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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 AdamHaun on Tuesday April 08 2014, @05:09AM
I have a hypothesis that a lot of the dysfunction in (computer) geek culture is a leftover reaction to the bullying that many older geeks experienced when they were kids. There's a sort of cultural superiority complex that developed around being better and smarter than "normal" people as a defense mechanism. This was really obvious back in the 90s in the early days of Slashdot et al. The stuff about Morlocks and Eloi in "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" was a great example, along with smaller things like talk about computer geeks "hacking politics". A couple years ago Slashdotters were saying that exposure to the Pirate Bay would be a key factor in bringing down dictatorships. And of course there's the ever-present crowd of libertarian ideologues, convinced that the rest of humanity just can't wait to steal everything they have.
Basically, a lot of geeks think of themselves as put-upon Atlases, heroically defending against the stupidity and shallowness of the common masses. Then someone suggests that they might be contributing to sexism or racism or some other social problem, and they just can't handle it. It's sad.
Adam Haun
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 08 2014, @03:48PM
Or it could be as simple as reading the article, you know...
This is an article about a woman who watched a live stream which featured a pardody of an app regarding boobs, this parody makes this woman fly into an uncontrollable rage on twitter claiming that these guys must hate women. Her businesspartner is then like "uh, I don't think these guys hate women", also on twitter, this makes her so hateful and mad towards him, despite the fact that he has never mistreated her or any other woman at work, that she ragequits the company. This simple disagreement also makes this poor dude lose his other job - something that is completely glossed over in the article, indicating that this was normal or good. He then tries to reason with her to get her to come back to work, but this is a no go... finally she bullies him into making an apology for having the nerve to disagree with her that these guys must really be women haters and forces him into an agreement that in the future she gets to censor his tweets.
Now, this is somehow supposed to be an article about how women are mistreated in IT?
WTF?