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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: 1) by HiThere on Monday April 07 2014, @07:40PM
That will *require* unequal policies, because:
1) Men are typically more aggressive than are women.
2) Men are more strongly attracted to women without considering other factors than their degree of sexual display than are women attracted to men on the same basis.[*]
3) Men currently occupy most of the positions of power, and tend to foster compatriots into other positions of power as they become available.
etc. I could continue at length, but the first two are currently the most important, with 3 acting to perpetuate the current situation (beyond that inherent in the first two).
* This is because men are genetically programmed to desire sex with many partners, while women prefer to only have one partner. And I hold this to be true despite the clear evidence that a woman unsatisfied with her current partner will try for an improved replacement.
P.S.: Please note that these are only statistical generalizations, and counter examples can be found to every one of the points. I also left out the degree of pleasure that men get when describing women's sexual characteristics, and the discomfort that this causes typical women (who don't like seeing themselves so depicted). One could consider this a corollary of point 2.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.