
An Outspoken Voice for Women in Tech, Foiled by His Tone - jdp23
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/technology/personaltech/an-outspoken-voice-for-women-in-tech-foiled-by-his-tone.html
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astazangasta
Foiled by his tone, or his content?

I don't see this as very complicated. Women, just like any aggrieved minority,
don't want to be spoken for, or spoken to. They want to be heard; they want to
speak for themselves.

The goal of engagement is not to get some establishment figure to "parrot some
feminist line", it's to listen to women's voices, for a change. The primary
work of male allies should not be speaking up on behalf of women, it should be
facilitating the voices of women. I.e., mostly, stand aside and listen.

~~~
s_baby
>I don't see this as very complicated. Women, just like any aggrieved
minority, don't want to be spoken for, or spoken to. They want to be heard;
they want to speak for themselves.

Are you a woman?

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A_COMPUTER
Read the Amelia Greenhall post and look at the conversation on Twitter about
this. The entire "conversation" emanating from people critiquing him is a
thermonuclear kafkatrap. None of it is in good faith and much of it is
flagrantly abusive, in particular the accusations that he was sexually
propositioning a woman by suggesting speaking in person.

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mcantelon
Ironically, I'd never heard of Wadhwa until the current campaign accusing him
of hogging the spotlight started.

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raincom
Well, there is a greater issue. Social scientists (or social sciences) have
been reduced to a variant of identity politics: who speaks for which group!!

Instead of this (who speaks for which group), these scientists (after all,
Wadhwa was (is?) a professor of business) should have produced 'knowledge'
about what is going in the tech industry. Here, it requires more than "who
speaks for which group": generating non-ad hoc hypotheses to understand
phenomena, testing such hypotheses for testable consequences.

When one can't produce knowledge, they end up with arguments. On one hand, one
can reasonably argue for any proposition, say P, to an extent. On the other
hand, some others can reasonbly argue for the logical opposite of P too. In
the end, it boils down to who believes P or not-P.

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serve_yay
It's best to just stay away from discussion of this issue IMO. Lots of heat
but very little light.

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JoeAltmaier
Oh for pete's sake. This is why I swore off commenting on this issue on HN.
You can only lose; you certainly can't win. Unless you stick to parroting some
feminist line (and good luck picking WHICH line).

~~~
smacktoward
I don't see how it's that hard to avoid Wadhwa's mistake. Despite what the
article asserts, from what I've seen his problem wasn't so much his tone on
Twitter as it was that he was putting himself forward -- and being booked to
speak at conferences, etc. -- as a spokesperson for women in tech. And the
spokesperson for women in tech _shouldn 't be a man,_ no matter how well-
intentioned he is. It should be a woman. Women are perfectly capable of
speaking for themselves; they don't need a man to do it for them.

If you're a man (like I am!), and you want to help women in tech (like I do!),
and someone approaches you to speak at a conference about that, the thing to
do is to _recommend some awesome women you know_ to speak instead. Instead of
talking about how women need support in this industry, support an _actual
woman_ in the industry.

Otherwise you run the risk of coming off like Wadhwa did. He looked like a
carpetbagger
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpetbagger](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpetbagger))
-- someone who had identified a hot trend and jumped on it to raise his own
personal profile. And if you're a man who sincerely wants to help women, the
way you do that is by helping them raise their own profiles, rather than using
their problems to goose your own.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Yet, that's cutting out half the available supporters of equal rights, isn't
it? Only women may speak about women's issues, seems reasonable. Until you
have something to say, and others aren't saying it. Then what? Do you choose a
puppet to speak for you? Do you keep silent, hoping someone will make your
point for you? What about venues where there ARE no women?

~~~
Lawtonfogle
You also now open a problem where women should not be speaking for men. Do we
really want to enforce such a gendered nature onto our public discourse?

~~~
lkbm
This is specifically public discouse about gender-specific issues.

Maybe it's okay for a man to be the spokesperson for women's issues, or a
white person to be the spokesperson for black issues, but it's important to
realize you're speaking for _someone else_. It's really hard to do that better
than that someone. Maybe I'm a better public speaker. Maybe people are more
likely to listen to me. Maybe I even have a better understanding of power
dynamics and sociology and tech culture. But it's also really, really critical
to have an understanding of the perspectives of those I'm speaking for. That's
hard. And in this situation, seems like a bunch of those people seemed to feel
that wasn't the case.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
If I'm being given information about heart attacks, I'd much rather hear from
a doctor who is well informed on the scientific consensus than a survivor of a
heart attack, even if the doctor has never had a single heart problem. Why is
information about the experiences of gender or race so different than all
other information, being that for any other information, experience is neither
necessary nor sufficient for expertise?

Also, anecdotal experience, even by large numbers of the population, should
not be taken as anything significant without a scientific endeavor to
interpret them. Consider the numerous parents who will state "As a parent..."
when disagreeing with an expert on child development. Even if thousands of
parents disagree, even if the expert has never been a parent, an immunologist
saying children should receive vaccines is still correct.

In all other fields, the expert lacking personal experience has the better
perspective than part of the population impacted with their own personal
anecdotes.

