Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, he could have just been joking....
The problem with telling a joke is that if it isn't funny you look like an asshole.
Yep, it was a joke. I didn't know HN had no sense of humor. My bad.
Learning how to attract women to web development
71–74 of 74 posts
Re: Learning how to attract women to web development
#72> One of our goals at Dev Bootcamp Chicago is to change the ratio of women in software development: we want a 1:1 ratio in our cohorts. Why? That's a serious question. My hobbies include writing, blacksmithing, cooking, and ceramics. In writing, around half the people are women. In blacksmithing perhaps 3% are women. In cooking probably 90% of the blogs I read and people who take classes are women. In ceramics it's a…
The question of 'why' is an important one, indeed. For example, I suspect that the disparity in cooking and ceramics is not due to a [perceived] unwelcoming culture, or a [perceived] pervasive attitude that men who are entering the field are inferior by default. It might be that women are considered inferior in blacksmithing; I'm not a blacksmith, though, so I don't know. I do know one woman who is a blacksmith, howe…
Well that's nice. When it comes to technical fields you assume that there are not many women because the men are arrogant assholes. When it comes to a soft field you assume that there are not many men because, well, you don't know. You are a sexist.
Re: Learning how to attract women to web development
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry, but "why?", by itself, is never a serious question. Except in cases of extreme naivety, it's a challenge, or worse, a roadblock, posed to force a reexamination of the underlying assumption. In this case, the underlying assumption is that the field of web development would be enhanced by a more equal ratio of women to men. Your "why?" implies a host of reasons, bounded only by imagination, why this might no…
> I'm sorry, but "why?", by itself, is never a serious question. I asked my question crisply and respectfully, taking the pro-diversity folks as serious and being people of goodwill. I think it's disrespectful of you, not to mention logically deficient, to immediately start your attack by asserting that my question was not intended in good faith. If you can't muster up a simple, respectful response to a simple respec…
The problem with asking "Why?" is that you leave yourself open a retort of "Why not?". Unless your argument managed to cover that possibility (which yours didn't) it's not a meaningful question.
Re: Learning how to attract women to web development
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having a discriminatory policy is unjust. So changing who you discriminate against is not less unjust.
> So changing who you discriminate against is not less unjust. I disagree. Discrimination is not always unjust depending on the motivation and the outcomes of it. If the motivation is to correct for existing systemic discrimination, and if it is successful in doing so, I do not see the injustice.
This is the argument in favor of "Affirmative action". Minorities have been discriminated against for 100 years, and so we need a period of time where they are discriminated for to make up for it.
I can see both sides of that. But ideally, you want to fix the systemic issue not just try to correct for it, because your correction is almost guaranteed to add more unfairness to the system not reduce it.