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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?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07 2014, @04:27PM
I only give up my seat for my wife or the elderly, usually only hold the door open for my wife or again, elderly, and ONLY bow down to the power that is my wifes sex. She gets special treatment because she is special to me. I don't see the issue here, all I have to do for all other women in the world is not make crude jokes about their bodies in front of them. When I'm with my close friends if someone makes that sort of joke it's because we all know how everyone around us will take it. "Sharing" that kind of thing too loudly is crude and shows no class. So these two idiots got up on stage and did it, and you guys are defending them... why? What if they'd created a where's waldo-types app with a single black person and called it "Where's Blackie?", hey.. just free speech, nothing wrong with it, southern-boys will be southern-boys... uhh, right? No, didn't think so.
Women want to be treated equally, and you say well by making jokes about your tits I'm treating you equally, but that implies that the rest of the time you're making comments about what an attractive package your male co-workers have, and I doubt that to be true. If you do, you are either not ALSO making the tit jokes because your interests lie elsewhere, or you are much closer to that male friend than to the woman you upset. You could probably get away with a couple tit jokes with female friends you were close enough with for them to understand that you see more in them than a pair of tits.