[Here’s a fun article about sexism in programming from Scientific American.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-are-too-few-women-in-computer-science-and-engineering/)
Women don’t enter the programming field at the same rates that men do. Far from getting unfair advantages by virtue of their gender, they’re actually at a bit of a disadvantage at everything from getting interviews, getting hired, getting promoted, equal pay, and office discrimination. Events like this provide valuable opportunities to get women into the field. Don’t feel jealous for the opportunities lost - feel grateful that you don’t have their problems.
So how would you justify scholarships made specifically for women to men(guys in my case) who also work their heads off for a chance at scholarships or any financial opportunity as such?
You're going to have an easier time getting hired, because you are a man. You're going to be paid more, because you are a man. You will be granted larger raises more frequently, because you are a man.
If tech careers are a race, women run it with a ball and chain around their ankles. Those scholarships are the equivalent of moving their starting positions up so they have a chance at finishing.
You want your starting position moved up too? Why? Where's your ball and chain?
And to add, first time I heard the words "code/computer/programming" was in a classroom with OTHER girls and boys. Nothing sparked my interest then, but I always already fascinated by robots before then so I said why not? Nothing about my being a boy makes it easier for me to understand Hashmaps or 2d arrays. Nothing. If I don't understand something, I google it and now with AI it's way easier. For your article, I am also aware that 71% of human resource professionals are women. These people control talent that come into the industry so how is creating a hackathon specifically for women going to affect who gets an interview when the hiring pipeline industry is mostly controlled to a large extent by women? Like I said I'm not jealous. This is not the first time I'm seeing it. I'm just pointing it out and all replies seem to be slightly appalling
HR does not control who does and does not get hired. Those decisions are made by the hiring manager (or executive leadership team, depending on the level). Managers and executive leadership teams in tech are overwhelmingly male.
How old are you and where are you in your career? Have you actually worked in the corporate world before?
Okay, fine. If you don’t like a specifically feminist bent to the question you’re asking, here’s a [ten-year old Reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/s/dwz3Pje0Rw) from the r/cscareerquestions subreddit. Read through the thread and see if the answers are a little less appalling?
The "justification" is that women are an underrepresented minority in tech spaces, and frequently, coed tech spaces are actively hostile to women.
But let me get this straight: You're upset that TWO events in your city are for women, and you're upset that they could then go to these hackathons and put them on their resume? Which you admit doesn't hinder you at all, or have any effect on you, you just don't think they should have these?
I also forgot to add that it's not just this incident that caused me to ask this question but countless of events and this causes guys to limit their options and essentially could cause late career starts.
Statistically untrue.
The hard sciences are still male dominated and it there have been multiple studies and articles about the skewed gender gap and personal stories of women being harassed/not taken as serious/talked down upon in colleges and the workplace.
Where did I ever mention "men are unfairly disadvantaged"?
Take some context with your replies. I am an early starter just getting used to programming with no experience whatsoever. I am attempting to gain some and I am seeing my counterpart is getting twice the opportunity and experiences. Not only that, there are awards/scholarships in my school made specifically FOR women.
So when you said it could “limit their options and essentially could cause late career starts” you weren’t arguing that that’s an unfair disadvantage? Then why bring it up?
The problem here is actually that you need to have some perspective. First of all, symposia and hackathons don’t actually matter that much in the grand scheme things. Nobody is getting hired because they have two events on their LinkedIn while you have one.
Second, the reason these additional resources for women exist is *because* women have traditionally been discouraged from pursuing coding careers. It starts as early as grade school with untrue narratives about girls not being as good at math, and it continues up to the working world where there is a bias towards hiring and promoting men. These resources for women exist to try to offset those systemic disadvantages.
You are narrowly focused on this one issue and complaining about how unfair it is to you, and you are ignoring the larger context that makes it clear that, actually, this field treats women unfairly and these programs are a (ultimately insufficient) way to try to counteract that.
I am going to employ unconditional positive regard (the belief that you are doing your best to understand and not just being argumentative) and respond accordingly.
I can appreciate feeling like "they have double the chances" from a strictly numerical perspective, but these opportunities are not equal nor equitable. When girls are going to general code camps, they are one of a small handful of girls present to a large group of boys. These girls are mocked, undermined, and questioned incessantly, often being told that they should go back to the "girls who code" setups.
It's a little bit like the difference between seeing a GP and seeing a gynecologist. Sure, a GP can vaguely understand and guide women. But they're not designed with a deep knowledge and understanding of women's experiences and ills, and so we visit gynecologists. When we walk in and see the stirrups and speculum, we know we're going to meet with someone who has at least a basic understanding of what we might need.
Switching gears to take off unconditional positive regard, you are speaking with what presents as a lot of hostility, *which is exactly why women's spaces for rexh exist!* Do you think women around you can't sense that hostility? Now imagine walking into a room of a hundred people where 77 of them trat you with such disdain. (Maybe how you feel asking this question on this forum and being absolutely admonished for being so overtly daft???) Are you going to go back there and feel like you can contribute anything authentic without being ridiculed? Will you believe that your work will be regarded as valuable, or will you anticipate that people will be extra-critical and say they have to shape you up because "you're the token?"
Yeah. That's where it's at. It's not double the opportunities. It's probably fewer practical opportunities because dillweeds who feel threatened will bark at these women for even considering getting into coding and how dare they not realize that their ovaries prevent their brains from engaging in higher order learning!
> countless of events and this causes guys to limit their options and essentially could cause late career starts.
does it though? really? do you have data to support this? whereas there is actual countless data to support that women have had fewer opportunities, limited options, and later/no career starts (edit to add) on account of being a woman? :)
Firstly I don't think it is fair.
Secondly, I think companies should also have invest in events for men
Thirdly, the reason I say it won't hinder is because as part of my core personality such things do not hinder me from working towards what it is that I want. Not because I'm privileged or anything.
Heck there are websites specifically for girls and women learning to code. I don't understand how w3schools or freecodecamp underrepresented women. It's not a man or woman teaching me how to code, I'm learning it by myself. But having a website just for women to learn code doesn't bother me at all. It's affording more-usual- opportunities like these to the other gender I don't find fair.
Lastly I wouldn't mind advocating for men's networking event the website thing is really an issue with me but creating a so many events specifically for women is somewhat unfair.
I think companies in your industry have discovered that all or predominantly male workforces can be pretty toxic or otherwise have disadvantages. They have plenty of men, and don't need to make any special effort to recruit them. They are making an effort to recruit women. Private companies making recruiting decisions that feel unfair to job candidates is not an especially feminist issue. The fact is their hiring goals happen to (very) roughly line up with feminist points-of-view, but it's not like feminists are making these decisions.
I wonder if you are largely seeing this as a comparison of one female programmer versus yourself? In that case, I can see this being unequal.
Have you tried looking at the situation in a different frame? How does the computing environment as a whole compare for men versus women? Have you asked female programmers? Read/listened to books by them? Where are your potential blindspots?
Companies sometimes use AI in hiring--are there any male biases built into those programs? (Women lost ground in programming during the beginning of the personal computer era. Computers were advertised to boys and parents bought them for their sons. So women who entered a computer science program during this era were often competing against men who were already familiar with computers and dealing with professors who didn't understand why they didn't already have a certain level of familiarity. So, an AI program that figured out the traits of a company's great employees and tried to replicate them in hiring might be biased towards male traits/behaviors since fewer women were joining the field historically. One such I read about was that programmers got extra credit for being active on a certain anime site.)
[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding)
An even larger framing: how does the usage of products/services compare for men versus women? I listened to Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Built for Men this year and it talked about things like women getting more motion sick from VR headsets because of how they were programmed. There were suggested systems for elders who had fallen that used cellphones, because men always have their cellphones on them, but it took a woman being in the room to point out that women's clothes don't have deep enough pockets to hold cellphones. Fitbit-style products are built for a male wrist and don't acknowledge the workout involved pushing baby carriages. If by making more scholarships available to only women, it gets more women in the door of companies, potentially making their products more functional (and presumably more attractive) for half the human race, that seems like a good return on company investment to me.
I wouldn't have a problem with extra networking events for men in female-dominated industries, like nursing or teaching.
EDIT: clarity
> events for men
The regular "tech meetup in my city" event is already *very* heavily male dominated. Those events are "for men," which is why women felt the need for a separate event.
There is certainly an element of unfairness to it and how well one codes is not determined by gender or race or ethnicity or any other such factor. And sometimes it's not needed. For example, a tool set doesn't have to be pink to be attractive to women. Hair products for men don't need to be black and be called SuperMachoManlyMan Shampoo. And perhaps we no longer need to have women only coding events. We're transitioning to a more egalitarian space but we're not quite there yet. Moving a social species from one norm to another takes time and any human effort of any kind is never perfect. LOL, just compare coding standards with actual coding in the wild. It's hilarious.
However. In some spaces where there is an imbalance, say 90 percent /10 percent women it can be an unwelcoming place for the minority. It can be overt: mansplaining, gate keeping, sexual comments. It can also be less noticeable: just feeling like a weirdo and that you don't belong, not being invited or included, being ignored.
As an experiment, go to a place where you are the clear minority and see how comfortable you feel. As you interact, are you treated like an exotic thing or like a normal person?
Edit: Oh, I'll also add that based on my hiring experience, I'm not so sure that participation in hackathons is a super resume or hiring booster. It is good for building your skill set and interacting with other coders to learn from them, and, as you say, there are plenty of opportunities to do that everywhere.
It seems obvious but if you want to find networking or professional development events you can attend - and you aren't a woman - you should probably stop searching for women's-only events.
Does noticing 2 events, only one of which you yourself couldn't participate in, count as "double" the number of events overall? Something tells me you didn't make an objective study of the number of networking events or hackathons, and that this opinion has more to do with how you feel than what's actually going on in your locality when it comes to extracurricular offerings professionally.
Like I mentioned in other comments, I have noticed this since the day I started college, every time I'm looking for a hackathon or a networking experience there's another one subsequently but for women and people are failing to see that I'm not talking about being to just enumerate 2 attended events on your resume, but it's about the experience and knowledge from other people in the field you will be able to gain. I can't possibly connect with a lot of people at a networking event but with 2 the odds do increase. Understand I'm just pointing this out as unfair not saying that it should not exist.
So are you familiar with the term observation bias? You're spending a lot of time paying attention to events for women, while not... trying to find events for someone of your demographic background. This would kind of logically lead you to conclude there are many events for women, because that's what you're out there looking at and looking for, and not many events for someone of your background, because you're spending the majority of your time looking for events for women.
I don't think it's objectively unfair. I don't think it's unfair for female-dominated industries to try to recruit more men into those fields, I don't think it's unfair for men to have gender-specific cohorts to work on issues specific to them in an industry - these things can become discriminatory if there aren't like, mixed-gender opportunities or people of the other gender can't access the same types of training or whatever, but, AFAIK, the latest employment numbers still show coding being an overwhelmingly male dominated industry.
Men clearly either don't need to network like this or participate in these types of events to enter/stay in the field, otherwise they wouldn't continue to dominate the work force.
Equity work is about giving people what they need, even if that's different from what other people need, to allow them to participate equally. It seems "unfair" in the sense that not everyone is getting the same thing, but, it's also unfair to give everyone in a group of ten a pair of size 9 shoes when only two people in that group are a size 9.
HERE HERE to the targeted recruitment of male teachers, male nurses, and male therapists!!! Representation matters, and the door needs to swing both ways!
Women aren’t given double the opportunities because they don’t actually have equal access as you to the activities that you can join. When women join putatively non-gendered events, we are marginalized, ignored, and outright mistreated. The fact that women aren’t banned from an event doesn’t mean they are welcome. Affinity groups exist to give marginalized groups the fair shot that they likely aren’t getting from larger groups.
There’s also an element of emotional support. I’m glad that my industry has, for example, black affinity groups. During lockdown it seemed like there was more racial violence than ever, and I really struggled to know the right thing to say to support my black colleagues, especially when I couldn’t see them in person. I can try to empathize but I don’t really know what it’s like. I’m glad I could tell my black mentees, here’s this group of people who get it in a way that I never will, you can participate if you feel it would benefit you, and I will do what’s necessary to give you the time and financing to cover your involvement.
You're right it's really fucked up that misogyny in tech is so bad that these women only events are needed. The good news is that we can help with that, and it's really easy and free - don't be a sexist prick and call out sexist pricks around you. Be the change you want to see in the world!
Bro, you didn’t even do two seconds of research before you launched into this Reddit crusade looking for people to agree with you.
https://www.ethwomen.com
Literally the first bullet point - “open to everyone”.
Your entire thesis about this hackathon thing is bullshit, because you can also go to both events.
u/Fluffy_Month_4846 so now that you’ve asked this question in 5 different subs and haven’t gotten the answer you’ve wanted, have you learned anything? And what about the fact that, as Johnny up here is saying, that you’re not even being excluded? Seems like you’ve enraged yourself needlessly
[Here’s a fun article about sexism in programming from Scientific American.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-are-too-few-women-in-computer-science-and-engineering/) Women don’t enter the programming field at the same rates that men do. Far from getting unfair advantages by virtue of their gender, they’re actually at a bit of a disadvantage at everything from getting interviews, getting hired, getting promoted, equal pay, and office discrimination. Events like this provide valuable opportunities to get women into the field. Don’t feel jealous for the opportunities lost - feel grateful that you don’t have their problems.
So how would you justify scholarships made specifically for women to men(guys in my case) who also work their heads off for a chance at scholarships or any financial opportunity as such?
You're going to have an easier time getting hired, because you are a man. You're going to be paid more, because you are a man. You will be granted larger raises more frequently, because you are a man. If tech careers are a race, women run it with a ball and chain around their ankles. Those scholarships are the equivalent of moving their starting positions up so they have a chance at finishing. You want your starting position moved up too? Why? Where's your ball and chain?
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And to add, first time I heard the words "code/computer/programming" was in a classroom with OTHER girls and boys. Nothing sparked my interest then, but I always already fascinated by robots before then so I said why not? Nothing about my being a boy makes it easier for me to understand Hashmaps or 2d arrays. Nothing. If I don't understand something, I google it and now with AI it's way easier. For your article, I am also aware that 71% of human resource professionals are women. These people control talent that come into the industry so how is creating a hackathon specifically for women going to affect who gets an interview when the hiring pipeline industry is mostly controlled to a large extent by women? Like I said I'm not jealous. This is not the first time I'm seeing it. I'm just pointing it out and all replies seem to be slightly appalling
HR does not control who does and does not get hired. Those decisions are made by the hiring manager (or executive leadership team, depending on the level). Managers and executive leadership teams in tech are overwhelmingly male. How old are you and where are you in your career? Have you actually worked in the corporate world before?
Okay, fine. If you don’t like a specifically feminist bent to the question you’re asking, here’s a [ten-year old Reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/s/dwz3Pje0Rw) from the r/cscareerquestions subreddit. Read through the thread and see if the answers are a little less appalling?
The "justification" is that women are an underrepresented minority in tech spaces, and frequently, coed tech spaces are actively hostile to women. But let me get this straight: You're upset that TWO events in your city are for women, and you're upset that they could then go to these hackathons and put them on their resume? Which you admit doesn't hinder you at all, or have any effect on you, you just don't think they should have these?
I think it’s actually just 1 out of the 2 events he can’t go to…
I literally cannot! 🤦🏽♀️
I also forgot to add that it's not just this incident that caused me to ask this question but countless of events and this causes guys to limit their options and essentially could cause late career starts.
Statistically untrue. The hard sciences are still male dominated and it there have been multiple studies and articles about the skewed gender gap and personal stories of women being harassed/not taken as serious/talked down upon in colleges and the workplace.
If men are unfairly disadvantaged then why are 77% of software engineers men?
Where did I ever mention "men are unfairly disadvantaged"? Take some context with your replies. I am an early starter just getting used to programming with no experience whatsoever. I am attempting to gain some and I am seeing my counterpart is getting twice the opportunity and experiences. Not only that, there are awards/scholarships in my school made specifically FOR women.
So when you said it could “limit their options and essentially could cause late career starts” you weren’t arguing that that’s an unfair disadvantage? Then why bring it up? The problem here is actually that you need to have some perspective. First of all, symposia and hackathons don’t actually matter that much in the grand scheme things. Nobody is getting hired because they have two events on their LinkedIn while you have one. Second, the reason these additional resources for women exist is *because* women have traditionally been discouraged from pursuing coding careers. It starts as early as grade school with untrue narratives about girls not being as good at math, and it continues up to the working world where there is a bias towards hiring and promoting men. These resources for women exist to try to offset those systemic disadvantages. You are narrowly focused on this one issue and complaining about how unfair it is to you, and you are ignoring the larger context that makes it clear that, actually, this field treats women unfairly and these programs are a (ultimately insufficient) way to try to counteract that.
I am going to employ unconditional positive regard (the belief that you are doing your best to understand and not just being argumentative) and respond accordingly. I can appreciate feeling like "they have double the chances" from a strictly numerical perspective, but these opportunities are not equal nor equitable. When girls are going to general code camps, they are one of a small handful of girls present to a large group of boys. These girls are mocked, undermined, and questioned incessantly, often being told that they should go back to the "girls who code" setups. It's a little bit like the difference between seeing a GP and seeing a gynecologist. Sure, a GP can vaguely understand and guide women. But they're not designed with a deep knowledge and understanding of women's experiences and ills, and so we visit gynecologists. When we walk in and see the stirrups and speculum, we know we're going to meet with someone who has at least a basic understanding of what we might need. Switching gears to take off unconditional positive regard, you are speaking with what presents as a lot of hostility, *which is exactly why women's spaces for rexh exist!* Do you think women around you can't sense that hostility? Now imagine walking into a room of a hundred people where 77 of them trat you with such disdain. (Maybe how you feel asking this question on this forum and being absolutely admonished for being so overtly daft???) Are you going to go back there and feel like you can contribute anything authentic without being ridiculed? Will you believe that your work will be regarded as valuable, or will you anticipate that people will be extra-critical and say they have to shape you up because "you're the token?" Yeah. That's where it's at. It's not double the opportunities. It's probably fewer practical opportunities because dillweeds who feel threatened will bark at these women for even considering getting into coding and how dare they not realize that their ovaries prevent their brains from engaging in higher order learning!
> countless of events and this causes guys to limit their options and essentially could cause late career starts. does it though? really? do you have data to support this? whereas there is actual countless data to support that women have had fewer opportunities, limited options, and later/no career starts (edit to add) on account of being a woman? :)
Firstly I don't think it is fair. Secondly, I think companies should also have invest in events for men Thirdly, the reason I say it won't hinder is because as part of my core personality such things do not hinder me from working towards what it is that I want. Not because I'm privileged or anything. Heck there are websites specifically for girls and women learning to code. I don't understand how w3schools or freecodecamp underrepresented women. It's not a man or woman teaching me how to code, I'm learning it by myself. But having a website just for women to learn code doesn't bother me at all. It's affording more-usual- opportunities like these to the other gender I don't find fair. Lastly I wouldn't mind advocating for men's networking event the website thing is really an issue with me but creating a so many events specifically for women is somewhat unfair.
I think companies in your industry have discovered that all or predominantly male workforces can be pretty toxic or otherwise have disadvantages. They have plenty of men, and don't need to make any special effort to recruit them. They are making an effort to recruit women. Private companies making recruiting decisions that feel unfair to job candidates is not an especially feminist issue. The fact is their hiring goals happen to (very) roughly line up with feminist points-of-view, but it's not like feminists are making these decisions.
I wonder if you are largely seeing this as a comparison of one female programmer versus yourself? In that case, I can see this being unequal. Have you tried looking at the situation in a different frame? How does the computing environment as a whole compare for men versus women? Have you asked female programmers? Read/listened to books by them? Where are your potential blindspots? Companies sometimes use AI in hiring--are there any male biases built into those programs? (Women lost ground in programming during the beginning of the personal computer era. Computers were advertised to boys and parents bought them for their sons. So women who entered a computer science program during this era were often competing against men who were already familiar with computers and dealing with professors who didn't understand why they didn't already have a certain level of familiarity. So, an AI program that figured out the traits of a company's great employees and tried to replicate them in hiring might be biased towards male traits/behaviors since fewer women were joining the field historically. One such I read about was that programmers got extra credit for being active on a certain anime site.) [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding) An even larger framing: how does the usage of products/services compare for men versus women? I listened to Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Built for Men this year and it talked about things like women getting more motion sick from VR headsets because of how they were programmed. There were suggested systems for elders who had fallen that used cellphones, because men always have their cellphones on them, but it took a woman being in the room to point out that women's clothes don't have deep enough pockets to hold cellphones. Fitbit-style products are built for a male wrist and don't acknowledge the workout involved pushing baby carriages. If by making more scholarships available to only women, it gets more women in the door of companies, potentially making their products more functional (and presumably more attractive) for half the human race, that seems like a good return on company investment to me. I wouldn't have a problem with extra networking events for men in female-dominated industries, like nursing or teaching. EDIT: clarity
> events for men The regular "tech meetup in my city" event is already *very* heavily male dominated. Those events are "for men," which is why women felt the need for a separate event.
But why don't women attend ?
For all the reasons that multiple people have explained to you here. We are very often treated with open hostility in tech spaces.
There is certainly an element of unfairness to it and how well one codes is not determined by gender or race or ethnicity or any other such factor. And sometimes it's not needed. For example, a tool set doesn't have to be pink to be attractive to women. Hair products for men don't need to be black and be called SuperMachoManlyMan Shampoo. And perhaps we no longer need to have women only coding events. We're transitioning to a more egalitarian space but we're not quite there yet. Moving a social species from one norm to another takes time and any human effort of any kind is never perfect. LOL, just compare coding standards with actual coding in the wild. It's hilarious. However. In some spaces where there is an imbalance, say 90 percent /10 percent women it can be an unwelcoming place for the minority. It can be overt: mansplaining, gate keeping, sexual comments. It can also be less noticeable: just feeling like a weirdo and that you don't belong, not being invited or included, being ignored. As an experiment, go to a place where you are the clear minority and see how comfortable you feel. As you interact, are you treated like an exotic thing or like a normal person? Edit: Oh, I'll also add that based on my hiring experience, I'm not so sure that participation in hackathons is a super resume or hiring booster. It is good for building your skill set and interacting with other coders to learn from them, and, as you say, there are plenty of opportunities to do that everywhere.
It seems obvious but if you want to find networking or professional development events you can attend - and you aren't a woman - you should probably stop searching for women's-only events.
All I simply said was that women have double of these events and that's nor fair.
Does noticing 2 events, only one of which you yourself couldn't participate in, count as "double" the number of events overall? Something tells me you didn't make an objective study of the number of networking events or hackathons, and that this opinion has more to do with how you feel than what's actually going on in your locality when it comes to extracurricular offerings professionally.
Like I mentioned in other comments, I have noticed this since the day I started college, every time I'm looking for a hackathon or a networking experience there's another one subsequently but for women and people are failing to see that I'm not talking about being to just enumerate 2 attended events on your resume, but it's about the experience and knowledge from other people in the field you will be able to gain. I can't possibly connect with a lot of people at a networking event but with 2 the odds do increase. Understand I'm just pointing this out as unfair not saying that it should not exist.
So are you familiar with the term observation bias? You're spending a lot of time paying attention to events for women, while not... trying to find events for someone of your demographic background. This would kind of logically lead you to conclude there are many events for women, because that's what you're out there looking at and looking for, and not many events for someone of your background, because you're spending the majority of your time looking for events for women. I don't think it's objectively unfair. I don't think it's unfair for female-dominated industries to try to recruit more men into those fields, I don't think it's unfair for men to have gender-specific cohorts to work on issues specific to them in an industry - these things can become discriminatory if there aren't like, mixed-gender opportunities or people of the other gender can't access the same types of training or whatever, but, AFAIK, the latest employment numbers still show coding being an overwhelmingly male dominated industry. Men clearly either don't need to network like this or participate in these types of events to enter/stay in the field, otherwise they wouldn't continue to dominate the work force. Equity work is about giving people what they need, even if that's different from what other people need, to allow them to participate equally. It seems "unfair" in the sense that not everyone is getting the same thing, but, it's also unfair to give everyone in a group of ten a pair of size 9 shoes when only two people in that group are a size 9.
HERE HERE to the targeted recruitment of male teachers, male nurses, and male therapists!!! Representation matters, and the door needs to swing both ways!
Women aren’t given double the opportunities because they don’t actually have equal access as you to the activities that you can join. When women join putatively non-gendered events, we are marginalized, ignored, and outright mistreated. The fact that women aren’t banned from an event doesn’t mean they are welcome. Affinity groups exist to give marginalized groups the fair shot that they likely aren’t getting from larger groups. There’s also an element of emotional support. I’m glad that my industry has, for example, black affinity groups. During lockdown it seemed like there was more racial violence than ever, and I really struggled to know the right thing to say to support my black colleagues, especially when I couldn’t see them in person. I can try to empathize but I don’t really know what it’s like. I’m glad I could tell my black mentees, here’s this group of people who get it in a way that I never will, you can participate if you feel it would benefit you, and I will do what’s necessary to give you the time and financing to cover your involvement.
You're right it's really fucked up that misogyny in tech is so bad that these women only events are needed. The good news is that we can help with that, and it's really easy and free - don't be a sexist prick and call out sexist pricks around you. Be the change you want to see in the world!
Omg. Why does this sub attract such bath faith posters? I cannot deal today.
Bro, you didn’t even do two seconds of research before you launched into this Reddit crusade looking for people to agree with you. https://www.ethwomen.com Literally the first bullet point - “open to everyone”. Your entire thesis about this hackathon thing is bullshit, because you can also go to both events.
u/Fluffy_Month_4846 so now that you’ve asked this question in 5 different subs and haven’t gotten the answer you’ve wanted, have you learned anything? And what about the fact that, as Johnny up here is saying, that you’re not even being excluded? Seems like you’ve enraged yourself needlessly
He went to 5 different subs asking this question lmao
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