6 ms·

I always wonder if these "female only" conferences, awards and events are beneficial for women. Many folks might (mistakenly) see them as an admission that wom

by taprun 12y ago

I always wonder if these "female only" conferences, awards and events are beneficial for women. Many folks might (mistakenly) see them as an admission that women can't hack it on a level playing field. Such thoughts would only serve to harden their chauvinistic mental models and cause gender discrimination to be more (rather than less) likely in the future.

krzrak 12y ago
I wonder, what would be the reaction if somebody organises "Male Founders Conference" or "White Men Coders Group" ;)
- zorpner 12y ago
  When the situations are asymmetrical, there's no insight to be gained by positing symmetric opposition.
- EliRivers 12y ago
  Those have been happening on a regular basis for years.
  - tonystubblebine 12y ago
    At my first OSCON conference, they'd converted the women's bathroom into a second men's bathroom. So yeah.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    I'm not well familiar with it, so might I ask if the Female Founders Conference is strictly limited in admission to women only? If so, your analogy doesn't pan out.
    - Impossible 12y ago
      Although there isn't anything that says whether or not it's women only, the application[1] has a gender option, so at the very least they are accepting applications from men. There isn't any language that says they are explicitly excluding men, although I'm sure they'd like a more balanced ratio than other startup events, and it's likely that the majority of the attendees will be women. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/ffc https://news.ycombinator.com/ffc
- untog 12y ago
  You don't need to organise them, they already exist by default.
  - ps4fanboy 12y ago
    To draw a parallel in an industry that went though this process some time ago, in Australia journalism was a male dominated industry and they organised programs to encourage women to enter the industry. Things like the women in journalism awards and press club events aimed at women. In the most recent one they announced the statistic that 65% of journalists in Australia are now women despite this the female targeted events continue. Once you have these events its hard to give them up and if someone was to now organised similar events aimed at the minority group men the reaction would be very hostile.
dang 12y ago
Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- grimtrigger 12y ago
  This conference is tightly tied into current politics. If you want to keep politics of news.ycombinator then the obvious solution is to remove this post (or the comments section entirely). -------- Edit: What I'm trying to say is that taprun didn't introduce the topic, katm did. Why are you singling out taprun and not katm?
- JoergR 12y ago
  Really? Dude can blubber oblivious sexist things about "even playfields" but answers have to be something new? What is there new to say about the same old sexist narratives? Nothing? Right, so basically the guidelines just enforce sexism. Good job, that's exactly why I despise Hackernews.
drcomputer 12y ago
As a female developer / hacker / mathy techy computer science person (for 20 years) who has never been to one; my only impression of them is the commentary I see from people online talking about their controversy. Otherwise, they are like fog to me: I can comment neither positively nor negatively nor even neutrally on whether they genuinely add or detract from my experience or interests. Lots of people seem to have opinions on these conventions, but to be seriously seriously honest, it is very rare I have been involved in any tech thing where, if you mandated that 90% of the participants must be male, that it would change the demographic. That is a satirical way of demonstrating that most technical, mathematical, engineering, and computer things are male dominated purely by their origin and lineage of development. It's like asking a 14 year old boy to go lingerie shopping. People react because it's not the norm. The reaction is neither good nor bad. I react to people too.
- lotharbot 12y ago
  Speaking as a former 14 year old boy who went on all sorts of embarrassing shopping trips with my mother (and sometimes 4 younger sisters), I would say the reactions other people had were the least significant effect. The most significant effect is that as an adult, I'm can walk into the maxi pad section and find the ones that meet the required criteria. If I ever have a daughter I need to take bra shopping, I can handle that. Developing confidence and competence to do those things is way more important than the reactions of other people. If a female founder conference helps women develop confidence or competence, or helps connect them to customers or investors or future employees, good for them. Those benefits will last a lot longer than whatever silly (over)reactions people have.
  - drcomputer 12y ago
    Yea. I have managed to develop confidence over the years. Despite the fact that I continue to obsess over hair, perfume, lots of makeup and fancy clothes, every time I go to code or work on something hard, I remember who I am. I'm the kid who spent hours pouring over numerical patterns and graphs after I learned about prime numbers. I'm the kid who grew up playing titles like "the logical zoombinis", " the incredible machine" and "treasure math storm". I had chemistry kits and microscopes, and I hacked my tamagotchis, neopets, and PC games with whatever I could figure out. These are the things that help me, when I stand in front of my wrote board, alone, trying to teach myself category theory while mashing together MVCs and relational databases in order to have a formalized way of reasoning no matter what systems I exist in. I at least have demonstrated to myself so far that set theory is useful for development. This stuff just makes me feel like I might one day achieve my goal of being 'crazy genius'. I hate when I let culture make me feel like I don't even fit into that group of people, just because I don't look like them.
lotharbot 12y ago
There are a lot of people who are affected by conferences like this, with some positive and some negative effects. I suspect the balance is strongly positive. The possible increased discrimination from those with pre-existing chauvinistic mental models can be weighed against decreased discrimination from those whose pre-existing chauvinistic models are challenged by seeing capable female founders, which I think would be the larger effect. And there are bigger and more direct benefits: networking with other founders, getting your startup / product out there in front of more potential customers and investors, media coverage, etc.
- gizmo686 12y ago
  The concern isn't (exclusively) increased discrimination from those with pre-existing chauvinistic mental models; you also have to be concerned about people who see this type of event and subconsciously infer that it means that females are inferior.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    You have to worry about those people anyways, because they are broken.
    - gizmo686 12y ago
      How so? They are incorrect, as subconscious inferences often are, but the conclusion is not a-priori unreasonable, and giving a group a handicap is often done because, all else being equal, they are not as good as the other group. Again, you can (as I do) disagree with this assessment and think that it should be obviously wrong with a little bit of thought and knowledge of the actual situation, but as a subconsious inference it seams reasonable. In fact, if you recall the "separate cannot be equal" ruling in relationship to racial discrimination, one of the arguments was that even if the separate accommodations were in fact equal (which they weren't) simply having black only schools creates a feeling of inferiority. EDIT: Minor correction. After looking up the opinion for separate cannot be equal (Brown v Board of education [1]), it turns out that, in the opinion of the court, accommodations were in fact equal (or being equalized), which is what forced an examination of the separate but equal doctrine itself. I'll just leave this quote here: "To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." [1] [1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/483#writing-USSC_CR_0347_0483_ZO http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/483#writing...
santacluster 12y ago
"Let's not provoke them" is a survival strategy, not a winning strategy. I don't think mere survival is the goal here.
smokey_the_bear 12y ago
I used to doubt the need for conferences like this, when I was in college in a 6% female major. I had tons of male friends and was completely comfortable. But as I've gotten older and worked and become a mother, I've really started to appreciate the opportunities to meet technical women. It seems to me it's a socially different experience to be a woman in engineering than a man in engineering. So perhaps some men sit around and use these conferences as an excuse to be chauvinistic, but the conference isn't for them, it's for women. Though, ironically, last year I couldn't go because I didn't have a babysitter.
- nobodyshere 12y ago
  Just for a second imagine a men-only conference for developers. Shit-storm would be stronger than anything you've ever seen. While I agree that IT industry is generally dominated by white men (no racism implied, I simply haven't seen a single black programmer yet), such events might be useful for women, but still would be interesting for me as a man to attend. I'd like to know what's going on on the other side of this whole situation. How are we going to bring equality here if we are separating ourselves from each other? I recently visited a conference in Moscow (Highload++), and there wasn't a single woman presenting. That's just sad. In the company I work for right now, there are probably about 10 women writing code vs over a 1000 men.
  - lotharbot 12y ago
    I've seen no indication that men would be blocked from attending this conference.
    - parennoob 12y ago
      "If you are thinking about starting a startup or are in the midst of running one, we hope hearing stories from other women will inspire you to take the leap (or keep going!)." This wording would seem to imply that the conference attendance, or at least the expected audience is restricted to women. The invitation request (https://news.ycombinator.com/ffc https://news.ycombinator.com/ffc) doesn't explicitly state it one way or the other, but does have a field for "Gender".
colmvp 12y ago
Indeed. Should we also make Black men only conferences to encourage more male Black engineers and cofounders?
- oldmanjay 12y ago
  Why not? Does the existence of something not aimed at you somehow make your life less worth living?
  - philipjoubert 12y ago
    Actually this kind of thing gets fairly complex. Consider for instance a scenario where the government was sponsoring an event like this - would that be OK? Or consider a company that has a table reserved in their cafeteria specifically for black men. Would that be OK? It seems as a society we've decided that a certain basis of discrimination is fine while others are not. For example having a table exclusively for executives is fine, while one based on race or gender is not.
    - oldmanjay 12y ago
      You can spin up hypotheticals until sundown if that helps you feel good, but I would be a lot more interested in the conversation if you even pretended to address the point I raised. It wasn't that discrimination is fine, it was "the existence of things not aimed at you does not ruin your life"
- kaitai 12y ago
  That would be great! I'd be interested in hearing a panel discussion.
Jun8 12y ago
Check out the spot on top answer to this SE question about why there are separate tournaments for men and women in chess: http://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/6282/why-are-there-separate-tournaments-for-men-and-women http://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/6282/why-are-there-.... The gist is: At novice level women-only events are very useful, at expert level they tend to be constricting.

by taprun 12y ago

krzrak 12y ago

I wonder, what would be the reaction if somebody organises "Male Founders Conference" or "White Men Coders Group" ;)

zorpner 12y ago
When the situations are asymmetrical, there's no insight to be gained by positing symmetric opposition.
EliRivers 12y ago
Those have been happening on a regular basis for years.
- tonystubblebine 12y ago
  At my first OSCON conference, they'd converted the women's bathroom into a second men's bathroom. So yeah.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  I'm not well familiar with it, so might I ask if the Female Founders Conference is strictly limited in admission to women only? If so, your analogy doesn't pan out.
  - Impossible 12y ago
    Although there isn't anything that says whether or not it's women only, the application[1] has a gender option, so at the very least they are accepting applications from men. There isn't any language that says they are explicitly excluding men, although I'm sure they'd like a more balanced ratio than other startup events, and it's likely that the majority of the attendees will be women. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/ffc https://news.ycombinator.com/ffc
untog 12y ago
You don't need to organise them, they already exist by default.
- ps4fanboy 12y ago
  To draw a parallel in an industry that went though this process some time ago, in Australia journalism was a male dominated industry and they organised programs to encourage women to enter the industry. Things like the women in journalism awards and press club events aimed at women. In the most recent one they announced the statistic that 65% of journalists in Australia are now women despite this the female targeted events continue. Once you have these events its hard to give them up and if someone was to now organised similar events aimed at the minority group men the reaction would be very hostile.

dang 12y ago

Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

grimtrigger 12y ago
This conference is tightly tied into current politics. If you want to keep politics of news.ycombinator then the obvious solution is to remove this post (or the comments section entirely). -------- Edit: What I'm trying to say is that taprun didn't introduce the topic, katm did. Why are you singling out taprun and not katm?
JoergR 12y ago
Really? Dude can blubber oblivious sexist things about "even playfields" but answers have to be something new? What is there new to say about the same old sexist narratives? Nothing? Right, so basically the guidelines just enforce sexism. Good job, that's exactly why I despise Hackernews.

drcomputer 12y ago

As a female developer / hacker / mathy techy computer science person (for 20 years) who has never been to one; my only impression of them is the commentary I see from people online talking about their controversy. Otherwise, they are like fog to me: I can comment neither positively nor negatively nor even neutrally on whether they genuinely add or detract from my experience or interests. Lots of people seem to have opinions on these conventions, but to be seriously seriously honest, it is very rare I have been involved in any tech thing where, if you mandated that 90% of the participants must be male, that it would change the demographic. That is a satirical way of demonstrating that most technical, mathematical, engineering, and computer things are male dominated purely by their origin and lineage of development. It's like asking a 14 year old boy to go lingerie shopping. People react because it's not the norm. The reaction is neither good nor bad. I react to people too.

lotharbot 12y ago
Speaking as a former 14 year old boy who went on all sorts of embarrassing shopping trips with my mother (and sometimes 4 younger sisters), I would say the reactions other people had were the least significant effect. The most significant effect is that as an adult, I'm can walk into the maxi pad section and find the ones that meet the required criteria. If I ever have a daughter I need to take bra shopping, I can handle that. Developing confidence and competence to do those things is way more important than the reactions of other people. If a female founder conference helps women develop confidence or competence, or helps connect them to customers or investors or future employees, good for them. Those benefits will last a lot longer than whatever silly (over)reactions people have.
- drcomputer 12y ago
  Yea. I have managed to develop confidence over the years. Despite the fact that I continue to obsess over hair, perfume, lots of makeup and fancy clothes, every time I go to code or work on something hard, I remember who I am. I'm the kid who spent hours pouring over numerical patterns and graphs after I learned about prime numbers. I'm the kid who grew up playing titles like "the logical zoombinis", " the incredible machine" and "treasure math storm". I had chemistry kits and microscopes, and I hacked my tamagotchis, neopets, and PC games with whatever I could figure out. These are the things that help me, when I stand in front of my wrote board, alone, trying to teach myself category theory while mashing together MVCs and relational databases in order to have a formalized way of reasoning no matter what systems I exist in. I at least have demonstrated to myself so far that set theory is useful for development. This stuff just makes me feel like I might one day achieve my goal of being 'crazy genius'. I hate when I let culture make me feel like I don't even fit into that group of people, just because I don't look like them.

lotharbot 12y ago

There are a lot of people who are affected by conferences like this, with some positive and some negative effects. I suspect the balance is strongly positive. The possible increased discrimination from those with pre-existing chauvinistic mental models can be weighed against decreased discrimination from those whose pre-existing chauvinistic models are challenged by seeing capable female founders, which I think would be the larger effect. And there are bigger and more direct benefits: networking with other founders, getting your startup / product out there in front of more potential customers and investors, media coverage, etc.

gizmo686 12y ago
The concern isn't (exclusively) increased discrimination from those with pre-existing chauvinistic mental models; you also have to be concerned about people who see this type of event and subconsciously infer that it means that females are inferior.
- tptacek 12y ago
  You have to worry about those people anyways, because they are broken.
  - gizmo686 12y ago
    How so? They are incorrect, as subconscious inferences often are, but the conclusion is not a-priori unreasonable, and giving a group a handicap is often done because, all else being equal, they are not as good as the other group. Again, you can (as I do) disagree with this assessment and think that it should be obviously wrong with a little bit of thought and knowledge of the actual situation, but as a subconsious inference it seams reasonable. In fact, if you recall the "separate cannot be equal" ruling in relationship to racial discrimination, one of the arguments was that even if the separate accommodations were in fact equal (which they weren't) simply having black only schools creates a feeling of inferiority. EDIT: Minor correction. After looking up the opinion for separate cannot be equal (Brown v Board of education [1]), it turns out that, in the opinion of the court, accommodations were in fact equal (or being equalized), which is what forced an examination of the separate but equal doctrine itself. I'll just leave this quote here: "To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." [1] [1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/483#writing-USSC_CR_0347_0483_ZO http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/483#writing...

santacluster 12y ago

"Let's not provoke them" is a survival strategy, not a winning strategy. I don't think mere survival is the goal here.

smokey_the_bear 12y ago

I used to doubt the need for conferences like this, when I was in college in a 6% female major. I had tons of male friends and was completely comfortable. But as I've gotten older and worked and become a mother, I've really started to appreciate the opportunities to meet technical women. It seems to me it's a socially different experience to be a woman in engineering than a man in engineering. So perhaps some men sit around and use these conferences as an excuse to be chauvinistic, but the conference isn't for them, it's for women. Though, ironically, last year I couldn't go because I didn't have a babysitter.

nobodyshere 12y ago
Just for a second imagine a men-only conference for developers. Shit-storm would be stronger than anything you've ever seen. While I agree that IT industry is generally dominated by white men (no racism implied, I simply haven't seen a single black programmer yet), such events might be useful for women, but still would be interesting for me as a man to attend. I'd like to know what's going on on the other side of this whole situation. How are we going to bring equality here if we are separating ourselves from each other? I recently visited a conference in Moscow (Highload++), and there wasn't a single woman presenting. That's just sad. In the company I work for right now, there are probably about 10 women writing code vs over a 1000 men.
- lotharbot 12y ago
  I've seen no indication that men would be blocked from attending this conference.
  - parennoob 12y ago
    "If you are thinking about starting a startup or are in the midst of running one, we hope hearing stories from other women will inspire you to take the leap (or keep going!)." This wording would seem to imply that the conference attendance, or at least the expected audience is restricted to women. The invitation request (https://news.ycombinator.com/ffc https://news.ycombinator.com/ffc) doesn't explicitly state it one way or the other, but does have a field for "Gender".

colmvp 12y ago

Indeed. Should we also make Black men only conferences to encourage more male Black engineers and cofounders?

oldmanjay 12y ago
Why not? Does the existence of something not aimed at you somehow make your life less worth living?
- philipjoubert 12y ago
  Actually this kind of thing gets fairly complex. Consider for instance a scenario where the government was sponsoring an event like this - would that be OK? Or consider a company that has a table reserved in their cafeteria specifically for black men. Would that be OK? It seems as a society we've decided that a certain basis of discrimination is fine while others are not. For example having a table exclusively for executives is fine, while one based on race or gender is not.
  - oldmanjay 12y ago
    You can spin up hypotheticals until sundown if that helps you feel good, but I would be a lot more interested in the conversation if you even pretended to address the point I raised. It wasn't that discrimination is fine, it was "the existence of things not aimed at you does not ruin your life"
kaitai 12y ago
That would be great! I'd be interested in hearing a panel discussion.

Jun8 12y ago

Check out the spot on top answer to this SE question about why there are separate tournaments for men and women in chess: http://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/6282/why-are-there-separate-tournaments-for-men-and-women http://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/6282/why-are-there-.... The gist is: At novice level women-only events are very useful, at expert level they tend to be constricting.