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I'm going to piggy-back on your comment here solely because I've appreciated your comments in the past: There clearly are talented women in tech (and other fie

I'm going to piggy-back on your comment here solely because I've appreciated your comments in the past: There clearly are talented women in tech (and other fields, I know a pretty amazing CEO), and clearly this is a problem that a lot of men aren't "getting", in the sense that either they don't see it as a problem or they don't know what to do about it. Do you think there's an opportunity yet for some of the leading women in tech to start collaborating on projects together, just to see how that goes? i.e., conferences where both genders are invited, but the organizers are strictly (or at least mostly) women. I'm partly curious to see if there would still be some of the same personality conflicts, but mostly, I'm starting to think that excluding guys from awesome things might be the best way to change behavior.

acgourley 14y ago
RockHealth is run by all women right now. AFAIK that outcome is not dictated by any founding principal, merely inertia. They are doing phenomenal, so there is one data point for you.
RobertHoudin 14y ago
"excluding guys from awesome things might be the best way to change behavior" Yes. That won't back-fire. At all.
rachelbythebay 14y ago
I'd like to see it happen but I can't imagine it would be an easy thing to do. I've seen a small number of people lash out at being "roped into" a group that was women this or women that. They did not want to be a part of it. You might think those people who reacted badly would be guys. They were not. They were women. I got the impression from one of them that her thought process went something like this: "I'm currently accepted as 'one of the guys' and as a result I am successful in this lopsided environment, so how dare you loop me in and remind them that I'm different?"... I was surprised by this, but it's real. I saw it happen when someone created a new group for women engineers of some sort at Google and auto-subscribed a bunch of people. There was a small but distinct amount of pushback from a few new members. So, really, I guess you'd have to find people who don't care if they come off differently (relative to the overwhelming majority) because they are in fact different. Then find the members of that set who are willing to take such a risk, and then the members of that set who have the resources to attempt it. Unfortunately, this kind of filtering effect doesn't yield a lot of people in my experience.

acgourley 14y ago

RockHealth is run by all women right now. AFAIK that outcome is not dictated by any founding principal, merely inertia. They are doing phenomenal, so there is one data point for you.

RobertHoudin 14y ago

"excluding guys from awesome things might be the best way to change behavior" Yes. That won't back-fire. At all.

rachelbythebay 14y ago

I'd like to see it happen but I can't imagine it would be an easy thing to do. I've seen a small number of people lash out at being "roped into" a group that was women this or women that. They did not want to be a part of it. You might think those people who reacted badly would be guys. They were not. They were women. I got the impression from one of them that her thought process went something like this: "I'm currently accepted as 'one of the guys' and as a result I am successful in this lopsided environment, so how dare you loop me in and remind them that I'm different?"... I was surprised by this, but it's real. I saw it happen when someone created a new group for women engineers of some sort at Google and auto-subscribed a bunch of people. There was a small but distinct amount of pushback from a few new members. So, really, I guess you'd have to find people who don't care if they come off differently (relative to the overwhelming majority) because they are in fact different. Then find the members of that set who are willing to take such a risk, and then the members of that set who have the resources to attempt it. Unfortunately, this kind of filtering effect doesn't yield a lot of people in my experience.