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Comment by ericclemmons | Hacker News Reader

It's so bizarre how offended people get (the Facebook commenters in this instance) when scrutinizing the person used in an ad. One in particular argues that the author isn't what female engineers are supposed to look like.

That reminded me of a pair of talented, male twins I've worked with who are attractive and quite slender (compared to the average American).

They get odd comments like "you're too slender, you don't look like a normal person", "you're too attractive/well-dressed to be tech" and other odd observations that sound like compliment, but aren't.

Either way, these are the people that you stay away from, and instead spend time working with people like those described in the author's ad.

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True Story: Once I was with a friend inside the elevator of my apartment building wearing a GitHub shirt. A foreign man asks "Do you work for GitHub?" I replied "No, but I use their product every day." "What do you do?" "I'm a developer" "What?! You're too hot to be an engineer!"

facepalm

As I stated below, woman starts rant, woman ends up saying "how hot I am"

anchalee above is the same anchalee who's blog we're talking about.

geez...and I lost three points on this thread!

Hudson, I wasn't planning on responding to you but I think you could use some honest advice.

I'm sorry for whatever you had to go through in your life to develop such an inflated and hostile perspective, but I think you're completely missing the point here. As for my previous comment -- there's nothing like sexism right at home.

This concept might blow your mind, but if you really knew me as a person you'd understand how FAR from shallow I am. I'm an introvert, I have a small handful of amazing friends and I see them for the human consciousness that I allocate my time to; it has very little to do with physical presence. You could be the most conventionally physically attractive person on the planet but I will not want to waste even a minute in your presence if you don't have a good heart. Physical appearances are relatively ephemeral, people who put too much value on looks are setting themselves up for extreme amounts of disappointment in life.

A wise man once said "There is more to life than being really really ridiculously good looking... and I'm going to find out what that is."

Sorry if I came off as sounding hostile. I'm sure having the experience of so much attention due to a media campaign is a bit disquieting. I think, when you start bring gender issues into it, you open yourself up for a backlash.

Reading through the non-gender issue parts of the post, you sound like a very nice and hardworking person. So I apologize for my knee-jerk reaction to what I saw as typical male bashing and let's drop the issue ;-)

I think, if you think bringing gender issues into it, means that you have to be a part of that backlash, you need to reassess why you feel that way.

Also, anchalee didn't actually bring up the gender issues in the first place. That was started by some idiotic dudes on facebook (which is the whole point of her medium post).

Don't get me wrong (the comment was really rude and insensitive) but I'd like to explore this social context for a second. How would, say, a jockey react to a remark such as "you are too tall to be a jockey". Being tall is usually considered a desirable trait, yet, I can easily imagine a jockey would be upset with such a comment. I know the context is much more complicated when attractiveness of women becomes the topic mostly because of our civilization's poor history of gender inequality, but it would be interesting to explore the borders of this space of offensive social assumptions. I have, myself, heard I'm "too white to be Brazilian" and that left me somewhat confused.

Just ... just, stop. Please. There is absolutely no way that armchair analysis of gender stereotypes in an industry is going to be an insightful discussion, because it's a discussion that really shouldn't even be happening.

You know what I never hear when I go climbing? "Wow, those girls don't look like climbers." I'm helping on the periphery of a project right now to open a small co-op bouldering gym in my town, there's a "core" group of people making it happen, we got together to figure out the building layout and wall design, and half the people there were women. The person negotiating the lease for the commercial space is a woman. Not once have I overheard even a single mention of gender there.

You know what I never hear when I play Ultimate? "Wow, she runs fast for a girl." Again, nobody cares. People show up, they play, they hang out together, they go home.

One of the strongest people doing go (weiqi / badul) lessons online right now is a woman, Haylee. Not a single, "oh, she doesn't look like a go player". Instead, nothing but piles and piles of enthusiasm for every one of her videos. She's becoming a niche celebrity.

The outlier is the software industry. It's full of people that feel they have some kind of special insight into the anthropological origins of gender relations in a technical context, or some such bullshit. This entire thing should be a non-issue. I can't believe an ad for some company is getting this much attention just because one of the ads featured a young woman. It's stupid.

Damn I wish tech would just get over itself and start treating eachother like fellow people.

Is is stupid and that's why I wanted to explore the broader demeaning stereotype issue. By looking at the broader issue, we have the chance to avoid some of our triggers that the gender stereotype in tech sensitizes and have an actual discussion that gives us insights into the specific issues we need to solve, because, stupid as they are, they are real.

> The outlier is the software industry.

You are very badly informed if you think it's just the software industry. I had a brief time at a place with mostly mechanical engineering work and the group of 40'ish people (100% men) were the most misogynistic men I have ever met in my life. Sexism in tech pales in comparison to the daily comments that flew in that office. I am very sure there is much worse sexism going on in other industries besides tech -- why tech gets pretty much all the attention, I'm not sure.

> It's full of people that feel they have some kind of special insight into the anthropological origins of gender relations in a technical context, or some such bullshit.

Actually, the friends I've made in the tech industry are some of the smartest. I actually do happen to think that for some reason system administrators are usually very smart folks (but that's just my observations).

> This entire thing should be a non-issue. I can't believe an ad for some company is getting this much attention just because one of the ads featured a young woman. It's stupid.

It is a non-issue. It's just a few nutcases on Facebook who made those comments. The bigger problem is the opportunistic attempt to make a story out of this. It's an easy sell, so the players involved are really taking it to town.

> You are very badly informed if you think it's just the software industry.

You're right. There was a lot of the same during my stint in electronics QA too. I probably should have said "tech industry" instead, although that's a bit broad and vague. Automotive repair shops tend to have a bit of a problem too.

> Actually, the friends I've made in the tech industry are some of the smartest.

I won't disagree there, but "smart" doesn't really correlate with "depth of knowledge". So, no, they don't really have a special insight, because they lack domain knowledge in fields outside their expertise. It seems to be a problem in tech specifically that, because someone is really good at understanding systems in one particular context, they start to believe that makes them as knowledgeable as the professionals in other contexts.

HN and Reddit both in particular exhibit that sort of behavior a lot.

(I realize the irony in saying that I've got some kind of special insight into the behavior of people on HN and Reddit... I'm stupidly becoming a data point in my own argument.)

> It's just a few nutcases on Facebook

I wish.

"You're too white to be a Brazilian" and "you're too tall to be a jockey," while in poor taste to say, do have explanations behind them. Brazilians are usually descended from black African slaves, native South Americans, Southern Europeans, etc. Many people forget about German and other East/North European ancestries. Jockeys are usually very small, so the horse can carry less weight and run faster.

"You're too attractive to be an engineer" makes no sense at all. It baffles me that you'd try to compare the statements.

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