The Ada Initiative For Supporting Women In Open Tech Is Ending

[Nobu]

We (men) don't become bitches, but we can get rather unruly, and make various unsavoury comments (usually in jest, but still). Even in an environment with mostly men and a few women, it can start to get bad. I'm honestly surprised at what's said sometimes, but I won't usually call someone out unless it sounds like they actually meant it. We have to tone it down a lot when someone from outside our shop comes in, so we don't accidentally step on someone's toes.

[Michael_S]

I have worked in retirement home where I was the only male worker in day shifts, and I had absolutely no issues with that. At night shift there was another male. In fact many nurses say it is better if there is even one male, else women in nursing begin to be serious bitches against each other. I haven't heard nor experienced men becoming total bitches in all male work environments.

Because you did not have a problem, that does not prove the problem does not exist for other people in other situations.

[wizard69]

What a bunch of loonies. As a software developer I have worked with women almost constantly over the past 10+ years and never have I heard one complaint about the working environment. Of course, with girls being so few in a team, we don't talk very often about cooking and make-up, but that's not harassing.
Also, I have never heard about "pornography in slides". Never ever.

I couldn't agree more. The problem with pornography is that it is in the eye of the beholder and frankly if you have a dirty mind almost anything can be called porngrpahic even the vegitable counter at your local grocery.

As for misbehaving people once they leave the home turf frankly that is equal opportunity with woman as bad as men especially when alcohol flows. That isn't a conference problem though it is a problem with disjunction all human beings. Frankly I'm very happy to see these nut cases fold up operation.

[wizard69]

Yes, that is a great way for them to end their career.

With that sort of attitude, I can't imagine why women wouldn't be jumping at the opportunity to be on your team.

The problem is you can't talk about the things men normally talk about, with woman around, because then you get this non sense that they f
"Feel" they are being excluded. The whole problem with this group is that they expect the tone of conversation to be tuned to the interests of woman and frankly I don't give a damn about what woman want to talk about. Every social context I've ever seen has had men and woman grouping off by sexes to talk about the things that the sexes are interested in.

[wizard69]

IF they are referring to fandom conventions instead of tech conventions for that specific claim (given there is some ambiguity in their overall statement), then there is some validity to that. Although in said cases it's not a gendered issue. It's a people molest cosplayers issue.

If they are using Comicon or one of the other fandom conferences as justification for their comments then they are certainly behaving unethically themselves. As it is those fan conferences attract a lot of strange trouble people and as such you pretty much have to expect a few bad players. Even then the conference shouldn't be responsible for the bad players that show up, responsibility and frankly punishment needs to be pushed upon the bad characters not the conference.

Like wise with a true tech conference the conference shouldn't be blamed for the bad behavior of an individual. Nor should the conference be blamed for a person that has a poor grasp on reality.

[wizard69]

errh, I believe you missed his/her point in it's entirety.

I think you have completely missed the point, the fact is given no outside pressure men and woman will always move their conversations in different directions as a group. It takes little effort at all to observe this in real life.

What you are saying is, that woman like to talk about cooking and make-up, which is degrading to woman just the same as saying 'men only talk about cars and sex'.

You take the statements literally rather than to digest the underlying meaning. The fact of the matter is that when in sex groups the conversations that men and woman have are dramatically different.

There are some woman who do enjoy cooking or talking about make-up but it's not okay to make it a defining factor like you did.

That isn't what he did!

You probably didn't meant it that way but that's how it sounds.

I really think that you don't have the ability to grasp the deeper meaning here.

[wizard69]

Social Justice Warrior and Feminist here. Counter points to some of what has been written:
- One of the biggest problems in tech women encounter is just guys that assume every woman in the industry is a novice. So they give women trivial tasks, don't trust them to work alone, and lecture women who already know what TCP, UDP, SSH, sockets, ports, firewalls, Oauth, etc... without stopping to ask if they already know. You will find thousands of complaints about this on blogs, social network sites, and so forth. When you meet another guy in the field, you don't blanket assume he doesn't know what HTTP means.

I've actually have seen this.

- Just because you personally haven't seen physical, sexual, or verbal harassment does not mean it never happens.

Of course not but that doesn't excuse what was said here which implied that the conferences condoned such behavior or even worst that the conference was responsible. This is perhaps the biggest problem I have with this group, bad behavior is the responsibility of the person behaving badly.

Obviously it's not everywhere. But it only takes a few people doing it to make the work environment uncomfortable. My sister works in another industry, not technology. About twelve years ago she left a job because she was getting sexually harassed by her boss. She tried to report it to his superior, but she was ignored. She didn't want the publicity and the rumors and all the other garbage associated with pressing charges, so she just quit the job. She didn't tell the rest of the family about it until years later, because she didn't want anyone in the family to go hunt the perpetrator down.

Contrary to popular beleif physical violence is one way to deal with such nonsense. Your sister should have decked the guy and elevated the problem to the point it couldn't have been ignored. Everyone has the right to defend their person, if you don't you just leave yourself open to more advances.

- Look at the flood of death threats, rape threats, sexist comments, and so forth that came out of Gamergate. Have you ever seen any men in the gaming industry get hammered with a flood of insults, death threats, and so forth?

I'm not even remotely familiar with gamergate.

- Look at the attendance at conferences that adopt specific anti-harassment policies. I can't find specific numbers, but 33% of the speakers at Pycon 2014 were women.

The number of speakers has little to do with the anti harrasment policy.

- Work environments are more comfortable when some substantial portion of the people have the same ethnicity or sex or both as you.

Baloney.

That's human nature. Imagine having a job where your meetings have seven Chinese women in the room and you (assuming you're not Chinese).

Such expressions as the above could be seen as appealing to certain male fantasies.

Or if that doesn't bother you, then maybe seven people of South American descent and you. Or indian, or whatever. The point is, even if no one is openly unfriendly to you it still feels less comfortable than when there are at least one or two people more similar to you in the room.

You are coming off as a racists here.

- We are missing out on intelligent people.

Again pure baloney!

There are brilliant women in medicine, in medical research, in law, and mathematics. How many open source software hackers are guys? 90%? 95%? 99%? If we have more women in engineering in general, then that's a lot more potential contributors.

I know of many talented woman that work in tech, to the best of my knowledge not a one of them works in open source? Why would they when it is the domain of the socially inept, people that don't have a life outside of work and frankly are pretty miserable to deal with be you a man or woman?

I will pit it this way, there are few woman in the open source movement because there are fewer woman in tech with significant mental health and social issues.

[Nobu]

You talk about "ability to grasp the deeper meaning", then proceed to call people racist based on a comment they made that has basis in reality? The fact is, whether you're racist or not, you'll feel uncomfortable if you're in a room surrounded by people who are different than you. Be that a bunch of body-builders, sumo-wrestlers, gangsters, or whatever, aside from a few groups of whom you might feel comfortable with for whatever perverse reason, or a minority who have some attraction to that sort of thing. People like to be in a group of people similar to themselves, or a mixed group, not a group of similar people who share little similarities to themselves other than maybe their job title.

[gotwig]

Can you please stop talking about women/girl stuff when not a single girl here is present ? like wtf ^_^

[r1348]

Just to make sure: is there a single woman participating to this discussion?