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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07 2014, @02:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07 2014, @02:54PM (#27531)

    Women can be very dismissive of male interests and passions, labeling them childish, immature and subjecting them to all sorts of ridicule, but the moment a woman has a feeling about something it's to be taken serious.

    If we are to move forward to true equality being especially accomodating to the rabid feminists foaming at the mouth while spewing their hatred of the male gender, while the men have to walk on eggshells around them to not offend them or be percieved as insensitive is not a way forward.

    If we take a hypothetical example, one that will for sure get me rated as a troll, if there were only two different opinions in the world, one being the nazis and the other being that all white people should die and I happened to be a caucasian I'd sure as hell side with the nazis.

    The only way forward is compromise, as long as feminists demand special consideration there will be a huge opposition. Come back with reasonable suggestions for compromise and we can finally move past the sexist mindsets on both sides of the argument.