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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 Vanderhoth on Monday April 07 2014, @02:58PM

    by Vanderhoth (61) on Monday April 07 2014, @02:58PM (#27537)

    The worst part here was I wasn't offended by her actions, she was offended by me trying to respect her privacy and not stare at her while she sitting directly behind my wife facing me.

    I don't equate whipping out a breast to publicly feed a child to whipping out a penis to publicly urinate. It's a little disconcerting to think the only appropriate place to feed a child in public is while sitting on a toilet in a public restroom. Women should be allowed to nurse in public, but I agree there has to be some compromise here. Either you do it openly and accept some people are going to see and maybe even stare or use a privacy blanket and accept it's your responsibility to protect your own privacy.

    Maybe marriage has jaded me, but I don't even know why breasts are still considered something that need to be covered up. I'm certainly not opposed to women going topless on a hot day (or otherwise), I see men all the time with larger breasts than most of the women I know who go topless and with the internet these days it's not like women's breast aren't already plastered all over the place. Breast just aren't that special, especially when you consider their just sacks of fatty tissue hanging off someones chest. The biggest reason I can see that we, as males, desire to look at them is because we're told we're not suppose to look at them.

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