Girl Tickets to ng-conf

I think their intention is good, and they deserve a little slack.

I totally get the whole "don't treat me any differently because I have a vagina" thing, but the conference organizers really do seem to have good intentions.

Yes, making the lanyard pink prompts a momentary mental picture of someone putting a pink lanyard over my head while babbling incoherent baby talk, but then I realize that maybe the person who decided on pink really just has that culturally ingrained boys = blue, girls = pink thing. Or maybe the person who picked the color is a woman who likes the color pink. Or maybe, there are so many other details to plan for the conference that picking the color of the discounted lanyard didn't get a whole lot of consideration.

Yes, someone should have told them we don't call women above a certain age "girls". They do say woman and women a couple times in the email, and I can see how maybe Woman Tickets or Lady Tickets or Gal Tickets just sound awkward compared to Girl Tickets. I don't get the sense they mean girl in a derogatory fashion at all.

Or, I could be totally wrong, and they could all be misogynist jerks.

And, to answer your question, the top three discounts/free money for women I can think of are: Bars and clubs Auto insurance Scholarships

I think you're looking at a false dilemma here. Your choices aren't limited to "don't encourage women and take flak for it" versus "encourage women in a ham-fisted way and take flak for it". I believe that in this case there were a lot of ways the organisers could have encouraged participation respectfully. I'd start by getting in touch with some of the relevant women-in-tech groups - this is kind of their area.

If you're attempting to reach a group of people of which you're not a member, you really need to be doing it in consultation with someone who is. Otherwise you're just going to make obvious outsider mistakes and shoot yourself in the foot. That goes just as much for women as it does for hardcore gamers or scotch enthusiasts.

I think you do have a good point, though: it feels like there's a lot of negativity around tech feminism sometimes without much positive to aspire to. As the article says, the organisers were well-intentioned but doing it wrong - which is, at least, a good start. It's a shame we don't see many articles praising the conferences that do a good job encouraging women to participate, or sharing best practices and advice. I feel like that would do more to prevent mistakes like this and ultimately improve the community.

When will events that have to do with learning programming and such give out "jock tickets": tickets to people, men and women, who has been involved in activities through their lives that has isolated them from nerd-culture. If anyone with glasses are seen with these tickets they will be escorted off the premises: the person might be myopic, which might be because of too much vigorous reading!

(No, being a jock and a nerd is not mutually exclusive. I feel like I have to point that out because of how so many seem to get easily offended in this thread. And it's mostly a joke.)

I love this line of thinking.

"As a random person with no stake at all in this yet a strong opinion on it, I can tell you that if your opinion is the opposite of mine then it doesn't matter even if this issue directly affects you".

That's the kind of lazy, passive-agressive, statement that has no place in proper discussion.