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Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

soledadpenades.com

291–300 of 375 posts

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#294

I went to ngconf this year and two of the talks that stood out to me were given by women. One was the angular materials talk / demo and it was amazing. The presenter was exuding tech prowess, I was blown away by how easy she made it look to make a dog adoption website. One of the best talks. The other was by the CEO of girl scouts giving a patronizing 5 minute talk about how we need all help women in tech succeed and…

Well, I don't think it's the goal of a CEO of a social organization to give a talk on tech issues. Their focus is on social issues, so I don't see this as a good example.

Perhaps it is perfectly fine for people to comment on the fact that women whining about this stuff is the worst possible approach to solving it. That the author's desire to be brought in to actually talk about tech is the correct position if you want to make real headway and that her insta-delete policy is brilliant.

One of the problems with being a woman in a tech environment is that there is already too much focus on the fact that you are a woman. Like that is something bizarre. Putting additional focus on it and allowing you to only talk about that and not about your actual professional expertise is all kinds of problematic.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#295
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I don't think it's the goal of a CEO of a social organization to give a talk on tech issues. Their focus is on social issues, so I don't see this as a good example.

To say nothing of the fact that it doesn't seem coherent to distinguish between "tech issues" and "social issues," this literally only makes sense if you think that the lack of diverse folks in tech isn't a social issue. That's deeply, deeply wrong. Of course it is a social issue.

I didn't say anything contrary to that.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#296
post #285

[deleted]

Thanks, I've fixed it.

Great! I've deleted my parent comment and marked the subthread off-topic, so it won't distract from what you posted.

Btw we're probably going to build moderation tools so users can give each other feedback about the guidelines like this without it having to take the main discussion off topic.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#297
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12130029 and marked it off-topic.

The original post was about sexism. If any sub-discussion about sexism is off-topic, why not just delete the entire post?

In this case the comment appeared trollish, and appearance of trollishness becomes reality in threads like this.

More generally in case you're interested, the thing we look for in moderating this sort of thread—i.e the sort that usually turns into a flamewar—is whether the discussion is staying concrete or whether it is veering into generic ideological disputes, which have the gravitational pull of black holes and are about as interesting to look at. I posted a bit more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12132109.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If there is no gender parity, there is a problem. This seems to be an extraordinary claim made in the complete absence of evidence. Is it a problem that there are more women going into early childhood education or biology, but more men going into petroleum engineering? Why? Why aren't men and women allowed to express their preferences without it being pathologized?

It wouldn't be a problem if inequality wasn't influenced strongly by negative factors for women. The tech industry is rife with evidence of hostility toward women; IT Barbie and gendered toy marketing are other examples of how women are not on equal footing with regards to entering this industry. And there is also the problem of women being paid less to do the same job. To paint a picture that says the current landsc…

There definitely are many problems and things that could be improved, however, the point is that even if all of those problems would be fixed, there would be a gender disparity in choice of occupations.

The GP statement "If there is no gender parity, there is a problem" is strictly false, even in an ideal world managed by fairies where all these problems are totally fixed, we would not observe gender parity - it would for most professions be much closer to 50/50 than nowadays, that's true, but it would not be at 50/50.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#299
post #162

> I don't think those guys were bad people, I don't think they sat there in their minds thinking, "let's tear the woman down". I really don't think they thought about it at all Yes, they are bad people, and the fact that they didn't have to think about going out of there way to tear someone down is part of why they are bad people. They didn't have to think about "let's tear the woman down" because they were already a…

> Yes, they are bad people Sometimes otherwise good people say stupid things. Sometimes being called out on that makes them reflect on what they were saying and realise they were being stupid. That definitely happened to me when I was younger - people called me out on saying stupid things and after thinking about what the other person said I like to think I became a better person as a result. I wasn't a bad person wh…

I think we're quibbling over semantics here. I disagree about you being a bad person: if you said stupid, hurtful things to someone, then yes, you were a bad person, at that moment in time. But that doesn't mean you're always bad, or that you'll always be bad. But bad behavior is bad behavior, and people who behave badly are bad people. We've all been bad people at some point in our lives. We need to be educated and corrected so that we can be better people. But again, this is semantics I think. It's kinda like how all governments are bad governments, but some are a lot better than others. Or that all operating systems suck, but some suck worse than others.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#300
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the "harder" aspects are being sexually harassed and intimidated in ways that aren't possible to do to men. I have a friend who was raped by her boss, and then he raped another coworker. They were afraid of getting fired, so they didn't tell anyone. Finally her friend spoke up and was fired. (This was at a VC-backed, Silicon Valley firm, by the way.)

Wow. Rape is a felony. She was "afraid of getting fired"? Pretty sure she could sue the VC and retire off their millions if they fired her for opening a rape case. By the way, you don't report rape to HR. You report it to the police, immediately after it has happened. And you go to the hospital and get a rape kit done. Rape isn't some microagression accusation you can just throw around when something uncomfortable ha…

This chain of logic is particularly pernicious.

Given the absence of more data, it's equally likely that the events reported were true, and went unreported for the reasons stated. There was some guy, recently, who wasn't even a Boss, or particularly powerful or influential in his own right, who beat and assaulted a woman, and experienced relatively minimal consequences for doing so?

Oh, yeah, this guy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_v._Turner

Certainly, the woman in question in that case is not now retired off the millions she earned for reporting what happened her to the police.

So, why would you expect a different outcome, or why should someone who has experienced such abuse expect a different outcome, when the perpetrator does have direct influence over their livelihood (and thus, ability to continue doing things like live indoors or eat food regularly)? And, expecting no real justice, why go through the public spectacle and (as frequently happens) accusations of being a liar (etc), possible public shaming and ostracization, etc, for no reason?

So, why jump to your conclusion? I anyone harmed by giving poeple who claim to have been hurt the benefit of the doubt?

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