
Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk - th0ma5
http://asherwolf.com/dear-hacker-community-we-need-to-talk/101/
======
w1ntermute
The problem with this woman's story is that she takes a few cases of explicit
sexism and extrapolates them as the reason why _everyone_ is saying rude
things to her. Or at least that's how I see it. Perhaps she is just commenting
on the general douchebaggery of the community, but even then much of the
criticism she received could be seen as fair if she was actually in the wrong.

Although sexism is clearly an issue in the hacker community that needs to be
tackled, the story makes me wonder if the author's behavior didn't initiate
some of the vitriol directed at her. There was certainly plenty of it without
any sexist connotations.

She says "I’ve gone from being a Facebook user to running OTR, PGP and Tor all
in under a month." Perhaps she is not as knowledgeable or as experienced as
she thinks she is, and so she is receiving criticism from those who know what
they're saying/doing.

~~~
moomin
Yeah, it's all just a few bad apples, there's no underlying problem. Just like
all the other women with appalling experiences of sexism in the tech
community.

Seriously, if you can't see a fundamental problem, I seriously doubt you're
looking very hard.

<http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/>
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cerian-jenkins/the-tech-
indust...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cerian-jenkins/the-tech-industry-is-
one-_b_1932440.html) <http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/CouchDB_talk>
<http://bitquabit.com/post/seriously/>
[http://farukat.es/journal/2012/10/669-kathy-sierra-primer-
se...](http://farukat.es/journal/2012/10/669-kathy-sierra-primer-sexism-
discussion)

~~~
jlgreco
_"a few bad apples"_

If you are going to use that expression, you should use it in it's entirety. A
few bad apples _spoil the bunch_.

A few sexists are creating a a negative situation that permeates the
community/industry. Not everyone is to blame, not everyone is guilty of this
sexism, but the problem is everybody's.

~~~
Falkvinge
This.

So many upvotes.

------
kabuks
If you are a man reading this, I invite you to:

a. Resist the urge to pick apart the OP's life and criticize how/what she
said.

b. Honestly reflect, without shame or blame, about what you know of sexism.
What do you understand of it? What do you understand it's roots are, and how
it works? What do you think your responsibility is, as a man, and as a member
of this community?

I invite you to do this, because it's a charged topic, but an important one.
See if you can look past the hurt feelings and accusations, and sincerely
reflect on what you can do to understand how sexism works a little better, and
address it.

EDIT: I am by no means an expert on the topic, but I've spent the past few
years earnestly looking at how oppression works and keeping an open mind. I
was truly astounded by the magnitude and difficulty of the problem.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>Honestly reflect, without shame or blame, about what you know of sexism. What
do you understand of it? What do you understand it's roots are, and how it
works? What do you think your responsibility is, as a man, and as a member of
this community?

You know what? I don't think I've ever personally witnessed a woman in tech
being subjected to sexist behavior. And I know exactly why that is. It's
because I so rarely encounter a woman in tech. They're like unicorns. And so
we treat them like unicorns, because we, men, are having a new experience. Lo,
a woman has entered into our mancave, let us attempt to impress her with our
alpha geek abilities. But for them, that must be the experience they have
continuously -- they are perpetually in the presence of a woman because they
are one, so the novelty of that wore off a long time ago and now they're just
constantly surrounded by men who act as though they've spotted a fantastical
creature and are suddenly anxious to capitalize on this rare opportunity to
try to mate with it.

I don't know how to fix that. A woman who knows what data locality
optimization means is _rare_. And it's dangerous to be rare. It's difficult.
You don't have safety in numbers. You don't have the benefit of the experience
of many others like you. You don't have a strong voice because you don't have
a strong population of similarly situated individuals.

So if I had a prescription for fixing it, it would be to make it not rare. We
need a thousand million new women in tech. Easier said than done, right? But
that's what we need. Chicken and egg. We drive all the women out by making
them feel awkward and vulnerable, and then there are not enough women to move
the needle on the treatment of women.

So women in tech… to use a popular phrase, a market segment in serious need of
disruption.

We need to make it cool to be a unicorn. When we encounter such rare creatures
we must make "respect" rather than "capture" to be the default response.

Which I know is hard. It goes against our nature. "New toy" and "human being"
are not equivalent but are far too easily confused, and the fact is, most of
the time we don't even realize we're doing it. And a lot of us are going to
fail a lot of the time, but we still need to try.

And we're still going to fail even when we're trying. Which is why I say to
those women who have bothered to read this far into my nonsense: Don't give
up! Please don't give up. Because we -- men -- need strong female role models.
We need to encounter women we can respect on a regular basis, so that
respecting women is something we have experience doing. We need you to put up
with our shit when we're embodying human imperfection and throw it back at us
when we deserve it, because if you don't, no one does and then it happens
again. We need you to call us out. We need you to not quit in the face of
adversity, because our daughters should not have to go through what you
already have.

Being a rare specimen is hard, but we need you. The future needs this to be
fixed. And if enough of you hang in there when the going gets tough,
eventually it can stop being rare, and stop being hard.

~~~
unreal37
I agree with you completely. It's partly a problem of rarity. It's also partly
that men in tech don't often have well developed social skills (were in the
computer lab all night in college instead of out at the frat parties) and
don't know what's appropriate and what isn't. More women in tech would go a
long way to make it easier to be a woman in tech.

------
venantius
It's so hard to know what to say in response to stuff like this. I want to
believe that there's a consensus amongst the enlightened hacker community that
the type of sexist behavior described is Not Acceptable, but it seems hardly a
week goes by without another major incident in which a long-standing female
contributor is finally pushed out of a project by stuff like this.

I agree with Ms. Wolf that community and convention anti-harassment rules,
policies, and introductions are a good place to start, but I can't help but
wonder what the real answer is. My introduction to this entire world came
through a female hacker, one that I still hold in highest esteem, and I can't
help but feel a sense of immense confusion and sadness that she and all those
beyond the straight/white/male class are still made to feel like outsiders.

~~~
krakensden
Prominent male members of the community burn out all the time (_why, Mark
Pilgrim) too. I think sexism isn't really the culprit, so much as being
exposed to the howling nether of the internet. There are a billion people
online, and some percentage of them are in a shit mood, and the more prominent
you are the more likely it is that someone will try to shit all over you for
no visible reason. If you get famous enough, you'll get it every day.

A lot of the other stuff sounds like the mundane bullshit that happens to
every open project- people promising to build stuff that then don't,
bikeshedding, flakiness, poor communication and clashing goals. The eternal
heartbreak of people preferring talk to action.

This sounds like her first rodeo. It sounds like that made everything worse.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the gender stuff is basically
incidental to the people making her life miserable, even if it feels central
to her. Being internet famous and trying to organize internet volunteers is a
recipe for awfulness.

------
apeace
In one paragraph, the OP implies that some in the hacker community have "no
will to fight harassment, discrimination and douchebaggery"

In the next, she describes "a bunch of privileged white boys" who seem to
anger her.

Why, then, is she surprised to be called a "mommy-type" when others are angry
at her?

My point being, people sometimes use mean words when they are angry. The best
way to "fight harassment, discrimination and douchebaggery" is not to use that
type of language when angry, or at all. The OP should consider her own
message.

------
timmm
They (big bad men) gave you trouble for seemingly valid difference in
opinions, deal with it.

And please don't imply that the HN has any hand in fostering misogyny or
sexism because it's a completely false characterization of the community at
large. In fact if you haven't picked up on it yet we're actually one of the
more "progressive" and or liberal industries.

But that doesn't mean we're going to hold you to any lesser standard or treat
you better because your a girl either.

By the way quitting and blaming others in a rant was probably the wrong
decision on your part.

~~~
lukev
I think you just proved her point - your tone is itself evidence that sexism
is a problem on sites like HN.

By using the phrase "big bad men" you are engaging in precisely the sort of
gender-oriented down-talking that she is complaining about. You are not just
criticizing her, you are implying that she's an emotional woman who can't play
with the big boys.

I don't know anything about the author, but just reading her post and your
response, it is quite obvious that there is a genuine problem here, and that
problem is you and people like you.

~~~
etherael
How can you be so certain that her interpretation, or your interpretation, of
what is happening is actually in line with reality? One cannot simply observe
something and immediately react emotionally and simultaneously imagine that
they've just completely nailed the core of the issue with complete accuracy
and no misunderstanding has taken place whatsoever.

From my subjective perspective for example the OP you're responding to used
the phrase "big bad men" to sum up the article case that the problem is sexism
/ men / external rather than her lack of understanding / expectations of
unearned respect / internal. It's up for argument which one of these positions
is valid, but I just don't grasp how people can immediately jump for the
second one as if it were indisputable truth?

~~~
lukev
Of course we can't know the true motivation of any of the parties involved.

But as big a problem as this has obviously become, I'd rather err on the side
of calling out apparent sexism when I see it rather than giving everyone the
benefit of the doubt and giving sexists the impression that this shit is ok.

And if I'm wrong, oh well. Worst case, some people might stop to think about
the language they use and how it affects others.

~~~
etherael
Worst case; in a field where logic is paramount, emotion trumping it on a
political correctness card starts to creep into the culture, poisoning
everything it touches and slowly bleeding it into just another mostly
political, messy, emotional human endeavour.

Honestly, if that's what it takes for women to feel accepted in this field I
would prefer they were not. I sincerely don't believe that to be the case
though, it's just convenient for sideline histrionics to label their cause
with something more mainstream like gender equality in order to advance their
agenda.

~~~
mr_eel
You're gonna tell me you never got cut up about the way people treated you?
You let cool logic rule you instead?

Bullshit! It's a basic fact that most people don't like being routinely
belittled and side-lined. That's got nowt to do with gender. The difference is
that women suffer it more often and gosh should they have the temerity to
complain, suffer a further avalanche of abuse under the guise of cool, logical
criticism.

"emotion trumping it on a political correctness card"

Political correctness is just short-hand for "don't be racist, don't be
sexist, don't be a prick". Pretty simple.

It's naive to think that politics and emotion can somehow be kept out of any
human endeavour. So, the _logical_ course is to have a open discussion about
how we can maintain respect and encourage all who are interested and able to
contribute. That's what is best for the field.

You've got such an undeveloped idea of gender equality that when someone
directly talks about it, you want to label it 'sideline histronics'.

You, yes YOU, the individual using the handle etherael are part of the
problem.

~~~
etherael
Sure, I've disliked the way people have treated me, on occasion I've disliked
it even when they had a good cause, at the end of the day though the way I was
treated wasn't at issue, the cause was. And yes, I throw away my immediate
emotional response in any situation like that so I can get to the core of the
issue and actually decide if there is valid information to take from the event
rather than simply something to complain about.

And if there never _is_ valid information to take from the event, and it's
truly just an endless tirade of "you're a woman, shouldn't you be in the
kitchen making me a sandwich?" level prattle, that in itself is a person
telling you that they're not worth your time interacting with, which is useful
information of another kind.

> Political correctness is just short-hand for "don't be racist, don't be
> sexist, don't be a prick". Pretty simple.

That's your definition of political correctness, but that sure isn't the
universally agreed and undisputed definition thereof.

But even accepting it, it opens a whole lot of doors; What is it to be racist?
simply acknowledging some statistics that are unfavourable to some ethnicities
is by some definitions racist. What is it to be sexist? Not to swallow
wholesale typical claims of gender discrimination from women's groups with
skewed supporting statistics without looking at the entire picture, or even to
be aware of certain information that skews the debate in the opposite
direction than currently has the mainstream cultural high ground? What is it
to be a prick? To acknowledge realities regardless of the fact that other
people may find them uncomfortable?

All of these things are useful, You can't plan affirmative action programs or
associated actions to address problems with ethnic groups unless you can
quantify what those problems actually are. You can't address the real problems
with gender equality if you simply swallow all the propaganda on one side of
the argument and instantly think you have the whole story. And you can't fix
your own problems if you're unaware of them because noone ever saw fit to tell
you because doing so would make them a prick. That's my fundamental problem
with it, political correctness promotes premeditated ignorance of various
facts which are inconvenient to culture.

A taboo on the objective examination of reality is never a good thing.

> It's naive to think that politics and emotion can somehow be kept out of any
> human endeavour.

I actually agree with this, but I disagree with your prescription, as soon as
you acknowledge the inevitability of it and set up political solutions as a
prescription, you simply hasten the downward slide. If on the other hand you
firmly allocate the entire pursuit into the waste of time category, any kind
of politicking will be out of place, and it won't simply be an endless
argument over which kind is appropriate and which kind is not.

> You've got such an undeveloped idea of gender equality that when someone
> directly talks about it, you want to label it 'sideline histronics'.

I'm not labeling this particular episode sideline histrionics, that's why I
originally laid out the two possibilities. The poster doesn't provide enough
information in my opinion to actually make a judgement as to which of these
cases it actually is.

My statement about sideline histrionics was precisely that it is a tactically
sound move for those that engage in them to attempt to frame them in a more
mainstream way that makes it appear that their personal grievances are a real
and widespread problem that requires addressing by everyone.

> You, yes YOU, the individual using the handle etherael are part of the
> problem.

I think that lumping people like me in with the "get back in the kitchen and
make me a sandwich" crowd is simply allowing them to mask their own sideline
histrionics with something much more rational and you do yourself no favors by
doing so. But if you still see fit to judge me in such a fashion then I'd
simply point out that by doing so, you move yourself out of the set of people
whose opinions I take seriously.

------
jiggy2011
"on-going experiences of misogyny, abuse, threats, put downs, belittlement,
harassment, rape."

This seems a little strong, is there any evidence to suggest that women in a
technical field have a heightened risk of rape vs any other field?

Especially something like lapdancing which seems to have no lack of female
participants.

------
jamestc
I submit that like most socially active voices, her method of appealing to
emotion will win no converts and will probably receive the praise of people
who agreed with her before she made the post.

I sympathize with her in regards to harassment, but I don't think there's
anything wrong with a headless female (or male) body made out of "creeper
cards" (a poorly thought out endeavor since, after all, not one of us is
righteous enough to hand out the cards in the first place).

My advice: nobody likes "we need to talk" conversation. Or, at least nobody on
the opposition does. The art of persuasion is still an art, no matter how
obviously correct you think your side of the argument is. Collect more facts,
provide more details that relate to harassment, edit better, don't preach. The
data and the details will be enough.

~~~
antihero
> like most socially active voices, her method of appealing to emotion

I'm not sure of the validity of this statement - history has been all about
appeals to emotion being more powerful than appeals to reason.

> don't think there's anything wrong with a headless female (or male) body
> made out of "creeper cards"

It's the sentiment - creeper cards are there because of the oppression of
females by lecherous males at these types of events. The fact that someone is
making fun of that it by being mildly perverse is terrible because it's
literally anti-anti-oppression - it's oppressive.

------
tomwalker
" I didn’t create Cryptoparty just so a bunch of privileged white boys
could.."

Why did she drag race into it? Completely unnecessary. She has valid points
without this.

~~~
sedev
Her agenda is about making crypto accessible to lots of people that it's not
currently available to. To those people, hackerdom often looks like an
undifferentiated mass of white dudes. Leaving race out of a discussion like
that is not a neutral thing: omitting race is a statement of its own.

~~~
robryan
This isn't the white males fault though, I am sure all of them would be happy
to see more diversity. The event is open invite though and this is the crowd
that it attracts right now.

------
fsiaf
This article is so big and confusing that I do not understand a thing...
Besides the fact that someone is pissed because of the way they treat her in
the tech community?

~~~
batgaijin
The real problem is that she thought she was an exclusion to RTFM and trusting
some random person to make a website for her. That really stands out to me...
she seems to make such an effort to learn crypto but just writes off reading a
wiki tutorial? I don't buy it.

------
kybernetyk
So she is getting mad because people did things $differently at their own
crypto parties and didn't obey when she told them to do otherwise?

And then all those people who created unofficial IRC channels and didn't add
those to the wiki?

This whole article sounds like an ego-thing rather than gender based
discrimination.

------
46Bit
That's quite the rant. It's a shame that someone's been put off like this, but
it doesn't seem like there's enough in this article to really work out what's
gone on.

Regret that I'm only learning of Cryptoparties now - I quite like the concept.

~~~
Locke1689
I agree; I find the message clear but the story itself very hard to follow.

------
yareally
I've been around the Android modding/hacking community for a couple of years
(I'm an admin at one of the larger ones) and it's quite a bit different than
this to give a different outlook. If you happen to make it known you're female
(through name/avatar/comments/etc), you'll most likely never suffer an ill
comment, no matter how "noobish" you are.

However, if you're a guy and asks something obvious like how to root your
device (because it's a pinned topic in a sub-forum), be prepared to be flamed
by a dozen or so users.

One can draw conclusions from all that, but I don't think it's really
important as the Android community I help to admin does not factor gender when
moderating discussions (though some of the general users might). I'll help a
user regardless of who they are, not because of their chromosomes. I may not
reply to a question or post for help because the information was discussed
many times over and can easily be searched, but I won't flame a user for
asking anyways. However, I will moderate those that do flame them because they
should either ignore them or give a helpful response. I'm a huge believer in
trying to seek out your answers first (if they're easy to find) and sometimes
a user will never do that if you don't let them try on their own before
providing assistance.

Android is kind of different though than many modding/hacking/tinkering
communities. It's far less exclusive and developers inter-mingle with average
users. Many times, it ends with the developer becoming introverted or ignoring
users after a while because of general douchebaggery of the community or users
(the community as a whole, not just the site I admin). Much of that though is
from the developers just being too accommodating
(<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969041>) and letting the users walk
all over them for their generosity.

The community I admin generally tries to prevent user flaming (regardless of
gender) and douchebaggery by users towards developers, but there's always some
that happens anyways and users have to be put back in check. I get annoyed at
some of these users and want to go off on them, but I just ignore them for the
good of the community and be polite or ignore them when possible. A community
is only as good as those that cultivate it.

------
verroq
Is there actually a point in all these because I've read about half way down
and I'm not seeing any substance, and I'm not convinced that there is one. If
anything, her approach to organisation (do whatever you want) is a big red
flag to me that this wasn't going to work well for her/or anyone in fact.

------
c141charlie
>> Women stay the hell away from hacker-spaces, conferences and tech
initiatives because of on-going experiences of misogyny, abuse, threats, put
downs, belittlement, harassment, rape.

To be clear, anyone who has abused, threatened, or raped someone should be
criminally prosecuted. And if you act unprofessionally, you should be
disciplined, fired, removed, etc. It doesn't matter what your race, sex, age,
sexual orientation, or educational background is, there is no excuse for
mistreating or restricting the liberty other another human being.

That said some of this post doesn't fit with what I see historically,
globally, or in my day to day activities.

For example, Ada Lovelace is widely recognized for envisioning the first
computer program. Marisa Mayer is the CEO of Yahoo. Meg Whitman runs HP. I
work on a team of ridiculously talented software engineers, many of whom are
women. Several books I've read to learn how to program were written by women.
There are many women who have been tremendously successful and influential in
tech.

With regard to women's rights and attitudes towards women, we've come a long
way, and undoubtedly have further to go. But I'm optimistic that tremendous
opportunities await women. I'm hopeful that ultimately intelligence,
ingenuity, drive, knowledge, and experience will lift women above the
experiences described in this article.

------
burntsushi
> Inequality doesn’t just spring up without a context.

There's the problem. People aren't equal, and they never will be. So yes,
inequality is fundamental. The sooner you accept that, the better.

~~~
rjknight
This is correct. Everyone is an individual and no two people are, strictly
speaking, equal.

But that doesn't justify all instances of treating people differently. If I
steal from you, you would expect me to receive the same punishment as if you
had stolen from me. We are therefore "equal before the law".

In the case of the law, we ask our legal system to suspend judgment of certain
inequalities and to focus only on the facts of the case. There's no reason why
we should not do this in other matters - if we're judging someone on their
merits as a software developer, we can legitimately consider their unequal
experience, intelligence, skills and abilities, but we should not consider
their age, gender or ethnicity.

Now, you might argue at this point that we wouldn't consider
age/gender/ethnicity _anyway_ , because these have no bearing on software
development. And you would be mostly right to do so - these factors are
genuinely unimportant. But most people are imperfect judges; they use
heuristics and intuition in ways which can sometimes go awry. We might apply
stereotypes, we might allow our judgment of other similar individuals we have
met in the past to cloud our judgment of the person before us now, and so on.

When people talk about equality, they're really asking that we find an
_effective_ way to ensure that we're making our judgments using only the truly
relevant criteria. Past experience suggests that this takes effort and
requires some cultural reinforcement. It's emphatically _not_ about denying
that people are different, but about ensuring that only the most contextually
important differences are considered.

~~~
burntsushi
I don't disagree with you. Actually, you're spot on.

The problem was the phrasing in the OP: "Inequality doesn’t just spring up
without a context." That doesn't jive, because inequality doesn't need some
"context." It's always there.

------
rachelbythebay
>> He sat in on the crowd-sourced process of writing of the application,
contributing nothing except criticism to anything I wrote for hours.

That's the part of this post which really grabbed me. I went through the same
sort of thing in a corporate environment not too long ago. I had suffered
through discovering a massive security hole on an internal system, managing
disclosure to just the right groups, writing the fix myself, and making sure
it was 100% patched in production before talking about it. This went on for
over a month.

When I did finally talk about it on an internal system, someone on the
internal security team spotted it and said I should expand it a bit to add
some recommendations about how others might avoid creating the same sort of
hole in the future. I asked if they had any restrictions on content, length,
or whatever, and they said that I could just keep doing what I had been doing.

I took that as a thumbs-up and started working on my new and improved writeup.
This "version 2" had code snippets showing the actual problem, a walkthrough
of how it happened in the first place, and details about how I managed
reporting and containing it (including escalation to appropriate corporate
security folks). I fired it off and waited.

Instead of a "thanks!" and an appearance in their next issue, someone else
from the security team jumped on it and started raising issues with my prose.
I was either "too chatty" or "too wordy" or similar, and basically, he had his
own ideas for what a post should look like, and I didn't write like him, so he
didn't like it. I told them they could "take it or leave it" as-is, and they
wound up rejecting it.

I turned around and self-published it internally, using the same sort of chat-
type channels my original writeup had used. A bunch of people spotted it and
shared it around, and I got a bunch of comments. These were just ordinary
engineers, not the special "security" ones who had turned me down. Yet, they
managed to focus on the security and technical content of the piece, and
actually found a bug in what I had written! I got some logic inverted
somewhere, and they caught it, so I fixed it. The document improved as a
direct result of sharing it with them.

Meanwhile, the so-called security guy was so fixated on my writing style that
he had apparently failed to look at the actual technical content within.

It's that last point I want to emphasize here: _some_ people get so fixated on
the container that they completely miss the technical content (or ability)
inside. That's just one way sexism rears its ugly head at times in my
experience.

Original post: <http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/11/prose/>

~~~
thaumaturgy
I'm going to piggy-back on your comment here solely because I've appreciated
your comments in the past:

There clearly are talented women in tech (and other fields, I know a pretty
amazing CEO), and clearly this is a problem that a lot of men aren't
"getting", in the sense that either they don't see it as a problem or they
don't know what to do about it.

Do you think there's an opportunity yet for some of the leading women in tech
to start collaborating on projects together, just to see how that goes? i.e.,
conferences where both genders are invited, but the organizers are strictly
(or at least mostly) women. I'm partly curious to see if there would still be
some of the same personality conflicts, but mostly, I'm starting to think that
excluding guys from awesome things might be the best way to change behavior.

~~~
rachelbythebay
I'd like to see it happen but I can't imagine it would be an easy thing to do.
I've seen a small number of people lash out at being "roped into" a group that
was women this or women that. They did _not_ want to be a part of it.

You might think those people who reacted badly would be guys. They were not.
They were women.

I got the impression from one of them that her thought process went something
like this: "I'm currently accepted as 'one of the guys' and as a result I am
successful in this lopsided environment, so how dare you loop me in and remind
them that I'm different?"...

I was surprised by this, but it's real. I saw it happen when someone created a
new group for women engineers of some sort at Google and auto-subscribed a
bunch of people. There was a small but distinct amount of pushback from a few
new members.

So, really, I guess you'd have to find people who don't care if they come off
differently (relative to the overwhelming majority) because they are in fact
different. Then find the members of that set who are willing to take such a
risk, and then the members of _that_ set who have the resources to attempt it.

Unfortunately, this kind of filtering effect doesn't yield a lot of people in
my experience.

------
8ig8
This 'letter' is addressed to the hacker community, but I've seen similar
behaviour at other male-dominated conferences, specifically commercial
construction conferences/seminars.

I'm not trying to get the hacker community off the hook for their behaviour, I
just wonder if the discussion needs to be broadened?

------
krakensden
> Would 10 minutes at the start of a conference explaining anti-discrimination
> policy and acceptable conduct really infringe on anyone’s “fun”?

> It won’t change the culture of asshattery over-night, but it will begin a
> conversation that’s needed – far more necessary than another article or blog
> post like this, or more red-card waving in the wind.

It's an interesting strategy, but I don't have much hope for it. The thing
that makes HR rules effective is that they can forcibly eject people from the
workplace. They also work in a framework of a fairly static population and an
understood hierarchy. A conference is a bunch of strangers together for a
quick day or two. It's hard to police, and hard to trust complaints from
people you don't know about things with no evidence.

------
JacobJans
I think there will be a lot to learn by how people respond to this. (There's
already been quite a few revealing comments.)

------
antihero
It might be nice to sit around on the throne of privilege and gaze over the
people with their problems, seeing simple solutions to all their petty seeming
squabbles, but until you feel the anger, dismay, and emotion that comes of
being on the ground, in the thick of discrimination and oppression, of not
only seeing those problems but having them affect you and those that you love,
you cannot "rationally judge" or "objectively assess" such events, because
true understanding requires not only reason but experience, and emotional
experience is one of those things.

~~~
Chris2048
Surely the term 'objectively' is at odds with requiring 'experience' (which
would be 'subjective')?

------
jjjeffrey
This article is exceptionally difficult to read because of the low contrast
between text and background color and because Firefox won't allow me to
highlight the text for some reason.

~~~
kybernetyk
The highlight color is just a nuance darker than the background - almost not
noticeable.

------
domrdy
I fail to see the connection between her personal incidents
(website/29c3/crypto) and the hacker community as a whole. Title is very
misleading in my opinion.

------
TallboyOne
I feel like I'm missing something.

Edit: I thought this said "Dear Hacker [News] Community"

~~~
timmm
Yeah I'm pretty sure the original title was "Dear HN..."

I could be wrong though.

------
rdl
I wonder if people "in security" are just particularly abrasive assholes, or
if there is just observer bias on my part.

In ~20 years of following this stuff, I've never seen a professional
discipline as petty and mean as security. On the other hand, I've never gotten
as deep into other fields like politics, finance, other parts of computers,
etc. From what I have seen, security is an outlier. Network operators are
slightly abrasive but nothing approaching security. Firearms and tactical
stuff absolutely has the "for guys" thing, but there are women in the
industry, and they tend to be treated fairly well. SANs and storage are
positively polite by comparison to security. etc.

------
michaelkscott
<http://contrastrebellion.com/>

------
ams6110
I recommend counseling. ASAP.

------
zeidrich
To be fair to the author, she doesn't claim that everything is a result of
sexism. The down-right douchebaggery is more apt a description for the
majority of it, but there's no question that sex factors into big parts of it.

There's a lot of egos in these communities, there are a lot of young people
with adolescent hormones and something to prove. The communities themselves
are pretty insular, and distinguish themselves by being exclusive.

Girls are outsiders, for whatever reason. I wont speculate as to how this
started, but it can perpetuate by staying hostile to girls. These communities
strive to maintain some exclusivity; you're something special, better than
others, smarter than others. You can't just let anyone new in, then you won't
be so special.

So in this article, you have a girl (outsider) who is non-technical (going to
get ridiculed whether you're a boy or a girl) trying to exert her will (which
is going to get you into fights regardless).

Sexism is a thing. It's not a good thing. However, I don't think that removing
sexism from this kind of community is a possibility, because sexism isn't the
basic issue here. I think that the basic issue is the general exclusivity of
the community. It's not a group to educate new people. In fact it's a group
that is hostile towards "noobs". It's a group that is trying to restrict
membership to those who are similar, who think similarly, or who can bully
their way to the top.

I think that the better situation is to recognize that this crowd of
douchebaggery does exist. The way you fight it isn't to try and get into it
and start shouting at people to change it. That's at best going to make you
hoarse, and at worst going to make you one of them. I think that to deal with
this is to do the kind of things that the author did.

The wiki creation, the creation of the cryptoparty. These are the things that
should be focused on. This is actually some cool stuff, and the author, a
woman, was instrumental. Now the thing about the idea is it's not something
that is owned by the author, it's just a good idea, and douchebags can make
use of good ideas.

I think the problem was that the author gets herself wrapped up in trying to
control and maintain the purity of her idea and in the end gets drawn into
pissing contests with other people trying to prove something. This is going to
happen whether you're a girl or a guy, however when you're a girl, the guys
have that knife in the wound already and they just need to twist it.

Naw, I think instead the way to do it best is to endeavor to make this
knowledge available to more people. Make it harder to be exclusive. Make it
something that anyone can learn. People can be douchebags when it's them vs.
the world. They can't be when it's just knowledge.

So I guess the question is, are you trying to educate, or are you hoping to
get people to accept you into their exclusive club? If you're trying to do the
former, then I wish you all the luck and support in the world. If it's the
latter, then even if you get your wish, you'll end up treating others how you
hate being treated, whether by race, age, prior knowledge, whatever or else it
will stop being an exclusive club.

I agree that sexism is a problem. But it's a big problem. It's a problem that
demands a lot of attention. You set up, or helped set up, a framework, and
then put yourself under pressure to control how that framework is being used
and abused all over the place; all the while still feeling responsible for
fighting sexism within this framework. I think that's far too much for one
person to handle, and I can promise that if a guy were to try it he wouldn't
have any better success just because the other guys respected his testicles.

Anyways, I commend the author's efforts, and I think the best way to combat
that form of general douchebaggery is to make the thing that they hold above
everyone else available to the mainstream. You don't stop sexism by going to
the men's club and ranting at them to treat women nicely. You stop sexism by
letting women vote, by training them to be doctors and engineers, and
otherwise giving them, (and further, any other excluded parties) access to
those things that were held over their heads before. And it's not a fast
process, it's a very slow and hard one. But don't be discouraged, I think she
did something good. Small, but good.

~~~
mburshteyn
There is a whole lot of derailing going on here.

<http://www.derailingfordummies.com/complete.html>

~~~
roopeshv
i think they should have one more section which says "i have no arguments to
make, so i'll add a link to some blog or website and go around smug in my
intelligence". I think it's a much needed section if you ask me, which should
be at the top of the list

------
mr_eel
First male that says something like 'I've never seen any sexism in the field'
has to leave Earth _forever_.

Of course you haven't my dears, because you don't suffer it, you're blind to
it.

------
aj700
The causes of the problem as I see it.

1\. A female who is a geek doubles her hotness to other geeks. 2\. The guys in
question are in the US, which has a shortage of hot women (which is hotly
debated) and an even bigger shortage of geeks in general, and therefore of
women who are also geeks.

------
kcarruthers
Let the mansplaining commence...

~~~
Chris2048
HN comprises mainly of men doesn't it?

'mansplaining' seems to mean a man explaining something to a woman in a
patronising way.

A man posting on HN will be seen mostly by other men.

I can't see how there will be mansplaining.

------
sublimit
Moral of the story: focus on the damn hacking and stay on your computer, at
least until you've achieved something worth having a conference speech or
"Cryptoparty" about. The thing about the hacker community is that people won't
like you if you draw unwarranted attention to yourself. Hoping that people
would accept her, the author just keeps on hitting herself with "creeper
cards" and social media outbursts that draw more unwarranted attention,
feeding the feedback loop.

Your life will be easier once you realize emotions and human relations only
get in the way, at least when it comes to hacking. If you want acceptance,
invent something good.

~~~
Maxious
> Moral of the story: focus on the damn hacking and stay on your computer

Focus on the damn cooking and stay in the kitchen?

~~~
boboblong
Uh...no?

------
cooldeal
What I learned from the post is the absolute lack of organizational structure
or delegation for "Cryptoparty" with everyone going off to do their own thing.
This is why structure is super important to organizing events.

Coming to sexism, there are a great many sexist events here as well as the
regular "you noob!" moments which seem to have been mistaken as sexist. There
is an extreme amount of manipulation, general douchebaggery, credit stealing,
blame shifting etc. in office politics and not just in IT and all of it
happens to guys too. Hearing only one side of the story from an an obviously
anguished individual also does not help. Alcohol, a thousand guys and six
women don't mix well and alcohol should have been taken off the table.

Having lost my father recently and realizing some truths about life, my
sincere advice for her is to take a step back, turn off Twitter, turn off
comments on her blog, take a deep breath and spend more time with her baby for
a week before coming online again. Wasting sleepless nights on things so
trivial in the long run is not even close to being worth it.

------
mburshteyn
Applies to many of the comments on this thread, so just posting it separately.
TL;DR the language we use to discuss and analyze these kinds of issues is not
neutral.

<http://www.derailingfordummies.com/complete.html>

~~~
jlgreco
Instead of spamming that link, why don't you try leading by example?

 _(Now tell me, which derailment tactic did I just employ? I can't be bothered
to read them all to find out.)_

