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Actually what happened was that the post triggered the flamewar detector. And judging from the comments, correctly so.

by pg 14y ago

mwetzler 14y ago
Good to know, thanks for responding. I fear that Hacker News flaggers are now over-generalizing "complaining about sexism" and lumping anything near that into the category of "nothing left to say". My post was about what companies can do when they are faced with a gender PR problem. I'm glad it got some reads from the community, but I'm sad it got dismissed so quickly due to flaming in the comments. This leads me to question the algorithm for flamewar detection, since it seemed like a valuable conversation. I also fear Hacker News readers are mistaking "complaining about sexism" as an attack or complaint about males in general. I think that's why we get so many defensive, flaming comments in threads discussing gender bias. This behavior only proves how much being male is engrained into the identity and culture of the tech community. When a woman says something about the tech community, males feel their gender is being attacked and very emotional posts result. I consider myself a member of the tech community working on building it, not a person attacking it, so this response was unexpected. This is a good lesson to consider when writing about gender in the future. There is a lot of good work we can do together to get more women into tech, and to give women here more confidence (did you know there has been a flight of women from the industry?). As tech becomes such a vital part of every company, I feel women are missing a huge opportunity if we don't become more involved here. Women need more encouragement than men do to make a go in this industry. I think that's worth writing about. So many bay area companies are doing great things to help with this cause. That's part of why I was so shocked that the online community was so dismissive of this post. I have another post planned to try to inspire the tech community to get more engaged. The reason these posts keep coming up is that there is still a lot we can do to make working in this industry better (if we can agree that having more technically skilled women is something worth working toward). I believe discussions about how to attract, maintain, and train developers are important to this community. I also believe there is a lot of opportunity in encouraging women to build skills and join us. I ask the Hacker News admins and flaggers of my post today to please consider the value of this discussion. PS: I think I will make it a point not to use "Sexism" in the title for future posts. Hopefully that will help.

Actually what happened was that the post triggered the flamewar detector. And judging from the comments, correctly so.

by pg 14y ago

Actually what happened was that the post triggered the flamewar detector. And judging from the comments, correctly so.

Good to know, thanks for responding. I fear that Hacker News flaggers are now over-generalizing "complaining about sexism" and lumping anything near that into the category of "nothing left to say". My post was about what companies can do when they are faced with a gender PR problem. I'm glad it got some reads from the community, but I'm sad it got dismissed so quickly due to flaming in the comments. This leads me to question the algorithm for flamewar detection, since it seemed like a valuable conversation. I also fear Hacker News readers are mistaking "complaining about sexism" as an attack or complaint about males in general. I think that's why we get so many defensive, flaming comments in threads discussing gender bias. This behavior only proves how much being male is engrained into the identity and culture of the tech community. When a woman says something about the tech community, males feel their gender is being attacked and very emotional posts result. I consider myself a member of the tech community working on building it, not a person attacking it, so this response was unexpected. This is a good lesson to consider when writing about gender in the future. There is a lot of good work we can do together to get more women into tech, and to give women here more confidence (did you know there has been a flight of women from the industry?). As tech becomes such a vital part of every company, I feel women are missing a huge opportunity if we don't become more involved here. Women need more encouragement than men do to make a go in this industry. I think that's worth writing about. So many bay area companies are doing great things to help with this cause. That's part of why I was so shocked that the online community was so dismissive of this post. I have another post planned to try to inspire the tech community to get more engaged. The reason these posts keep coming up is that there is still a lot we can do to make working in this industry better (if we can agree that having more technically skilled women is something worth working toward). I believe discussions about how to attract, maintain, and train developers are important to this community. I also believe there is a lot of opportunity in encouraging women to build skills and join us. I ask the Hacker News admins and flaggers of my post today to please consider the value of this discussion. PS: I think I will make it a point not to use "Sexism" in the title for future posts. Hopefully that will help.