GitHub donates private repositories to women learning open source software

"female" -> "female human" -> "woman"

Was it really so unclear that you needed a whole scolding comment here?

Voidkom's created an account specifically for this thread. Please join me while I ignore the troll. I've already fallen into their trap by responding.

To quote another story on the front page:

... that’s what happens when we hold events for women in IT when there aren’t that many women in this industry – we tend to broaden the definition of women in IT.

The software industry exists to write software, and ideally it's good software. We're not here to engender happy feelings about bad code. If you're worried about immature people non-constructively mocking your code, then the solution is to realize that those people are unlikely to be particularly great developers themselves, and aren't worth paying attention to.

Any sufficiently experienced and mature developer ought to know better than to throw stones from the glass house of their own imperfection. It's better to join or create a welcoming community of experts, than trying to create a coddling safe-space where equally inexperienced people can provide each other with congratulatory pats on the back.

Supposing that this problem does affect men and women alike, there is still good reason for GitHub to target one group and not the other. The deck is stacked against women due to sexism, e.g. kitchen jokes; this will take time to end. In the mean time, GitHub can mitigate other pain points to make life as a female programmer easier.

You know this makes me sick. Time and time again, articles pop up here on HN talking about some organization trying to promote and encourage women in technology and the comments explode with privileged boys whining about about how "it's not fair"

You know what's not fair? A Teacher telling a 12 year old girl that she needs a backup plan because girls getting an engineering degree, well, that's hard. Getting one from MIT, girls just don't do that. With the very next breath telling the boy standing next to the girl that she (the teacher) knows he can get into MIT if he works hard.

I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of my little girl coming home crying because some idiot crushed her dream of an engineering degree from MIT because girls don't do that. I'm sick of the privileged idiots here, complaining that women are getting some kind of advantage because they get a free github account. I'm sick of cluelessness.

The barriers for women in the workplace are difficult enough, it's worse in tech. The sooner we accept that, and accept that some organizations really are try to make a difference, the better off we'll be. How many times have we read stories about women who are alienated by their peers because their interests align with something that isn't "girlie." Please!

I've fought hard to teach my girls that society's barriers are there to be knocked down, that they shouldn't get discouraged and that they can do what ever they want. 18 years later, I'm proud that my oldest has ignored the criticism, the "you can't do that, it's a man's job" BS and is on her way to the Coast Guard where she will train as a rescue swimmer (there's only 7 women rescue swimmers now). I'm proud that my youngest stood up to that teacher and told her: well, perhaps MIT isn't the place for her. After all, MIT engineers ask UIUC engineers for help of the real difficult problems, though MIT will make a fine backup plan.

My point is, boys, get over it. I'm sorry you didn't get something for free. Oh wait, you did. You got to be male, a much bigger advantage than a free private github repository.

Edit: Spelling/grammer