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Comment by dandrews | Hacker News Reader

Problem is, Crake, we're doing something wrong. Three years I went to Conj, and the first year there were -zero- women attendees out of 300. Second year it was -three- attendees out of 300. Third year it was eight or nine. I don't know what Lynn and company managed to attract last year.

The people attending Conj are bright, well-spoken, polite. I didn't meet a jerk in three years, a crowd I was proud to be seen with. But WHERE WERE THE WOMEN? What is going on here?

We must do something. I don't know what. I'll agree with you that exclusionary events are counterproductive, but I can't see the harm in recognizing successful women who can show us how it's done.

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Women have more attractive career alternatives. That's why they don't choose CS. I love CS, but it involves sitting in front of a computer a lot. That isn't healthy. Doing something with more people interaction is way healthier - and those are the jobs women tend to choose.

My take has always been that women are simply too smart to enter IT.

> Problem is, Crake, we're doing something wrong.

And perhaps the support of segregationist policies is the thing we're doing wrong.

Enabling people in a minority group to associate with one another while still not excluding them from anything is not segregationist; it's just considerate.

However, you have a very testable hypothesis here with the idea that these policies are the source of the inequality. And much like "Wet ground makes it rain," the hypothesis is easily disproven by considering the order that the correlated things happened in. The ground gets wet after it rains, and these events started being organized in response to the conditions you're suggesting they may have caused.

> and these events started being organized in response to the conditions you're suggesting they may have caused.

I assume that by "these events" you mean events targeted towards women. I never claimed anything about what events targeted towards women cause. I only mentioned events which support segregation, of which these events are a subset.

Okay.

Let's hear your proposal for addressing the already segregationist technology industry.

Let's hear your proposal for elevating female/non-white founder percentages out of the single digits.

What've you got?

what do you mean already segregationalist? People were hired for their skills. Now they want to hire for gender. We got segregationalist now.

something needs doing

I'm doing something

something has been done.

full disclosure: I have no skin in this game, nor opinions. Just making an observation.

> Let's hear your proposal for addressing the already segregationist technology industry.

Stop supporting segregationist policies.

Isn't a conference for just Pythonistas considered segregation?

Definition of segregation for your convenience:

the action or state of setting someone or something apart from other people or things or being set apart

Indeed, a broad definition of the word would include this. I meant to imply that I was talking about segregation of groups which are often considered in genuine social conflict with one another, like gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, rich/poor, etc. Sure, there are "holy wars" between groups like Pythonistas and Rubyists, but I think most people agree that this doesn't reflect genuine social struggle.

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