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posted by LaminatorX on Monday April 07 2014, @08:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the Don't-be-a-jerk! dept.

Written in a New York Times article and summarily paraphrased here,

Elissa Shevinsky can pinpoint the moment when she felt that she no longer belonged. She was at a friend's house watching the live stream of the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon, when she saw that it opened with two men who developed an app called Titstare. After some banter, one of Titstare's developers proudly proclaimed, "This is the breast hack ever."

Ms. Shevinsky felt pushed to the edge. Women who enter fields dominated by men often feel this way. "It's a thousand tiny paper cuts," is how Ashe Dryden, a programmer who now consults on increasing diversity in technology, described working in tech. Women in tech like Shevinsky and Dryden advocate working to change the tech culture from inside-out, but other women like Lea Verou write that,

' women-only conferences and hackathons cultivate the notion that women are these weak beings who find their male colleagues too intimidating...As a woman, I find it insulting and patronizing to be viewed that way.'

This all being hot on the heels of engineer Julie Ann Horvath's departure from Github as a result of similar concern.

Any of you care to address your own personal experiences or opinions regarding the subject matter; as well as the accuracy of the articles' stories compared to the industry-at-large?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by lx on Monday April 07 2014, @11:22AM

    by lx (1915) on Monday April 07 2014, @11:22AM (#27389)

    I notice that taking care of the interests of others doesn't figure at all in your list of possibilities. Those are the pursuits of a little boy not those of a grown man.
    Which takes us back to the topic at hand. Women in tech feel excluded and few of us even consider that it might be up to us to make them feel welcome. Not because of human rights or equality laws, but because it is the right thing to do.

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  • (Score: 2) by SGT CAPSLOCK on Monday April 07 2014, @11:36AM

    by SGT CAPSLOCK (118) on Monday April 07 2014, @11:36AM (#27391) Journal

    > I notice that taking care of the interests of others doesn't figure at all in your list of possibilities.

    How did you come to such an opposite conclusion?

    > Those are the pursuits of a little boy not those of a grown man.

    You're wrong. "personality, interests, experience, biology, etc," to quote myself, are odd activities for the, ahh... insult(?) that you're trying to shame them with.

    > Which takes us back to the topic at hand.

    At last!

    > Women in tech feel excluded and few of us even consider that it might be up to us to make them feel welcome.

    Please do!

    > Not because of human rights or equality laws, but because it is the right thing to do.

    Doing the right thing always feels good.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07 2014, @11:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07 2014, @11:43AM (#27397)

    I notice that taking care of the interests of others doesn't figure at all in your list of possibilities.

    Why the hell should it? The only person interested in your interests is you. You take care of them. I'm not interested, and that you think anyone else should be is what is so laughable.

    And nice attempt at shaming language: "the pursuits of a little boy". I'm surprised you didn't include the classic "Man up!".

    If you feel excluded, perhaps it's because you're going around telling coworkers that you think they're acting like children and that their primary purpose in life should be to work tirelessly for whatever YOU are interested in. I'd exclude anyone trying to get me to be their slave, too.

  • (Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Monday April 07 2014, @12:22PM

    by Vanderhoth (61) on Monday April 07 2014, @12:22PM (#27416)

    Women in tech feel excluded and few of us even consider that it might be up to us to make them feel welcome

    Making special allowances for women is sexist, professional women want to be treated like employees and trying exceptionally hard to make them feel welcome is singling them out, breeding disdain from employees who don't receive the same treatment and the opposite of what this article is about and how professionals expect to be treated. It's completely undermining.

    Stop and ask yourself, do we do that for <inverse of group x>? If you aren't then you're singling out group x, which isn't doing any favors for anyone.

    I'm pretty sure the answer here is no, we expect men to get in and do the job they're hired to do without hand holding. Men or women, they're employees, their gender shouldn't factor into it. Gender shouldn't even be a factor with sexual harassment. Men can sexually harass other men, and women other women. If an employee is bringing inappropriate private behavior to the work place then that needs to stop, but this isn't an "us vs. them" situation. Some groups try to make it a men vs. women situation because it's beneficial to them.

    Some of the *WORST* sexual harassment behavior I've seen in my life was when I was visiting my wife at her office, a mostly female work environment, where the mail boy, and he was a boy, was being extremely mistreated by women, most several decades older. I almost called out my wife's manager who was actively participating by smacking the mail boy on the ass. Had this situation been reversed, there would have been a sexual harassment suit and, given the boy's age, probably a lot worse.

    This behavior isn't exclusive to the tech industry and we're all capable of it. We need to stop acting like it's exclusively men and exclusively in IT. I'm not misdirecting, but there's a bigger problem here, some of which is people being too sensitive, some of which is people being overly offensive.

    --
    "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe