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The hackathon that they mention in the post (Mhacks) put up an application process and enforced a 50/50 gender ratio. In the weeks leading up to the event, I ov
by mdxn 11y ago
The hackathon that they mention in the post (Mhacks) put up an application process and enforced a 50/50 gender ratio. In the weeks leading up to the event, I overheard many defeated conversations from fellow CS students over anxiety of getting rejected from this hackathon because they were male. The females didn't share the same anxiety, but it definitely made them feel down that they wouldn't be able to participate with their male friends who were rejected/waitlisted. Overall, the fact that things ended up this way made everyone feel very awkward, guilty, and discouraged. Hopefully its success makes up for the hidden fractures that will be felt by our student body for quite a while after.
Mhacks lists the 50/50 gender divide on their site followed by the reasoning: "because it’s about time for a little change in the tech world"
Disclosure: I am a CS-Eng student at this university. I did not plan to attend or care about this hackathon.
- hueving 11y agoThat's the dumbest barrier I've heard in a long time to enter a hackathon. Your gender shouldn't prevent you from getting into an event to get work done, it should be based on the merit of what you want to do. Did anyone ask if their rejection would be reconsidered if they chopped their penis off?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- collyw 11y agoWe are sexist in this industry apparently, so the way to solve it is to choose people based on their sex....
- turkishrevenge 11y agoJust exploit the identity-political zeitgeist that's overtaken universities lately: claim yourself genderqueer, non-binary presenting as male. With the right incantation, the organizers will fold like a house of cards, lest they suffer the blowback to excluding a "righteous" participant.
- rdtsc 11y agoI hear this is done already with the race thing, I've heard of the "check Hispanic" trick a while back to make it easier to get into collge.
- pluma 11y agoTo be fair the American racial categories seem pretty inane to my non-American eyes to begin with. I understand that there is a lot of cultural baggage to the various categories but I can't count how many times I've been genuinely surprised by Americans identifying as black or Latina/o. The most striking ones I think were Halle Berry and Obama -- it took me a while to process that their recognition was genuinely noteworthy in the US because of their ethnicity. You could have told me Obama were Moroccan or Halle Berry were Indian and I wouldn't have been any more surprised. For context: I'm German, grew up in the 90s in a city with ~1M residents and am literally colorblind (partially green blind). I'm not sure what part of that makes me unable to properly racially categorize people but I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.
- rdtsc 11y agoI grew up in Europe and then moved to US. In US, at least in some context (college admissions for example), there is a thing called affirmative action. It seems in order to right a a wrong from the past, or to promote diversity they would sometimes have quotas on how many students from each background to pick. So depending just on race, one could have an easier or much harder way getting accepted. Therefore people would play that card in order to game the system.
- pluma 11y agoI understand that the legislation/culture around race is in part used to correct historical racism (and the present day consequences of it) but I do wonder whether this obsession with racially categorizing oneself is a necessary evil or just evil.
- dogecoinbase 11y ago
- robowork 11y agoIt's about time we synthetically attempted to skew the gender ratios in an entire industry! Fucktards.
- benten10 11y agoPro tip: It is often a good heuristic to identify a sexist by their use of 'male' and 'female' for humans instead of 'men' and 'women', because it sounds dehumanizing. Call them 'women', never females, etc, etc.