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Comment by daleharvey | Hacker News Reader

Your comment is fairly disgusting, it admits that women are ostracized in the industry but then implies its because they ... as a gender ... lack the skill to code.

But the rest of the statement was ironic given recent popular story about the topic - http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/...

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A charitable interpretation of his comment: many women suck, just as many men suck. People who suck are treated as bad programmers. A subset of the women who are treated as bad programmers assume it is due to their gender rather than their poor ability.

An equivalent claim which I made in real life:

Steve, an old school NY boy with a south-asian family: "She dissed me because I'm brown."

Me, another old school NY boy more Italian than anything else: "She dissed you because your a bridge&tunnel boy rather than a wealthy hipster in $200 skinny jeans. She'd have dissed me too."

Notice the question mark after the "lack of skills" - I'm just saying this may be one reason among others. Not everything revolves around gender.

Even accepting it as a questionable hypothesis is ridiculous. Everything does not revolve around gender, which is why a lot of people (not just 'some women') question why this industry revolves entirely around the male gender. Comments like yours help exacerbate that.

Questioning about whether something revolves around gender is kinda making us revolve more around gender.

I don't see guys complaining "why are nurses mostly females? OMG there must be some discrimination going on, let me find a user group on the internets to complain about that". Some professions have more females than males, and some others the opposite. And some workplaces have about an equal ratio. There isn't a great conspiracy at work going on here. It's fairly obvious that since the beginning of computing, most people interested in computers happened to be male, and therefore you end up with an industry mainly composed by male workers. This is going to evolve as there are more and more schools to learn coding/design/etc... than before, and therefore I expect more women to come in that workforce progressively. Whether it's 50/50, no-one knows, but honestly who cares? It's not as if women are prevented from entering or learning. There are very capable women in many IT-related industries (I know many working in video games), and honestly if a woman has the right skills and the right attitude, I don't see why a company would turn them down. But bear in mind that in terms of employment, men and women are not equal (women tend to want to have kids and maternity leave) and that's also something an employer factors in when they recruit people, especially when they are in a very small structure. Just stating the obvious.

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