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This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup

165 points by frankdenbow 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
meritt 13y ago
> In my mind, it’s a little preposterous that if I want to do so, however, I have to be ok with being felt up and indirectly insulted. To the author: You're right, it's unacceptable but you know how to fix it? You say something at the point in which it occurs. Nip it in the bud. Running off to write yet another gender-division-in-the-tech-world blog which will be read, primarily, by the sort of folk who already agree with you isn't going to make nearly as much of a difference as taking care of issues promptly. After doing so, blog about what happened and the resulting reaction. That's the sort of story that'll spread like wildfire.
- kevingadd 13y ago
  Someone with such a messed up perception of personal boundaries and acceptable behavior that they would FEEL UP SOMEONE IN PUBLIC is not necessarily going to stop just because you tell them. They might get more aggressive.
  - BlackDeath3 13y ago
    Perhaps this is where self-defense comes into play? If your options are 1) say something and make the aggressor more aggressive, or 2) distance yourself and hope they don't press the situation further, at some point you should have a backup plan.
    - DanBC 13y ago
      So, the woman is dumb for leaving the home without having a plan to deal with people who physically assualt her in a public space? Is that what you're saying?
      - BlackDeath3 13y ago
        I don't think I actually said that, so I'm not sure where the hostility comes from, but... maybe? Sure, she shouldn't have to be competent at self-defense just to leave the house and meet-up with some fellow Bitcoiners (or any other hobbyists), but I think that if you don't have some sort of backup plan, you're basically at the will of whatever you meet along the way. It seems that you disagree. Care to talk about it (civilly)?
        DanBC 13y ago
        Other people came to a similar conusion to me. So, being charitable, your post wasn't as clear as it could be. That's me being civil. If you agree that I misread your post you can stop reading here because the rest of this post is less civil and not relevant. On the other hand maybe you really do think that women should learn self defence or somesuch because they could be the victims of violent crime. Except this wasn't some mugger trying to rob her. The appropriate response is not to say "that sucks, but it would have sucked less if you learnt self defence". The appropriate response is to say "that sucked, and it sucked that noone steps up to tell him he was wrong". People blame the victims of crime all the time and it fucking sucks. "Contributory Negligence" (Attila the Stockbroker) was written in 1985. It's baffling why people still think that when a woman is groped in public it's somehow up to her to have a backup plan, with everyone else there getting a pass to just ignore it. The really fucking baffling thing is that these abhorant views ("she deserved it") aren't going away. http://www.newstatesman.com/glosswitch/2013/09/there-no-great-stigma-attached-being-rapist http://www.newstatesman.com/glosswitch/2013/09/there-no-grea...
        BlackDeath3 13y ago
        Well, people love a good disagreement, don't they? Do I think that people should learn self-defense because they could be victims of violent crime? That's one reason to do so, yes. As women tend to be a particularly vulnerable subset of "people", this applies to them in particular. What does it matter if this scenario was not that of a particular type of violent crime? I don't see where you're going with the mugging comparison. Violent crime is violent crime. That I didn't immediately chastise the aggressor doesn't mean that I don't blame the aggressor, but the fact is (and I've said this in another comment) if you cannot defend yourself, you are at the mercy of forces beyond your control. This is not a life philosophy or a political position, but a piece of advice based on fact of reality. Call it "victim blaming" if you want to (and I know that you do), I call it living in the real world. If I'm caught in a mugging, it isn't necessarily my fault (even if I could have taken steps to prevent such a situation) and I probably didn't choose to get mugged, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't have some sort of self-defense plan in-place to mitigate risk. This isn't about right and wrong. This is about surviving in a world that many of us forget is still very often hostile to our existence.
    - king_jester 13y ago
      Why is that women have to prepare themselves to deal with aggressive behavior and/or pretend nothing happened and hope someone doesn't violate their personal space again? That squarely puts the blame on women for the harassing behavior of others and makes it their problem, when the reality is that the problem is with the harasser and people need to speak up.
      - BlackDeath3 13y ago
        You're reading too much into what I'm saying. I didn't say that this is the woman's fault. I didn't say that the man is blameless. I said that if you cannot defend yourself, you are at the mercy of forces beyond your control. Period. This isn't a life philosophy or a political position, this is a fact of reality. In an ideal world, she wouldn't have to worry about defending herself, but we aren't living in CandyLand. If you cannot rely on yourself, who can you rely on?
    - AnimalMuppet 13y ago
      She shouldn't need self-defense. I'm a male, pretty scrawny, middle aged. But if I'm in a group of men, and a female comes by, and one of the men is groping her, and she tells him to back off, and he won't, I'm going to get in his grill. (Think of it as self-policing for the male community.) I strongly suspect that I won't be alone, but if I am, I'll do it alone. My mother got a master's degree in math in the 1950s. She had to put up with a professor telling her that women don't belong in math. No woman should have to put up with that crap in 2014.
      - BlackDeath3 13y ago
        >She shouldn't need self-defense I agree that she shouldn't have to worry about this sort of situation, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't need to worry about it.
  - genericuser 13y ago
    They 'might' do just about anything if you tell them to stop. (including stop) The point is if you don't try, they have already shown what they plan to do. And in a group of people with two people you know some of the risk is mitigated. Now I think she handled a bad situation quite politely, and she has no obligation to put effort into making that particular situation better. However I believe that in making the blog post she is showing herself to be a person who both wants to and is brave enough to make the situation better. But as mentioned by the gp the people who read these types of blog posts are largely the type of people who believe we should treat everyone like a person. As such helping out further by informing the person or group of people of their unwelcome and in this case inappropriate behavior could further that goal of improving the situation for everyone. Edit: I am a privileged white male who realizes I might have huge misconceptions about what it is exactly like to live as one who is treated with less privilege, so would welcome criticism of my view point. So if my above comment smacks of 'of course you think that you've never had to deal with....' I would like to know.
    - kevingadd 13y ago
      Unfortunately many women simply don't feel safe enough to fight back and instead will remove themselves from a situation like that. If the space itself feels unsafe (instead of it just being a 'bad person in a good place' situation), that's going to make it seem like a much better idea to leave. After all, it's not as if these are unusual occurrences. They're all too common.
    - tommorris 13y ago
      This whole HN thread has been a huge volley of victim blaming. It's quite disappointing but not at all surprising. Last year, I was on a train back to visit my parents place—a little village in quiet commuter-land suburbia. It was late. I had drunk a small amount before getting on the train but wasn't drunk. A tall drunk man started shouting at me about how he wanted me to suck his dick. I obviously didn't do a good enough impression of a disgusted homophobe by shouting "eww, no". He twigged that I was actually gay and started shouting abuse at me. He was there with a friend who was leering and laughing along. There were no third parties in the nearby vicinity. So, what did I do? I let the abuse continue and didn't put up a fight. I was surprised this was happening - these were grown men, this was a train line going mostly out to quiet middle-class suburbia. There were two of them and one of me—they were bigger and stronger while I have the body of a lifelong sedentary computer programmer; if there were a physical altercation, I'd come out worse for it. I don't want to end up in the emergency room. Should I have stood up to them and told them to stop? To give as good as I get? Yes. It might stop them next time. I certainly want to make the situation better. But in the moment when you are being picked on and attacked, the calculation you make isn't the same calculation you'd make after the event. The flipside is I have seen other examples of homophobic abuse of others and been ready and prepared to step in (hasn't been needed). There's a sort of frozen moment of panic when you are abused. I've had friends who have had very bad sexist abuse who have said the same thing. I have one friend who is trans and a sexual abuse survivior who goes through far more abuse and manage to stand up to it and live their life. I have great admiration for them, but I don't think it is anyone's job to go around policing the reactions of victims when faced with discrimination and abuse.
- ossreality 13y ago
  Easier said than done. I've been "out" for years and despite being opinionated and a "proud" person, I still find it extremely hard to put my neck out there and call others out (and interesting, it's much easier for me to stand up for female friends than it is to stand up for myself or other LGBT-specifically related issues). It's hard enough to do, at all, to confront someone. But it's another thing when you've just been thrown completely off-kilter by having a stranger inappropriately groping you in public (Plus, you think he's going to have a positive reaction to her chiding him? Somehow I doubt it.). I'll give her a pass on not reprimanding him. (Plus, your post has the distinct scent of victim blaming)
  - meritt 13y ago
    Of course the asshole wouldn't have a positive reaction. That's precisely the point: Make it known how inappropriate and unacceptable their actions were. Make them uncomfortable. Victim blaming? Dare I even respond to that? That would imply I'm somehow suggesting the author was at fault or responsible for the action occurring, or that it was somehow acceptable because she didn't react then on the spot. Not in the slightest.
    - ljf 13y ago
      Sorry, but victim blaming is exactly how your original post came across. You might not have meant it that way, but that to me is how it read.
- lincolnq 13y ago
  This is a great point, but it's hard to be confrontational in a place where you're already worried about your social standing. I agree that things would change faster if people were more confrontational but it's kind of a lot to ask. Posting a blog post about it (and one that's well-written, with good examples and explanation) is also a great step forward, and requires substantial courage on its own.
- runjake 13y ago
  I'm really turned off by these posts, too. I roll my eyes and mutter "Christ, not another one". But I'm a male who doesn't have to worry about being groped and I keep my hands to myself. But let me guess how the reality turns out for her: - She says something about it. - The guy who is misbehaving is probably physically bigger than her. She may feel fearful of speaking up. or - She speaks up and gets called a "prude" or, ironically, a "slut". Maybe they'll blame it on her sweater being a little too form-fitting, or a little too low-cut. Then, she follows your advice and posts what happened and the resulting action which results in even more criticism, death and rape threats than the course she actually took here. If you have a young daughter, these are the kinds of issues she'll have to deal with some day. Might as well think about this now.
  - blairbeckwith 13y ago
    disclaimer: I'm on her side. I've never really understood the potential-physical-confrontation argument. It must be a very, very small minority of men who's first reaction to being embarrassed and shamed by a woman is to physically assault her in public?
    - runjake 13y ago
      I am not a woman. I am a large, muscular male who doesn't get bothered by anyone. But it doesn't have to lead to actual physical assault to be uncomfortable or cause negative lasting effects in one's life. The intimidation, the mental abuse aspect of it is enough. If you've been mugged without being shot, it might make a little more sense to you. And really, he put his hands on her inappropriately, so he's already committed physical assault -- not to get all bleeding-heart emo feminist or anything. But that just ain't right.
      - rfnslyr 13y ago
        Funny how far removed real problems are from our society. "The intimidation, the mental abuse aspect of it is enough." versus Collecting wood in a forest 40km away so you can stoke a fire and your family can eat. Tell the guy to get his hands off you, grab a seat, introduce yourself. Everyone needs an emotional baby sitter and therapist nowadays.
- 4bpp 13y ago
  I don't know. Doing that would probably, consciously or not, forever put the author down in the other attendees' "difficult to deal with; better to stay clear of in the future" list. On the other hand, chances are the social repercussions the groper will suffer for his actions will be minimal regardless of whether he is called out or not. There is a lot the unmentioned presumable majority of perfectly reasonable guys at that meeting could have done to make the few bad apples feel excluded and uncomfortable in a way which would far surpass any explicit callout by anyone in its effectivity, but unfortunately, in practice, most people are very reluctant to use social signalling in any rational or deliberate way.
  - meritt 13y ago
    I hope we're intelligent enough to differentiate between "unwelcome physical groping" and "overheard some guys make private a joke about 'dongles' and overreacted" but you do bring up a valid point certainly. I guess I just get tired of people in general who complain about things and never take action to remedy it, then go back and garner support by preaching to the choir. I'm absolutely aghast that it happened to her but I just wish people would start being as vocal in person as they can be on their blogs.
    - 4bpp 13y ago
      Yes, the "dongles" story is not really comparable to this and I don't see any agenda I would consider desirable being served by conflating the two. While the old "would you find this okay if the genders were reversed" benchmark seems insufficient to me, a stronger version along the lines of "would you find this okay for every possible assignment of genders to the people involved" both clearly distinguishes the two and preempts the "I'm sure every man would be happy to be groped by random women!" defense one hears all too often in the case of situations such as this one.
    - scott_s 13y ago
      I think you are not acknowledging the difficulty of calling someone out on the spot. It is awkward, and puts a complete stop to the actual, desired activity. It also puts the victim through two unwanted situations. As others have also said, people in such situations are sometimes so surprised by the infraction that they are stunned, and at a loss for how to react. It may take them time after the event to process what happened and determine how they feel. The reason that others in the thread have brought up blaming the victim is that you have not acknowledged these aspects of the situation.
- zasz 13y ago
  What exactly do you want her to say? "Hi, stop being a dick, because this kind of behavior is a serious turn off to women who want to be involved in tech?" That's obviously not going to fly. So what about, "Hi, could you not awkwardly hug me?" What people say in response to that is, "Why are you being mean to me? I was just trying to be friendly." It's extremely hard to say something in the moment without getting stereotyped as a frigid bitch.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Not a woman, but perhaps something like "This is much too forward of you", in a disapproving tone. Nothing makes me quickly reconsider my actions like this words, even if it turns out she was kidding. It provides the suggestion that if he proceeded differently, there might be a chance, but if he continues this way there is not. That suggestion might be enough to restore at least a semblance of normal interaction?
    - prawn 13y ago
      At the hug, she says "Sorry, we've only just met." And removes herself from it if it lingers. If he makes a joke about getting to know her, she says "That's a bit creepy, aren't we here to talk Bitcoin?" And moves on. At the hand on the thigh, remove it firmly, say with some volume "Please don't put your hand on my leg, it's inappropriate." Then stand up to move seats. If there are no seats, ask "Can someone spare some room down this (other) end of the table?"
    - silencio 13y ago
      As a woman, what I hate is when I'm trying to be nice and proper and educational about telling people to back off and they use that as a springboard to go all "who, me?" or maybe "oh, okay" and then assume I'm a frigid bitch anyway instead of recognizing that they're the ones making a big mistake. So nowadays I am of the shove the offending body part off and "get your hands off me" mindset because it doesn't really matter. I don't need to be nice about someone invading my personal space especially if I'm going to be known as a frigid bitch anyway. It's also not my problem to educate that person on basic human interaction no matter who they are and no, I refuse to accept stereotypes as an excuse for what they did. (I would expect no less if I were doing the same to someone else - minus the frigid bitch part.) Regardless, the other problem with confronting something as it happens - that a lot of people here right now don't seem to recognize - is that sometimes you don't even fully realize what's going on until after it's happened or started. Either you're in shock, or you're not noticing how fast something escalated. You also might have no idea what to do because you're worried about the consequences (which range from physical force to losing your job and death threats and "frigid bitch" namecalling). It's not easy. I only wish it were, and I speak from a rather privileged perspective where I work for myself, don't care about what people say about me most of the time, and have a big, tall, hairy fiancé and a big, tall, intimidating roommate to back me up.
- slewis 13y ago
  It's not on the author to say something. There were a handful of other people there who could have spoken up. Please, everyone, if you witness this type of rude behavior, speak up. We are all, male, female, undecided, both etc. responsible for improving treatment of non-males in tech. Take an active role.
  - meritt 13y ago
    I doubt the others noticed the groping but you're absolutely right. People need to stop inappropriate behavior when and where it occurs.
  - throwawaycoder 13y ago
    It's not always easy to know what kind of relationship people are in. That's probably a reason why people tend to wait until it escalates beyond a certain point. If people would interfere too soon, feminists wouldn't be happy either. Because that kind of behavior would imply that women are weak and unable to take care of themselves.
    - patrickmay 13y ago
      The average man is five to six inches taller and forty or more pounds heavier than the average woman. Men are also physically stronger pound for pound. I'd rather take a tongue lashing for being an interfering white knight wannabe than not say something and find out that the woman was too uncomfortable, for all the reasons being discussed in this thread, to extricate herself from the person bothering her.
      - throwawaycoder 13y ago
        It sounds to me as if you don't have a lot of experience. Neither have I, but I have met women who flirted with other men so that their boy-friends could get in a fight with them. Or women who would claw your eyes out because you hit their boy-friend, even if the same boy-friend hit them a minute ago. But why do I bother - just go ahead and do what you feel is right. Maybe your feeling for such situations is simply better than that of other people. How many times have you tried to interfere so far?
- ariannahsimpson 13y ago
  Good comment! I am working on organizing a meetup of my own to counter.
- zeidrich 13y ago
  I think that the point is less to change it than to report on the fact that it's (still) happening. If she just told him off and he avoided her for the rest of the night, but otherwise she still felt as isolated and ogled, how would that change things? If she picked up a megaphone and shouted about how she needed to be treated with more respect, would she be? Or would everyone just think she was looking for attention. The way she conducted herself makes sense to me, and while she was put off by the situation, she still got most of what she wanted to out of it. She didn't go to the bitcoin meetup to make a stand on her rights, she did it to talk about bitcoins. While there, she was put off by the way she was treated. Had she just made a scene about the way she was treated, maybe she wouldn't get to talk about bitcoins, maybe the people there would think "Oh, ok, this makes sense. Women don't really talk about bitcoins, she's not here because she is interested in bitcoins, she's one of those feminists. I get it now." Her blog post is just a way of expressing "Hey, I experienced some uncomfortable situations at a bitcoin meetup because I was one of two women in a sea of men who didn't take me seriously." The thing is, it's not her responsibility to fix it. Sure, there's things that she can do, but when men go to a bitcoin meetup, they don't go there to argue for men's rights, they go to talk about bitcoins. She can't reasonably do both, and the only way women can get into bitcoins is if they talk about bitcoins. If they have to defend their gender position instead, they don't have much opportunity to do that. The way to fix it is to support your female friends who are interested in these things to continue to be interested in them. To go with them, whether you're a guy or a girl yourself, to give them support when they are learning about them. To not make a big deal about the fact that they're a woman and you like these things. Instead spend your time just collaborating on those things that they're interested in. The only real way it will change is when people start to see it as not unusual. The only way for it to become not unusual is for more women in general to get interested. If women are getting turned off these things by weird guys and sexist comments (which come about because culturally not many women participate in these topics), then you can either try and stop every immature guy from saying something sexist about a women who does things that no other women do, or you can support more women when they want to do those things so that can get something out of it even when the weird guys bug them. Maybe with enough women interested it will no longer be something that seems surprising.
  - 13y ago
- hbags 13y ago
  I think it's absolutely disgusting that you criticize the victim for documenting what happened to her. It's despicable and downright fucking evil that you basically accuse her of sharing her story solely because she wants attention. The worst part of your god-awful post is that it's currently pinned to the top of this board. The fact that your disgusting, insensitive post is at the top is why women don't work in tech. They don't want to have to deal with assholes like you who have nothing better to do than say "she should do X instead of sharing her story", or whatever else you want to do to silence her, and shame her for sharing her story. She is brave for doing anything, because she knew the world is full of assholes like you: cowardly bigots who will criticize ANY action she takes. I'm sorry she had a problem. And I'm more sorry that HN has degraded to the point where a cowardly attack from a piece of shit like you is pinned to the top.
  - rosser 13y ago
    All I can think of in response to this diatribe is a line from The Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole." Seriously, dude; chill. You can communicate your (not incorrect) point so very much more effectively without ragefacing all over the person you're replying to. It gets in the way of successful communication, and probably does horrible things for your blood pressure to boot.
    - ZenoArrow 13y ago
      I disagree. Of the comments I've read here so far, I agreed with hbags the most. There are plenty of more measured responses to be found here, but none that captured how I felt as well as hbags. I'm not someone who holds grudges, and I accept we all sometimes say things without understanding what we imply, but in the moment I was glad someone could give voice to how I felt.
    - hbags 13y ago
      I'm not dumb enough to try to change the stripes on a proudly bigoted jerk like Meritt. I just want anybody who sees his spew to know that his opinion is not the only one. I want any human who is harassed to know that if they share their story after the fact, that's good. And they shouldn't worry about the fact that some utterly worthless assholes like Meritt will try to shame them for speaking out. They shouldn't be ashamed if they were too afraid, too shy, or too confused to respond in the moment. It is GOOD that we share these stories. It is GOOD that we move towards a world where these things happen less often. And the utterly worthless assholes like Meritt who want to shame people for sharing their stories... they might be well represented in HN, but they're a minority of normal humans. And I'd like other potential Meritt's to realize how utterly disgusting it is that he tried to shame the victim into silence.
- wonderzombie 13y ago
  That's the sort of story that'll spread like wildfire. You must be using a different Internet from me. On my Internet, it looks something like this: "Oh, you did speak up? You should have spoken up louder. You (should|should not) have cursed at him. You (should|should not) have been more polite. You (should|should not) have left. You (should|should not) have called the cops." You can nitpick someone's past circumstances ad infinitum, as being too much of this or too little of that because there will never be a perfect, falsifiable individual test case— someone will find a reason why it's invalid. And after the fact, an individual can't go back and revise what they did, so all folks like you have to do is pick a reason why they did it wrong, and you can safely write it off. In actuality, post isn't meant to be a conclusive proof or some damning, final conclusion. It's a data point, one among many as women get up the courage to talk about this shit. We need data points because there is actually a large subset of people who simply don't believe this is even a problem, let alone something they ought to think about.
- dgempesaw 13y ago
  If we actually want to "nip it in the bud," shouldn't we be talking at/about/towards the men who groped and insulted her ? That's the actual bud here, right? Why are we all trying to police her behavior instead of the men who attacked her?
- mikeleeorg 13y ago
  Not everyone is able to "nip it in the bud" as easily as you may be. I'm not saying you're wrong, just pointing out that the solution you cite is not always easy.
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- blairbeckwith 13y ago
  You are wrong, and a part of the problem.
- BlackDeath3 13y ago
  I'm pretty socially-retarded, but a lot of this sounded pretty not-cool.
  - ariannahsimpson 13y ago
    Hahah best comment on the chain
- aetherson 13y ago
  No. The guys she's writing about need to not: * Hug people they've never met. * Put their hands on people's legs seconds after meeting them. * Put everything a particular woman says into the frame of "Women don't do X." * Assume that women who attend tech meetups are exclusively there as the girlfriends of the men present.
  - ossreality 13y ago
    That's my favorite part. "Girls can like computer stuff?" is just sad to see. It's as face-palm-y as "Gay guys can like football?". I have to do a double-take to see if people are still making those sorts of statements with a straight face in 2014.
  - ariannahsimpson 13y ago
    Bingo.
  - stefan_kendall 13y ago
    Immediately becoming physical is a valid showing of sexual interest. If she wasn't interested, she should have stopped it immediately. I've had it go both ways and end in sex, although never in a professional setting.
shizzy0 13y ago
Super yuck.
ossreality 13y ago
Where do people get off thinking they have the right to touch others, especially repeatedly, unreciprocated? So many of these tech, gender, sex issues would be pre-empted so many times if people simply respected some basic boundaries, were less presumptive and thought about their actions. I'd love to know what that groper would've done if I'd walked in, as a guy, and immediately started hitting on him and touching him. Even more bonus points if he knew I was gay when I walked in. Except that I'm disgusted with myself even imagining doing that to make a point. Just think people. Have a tiny ounce of empathy.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  I think it's pretty simple; human courting is chock full of nonverbals and hints and read-between-the-lines. You take a guy who understands he's supposed to pick up on these things and be bold, but is quite bad at detecting whether interest is reciprocated, and tadah- you have this blog post. Supporting evidence that I felt greatly bolstered my theory- Not long ago I went for a kiss with a girl I barely knew. I knew from body language alone she wanted that, and I was right. She later explicitly told me how happy she was that I had been bold, taken control, and made the leap totally out of the blue. So at least to my figuring, it isn't like these people are fundamentally misguided. It isn't like courtship is supposed to be started with "May I stroke your hair? Ok, now I'm going to kiss you, is that Ok?". They are probably just really bad at navigating these waters.
  - ossreality 13y ago
    I uh, I do understand what you're saying. My empathy is overflowing, and I've seen friends that have gone from timid to "over confident" in order to find more success in dating... so I can understand that a million thoughts were flying through his head when he decided to go for it. BUT, the two were strangers, in a topic-oriented setting, and she rebuffed his first attempt. That could have, and should have been the end of the story... Put another way: if he had hugged her, she said "We just met..." and that was the end of it, we wouldn't be having the conversation at all. Unfortunately, as you allude, there's not really a definitive way of solving this problem unless we build a way of giving passive signals constantly. Some sort of an indicator or smart phone app "Yes, I am willing to be hit on by you and you, but not you and you". There's a weird idea...
lincolnq 13y ago
Great examples of what not to do. I would guess that many of these are fairly easy mistakes to make if you haven't been inoculated. For most people, I think a single article like this is enough to "inoculate" -- to make the reader substantially more aware of potential mistakes / hidden assumptions in their social interactions, and likely change their behavior. Yet we still read lots of stories like these. I guess distributing these stories widely should help the situation.
- ariannahsimpson 13y ago
  Yep, that was my objective. I hope it helps someone, at some point. Goal was not to bitch aimlessly.
McGlockenshire 13y ago
>Was either of us mistreated? Technically, no. This doesn't really line up with the entire second paragraph, in which she was basically groped. Groped. And then treated like a piece of meat instead of as a human being. If that's not mistreatment, I really don't know what would be.
- rosser 13y ago
  I think it's actually disturbingly telling that women's (or at least this particular woman's) expectations for how they'll be treated at tech meetups are so low that the described behavior isn't considered mistreatment.
blairbeckwith 13y ago
I agree wholeheartedly with this article, however I don't think it's fair to use such a wide brush. "This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at _This_ Bitcoin Meetup" would have been more appropriate. There are bad apples in every community, and it certainly sounds like the author met some, but it's important to realize that a few bad apples don't ruin the whole bushel.
- jpwright 13y ago
  How many more posts like this are needed to convince you that the whole community of tech meetups is hostile towards women? Of course that individual deserves the lion's share of the blame, but writing this off as an isolated individual acting inappropriately misses the forest for the trees (i.e. misses the root cause [culture] for the proximate cause [assholes]). To further analogize, perhaps the bad apple was there because the bushel was poisoned?
  - 2gg2rg 13y ago
    > How many more posts like this are needed to convince you that the whole community of tech meetups is hostile towards women? A whole lot more, because I don't see this shit at the tech meetups I go to.
    - jpwright 13y ago
      Looks like you have some reading to do. Here's a good place to start: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents
      - rfnslyr 13y ago
        Yeah, and OP's incident doesn't even register on the radar.
      - throwawaycoder 13y ago
        That list is well known, but I think it shows the opposite of what you claim - contrast the number of incidents to the number of tech events and people involved in tech. Apart from being merely anecdotal anyway.
jakejake 13y ago
The story is pretty sad and not reflective of the tech community in my opinion. It sounds like a group of either a) nerdy guys with severely lacking social skills or b) just garden-variety douchebags.
dnautics 13y ago
might be a west coast thing. http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/bitcoin-doesnt-need-women/ http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/bitcoin-doesnt-need-women/
- Crito 13y ago
  This apparently happened in NYC. I've lived on both coasts, and one thing that I have noticed is that people on the east coast refer to people on the west coast as being either not sufficiently progressive, or progressive in the wrong ways. People on the west coast refer to people on the east coast as being either sufficiently progressive, or progressive in the wrong ways. Other than that, they both seem fairly identical to me...
hosh 13y ago
Good thing that, unlike meetups, the bitcoin protocol doesn't care if a bitcoin address is controlled by a man or a woman. I mean, that's the whole point of having a collective ledger where every agent is untrusted. There is no one saying, "Your money is no good here," based on your gender, race, creed, or political leanings.
- BlackDeath3 13y ago
  This is sort of what I was thinking. Bitcoin's involvement here seems merely incidental.
- throwawaycoder 13y ago
  This story made me realize that eventually we will get some sort of "FemCoin", though. Anybody who continues to use Bitcoin will be labeled a sexist and be made a social pariah. The reason is that women didn't have a fair chance to get into Bitcoin in time because the community was so hostile. Therefore all the Bitcoin wealth is unfairly shifted to white men. Edit: turns out Femcoin already exists https://bitbucket.org/valerieaurora/femcoin https://bitbucket.org/valerieaurora/femcoin
  - hosh 13y ago
    That's interesting. What you are suggesting is that, with lower barriers of entry to create new currencies, we will see a rise in forking economies just as open source and distributed source control allowed open source communities to maintain forks. Leaving aside that, however, notions of "fairness" is flawed. Fairness for me means that a hostile community self-destructs under its own weight of hostility, not that "Bitcoin wealth is unfairly shifted to white men." An unfair economy that discriminates against a class of people will see people leaving. I am not sure if it will happen like that, but that's an interesting thought.
    - throwawaycoder 13y ago
      There are already a lot of forks of Bitcoin, some even moderately successful. Actually independent of feminism I have long wondered if other cryptocoins might supersede Bitcoin exactly for the reason of fairness. Assume the world wakes up to Bitcoin in a couple of years. Then the BTC wealth will be very unequally distributed. Why should people start using BTC if they are poor in it? They could as well say "hey, cryptocurrencies are swell, but let's use another one were nobody had a headstart". I guess part of dogecoins success story is that everybody got rich in dogecoin quickly (1 Million doges per minute). A lot of people who didn't like Bitcoin like dogecoin.
fantnn 13y ago
I don't understand how women can continue to attribute a bad experience with one particular person as indicative of the whole tech community. I know some slutty women, but do I treat every woman like that? Of course not. Personality and the interaction that stems from it fall on a continuum, and these omg! Tech is so sexist! Read this anecdote! Is getting fucking old imo.
VladRussian2 13y ago
not sure what connection to Bitcoin here. The guy behaved like, for example, the mayor of San Diego (that mayor). Different age, different business ... Would it warrant "This is What it's Like to Be a Woman in a city administration"?
angersock 13y ago
Jesus Christ. Is it only Texans and the South that know how to raise a gentleman these days?
- BlackDeath3 13y ago
  How about we just meet somewhere in the middle of "rushing to open the car door for her" and sexual groping?
  - angersock 13y ago
    Yep.
rayiner 13y ago
> “Wow. Women don’t usually say that type of things”. To be perfectly honest, this is something I might have thought (but even then had the sense not to say) when I was working as an engineer. The mere lack of women in tech leads to perceptions that make it unpleasant for women to enter the field. Most people interact with just a few spheres: people they work with, people they meet on the street, and their friends, which are often drawn from people they work with or people they went to school with. When you go to school with very few women, and work with very few women, as engineers usually do, your perception of the whole gender is disproportionately shaped by those women you meet on the street, in the course of day to day activities. For people who work in intellectually demanding fields, the people you meet on the street are quite likely to not be as smart as the people you work with or the people you went to school with. And that as a real impact.
- js2 13y ago
  Really? I've been a geek since, well, always, have a CS degree and have been working as a sysadmin and programmer since 1996. There have been women along the way, in my CS program, as coworkers, at the various startups I've worked at. Some of them have been a whole lot brighter than me. And in all that time, I've never thought "oh wow, how unusual." I just don't get it.
rfnslyr 13y ago
So you didn't immediately tell him to stop and continue on with your life and fled to the internet just so you can get HN karma? Yeah I stopped reading right there. This is why "women in tech" are a problem, because they constantly put themselves on a pedestal.
- MartinCron 13y ago
  You disapproved of someone's response to a situation you have never yourself experienced and stopped reading but you had to come here and post an insulting comment? Are you OK?
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    Yeah I'm doing OK, are you?
    - MartinCron 13y ago
      I'm fine. I'm just concerned that someone in this community (you) could be so upset about this story that you're posting things that I can only interpret as deliberately inflammatory and hostile. Instead of just assuming that you're a bad person trying to stir up trouble, I was wondering if something else was bothering you.
deleted 13y ago
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davidy123 13y ago
There is an idea of feminist perspectives helping find a way past the current zero sum dog eat dog approach of society. Aping a bunch of dysfunctional men in their self-serving comprehension of governments and money systems is not it.
aferreira 13y ago
Congratulations, you have successfully determined that scumbags are everywhere. The behavior of these people should not be directly correlated with bitcoin/tech/startups/whateveryouwanttocallit.
ghc 13y ago
If nobody bothers to challenge or set boundaries with cretins like this, how will the situation ever change? I don't think this is a situation where you'd have to fear for your safety for showing a little bit of a spine. It's not as if people who are socially retarded enough to think that behavior is okay will change without negative repercussions for their actions.
guard-of-terra 13y ago
Maybe it isn't related to Bitcoin and Tech so much as it is related to, say, USA and SF? Because I can't imagine such stories materialize in other places (of developed word and large parts of developing world either). You just seem to have enough peculiar traits from both gender sides for a perfect storm.
- rayshan 13y ago
  The event was in NYC not SF. SF / SV has its own share of problems but the one being discussed here isn't unique to SF or the U.S. Though I do wonder how the U.S. rank in terms of % of women in STEM majors or STEM careers. Also the issue here has something to do with bitcoin attracting early adopters and groups with certain political preferences. I certainly wouldn't call the bitcoin subculture mainstream yet.
  - guard-of-terra 13y ago
    Okay, I have to admit I picked SF from comments. I think this issue doesn't have to be correlated to "% of women in STEM majors". I think that by tackling this as simple the numbers problem you're only making it worse. Maybe it's not so much Bitcoin attracting certain early adopters, rather USA having a peculiar supply of early adopters (for many things) that also happen to clash with USA's supply of women? This way you can't win, Bitcoin or no Bitcoin.
  - bdr 13y ago
    Thanks. FWIW, I haven't seen or heard about anything like this happening at the SF Bitcoin Meetup. If I did, it wouldn't be tolerated. In fact, there's been a woman running the show more often than not, and now one of the main co-organizer is a woman.
mercer 13y ago
This sounds absolutely horrible, but it raises a questions. I'm a guy, and I tend to be quite aware of things happening around me. If I were to notice things unfold as described in this post... Assuming I'm not in charge: is it preferable that I somehow try to play a role in this, or would this only make everything more complicated/awkward. Should I stay back and just be pissed off? What would be the best way to approach this situation?
- detcader 13y ago
  If someone is physically assaulting someone you should probably try to do something to stop the assault? Kind of obvious
- prawn 13y ago
  Notice unease. "Hey (groper), haven't you only just met (gropee)? Bit inappropriate to have your hand on her leg like that?" Risk is that she may avoid confrontation by saying something to defuse the situation and the groper then misses the point and just takes you as an obstacle, thinking or later saying "It's hard enough to meet women without you blocking me, man!" Response to that is easy, of course.
- dictum 13y ago
  The way that values basic human decency and empathy the most would be to notify the organizers and ensure that they don't just ignore your complaint, and to talk to the person who was assaulting the other person. Unfortunately, I'm jaded enough to believe that no good deed goes unpunished, so in the same situation I'd just notify the organizers.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  If you are worried about causing a scene, butt in about something else. Hey <NAME>, I heard somebody say you like <TECHNOLOGY>! I'm a huge fan too! If he's resistant to your interruption, be more forceful in trying to engage him. Maybe sit down next to him. Worst-case he becomes aggressive towards you, but so long as you stay bright & friendly, everyone else will see him picking the fight. That way you can try to defuse the situation indirectly. Maybe you get him engaged in conversation, or maybe the girl seizes the moment to excuse herself. Maybe you offer to the girl, Some other girls were looking for their friend, they said she had a blue shirt, was that you? If he seems reasonable yet misguided (rather than a total asshole who knows the girl wants nothing to do with him), you can optionally try leading him away and quietly saying something like, I noticed that girl was starting to feel uncomfortable, tone it down/back off/try a different tactic. Anyway, that's what I'd do if I was trying to avoid making a scene.
jellicle 13y ago
To the younger folks out there: if you see something like this occur as a third party (you're neither the groper nor the gropee, neither the misogynist nor the victim), you need to not politely ignore it but to step in and correct the asshole, as firmly as necessary. Whether it's groping or just verbal putdowns of some sort, you should step forward and add yourself to the situation, making it clear that the behavior you witnessed is not acceptable to you. Otherwise, you're part of the problem too.
- AnimalMuppet 13y ago
  Especially if she makes it clear that it's making her uncomfortable.
- UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
  Are you suggesting that "younger folks" just start trying to intervene in every public display of affection they see at a meetup? If I hug my wife the last thing I need is some white knight running up and calling me names because they have some imagining of what is going on. Honestly that advice on the face of it is terrible. We should discourage this behaviour but it should be through having rules for meetups, a complaints/reporting facility, and banning the offenders (or giving them warnings in less egregious examples). Recommending people get into a confrontation if they get a bad vibe is just bad advice that will result in bad situations (see dongle-gate, et al).
- GrahamsNumber 13y ago
  Umm... no.
- pstack 13y ago
  Well, the author was apparently there with her when this occurred. Doesn't sound like he spoke up about it. Frankly, that seems weird to me. If this happened to a friend I was out with, I would be expected to say something. Unless he was oblivious to this occurring, I don't understand how someone would just let a stranger grab their friend without stepping in. As to stepping in and "adding yourself to the situation" with a stranger? I don't know about that, so much. I've had my fair share of trying to be the considerate stranger stepping in to help out, only to be screeched at by the person I was speaking up for. It often doesn't pay to try and help people out. (Not saying you shouldn't do it, anyway, just on principle).
Groxx 13y ago
I can never tell how to interpret stories like this. They met assholes. Assholes are everywhere. They're guaranteed continue to be assholes until their targets stop them / make others aware that they are assholes. Slap them (it's loud, shocking, and non-damaging). Make a scene. It's not acceptable behavior, regardless of gender or location.
- lauradhamilton 13y ago
  You can't just go around slapping people.
  - beachstartup 13y ago
    completely agree. slapping someone is an invitation to get punched in the face and/or shoved down (both of which carry a serious risk of death or coma due to head trauma), regardless of if you're a woman or not. this is the real world, not movies. many people (especially men) and animals retaliate automatically when attacked physically. it doesn't matter what gender the attacker is, there's a high chance you will get your ass beat if you assault a man, regardless of the context.
  - AnimalMuppet 13y ago
    She can go around slapping people who are groping her. Absolutely she can. What, you're worried about him escalating from there? In a roomful of almost entirely guys? He won't make it very far with that...
    - vacri 13y ago
      The bulk of the article was about not being treated as an intellectual equal by the group, not the physical contact of one person.
blhack 13y ago
Nobody deserves to be physically or verbally assaulted like that, and it's up to the rest of the community (at everything: hackathons, meetups, open hours, etc.) to deal with toxic people. People in situations like this: please if somebody is making you uncomfortable, speak up. Maybe the guy putting his hand on your leg is your boyfriend? The "good people" in the room want to make you feel comfortable, but sometimes its hard to determine if somebody is a friend or not.
iterationx 13y ago
I wonder what percentage of men act like that? Is there anyway to make an educated guess?
ryanyeah 13y ago
God I hate feminists.
moron4hire 13y ago
I've had some experience with managing tech meetups, and the inevitable occurrence of creepers making the attending women uncomfortable. The correct solution is for the people running the event to be paying attention to the behavior of the attendees and kick people out who are being disrespectful. And to do it noisily. It needs to be made an example of. Unfortunately, these guys creep out other guys, too, so it's often the case that you see nothing happen because nobody wants to deal with the 'tard. But it's no excuse. Pull up your big boy pants and give the asshole the boot.
pera 13y ago
I am really sorry about your experience. Last year my girlfriend wanted to go to a Bitcoin Meetup in Buenos Aires. Nothing like that happened in that occasion, but it was really boring imo... though it was interesting to see how many "bitcoiners" are mostly clueless about how Bitcoin actually works btw I would change the title to "This is What it’s Like to Be a Woman."
p_random 13y ago
a nice-looking lady ventures into a place infested by nerds who are sexually frustrated and lacking in experiences with the opposite gender and then she complains that they lack the ability to communicate well with her... here, let me say it. TAKE YOUR GENDER AND SHOVE IT PLEASE. GENDER MEANS NOTHING.
blueblue 13y ago
WHY do UNFRIENDLY Cultures exist for women? Answer: Why are there thieves? Because the neighbor will buy stolen goods. simple: always know 'the leader'. If not, carry the 'warning cards printed' and give them to everyone. Placing your hands on female body should have a very very good explanation. Wing Chun started by buddhist nun. It seems that her young nuns were good looking and had to go begging door to door for alms. They were 'taken advantage of' and even 'molested SEVERELY' with pregnancies. So, Wing Chun. bending the pinkie finger backwards. nerve points... Computer physical security is a lot like computer security. accidental spill of water bottle all over the MANS lap may be helpful. When he goes to the washroom. explain the situation and find another seat.
sliverstorm 13y ago
Semi-related question about the comments on "how women think" and "what women care about". I am occasionally faced with a discussion, naturally with a woman, about something that has an empirical gender bias. I'm curious what other people think. A recent conversation along these lines: Them: Smiling, Why are you looking at me like that? Me: Well, I see that you like X. Most women I meet don't really like X, it's nice that you do. Is that a reasonable framing?
EricDeb 13y ago
Not to defend the men in this story but I imagine they are like many guys in tech-single and lonely, and see these sorts of meet-ups as an opportunity to meet women with similar interests. Specifically the line "Oh ok cool, so if we start dating I can use the app with you!" seems to suggest this objective. I think a lot of their statements are said to provoke a reaction from women in a "flirty" manner, not because these men are actually misogynistic. Their well-intentioned flirtatious remarks are being interpreted as sexist by women attending these events, likely because these men are inexperienced with women and unsure how to relate to them.
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  I think a lot of their statements are said to provoke a reaction from women in a "flirty" manner, not because these men are actually misogynistic. Which nobody seems to get. The victim card is laid down instantly and anyone saying otherwise is obviously a misogynist. People should learn to draw the line between shitty personal encounter and actual misogyny.
vacri 13y ago
It's interesting that so much of the commentary is focused on the actions of one man described in only the first two paragraphs, when the article is really talking, at length, about women not being treated as intellectual equals by the group. There is an irony here in that the discussion is less about what she's saying and more about how her body should be treated.
DorintheFlora 13y ago
My concern with posts like this is that a) men currently hold most of the power b) attacking their behavior in a confrontational manner tends to close doors, not open them and c) I do not see it offering a real solution. I am female. I think about such things a lot and have, in the past, written about my own negative experiences. But my concern is that this does not give us a path forward.
- boon 13y ago
  Not that I have a problem with your premise, I'm just curious what criteria you used to determine a)?
  - DorintheFlora 13y ago
    Men currently hold most of the "worldly" power -- political offices, CEO positions, etc -- and, on average, make about 150% of the money women make in the U.S.* * (These stats may be a bit out of date but I have no reason to believe that they have changed substantially. HN itself is a very male dominated forum and it is a place to meet and greet power brokers and god help you if you are a woman. It is not a very friendly place for a woman trying to make professional contacts, etc.)
ljf 13y ago
Amazing to see this story so swiftly knocked from the front page. Sad reflection on our industry.
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gosukiwi 13y ago
All she had to do is say aloud that she was unconfortable and why did he had his hand there... Surprisingly most american girls just don't know how to interact with that kind of people, seems to me for the ammount of similar posts out there, I know some girls that would have just make the guy blush and just have a nice time there.
coulix 13y ago
I do not get it, didnt anyone have at least a few female classmates from their uni time?. Even at work, in France, we have some bright female engineers leading guys on code reviews. It should not be surprising to see female bitcoin crypto fans.

165 points by frankdenbow 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

> In my mind, it’s a little preposterous that if I want to do so, however, I have to be ok with being felt up and indirectly insulted. To the author: You're right, it's unacceptable but you know how to fix it? You say something at the point in which it occurs. Nip it in the bud. Running off to write yet another gender-division-in-the-tech-world blog which will be read, primarily, by the sort of folk who already agree with you isn't going to make nearly as much of a difference as taking care of issues promptly. After doing so, blog about what happened and the resulting reaction. That's the sort of story that'll spread like wildfire.

kevingadd 13y ago
Someone with such a messed up perception of personal boundaries and acceptable behavior that they would FEEL UP SOMEONE IN PUBLIC is not necessarily going to stop just because you tell them. They might get more aggressive.
- BlackDeath3 13y ago
  Perhaps this is where self-defense comes into play? If your options are 1) say something and make the aggressor more aggressive, or 2) distance yourself and hope they don't press the situation further, at some point you should have a backup plan.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    So, the woman is dumb for leaving the home without having a plan to deal with people who physically assualt her in a public space? Is that what you're saying?
    - BlackDeath3 13y ago
      I don't think I actually said that, so I'm not sure where the hostility comes from, but... maybe? Sure, she shouldn't have to be competent at self-defense just to leave the house and meet-up with some fellow Bitcoiners (or any other hobbyists), but I think that if you don't have some sort of backup plan, you're basically at the will of whatever you meet along the way. It seems that you disagree. Care to talk about it (civilly)?
      - DanBC 13y ago
        Other people came to a similar conusion to me. So, being charitable, your post wasn't as clear as it could be. That's me being civil. If you agree that I misread your post you can stop reading here because the rest of this post is less civil and not relevant. On the other hand maybe you really do think that women should learn self defence or somesuch because they could be the victims of violent crime. Except this wasn't some mugger trying to rob her. The appropriate response is not to say "that sucks, but it would have sucked less if you learnt self defence". The appropriate response is to say "that sucked, and it sucked that noone steps up to tell him he was wrong". People blame the victims of crime all the time and it fucking sucks. "Contributory Negligence" (Attila the Stockbroker) was written in 1985. It's baffling why people still think that when a woman is groped in public it's somehow up to her to have a backup plan, with everyone else there getting a pass to just ignore it. The really fucking baffling thing is that these abhorant views ("she deserved it") aren't going away. http://www.newstatesman.com/glosswitch/2013/09/there-no-great-stigma-attached-being-rapist http://www.newstatesman.com/glosswitch/2013/09/there-no-grea...
        BlackDeath3 13y ago
        Well, people love a good disagreement, don't they? Do I think that people should learn self-defense because they could be victims of violent crime? That's one reason to do so, yes. As women tend to be a particularly vulnerable subset of "people", this applies to them in particular. What does it matter if this scenario was not that of a particular type of violent crime? I don't see where you're going with the mugging comparison. Violent crime is violent crime. That I didn't immediately chastise the aggressor doesn't mean that I don't blame the aggressor, but the fact is (and I've said this in another comment) if you cannot defend yourself, you are at the mercy of forces beyond your control. This is not a life philosophy or a political position, but a piece of advice based on fact of reality. Call it "victim blaming" if you want to (and I know that you do), I call it living in the real world. If I'm caught in a mugging, it isn't necessarily my fault (even if I could have taken steps to prevent such a situation) and I probably didn't choose to get mugged, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't have some sort of self-defense plan in-place to mitigate risk. This isn't about right and wrong. This is about surviving in a world that many of us forget is still very often hostile to our existence.
  - king_jester 13y ago
    Why is that women have to prepare themselves to deal with aggressive behavior and/or pretend nothing happened and hope someone doesn't violate their personal space again? That squarely puts the blame on women for the harassing behavior of others and makes it their problem, when the reality is that the problem is with the harasser and people need to speak up.
    - BlackDeath3 13y ago
      You're reading too much into what I'm saying. I didn't say that this is the woman's fault. I didn't say that the man is blameless. I said that if you cannot defend yourself, you are at the mercy of forces beyond your control. Period. This isn't a life philosophy or a political position, this is a fact of reality. In an ideal world, she wouldn't have to worry about defending herself, but we aren't living in CandyLand. If you cannot rely on yourself, who can you rely on?
  - AnimalMuppet 13y ago
    She shouldn't need self-defense. I'm a male, pretty scrawny, middle aged. But if I'm in a group of men, and a female comes by, and one of the men is groping her, and she tells him to back off, and he won't, I'm going to get in his grill. (Think of it as self-policing for the male community.) I strongly suspect that I won't be alone, but if I am, I'll do it alone. My mother got a master's degree in math in the 1950s. She had to put up with a professor telling her that women don't belong in math. No woman should have to put up with that crap in 2014.
    - BlackDeath3 13y ago
      >She shouldn't need self-defense I agree that she shouldn't have to worry about this sort of situation, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't need to worry about it.
- genericuser 13y ago
  They 'might' do just about anything if you tell them to stop. (including stop) The point is if you don't try, they have already shown what they plan to do. And in a group of people with two people you know some of the risk is mitigated. Now I think she handled a bad situation quite politely, and she has no obligation to put effort into making that particular situation better. However I believe that in making the blog post she is showing herself to be a person who both wants to and is brave enough to make the situation better. But as mentioned by the gp the people who read these types of blog posts are largely the type of people who believe we should treat everyone like a person. As such helping out further by informing the person or group of people of their unwelcome and in this case inappropriate behavior could further that goal of improving the situation for everyone. Edit: I am a privileged white male who realizes I might have huge misconceptions about what it is exactly like to live as one who is treated with less privilege, so would welcome criticism of my view point. So if my above comment smacks of 'of course you think that you've never had to deal with....' I would like to know.
  - kevingadd 13y ago
    Unfortunately many women simply don't feel safe enough to fight back and instead will remove themselves from a situation like that. If the space itself feels unsafe (instead of it just being a 'bad person in a good place' situation), that's going to make it seem like a much better idea to leave. After all, it's not as if these are unusual occurrences. They're all too common.
  - tommorris 13y ago
    This whole HN thread has been a huge volley of victim blaming. It's quite disappointing but not at all surprising. Last year, I was on a train back to visit my parents place—a little village in quiet commuter-land suburbia. It was late. I had drunk a small amount before getting on the train but wasn't drunk. A tall drunk man started shouting at me about how he wanted me to suck his dick. I obviously didn't do a good enough impression of a disgusted homophobe by shouting "eww, no". He twigged that I was actually gay and started shouting abuse at me. He was there with a friend who was leering and laughing along. There were no third parties in the nearby vicinity. So, what did I do? I let the abuse continue and didn't put up a fight. I was surprised this was happening - these were grown men, this was a train line going mostly out to quiet middle-class suburbia. There were two of them and one of me—they were bigger and stronger while I have the body of a lifelong sedentary computer programmer; if there were a physical altercation, I'd come out worse for it. I don't want to end up in the emergency room. Should I have stood up to them and told them to stop? To give as good as I get? Yes. It might stop them next time. I certainly want to make the situation better. But in the moment when you are being picked on and attacked, the calculation you make isn't the same calculation you'd make after the event. The flipside is I have seen other examples of homophobic abuse of others and been ready and prepared to step in (hasn't been needed). There's a sort of frozen moment of panic when you are abused. I've had friends who have had very bad sexist abuse who have said the same thing. I have one friend who is trans and a sexual abuse survivior who goes through far more abuse and manage to stand up to it and live their life. I have great admiration for them, but I don't think it is anyone's job to go around policing the reactions of victims when faced with discrimination and abuse.
ossreality 13y ago
Easier said than done. I've been "out" for years and despite being opinionated and a "proud" person, I still find it extremely hard to put my neck out there and call others out (and interesting, it's much easier for me to stand up for female friends than it is to stand up for myself or other LGBT-specifically related issues). It's hard enough to do, at all, to confront someone. But it's another thing when you've just been thrown completely off-kilter by having a stranger inappropriately groping you in public (Plus, you think he's going to have a positive reaction to her chiding him? Somehow I doubt it.). I'll give her a pass on not reprimanding him. (Plus, your post has the distinct scent of victim blaming)
- meritt 13y ago
  Of course the asshole wouldn't have a positive reaction. That's precisely the point: Make it known how inappropriate and unacceptable their actions were. Make them uncomfortable. Victim blaming? Dare I even respond to that? That would imply I'm somehow suggesting the author was at fault or responsible for the action occurring, or that it was somehow acceptable because she didn't react then on the spot. Not in the slightest.
  - ljf 13y ago
    Sorry, but victim blaming is exactly how your original post came across. You might not have meant it that way, but that to me is how it read.
lincolnq 13y ago
This is a great point, but it's hard to be confrontational in a place where you're already worried about your social standing. I agree that things would change faster if people were more confrontational but it's kind of a lot to ask. Posting a blog post about it (and one that's well-written, with good examples and explanation) is also a great step forward, and requires substantial courage on its own.
runjake 13y ago
I'm really turned off by these posts, too. I roll my eyes and mutter "Christ, not another one". But I'm a male who doesn't have to worry about being groped and I keep my hands to myself. But let me guess how the reality turns out for her: - She says something about it. - The guy who is misbehaving is probably physically bigger than her. She may feel fearful of speaking up. or - She speaks up and gets called a "prude" or, ironically, a "slut". Maybe they'll blame it on her sweater being a little too form-fitting, or a little too low-cut. Then, she follows your advice and posts what happened and the resulting action which results in even more criticism, death and rape threats than the course she actually took here. If you have a young daughter, these are the kinds of issues she'll have to deal with some day. Might as well think about this now.
- blairbeckwith 13y ago
  disclaimer: I'm on her side. I've never really understood the potential-physical-confrontation argument. It must be a very, very small minority of men who's first reaction to being embarrassed and shamed by a woman is to physically assault her in public?
  - runjake 13y ago
    I am not a woman. I am a large, muscular male who doesn't get bothered by anyone. But it doesn't have to lead to actual physical assault to be uncomfortable or cause negative lasting effects in one's life. The intimidation, the mental abuse aspect of it is enough. If you've been mugged without being shot, it might make a little more sense to you. And really, he put his hands on her inappropriately, so he's already committed physical assault -- not to get all bleeding-heart emo feminist or anything. But that just ain't right.
    - rfnslyr 13y ago
      Funny how far removed real problems are from our society. "The intimidation, the mental abuse aspect of it is enough." versus Collecting wood in a forest 40km away so you can stoke a fire and your family can eat. Tell the guy to get his hands off you, grab a seat, introduce yourself. Everyone needs an emotional baby sitter and therapist nowadays.
4bpp 13y ago
I don't know. Doing that would probably, consciously or not, forever put the author down in the other attendees' "difficult to deal with; better to stay clear of in the future" list. On the other hand, chances are the social repercussions the groper will suffer for his actions will be minimal regardless of whether he is called out or not. There is a lot the unmentioned presumable majority of perfectly reasonable guys at that meeting could have done to make the few bad apples feel excluded and uncomfortable in a way which would far surpass any explicit callout by anyone in its effectivity, but unfortunately, in practice, most people are very reluctant to use social signalling in any rational or deliberate way.
- meritt 13y ago
  I hope we're intelligent enough to differentiate between "unwelcome physical groping" and "overheard some guys make private a joke about 'dongles' and overreacted" but you do bring up a valid point certainly. I guess I just get tired of people in general who complain about things and never take action to remedy it, then go back and garner support by preaching to the choir. I'm absolutely aghast that it happened to her but I just wish people would start being as vocal in person as they can be on their blogs.
  - 4bpp 13y ago
    Yes, the "dongles" story is not really comparable to this and I don't see any agenda I would consider desirable being served by conflating the two. While the old "would you find this okay if the genders were reversed" benchmark seems insufficient to me, a stronger version along the lines of "would you find this okay for every possible assignment of genders to the people involved" both clearly distinguishes the two and preempts the "I'm sure every man would be happy to be groped by random women!" defense one hears all too often in the case of situations such as this one.
  - scott_s 13y ago
    I think you are not acknowledging the difficulty of calling someone out on the spot. It is awkward, and puts a complete stop to the actual, desired activity. It also puts the victim through two unwanted situations. As others have also said, people in such situations are sometimes so surprised by the infraction that they are stunned, and at a loss for how to react. It may take them time after the event to process what happened and determine how they feel. The reason that others in the thread have brought up blaming the victim is that you have not acknowledged these aspects of the situation.
zasz 13y ago
What exactly do you want her to say? "Hi, stop being a dick, because this kind of behavior is a serious turn off to women who want to be involved in tech?" That's obviously not going to fly. So what about, "Hi, could you not awkwardly hug me?" What people say in response to that is, "Why are you being mean to me? I was just trying to be friendly." It's extremely hard to say something in the moment without getting stereotyped as a frigid bitch.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Not a woman, but perhaps something like "This is much too forward of you", in a disapproving tone. Nothing makes me quickly reconsider my actions like this words, even if it turns out she was kidding. It provides the suggestion that if he proceeded differently, there might be a chance, but if he continues this way there is not. That suggestion might be enough to restore at least a semblance of normal interaction?
  - prawn 13y ago
    At the hug, she says "Sorry, we've only just met." And removes herself from it if it lingers. If he makes a joke about getting to know her, she says "That's a bit creepy, aren't we here to talk Bitcoin?" And moves on. At the hand on the thigh, remove it firmly, say with some volume "Please don't put your hand on my leg, it's inappropriate." Then stand up to move seats. If there are no seats, ask "Can someone spare some room down this (other) end of the table?"
  - silencio 13y ago
    As a woman, what I hate is when I'm trying to be nice and proper and educational about telling people to back off and they use that as a springboard to go all "who, me?" or maybe "oh, okay" and then assume I'm a frigid bitch anyway instead of recognizing that they're the ones making a big mistake. So nowadays I am of the shove the offending body part off and "get your hands off me" mindset because it doesn't really matter. I don't need to be nice about someone invading my personal space especially if I'm going to be known as a frigid bitch anyway. It's also not my problem to educate that person on basic human interaction no matter who they are and no, I refuse to accept stereotypes as an excuse for what they did. (I would expect no less if I were doing the same to someone else - minus the frigid bitch part.) Regardless, the other problem with confronting something as it happens - that a lot of people here right now don't seem to recognize - is that sometimes you don't even fully realize what's going on until after it's happened or started. Either you're in shock, or you're not noticing how fast something escalated. You also might have no idea what to do because you're worried about the consequences (which range from physical force to losing your job and death threats and "frigid bitch" namecalling). It's not easy. I only wish it were, and I speak from a rather privileged perspective where I work for myself, don't care about what people say about me most of the time, and have a big, tall, hairy fiancé and a big, tall, intimidating roommate to back me up.
slewis 13y ago
It's not on the author to say something. There were a handful of other people there who could have spoken up. Please, everyone, if you witness this type of rude behavior, speak up. We are all, male, female, undecided, both etc. responsible for improving treatment of non-males in tech. Take an active role.
- meritt 13y ago
  I doubt the others noticed the groping but you're absolutely right. People need to stop inappropriate behavior when and where it occurs.
- throwawaycoder 13y ago
  It's not always easy to know what kind of relationship people are in. That's probably a reason why people tend to wait until it escalates beyond a certain point. If people would interfere too soon, feminists wouldn't be happy either. Because that kind of behavior would imply that women are weak and unable to take care of themselves.
  - patrickmay 13y ago
    The average man is five to six inches taller and forty or more pounds heavier than the average woman. Men are also physically stronger pound for pound. I'd rather take a tongue lashing for being an interfering white knight wannabe than not say something and find out that the woman was too uncomfortable, for all the reasons being discussed in this thread, to extricate herself from the person bothering her.
    - throwawaycoder 13y ago
      It sounds to me as if you don't have a lot of experience. Neither have I, but I have met women who flirted with other men so that their boy-friends could get in a fight with them. Or women who would claw your eyes out because you hit their boy-friend, even if the same boy-friend hit them a minute ago. But why do I bother - just go ahead and do what you feel is right. Maybe your feeling for such situations is simply better than that of other people. How many times have you tried to interfere so far?
ariannahsimpson 13y ago
Good comment! I am working on organizing a meetup of my own to counter.
zeidrich 13y ago
I think that the point is less to change it than to report on the fact that it's (still) happening. If she just told him off and he avoided her for the rest of the night, but otherwise she still felt as isolated and ogled, how would that change things? If she picked up a megaphone and shouted about how she needed to be treated with more respect, would she be? Or would everyone just think she was looking for attention. The way she conducted herself makes sense to me, and while she was put off by the situation, she still got most of what she wanted to out of it. She didn't go to the bitcoin meetup to make a stand on her rights, she did it to talk about bitcoins. While there, she was put off by the way she was treated. Had she just made a scene about the way she was treated, maybe she wouldn't get to talk about bitcoins, maybe the people there would think "Oh, ok, this makes sense. Women don't really talk about bitcoins, she's not here because she is interested in bitcoins, she's one of those feminists. I get it now." Her blog post is just a way of expressing "Hey, I experienced some uncomfortable situations at a bitcoin meetup because I was one of two women in a sea of men who didn't take me seriously." The thing is, it's not her responsibility to fix it. Sure, there's things that she can do, but when men go to a bitcoin meetup, they don't go there to argue for men's rights, they go to talk about bitcoins. She can't reasonably do both, and the only way women can get into bitcoins is if they talk about bitcoins. If they have to defend their gender position instead, they don't have much opportunity to do that. The way to fix it is to support your female friends who are interested in these things to continue to be interested in them. To go with them, whether you're a guy or a girl yourself, to give them support when they are learning about them. To not make a big deal about the fact that they're a woman and you like these things. Instead spend your time just collaborating on those things that they're interested in. The only real way it will change is when people start to see it as not unusual. The only way for it to become not unusual is for more women in general to get interested. If women are getting turned off these things by weird guys and sexist comments (which come about because culturally not many women participate in these topics), then you can either try and stop every immature guy from saying something sexist about a women who does things that no other women do, or you can support more women when they want to do those things so that can get something out of it even when the weird guys bug them. Maybe with enough women interested it will no longer be something that seems surprising.
- 13y ago
hbags 13y ago
I think it's absolutely disgusting that you criticize the victim for documenting what happened to her. It's despicable and downright fucking evil that you basically accuse her of sharing her story solely because she wants attention. The worst part of your god-awful post is that it's currently pinned to the top of this board. The fact that your disgusting, insensitive post is at the top is why women don't work in tech. They don't want to have to deal with assholes like you who have nothing better to do than say "she should do X instead of sharing her story", or whatever else you want to do to silence her, and shame her for sharing her story. She is brave for doing anything, because she knew the world is full of assholes like you: cowardly bigots who will criticize ANY action she takes. I'm sorry she had a problem. And I'm more sorry that HN has degraded to the point where a cowardly attack from a piece of shit like you is pinned to the top.
- rosser 13y ago
  All I can think of in response to this diatribe is a line from The Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole." Seriously, dude; chill. You can communicate your (not incorrect) point so very much more effectively without ragefacing all over the person you're replying to. It gets in the way of successful communication, and probably does horrible things for your blood pressure to boot.
  - ZenoArrow 13y ago
    I disagree. Of the comments I've read here so far, I agreed with hbags the most. There are plenty of more measured responses to be found here, but none that captured how I felt as well as hbags. I'm not someone who holds grudges, and I accept we all sometimes say things without understanding what we imply, but in the moment I was glad someone could give voice to how I felt.
  - hbags 13y ago
    I'm not dumb enough to try to change the stripes on a proudly bigoted jerk like Meritt. I just want anybody who sees his spew to know that his opinion is not the only one. I want any human who is harassed to know that if they share their story after the fact, that's good. And they shouldn't worry about the fact that some utterly worthless assholes like Meritt will try to shame them for speaking out. They shouldn't be ashamed if they were too afraid, too shy, or too confused to respond in the moment. It is GOOD that we share these stories. It is GOOD that we move towards a world where these things happen less often. And the utterly worthless assholes like Meritt who want to shame people for sharing their stories... they might be well represented in HN, but they're a minority of normal humans. And I'd like other potential Meritt's to realize how utterly disgusting it is that he tried to shame the victim into silence.
wonderzombie 13y ago
That's the sort of story that'll spread like wildfire. You must be using a different Internet from me. On my Internet, it looks something like this: "Oh, you did speak up? You should have spoken up louder. You (should|should not) have cursed at him. You (should|should not) have been more polite. You (should|should not) have left. You (should|should not) have called the cops." You can nitpick someone's past circumstances ad infinitum, as being too much of this or too little of that because there will never be a perfect, falsifiable individual test case— someone will find a reason why it's invalid. And after the fact, an individual can't go back and revise what they did, so all folks like you have to do is pick a reason why they did it wrong, and you can safely write it off. In actuality, post isn't meant to be a conclusive proof or some damning, final conclusion. It's a data point, one among many as women get up the courage to talk about this shit. We need data points because there is actually a large subset of people who simply don't believe this is even a problem, let alone something they ought to think about.
dgempesaw 13y ago
If we actually want to "nip it in the bud," shouldn't we be talking at/about/towards the men who groped and insulted her ? That's the actual bud here, right? Why are we all trying to police her behavior instead of the men who attacked her?
mikeleeorg 13y ago
Not everyone is able to "nip it in the bud" as easily as you may be. I'm not saying you're wrong, just pointing out that the solution you cite is not always easy.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

blairbeckwith 13y ago
You are wrong, and a part of the problem.
BlackDeath3 13y ago
I'm pretty socially-retarded, but a lot of this sounded pretty not-cool.
- ariannahsimpson 13y ago
  Hahah best comment on the chain
aetherson 13y ago
No. The guys she's writing about need to not: * Hug people they've never met. * Put their hands on people's legs seconds after meeting them. * Put everything a particular woman says into the frame of "Women don't do X." * Assume that women who attend tech meetups are exclusively there as the girlfriends of the men present.
- ossreality 13y ago
  That's my favorite part. "Girls can like computer stuff?" is just sad to see. It's as face-palm-y as "Gay guys can like football?". I have to do a double-take to see if people are still making those sorts of statements with a straight face in 2014.
- ariannahsimpson 13y ago
  Bingo.
- stefan_kendall 13y ago
  Immediately becoming physical is a valid showing of sexual interest. If she wasn't interested, she should have stopped it immediately. I've had it go both ways and end in sex, although never in a professional setting.

shizzy0 13y ago

Super yuck.

ossreality 13y ago

Where do people get off thinking they have the right to touch others, especially repeatedly, unreciprocated? So many of these tech, gender, sex issues would be pre-empted so many times if people simply respected some basic boundaries, were less presumptive and thought about their actions. I'd love to know what that groper would've done if I'd walked in, as a guy, and immediately started hitting on him and touching him. Even more bonus points if he knew I was gay when I walked in. Except that I'm disgusted with myself even imagining doing that to make a point. Just think people. Have a tiny ounce of empathy.

sliverstorm 13y ago
I think it's pretty simple; human courting is chock full of nonverbals and hints and read-between-the-lines. You take a guy who understands he's supposed to pick up on these things and be bold, but is quite bad at detecting whether interest is reciprocated, and tadah- you have this blog post. Supporting evidence that I felt greatly bolstered my theory- Not long ago I went for a kiss with a girl I barely knew. I knew from body language alone she wanted that, and I was right. She later explicitly told me how happy she was that I had been bold, taken control, and made the leap totally out of the blue. So at least to my figuring, it isn't like these people are fundamentally misguided. It isn't like courtship is supposed to be started with "May I stroke your hair? Ok, now I'm going to kiss you, is that Ok?". They are probably just really bad at navigating these waters.
- ossreality 13y ago
  I uh, I do understand what you're saying. My empathy is overflowing, and I've seen friends that have gone from timid to "over confident" in order to find more success in dating... so I can understand that a million thoughts were flying through his head when he decided to go for it. BUT, the two were strangers, in a topic-oriented setting, and she rebuffed his first attempt. That could have, and should have been the end of the story... Put another way: if he had hugged her, she said "We just met..." and that was the end of it, we wouldn't be having the conversation at all. Unfortunately, as you allude, there's not really a definitive way of solving this problem unless we build a way of giving passive signals constantly. Some sort of an indicator or smart phone app "Yes, I am willing to be hit on by you and you, but not you and you". There's a weird idea...

lincolnq 13y ago

Great examples of what not to do. I would guess that many of these are fairly easy mistakes to make if you haven't been inoculated. For most people, I think a single article like this is enough to "inoculate" -- to make the reader substantially more aware of potential mistakes / hidden assumptions in their social interactions, and likely change their behavior. Yet we still read lots of stories like these. I guess distributing these stories widely should help the situation.

ariannahsimpson 13y ago
Yep, that was my objective. I hope it helps someone, at some point. Goal was not to bitch aimlessly.

McGlockenshire 13y ago

>Was either of us mistreated? Technically, no. This doesn't really line up with the entire second paragraph, in which she was basically groped. Groped. And then treated like a piece of meat instead of as a human being. If that's not mistreatment, I really don't know what would be.

rosser 13y ago
I think it's actually disturbingly telling that women's (or at least this particular woman's) expectations for how they'll be treated at tech meetups are so low that the described behavior isn't considered mistreatment.

blairbeckwith 13y ago

I agree wholeheartedly with this article, however I don't think it's fair to use such a wide brush. "This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at _This_ Bitcoin Meetup" would have been more appropriate. There are bad apples in every community, and it certainly sounds like the author met some, but it's important to realize that a few bad apples don't ruin the whole bushel.

jpwright 13y ago
How many more posts like this are needed to convince you that the whole community of tech meetups is hostile towards women? Of course that individual deserves the lion's share of the blame, but writing this off as an isolated individual acting inappropriately misses the forest for the trees (i.e. misses the root cause [culture] for the proximate cause [assholes]). To further analogize, perhaps the bad apple was there because the bushel was poisoned?
- 2gg2rg 13y ago
  > How many more posts like this are needed to convince you that the whole community of tech meetups is hostile towards women? A whole lot more, because I don't see this shit at the tech meetups I go to.
  - jpwright 13y ago
    Looks like you have some reading to do. Here's a good place to start: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents
    - rfnslyr 13y ago
      Yeah, and OP's incident doesn't even register on the radar.
    - throwawaycoder 13y ago
      That list is well known, but I think it shows the opposite of what you claim - contrast the number of incidents to the number of tech events and people involved in tech. Apart from being merely anecdotal anyway.

jakejake 13y ago

The story is pretty sad and not reflective of the tech community in my opinion. It sounds like a group of either a) nerdy guys with severely lacking social skills or b) just garden-variety douchebags.

dnautics 13y ago

might be a west coast thing. http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/bitcoin-doesnt-need-women/ http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/bitcoin-doesnt-need-women/

Crito 13y ago
This apparently happened in NYC. I've lived on both coasts, and one thing that I have noticed is that people on the east coast refer to people on the west coast as being either not sufficiently progressive, or progressive in the wrong ways. People on the west coast refer to people on the east coast as being either sufficiently progressive, or progressive in the wrong ways. Other than that, they both seem fairly identical to me...

hosh 13y ago

Good thing that, unlike meetups, the bitcoin protocol doesn't care if a bitcoin address is controlled by a man or a woman. I mean, that's the whole point of having a collective ledger where every agent is untrusted. There is no one saying, "Your money is no good here," based on your gender, race, creed, or political leanings.

BlackDeath3 13y ago
This is sort of what I was thinking. Bitcoin's involvement here seems merely incidental.
throwawaycoder 13y ago
This story made me realize that eventually we will get some sort of "FemCoin", though. Anybody who continues to use Bitcoin will be labeled a sexist and be made a social pariah. The reason is that women didn't have a fair chance to get into Bitcoin in time because the community was so hostile. Therefore all the Bitcoin wealth is unfairly shifted to white men. Edit: turns out Femcoin already exists https://bitbucket.org/valerieaurora/femcoin https://bitbucket.org/valerieaurora/femcoin
- hosh 13y ago
  That's interesting. What you are suggesting is that, with lower barriers of entry to create new currencies, we will see a rise in forking economies just as open source and distributed source control allowed open source communities to maintain forks. Leaving aside that, however, notions of "fairness" is flawed. Fairness for me means that a hostile community self-destructs under its own weight of hostility, not that "Bitcoin wealth is unfairly shifted to white men." An unfair economy that discriminates against a class of people will see people leaving. I am not sure if it will happen like that, but that's an interesting thought.
  - throwawaycoder 13y ago
    There are already a lot of forks of Bitcoin, some even moderately successful. Actually independent of feminism I have long wondered if other cryptocoins might supersede Bitcoin exactly for the reason of fairness. Assume the world wakes up to Bitcoin in a couple of years. Then the BTC wealth will be very unequally distributed. Why should people start using BTC if they are poor in it? They could as well say "hey, cryptocurrencies are swell, but let's use another one were nobody had a headstart". I guess part of dogecoins success story is that everybody got rich in dogecoin quickly (1 Million doges per minute). A lot of people who didn't like Bitcoin like dogecoin.

fantnn 13y ago

I don't understand how women can continue to attribute a bad experience with one particular person as indicative of the whole tech community. I know some slutty women, but do I treat every woman like that? Of course not. Personality and the interaction that stems from it fall on a continuum, and these omg! Tech is so sexist! Read this anecdote! Is getting fucking old imo.

VladRussian2 13y ago

not sure what connection to Bitcoin here. The guy behaved like, for example, the mayor of San Diego (that mayor). Different age, different business ... Would it warrant "This is What it's Like to Be a Woman in a city administration"?

angersock 13y ago

Jesus Christ. Is it only Texans and the South that know how to raise a gentleman these days?

BlackDeath3 13y ago
How about we just meet somewhere in the middle of "rushing to open the car door for her" and sexual groping?
- angersock 13y ago
  Yep.

rayiner 13y ago

> “Wow. Women don’t usually say that type of things”. To be perfectly honest, this is something I might have thought (but even then had the sense not to say) when I was working as an engineer. The mere lack of women in tech leads to perceptions that make it unpleasant for women to enter the field. Most people interact with just a few spheres: people they work with, people they meet on the street, and their friends, which are often drawn from people they work with or people they went to school with. When you go to school with very few women, and work with very few women, as engineers usually do, your perception of the whole gender is disproportionately shaped by those women you meet on the street, in the course of day to day activities. For people who work in intellectually demanding fields, the people you meet on the street are quite likely to not be as smart as the people you work with or the people you went to school with. And that as a real impact.

js2 13y ago
Really? I've been a geek since, well, always, have a CS degree and have been working as a sysadmin and programmer since 1996. There have been women along the way, in my CS program, as coworkers, at the various startups I've worked at. Some of them have been a whole lot brighter than me. And in all that time, I've never thought "oh wow, how unusual." I just don't get it.

rfnslyr 13y ago

So you didn't immediately tell him to stop and continue on with your life and fled to the internet just so you can get HN karma? Yeah I stopped reading right there. This is why "women in tech" are a problem, because they constantly put themselves on a pedestal.

MartinCron 13y ago
You disapproved of someone's response to a situation you have never yourself experienced and stopped reading but you had to come here and post an insulting comment? Are you OK?
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  Yeah I'm doing OK, are you?
  - MartinCron 13y ago
    I'm fine. I'm just concerned that someone in this community (you) could be so upset about this story that you're posting things that I can only interpret as deliberately inflammatory and hostile. Instead of just assuming that you're a bad person trying to stir up trouble, I was wondering if something else was bothering you.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

davidy123 13y ago

There is an idea of feminist perspectives helping find a way past the current zero sum dog eat dog approach of society. Aping a bunch of dysfunctional men in their self-serving comprehension of governments and money systems is not it.

aferreira 13y ago

Congratulations, you have successfully determined that scumbags are everywhere. The behavior of these people should not be directly correlated with bitcoin/tech/startups/whateveryouwanttocallit.

ghc 13y ago

If nobody bothers to challenge or set boundaries with cretins like this, how will the situation ever change? I don't think this is a situation where you'd have to fear for your safety for showing a little bit of a spine. It's not as if people who are socially retarded enough to think that behavior is okay will change without negative repercussions for their actions.

guard-of-terra 13y ago

Maybe it isn't related to Bitcoin and Tech so much as it is related to, say, USA and SF? Because I can't imagine such stories materialize in other places (of developed word and large parts of developing world either). You just seem to have enough peculiar traits from both gender sides for a perfect storm.

rayshan 13y ago
The event was in NYC not SF. SF / SV has its own share of problems but the one being discussed here isn't unique to SF or the U.S. Though I do wonder how the U.S. rank in terms of % of women in STEM majors or STEM careers. Also the issue here has something to do with bitcoin attracting early adopters and groups with certain political preferences. I certainly wouldn't call the bitcoin subculture mainstream yet.
- guard-of-terra 13y ago
  Okay, I have to admit I picked SF from comments. I think this issue doesn't have to be correlated to "% of women in STEM majors". I think that by tackling this as simple the numbers problem you're only making it worse. Maybe it's not so much Bitcoin attracting certain early adopters, rather USA having a peculiar supply of early adopters (for many things) that also happen to clash with USA's supply of women? This way you can't win, Bitcoin or no Bitcoin.
- bdr 13y ago
  Thanks. FWIW, I haven't seen or heard about anything like this happening at the SF Bitcoin Meetup. If I did, it wouldn't be tolerated. In fact, there's been a woman running the show more often than not, and now one of the main co-organizer is a woman.

mercer 13y ago

This sounds absolutely horrible, but it raises a questions. I'm a guy, and I tend to be quite aware of things happening around me. If I were to notice things unfold as described in this post... Assuming I'm not in charge: is it preferable that I somehow try to play a role in this, or would this only make everything more complicated/awkward. Should I stay back and just be pissed off? What would be the best way to approach this situation?

detcader 13y ago
If someone is physically assaulting someone you should probably try to do something to stop the assault? Kind of obvious
prawn 13y ago
Notice unease. "Hey (groper), haven't you only just met (gropee)? Bit inappropriate to have your hand on her leg like that?" Risk is that she may avoid confrontation by saying something to defuse the situation and the groper then misses the point and just takes you as an obstacle, thinking or later saying "It's hard enough to meet women without you blocking me, man!" Response to that is easy, of course.
dictum 13y ago
The way that values basic human decency and empathy the most would be to notify the organizers and ensure that they don't just ignore your complaint, and to talk to the person who was assaulting the other person. Unfortunately, I'm jaded enough to believe that no good deed goes unpunished, so in the same situation I'd just notify the organizers.
sliverstorm 13y ago
If you are worried about causing a scene, butt in about something else. Hey <NAME>, I heard somebody say you like <TECHNOLOGY>! I'm a huge fan too! If he's resistant to your interruption, be more forceful in trying to engage him. Maybe sit down next to him. Worst-case he becomes aggressive towards you, but so long as you stay bright & friendly, everyone else will see him picking the fight. That way you can try to defuse the situation indirectly. Maybe you get him engaged in conversation, or maybe the girl seizes the moment to excuse herself. Maybe you offer to the girl, Some other girls were looking for their friend, they said she had a blue shirt, was that you? If he seems reasonable yet misguided (rather than a total asshole who knows the girl wants nothing to do with him), you can optionally try leading him away and quietly saying something like, I noticed that girl was starting to feel uncomfortable, tone it down/back off/try a different tactic. Anyway, that's what I'd do if I was trying to avoid making a scene.

jellicle 13y ago

To the younger folks out there: if you see something like this occur as a third party (you're neither the groper nor the gropee, neither the misogynist nor the victim), you need to not politely ignore it but to step in and correct the asshole, as firmly as necessary. Whether it's groping or just verbal putdowns of some sort, you should step forward and add yourself to the situation, making it clear that the behavior you witnessed is not acceptable to you. Otherwise, you're part of the problem too.

AnimalMuppet 13y ago
Especially if she makes it clear that it's making her uncomfortable.
UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
Are you suggesting that "younger folks" just start trying to intervene in every public display of affection they see at a meetup? If I hug my wife the last thing I need is some white knight running up and calling me names because they have some imagining of what is going on. Honestly that advice on the face of it is terrible. We should discourage this behaviour but it should be through having rules for meetups, a complaints/reporting facility, and banning the offenders (or giving them warnings in less egregious examples). Recommending people get into a confrontation if they get a bad vibe is just bad advice that will result in bad situations (see dongle-gate, et al).
GrahamsNumber 13y ago
Umm... no.
pstack 13y ago
Well, the author was apparently there with her when this occurred. Doesn't sound like he spoke up about it. Frankly, that seems weird to me. If this happened to a friend I was out with, I would be expected to say something. Unless he was oblivious to this occurring, I don't understand how someone would just let a stranger grab their friend without stepping in. As to stepping in and "adding yourself to the situation" with a stranger? I don't know about that, so much. I've had my fair share of trying to be the considerate stranger stepping in to help out, only to be screeched at by the person I was speaking up for. It often doesn't pay to try and help people out. (Not saying you shouldn't do it, anyway, just on principle).

Groxx 13y ago

I can never tell how to interpret stories like this. They met assholes. Assholes are everywhere. They're guaranteed continue to be assholes until their targets stop them / make others aware that they are assholes. Slap them (it's loud, shocking, and non-damaging). Make a scene. It's not acceptable behavior, regardless of gender or location.

lauradhamilton 13y ago
You can't just go around slapping people.
- beachstartup 13y ago
  completely agree. slapping someone is an invitation to get punched in the face and/or shoved down (both of which carry a serious risk of death or coma due to head trauma), regardless of if you're a woman or not. this is the real world, not movies. many people (especially men) and animals retaliate automatically when attacked physically. it doesn't matter what gender the attacker is, there's a high chance you will get your ass beat if you assault a man, regardless of the context.
- AnimalMuppet 13y ago
  She can go around slapping people who are groping her. Absolutely she can. What, you're worried about him escalating from there? In a roomful of almost entirely guys? He won't make it very far with that...
  - vacri 13y ago
    The bulk of the article was about not being treated as an intellectual equal by the group, not the physical contact of one person.

blhack 13y ago

Nobody deserves to be physically or verbally assaulted like that, and it's up to the rest of the community (at everything: hackathons, meetups, open hours, etc.) to deal with toxic people. People in situations like this: please if somebody is making you uncomfortable, speak up. Maybe the guy putting his hand on your leg is your boyfriend? The "good people" in the room want to make you feel comfortable, but sometimes its hard to determine if somebody is a friend or not.

iterationx 13y ago

I wonder what percentage of men act like that? Is there anyway to make an educated guess?

ryanyeah 13y ago

God I hate feminists.

moron4hire 13y ago

I've had some experience with managing tech meetups, and the inevitable occurrence of creepers making the attending women uncomfortable. The correct solution is for the people running the event to be paying attention to the behavior of the attendees and kick people out who are being disrespectful. And to do it noisily. It needs to be made an example of. Unfortunately, these guys creep out other guys, too, so it's often the case that you see nothing happen because nobody wants to deal with the 'tard. But it's no excuse. Pull up your big boy pants and give the asshole the boot.

pera 13y ago

I am really sorry about your experience. Last year my girlfriend wanted to go to a Bitcoin Meetup in Buenos Aires. Nothing like that happened in that occasion, but it was really boring imo... though it was interesting to see how many "bitcoiners" are mostly clueless about how Bitcoin actually works btw I would change the title to "This is What it’s Like to Be a Woman."

p_random 13y ago

a nice-looking lady ventures into a place infested by nerds who are sexually frustrated and lacking in experiences with the opposite gender and then she complains that they lack the ability to communicate well with her... here, let me say it. TAKE YOUR GENDER AND SHOVE IT PLEASE. GENDER MEANS NOTHING.

blueblue 13y ago

WHY do UNFRIENDLY Cultures exist for women? Answer: Why are there thieves? Because the neighbor will buy stolen goods. simple: always know 'the leader'. If not, carry the 'warning cards printed' and give them to everyone. Placing your hands on female body should have a very very good explanation. Wing Chun started by buddhist nun. It seems that her young nuns were good looking and had to go begging door to door for alms. They were 'taken advantage of' and even 'molested SEVERELY' with pregnancies. So, Wing Chun. bending the pinkie finger backwards. nerve points... Computer physical security is a lot like computer security. accidental spill of water bottle all over the MANS lap may be helpful. When he goes to the washroom. explain the situation and find another seat.

sliverstorm 13y ago

Semi-related question about the comments on "how women think" and "what women care about". I am occasionally faced with a discussion, naturally with a woman, about something that has an empirical gender bias. I'm curious what other people think. A recent conversation along these lines: Them: Smiling, Why are you looking at me like that? Me: Well, I see that you like X. Most women I meet don't really like X, it's nice that you do. Is that a reasonable framing?

EricDeb 13y ago

Not to defend the men in this story but I imagine they are like many guys in tech-single and lonely, and see these sorts of meet-ups as an opportunity to meet women with similar interests. Specifically the line "Oh ok cool, so if we start dating I can use the app with you!" seems to suggest this objective. I think a lot of their statements are said to provoke a reaction from women in a "flirty" manner, not because these men are actually misogynistic. Their well-intentioned flirtatious remarks are being interpreted as sexist by women attending these events, likely because these men are inexperienced with women and unsure how to relate to them.

rfnslyr 13y ago
I think a lot of their statements are said to provoke a reaction from women in a "flirty" manner, not because these men are actually misogynistic. Which nobody seems to get. The victim card is laid down instantly and anyone saying otherwise is obviously a misogynist. People should learn to draw the line between shitty personal encounter and actual misogyny.

vacri 13y ago

It's interesting that so much of the commentary is focused on the actions of one man described in only the first two paragraphs, when the article is really talking, at length, about women not being treated as intellectual equals by the group. There is an irony here in that the discussion is less about what she's saying and more about how her body should be treated.

DorintheFlora 13y ago

My concern with posts like this is that a) men currently hold most of the power b) attacking their behavior in a confrontational manner tends to close doors, not open them and c) I do not see it offering a real solution. I am female. I think about such things a lot and have, in the past, written about my own negative experiences. But my concern is that this does not give us a path forward.

boon 13y ago
Not that I have a problem with your premise, I'm just curious what criteria you used to determine a)?
- DorintheFlora 13y ago
  Men currently hold most of the "worldly" power -- political offices, CEO positions, etc -- and, on average, make about 150% of the money women make in the U.S.* * (These stats may be a bit out of date but I have no reason to believe that they have changed substantially. HN itself is a very male dominated forum and it is a place to meet and greet power brokers and god help you if you are a woman. It is not a very friendly place for a woman trying to make professional contacts, etc.)

ljf 13y ago

Amazing to see this story so swiftly knocked from the front page. Sad reflection on our industry.

deleted 13y ago

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gosukiwi 13y ago

All she had to do is say aloud that she was unconfortable and why did he had his hand there... Surprisingly most american girls just don't know how to interact with that kind of people, seems to me for the ammount of similar posts out there, I know some girls that would have just make the guy blush and just have a nice time there.

coulix 13y ago

I do not get it, didnt anyone have at least a few female classmates from their uni time?. Even at work, in France, we have some bright female engineers leading guys on code reviews. It should not be surprising to see female bitcoin crypto fans.