

How To Exclude Women From Your Technical Community: A Tutorial - Kototama
http://tim.dreamwidth.org/1762846.html

======
IsTom
There's no tutorial in there. That's a whole post about one sentence said once
on one symposium streched onto an "universal lession" how it was sexist.

I'm not saying that there are many people who are jerks to women (and jerks in
general) in the community, but this example is just not really a good one, nor
is this post really insightful. There are plenty posts like that.

~~~
pmr_
The article wasn't even explain why the sentence-fragment was sexist. And I
don't see how it was. Yes, meetings would be more attractive if there
attendants were more evenly distributed across the spectrum of the human
population.

Otherwise some of the advice was really good for most kinds of confrontations.

~~~
greenrd
There was some good discussion about it on Reddit, and Twitter. I recommend
checking out the reddit thread to better understand this point of view.

However, even though reading this stuff made me think the blogger is probably
right - it's a little off-putting that he doesn't seem to think his speech
code should apply to him:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/eassumption/status/24663647380006...](https://mobile.twitter.com/eassumption/status/246636473800069120)

Makes you question the whole credibility of the radical feminist ethic, if
they can't even follow their own rules. Or as I like to think of it after
seeing that tweet, the "radical feminist reality distortion field".

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quesera
I had to look up "cissexual".

Here ya go: "In gender studies, cisgender and cissexual gender identities are
two related types of gender identity where an individual's self-perception and
presentation of their gender matches the behaviors and roles considered
appropriate for one's sex." "Antonyms: transgender, transsexual."

There's something satisfying about the fact that, despite four years of Latin
and possession of all the other tools I needed to get there on my own, the
field of Gender Studies caught me off my game with a word that means "normal".

"Normal" is a perfectly good word. I don't advocate the _being_ of it, but I'm
not afraid to _say_ it...

And somehow I'm sure this makes me an awful person.

~~~
ams6110
The author is clearly not "normal" him/herself, so it's not surprising that
he/she might have a problem using the word.

Not that there's anything wrong with not being normal, but this person seems
to be rather obsessed with gender issues and sexism.

~~~
quesera
Right. The error is in conflating "normal" with "good", or "proper".

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, sometimes there's no such thing.

In fairness, if you spend a lot of time thinking about these sorts of things,
you do need a specific word for "normal in exactly the way I mean", and "non-
transsexual" is a piece of work.

I was just having fun, and I know that's not really allowed.

------
ranman
So let me get this straight... If you say that women are attractive then the
only possible reason you could be doing that is because you're secretly
insulting their intelligence?

Insecure much? Why is this nonsense on HN.

~~~
roguecoder
"We need more Macs in this room; it'll pretty it right up" certainly implies
that we _don't_ need Macs because they are good machines. It's not "secretly
insulting their intelligence", it is explicitly and overtly discounting the
professional capabilities of the people he supposedly wanted to recruit.

You seem to be being purposefully obtus to me. If it weren't a sexist joke
people wouldn't have laughed at it.

------
redfred
You make it seem like he was completely serious when it appears from the video
that he was making a joke. I understand the joke would probably put off women
from their conference, but what he said after that is the woman in his classes
have liked using Haskell so more woman should be encouraged to try Haskell
because they will likely do well. I think you are overstating the sexist
nature of his comment.

------
ktizo
This line from the article is brilliant -

 _Everyone who's ever written code knows that the compiler doesn't care about
your intent; extend that to your interactions with other people, and you might
find yourself behaving more fairly._

~~~
ams6110
Perhaps, but "other people" are not compilers. Having real interactions with
them requires a lot of nonverbal communication and interpretation of intent.

~~~
natep
The point was not that intent doesn't matter. The point was that intent is
_not enough_ when your language (verbal and physical) do not properly convey
it.

