4 ms·

Western men "kick the living crap out of" women who speak their mind like that? And tell her "to STFU"? I think you're confusing the West with countries like S

by pcf 6y ago

Western men "kick the living crap out of" women who speak their mind like that? And tell her "to STFU"? I think you're confusing the West with countries like Saudi Arabia.

DoreenMichele 6y ago
Mmm, hmmm. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24317792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24317792
- luckylion 6y ago
  You are mixing up traditions that are optional, voluntary and more role play than anything else (as if it was common that a Western man in a Western country would ask the father of the bride to be instead of her; it's, for some people, a formality after the couple has decided to get married, and everybody plays their part) with state law with heavy punishment. Similarly: it's tradition to say "until death do us part" in marriage vows, but essentially nobody means it, divorce is common. "There are crazy drops in a sea of sane people" != "There's a sea of crazy people, but I've seen a sane drop or two".
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    I'm really not mixing up anything. Please, kindly, don't tell me I simply have muddled thinking and no real validity to my point of view. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of HN. I spent nearly six years homeless while a member here. I remain dirt poor. Meanwhile, some of the men on the leaderboard are millionaires who made their millions in part by networking via HN. The figures for women in leadership positions at Fortune 500 companies is something like 6 percent female CEOs and 17 percent overall. There appears to be one and only one woman on HN to have ever graced the leaderboard, a list of 100 names that has changed over time. So my brief appearance there puts me in a league of my own and well under one percent of those names is someone who posts as openly female. Yet all most men here want to know if they email me is if I will sleep with them. So HN has been a huge networking fail for me and I remain dirt poor. Since that poverty means I can't afford to eat today, I'm a hair crankier than usual about the whole thing. Sexism is alive and well in the West and the gains we've made fall very far short of anything resembling equality. I think I'm done here for now. My story is not remotely a secret. It's galling how I get treated here and then told to quit my whining about my poverty. In discussions of gender equality, so it's on topic. It's just not welcome and this is a silencing tactic that helps ensure I can never get any kind of remedy.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Doreen, as someone who is here fairly often, I appreciate the perspective you provide, as it’s one that’s uncommon here and I (and judging by the fact that you have been on the leaderboard) and Hacker News finds very valuable. While I’m nowhere near being a millionaire, I’m young, male, and fairly removed from being in any sort of poverty; I think you would be right in your claim that on the leaderboard there is probably nobody with the same experience as you, while you could say I bring comparatively little that is novel “to the table” if you will. That being said, a couple things you’ve mentioned that I wanted to talk about: one is that you’re one of the only women, or poor people on this site (I noticed you’ve qualified it with “leaderboard”, but I suspect you know as well as I do that this is highly correlated to “how much do you use the site”). I won’t claim in any way that this group forms a majority of course, but I have run women who qualify themselves as being a woman in pretty much every thread where it would make sense to do so. I see people who are poor, perhaps living in countries where wages are an order of magnitude lower than they are in say the US, some that don’t have a roof over their heads or have been skipping meals. So these people are here, and I am glad to hear from them just as I am glad to hear from you as well. In addition, you’re not really being fair to Hacker News with your claim that men here would only email you to see if you would be interested in them. Some might, of course–as you mention, sexism is a real thing, it exists everywhere including in what we would call “western countries”. But it’s something that Hacker News is not about, nor is it acceptable behavior; the majority of men are not how you’re describing them to be. You mention that you haven’t been able to network effectively, but of course Hacker News skews heavily into recruiting people with college degrees in computer science, maybe multiple programming languages under their belt, maybe a fresh graduate or someone with experience at another software engineering company. We can talk all about whether this is what Hacker News should be about, and perhaps if it should branch out into being more welcoming to people of your background, but I just wanted to point out that I don’t think that you can necessarily correlate your experience with “nobody wants to network with me because I talk about being a woman and also being poor”. To be clear: we’re not saying there isn’t a problem in the US with sexist, or trying to downplay your hardships both in life and on Hacker News in particular. But on a topic of “is life worse for women in Saudi Arabia or the United States” your personal experience with sexism is anecdotal and answers the question “is there still sexism in the United States”.

by pcf 6y ago

Western men "kick the living crap out of" women who speak their mind like that? And tell her "to STFU"? I think you're confusing the West with countries like Saudi Arabia.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

Mmm, hmmm. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24317792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24317792

luckylion 6y ago
You are mixing up traditions that are optional, voluntary and more role play than anything else (as if it was common that a Western man in a Western country would ask the father of the bride to be instead of her; it's, for some people, a formality after the couple has decided to get married, and everybody plays their part) with state law with heavy punishment. Similarly: it's tradition to say "until death do us part" in marriage vows, but essentially nobody means it, divorce is common. "There are crazy drops in a sea of sane people" != "There's a sea of crazy people, but I've seen a sane drop or two".
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I'm really not mixing up anything. Please, kindly, don't tell me I simply have muddled thinking and no real validity to my point of view. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of HN. I spent nearly six years homeless while a member here. I remain dirt poor. Meanwhile, some of the men on the leaderboard are millionaires who made their millions in part by networking via HN. The figures for women in leadership positions at Fortune 500 companies is something like 6 percent female CEOs and 17 percent overall. There appears to be one and only one woman on HN to have ever graced the leaderboard, a list of 100 names that has changed over time. So my brief appearance there puts me in a league of my own and well under one percent of those names is someone who posts as openly female. Yet all most men here want to know if they email me is if I will sleep with them. So HN has been a huge networking fail for me and I remain dirt poor. Since that poverty means I can't afford to eat today, I'm a hair crankier than usual about the whole thing. Sexism is alive and well in the West and the gains we've made fall very far short of anything resembling equality. I think I'm done here for now. My story is not remotely a secret. It's galling how I get treated here and then told to quit my whining about my poverty. In discussions of gender equality, so it's on topic. It's just not welcome and this is a silencing tactic that helps ensure I can never get any kind of remedy.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Doreen, as someone who is here fairly often, I appreciate the perspective you provide, as it’s one that’s uncommon here and I (and judging by the fact that you have been on the leaderboard) and Hacker News finds very valuable. While I’m nowhere near being a millionaire, I’m young, male, and fairly removed from being in any sort of poverty; I think you would be right in your claim that on the leaderboard there is probably nobody with the same experience as you, while you could say I bring comparatively little that is novel “to the table” if you will. That being said, a couple things you’ve mentioned that I wanted to talk about: one is that you’re one of the only women, or poor people on this site (I noticed you’ve qualified it with “leaderboard”, but I suspect you know as well as I do that this is highly correlated to “how much do you use the site”). I won’t claim in any way that this group forms a majority of course, but I have run women who qualify themselves as being a woman in pretty much every thread where it would make sense to do so. I see people who are poor, perhaps living in countries where wages are an order of magnitude lower than they are in say the US, some that don’t have a roof over their heads or have been skipping meals. So these people are here, and I am glad to hear from them just as I am glad to hear from you as well. In addition, you’re not really being fair to Hacker News with your claim that men here would only email you to see if you would be interested in them. Some might, of course–as you mention, sexism is a real thing, it exists everywhere including in what we would call “western countries”. But it’s something that Hacker News is not about, nor is it acceptable behavior; the majority of men are not how you’re describing them to be. You mention that you haven’t been able to network effectively, but of course Hacker News skews heavily into recruiting people with college degrees in computer science, maybe multiple programming languages under their belt, maybe a fresh graduate or someone with experience at another software engineering company. We can talk all about whether this is what Hacker News should be about, and perhaps if it should branch out into being more welcoming to people of your background, but I just wanted to point out that I don’t think that you can necessarily correlate your experience with “nobody wants to network with me because I talk about being a woman and also being poor”. To be clear: we’re not saying there isn’t a problem in the US with sexist, or trying to downplay your hardships both in life and on Hacker News in particular. But on a topic of “is life worse for women in Saudi Arabia or the United States” your personal experience with sexism is anecdotal and answers the question “is there still sexism in the United States”.