What Women Don’t Want

The difference is professionalism. The software industry is founded by young upstarts who broke all the rules of big business, and don't see a need to bring any back. There are no steel mills with foosball and yoga classes. There are no banks where tellers wear flip-flops and cargo shorts to work. No foremen who decorate their office with anime statues and posters. We created our own culture, rejecting the stuffiness of big business.

But we might've thrown the baby out with the bath-water when it comes to a certain amount of professional conduct. Because a key difference here is that, while a lot of other businesses might have characters like Pax and the TitStare guys, they would know better than to parade this crap out front of the public gallery. And in this case, image is important beyond the embarrassment to IT. The image is also what's keeping the problem from solving itself.

If women and poor minorities never become a normal part of IT, then they'll never be accepted by the vast swath of people who just can't accept things until they're everywhere. And if crap like this keeps happening, they'll all know to steer the heck away from the industry.

So have a little class. Put on your big-boy pants when you come to work.

However, in the context of this particular cause, it's often the case that those who set the scope are the least directly impacted by the problems which the cause is fighting against. Given lack of experience, and especially a lack of empathy, it often looks like a non-issue. People who just want to focus on their problem domain at the expense of their duties to their personnel can easily can fall into this category.

Put bluntly, people like that should not be responsible for other people.

Edit:

> Create problems on a team, you will get bounced from the team

As it should be. However if this is implemented correctly, standing up for yourself should never be viewed as creating a problem.

1) An individual says something mildly offensive 2) People incite mob anger via Twitter 3) Person gets fired. 4) Twitter applauds itself.

How many more times are we going to see this?

Maybe it's sick for these people to hold these views.

It's also sick to try and get people _fired_ when you 1) don't even know them and 2) probably didn't even hear their offensive remark in person.

No one can ever claim they've never said something inoffensive.

I'm going to delete my Twitter account. We're living in an era of mob rule.