Female Founders Conference

It looks like you've spent the last few months ignoring all but the worst arguments against your position. That sort of insularity doesn't help you understand the other side.

> I mean, do these guys think that they are such brilliant thinkers that they are the first ever to try apply symmetry to an asymmetrical context?

You need to read more charitably, because I can safely say that everyone recognizes the asymmetry.

There are a couple of issues here, the first of which is that contextual asymmetry doesn't always matter.

One example:

Sarah and Amy walk up to John and Christopher on the playground at school. John is enjoying a strawberry ice cream cone.

The two girls slap Christopher, who retaliates by slapping them both back. John, ice cream cone still in hand, yells for the teacher to come over.

"Christopher!", scolds the teacher, "Slapping is wrong! Come to the office with me."

"But Sarah and Amy slapped me first! Why aren't they getting in trouble?"

"Because John has an ice cream cone, and you're both boys."

Second, some of the asymmetry in this context is actually inconvenient for your position.

A few examples:

1. Society is far more sensitive to the plight of girls than to the plight of boys. As such, it's often politically unfeasible to ever reverse a program that elevates girls at the expense of boys. For instance, there are still far more scholarships available to girls than are available to boys, despite the fact that women have outnumbered men in college for decades.

2. Boys and men are less risk-averse than girls and women, and as a result, they find themselves more numerous at both the top and the bottom of society. Programs that ignore the men not at the top of society, in favor of elevating women toward the top, end up hurting disadvantaged men.

3. STEM jobs are perhaps the only good realistic job prospect for young boys today. Programs that whisk girls ahead of boys for STEM jobs end up leaving those boys with nowhere to turn, because there is insufficient (not non-existent) political pressure to open up other opportunities for them (as point #1 above demonstrated).

I can tell you why I'm beginning to go silent.

Because I'm done with these people bashing these events. Either they're highly-advanced trolls and we're all getting played REALLY HARD or these people are serious; if the latter then as far as I'm concern they're just awful people not much better than the folks at stormfront.org. I think any reasonable person understands it would be a waste of time trying to argue with stormfront.org members... and I'm just about ready to mentally tag these HN comments with the same level of lunacy & bigotry.

____

Preemptive: And yes, I know one of you is going to come along and throw the definition of bigotry back in my face. I don't care. I refuse to consider the ridiculous points of view I've been seeing on these gender stories in the same way I refuse to consider stormfront.org. You're all just trolls or really awful people. The end. I'm just super-happy that Ycombinator officially supports & organizes these kind of event to show YC is above your nonsense.

Rather than crying, try being more persuasive in your arguments. If it ain't working, try a different angle. It will go over better with the people whose opinion you're trying to change - the silent and cautiously indifferent majority. Persuasion is hard, but you sort of signed up for the hardship here, didn't you?

A lot of people on "your side" of the issue are either flat out incoherent or go far too deep into proselytization land to be tolerable. The other side is also somewhat incoherent and often shallow or juvenile. Together the two sides are creating a lot of noise for each other, with hardly any digestible information for the masses.

Yeah. I.... Yeah. I'm so sorry.

>You might not realize it, but women face a similar issue all the time at conferences/events where "unisex" (really men's) cut t-shirts are given out. These t-shirts are generally quite flattering on men and not-so-flattering on women, so I'd argue they're the woman's equivalent of your purse.

Erm. This kind of makes a lot of assumptions about what 'flattering on women' means. Which of course begs the question about a lot of possible latent sexism at play in your response.

The sorts of t-shirts given out at conferences don't fit anyone. They're generic pieces of cloth that wear like drapes. Hanes Beefy-Ts. That you think they're appropriate for men but not women kinda speaks volumes. Drapes over pecs are fine, but not breasts? Why? What would make a women's t-shirt fit in a more 'flattering' manner? Tighter? More forming to curves on the waist and breasts? Looser, more baggy? Why would that particular fit be flattering?

Also why is the goal to have a 'flattering' t-shirt -- which implies impressing other people, being an object for everyone else's gaze -- rather than a t-shirt that you like? It's sexism against women if we don't provide t-shirts that are 'flattering' to the people looking at her?