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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: 1) by SuggestiveLanguage on Friday April 11 2014, @12:55PM

    by SuggestiveLanguage (1313) on Friday April 11 2014, @12:55PM (#30004)

    That claim amounts to hand waiving away the central point: There is no correlative, cross-cultural relationship between the intellectual performance of men and women in STEM fields. Now you've shifted the argument to murky goal-post shifting to difficult to pin-down social constructs (which I have to read as difficult of falsify assertions) I will have to bow out of this discussion. Good day sir.

  • (Score: 1) by Serial_Priest on Friday April 11 2014, @07:27PM

    by Serial_Priest (2493) <{accusingangel} {at} {autistici.org}> on Friday April 11 2014, @07:27PM (#30226)

    I don't think we actually disagree. (Reread my comments re: intellectual performance; there is no "waiving" going on.) And yes, "social constructs" like the "sense of belonging" or "comfort" identified in TFA are hard to "falsify" or quantify. That's exactly my point. The article depicts efforts to reconstruct corporate policy on the basis of emotion and psychology. Such efforts are arguably problematic for a variety of reasons. Your comments on graduation statistics, STEM performance, etc. are interesting but have only a tangential relationship to the central problem, which, as I initially noted, are grievance-prone personalities and intolerance of group heterogeneity.