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I'll go straight to the difficult questions: 1. I thought gender-based discrimination was illegal. How is Leap not illegal? 2. One of the main objections of "

I'll go straight to the difficult questions: 1. I thought gender-based discrimination was illegal. How is Leap not illegal? 2. One of the main objections of "gentleman's clubs" was that their (male) members had access to important networking contacts, putting women in unequal foot in an unfair way when it came to businesses. Wouldn't Leap be unfair in the same way?

rev_bird 9y ago
>Wouldn't Leap be unfair in the same way? This assumption completely disregards the measurable advantage men have in the tech community. If you have identical programs, one for a historically disenfranchised group, and one for the group that's been in power for decades, only one of those programs is shitty. edit: "Advantage" was a poor choice of words, but since it's been quoted in replies I'll leave it. I meant something more like "given the gender disparities in the tech community."
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  > This assumption completely disregards the measurable advantage men have in the tech community. There is obviously an imbalance in the industry, but can you please provide proof that this is due to an advantage that men have? > If you have identical programs, one for a historically disenfranchised group, and one for the group that's been in power for decades, only one of those programs is shitty. Why would fighting racism with racism or sexism with sexism be a productive method of correcting imbalances? Wouldn't that just fuel and maintain the disdain between groups?
  - rev_bird 9y ago
    >Why would fighting racism with racism or sexism with sexism be a productive method of correcting imbalances? Wouldn't that just fuel and maintain the disdain between groups? Is this the "all lives matter!" response to this project? It's not a crime to point out that some groups are poorly represented in an industry. Are you saying the solution to "hey, women feel isolated in the tech industry" is to say "Well, let's figure out how to include men too"? If women felt like their discussions were being treated fairly in public forums, they'd have stayed in them.
    - metaphoracle 9y ago
      > If women felt like their discussions were being treated fairly in public forums, they'd have stayed in them. This so much. Most men in tech can have a majority male discussion in any open community, due to their numbers. The amount of disparity from men towards leap in this thread is a prime example of why we women in tech seek to have discussions in more closed environments.
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      > Are you saying the solution to "hey, women feel isolated in the tech industry" is to say "Well, let's figure out how to include men too"? No, my solution to a sense of isolation is instead to find ways for women to no longer feel isolated within their field. A great example with the other sex would be male nurses. Male nurses are definitely the minority in their field, yet they manage to not feel isolated overall. Even if they did, creating a male-nurse-only group wouldn't do a thing to correct the isolation-causing systems in their place of employment, and would only work to further separate male nurses from the majority by isolating them from the wider nursing community. If women feel isolated, we should try to find out why and correct that instead of just sticking them with other isolated women.
      - rev_bird 9y ago
        The only way you'd be able to say "groups like this won't fix feelings of isolation!" is if you ignored all the women in this comment section saying it has definitely helped their feelings of isolation. Which I guess might be kind of the point.
      - jjeaff 9y ago
        >No, my solution to a sense of isolation is instead to find ways for women to no longer feel isolated within their field If you ever wondered what "mansplaining" is, your response is a great example. Gee, maybe having other people like them, having the same problems and discussing them after spending the day surrounded by a 90% plus group of males only is good way to no longer feel isolated. You sound like that boss that has no clue what is going on, pokes his head in the door and offers up "better" solutions to the problem then continues on his way.
  - dang 9y ago
    > Why would fighting racism with racism or sexism with sexism be a productive Here you cross into making this yet another same-old generic ideological thread, thus guaranteeing repetition and tedium. What more we can do to explain to HNers that this is where discussions become off topic because the light/heat ratio goes to zero? I realize the line isn't obvious when a topic starts out close to it anyhow. But you know, it especially isn't obvious when you aren't consciously looking for it in the first place. Since you have a habit of doing this in HN threads and stand out as a user who's done particular damage this way—unintentionally I'm sure—we need you to do a better job with this. Perhaps the following heuristic would help. If a comment breaks away from the specific content of the specific story and becomes generically ideological, it's on the wrong side of the line and you probably should not post it. Note that this doesn't have to do with the ideologies or politics in question, or what view you're arguing for. It has to do with generic discussions being boring in HN's sense of the word. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20generic https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      There definitely is something I'm not understanding if this comment crossed the line. I'm sorry, it's still not my intent to negatively affect the quality of this site. This may seem pedantic, but what do you consider ideological? I said what I said because I saw it as a fundamental flaw of the community. I don't believe fighting discrimination with discrimination is productive, and I believe a woman-only community is discriminatory. Would it have avoided the genericism if I had tied it directly to the thread by saying "I believe this community is wrong because you can't fight discrimination with discrimination?" Or would mentioning discrimination genericize the conversation as well?
      - dang 9y ago
        By ideology I mean something like predictable clusters of ideas around large questions. On HN it doesn't much matter which ideology people subscribe to or battle against—it's all more or less off topic here. There are two reasons. First, all of it is predictable. Each time something gets repeated, its potential to gratify curiosity diminishes. In the case of ideological squabbles, the repetition is so entrenched that there's no curiosity potential left at all. What is has instead is strong conflict potential, meaning that such discussions not only add no value here, they burn up and destroy what does have value. Second, it's all generic. The larger a question is, the harder it is to say meaningful things about it. Signal/noise ratio goes down as topics get more generic. I don't doubt that it's possible for people to find new, meaningful things to say about large generic questions. But internet comments are not the right genre for expressing them. Someone who truly has such ideas would write a book or an essay, for the same reason one wouldn't excavate the foundation for a house with a thimble.
- fvdessen 9y ago
  > The measurable advantage men have in the tech community What is that advantage and how is it measured ?
  - rev_bird 9y ago
    As I noted above, "advantage" was the wrong word, my apologies. There's tons of information out there about the disproportionate number of men working in tech, to say nothing of the salary discrepancies that cause so much drama here. At the end of the day, women say they feel that they feel isolated by an industry that is overwhelmingly male, and that being able to connect with other women and discuss their experiences is a valuable way to stay in a career that they might otherwise bail on. I'm inclined to believe them.
    - eevilspock 9y ago
      What do you mean "advantage" is the wrong word? In general men clearly have an advantage in tech. Denying it is like denying that white people generally have an advantage in America. That you feel compelled to apologize reflects the self-preserving power of this male advantage.
    - fvdessen 9y ago
      > At the end of the day, women say they feel that they feel isolated by an industry that is overwhelmingly male. I would like to offer another point of view; A lot of the males who ended up in that industry are, to be blunt, social rejects. They were not the popular kids in high school, but those guys who were playing magic in the corner. Being a male in IT is a big stigma in the outside world. Nerd and Geek are still insults. There are entire sitcoms (IT Guys, Big Bang Theory) designed to laugh at them. Many dating website have the option to filter out men working in IT. I usually hide the fact that I work in IT and have found it very beneficial. Now that there's money and power involved, things are changing a bit. But I still feel that a large reason that the IT community is like it is because it was simply excluded from society at large for a long time and still is in a way. I think that people coming now and turning the table around with such righteousness is a bit insensitive. How would you feel about being excluded from the club you build for yourself after having been excluded from everywhere else ?
- glorkk 9y ago
  > the measurable advantage men have in the tech community I’m sure if it is “measurable” you can provide some numbers?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - beat 9y ago
    I'm sure you can google them. Or, if you're in a tech office right now, just open your eyes and look around you for anecdotal evidence.
rubicon33 9y ago
I am interested in the answers to these tough questions as well. I can sympathize with the position women are in and can understand the strong desire to form an organization like Leap. To that end, I applaud and support them. However, I do wonder about comments like this: > "a community where the core culture was set by women, and the software and product decisions were also made by women" Progressives are currently combatting this same kind of toxic / exclusionary behavior in men that exacerbates the inequality between men and women to this day.
- lhorie 9y ago
  If you follow that line of reasoning to its extreme logical conclusion, you might arrive at a completely nonsensical argument that former rapists should be allowed to join rape victim support groups. If someone wants to make an argument about equality, one needs to also consider the concept of a safe haven. If a specific type of people are a threat to the safety and well being of a community, the community should have the option to disallow that type of people altogether without being subject to "social justice" pedantry. Condominiums can bar entry to homeless people on the grounds of vandalism prevention and that's perfectly legal and accepted. I don't see how this is much different.
  - chrislynch42 9y ago
    Being a rapist is illegal, while identifying as a man is not. I would think a better analogy is that a rape support group would not allow male victims as most rapists are men.
    - lhorie 9y ago
      _Raping_ is illegal. Being a registered sex offender means you might have served jail time and then released. Whether a rapist feels remorse or whether they've received fair punishment under the law is completely beside the point. Being homeless is certainly not illegal and the thing about condos is still true.
- notyourday 9y ago
tptacek 9y ago
Gender discrimination is obviously not illegal. How do you think rec sports leagues or support groups work?
- probably_wrong 9y ago
  Gender is a protected class, so "it's (not) illegal" in either direction is a bit of a blanket statement. So let me try and be more precise. In some states, AFAIK the "women-only gym" is allowed, but in others it isn't. The point, if I remember correctly, is "exercise requires such compromising clothes and positions, that the right to personal privacy trumps the right to not be discriminated based on gender". And even then, this is not a 100% clear case. Toilets and physical activity follow a similar (although less polemic) pattern. Having said that, and as far as I understand, you need to show that discriminating based on gender is so important for your activity that it can't be done in any other way. My gut feeling is that, should anyone sue Leap, clearing that barrier would not be trivial. I would appreciate a lawyer's point of view, and was hoping that Leap had already talked to one that could give a properly researched answer. Edit: I found a very interesting article[1] about the law when it comes to all-female health clubs. As expected, the conclusion seems to be "it's complicated". [1] http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1155&context=yjlf http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
  - tudorw 9y ago
    me too, i'd hate to think this precedent would allow the creation of men only forums
    - tptacek 9y ago
      You are already welcome to create a man-only forum.
      - to_bpr 9y ago
        >You are already welcome to create a man-only forum. Any man taking such an action in 2018 would likely lose their career over it.
christophilus 9y ago
I think one could easily start a website that was for men only-- a widower support system, say-- and no one would complain. I think you could argue that Leap is somewhat similar to that. It's a support network for a group of people who face a particular challenge and need a safe place to talk.

rev_bird 9y ago

>Wouldn't Leap be unfair in the same way? This assumption completely disregards the measurable advantage men have in the tech community. If you have identical programs, one for a historically disenfranchised group, and one for the group that's been in power for decades, only one of those programs is shitty. edit: "Advantage" was a poor choice of words, but since it's been quoted in replies I'll leave it. I meant something more like "given the gender disparities in the tech community."

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
> This assumption completely disregards the measurable advantage men have in the tech community. There is obviously an imbalance in the industry, but can you please provide proof that this is due to an advantage that men have? > If you have identical programs, one for a historically disenfranchised group, and one for the group that's been in power for decades, only one of those programs is shitty. Why would fighting racism with racism or sexism with sexism be a productive method of correcting imbalances? Wouldn't that just fuel and maintain the disdain between groups?
- rev_bird 9y ago
  >Why would fighting racism with racism or sexism with sexism be a productive method of correcting imbalances? Wouldn't that just fuel and maintain the disdain between groups? Is this the "all lives matter!" response to this project? It's not a crime to point out that some groups are poorly represented in an industry. Are you saying the solution to "hey, women feel isolated in the tech industry" is to say "Well, let's figure out how to include men too"? If women felt like their discussions were being treated fairly in public forums, they'd have stayed in them.
  - metaphoracle 9y ago
    > If women felt like their discussions were being treated fairly in public forums, they'd have stayed in them. This so much. Most men in tech can have a majority male discussion in any open community, due to their numbers. The amount of disparity from men towards leap in this thread is a prime example of why we women in tech seek to have discussions in more closed environments.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    > Are you saying the solution to "hey, women feel isolated in the tech industry" is to say "Well, let's figure out how to include men too"? No, my solution to a sense of isolation is instead to find ways for women to no longer feel isolated within their field. A great example with the other sex would be male nurses. Male nurses are definitely the minority in their field, yet they manage to not feel isolated overall. Even if they did, creating a male-nurse-only group wouldn't do a thing to correct the isolation-causing systems in their place of employment, and would only work to further separate male nurses from the majority by isolating them from the wider nursing community. If women feel isolated, we should try to find out why and correct that instead of just sticking them with other isolated women.
    - rev_bird 9y ago
      The only way you'd be able to say "groups like this won't fix feelings of isolation!" is if you ignored all the women in this comment section saying it has definitely helped their feelings of isolation. Which I guess might be kind of the point.
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      >No, my solution to a sense of isolation is instead to find ways for women to no longer feel isolated within their field If you ever wondered what "mansplaining" is, your response is a great example. Gee, maybe having other people like them, having the same problems and discussing them after spending the day surrounded by a 90% plus group of males only is good way to no longer feel isolated. You sound like that boss that has no clue what is going on, pokes his head in the door and offers up "better" solutions to the problem then continues on his way.
- dang 9y ago
  > Why would fighting racism with racism or sexism with sexism be a productive Here you cross into making this yet another same-old generic ideological thread, thus guaranteeing repetition and tedium. What more we can do to explain to HNers that this is where discussions become off topic because the light/heat ratio goes to zero? I realize the line isn't obvious when a topic starts out close to it anyhow. But you know, it especially isn't obvious when you aren't consciously looking for it in the first place. Since you have a habit of doing this in HN threads and stand out as a user who's done particular damage this way—unintentionally I'm sure—we need you to do a better job with this. Perhaps the following heuristic would help. If a comment breaks away from the specific content of the specific story and becomes generically ideological, it's on the wrong side of the line and you probably should not post it. Note that this doesn't have to do with the ideologies or politics in question, or what view you're arguing for. It has to do with generic discussions being boring in HN's sense of the word. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20generic https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    There definitely is something I'm not understanding if this comment crossed the line. I'm sorry, it's still not my intent to negatively affect the quality of this site. This may seem pedantic, but what do you consider ideological? I said what I said because I saw it as a fundamental flaw of the community. I don't believe fighting discrimination with discrimination is productive, and I believe a woman-only community is discriminatory. Would it have avoided the genericism if I had tied it directly to the thread by saying "I believe this community is wrong because you can't fight discrimination with discrimination?" Or would mentioning discrimination genericize the conversation as well?
    - dang 9y ago
      By ideology I mean something like predictable clusters of ideas around large questions. On HN it doesn't much matter which ideology people subscribe to or battle against—it's all more or less off topic here. There are two reasons. First, all of it is predictable. Each time something gets repeated, its potential to gratify curiosity diminishes. In the case of ideological squabbles, the repetition is so entrenched that there's no curiosity potential left at all. What is has instead is strong conflict potential, meaning that such discussions not only add no value here, they burn up and destroy what does have value. Second, it's all generic. The larger a question is, the harder it is to say meaningful things about it. Signal/noise ratio goes down as topics get more generic. I don't doubt that it's possible for people to find new, meaningful things to say about large generic questions. But internet comments are not the right genre for expressing them. Someone who truly has such ideas would write a book or an essay, for the same reason one wouldn't excavate the foundation for a house with a thimble.
fvdessen 9y ago
> The measurable advantage men have in the tech community What is that advantage and how is it measured ?
- rev_bird 9y ago
  As I noted above, "advantage" was the wrong word, my apologies. There's tons of information out there about the disproportionate number of men working in tech, to say nothing of the salary discrepancies that cause so much drama here. At the end of the day, women say they feel that they feel isolated by an industry that is overwhelmingly male, and that being able to connect with other women and discuss their experiences is a valuable way to stay in a career that they might otherwise bail on. I'm inclined to believe them.
  - eevilspock 9y ago
    What do you mean "advantage" is the wrong word? In general men clearly have an advantage in tech. Denying it is like denying that white people generally have an advantage in America. That you feel compelled to apologize reflects the self-preserving power of this male advantage.
  - fvdessen 9y ago
    > At the end of the day, women say they feel that they feel isolated by an industry that is overwhelmingly male. I would like to offer another point of view; A lot of the males who ended up in that industry are, to be blunt, social rejects. They were not the popular kids in high school, but those guys who were playing magic in the corner. Being a male in IT is a big stigma in the outside world. Nerd and Geek are still insults. There are entire sitcoms (IT Guys, Big Bang Theory) designed to laugh at them. Many dating website have the option to filter out men working in IT. I usually hide the fact that I work in IT and have found it very beneficial. Now that there's money and power involved, things are changing a bit. But I still feel that a large reason that the IT community is like it is because it was simply excluded from society at large for a long time and still is in a way. I think that people coming now and turning the table around with such righteousness is a bit insensitive. How would you feel about being excluded from the club you build for yourself after having been excluded from everywhere else ?
glorkk 9y ago
> the measurable advantage men have in the tech community I’m sure if it is “measurable” you can provide some numbers?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- beat 9y ago
  I'm sure you can google them. Or, if you're in a tech office right now, just open your eyes and look around you for anecdotal evidence.

rubicon33 9y ago

I am interested in the answers to these tough questions as well. I can sympathize with the position women are in and can understand the strong desire to form an organization like Leap. To that end, I applaud and support them. However, I do wonder about comments like this: > "a community where the core culture was set by women, and the software and product decisions were also made by women" Progressives are currently combatting this same kind of toxic / exclusionary behavior in men that exacerbates the inequality between men and women to this day.

lhorie 9y ago
If you follow that line of reasoning to its extreme logical conclusion, you might arrive at a completely nonsensical argument that former rapists should be allowed to join rape victim support groups. If someone wants to make an argument about equality, one needs to also consider the concept of a safe haven. If a specific type of people are a threat to the safety and well being of a community, the community should have the option to disallow that type of people altogether without being subject to "social justice" pedantry. Condominiums can bar entry to homeless people on the grounds of vandalism prevention and that's perfectly legal and accepted. I don't see how this is much different.
- chrislynch42 9y ago
  Being a rapist is illegal, while identifying as a man is not. I would think a better analogy is that a rape support group would not allow male victims as most rapists are men.
  - lhorie 9y ago
    _Raping_ is illegal. Being a registered sex offender means you might have served jail time and then released. Whether a rapist feels remorse or whether they've received fair punishment under the law is completely beside the point. Being homeless is certainly not illegal and the thing about condos is still true.
notyourday 9y ago

tptacek 9y ago

Gender discrimination is obviously not illegal. How do you think rec sports leagues or support groups work?

probably_wrong 9y ago
Gender is a protected class, so "it's (not) illegal" in either direction is a bit of a blanket statement. So let me try and be more precise. In some states, AFAIK the "women-only gym" is allowed, but in others it isn't. The point, if I remember correctly, is "exercise requires such compromising clothes and positions, that the right to personal privacy trumps the right to not be discriminated based on gender". And even then, this is not a 100% clear case. Toilets and physical activity follow a similar (although less polemic) pattern. Having said that, and as far as I understand, you need to show that discriminating based on gender is so important for your activity that it can't be done in any other way. My gut feeling is that, should anyone sue Leap, clearing that barrier would not be trivial. I would appreciate a lawyer's point of view, and was hoping that Leap had already talked to one that could give a properly researched answer. Edit: I found a very interesting article[1] about the law when it comes to all-female health clubs. As expected, the conclusion seems to be "it's complicated". [1] http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1155&context=yjlf http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
- tudorw 9y ago
  me too, i'd hate to think this precedent would allow the creation of men only forums
  - tptacek 9y ago
    You are already welcome to create a man-only forum.
    - to_bpr 9y ago
      >You are already welcome to create a man-only forum. Any man taking such an action in 2018 would likely lose their career over it.

christophilus 9y ago

I think one could easily start a website that was for men only-- a widower support system, say-- and no one would complain. I think you could argue that Leap is somewhat similar to that. It's a support network for a group of people who face a particular challenge and need a safe place to talk.