The stage of creating women-only and women-focused groups ( and buying into the diminutive labeling the original author hates ), is what happens after you have a bunch of really, really, really shitty interactions.

Thus, I think it is likely the author simply hasn't had the kind of really poor interactions & groping & whatnot, and she doesn't mention it in her post.

I am passionate about this because my significant other is a woman, and she's in tech. I know plenty of other women in technology. Most of them aren't deeply involved in "women-in-tech" and prefer a low-key evangelizing of the great women that have been in tech, combined with fleeing from companies that employ ... jerks ... who harass and ignore.

I was very happy that, in my startup under my leadership, we had a 50% male-female ratio. Subsequently, as CTO without much staff, that ratio has steadily decreased, and we are now down to 0% women in engineering. While that can be sampling error ( we don't have a 1000 member engineering staff ), it does give me pause.

The women technologists I know don't specifically slag the "women-in-tech" movement as the author did, I suspect because they do realize the magnitude of the problem is great enough that multiple points of pressure are required. Simply being great isn't enough, and the problem is getting worse not better - but there are likely other reasons.

That said, I definitely recoil at the idea of being selected for any role or being treated differently simply because I'm female, since I would put my own abilities up against my male peers without hesitation. Special treatment feels condescending.

Also we have more initiatives than ever trying to get women into tech yet the numbers are at an all time low, shouldn't we admit that we need to change our approach?

Why do women-only tech events bother you? Do you think women are meeting up to exert power over you?

You could say that doing something is better than doing nothing even if it is worthless, but I don't agree. Celebrating tokenism just means that companies will pat themselves on their backs for implement these token measures and then forget about their diversity problem.

Perhaps you can see why being told by you (presumably a man) that they shouldn't do the thing that they want to do because you know what's best for them might not go down well? Be my guest :)

You'll find that people make choices for reasons other than industry statistics. Many people feel more comfortable at those events because mainstream events can have conduct issues and bias issues.

Of course exclusive events are far from an ideal, but labelling them as "worthless" misunderstands why people do them.

The gender war has nothing compared to the class war. A rich black girl has more privilege than a white trailer park boy.

Huge difference in network and in knowledge of what is available for education and financial investment.

And guess what part of the working world has given the most opportunities to get out of the gutter the last 3 decades? Tech. So when trust-fund people start complaining on behalf of women, it can feel like class warfare.

For example, if mens only clubs and events are wrong, then so too are women only events.

I notice a lot of people saying what you're saying, that safe spaces or clubs for certain types of people are the "reverse" of whatever ___ism they're trying to address.

Certainly you realize there are systemic issues that are causing much greater offenses to the idea of "fundamental fairness" yet you seem to concentrate specifically on minor conceptual issues with the methods of the people trying to address it. That's pretty telling.

Fundamental fairness is that we should treat each other equally. I think we should treat each other equally, regardless of skin colour, religion, or gender. I abhor sexual harassment and believe that people should get equal pay for equal work.

I also think like the author of this blog post that splitting people into smaller tribes creates an us vs them environment and makes everyone worse off.

I didn't focus on this 'one aspect' the person above asked how people thought about it and I responded why I didn't like those things.

I didn't get the sense that she's trying to change anything. She's just trying to be a person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ&t=12s

Are millennials attached do their cellphones? Yes .. so are mothers, fathers, grandparents and some dogs. It's literally the most compact and powerful communication and computational device we've ever had. When you break down all the labels, all you really have is people. Talk to them like people.

You'd think people would have figured this out centuries ago, yet we still self-segregate and divide ourselves wherever possible. Shame.

On top of that their are cognitive biases like I got an CS degree so getting a CS degree must be a good idea. Therefore I will give preference to others with a CS degree.

PS: Men do face discrimination in female dominated fields, and being white can often hurt your chances for various things. But, while dead weight losses exist the incentives often favor discrimination even if it's called networking.

I'm curious if anyone has thoughts to what might change this.

This is just speculation on my part, but the only way we'll achieve cohesion as a species is if/when we encounter intelligent alien life. We'll still be tribal, but at an interplanetary level.

Why do you resist? We only wish to raise the quality of life for all...

Course, same solution for them too. Back off Borg. If your society's so great, sell it to me, don't force yourself on me.

But the more people working along side me who I can collaborate with, the better. That only makes both our jobs easier. It doesn't matter what you label yourself as. If labels are getting in the way of our mutual increased success by arbitrarily keeping you from working with me as an equal, why wouldn't I want to help?

It's not like that at all. Ideologies exist on a spectrum. And there are some on the extreme ends that are so reprehensible that there's no good reason to find a way to include them in any reasonable dialog.

I don't care how hurt someone feels if they can't find a safe space to talk about their racist ideas. If you're a little racist on the inside, fine, just be uncomfortable and don't be racist on the outside. We're not here to police how people think but you better watch how you behave. I won't feel sorry for you if someone punches you in the face.

The real problem is that centuries of oppression have made sexism normal. It's part of the institution. It's invisible to most people. There isn't a clear label you can apply to people to sort out whose sexist. It's everywhere. How do you fight something like that?

I want it to be normal as hell to be a woman/person of colour/queer/etc-in-tech (and the rest of the world). I don't look at programs that give people recognition or assistance as a pity-party or somehow makes them less. I see it as evening the playing field... but it's only treating a symptom. The harder battle is curing the disease.

If you don't want these "programs" to exist at the professional level, you have to go all the back to college and high school. You can only continue to treat symptoms through affirmative action, because that is the cycle we're stuck in. That is the disease you are identifying. People who are propped up by outside assistance will naturally continue to depend on those props and leech resources at a disproportionate rate.

When these props are removed, the whole thing comes crashing down and we'll be forced to face the reality that these issues can't be fixed from a top down approach. Hiring more women or minorities into tech won't trickle down into incentivizing more women/minorities to major in Computer Science. Accepting more women/minorities into CS programs won't encourage more women/minorities to become interested in nerdy stuff in high school.

The real disease is third party intervention. Thinking all the world's problems can be solved as long as it looks like somebody's doing something for a long enough period of time. All that does is allow under-qualified individuals to shit the pool for the demographic that they represent and reinforce negative perspectives until people who pay for productive work can't turn a blind eye and then get punched in the face I suppose.

Sure, we need to get more women into the pipeline. But we also need to not be pushing them out of the industry because they don't want to be groped, ignored, or otherwise disrespected.

In my experience, every woman I've worked with in tech has been above average or excellent. It's the men I've worked with who are much more variable in skill.

I heard a woman on this phenomenon in a podcast, saying that we'll know we actually reach gender parity when there are women working in tech who are below average in skill. And we're not there yet; women in tech tend to the exceptional. Women who stay are the ones who couldn't imagine doing something else because they're so good at tech.

it seems like diversity and inclusion are at odds. id like to feel okay with my unfasionable identity, too. highlighting how different i am from others helps to discourage inclusion by them-ing my peers.

The spirit is one where we're not living in a system that encourages to sub-consciously bias ourselves against others.

I'd like it if my friends didn't have to succeed in spite of all the time whereas I get a (pretty much) free ride.

We've heard the same arguments from white supremacists in 1991 when Christopher Hitchens graciously hosted John Metzger Jr. (and Sr!) on his show. It was the same line then that these wet alt-right nationalists are using today: pride, freedom of speech, censorship. It didn't work on his show then and I'm not going to be fooled by this petty idea that we need to include every voice in the discussion. That's not the case and we need to maintain an "us versus them" attitude when it comes to defending ourselves against such abhorrent ideology.

The problem is not unapproachable. It takes time to change hundreds of years of oppression and institutionalized behaviour.

It's not a very high ground. It's more like a sunny hill. I think you protest too much.

I'm just an average, under-achieving person who tries really hard like most people here.

In a word, the thing that tells me which ideas are worth debating and which to ignore? Ethics.

Immigration policy is already a hot topic for many reasons. There are reasonable positions to take on various questions. Should we increase the number of allowed refugees this year in order to meet our international disaster relief commitments? A reasonable position would be, "No, the recent economic downturn has forced us to cut funding to essential services that are already operating at peak capacity; allowing more refugees in might put them into more harms way as we struggle to find out what we can do with them." What about the question, should we incarcerate and mass-deport people of X ethnic minority because they're taking our jobs and using our under-funded healthcare system? That's not even a debate worth having: the question is based in nationalist protectionism and racist ideology. It is unethical.

How about the "all lives matter" debate? Bunk. The only reason to argue against BLM is to continue stealing the spotlight from a very noble and necessary cause.

Don't even get me started on the anti-feminist rhetoric of MRAs. "Debate," there is just a trollish tactic to harass people.

There isn't a leg to stand on for these ideologies and positions. They're ethically and morally reprehensible and completely unreasonable. There's no debate to be had. The people who insist on debating in favour of them do so without a credible argument or position. They only want to continue the "debate" to keep attention away from the real arguments. It's a waste of time.

The only reason the Metzger interview was interesting to me was as a demonstration of just how weak and pathetic these people are. There's no reason for anyone to take the Metzger's of the world seriously at all. Rather we should take the proliferation of their ideas seriously and should stamp them out everywhere we find them.

Why NOT separate yourselves into an "us" vs "them"? Why should oppressed people try to "work together" with their oppressors?

If you're so interested the effectiveness of social movements, why haven't you looked at cases like Susan Fowler's to see how little it accomplishes to "work together", or within the system, "to find a solution"?

What rulebook, exactly, should people consult when organizing to stop awful shit from happening? Let us know so we can tell which methods are kosher with you. In the meantime maybe start holding the perpetrators to the same rigorous standard of moral behavior.

How exactly do support groups for women in STEM tear at the fabric of society? How does it do so in such a way that actively excluding them doesn't (via harassment and other boundaries), and why aren't you equally critical of those people?

Then there are alternatives solutions which don't include either inclusivity nor exclusivity. Instead you address underlying issues that create the unwanted behavior. That too would not be people pretending that the problem don't exist, but rather a indirect way to solve the problem.

Different solutions have different drawbacks and benefits. Criticism of one don't mean the denial of the problem.

Take the "black lives matter" movement. If we followed the OPs advice, they should just protest that "all lives matter" instead, which is precisely what their opposition is doing (e.g. blue lives matter, all lives matter), to diminish their campaign.

I understand how it can be annoying to be labeled or be associated with a group, even if you don't want to, but this problem is not going to be solved if it's not identified and that is what is going on. I think she's just reading too much into it.

Modernism (and I'm talking as far back as the early 1900s, and arguably, even earlier than that) has eroded our sense community. Our communication tech has, over the past few centuries, have allowed people to talk to each other at greater physical distance while at the same time, created more emotional distance from each other. While modernism might have produced great advancement in science and technology and challenged traditional dogmas, it also threw out a lot of what we needed from those traditions. Community-building is one of them.

Movements that are trying to raise awareness on problems and change don't always have a clear idea on what happens after the fight is over: can you imagine still living, working, and playing with those people after all is said and done?

Take "Black Lives Matter", or even "All Lives Matter". People voice their deep concerns, the ugly things get aired out. And after all of that, can you see yourself living next door? Your children playing and going to school together? Going to the pub after a town hall meeting? Barbecue at the park on a summer day? Borrow each other's tools? Asking each other for advice? Taking in one of the kids after school because your neighbor is busy that day?

Or do you get a sense of fear, disgust, resentment, contempt, or despair?

The "black lives matter" movement is a great example of a movement being required because they have been shut out of a "community" that already exists. That community being their actual community they live in. The community is the problem. All those things you have listed -- fear, disgust, resentment, contempt, despair -- are things black people have experienced against them at the hands of our government/police and that is why BLM exists, and that is why a movement is needed to change the community. Just like the civil rights movement, which is not over.

I agree many movements do not have clear goals, but that often speaks to their poor leadership (e.g. occupy wall street), not a problem of movements in general or their grievances. Look at the civil rights movement. I think movements often arrive because the community has failed them.

I would be interesting in hearing more practical examples of how a community would better solve some of these problems (or historical 20th century problems) over a movement, or what that distinction truly is or means. Definitely curious!

Yes, that's the obvious response. There is also the other responses: that you can live with white people without fear, resentment, anger, disgust, or despair. Like being able to go onto a bus and not have judgements made on you that you're dangerous or seeing fear flicker in white people's faces, and in turn, put on a blank mask because to get angry will confirm all those fears. (Disclaimer: I'm not black; I people-watch a lot). There's a mirroring effect that happens where you don't know whose fear it is, or whose fear "started" it.

> I would be interesting in hearing more practical examples of how a community would better solve some of these problems (or historical 20th century problems) over a movement, or what that distinction truly is or means. Definitely curious!

I would too. This is the first time I am trying out these ideas outside my circle of friends, so I'm still working out concrete examples and brainstorming with others.

That was why my attempt here started with an empathy-visualization exercise to test the waters.

Here's another test: in my yuppie neighborhood I live in within metro Phoenix (which isn't my first choice, but family circumstances ... ) people get very passionate about homeless people on Next Door. There are vocal people who wants to kick them out and a smaller, but just as vocal group that talks about what it is like to be homeless. Some people want to call the cops. Some people reported a soup kitchen as a homeless hangout. (There _are_ people who case homes, or things like use card skimmers to steal credit cards, or try to arrange for a busted tire in order to corner a woman driving alone; it isn't as if this place was crime-free either).

Using this frame about community, we can ask these questions: are homeless and vagrants a part of this local community or not? Can you see yourself living with them? Or do you feel disgust and fear?

It's best to test for emotional reactions where your personal body and your family -- especially your children -- may actually be under threat. (In the esoteric martial arts, we call this "heart living under the sword": can you _really_ maintain loving-kindness even in face of threat, danger, and aggression?)

We definitely need better communities, especially as religion becomes less popular in America and that was the traditional community before. Stable life-long jobs and unions are also leaving which are another form of secular community. So people are definitely more isolated. And if we are isolated from people who are different than us, including black people, it will make these kind of fears more pronounced as we often fear the unknown or give in to the loudest stereotypes.

I also live in a yuppie neighborhood, in Denver, which has one of the highest homeless rates in the country. My view on the homeless is that I really don't mind them as a group, but some of them are trouble, just like some non-homeless people are trouble. Never had a violent interaction with a "homeless person" or felt scared by the existence of homeless people. The homeless are part of my community, they live in my community. They are people...without homes, but they are still humans.

So, you ask whether you can maintain loving kindness in the face of threat/danger/aggression? I'm saying there is no such thing that exists on a daily basis. I don't fear any homeless person unless they approach me in a way that says they mean harm to me personally.

I think it's important for Americans to see the homeless in our neighborhoods, ESPECIALLY us yuppies, so that we can be reminded of what a shameful failure it is that the richest country in the world still has a homeless problem this bad. And we can privatize and segregate ourselves as much as possible in our homes and parks to shield us from it, but we can't eject homeless people from a city that we have to share.

The split between Lutherans and Catholicism is not a good example of community building. That is an example of exchanges of ideologies and dogma, not really about the exchanges of people and community. A slightly better example might be when my friend brought a group of Thai Theraveda Buddhist monks to visit a colony of Trappist monks outside of Atlanta. They got into the sanctuary and were amazed by the acoustics. The Buddhist monks tried out some chants and then Trappist monks performed some of their own chants. They could do that despite differences in philosophy because there was a sense of ultimately belonging to the greatest whole. It is also not a good example because monks are not ordinary people.

Have you read any of the philosophies about modernism? I think you're conflating religions with the traditional modes. Philosopher Ken Wilbur has some great stuff to say about this. One of the characteristics of traditional, pre-modern communities has to do with this idea of the Great Chain of Being. The name is specific to Western ideas, but the generalization of the "Great Chain of Being" covers a lot of ground, even into Eastern philosophies as well as indigenous, tribal cultures.

It is this knowing that you are part of a greater whole (and that greater whole is part of an even larger greater whole, and that greater whole is a part of a larger greater whole). Religions used to provide that sense of knowing where you belong -- but so did tribal cultures without organized religions. This sense of belonging used to be normative and now it is not. Stable, long-term jobs and unions were imperfect substitutes for what modernism broke. Our hyper-connectedness has exacerbated that separation.

On Facebook, for example, people seek out other like-minded people, not to connect (like you were saying in your homeless example), but more to reinforce psychological ego (the beliefs, narratives, and identities a person develops for a false sense of self). Connection requires opening up, of allowing the social masks to be vulnerable, of mutual impact and sharing. That generally does not happen on Facebook (instagram/snapchat/etc).

> So, you ask whether you can maintain loving kindness in the face of threat/danger/aggression? I'm saying there is no such thing that exists on a daily basis. I don't fear any homeless person unless they approach me in a way that says they mean harm to me personally.

Like you, I generally don't fear the homeless. When I lived in Seattle, there were many that lived out in the neighborhood I lived at, more easily found there than in Phoenix. (You have to hide from the sun in Phoenix).

However, I think you live in a very narrow, and sheltered view. There are places in the world where people do live in fear, on a daily basis. My point is exactly that: threats and aggression to someone's life often brings them much closer to ugly parts of themselves. There are not many people in the world who can actually maintain loving-kindness in face of existential threats. While it is possible, generally, ideals tend to get thrown out the window when the pressure is on and shit hits the fan.

> I think it's important for Americans to see the homeless in our neighborhoods, ESPECIALLY us yuppies, so that we can be reminded of what a shameful failure it is that the richest country in the world still has a homeless problem this bad.

Americans living in rural areas also have it bad, but are not exactly "homeless". One of the cherished ideals is this idea of self-reliance. From their perspectives, all those city folks are crazy. And rural folks would not see themselves as being a part of the richest country in the world. Much of that wealth-building had passed them by too. Seeing laws and government policies that favor disadvantaged groups -- who are largely city-dwellers, must rub 'em the wrong way in a bad way.

That might have been more effective, even if it isn't as fair or correct.

Hard to say, but in the lead up to the the latest US presidential election, there were many movements that I absolutely agreed with that I wish had shut up for just 1 year, because I could seem them fueling resentment on 'the other side' much more than energizing their own side. The rural side of my family was in the middle of being completely out of their minds over having a black president and gay marriage made legal when media started pushing for black lives matter and transgenders in bathrooms. They revolted, and now we have a moron as a president. "Deepened the divide" indeed.

This may be an evolution in my own thinking, that there can be more important things than being "right". Think long term.

It's also a lot easier to tell someone else to wait when you're not the one that has had their rights violated. If these are truly rights and not privileges, then waiting any time at all really makes no sense.

I do understand what you're saying, thinking about the bigger picture, but I think it's dangerous path. We have to accept some short-term losses for the greater good. It could be argued that Obamacare was the reason Congress was handed over to the GOP. But now look at how the discussion has changed in America about healthcare -- it's less about whether people should be covered and mostly about what it's going to cost in premiums.

Just a hypothetical, but can you imagine any of the gun owners in America going along with a "just wait" strategy if Obama had banned guns?

Of course, those who passed this compromise may have been thinking: well let's not rock the boat or we won't have a Constitution! So maybe let's wait a year or five and revisit...

How did that work out for them? Or the slaves?

Hardly[0]. Don't believe the hype. The GOP won using gerrymandering, voter-suppression tactics and clever electoral positioning. Its tools: Voter ID laws and propaganda that deactivated potential voters.

0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...

It's been shown that voter fraud in several districts was much higher than previously expected or proposed.

I'm against a lot of the propaganda, and frankly the gerrymandering pisses me off to no end. But saying that requiring an ID to vote is excessive is pretty much out of line with the reality of living in society today.

>  In states where the voter identification laws did not change between ’12 and ’16, turnout was up +1.3%. In states where ID laws changed to non-strict (AL, NH, RI) turnout increased less, and was only up by +0.7%. In states where ID laws changed to strict (MS, VA, WI) turnout actually decreased by – 1.7%.

https://www.thenation.com/article/a-black-man-brought-3-form...

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/24490932/ns/politics-decision_08/t...

When you can vote with a gun license and not with a student ID, you know exactly what they're doing.

Regarding gun license vs. student id, student ids don't indicate nation of birth, or non-citizenship. Though, I don't think a gun license should either. But I'm not in favor of gun licensing as a general rule.

I'm not trying to belittle anyone's struggle here, but I wouldn't expect to put off getting my ID renewed for however long, then take care of it right before voting. Depending on residence, it might be easier to get an absentee ballot. Beyond this, not every state has enacted voter laws the same, or made it nearly as difficult to get a state issued ID.

It comes down to a question of fundamentally, who are we as a people? Air travel doesn't define who we are as Americans. We believe, fundamentally, that citizens have the unalienable, inviolable right to democratically elect their representatives in government. It's literally [EDIT: We've fought long and hard for it to be] in the contract :)

>It is not hard for me, therefore it is not hard. These people should have just had the foresight, resources and knowledge of their local regulations to prepare all the documentation they needed to vote beforehand.

I hope by stating it this way you see the strategy for what it is: a formula for denying citizens--with the right to vote--the ability to do so.

It's a classic onboarding funnel problem. Ask any Product Engineer worth their salt: if you're trying to get people to do a thing: buy a product, click a button, etc, you minimize the number of barriers to that action. This does the opposite, for no good reason.

>Beyond this, not every state has enacted voter laws the same, or made it nearly as difficult to get a state issued ID. [Therefore it is not a problem]

Remember Trump only won because certain key states swung by tiny margins. These states resurrected Jim Crow Voting Restriction laws, sold them as a solution to a problem that doesn't statistically occur, and affected the outcome in real, measurable ways. (See zimpenfish's response.)

It matters. And the GOP is gearing up to take the strategy national.

http://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/no-drivers...

And people voted for him because they liked what he had to say. Not sure why you're looking for some magical reason why he was elected.

It's never that simple :)

What does "better campaign" mean exactly?