Comment by drcomputer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drcomputer | Hacker News Reader

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As a female developer / hacker / mathy techy computer science person (for 20 years) who has never been to one; my only impression of them is the commentary I see from people online talking about their controversy. Otherwise, they are like fog to me: I can comment neither positively nor negatively nor even neutrally on whether they genuinely add or detract from my experience or interests.

Lots of people seem to have opinions on these conventions, but to be seriously seriously honest, it is very rare I have been involved in any tech thing where, if you mandated that 90% of the participants must be male, that it would change the demographic. That is a satirical way of demonstrating that most technical, mathematical, engineering, and computer things are male dominated purely by their origin and lineage of development. It's like asking a 14 year old boy to go lingerie shopping. People react because it's not the norm. The reaction is neither good nor bad. I react to people too.

Speaking as a former 14 year old boy who went on all sorts of embarrassing shopping trips with my mother (and sometimes 4 younger sisters), I would say the reactions other people had were the least significant effect. The most significant effect is that as an adult, I'm can walk into the maxi pad section and find the ones that meet the required criteria. If I ever have a daughter I need to take bra shopping, I can handle that. Developing confidence and competence to do those things is way more important than the reactions of other people.

If a female founder conference helps women develop confidence or competence, or helps connect them to customers or investors or future employees, good for them. Those benefits will last a lot longer than whatever silly (over)reactions people have.

Yea. I have managed to develop confidence over the years. Despite the fact that I continue to obsess over hair, perfume, lots of makeup and fancy clothes, every time I go to code or work on something hard, I remember who I am. I'm the kid who spent hours pouring over numerical patterns and graphs after I learned about prime numbers. I'm the kid who grew up playing titles like "the logical zoombinis", " the incredible machine" and "treasure math storm". I had chemistry kits and microscopes, and I hacked my tamagotchis, neopets, and PC games with whatever I could figure out. These are the things that help me, when I stand in front of my wrote board, alone, trying to teach myself category theory while mashing together MVCs and relational databases in order to have a formalized way of reasoning no matter what systems I exist in. I at least have demonstrated to myself so far that set theory is useful for development.

This stuff just makes me feel like I might one day achieve my goal of being 'crazy genius'. I hate when I let culture make me feel like I don't even fit into that group of people, just because I don't look like them.

They have videos of previous such conferences here http://blog.ycombinator.com/female-founders-conference-video.... There was a lot to learn from them. I particularly remember Diane Green's talk about communication.

Lots of high energy stuff going on there.

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