Carried forward, in a court-like environment, or throwing salvos over PR mediums?
I take it as a bad smell someone goes the PR route over a lawyer (perhaps a confidential legal threat?) to discuss things privately and settle thing amicably.
Depends on what the aim is. There are some considerations here:
1. People tend to view going for the lawyers as going for the 'big guns,' and can be reluctant to do so.
2. Companies can become less cooperative very quickly once it's a matter being decided by lawyers and/or in a court.
3. She may not have consulted a lawyer because she doesn't think that anything which transpired qualifies as 'illegal,' rather than unprofessional, rude, mean, etc.
From the story presented to us, it sounds like she wants to leverage bad PR to get Github's HR / board to hold the people she views as having wronged her accountable.
After reading the article I assumed that she didn't go to a lawyer because she believed there was nothing there that would merit a lawsuit. The fact that she didn't mention what her initial grievance was, leads me to believe it wasn't such a big deal as to rise to the level of a lawsuit.
Or possibly she just believes that going public like this is the best way to bring about change.
> We are awaiting comment from GitHub regarding these allegations, and GitHub says it is looking into it.
> We are waiting for comment from GitHub about these allegations.
> GitHub says it is investigating the matter: “We’re looking into this.”
This post might be entirely true, but for now it is an expanded personal blog post posing as news. I will hold judgement on both parties until there is evidence, but I doubt most readers skimming headlines will.
It is unfortunate this was posted before TechCrunch or any other "news" site got corroboration from other parties or evidence of any of it. The post offers no evidence outside what was created by Ms. Horvath herself.
In USA, we have a special sub-type of "office lady", which is the "marketer / enthusiast" twitter troll.
The issue is, in other countries, office ladies are happy to just dress professionally and do their clerical work.
In USA, we have self-esteem bubbles, an education system, a political culture that create a factory of women like this. Basically, office ladies who act like bulls, get enabled by nice-meaning people, then bite off more than they can chew.
Also in USA, understand that our english isn't to be taken literally; it infers complicated politically-charged emotions. Americans react very harshly and nit-pick blunt truths, our public discourse is not one of reflection, clarification or debate, but projecting emotion at an idea we don't feel reaffirms our view of the world.
These people are a tiny sliver of our society, but since we in USA are good people, we tend to give them benefit of the doubt. Because of the abuse by this type of women in the workplace, some Americans are associating women in distress with people like this. The boy who cried wolf.
People like this can really hurt things for actual victims of discrimination who do their job.
I don't understand what this has to do with "office ladies" specifically.
You could make similar claims about any cult personality. Anyone in a typical low-to-mid-level corporate job who has more social capital in the external world (twitter, etc.) than social capital inside the company.
The results are predictable. A marketer / evangelist on twitter that survives off validation exploits a loophole in USA's charitable, politically correct culture. She bites more than she can chew, she is copying what she sees in popular culture of an Erin Brokovich fighting her enemies.
She simply is mentally unable to admit personal fault. Why? Social media encouragement and well-meaning enablers.
The secret.ly screenshot says how she can't handle professional criticism - behaviorally reinforced by culture, twitter and social networking sites "+1" and "retweet" is more important that doing what her manager and the house wants her to do.
I don't know why anyone takes the bait with your comments. You're an anonymous single-issue throwaway account; there are no comments in your whole history that aren't you taking a valiant stand against the evil forces of feminism.
Imagine if someone shared an opinion in support of feminism, and you, having read something you disagree with, proceeded to read their entire comment history and then comment upon it. That's a very, very common tactic against the very people you're supporting, so I'd caution against venturing down this path. Everybody loses.
If you disagree, form some substance. If you want to attack the messenger, hold your tongue. You're not helping regardless of which side you stand on and no matter how obviously that account is perceived by you to be a troll.
Single issue commenters are rather rare on hacker news. When that single issue is non technical, they're far outside the norm. It's relevant for me to know if a commenter here is not a regular user.
I don't think this is a feminist/anti-feminist issue in this case. I'd want to know either way.
I have no idea what you're trying to tell me here. The person we're talking about is a troll. That's useful information, regardless of whether it bothers you.
Yeah, because saying "be careful disagreeing in that manner because people use that tactic against feminists all the time" is totally sticking up for the comment in question. I'm on board with that logic, 100%. All the way. Because it totally makes sense.
Normally I'd ignore it but you're trying to be an ally. Except, you're using one of the top tricks in the book that is used against your very allies to silence them, in order to silence a troll account that you disagree with. Pot, kettle, and so forth.
I am not trying to be an ally. These HN threads are beyond rescuing. My problem is that HN's immune system doesn't appear to recognize commenters like the one above for what they are. It's the immune system that needs to improve, not the logic on these gangrenous threads.
The thing that surprises me is you're a CEO of security company - you don't even go into the subject of my thread. This doesn't befit you.
It's true, in USA, we respond to things emotionally, even the best of us sometimes.
Imagine, if you as a CEO of a security company acts like this, imagine what a marketer with no talent or skill does when she doesn't get what she wants? She can't lean on ability... nor reason, She leans on the, you've guessed it, the crowd.
I bet you, 9/10 times, you have better things to do than pick a fight or be on twitter because you have skills. Even if people hate you, you still can be a productive member of society. Other people only have a self-esteem boost of retweets to rely on, and they misinterpret that as career value.
Does she need to be an engineer or a "good engineer" to have a non-hostile workplace?
Considering that GitHub appears to have hired her partially for the purpose of bettering the culture, your point about "feminist agendas" also falls short.
I'll wait for real facts before coming to any conclusions, but immediately rejecting her statements like you're doing is not constructive for anyone.
'prominent engineer' makes it sound like the prominence is due to being well-respected for skill in engineering, when it's apparently not. This is what ehutch79 is saying.
As an example, my primary role in my company is administration of systems. I very rarely take out the trash, and sometimes refill the toilet rolls if they're low. It would be misleading to refer to me as a janitor, prominent or otherwise.
Edit: I say 'apparently not' because she may be an awesome engineer, but her code is in private repos.
Going into a workplace with the idea that everyone should be treated fairly and equally is a distraction and a problem waiting to happen? "Feminism" isn't "women better, dudes worse."
(And the always popular implication that people who aren't engineers don't matter...)
Tumblr isn't representative of feminism or humankind for that matter. And a collage of Tumblr posts cherry-picked for their awfulness isn't even representative of Tumblr itself.
The "I was born a woman but I really am a chinchilla inside" variety of Tumblr users in perpetual Poe's law mode aren't the average feminist, but the Twitter feminist circles I've seen (I don't know if Julie is really a part of them — I recall seeing her name often, but I don't know much about her) are, honestly, more articulate and powerful versions of some SJ Tumblr circles. They don't rise up for the same reasons the more unhinged[0] Tumblr posters do, but they have some pressure power that's used unwisely like in the dongle/fork situation last year.
[0] Both many prominent Twitter Feminists and Tumblr SJWs cling to the idea that if you're privileged, you can't criticize the oppressed (even if you're not directly oppressing the oppressed in question), so if you're misunderstood as doing something that opresses the oppressed they can start a campaign against you so you lose your job, etc, but you can't answer in the same tone. This is to say, I'm being a jerk for using the word "unhinged" when I don't have any apparent mental disorders.
How about university courses about feminism, taught by self-proclaimed feminists? I've been dropped from such a course against my will for no other reason than being male IMO, after two days of class, having said nothing (like everybody else). "Too many people in the class", the only two dropped were the two males of which I was one. I don't think it's a stretch either to say that a great deal of feminist writing reeks of misandry.
The last women's studies course I took in college had the professor actively thanking the men in the class for their contribution to the discussion.
Some people are Assholes. Feminists are people. Ergo, some Feminists are Assholes. It doesn't say anything more about feminism than it does people in the checkout line at the grocery store.
I think we can expect more from full professors than people in the checkout line. It's hard to imagine any professor in any other discipline not being fired for that.
Tumblr feminism is actually an even extremer extension of postmodern feminism, which is the mainstream ideology nowadays, promoted by journals such as Jezebel and Feministing.
The vast majority of tech industry feminists are postmodernists.
When no one does anything to counter them, or to make it clear they don't speak for the social group, it does actually define said group.
There's a lot more to this phenomenon than you could get into on hacker news, but it goes something like "if you don't agree with everything i say exactly, you're clearly the enemy"
Sigh... No it's not, it is just comparing apples to oranges. If you cite the 20% number I know you have no interest in understanding the issue, because that number is a comparison across all jobs, and it ignores education, part time, everything. You don't have women and men working in the same company with 20% difference in wages (at least not significantly many - of course such things happen, but also with men vs men).
The 20% number definitely is not from the tech industry either.
So you have women picking different jobs. You have different incentives and preferences (motherhood is the big one here), different preferred industry (like media vs mining or whatever).
You also have women getting half of the income of their husbands, having the option to drop out of unpleasant jobs, not being under the same pressure to feed their family, and so on.
There are many many aspects to this. So far I haven't seen anything that convinces me women are being treated unfairly.
There are issues, but only if you consider staying at home with kids degrading. For example I suppose the incentive to get a good education is less if you know you will miss out several years where you could earn back the money invested. I don't think "unfair" is the right way to characterize that issue, though.
> the always popular implication that people who aren't engineers don't matter
There is also the popular implication when there is a girl on twitter starting trouble again, they're not coding and trying to claim some form of discrimination, instead of developing programming skill.
You can't--and obviously I mean in the "if you're a basically functioning, mostly vertebrate human being it's morally repugnant" sense of "can't", not the physical, over-literal sense that I feel like you're going to use--blame shitty workplace behaviors (and this isn't the first I've heard of GitHub having problems) on people not knowing how to code. I mean, what kind of world do you want to live in where you can excuse mistreating people because they don't "develop programming skill"?
Actually, don't answer that. I don't want to know what kind of world you want to live in.
But that's an unfair implication, not one you should be looking to imitate.
Edit: I see from your profile that you're an undergrad. Hopefully you'll grow out of the attitude that only super-coders are valuable to a project, like I did.
Julie has contributed to one of my projects, but due to my own fuckup, the code has not yet made it into master, and so doesn't appear on that graph: https://github.com/resque/resque.github.com/pull/3
It's an incredibly valuable contribution that I thanked her for and apologized for not yet merging in person.
The article calls her an engineer, she describes herself as a designer and front-end developer. And just because someone doesn't have many publicly available repositories doesn't mean they don't contribute to private repositories. This isn't even the controversy, what she does for a living is of little consequence, it's the alleged harassment that's up for discussion – we shouldn't be judging how good she is at programming.
I downvoted you for the "marketer/enthusiast" comment. I think that was out of line. Deciding whether she's an engineer or a marketer is not up to you, it's between her and Github.
That said, feminism describes lots of different things, and I think she was addressing a broad group with that first statement. The sooner you realize that not all feminists have the same agenda, the easier it will be for you to understand what's going on.
"Prominent GitHub Employee Quits, Alleging Gender-Based Harassment" ...there fixed, now is it relevant ? Let's just add the title to all the other shoddy inaccuracies in the article. So, now do you agree ??
>> What job she did there has no relevance to whether or not harassment is worth investigating.
You're right, but as a writer, if you mess up something so simple as somebodies job title, then your integrity takes a hit. I want a solid piece, that includes getting minutia like this right.
Relevant to the article title but not that actual issue. How she was treated is not made better or worse depending on whether or not she's an engineer.
Splitting hairs about her position distracts from the actual issue at hand.
Yes. But it also addresses the quality of the journalism, which in this case is disgustingly poor. The link to random open source repos hosted on github, the inability to nail down a title... just poor journalism.
If the author couldn't make this distinction, I wonder what else they missed? Integrity is required all across the board, and it reflects poorly on you as a writer if you mess up something so central and easy in the title of your article.
I think rds2000's comment about her not being an engineer was responding to the origin article referring to nrrdcore as variously, "prominent github engineer" and "influential engineer".
>Does anyone here have proof of gender discrimination or she was a good engineer?
Her skills and/or experience as a software developer have absolutely nothing to do with this. Someone's performance on a job is completely irrelevant when it comes to harassment or intimidation in the workplace.
You are part of the problem with sexism that exists in software development teams.
indeed it has nothing to do with gender: the article quotes hint that she was performing poorly and thus raged against people - used any kind of things available to her to circunvent the performance issue - including saying shes being harrassed or told she perform poorly because shes a women - even thus they seem to imply it has not been the case.
see the problem?
the only gender based issue is calling her queen.
i think people like you are the problem with toxic workplaces in general l you're blindly transforming arguments into whatever serves your cause - even when unjustified.
If she feels like people are treating her as if she's not good at her job because she's a woman when the reality is that she's just not good at her job, then yes, that is relevant. Not every time a woman gets passed over for a promotion is sexism, and all we've heard is one, obviously biased, detail-free version of the "story."
Ditto. I had private repos on github, even, but moved to bitbucket because their pricing model made more sense to me. My bitbucket account looks equally empty to anyone that isn't logged in as me. That's excluding the dummy github and bitbucket accounts I have, just like the dummy irc and email and twitter and more accounts I have because some people are assholes and my real name (Jane) is so very obviously feminine. Oh, I can't forget to include HN in there too - I picked a very gender ambiguous username all those years ago for a reason.
Not to mention I can't actually share the code to a lot if not all of the work that I do, and I'm too busy elsewhere (a restaurant...) or dealing with impostor syndrome to share anything else most days. Hell, sometimes I have a hard time just opening my mouth to talk to other people because of impostor syndrome. But I code for a living, and I thought that was enough to call myself a coder.
But according to some people, including people I used to consider friends and allies of my very laid back feminism, nothing is ever fucking good enough for them so I don't really know what I am in the end. Amateur hour involving a part time restaurant owner that is clearly a fake coder and couldn't possibly have majored in CS in college because she has big boobs and she has other hobbies that aren't staring at the computer for the entire day? Gasp. I really have no fucking clue, why don't you tell me what I am? :|
So a person has to have lots of open source code available to prove that they are good engineer? Maybe, just maybe, they were too busy earning money and the code they wrote, however brilliant, was commercial?
The ultimate sign of a piece of shit with no social comprehension is a programmer who uses the not equal relational operator in conversation. Human lives are not as simple as the PHP you write at your day job, dude.
Then you turn it into some sort of fucked up meritocracy thing. She wrote No Code therefore her opinions are invalid! I've got more bitcoins than her too!!
> The quality of open-source typography has massively increased in just the past few years, and it's great to see Intel making its own contribution. The number of free options we have today for well-balanced, full, multi-weight type families (not just "fonts") would have seemed impossible just four years ago.
What are some examples of the recent ones? (links are preferred, please).
I think sometimes something as petty as wanting an ego-trip motivates this post, more so than really caring about disadvantaged people.
I feel everyone gets a temporary jolt of validation from being voted up. However, it should be in exchanged for adding value (being insightful, interesting, useful, funny).
Why would he. Android is a consumer operating system that has many differences from linux on the server or desktop. Namely, it conceals the inner workings.
Forcing people to use Linux sounds antagonizing and like it'd hurt the reputation of Linux. The same way feminists / marketers think they should be CTO's and top developers with nothing but twitter followers - and how it could potentially hurt females who no axe to grind who actually love engineering.
What creates a hostile environment for woman is where a sector, made of predominately men is scrutinized with a hysterical "boy who cried wolf" mentality.
It's a vicious cycle.
1. First there is a tiny group of feminists, mostly consisting of marketers, call themselves coders, but if you were look them up, they're twittering and having fun more than building. They seem very happy to stir indignation.
2. Then, people in positions of power bend toward the illegitimate trolls who cried wolf. I'm talking, the word "meritocracy" being offensive by github CEO [1], python board members referring to geekfeminism.org as a charter [2] for pycon conferences.
Pack up and go home, these are the leaders, the chiefs, the alphas of engineers - and they are cowing down to politically correct trolls on twitter, who aren't even participants to the causes.
Twitter and blogs allow anyone to claim to be anything. You used to need a degree to Marketer! Now any girl with an iPhone can be one! Twitter lets anyone call themselves a programmer.
However, Github holds people accountable for actually having to program - funny how meritocracy came up as a bad word to these people!
What is really creating a hostile work environment for woman? I can tell you, men who stay silent watching this bogus stuff happen, woman with legitimate skill and talent may be cast off as a liability.
Consider this: if you are a woman, and you would let a bad joke ruin someone's life, or abuse politically correct sympathy as a female to get benefits - is that going to help your cause? If you are a leader or boss, and you let these trolls shape you - You lack backbone. I feel this is a lack of integrity, and they're not fit to lead.
I hope leaders set an example and not feed these attention trolls and call their crap out. These are woman creating a hostile environment for woman who would otherwise feel grateful to earn their way and belong.
Hey dude, here's a hint: perhaps these women are arguing on social media because guys like you fail to give them the basic modicum of respect as a human being, and they have to spend time fighting to be respected, which takes away from their time to build stuff. Whereas, unlike your privileged life wherein people don't fundamentally deny you basic human respect, you have plenty of time to spend on doing things you enjoy, rather than getting people to treat you like an equal human being.
Beyond that, the entire rest of your comment reeks of sexist views (prejudiced biases against women), so I’m probably already wasting my time trying to get you to open your mind slightly to the possibility that perhaps nobody here is "cowing" to anyone, that being "politically correct" is actually the admirable and proper way of being a decent human being (aka "not being an asshole"), that people favor those leaders who listen to complaints from within their communities rather than those who behave like dicks and tell huge numbers of people to go away, like you're suggesting. But if you entertain these ideas for some time and express a genuine desire to learn, rather than find support for your skewed and misinformed perspectives on how the industry (and society) works in the dark recesses of a community that was once full of people sharing your harmful worldview, then I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.
> unlike your privileged life wherein people don't fundamentally deny you basic human respect
Nerds are not afforded basic human respect unless their rare obsession happens to become valuable to somebody. We're merely being tolerated for the time being. And I don't believe anyone has ever gained a shred of respect by complaining about the lack of it. That just reinforces one's image as weak and unpleasant to interact with.
> I’m probably already wasting my time trying to get you to open your mind slightly
Rather than wasting time casting aspersions on one commenter (which just looks petty), I suggest supporting your arguments for the many other readers will have greater overall effect.
>Nerds are not afforded basic human respect unless their rare obsession happens to become valuable to somebody.
I do think this might be part of why the social justice warriors and feminists seem so hellbent on targeting the tech community lately; people who have been bullied their whole lives tend to just put up with more of the same, and nerds have long been an acceptable target for bullying. I don't see a lot of self flagellation about sexism from the lawyer profession, which attracts a different personality type entirely.
>I suggest supporting your arguments for the many other readers will have greater overall effect.
That's very generous of you, but these people rarely have an argument. Hence the plethora of bland ad hominems, I suppose.
Yes, being bullied for being a nerd is TOTALLY WORSE than being shot for having a different skin color, being raped for having a vagina, being murdered for being transgender, being lit on fire for being gay, earning as little as 56 cents to the dollar because you are both black and a woman even though you do the exact same work at the exact same quality as a white male coworker.
Get some fucking perspective about the reality of the world, already. You're being the quintessential bad example of Hacker News, here; the reason why HN has this reputation of sexist, racist idiots who think they know everything but keep spouting COMPLETELY IDIOTIC bullshit like you just did.
Being shot or earning less money unfairly is not "social ostracizing."
You're being so incredibly disingenuous here and discrediting yourself so fiercely on any topic relating to society, economics or social justice that I truly do not understand why you keep opening your mouth. But by all means, go on.
Are you really arguing that the “oppression” faced by white, heterosexual, cisgendered, male nerds is comparable to the denial of human rights that women, non-whites, transgendered people, and other oppressed groups face every day of their lives? I'm not looking to get into the oppression olympics, but to claim that it's in any way comparable suggests a fundamental, offensive lack of awareness about others' experiences.
Women in first world countries have the same rights that men do--if not more, as in the case of being exempt from the draft. Since the "denial of human rights" we are talking about in this thread is over the use of the word "bro," and the (to feminists) perceived social ostracizing of women as a result of the word existing, mentioning another minority well known for being socially ostracized isn't exactly a stretch.
Also, please stop hating on the white het cis males. I may not be one myself, but they are my friends, and my allies, and I also don't like seeing people treated poorly for the way they were born (having experienced too much of that myself). You are setting back the GLBT and PoC equality movements every time you hate someone based on their sex, race, gender, or sexual orientation. It's not appreciated.
You do realize that of the list of first world countries, most no longer have conscription, and of those that do, over half of them include women, leaving just a tiny number where women are exempt? And that this NOT EVEN REMOTELY offsets the various rights women lack compared to men (seriously, do some research rather than making nonsensical claims), and that women earn significantly less worldwide — including first world countries — compared to men despite equal qualifications and quality of work, and that your continued insistence on spreading the lie that women have "more rights" is both disingenuous and contributes to more people believing lies, perpetuating them and continuing to uphold their misogynist views justified on the basis of these lies?
Wait, no, clearly you do not realize that. But you should. Please do. It's getting tiresome.
It's adorable how you think "nerds" are a legal demographic. Or that they are not privileged because BULLIES??? Or that someone fighting for their right to be respected against a society that has discriminated against them their entire lives is somehow "[reinforcing their] image as weak and unpleasant", rather than a strong, courageous and independent person.
We have been supporting our arguments. That's the whole reason Github got rid of the stupid rug. It's the reason why increasingly many people—men and women and others alike—are vocally calling out stupid bullshit like "bro pages" that reinforce the idea that computer science fields are for men.
Perhaps you should stop ignoring all the stuff we say and start listening for a change. Would do you much good.
>Whereas, unlike your privileged life wherein people don't fundamentally deny you basic human respect, you have plenty of time to spend on doing things you enjoy, rather than getting people to treat you like an equal human being.
Making a lot of assumptions there about someone you know nothing about. How the hell do you feel you have any right to say these things? You are the one very clearly failing to give basic human respect here.
> but if you were look them up, they're twittering and having fun more than building.
The irony of this comment being in a long-winded post on Hacker News is lost, perhaps? You do realize the vast majority of "programmers" aren't building 100% of the time.
Judging by that and the fact you throw out "feminist" like it's an insult, I'm going to say you've got some pretty heavy bias.
I don't want to make personal examples, if you compare the look at the replies to @defunkt's twitter post, the females cheering - who even go so far as to overly call themselves feminists - have basically no engineer cred to speak for. Not on github, not on LinkedIn.
Judging by that and the fact you throw out "feminist" like it's an insult,
I'm going to say you've got some pretty heavy bias.
Bias? Feminists on twitter? Hypersensitivity and hysteria about sexual harassment at conferences? Spooking male engineers into special consideration just because they're girls? Geekfeminism.org being mentioned by the pycon organizer? Merit being a taboo word?
In engineering culture, we consider this disruptive behavior disruptive and call it trolling.
Our consumer culture makes everything so easy and convenient. Our compassion to woman and how nice we are to them allows some of them to take advantage. This is a case of it.
In any case, removing merit from the dictionary won't get you into an engineer position. These tricks and trolls may have worked for special treatment before, but programming will take honest, hard-work and effort.
Have you ever considered the idea that your apparent dislike towards all things and people described as "feminist" suggests that you have, over the course of your seemingly-angry life, adopted a huge amount of misogynistic perspectives on things? Because, hate to break it to you, but you were born a feminist. Everyone is. Every person that has ever lived on planet Earth was born a feminist. Because the idea that women are somehow in any way inferior to men is a completely fabricated notion by a sexist society that instills these views onto people (meaning all of us), and feminism at its most fundamental is simply the premise that women and men are not different (in terms of hierarchical notions, like one being better than the other, or more "valuable", …etc.), which is the default view of any newborn mind.
You are born a feminist; if you don't die a feminist, you lost a bit of your humanity during your life.
I'm not reading anyone saying that women are inferior to men here.
The only thing I'm seeing people say is that both sexes need to earn their stripes and credibility through effort - and this needs to be true in programming just like any other field.
It's disingenuous to argue that all genders need to "earn their strips and credibility through effort" when everyone who isn't male (and additionally, not white, and not straight, and not able-bodied, etc.) is actively discriminated against and enjoys fewer opportunities to learn programming or design techniques.
I didn't realize that TCP/IP had a "race" byte that introduces errors preferentially based on the ethnic background of the programmer.
OK, so I'm being snarky there, but the nucleus of computer science and programming is truly objective and has no preference or prejudice based on race/sex/religion/disability/etc. As others have said, the compiler doesn't care who or what you are. And there are a ton of free resources available online. A person who wants to learn this material, who truly has the will and drive to mastery, and an internet connection, can do so.
The barriers to learning that you describe are cultural, not intrinsic to the subject, and people are chipping away at them (Ada, Black Girls Code, etc), and that's a fine thing too. Changing the stereotype of "programmer" as a fat white guy in a basement chugging Mountain Dew and covered in Cheetos dust is a goal we can all get behind.
>Because, hate to break it to you, but you were born a feminist. Everyone is.
>You are born a feminist; if you don't die a feminist, you lost a bit of your humanity during your life.
If everyone is born feminist, where did this allegedly sexist society come from in the first place?
You are neglecting to account for the entire field of biology and genetics, as well as making feminism sound like some sort of creepy religious cult (although it's certainly starting to resemble that, recently). People aren't really a blank slate at birth. Nature and nurture are fundamentally intertwined.
Additionally, what a "feminist" is seems to vary widely, from "thinks people should be equal" to "we should exterminate men." Your claim seems ludicrous in light of the fact that even feminists do not seem to know what exactly a feminist is.
> Because, hate to break it to you, but you were born a feminist. Everyone is. Every person that has ever lived on planet Earth was born a feminist.
I'm sensing some religious overtones... Everyone is a born into this world an innocent child, but the world is not run by God. But everyone wants to reconnect with God.
> Every person that has ever lived on planet Earth was born a feminist. Because the idea that women are somehow in any way inferior to men is a completely fabricated notion by a sexist society that instills these views onto people (meaning all of us), and feminism at its most fundamental is simply the premise that women and men are not different (in terms of hierarchical notions, like one being better than the other, or more "valuable", …etc.), which is the default view of any newborn mind.
Sure, if feminism = equality of sexes, and just that. Maybe I'll also say to you that you were born a communist, and if you don't identify as one, you hate equality. (Or you hate freedom if you're not a capitalist, for that matter.) What is the problem with me saying something like that? Maybe communists intent and goal is equality, but it is not just an idea that people should be more equal; it also brings with it all kinds of things on how that should be achieved. It's an ideology. In the same vein, feminism isn't just about equality between the sexes, but about a whole lot of other stuff, like how that equality should be achieved, worldviews, if equality of opportunity is enough or if we should have equality of outcome. So if the ideology doesn't fit your worldview, even though you might agree on the goals they have, you might want to find a different kind of ideology.
Feminism is more unique, in this regard, since it is the only mainstream ideology that concerns itself with equality of the sexes. As a result, anyone who says that they are not a feminist because they don't agree with some parts of the approach ideology and the culture, even though they might be for gender equality, can be easily targeted as social piranhas because they don't have any mainstream school of thought to claim allegiance to. So then they might be told that "you don't need to look for a school of thought on the problems of gender equality because there already is one: Feminism! Clearly, if you are not one of us, you are against us on all levels!"
> You are born a feminist; if you don't die a feminist, you lost a bit of your humanity during your life.
> I'm sensing some religious overtones... Everyone is a born into this world an innocent child, but the world is not run by God. But everyone wants to reconnect with God.
Very weird that you took the comment that way; it's an atheistic credo that all people are born atheists and must be taught to believe in god. So this is actually the exact opposite of a religious view.
I didn't know that there was a credo like that. :)
Though it seems obvious that most people are religious as a matter of upbringing rather than as a cause of something like a personal, spiritual insight or feeling, someone might argue that people are predisposed to religious institutions from nature's side, because it helps them make sense of the world, it makes creating social contracts easier, or something to that effect.
They don't substitute them, but they do complement them. Software engineering is an inherently social process--unless you're a self-employed lone wolf who doesn't interact with customers, you have to work with other people to build and program. That means you should work to create an environment of mutual respect, inclusion, and professionalism, and that requires a degree of sensitivity and empathy on your (and your teammates') part. Otherwise, why would anyone want to work with you? Especially if you could be replaced by someone who's just as talented, but more socially professional?
One thing I've always loved about math and science and code is how gender neutral it is. Historically, sure, there's been some bias, but it's mostly a thing of the past. Equality of opportunity (which we are now approaching, if we haven't achieved already, at least for the female gender) is not necessarily going to give us an equal 50/50 representation of the sexes in a specific field. Boys and girls tend to utilize their free time very differently.
Engineering has always been about results, so being capable is really the most important thing. I can see how that would be offensive to feminists, who like to push affirmative action and so on, but at a very basic level science and the fields deriving from it do not care about the social attributes of the person performing them.
This might be why the sjws have such a hard time understanding why tech people are so allergic to them--the sjws derive value exclusively from superficial attributes, like race and sex. However, bad code is bad code whether it's an evil cis white male who wrote it, or a poor queer poc. Logic is fundamentally egalitarian. SJWs are very anti-egalitarian.
Feminists are all for women in tech, so long as they don't have to be the woman in tech. Unless, as you've noted, "being a woman in tech" means tweeting to friends all day long. Sometimes I feel like the people who complain about stereotypes the most are the reasons those stereotypes even exist.
1) it appears to be a pretty even mix of men and women responding positively.
2) a huge number of the people who responded positively (male and female) are in fact software engineers, some of them fairly well known (e.g. conference speakers), several of which work at big name companies.
> However, Github holds people accountable for actually having to program - funny how meritocracy came up as a bad word to these people!
Uh, no it doesn't? There are plenty of reasons someone might be a programmer that doesn't have work on github. Maybe their employer has a really restrictive invention assignment agreement and they don't feel like giving them free code. Maybe it's their day job and they do other things with their free time, like paint. Maybe they don't have any free time because they're a single parent or whatever.
One of the good things about discussions like this, is that it brings out the real dregs of the community. If not for posts like these, I might be naive enough to think the community really is a welcoming place for all people. But then I see things like "group of feminists, mostly consisting of marketers" and "now any girl with an iPhone can be one!"
I'd like to see you question street cred of all brogrammers with such scrutiny. Like, you know, grant them rights in a community according to quality of their code and what they post on Twitter. Just let me get my popcorn.
A higher standard? How about an individual having backbone and integrity to stand firm, hold the line and not supplicate?
I feel this, "Change it.", as if you are some castrating, sky-god feels eerie. Like you are some judge of the highest moral purity, when in reality, you're the enemy of purity. You are taking an honest, organic creation and molding it for your own ability to feel powerful on the internet.
Change yourself.
Feel castrated?
edit: What really bothers me here is the "Change it.", it feels like a summary judgment. I don't think the author should be intimidated by popularity or political correctness. If he makes a joke, sometimes is best to own it. Personally, I don't find it funny, but I think it's an O.K. name and helps me remember its an app for reference purposes.
> How about an individual having backbone and integrity to stand firm, hold the line and not supplicate?
I have the backbone and integrity to know that as I walk through life, I am responsible for stepping carefully and thoughtfully.
I have no problem stepping forward to call people out when they're well-intentioned but wrong, or ill-intentioned. Even if it costs me karma, or sales, or popularity, it is sometimes the right thing to do.
In this case, I am calling you out on the word "supplicate.' I choose to make the world a better place. I'm not supplicating, or white knighting, or anything like that. It's not about appeasing anyone, it's about doing the right thing for us.
The very word "supplicate" implies a them vs. us dichotomy which is itself a problem. YOU are furthering these problems by using divisive language.
The library is an organic creation. Organisms grow and evolve and CHANGE FOR THE BETTER. If you think it would be better with a name that many find offensive and divisive, that's your opinion.
But you can guess what I think of the premise that when things are offensive, it's everyone else's responsibility to change. It sounds like a spoiled brat who thinks the world should revolve around them, and everyone else should change so that they can do as they like without pushback.
rds2000 is literally saying that being a man is pitiful and should be shamed, and then argues elsewhere in this very thread that the real problem with our industry are the feminists.
Standing firm on something dumb is not a matter of integrity. Backbone and integrity mean you do what's right even under pressure not to. Sticking with this name isn't right. It's not particularly wrong, but it's not some noble thing.
It's provocative, distracting and subverting - Introducing a politically sensitive, racially charged, artificial problem.
This will incite anger through political correctness. The cause is bogus.
Snubbing it is politically incorrect to criticize women and ethnic minorities in the west.
Non sequitur, PC trolls like this can do as much distracting as they please.
Why not bring up english? There are many people who are engineers who would benefit from localized API and developer documentation and understanding english better.
If you want discrimination in engineering - I'm surprised no one brings up english.
Edit to below: Sorry for editing this after your reply. I didn't notice.
You make a great point aboit the use of English for documentation, and the need for translation to other languages to promote computing in different nations.
See how I didn't mention race or sex or sexuality? That's because you don't need to mention that other stuff when you have a tight focus.
"Help girls code" does not mean "stop translating documentation to Portuguese".
"Help translate all these documentations and apis to many languages" doesn't mean "don't bother spending time teaching girls to code".
Dan, even using english as a first language - I have a difficult time articulating this subject.
1. English
English is the more topic subject dividing engineers and programmer's from reaching their potential. These are people who are already on their path and passionate about growing themselves into programmers.
Can you imagine how we can help them? Their potential if they have localized documentation?
A story of disadvantage - imagine having an issue and being powerless to articulate yourself to a predominately english-speaking world of engineers. What about their hearts, their passions?
And this is effective, safe. Helps people. Constructive. This is great news man.
Now you see where I'm going?
2. The PC troll issue
I feel tempted to blurt out every emotion. But when a particular group is mentioned - we have to make everyone happy? Why is pycon code of conduct pulled off geekfeminism.org (http://jessenoller.com/blog/2012/12/7/the-code-of-conduct). This is sensitivity not to woman, but I feel it's creating a culture of hysteria.
Truly, I do not believe woman in the first world (I'm sorry if this offends people) are at risk of rape or sexual harassment at conferences. Most conferences do not have codes of conduct that state this because it makes you ask, "Why?". Do these people ever go outside, to starbucks, etc? Do they live in a Chapel away from vulgar language and stringent political correctness? I'm deeply sorry to offend anyone here.
But how do you even get to Pycon if you're in this feminist Cabal? Do you go around in a bubble when you're outside? Especially in SF where radical free expression is so prevalent, it's amazing how the when it gets to the workplace and conferences, women (a select few), pull what we may see as a 180. Now they're ultra-chaste, "triggered"* by humor they probably laughed out at dinners before, especially in front of more confident and boastful company.
I feel I can't talk about anything. I feel it's a sand pit meant to distract and divide. I feel like I can't express myself in the most basic ways.
* Triggered means PTSD for traumatic events in their past. So now it's not a matter of political niche. Ever study cognitive-behavioral psychology? People can link a bad memory to anything!
2. Right to confront accusers? This seems extremely one-sided. No one she blames gets to defend themselves, where are the witnesses on either side?