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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: 2, Insightful) by VitalMoss on Monday April 07 2014, @06:27PM
A Cigar is just a cigar.
It was a joke-A bad joke admittedly-but a joke nonetheless. To try and cry "A thousand papercuts" on something so blatantly stupid is a fault on the woman's fault, not the men who were trying to make a joke. It obviously wasn't real, and I don't see how this alienates women. If a woman made a joke app called "Whack-a-Man" I'm not going to cry foul, nor am I going to hold it against them. If women want into this workplace, they need to be able to assimilate into the environment. If they join a predominantly male team, expect that they will act like guys, whereas a man joining a predominantly female team will have to work with women who will act like women.
(Score: 1) by HiThere on Monday April 07 2014, @07:48PM
The proper quote is "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." (Actually, the proper quote would be in German...or perhaps even Viennese, a distinctly separate dialect.)
But given the context[*] Freud's students properly stared at it, and were properly dubious of his explanation.
So that's an apt example. I'm properly dubious about it just being a joke.
* The context was a lecture on sexual symbolism. Freud had just put down his cigar projecting over the edge of the desk towards the class.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.