Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

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nonrandomstring

> This wasn't because they had low opinion of women in tech. It's because some other speakers refused to attend if there weren't a specific percentage of women speakers

You raise a good, fair objection.

Maybe I shouldn't have said "low opinion". I don't know these chaps and what their opinion is.

"Quotas" and suchlike certainly do those of us that advocate for diversity - but confront reality - a great disservice.

> Still scummy to fake women speakers, but the motivation was not simply a low opinion of women.

What I think happened (and maybe watch our video, please because Mercy and Helen say things a little bit different - and why pay attention to my words, written by a man, when you can see and hear what the women actually have to say):

> but the organizers couldn't find enough to meet that quota.

Where I disagree is over "the organisers couldn't find enough". No way, they could have "found enough". There's no shortage of smart, confident women who have plenty to say about working in digital tech. I've been in that situation myself as a conference organiser and had to work extra hard to convince them that they would be taken seriously and given equal voice - and could say what they want.

I strongly suspect what these organisers couldn't find were women who would say the things they wanted.

> Where I disagree is over "the organisers couldn't find enough". No way, they could have "found enough".

It depends at lot on what the definition of "inclusive" Hanselman and other speakers were using. There are indeed situations where people are expected to have female participation that's well above their rate of participation.

This tracks well with what women in tech have told me: they're constantly bombarded with requests for them to speak. But they're quite reluctant because they feel (often correctly) that they're primarily being invited on account of inclusivity quotas like Hanselman's.

Sounds like a chicken and egg problem: those women don't want to speak because of the quotas, but the quotas exist because not enough women speak at those conferences.

> I strongly suspect what these organisers couldn't find were women who would say the things they wanted.

Agreed. Plus you don't have to pay sockpuppets.

He was making them "cancel" their talk, but he had then met the "women quota" so all good.

Honestly it's the affirmative action culture that led to this.

People will take advantage of things like that.

Like a man that gets last in weight lifting amongst their male peers, "transitions", then blows out the #1 spot amongst women.

"yes i turned my life upside down, opened myself up to discrimination, and took a cocktail of drugs that will actively make me dysphoric and also cause my muscles to atrophy, just so i can beat women in sport, despite the fact that the hormones i have been on for the last year have actually normalised my performance with women"

do people seriously think people transition to win at sports?

Sweet summer child. See Laurel Hubbard...

But yes, it's an incredibly petty thing to do, hard to imagine, similar to creating fake women speakers.

And no, hormone therapy does not "normalize" you with women.

Your bone structure and many other factors are at play.

Hormone therapy doesn't magically reverse these things.

You can literally look at the guy and see the difference between the women he's taking advantage of.

a trans woman who had been on HRT for 5 years managed to qualify for and come second in an event, and later won some others, yes that is most certainly evidence that she had an unfair advantage /s

she was also in the ballpark with the other competitors, not the sort of far and away difference that you make it out to be.

Not true, look at this graph comparing Hubbard's lifts at the World Masters to male and female competitors: https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/JrzQoA6fWKtYdm8auCMj6RKil0Y...

He sits squarely within the male range and is a huge outlier from the women competitors.

Doesn't matter what the original motivation is. Women's sports are not a venue for making males feel better about themselves, they're to celebrate female excellence and female competition.

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