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I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

imallika.com

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Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#61

Post by gbacon »

dang wrote: post #2

This article was flagged unfairly. It's substantive and grounded in personal experience. Those are good qualities for an HN piece whether one agrees or disagrees, so I've turned off flags and rolled back the clock on this submission to give it a second shot. If you want to comment here, please (re-)familiarize yourself with the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html , including this one:…

I’m guessing by the domain and HN username that the author and OP are the same person.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#62

Post by kelukelugames »

Has anyone seen the scene from SV where Jared is excited after they hired a woman engineer? And Jared expects her to be pals with Monica because both are female?

I feel some of us men behave that way. :(

link to clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dek5HtNdIHY

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#63

Post by DoreenMichele »

On the one hand, I agree. And on the other hand, I wonder how helpful it is to be writing this and posting it to HN instead of writing about some engineering subject and posting that instead.

I think we need more women in tech talking about tech and less women in tech talking about the problems with being women in tech and only getting attention of the wrong kind -- for being women in tech.

I mean, it's kind of recursive.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#64

Post by calvinbhai »

dominotw wrote: post #43

Its nice that author ended up going to engineering school via massive social and economic inertia afforded only to a tiny sliver of indian population. But there are lot more women who need the helping hand and encouragement provided by those groups. So perhaps a little empathy towards those programs and what they are trying to achieve, even if it causes minor distress?

I know many women/engineers from/in India who have braved worse situations to become engineers, because that often is the only hope for anyone irrespective of their gender, to gain a good career and escape from poverty or move up the wealth ladder.

Not sure of the author's family background, but either way, its not trivial for women in India to escape the social pressure (of getting married earlier than men) even if parents are supportive.

From my Indian POV, it feels a little frustrating to see that there's so much focus on getting women into tech after they are out of college or mid career, than focusing on it when they are in middle/high school.

As you said, "helping hand and encouragement provided by those groups" is needed, but it needs to focus disproportionately more on kids about to start middle school / high school than girls at any other age. It is too late to think of helping for a transition once a girl / woman is out of college.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#65

Post by orsenthil »

I make this point every time with my friends whenever discussing these "Girls who code" kind of initiatives. I grew up with two sisters who took interest in science naturally. In my class in computer science, girls outnumbered boys and scored well. It is natural for girls in India (middle class educated Indian, which is the majority of the country for the past 50 years) to pursue science related degrees. I think, in US this is not the case and US girls were encouraged to impress boys for dating and activism is targeted at US girls.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#66

Post by gkya »

belorn wrote: post #16

I often see people arguing against the idea of sexless-ness based on the idea that its been tried and failed, but I honestly the only time I truly seen evidence of this is in movies making fun of the 70th's. It seems that when the feminist movement moved away from equality feminism it cultural had to disavow the concept of sexless-ness. The idea of sexless-ness, which can also be describe as women/men as equal and un…

Identity politics has won over these ideals. Instead of gender becoming less and less relevant, it came to define the person's identity, and in the process begot more and more genders in a quest to categorise everyone. As victimhood and groupthink are the pillars of current politics, instead of trying to obtain more and more freedom and detach from stereotypes, people try to belong more strongly to the categories in which they can protect themselves from interacting with the other and confronting criticism. Maybe this is a natural and temporary defence mechanism, employed very widely today as the transition from a world of unquestionable hierarchies based on classes and categories to a more fluid global society has just started, and due to this infancy of such a world where the old comfort zones and innate prejudices are (slowly) being erased, people feel fragile alone, given also self-realisation in a non-traditional way may still require fighting conservatism and the fear of the different, as no society is evolving homogenously.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#67

Post by hyperdunc »

21 wrote: post #5
programmarchy wrote: post #3

This seems like a good illustration of the soft bigotry of low expectations. Yes, we should make an effort to be inclusive of all individuals, but when that's done by putting people on a pedestal simply because they're a minority, it's superficial, cringy and embarrassing for everyone involved.

In my team, where we have a 50-50 target goal, we were told that if we know a potential woman hire we should refer her not to the regular hiring track, but to a special "woman friendly" hiring track.

Was it explained to you why there's a 50-50 target goal, or is the value of such a goal automatically assumed to be known and shared?

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#68

Post by mynameishere »

She really seems to think that South India is particular in parents wanting their children to excel in math and engineering. That's...really a strange assumption. That extreme of cultural ignorance is all anyone would notice about this article were it pointed the other direction.

Also "pink elephant" is a kind of symbol for delirium tremens, though I don't know how common that is anymore.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#69

Post by gkya »

mirimir wrote: post #57
gkya wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe one day people are going to learn to not treat "the other" as a homogenous invariant being. Your comment blindly factors out for example the possibility that the social class the science and tech folk originate from is different from a more ample and lower class suffering more gender-related inequalities which when factored in skews the picture dramatically. Many of the regions you refer have largely multifacet…

Yes, I was puzzled at first, reading the article. Because I don't think of India as a paragon of sexual equality. But then, I realized that the author is probably upper-class.

Well this does not simply boil down to economics, too. In Turkey for example (where I'm from), we have a very complex gradient of secular and religious cultures, where the economical situation of the individuals or of the families are only a small determinant in what part of such a gradient they are. Especially in this day and age where local cultures are becoming but a simple debile component of a more global archi-culture.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#70

Post by good-econ1351 »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #26

Something I've noticed after 10 years in tech/finance is that there are very, very few western women in engineering roles. I think I've only ever worked with 1 woman who wasn't an Eastern European or Asian immigrant (and yeah, I eventually married one of the immigrant ones). The gender gap is purely cultural, and we should be learning from what those cultures are doing that's different than us. This article really hi…

Purely cultural? Do you deny the existence of biology entirely?
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