There are Ladies Present

IMHO this is one of the few thoughtful, productive pieces I've read on the PyCon debacle. I appreciated his last line:

> Of course I'm just Tim Taylor, talking over the fence to Wilson. Women, do I have this right?

I too would love to hear reactions from both male and female members of the community on his thoughts.

i disagree. he seems to be saying that the industry needs women because of the new and different, "grown-up, nurturing, ..." perspective they can bring to the table. i think the industry needs women because, well, when you arbitrarily exclude half the human race from contributing, you are unquestionably losing something of significant value.

the thing is this: women have already gotten a raw deal by being socialised to find sex uncomfortable, and by living in cultures where sex has been linked to aggression. the problem with the pycon incident was not that anything was intrinsically wrong with dick jokes, but that it was creating a hostile environment in the context of a playing field that was already tilted.

the critically important thing to take away, in my opinion, is not that "women are different" (because that lumps women into one group and men into another, and posits that there is less variance within the groups than across them), it is that women live in a different environment than men do, and that while men are unaffected when they forget this, women are reminded of it every single day. (look up microaggression theory for a lot more about this.)

Do a lot of guys approach coding with a conquest mentality? I found this sentiment particularly interesting. I've always had a more creative / constructive mindset while coding and curious / scientific mindset while debugging. As a male programmer, I'm curious if I live out in the tails of the distribution, or if Uncle Bob is less average than he assumes.

> Men, can you imagine how hard it would be if all the women were constantly, and openly, talking about tampons, cramps, yeast infections, cheating, being cheated on, Trichomoniasis, faking-it, etc? I don't know about you, but It would make me feel out of place.

You're right--you don't know about me. I fully wish this were the case!

The place I want to work is the place where people are people, not separately "men" and "women": and people like fart jokes, dick jokes, cramping jokes, faking-it jokes, what have you. They also like pictures of cats!

...or, at least, when you ask them by themselves, they do. But something strange happens when you ask them in a sufficiently large group: suddenly they'll say there are certain things that are horribly offensive, even though they're not "personally" offended!

Now, someone with some evolutionary-biology experience can probably give you the full low-down as to why, but here's my (limited) understanding: when we're in a group of people large enough, and who don't know one-another particularly well, we start to think we might have the opportunity to mate with someone else in the group without that becoming a "sore point" for the group later on (especially if the group isn't closed to new people entering/leaving.) So, we start to enforce these "global social norms" on one another, even if we don't agree with them ourselves. We do it so we can show we can "do the dance" of mating, that we're clever enough to avoid slipping up in the complex social machinery we've instantiated, and thus we sort ourselves into rankings of social ability. Both the people in higher and lower rankings subliminally know their position, and so the people in lower rankings are subconsciously proscribed to submit to those of higher rankings when a rivalry springs up for the affection of a potential mate. Thus, the people best at the dance have the most choice, and we call that something like "charisma."

We drop the whole dance when we end up in groups of "just friends." If nobody around us is a potential mate, why bother? Around friends, we tell all the fart jokes we like, and nobody gets offended. But take those same friends and sit them at a fancy banquet--where strangers can hear them--and suddenly they'll be shushing one another to prevent those jokes from slipping out!

Now, in my opinion, the whole etiquette game is a game--and you shouldn't be playing games at work. It's easy enough to avoid when everyone at your workplace are friends--and this seems to be the real goal that employers are trying to foster through "team-building": the ability for everyone to see one-another as someone to goof off with and tell silly jokes, not a potential mate (and especially not a potential rival for mates!) But it rarely succeeds, precisely because humans are intelligent and observant social animals, who notice when, despite the trappings of "friendship", nobody really cares about what anyone else did on the weekend, nobody will actually keep in touch with anyone else after they move on to another job, etc.

I don't know how to solve the problem, other than to form companies solely from people who are already friends (like YC tends to do!) and then not grow them at all beyond that :)

The worst thing to come out of the pycon event is that reasonable people like the OP are trying to "get" why this was a case of sexism. The answer is that it wasn't, and many posters, including women, have pointed out why. It's an issue of professionalism, not sexism. This kind of post of is exactly the reason why some have remarked that Adria may have set back her cause.