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: Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Edit: I feel bad about not being able to find a way to let the author know that her article is currently being discussed on HN, so if any of you know her, could you give a heads-up? When people submit an article, it doesn't get attention, and then we re-boost it, we always email them if we can.
Wonder if the flagging system can be enhanced by having the flagger provide a reason. Maybe having to explain would reduce the incidence of drive-by flagging.
I doubt it; my guess is that people would just make up reasons and flag much the same as they do now. The way that upvoting and flagging work seems to be rooted in human nature somehow. What's interesting is how different the two mechanisms are.
Perhaps 'interrogated' is the wrong word? How about 'discuss'. Since HN is a discussion forum, presumably users are open to discussing their flags and reasons for flagging. If not, just like any other type of discussion, we don't have to give their flag any credence.
I would like this. Often I want to flag an article because I feel it's of poor quality, but refrain from it because the mods might think I flagged it because of some partisan reason and my flagging rights will be taken away.
Users flagged this...? Really HN? :/ It's difficult enough to have a conversation about this stuff already. Thanks for unflagging it, dang.
Now, serious question: Are there women here who have a counter to this article? I do know a few who got into tech through specialized programs such as "<Project> Girls", but I also know many (possibly more) who have been turned off by the constant.. uhm, patronizing feel to them.
I'm not a woman, nor am I a minority (not in tech at any rate), so I can't confirm or deny whether it actually is patronizing when in that position. It sure feels to me like it is: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQ3iqzTVoAANW7X.jpg:large
No offense to React.js Girls, I've not actually heard anything negative about it in particular. But ... am I crazy to think it's incredibly rude to put so much emphasis on gender (or really, anything)? Like, if these events were about skin color, sexual orientation or religion in place of gender, who here would find this appropriate?
I should also say, I was invited to help volunteer at a local Django Girls event a few years back. I turned it down because it sounded a little creepy to me to have an event be run only by men, that invites only women. (Note: this is obviously not the case all the time; it was in the instance I was invited to.)
So, what am I missing here? Obviously I'm missing something because, whenever I see this opinion getting expressed, it gets downvoted or, in this case, flagged.
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.
That's exactly what I'm also wondering. Given that the whole company seems genuinely devoted to increasing diversity, I would tend towards the first possibility, especially since the team manager boasted a lot that his team has one of the highest female to male ratio in the company.
Probably just means "Don't let her be interviewed by the guy we all know is a serial sexual abuser but whom we plan to do nothing about until after at least three women have gone viral with their stories of creepy abuse at his hands".
I would have put it a little less... pessimistically, but that's my concern. I think everyone's worked on a team where it was agreed that certain people shouldn't be part of the interview process, whether it's because of something god-awful like that, or if it's just because they lack social skills, or because they're an asshole.
I've encountered something similar. Basically two roles were open and I was on the interviewing team. We were told at the start that one of the roles would be for a woman. We got two CVs from women, and about 45 or so from guys. Not fair really but what can you do. It'd be insanity to challenge that, so just keep your head down and nod along.
When a minority isn't being hired, it is probably hard to prove that it was because of discrimination... that's probably why a minimum is sometime required
I'm not sure why you're getting downvotes. A couple of thoughts:
Phrasing such as "a minority" might be seen as unfavourable.
"A minimum is sometimes required" -- if this is about positive discrimination / affirmative action, this is a potentially controversial and complex topic, as other posts in this thread reveal.
However, I do agree with your point that discrimination in employment can indeed be very hard to prove for individual cases, even though broader statistics may illustrate that it occurs.
What makes it a bit worse is that we are social animals, and expectations matter.
High expectations or low expectations, people often rise to the level expected of them.
Not to mention, whether you got in on the regular track or the alternate track affects people's attitudes about your abilities. People need information about others, and the circumstances of how they joined the organization (whether they are in the group that got assistance or not) is a source of information. Sure, some people have been trained to ignore that for the sake of fairness, but not 100% of everyone.
One side ostracizes the "other" in an attempt at superiority and domination, as they are naturally driven to do. The other side places the "other" on a pedestal, in an attempt at submissiveness and placation, as they feel natural.
The "other" sees this for what it is - 2 people pandering instead of including them into a group of 3 equals. When confronted, each side will claim this is how they include people, and accuse of sowing dissent.
The more people I meet, the more I realize there is no "them" - there is us, just us, and more of us.
"All one should care about is - is this excellent or is it not? Is this right or is this wrong?"
I generally agree with this article. But you can't be a white male and speak this way in silicon valley without being shamed and being labeled a Trump supporter. Especially if your company has militant diversity advocates.
The tragedy here cannot be overstated. The truth itself has been demonized by people who claim to be "just speaking the truth" when they lie, and people who can't see through it and believe it's ok to sacrifice truth on the altar of their ideology.
The tragedy is that for hundreds if not thousands of years half the population has had their voice muted and ability to contribute intellectually hamstrung
For hundreds if not thousands of years 90%+ of the population had their voice muted and ability to contribute intellectual hamstrung. It's only the few hundred years that we've had the resources to change this.
90% is an heavily underestimated number, where reality should be closer to 99%. We only need to go back a bit more than 100 years where researchers either was extremely wealthy and supported the work themselves (generally through inheritance), or required a patronage from someone who was wealthy. Going through the list of famous scientists that dates back hundreds if not thousands and the idea that you need to be rich to do intellectual work is a repeating pattern.
Not many people, then or now, can afford at an early age to stop focusing on creating food on the table and roof over their head, and on top of that fund what is generally a rather expensive passion.
Uhhhhh I guess hacknernews doesn't let you delete comments or even edit them (wtf??) But it looks like I read the previous comment wrong and responded to something that wasn't actually said.
You can edit a comment within during a certain period after initial creation (20 minutes, I believe). You can delete a comment during that time as well as long as no one has responded. You may have missed the edit window here, but you did the next best thing, make a comment with a correction or addendum.
Nobody is saying to hire people who are less excellent than you normally would. What people are saying is make an effort to find candidates that are underrepresented.
The political correctness climate is so unpredictable. I'm considered both sexist & feminist due to being a white male who doesn't pay attention to the gender of my non romantic relationships. Laissez faire ideals makes you an enemy of everyone in an age of 'allies'
Easy. Don't make discounts or other a priori judgments about the other person based on gender. Outside of childbirth, and certain extreme physical activities, assume no difference between carriers of XX and XY chromosomes. Age, culture, experience, etc play by far a bigger role, and make the real difference.
For me, this works reasonably well, and meets about equal (quite moderate) resistance from tradition-minded people in countries as different as US and Russia. (This also illustrates that a culture predominant among engineers likely differs less between countries that between different social strata or education backgrounds in the same country. Compared to this, inter-gender differences can be very safely assumed to be zero.)
>It's substantive and grounded in personal experience.
Yes, but it's the personal experience of someone who has never "had to defend their choice of or fight an uphill battle while selecting engineering as a career choice". Which makes it seem like more of an "argument by outlier" than the expression of some deep universal insight-- yes, maybe Mallika doesn't appreciate someone listening to her talk as "being supportive", but maybe women who have had to fight an uphill battle would appreciate the show of solidarity and the chance afterwards to swap war stories.
(I do agree that it was unfair to flag the article.)
Indeed. When I visited India on a delegation to learn about these very issues, I was told that the local elementary schools didn't even have girls' bathrooms, that young women can't attend the entrance exam prep classes because they're held at night and it's too dangerous, and that when women do get into engineering schools, it's never the tier one schools.
Obviously I did not grow up in India so I can't say with certainty that the author is an outlier. But I have heard face-to-face from many, many, many Indian women who tell a very different story from the one we're reading here.
I hope anyone (including you and the author) talking about India is aware that it is a country of 1.3 billion people.
So you can find a Germany+Austria+Italy equivalent number of poor people in desolate conditions, but there also a UK+France+Spain+Nordic-countries equivalent number of people who are doing much better and have access to many resources.
So one's view of India totally depends on which European country equivalent you interfaced with, unless they have travelled to every region/state in India and lived there for a few months/years, without having a political/religious/NGO entity planning their itinerary.
In support of the author, I agree with what she says. Those women who do make it to engineering / tech / high-skilled professions tend to do so without having experienced the pink-elephant phenomena. In fact, I can totally empathize with what the author is saying in her post.
PS: I just made up the list of countries and equivalents, but I hope my analogy helps in understanding how vast India is, in terms of population, the demography, including the languages spoken, scripts written, religions / cultures followed by people.
Absolutely agree. India is a huge place. I may not have been strong enough in my caveats: this was a delegation with a specific purpose and fixed meetings; we visited two regions only; the use of the word "local"; and obviously none of us on the delegation are even from there, so what do we know, really? I just wanted to point out that I've heard stories from Indian women that are different than this one.
As a woman I can also empathize with the author and would of course prefer to have my work valued on its merits. I just don't think that's contradictory to having a robust diversity effort.
You don't agree with the thinking therefore the author is wrong and her experience and opinion isn't worth considering. This is the very antithesis of acceptance, inclusiveness, and diversity.
I think her message is very simple and powerful. Just be interested in what she is working on based on the merits or her work. I think that's an excellent model to strive for, and really, it's sad anyone has to even say it.
>You don't agree with the thinking therefore the author is wrong and her experience and opinion isn't worth considering.
No, I just don't agree that the author's experience generalizes to other women.
>Just be interested in what she is working on based on the merits or her work.
And what of people like the event manager in the article who are interested in other aspects of her career? Shouldn't we practice "acceptance, inclusiveness, and diversity" toward them also?
It is not an "argument by outlier", though. She describes a culture where her experience is normal. This culture results in both male and female engineers. Her critique is about a culture that feels compelled to pretense instead of compelled to change.
This comment originated as a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15948126, but that subthread is penalized for being off topic. It doesn't seem fair for your comment to suffer that fate, so I've done something I don't think I ever did before, which is detach it from its parent and mark it on-topic. Sorry for the digression but your reply lacks context otherwise.
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 undifferentiated from that of men/women, seems to me as the way to reach optimal freedom and agency in life. Gender roles and associated expectations affect incentives and disincentives, neither which is optimal if we want to reach the point where every individual can seek their own passions. I only hope that the ideas behind equality feminism can once again raise to be dominant within the progressive culture.
The problem with sexless-ness is that it only addresses what we're conscious of, when we know that there's lots of unconscious or systemic biases that still exist.
One famous example was a study that involved submitting resumes to various jobs with names removed and then randomly reassigned (to avoid any actual correlation between the name's perceived gender and the quality of the resume). Resumes with female names received half the callbacks than if they had male names. You can't practice sexless-ness when you're not aware that you're discriminating.
Thats not studies on sexless-ness, but rather plain discrimination. There are many such studies, some which favor men and some which favor women, but all falls within typical gender roles and expectations. Sexless-ness and gender roles are opposites.
Lets bring in other similar studies. Physiologist that work for the juridical system and makes decisions about the mental status of accused criminals. Identical submitted profiles with female names received twice the number of judgments on being criminal insane than men, resulting in more lenient punishment and more time in medical care. Physiologist outside of the juridical system has also got similar studies where identical profiles of clinical depressed people, and women are twice as likely to be correctly diagnosed. A female name is more likely to get social support while being homeless, and similarly if you test judges who decide over family disputes you see a clear bias.
Neither of those involve a society which practice sexless-ness. All dictate that professionals (including those in government) treat both women and men equally. Culturally we do not practice sexless-ness and we are nowhere near in abolishing gender roles. What the studies do prove is that gender roles has still a major impact on people in professional positions and rules of equality do not trump peoples expectations when the only clue to a gender is a name.
There are many, many studies of the justice system in the U.S. showing very biased outcomes depending on factors like gender or race. Practicing sexless-ness is, as you observe, what's supposed to be done already ("All dictate that professionals... treat both women and men equally"). Do you think we believe that we're practicing sexless-ness and then not doing so in practice? Or that there are unconscious or systemic effects at play as well that conscious dedication to sexless-ness isn't affecting?
I do not think anyone is practicing sexless-ness at all. While the law says that they should treat both women and men equally, people still perceive women as women and men as men. That in turn carries with a huge number of cultural expectations and values.
Race has a similar problem, through here it seems to be a proxy for social economical status (class), which then leads to the cultural expectations and values.
In both cases it seems very conscious behavior, and when it comes to diversity work its explicitly so. Few are still preaching that you should not see gender or race, and those that do are generally attacked for doing so. Gender roles are emphasized and highlighted in practically all form of news and cultural media, occasionally reversed for the shock or comedy effect. Its very explicit and conscious.
You're conflating an intent to practice sexless-ness with the actuality of it. You're right that we're not practicing it--everywhere we look we see inequity that's obvious tied to gender (or race, or disability...). But we think we are, or at least that we're trying. We've spent a century disassembling laws and customs that treat women differently, and yet the inequities remain. Why are you so hostile to the idea that we're not all that conscious of our lack of sexless-ness in application? That the inequities of sexism are at least partly systemic and not a conscious choice to be discriminatory?
> Resumes with female names received half the callbacks than if they had male names.
I'm a man named Lyndsy. I've experienced the opposite bias - companies that were initially very enthusiastic about my interviewing with them, right up to the moment where they realized I was male.
Obviously, I have no way of knowing whether I received fewer callbacks as a result of my name - but I do know with a very high degree of confidence that I have landed at least one interview based on my name.
It seems to me that actively "working against" this unconscious bias merely replaces it with another.
It's probably true that a person trying to self-correct for bias will tend to over-correct, to no one's benefit. But the sort of things you do to correct for widespread unconscious bias are different. For instance, the New York Symphony Orchestra found that female applicants were making it through the tape screening round more often when their tapes were blinded, replacing identifying information with a serial number. Women were still being rejected at the audition stage in higher numbers than men, so they started having the applicants play from behind a screen so the judges couldn't see the gender of the audition, and once again, the number of women making it through that round increased[1]. This was all at a time when the NYSO was consciously trying to practice sexless-ness, if not actively increase the number of women in the orchestra.
Several years ago, GoGaRuCo brought in blind judging of their talk applicants pool after ensuring the pool was seeded with half women. Suddenly their roster was half women too, on judging the talks purely on the merits of the proposal.
We constantly see that when we successfully block stimuli to unconscious bias, the bias is disarmed.
[1] Interestingly, they didn't significantly increase until they made auditions walk on stage in their socks, because the sound of their formal-wear shoes were obviously different.
Maybe sexlessness overstates the case. It was more like sex blindness. Or sex irrelevance. I mean, she writes:
> I come from a country and a back ground where intelligence and the ability to work extremely hard is valued highly, with beauty, money and popularity ranked far, far below.
In contrast, modern American culture (which is globally pervasive) is just so incredibly sexualized. And incredibly polarized. Many women are angry, and many men are addicted to angry porn. It seems rather a divide-and-conquer strategy by the kleptocrats. But maybe it's just chaos.
> strategy by the kleptocrats. But maybe it's just chaos.
Maybe it's just advertizing?
Someone want's to make you buy a product that makes you more "more". More manly, more womanly, more better looking, more money. News and TV wants to make you more engaged, if that is by telling you more lies, or making you more angry they will do it, so you watch more ads.
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.
I think it's important to note that women's issues in different cultures are often very different, and if you start diagnosing one culture's issues with the yardstick of another, you will cause a lot of false positives and negatives.
For instance, India, where the author comes for, is often celebrated for having had a 1) female prime minister all the way back in the 60s 2) a female president 10 years ago, and lots of women in the three pillars of democracy. Compared to the US, that makes India look like a bastion of women's rights.
But anyone who's lived there will obviously tell you that women there have their own set of problems. And in fact, when it comes to the president and the prime minister too, some would argue that they were instated as 'puppets' (Google for "Indira Gandhi dumb doll"). It's a different matter that she towered above all that and developed an identity of her own.
A certain Indian MP tried to play the female president card with me. I pointed out that the election of Barack Obama had hardly heralded the end of racism in my own country.
Maybe not the end of racism, but it did reflect some decades of empowering African American voters. Plus Republican disarray, culminating in the bone-headed McCain-Palin ticket. And you know, he's no Wyclef Jean ;)
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 hits the nail on the head in terms of what we do in the west (ie: "math is for boys!") vs other places where your sex isn't really factored into what subjects are appropriate. It's very good.
>The gender gap is purely cultural, and we should be learning from what those cultures are doing that's different than us.
The countries with low gender gap in science/tech are also the countries that measure low on general measures of gender equality. It turns out there isn't anything to learn from these cases. In regions with low gender equality and weak social safety nets, technology is seen as the means to economic security and thus empowerment. Conversely, regions with high gender equality and strong social safety nets have the largest gender gaps. There is something to be learned from this, but we probably won't like what we find.
Instead of hinting at something, why not just tell us how you really feel? Is it because it's a conclusion that is generally not accepted when put in plain terms?
Not op but since you asked, I will draw the conclusion.
Given that we observe a larger gender gap in countries that are more gender equality we can conclude that when men and women feel more equal their choice of profession diverge.
You've got a huge number of confounding variables here that you're not accounting for. Gender equality and cultural attitudes towards gender roles are not simple metrics, you can't infer that just because some aspect of a culture demonstrates superior gender equality to another that this culture is necessarily superior in gender equality in every way. Attitudes are vastly more complicated than that, and there's no reason to believe that a society that is more progressive in one sense can't be more regressive in another.
It is definitely possible that it is just confounding variables, I don't know I haven't really looked into it. One thing I know is that if the correlation went the other way, it would be a good data point that the gender gap is cultural.
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 multifaceted and mostly multi-ethnical demograpic structures.
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.
Yes, thanks. I didn't mean to imply economic wealth. Because she notes that money isn't an important goal. I'm too ignorant about South India to know what her background might be. Maybe something like academic? Or intellectual?
Read the whole article. She makes it abundantly clear that her parents were not upper class. Just middle class what in the context of that region means "no private transportation of any sort let alone a car". I assume they had bicycles at most.
Just because a culture scores low on overall gender equality doesn't mean you can't learn something by looking at it. Your point about an inverse correlation of gender equality and gender gap is certainly interesting, if true, but that doesn't mean we can't make useful observations like the GP's. Even if a particular culture has low gender equality overall, if they have high gender equality in a particular area it might be useful to look at it.
It may be smaller in other cultures, but it's my impression that it's still there. At least among non-Western immigrants to the U.S., there are still at least 2-3 males for every female engineer.
Dunno about the quality or authoritativeness of the numbers, but this link indicates that India still has plenty of room for growth, assuming that 50/50 is the ideal gender ratio.
Even at the college level in India, it isn't uncommon to see a 2:1 male to female ratio in engineering classes. Women in India do face plenty of bias, most of which stems from the fact that they are expected to get married and take care of their families. So investing in their education isn't seen as a priority as the assumption is they won't be able to fully concentrate on their careers once they have a family and kids. Now there are some castes where this bias isn't as strong - like Iyers and Iyengars for example, but they are the exception rather than the norm. Even amongst those castes, you'll find plenty of men who think that they are naturally gifted when it comes to math and science. So they claim they can goof around in college and still get good grades while women, who lack that natural talent, have to spend all their time mugging up for exams.
Rather, it seems it has to be biological, but it's left to flourish most in wealthy countries.
The resistance to this gender essentialist conclusion is easy to understand, but it shouldn't change anything to true egalitarians. If someone's suitable for a job, hire them. Gender or race quotas are sexist and racist, by definition, and it's those policies that are endangered, not egalitarianism.
You have a point, from the perspective of immediate equity. But such quotas are driven by long-term equity goals. And there's more to it than reparations for past injustice. It's about social transformation.
If we made a poll for boys and girls from the age they learn to speak until 18 years old, and asked to rate 3 statements:
Math is important.
Money and getting a high paying job is important.
Having rich social life and a large family.
What will the gender differences be, and which will have a bigger extreme? Which will see an reinforced difference as the children grows older and into puberty, the time where career directions are usually made? Last, how does the economy of the country in which the children live influence the answers.
Here is a bet: Its all about the second question, for which math correlates to. Culture will influence children to strive for money if there is a risk to not have food on the table, roof over their head, and parents that will go without both at elderly days. This result in gender roles to merge on the subject of being the provider. "math is for boys" is identical to the idea that "beauty parlors are for girls"; inter-gender competition thats are effective strategies when other basic needs are fulfilled. Focusing on inter-gender competition while starving is a poor strategy. A collaborating evidence to that bet would be if women in countries with lower gender segregation in tech has a better chance in escaping poverty through math than marriage. It would then be maladaptive in those places to have stereotypical gender roles where men are the sole providers.
> I come from a country and a back ground where intelligence and the ability to work extremely hard is valued highly, with beauty, money and popularity ranked far, far below. Growing up as a South Indian in Mumbai, neither me, not anyone I know or grew up with, has ever had to defend their choice of or fight an uphill battle while selecting engineering as a career choice, regardless of their sex.
I come from the different country but I've got few Indian colleagues. We're talking a lot because I've been always interested in cultural differences. From what they said I feel like above sentence is not true. Male's role in the society is to become an engineer and bring money. Female's - to get married and raise kids. Society's expect you to fit in your role and it's difficult to do something else without tons of comments from your family and friends. One example could be a male colleague who's interested in cooking and wish he could open a restaurant. Yet, he's an engineer. Another one says he didn't really have a choice - he could be an engineer or nobody so, obviously, he choose to be an engineer.
Could anyone confirm how does the reality look like? Maybe it differs by region. It's a big country after all.
Maybe the picture you're getting is not from South Indian people? There's a different mentality and situation in the south. The southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala have the highest literacy rates in India, with Kerala especially having the highest literacy rate for women. Mallika's perceptions about the cultural importance of education are almost certainly correct especially if she is from the south.
And now I'm vaguely remembering a section of Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, where Jack Shaftoe gets help from a so-called "pirate queen". In Kerala, I think.
FWIW, as someone who grew up in western India (but not Mumbai, another city/state), my personal experience is very similar to what the author described in the article.
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.
I agree. She's a minority and the compassionate thing to do is say, hey don't bug me about it but feel free to use me as a role model so in X years we'll have 50% women in the role of your speciality and we can move on. I wouldn't force anyone to be a public figure but to disengage completely is denying there is an imbalance. Also, I bet as an Indian woman she's not going to deny there is a massive need for general improvement in health in safety? Maybe she's really lucky but I just read [1] this morning and was reminded that I, as a woman, don't feel safe alone in certain contexts in India. I can afford a private car and security but that certainly doesn't stop me wanting safety for everyone. What's she saying read to me like, "I'm from a supportive family and wealthy enough background to have made it, leave me alone in my bubble where everyone around me has everything we need"
> There is no room for “maybe” - and there is no room for “is this a woman who wrote this or is it a man”. All one should care about is - is this excellent or is it not? Is this right or is this wrong?
The general way that I have understood folks who advocate the programs that are being presented as problematic here is: whether or not there should be room for "maybe", and whether or not one should care about anything else, people inject maybes and do care about gender. That is, the diversity programs and the sense of “I should support this person because she is a woman” is rooted in an observation or impression that being a woman puts you at a disadvantage in one way or another. The bias is already there, and the attempt is at a counterbias.
I think it's very good that this isn't a problem in the author's experience, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem at all. That said, I'm wondering if there can be a better balance between supporting women who are good but aren't judged to be, or feel like they aren't even though they are, and women who are perfectly confident in their abilities and just want to operate like a sexless engineer at work. Certainly I'm hopeful that women don't experience that bias in every organization, and a (hypothetical) organization that's already structured in an unbiased way would perhaps not want to focus on gender.
From a purely practical standpoint, though, it feels like the right question here is, does the approach the author doesn't like reduce the number of women who don't enter or who leave the industry due to bias more than it increases the number of women who leave in frustration from being treated as ‘different’. If the problem these programs are meant to address is ‘many women leave the industry or don't join it because of perceived bias’, then that's the real metric. In a perfect world, nobody cares… But in a world where people are biased against women, perhaps you have to try to adjust explicitly for that in the short term, so that you can get to the goal of a world where nobody cares in the longer run.
Excellent title. It conveyed the entire meaning of the article in this context. That's wonderful, because the moment I clicked through, I realized I would not be able to read the article without enabling javascript. All I receive is a loading spinner. I closed the page and checked the comments to confirm my understanding of the article was accurate. It seems it was. Excellent title. I wish more articles could be this clever and succinct at the same time.
Dear Mallika, Many thanks for writing this article! Totally echoes my thoughts.
fwiw, as an Indian male engineer in US, I initially was very enthusiastically thinking "lets go out of our way to support the pink elephants" and later was surprised when some of my peers (female engineers from India in US or of Indian origin) showed utter disinterest in being part of many of these women centric meetups/conferences.
They were more enthusiastic to go to conferences that successfully enforced a 'No Asshole Rule' on attendees, followed by attending conferences without 'all male' speakers, than conferences of any other type. (I thought the feedback I received was an outlier, but it is good to know I'm not alone).
Hope such articles bring positive changes to improve diversity organically and address the pink elephant syndrome.
This article reminded me of this video "Modern Educayshun" (by an Aussie Comedian of Indian origin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM . Feels like the video makes a similar point.
I'm surprised that you were not very enthusiastic about conferences with a "No Asshole Rule". Maybe it's possible to try multiple approaches at the same time? And that trying several different things is good?
I would be pleasantly surprised if you were also very enthusiastic about conferences with a "No Asshole Rule", but that would make your previous comment a bit strange.
Not sure where the miscommunication is, but it looks like one of us is really bad at understanding English :)
Either way, I’m not a fan of the bro-mentality places(jobs/conferences) and I absolutely love conferences which make it nice for people (of any gender, orientation, race, culture, language) to attend.
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?
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 feel it's true that we should set our course for a (near) future wherein women in tech writing about tech is the norm. Unfortunately this is likely to take some time.
That means, between now and then, we're going to hear from plenty of die-hards with opposing views.
En route it will be necessary to remind ourselves of the course we should be plotting, and to continue to respond to opposition.
To have women in tech talking about tech topics instead of what it feels like to be a woman in tech. Although the show is labeled "women in tech", it's simply to raise awareness of this. This is a good way to help our industry.
Sorry for the late reply. I didn't see this earlier.
I have followed the twitter handle. It looks like it is all audio, which I suspect is not very compatible with Hacker News, but I am trying to ask around and get some feedback on that detail.
How are you promoting it? Would it be possible to create transcripts? With transcripts, they could be posted to HN as actually relevant here instead of the angry feminazi crap I so often see posted.
Good on you. Feel free to email me if you want to talk.
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.
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.
“Lived experience” is anecdote, which is a fine way of coming up with hypotheses about generalities, and a very bad basis for asserting any but very weak, tentative conclusions about generalities.
Absolutely. I agree with you. For the purposes of her article, I think it's more than enough. Most discussions about issues of diversity and similar "dangerous ideas" try to use statistics to back them up but often do use statistics terribly.
It's better in my opinion to be upfront about anecdotal data.
> Intelligence was, and still holds the top spot amongst almost all South Indian families.
She can say that intelligence is highly valued, and she can say that not a single person she knows or grew up with fought the kinds of battles against sexism we're familiar with in the U.S. Likewise, I can say, "I'm familiar with battles against sexism in the U.S.," without needing to cite or defend a single thing.
But the moment either one of us makes a statement to characterize some grouping of people outside of our direct experience, there almost always needs to be more than anecdotal evidence to back it up.
Likewise, me saying, "blank is the single greatest problem facing U.S. corporations today," would need citations-- plus probably an elucidated theory. Otherwise I'm just stating my own personal intuition in language that is unreasonably broad.
clarification: I changed "all" to "some grouping of people outside of our direct experience." I think that's a much more meaningful way to put it, as it doesn't matter whether someone is talking about "all", "almost all", "most", etc.
I liked the article, but disappointed that I had to run code from tumblr.com in order to be able to read it. I'd urge the author and others to reconsider site designs like this.
Damn. This nails it. Ever since my first exposure to computing and “programming”, I always deeply felt it was a great equalizer and meritocracy filter. A field where instead of your skin, the only color that mattered was of the grey in your brain. Where gender was as meaningless as asking androids their sex. Where your “accent” didn’t matter, because code does not have any. Where what you smell of didn’t matter because all anyone smelt was factory-fresh PCBs, come to life with electrons. Where money was a result of smarts, hard work and imagination. It was, and will likely always be my utopia. It may or not exist in the world out there. Maybe it never did. But, it is real to me, somewhere within me and will always be, in some way small or large. DudeBros, CodeJocks and SoftDogs be damned along with PussyPasses and the GoldDiggers.
"I come from a country and a back ground where intelligence and the ability to work extremely hard is valued highly, with beauty, money and popularity ranked far, far below."
Wait! Where is this fabled land? I would bow humbly before the philosopher-kings who rule it, grovel at their feet to learn how they so wisely manage mere human weaknesses! Surely there the streets are paved with gold and happiness and good fortune follow all those who fail to foolishly abandon such a blessed land.
Even developed country that was never exploited, suffered no war damage to their production capacity since the beginning of industrial revolution, basically used WWII to switch their industry to high gear and sucked in half of the world scientists doesn't have streets paved with gold.
Then again it might be just because they think they owe their success to being right about everything, which they are not.
146 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadIf you want to comment here, please (re-)familiarize yourself with the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, including this one: Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Edit: I feel bad about not being able to find a way to let the author know that her article is currently being discussed on HN, so if any of you know her, could you give a heads-up? When people submit an article, it doesn't get attention, and then we re-boost it, we always email them if we can.
Now, serious question: Are there women here who have a counter to this article? I do know a few who got into tech through specialized programs such as "<Project> Girls", but I also know many (possibly more) who have been turned off by the constant.. uhm, patronizing feel to them.
I'm not a woman, nor am I a minority (not in tech at any rate), so I can't confirm or deny whether it actually is patronizing when in that position. It sure feels to me like it is: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQ3iqzTVoAANW7X.jpg:large
No offense to React.js Girls, I've not actually heard anything negative about it in particular. But ... am I crazy to think it's incredibly rude to put so much emphasis on gender (or really, anything)? Like, if these events were about skin color, sexual orientation or religion in place of gender, who here would find this appropriate?
I should also say, I was invited to help volunteer at a local Django Girls event a few years back. I turned it down because it sounded a little creepy to me to have an event be run only by men, that invites only women. (Note: this is obviously not the case all the time; it was in the instance I was invited to.)
So, what am I missing here? Obviously I'm missing something because, whenever I see this opinion getting expressed, it gets downvoted or, in this case, flagged.
Her Twitter is in the site's footer, FYI.
Her twitter account is linked at the bottom of her page - https://twitter.com/iyermallika
Phrasing such as "a minority" might be seen as unfavourable.
"A minimum is sometimes required" -- if this is about positive discrimination / affirmative action, this is a potentially controversial and complex topic, as other posts in this thread reveal.
However, I do agree with your point that discrimination in employment can indeed be very hard to prove for individual cases, even though broader statistics may illustrate that it occurs.
High expectations or low expectations, people often rise to the level expected of them.
Not to mention, whether you got in on the regular track or the alternate track affects people's attitudes about your abilities. People need information about others, and the circumstances of how they joined the organization (whether they are in the group that got assistance or not) is a source of information. Sure, some people have been trained to ignore that for the sake of fairness, but not 100% of everyone.
The "other" sees this for what it is - 2 people pandering instead of including them into a group of 3 equals. When confronted, each side will claim this is how they include people, and accuse of sowing dissent.
The more people I meet, the more I realize there is no "them" - there is us, just us, and more of us.
I generally agree with this article. But you can't be a white male and speak this way in silicon valley without being shamed and being labeled a Trump supporter. Especially if your company has militant diversity advocates.
Not many people, then or now, can afford at an early age to stop focusing on creating food on the table and roof over their head, and on top of that fund what is generally a rather expensive passion.
And chances are you were still being racist/sexist but you didn't even realize it because you've got the wall shadows that deeply ingrained in you.
For me, this works reasonably well, and meets about equal (quite moderate) resistance from tradition-minded people in countries as different as US and Russia. (This also illustrates that a culture predominant among engineers likely differs less between countries that between different social strata or education backgrounds in the same country. Compared to this, inter-gender differences can be very safely assumed to be zero.)
Yes, but it's the personal experience of someone who has never "had to defend their choice of or fight an uphill battle while selecting engineering as a career choice". Which makes it seem like more of an "argument by outlier" than the expression of some deep universal insight-- yes, maybe Mallika doesn't appreciate someone listening to her talk as "being supportive", but maybe women who have had to fight an uphill battle would appreciate the show of solidarity and the chance afterwards to swap war stories.
(I do agree that it was unfair to flag the article.)
Obviously I did not grow up in India so I can't say with certainty that the author is an outlier. But I have heard face-to-face from many, many, many Indian women who tell a very different story from the one we're reading here.
So you can find a Germany+Austria+Italy equivalent number of poor people in desolate conditions, but there also a UK+France+Spain+Nordic-countries equivalent number of people who are doing much better and have access to many resources.
So one's view of India totally depends on which European country equivalent you interfaced with, unless they have travelled to every region/state in India and lived there for a few months/years, without having a political/religious/NGO entity planning their itinerary.
In support of the author, I agree with what she says. Those women who do make it to engineering / tech / high-skilled professions tend to do so without having experienced the pink-elephant phenomena. In fact, I can totally empathize with what the author is saying in her post.
PS: I just made up the list of countries and equivalents, but I hope my analogy helps in understanding how vast India is, in terms of population, the demography, including the languages spoken, scripts written, religions / cultures followed by people.
As a woman I can also empathize with the author and would of course prefer to have my work valued on its merits. I just don't think that's contradictory to having a robust diversity effort.
You don't agree with the thinking therefore the author is wrong and her experience and opinion isn't worth considering. This is the very antithesis of acceptance, inclusiveness, and diversity.
I think her message is very simple and powerful. Just be interested in what she is working on based on the merits or her work. I think that's an excellent model to strive for, and really, it's sad anyone has to even say it.
No, I just don't agree that the author's experience generalizes to other women.
>Just be interested in what she is working on based on the merits or her work.
And what of people like the event manager in the article who are interested in other aspects of her career? Shouldn't we practice "acceptance, inclusiveness, and diversity" toward them also?
She describes having grown up in a culture where that experience is normal, but that is not necessarily the same culture that she is working in now.
The idea of sexless-ness, which can also be describe as women/men as equal and undifferentiated from that of men/women, seems to me as the way to reach optimal freedom and agency in life. Gender roles and associated expectations affect incentives and disincentives, neither which is optimal if we want to reach the point where every individual can seek their own passions. I only hope that the ideas behind equality feminism can once again raise to be dominant within the progressive culture.
One famous example was a study that involved submitting resumes to various jobs with names removed and then randomly reassigned (to avoid any actual correlation between the name's perceived gender and the quality of the resume). Resumes with female names received half the callbacks than if they had male names. You can't practice sexless-ness when you're not aware that you're discriminating.
Lets bring in other similar studies. Physiologist that work for the juridical system and makes decisions about the mental status of accused criminals. Identical submitted profiles with female names received twice the number of judgments on being criminal insane than men, resulting in more lenient punishment and more time in medical care. Physiologist outside of the juridical system has also got similar studies where identical profiles of clinical depressed people, and women are twice as likely to be correctly diagnosed. A female name is more likely to get social support while being homeless, and similarly if you test judges who decide over family disputes you see a clear bias.
Neither of those involve a society which practice sexless-ness. All dictate that professionals (including those in government) treat both women and men equally. Culturally we do not practice sexless-ness and we are nowhere near in abolishing gender roles. What the studies do prove is that gender roles has still a major impact on people in professional positions and rules of equality do not trump peoples expectations when the only clue to a gender is a name.
Race has a similar problem, through here it seems to be a proxy for social economical status (class), which then leads to the cultural expectations and values.
In both cases it seems very conscious behavior, and when it comes to diversity work its explicitly so. Few are still preaching that you should not see gender or race, and those that do are generally attacked for doing so. Gender roles are emphasized and highlighted in practically all form of news and cultural media, occasionally reversed for the shock or comedy effect. Its very explicit and conscious.
I'm a man named Lyndsy. I've experienced the opposite bias - companies that were initially very enthusiastic about my interviewing with them, right up to the moment where they realized I was male.
Obviously, I have no way of knowing whether I received fewer callbacks as a result of my name - but I do know with a very high degree of confidence that I have landed at least one interview based on my name.
It seems to me that actively "working against" this unconscious bias merely replaces it with another.
Several years ago, GoGaRuCo brought in blind judging of their talk applicants pool after ensuring the pool was seeded with half women. Suddenly their roster was half women too, on judging the talks purely on the merits of the proposal.
We constantly see that when we successfully block stimuli to unconscious bias, the bias is disarmed.
[1] Interestingly, they didn't significantly increase until they made auditions walk on stage in their socks, because the sound of their formal-wear shoes were obviously different.
> I come from a country and a back ground where intelligence and the ability to work extremely hard is valued highly, with beauty, money and popularity ranked far, far below.
In contrast, modern American culture (which is globally pervasive) is just so incredibly sexualized. And incredibly polarized. Many women are angry, and many men are addicted to angry porn. It seems rather a divide-and-conquer strategy by the kleptocrats. But maybe it's just chaos.
Maybe it's just advertizing?
Someone want's to make you buy a product that makes you more "more". More manly, more womanly, more better looking, more money. News and TV wants to make you more engaged, if that is by telling you more lies, or making you more angry they will do it, so you watch more ads.
It'd be hilarious if it were just greed-driven advertising that's destroying American society.
For instance, India, where the author comes for, is often celebrated for having had a 1) female prime minister all the way back in the 60s 2) a female president 10 years ago, and lots of women in the three pillars of democracy. Compared to the US, that makes India look like a bastion of women's rights.
But anyone who's lived there will obviously tell you that women there have their own set of problems. And in fact, when it comes to the president and the prime minister too, some would argue that they were instated as 'puppets' (Google for "Indira Gandhi dumb doll"). It's a different matter that she towered above all that and developed an identity of her own.
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 hits the nail on the head in terms of what we do in the west (ie: "math is for boys!") vs other places where your sex isn't really factored into what subjects are appropriate. It's very good.
The countries with low gender gap in science/tech are also the countries that measure low on general measures of gender equality. It turns out there isn't anything to learn from these cases. In regions with low gender equality and weak social safety nets, technology is seen as the means to economic security and thus empowerment. Conversely, regions with high gender equality and strong social safety nets have the largest gender gaps. There is something to be learned from this, but we probably won't like what we find.
Given that we observe a larger gender gap in countries that are more gender equality we can conclude that when men and women feel more equal their choice of profession diverge.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It may be smaller in other cultures, but it's my impression that it's still there. At least among non-Western immigrants to the U.S., there are still at least 2-3 males for every female engineer.
Dunno about the quality or authoritativeness of the numbers, but this link indicates that India still has plenty of room for growth, assuming that 50/50 is the ideal gender ratio.
http://blog.belong.co/gender-diversity-indian-tech-companies
If people are being oppressed/suppressed, then surely we have some things to learn.
But cultures are often 'just different' and one may not be better than the other because more women or men do this or that.
We also have gendered roles in teaching, construction etc., nobody is screaming injustice.
1. One of the very few jobs that is well paid. So you are either a software engineer or poor.
2. There is not social stigma associated with being an engineer. infact its the opposite, see point 1.
3. Even in India "math is for boys" meme is strong but point 1 overpowers everything else.
> The gender gap is purely cultural
Unless you can point me to a non-poor country where this is true, I would say 'The gender gap is purely economical '
The resistance to this gender essentialist conclusion is easy to understand, but it shouldn't change anything to true egalitarians. If someone's suitable for a job, hire them. Gender or race quotas are sexist and racist, by definition, and it's those policies that are endangered, not egalitarianism.
Math is important.
Money and getting a high paying job is important.
Having rich social life and a large family.
What will the gender differences be, and which will have a bigger extreme? Which will see an reinforced difference as the children grows older and into puberty, the time where career directions are usually made? Last, how does the economy of the country in which the children live influence the answers.
Here is a bet: Its all about the second question, for which math correlates to. Culture will influence children to strive for money if there is a risk to not have food on the table, roof over their head, and parents that will go without both at elderly days. This result in gender roles to merge on the subject of being the provider. "math is for boys" is identical to the idea that "beauty parlors are for girls"; inter-gender competition thats are effective strategies when other basic needs are fulfilled. Focusing on inter-gender competition while starving is a poor strategy. A collaborating evidence to that bet would be if women in countries with lower gender segregation in tech has a better chance in escaping poverty through math than marriage. It would then be maladaptive in those places to have stereotypical gender roles where men are the sole providers.
> I come from a country and a back ground where intelligence and the ability to work extremely hard is valued highly, with beauty, money and popularity ranked far, far below. Growing up as a South Indian in Mumbai, neither me, not anyone I know or grew up with, has ever had to defend their choice of or fight an uphill battle while selecting engineering as a career choice, regardless of their sex.
I come from the different country but I've got few Indian colleagues. We're talking a lot because I've been always interested in cultural differences. From what they said I feel like above sentence is not true. Male's role in the society is to become an engineer and bring money. Female's - to get married and raise kids. Society's expect you to fit in your role and it's difficult to do something else without tons of comments from your family and friends. One example could be a male colleague who's interested in cooking and wish he could open a restaurant. Yet, he's an engineer. Another one says he didn't really have a choice - he could be an engineer or nobody so, obviously, he choose to be an engineer.
Could anyone confirm how does the reality look like? Maybe it differs by region. It's a big country after all.
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/education/story/living-examples...
And now I'm vaguely remembering a section of Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, where Jack Shaftoe gets help from a so-called "pirate queen". In Kerala, I think.
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/11...
The general way that I have understood folks who advocate the programs that are being presented as problematic here is: whether or not there should be room for "maybe", and whether or not one should care about anything else, people inject maybes and do care about gender. That is, the diversity programs and the sense of “I should support this person because she is a woman” is rooted in an observation or impression that being a woman puts you at a disadvantage in one way or another. The bias is already there, and the attempt is at a counterbias.
I think it's very good that this isn't a problem in the author's experience, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem at all. That said, I'm wondering if there can be a better balance between supporting women who are good but aren't judged to be, or feel like they aren't even though they are, and women who are perfectly confident in their abilities and just want to operate like a sexless engineer at work. Certainly I'm hopeful that women don't experience that bias in every organization, and a (hypothetical) organization that's already structured in an unbiased way would perhaps not want to focus on gender.
From a purely practical standpoint, though, it feels like the right question here is, does the approach the author doesn't like reduce the number of women who don't enter or who leave the industry due to bias more than it increases the number of women who leave in frustration from being treated as ‘different’. If the problem these programs are meant to address is ‘many women leave the industry or don't join it because of perceived bias’, then that's the real metric. In a perfect world, nobody cares… But in a world where people are biased against women, perhaps you have to try to adjust explicitly for that in the short term, so that you can get to the goal of a world where nobody cares in the longer run.
fwiw, as an Indian male engineer in US, I initially was very enthusiastically thinking "lets go out of our way to support the pink elephants" and later was surprised when some of my peers (female engineers from India in US or of Indian origin) showed utter disinterest in being part of many of these women centric meetups/conferences.
They were more enthusiastic to go to conferences that successfully enforced a 'No Asshole Rule' on attendees, followed by attending conferences without 'all male' speakers, than conferences of any other type. (I thought the feedback I received was an outlier, but it is good to know I'm not alone).
Hope such articles bring positive changes to improve diversity organically and address the pink elephant syndrome.
This article reminded me of this video "Modern Educayshun" (by an Aussie Comedian of Indian origin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM . Feels like the video makes a similar point.
Not sure where I mentioned that?
I don't see any inconsistencies in his comment. He supports the author's thesis with an anecdote.
But maybe he edited after your comment.
Either way, I’m not a fan of the bro-mentality places(jobs/conferences) and I absolutely love conferences which make it nice for people (of any gender, orientation, race, culture, language) to attend.
I feel some of us men behave that way. :(
link to clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dek5HtNdIHY
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.
That means, between now and then, we're going to hear from plenty of die-hards with opposing views.
En route it will be necessary to remind ourselves of the course we should be plotting, and to continue to respond to opposition.
Articles such as this are part of that journey.
That is exactly what I am trying to do.
In case it came across as such, I didn't intend my comment to be negative or contradictory, but to add to yours.
To have women in tech talking about tech topics instead of what it feels like to be a woman in tech. Although the show is labeled "women in tech", it's simply to raise awareness of this. This is a good way to help our industry.
I have followed the twitter handle. It looks like it is all audio, which I suspect is not very compatible with Hacker News, but I am trying to ask around and get some feedback on that detail.
How are you promoting it? Would it be possible to create transcripts? With transcripts, they could be posted to HN as actually relevant here instead of the angry feminazi crap I so often see posted.
Good on you. Feel free to email me if you want to talk.
Also "pink elephant" is a kind of symbol for delirium tremens, though I don't know how common that is anymore.
What's the evidence for that claim?
It's better in my opinion to be upfront about anecdotal data.
> Intelligence was, and still holds the top spot amongst almost all South Indian families.
She can say that intelligence is highly valued, and she can say that not a single person she knows or grew up with fought the kinds of battles against sexism we're familiar with in the U.S. Likewise, I can say, "I'm familiar with battles against sexism in the U.S.," without needing to cite or defend a single thing.
But the moment either one of us makes a statement to characterize some grouping of people outside of our direct experience, there almost always needs to be more than anecdotal evidence to back it up.
Likewise, me saying, "blank is the single greatest problem facing U.S. corporations today," would need citations-- plus probably an elucidated theory. Otherwise I'm just stating my own personal intuition in language that is unreasonably broad.
clarification: I changed "all" to "some grouping of people outside of our direct experience." I think that's a much more meaningful way to put it, as it doesn't matter whether someone is talking about "all", "almost all", "most", etc.
Wait! Where is this fabled land? I would bow humbly before the philosopher-kings who rule it, grovel at their feet to learn how they so wisely manage mere human weaknesses! Surely there the streets are paved with gold and happiness and good fortune follow all those who fail to foolishly abandon such a blessed land.
Then again it might be just because they think they owe their success to being right about everything, which they are not.