Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheAdamAndChe | Hacker News Reader

> Are you saying the solution to "hey, women feel isolated in the tech industry" is to say "Well, let's figure out how to include men too"?

No, my solution to a sense of isolation is instead to find ways for women to no longer feel isolated within their field.

A great example with the other sex would be male nurses. Male nurses are definitely the minority in their field, yet they manage to not feel isolated overall. Even if they did, creating a male-nurse-only group wouldn't do a thing to correct the isolation-causing systems in their place of employment, and would only work to further separate male nurses from the majority by isolating them from the wider nursing community.

If women feel isolated, we should try to find out why and correct that instead of just sticking them with other isolated women.

View on HN

"If women feel isolated, we should try to find out why and correct that instead of just sticking them with other isolated women." Certainly you realize they may feel isolated because you are not sticking them with other women?

What is wrong with doing something like this until they generally feel less isolated, then moving on to something else?

IE Why is it unreasonable for this to be a step along the path?

> Certainly you realize they may feel isolated because you are not sticking them with other women?

This is possible. I do not know.

> What is wrong with doing something like this until they generally feel less isolated, then moving on to something else?

What I'm afraid will happen by taking this route(though I do not know that this will happen) is that this will divert energy that would have gone into converting work cultures to improve the interaction between men and women and shift that energy into an external forum that doesn't affect their real employment conditions in the slightest.

I'm also afraid of the optics of a double standard. If women can have women-only groups while men can't socially get away with having men-only groups at the same time that the number of women grows in the field, then that may make seemingly displaced men very angry.

I could be wrong. If you see a reason why this doesn't make sense, please let me know.

The only way you'd be able to say "groups like this won't fix feelings of isolation!" is if you ignored all the women in this comment section saying it has definitely helped their feelings of isolation. Which I guess might be kind of the point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com