Mon, Dec 18, 2017, 1:30 AM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #28

dang wrote: post #2

This article was flagged unfairly. It's substantive and grounded in personal experience. Those are good qualities for an HN piece whether one agrees or disagrees, so I've turned off flags and rolled back the clock on this submission to give it a second shot. If you want to comment here, please (re-)familiarize yourself with the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html , including this one:…

> I feel bad about not being able to find a way to let the author know that her article is currently being discussed on HN Her Twitter is in the site's footer, FYI.

I'm a tweetotaller. Perhaps one of you twitterers can take it up.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#55

Post by dang » Mon, Dec 18, 2017, 1:31 AM UTC

yawaramin wrote: post #37

rdtsc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if the flagging system can be enhanced by having the flagger provide a reason. Maybe having to explain would reduce the incidence of drive-by flagging.

Would be better to de-anonymise flagging so that we could interrogate flaggers. Show 'flagging's as actions that appear like comments on the page.

There can be few things HN users would like worse than being interrogated.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#56

Post by Veelox » Mon, Dec 18, 2017, 1:33 AM UTC

aalleavitch wrote: post #49

Veelox wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op but since you asked, I will draw the conclusion. Given that we observe a larger gender gap in countries that are more gender equality we can conclude that when men and women feel more equal their choice of profession diverge.

You've got a huge number of confounding variables here that you're not accounting for. Gender equality and cultural attitudes towards gender roles are not simple metrics, you can't infer that just because some aspect of a culture demonstrates superior gender equality to another that this culture is necessarily superior in gender equality in every way. Attitudes are vastly more complicated than that, and there's no re…

It is definitely possible that it is just confounding variables, I don't know I haven't really looked into it. One thing I know is that if the correlation went the other way, it would be a good data point that the gender gap is cultural.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#57

Post by mirimir » Mon, Dec 18, 2017, 1:33 AM UTC

gkya wrote: post #51

hackinthebochs wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The gender gap is purely cultural, and we should be learning from what those cultures are doing that's different than us. The countries with low gender gap in science/tech are also the countries that measure low on general measures of gender equality. It turns out there isn't anything to learn from these cases. In regions with low gender equality and weak social safety nets, technology is seen as the means to econom…

Maybe one day people are going to learn to not treat "the other" as a homogenous invariant being. Your comment blindly factors out for example the possibility that the social class the science and tech folk originate from is different from a more ample and lower class suffering more gender-related inequalities which when factored in skews the picture dramatically. Many of the regions you refer have largely multifacet…

Yes, I was puzzled at first, reading the article. Because I don't think of India as a paragon of sexual equality. But then, I realized that the author is probably upper-class.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#58

Post by danaliv » Mon, Dec 18, 2017, 1:34 AM UTC

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #23

I think it's important to note that women's issues in different cultures are often very different, and if you start diagnosing one culture's issues with the yardstick of another, you will cause a lot of false positives and negatives. For instance, India, where the author comes for, is often celebrated for having had a 1) female prime minister all the way back in the 60s 2) a female president 10 years ago, and lots of…

A certain Indian MP tried to play the female president card with me. I pointed out that the election of Barack Obama had hardly heralded the end of racism in my own country.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#59

Post by yawaramin » Mon, Dec 18, 2017, 1:39 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #55

yawaramin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be better to de-anonymise flagging so that we could interrogate flaggers. Show 'flagging's as actions that appear like comments on the page.

There can be few things HN users would like worse than being interrogated.

Perhaps 'interrogated' is the wrong word? How about 'discuss'. Since HN is a discussion forum, presumably users are open to discussing their flags and reasons for flagging. If not, just like any other type of discussion, we don't have to give their flag any credence.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#60

Post by calvinbhai » Mon, Dec 18, 2017, 1:39 AM UTC

Dear Mallika, Many thanks for writing this article! Totally echoes my thoughts.

fwiw, as an Indian male engineer in US, I initially was very enthusiastically thinking "lets go out of our way to support the pink elephants" and later was surprised when some of my peers (female engineers from India in US or of Indian origin) showed utter disinterest in being part of many of these women centric meetups/conferences.

They were more enthusiastic to go to conferences that successfully enforced a 'No Asshole Rule' on attendees, followed by attending conferences without 'all male' speakers, than conferences of any other type. (I thought the feedback I received was an outlier, but it is good to know I'm not alone).

Hope such articles bring positive changes to improve diversity organically and address the pink elephant syndrome.

This article reminded me of this video "Modern Educayshun" (by an Aussie Comedian of Indian origin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM . Feels like the video makes a similar point.