Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"NO, WE ARE NOT" followed by a screed that goes to prove you are _exactly_ that. Couldn't have been more beautifully demonstrated.
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Speaking up
61–70 of 342 posts
Re: Speaking up
#62> it’s about finding female speakers who have enough of a thick skin to want to stand up infront of an audience of twitter-trigger-happy males and public speak Was this awful incident a one off or is attacking female speakers at tech conferences a thing ? I've not noticed it until now. I don't get it, why would you? To what end?
Unfortunately, it's a thing: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents
One of the more famous incidents was the twitter backchannel for dana boyd's Web2.0 talk http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/11/24/spectac...
(admittedly, she did have a talk that bombed, but that's still no excuse for the angle that the twitter talk took.
Re: Speaking up
#63Are there any high profile women in this industry who haven't been treated like shit in some way such as this? What a nasty bunch of people we are. Are we (developers) the douchey 80s guy of the 21st century?
Are we (developers) the douchey 80s guy of the 21st century? To paraphrase Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, one problem is guys believing that they're too smart to be sexist. I also believe that a lot of people involved can't handle the idea that they're being bullies, and so further attempt to rationalise their actions with terrible analogies and arguments that boil down to "I'm a geek - I'm incapable of oppressing som…
This sort of stuff also ties into the whole 'fake geek girl'thing as well: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/fake-geek-g...
Or, the pink ghetto: http://tarahunt.com/2011/09/14/a-pink-collar-tech-ghetto/
Re: Speaking up
#64Are there any high profile women in this industry who haven't been treated like shit in some way such as this? What a nasty bunch of people we are. Are we (developers) the douchey 80s guy of the 21st century?
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Your comment is the most surprising thing I've read the whole week. The surprise is due to the fact that you led with a statement I wholeheartedly agreed with (no, it's not okay to generalize that we're all sexist) and that set up an expectation that I would agree with the rest. Instead, you came up with a bunch of archetypal examples of why sexism is still very much a problem.
But it seems if girls are bad at anything in the computer industry, they aren't actually bad at it, it's just because they are girls and developers are sexist and will not accept them.
I don't usually like to be rude, but this particular quote deserves pointing out that you've pulled that stuff out of your ass. Go look on previous HN discussions about sexist treatment and you'll see that most of the time the women's complaints are backed by specific examples of undeniably sexist behavior, such as one of the examples from Sarah's post: "no offence, I just don’t relate to girls speaking about the industry at all, I learn better from guys."
I'm in the domain for some years and never ever saw that happening.
"Works on my machine" logic. If you haven't seen it, then it must be an exaggeration, perpetrated by all those silly lying women who can't measure up to men and conspire to be treated as equals without merit.
You think I'm laying it on too thick? Read the next quote:
Girls should just stop complaining about it for their own good.
Why, because they're crying wolf? Nobody's going to believe them if they keep doing that, right?
I'm being serious here: either you're claiming that they're lying or you're claiming they aren't but they should shut up anyway. From what I've seen in your comment, it seems to be the former, but your mistake is that you're basing it on your anecdotal experience.
Doesn't it strike you at least a little bit arrogant to claim that a whole bunch of people are lying just because you haven't personally seen any evidence of something like that happening in your own environment? I'm not talking about expressing skepticism here, you're actually implying that they're lying. Think about it.
Re: Speaking up
#65It's somewhat encouraging to read the comments here and note that for a change they are not already overrun by aggressive apologists for the continuing misogyny in software development.
I was just about to write the same thing, before I saw your comment. HN is a cesspool in these cases usually, but I'm genuinely happy that it's different this time around.
Re: Speaking up
#66Sorry about your treatment. :( (And here I go into down-vote territory... :D) Before I say anything, let me say clearly I am not sexist; I am a strong advocate of equal rights (key word: equal). Some of your attacks can definitely be attributed to sex, but it's bad propaganda just to throw them all in the sexism bucket, or treat sexism like it is the norm. I know several females in the industry who are not afraid of…
> and have never been attacked on the basis of their sex
Do you really know this, or do they just never ever mention it?
I agree that everyone with enough followers will be the victim of attacks. But those attacks often take the easy route - someone who is Jewish will have anti-semitic rants posted about them; a woman will have graphic depictions (in text or imagery) of what people "want to do to her"; etc. It's fine to call a hateful attack sexist if it's using sexist tactics for the attack.
And it's a fact that women are more likely to be attacked than men. This is easy (but laborious) to prove - you get a list of conferences and speakers in 2012, then ask speakers if they had any attacks, then categorise and finally run some graphing / plotting software.
(I didn't downvote you BTW.)
Re: Speaking up
#67Please, tell me, how would comments look if someone did the same thing, but for the guy? The sight of a bunch of guys rushing to fight sexism (often without even understanding what sexism is) and solve women's issues for them is amusing. This is not to say, that there are no problems. But the biggest problem I see is a knee-jerk reaction to anything involving gender or race. Sometimes assholes are just assholes and c…
It's interesting that you say "couldn't care less if their victim is a women or black person, or whatever". Can you come up with a good example of this kind of extreme attacking of a white man? You say "How would this look for a guy", I honestly can't think of any examples where people go anywhere near as far trolling and harassing white men. I may of course just be forgetting some obvious cases.
I can, unless you mean white straight men.
Re: Speaking up
#68What do we do about less overt sexism? For instance, there's a popular developer who writes useful plugins named after genitalia and sex acts. I find his code useful, and I've asked him publicly and privately to choose nonsexual names for his code, but he and his users see nothing wrong with this. Even consider the "weinre" project that's on the frontpage right now. "Get your weinre out"?!
His assertion is that it's not sexist if his projects are called "testicle" or "foreplay", since those words aren't intrinsically sexist. How do we, as a community, emphasize that sexuality and development can't mix if we want women to feel comfortable, given that they're currently a minority?
Re: Speaking up
#69I constantly wonder if the era of self-centered, socially-awkward developers is coming to an end (hopeful). More often that not the younger developers I see tend to be bucking that trend which should go a long way towards addressing this problem - unless of course they are the primary offenders. Are these instances centered around older or younger developers, I wonder? If younger then perhaps this entire assumption is baseless, in which case the path developers are on in general is indeed alarmingly derailed.
Re: Speaking up
#70Please, tell me, how would comments look if someone did the same thing, but for the guy? The sight of a bunch of guys rushing to fight sexism (often without even understanding what sexism is) and solve women's issues for them is amusing. This is not to say, that there are no problems. But the biggest problem I see is a knee-jerk reaction to anything involving gender or race. Sometimes assholes are just assholes and c…
> Please, tell me, how would comments look if someone did the same thing, but for the guy? HN is getting better at being less aggressive and at being more constructive with criticism. Perhaps you can find an example where a male dev had pictures of his face, and pictures of another man's penis, posted to a website with his name and email address. And, when you find it, HN will be supportive of that man and will conde…
As an actual example, in the GitHub penis incident, HN seemed mostly supportive of the target: