Hacker News Reader

Comment by theorique | Hacker News Reader

She nailed it: it's a waste of my time to be invisible to half the people I need to talk to.

The danger with women-only events is that they become perceived as a ghetto. By opening the doors to all, the entire community has a voice, which is as it needs to be if women are to be full, mainstream members of tech communities.

There's a place for "safe spaces" if people are sharing extremely personal stories (e.g. sexual assault, legal issues), but those tend to be done best as small groups anyway - it's a lot harder for a 1000 person auditorium to be a true "safe space".

View on HN

How would you feel about an event with a female only speaker list?

Instinctively, it raises my hackles, because positive discrimination is still discrimination, but I've seen it work really well in stand up comedy.

Women standups only events have a very different feel, but you are also more likely to see women do standup that is normally male territory. So you might see an angry female political shock comic, whereas mainstream female comics tend to do observational humor about life.

I'd suggest that there is value in creating a situation where vacuum causes people to fill roles they normally feel they don't fit the expectation for.

Are they all qualified speakers who are insightful and sharing something I can learn from? In that case, I wouldn't mind one bit.

This reminds me of a joke. HR person comes to the boss and says "I've got two candidates for the job. Joe and Jane."

The boss interrupts the HR person. "You know, I've had it with all this affirmative action and diversity crap. It's a waste of time. Let's just stop all this. I just want to interview the best qualified person."

The HR person says "Ok, boss." The next day Jane shows up for the interview.

So... where's the joke?

The idea that HR could actually pick the most qualified person?

The joke is that, even without affirmative action, the minority person (well in tech, women are a minority) is more qualified. Since it's a joke I won't analyze it except to say it's not very funny.

I'd probably attend, because I tend to be curious about things and I'd want to see how an event with only female speakers operated differently from 'business as usual'.

Stereotypically, females tend to do the front-end, QA, and design aspects (not saying this is always true or that it should be true, just that this is the common stereotype). So I would find it cool to have more women speaking about "hardcore" stuff like language and compiler implementation in C, low-level optimization, and so forth.

If it was coincidence, no problem.

The issue here is that she got some notoriety exploiting the gender issue, and now she's burned out because of the gender issue and she doesn't want that.

Typical case of wanting to have the cake and eating it too.

There's a difference between her goals, and the goals of a women-only tech event.

Her goal is to change society by introducing new ideas about how society works. In order to be most effective in doing this, she wants to talk to as many people as possible. In particular, if she does not go to all-inclusive events, she'll eliminate the very people who are in the best position to do something about it.

Women-only tech events have the goal of encouraging individual women to engage in technology. Their hypothesis is that there is something about society (either at-large, or localized to technology) itself that discourages women from engaging. So, instead of changing society as a whole, they create a new space which operates in a way that they think is more conducive to engaging women in technology.

I think that both approaches are valid and commendable. I think it's a mistake to confuse the two, or to say that having one means the other is not useful.

That's a danger, but it's not a guarantee. And I think you're not seeing some of the benefits of a single-gender event. For example, Mz pointed out one reason you might want a women-only event: a good reason to have some "ladies only" groups is because of the way a lot of women behave around men, not because of the way men behave around women or because "men are all sexist pigs". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5272532

That said, I don't think the article is about intentionally women-only events. I think she was planning to talk to men as well, and the men though she wasn't talking to them.

"it's a lot harder for a 1000 person auditorium to be a true "safe space"."

My limited personal observation at real world events is when you go to a con where they strongly encourage female attendance like the HOPE cons a couple years back (even if just "bring your SO; because its a cheap date") has dramatically better behavior than "if it happens in Vegas it stays in Vegas" class of behavior. I'm sure contrary anecdotes also exist, although probably not many.

Another observation is that brogrammer events aren't really tech events... a different clique of morons doing keg stands doesn't really change anything.

Finally I've noticed that once event attendance exceeds 1/3 or so journalists, it stops being a tech event and turns into the usual journalist boozing and schmoozing and related unsavory activity, but anything negative will of course be blamed on the techs, as if its still a techie event. You get 1/3 journalists, and 2/3 marketing and management drones at an event where they talk about techies but none are actually there, and anything bad will get blamed on the techie culture despite being practically no representation present. It would be very much like if things got out of hand at an SCA event, then blame it all on the historical figure Richard the Lionhearted even if he didn't attend. After all, the problem can't be the people who were actually there; they're the people who are in charge therefore they don't make the mistakes.

I think the more powerful aspect isnt even the gender biases but how she frames her potential future talks as basically "You want to follow me because it makes economic sense."

Arguments about fairness quickly fall apart because (I believe) the vast majority agrees with tenets of fairness, but they don't see how it effects their bottom line.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that there are certain categories of behavior that you would be far less likely to see at an all-female convention than one with men and women. Sexual assault isn't the only thing women worry about— there's a lot more subtle stuff out there that flies right over the head of regular, non-terrible dudes. See some of the stuff Cherie Priest and other ladies in the SF community have posted about lately.

"Become perceived as a ghetto"?

I go to plenty of mainstream tech events. But I also go to a gay geek event every month. Is that "ghettoing"? No. It's a fun night out with people who share both interests and sexual orientation.

I don't see why this is such a big deal.

I don't personally see it as a big deal or a problem.

As a straight guy, I probably wouldn't attend, seeing as it's not intended to be an event for me (although I would if I were invited by a friend).

I was mainly referring to "women only" of conference scale. I'm sure they are useful for networking and comparing notes (e.g. which companies are sexist, which companies promote women into leadership).

But since most of the most distinguished / known people in tech still tend to be male, if women want to reach the top of the profession, they will also need the support and endorsement of men. So female-only events are fine, but they don't boost women's careers all on their own.

Incidentally, we welcome all people to the gay geek events. The original Girl Geek Dinners had a "men can come if they are invited by a female attendee" policy which worked reasonably well in ensuring that it didn't become ghettoised, but that it remained majority women.

Incidentally, the original Girl Geek Dinners in London was created precisely after Sarah Blow, the woman who started it, went to a mainstream geek event and had someone just flat out presume that she was a marketing/PR girl rather than a developer because she was young, blonde and female. The point of them was to have a place to grump and grumble and have a night out where that was pretty much guaranteed not to happen. It was always hoped that it would be in addition to mainstream rather than gender-specific events.

I don't think it's a choice between women going only to women-only events and women avoiding them as "ghettoising". As I said, I go to gay geeks one (or sometimes two) nights a month. There's plenty of other days for other events.

It was always hoped that it would be in addition to mainstream rather than gender-specific events.

That makes sense.

Special events for specific sub-communities is good. And participating in the broader community culture (and criticizing / opposing it when necessary) is also good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com