Introducing Passion Projects

No one is trying to make the overall industry more hostile to men. Some people are trying to make certain spaces that feel safe and encouraging to women, which often means minimizing the maleness of the space.

Most don't fully exclude men, but they have legitimate reasons to want to make it feel like a female space, and if that means taking measures that prevent some men who would like to attend from attending, that's not necessarily a problem.

I say this as a male who has attended campus women in CS dinners and talks. These events are open to all, but aimed at giving women interested in computer science a community, role models, etc. When I go, I am always prepared to leave if I feel that my presence is hurting the overall atmosphere, because I realize that the events are a powerful force against inequalities in society, and the least I can do is stay out of the way. And when you ask the organizers if men can come, they say yes, but they do mention that it's important for it to feel like a female space, and that if it got to the point that so many men attended that this compromised that feeling, they would start discouraging men from attending.

Not every event needs to serve everyone in the industry. There are probably some language-focused meetups where you wouldn't feel especially comfortable or welcome because you don't know the language, or maybe even actively hate it. I understand that you feel it is different because you'd at least be allowed to attend a meetup for a language you don't know, but it still illustrates that not all events in the industry have to cater to you. When they're catering toward a disadvantaged group, they deserve even more leeway to make sure they achieve their goals. As long as the network of women-focused events doesn't become so large and meaningful that it is systematically disadvantaging men, I don't see any problem with some events excluding men in various ways.

You're concerned about sexism in the small--in this one event. Others are more concerned with sexism in the large--the pervasive social environment that systematically discourages women from entering an extremely rewarding and lucrative industry. Both are suboptimal. In the ideal world, there wouldn't be any women-only tech events. But in the ideal world, there wouldn't be any cultural problems in the industry that make women feel less welcome and free to speak at an event with significant male attendance than at an event that is all or nearly all women. Understand that if organizers choose to, say, split the tickets so that at most 25% of tickets may go to men, they're not doing it because they want to discriminate against men, but because they worry that allowing too many men to attend will make their event less effective at correcting an injustice that we all believe is worth fixing.

So I started programming (for real) about two years ago. I spent about four months teaching myself coding PHP, JavaScript and CSS. I was able to secure a job after four months. I wasn't really good enough for the position.

My wife is doing the same. She is following my path. She have me, I teach her and she is learning much faster. After a year, she is still looking for a volunteer job! Nobody believes she can do anything.

This is extremely sad. My wife is far more advanced than me when I got my first job. We are immigrants and we are not white, I believe those adds to our problems.

Everyone who says women don't deserve this kind of attention never saw a women struggling get in tech world.

It takes passion for someone to keep doing what they do despite the challenges they face.

I must vehemently disagree with your argument that discrimination against men on the basis of gender is not sexism, and I take offense at the notion that it is "nonsense", however that is only a pedantic tangent in the context of this discussion. To avoid further pedantry, going forward I will simply refer to it as discrimination.

Whatever your definition of that word, discrimination of any sort is morally and ethically wrong, and I must persist my argument that introducing more discrimination into an already discriminatory environment will only further escalate hostile feelings.

Regarding your point that this series is about women and therefore "[...] why are you bringing men up at all? Don't they have their own spheres which they already dominate?" I did not think that was the goal of Passion Projects. Are you trying to say that you would prefer a separate industry of women's technology and men's technology? The ultimate success of this project and others like it, I had assumed, was integration of all peoples into a cohesive community free from discrimination. To that end, I celebrate GitHub's initiative and hope that it is as successful as it can be.

A "passion project", in my mind, is simply a project that you're excited about (notably one that is likely outside the bounds of your normal, day-to-day job). I distinguish them from "side projects", which tend to be something you're interested in, but not something you're necessarily defined by. That's the reason the program's called passion projects — hopefully we'll have a ton of talks on really interesting things that our speakers are really, well, passionate about.

I don't view "passion" as a word that is exclusive to women, in other words — we could just as easily pull in men for the same talk series.