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Comment by laureny | Hacker News Reader

> I want to convince you that you can program, that you can do math, that you can design car suspensions and fire suppression systems and spacecraft control software and distributed databases,

I know you are trying to help but you need to realize that the whole section, and this part in particular, is incredibly condescending and guaranteed to piss off any female who might be reading you.

You want to help achieve gender equality in the technical field?

Pretend that the gender of your reader is of no consequence and just write your stuff, period.

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It's just a small motivational line with no agenda behind it. You have to pick your words perfectly on the internet because everyone is gonna feel compelled to have an opinion about it.

> It's just a small motivational line with no agenda behind it.

Just because you don't see the agenda doesn't mean it's not there. How do you explain that half of the comments in this thread are not about the content of the article but about the mysogyny of its author?

One might argue that the author hasn't done an effective job of welcoming women to coding. One might even argue that the author has misguidedly had the opposite impact than he intended. But claiming that the author is misogynistic seems way overboard to me.

And the fact that people are commenting on the author's agenda could be evidence that people are defensive or in denial that they are part of a system that is biased against women as much as it is evidence that the author maybe hasn't done the best job of combating that problem.

Oh, please. All writing is inherently motivational. Dispassionate writing on the web isn't very inspirational. Write passionately about anything and you'll be bound to piss off some group or constituency. This walking-on-eggshells, I-can't-write-a-line-until-it's-group-vetted stuff kills creativity and makes everything it touches stale.

Please apologize for insinuating the author is a mysogynist. I see no other comments that come even close to implying that.

I do not see how anyone could possibly believe the author is exhibiting misogyny. Perhaps you are confused by the meaning of the word:

Misogyny /mɪˈsɒdʒɪni/ is the hatred or dislike of women or girls.

Or, as the person you replied to said, you just don't have to say any of it. The article was a great technical tutorial combined with a unnecessary political screed.

This reminds me of a comment Morgan Freeman made when an interviewer asked why he wasn't celebrating black history month. Paraphrasing from memory:

Interviewer: So how do you think race should be addressed?

Freeman: Just stop talking about it! I'm not a black man, and you're not a white man.

I agree that the part you quoted could come off condescending, but I disagree with your prescription. We have plenty of resources for learning how to code that make no gender assumptions, and yet we still have a glaring disparity. I see little reason to believe that your suggested solution of writing dispassionately about coding while avoiding elephant in the room of the gender disparity, in a piece meant to address that, is the proper remedy.

Agreed, it struck me as unique that the author says anything about women. I have seen dozens (if not hundreds) of programming tutorials and that was the first one that said anything about genders. The problem is somewhere else.

Avoiding talking about gender in tutorials is not a prescription for fixing the gender gap in tech, it's a way to not make it worse. The fix, IMO, has to happen on a personal level, encouraging individuals of all stripes to try programming or other tech fields, and calling out those who make it harder.

Chillax, man!!

  Pretend that the gender of your reader is of no consequence 
  and just write your stuff, period.

Are you having your period?

Stop clogging this post with your feminist angst. Learn some fucking Clojure or STFU.

Dude you're an idiot. Go fuck yourself. Really.

A lot of this discussion on gender seems extraneous. Learning Clojure is a simple 2-step process

  * stfu
  * learn Clojure

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