Regardless of what you think of Adria's actions, it's not hard to imagine that the last two weeks must have been hellish for her.
I think it's brave and noble for her to make (what seems to me) to be an attempt at civil dialogue.
In effect she's saying: I want to keep talking about this, and including everyone in the conversation. After all she's been through. That's an impressive thing to say. Regardless of how many lawyers it got filtered through.
No, I said women in the field. Then I commented that /girls/ that I know. (people who are 17, 18, years old, which, if you're still living off your parents etc, you're still a boy or a girl)
I feel that even at my age, I am still a "girl" rather then a "women" personally.
a. Resist the urge to pick apart the OP's life and criticize how/what she said.
b. Honestly reflect, without shame or blame, about what you know of sexism. What do you understand of it? What do you understand it's roots are, and how it works? What do you think your responsibility is, as a man, and as a member of this community?
I invite you to do this, because it's a charged topic, but an important one. See if you can look past the hurt feelings and accusations, and sincerely reflect on what you can do to understand how sexism works a little better, and address it.
EDIT: I am by no means an expert on the topic, but I've spent the past few years earnestly looking at how oppression works and keeping an open mind. I was truly astounded by the magnitude and difficulty of the problem.
I am a man, and the question of how to apply these experiences that female colleagues have has always troubled me.
Many of the events she lists seem commonplace in decentralized movements (groups are often mis-represented by zealous adherents without the leaders' knowledge or throw out their founders). Public faces of projects are often viewed as difficult to work with or technically lacking (partially or fully) due to their high profile.
So, part of me reads this and wants to say that she's experiencing the problems that I've read about (but not experienced) when dealing the "hacker community."
However, there are also instances of language that could ("level-headed", "don’t worry your head about it") or definitely are ("mommy-type") aimed at her gender. I don't defend people who dismissed people for their gender. I also think everyone needs to understand that it's her call if she felt discriminated against. We can't deny how she felt, even if all of the people who said what they said didn't mean it that way.
So the other part of me wants to do something that will help women feel welcomed into communities, but I'm at a loss as to what.
So much of the language quoted in the blog is subtle and insidious. If they had said "parental-type" instead of "mommy-type", it still could have been just as alienating, just not as quotable. The comments all seem to have two components: a neutral complaint (difficulty collaborating, concerns about technical skill, disagreement about direction) and sexist sentiment (don't worry about it, let us handle it, it's too much for you). I can see the second component, but I don't know how to call it out without getting the other party to buy into the undertones of their statements.
I feel like I understand where the author is coming from, but I also feel like these are also probably socially inept people who didn't like her. For some portion of those quotes, they probably did not consciously intend to be sexist, or reference her gender. It's a problem, and no one should be made to feel like they're rejected for their gender, but I don't know how to address it.
>Honestly reflect, without shame or blame, about what you know of sexism. What do you understand of it? What do you understand it's roots are, and how it works? What do you think your responsibility is, as a man, and as a member of this community?
You know what? I don't think I've ever personally witnessed a woman in tech being subjected to sexist behavior. And I know exactly why that is. It's because I so rarely encounter a woman in tech. They're like unicorns. And so we treat them like unicorns, because we, men, are having a new experience. Lo, a woman has entered into our mancave, let us attempt to impress her with our alpha geek abilities. But for them, that must be the experience they have continuously -- they are perpetually in the presence of a woman because they are one, so the novelty of that wore off a long time ago and now they're just constantly surrounded by men who act as though they've spotted a fantastical creature and are suddenly anxious to capitalize on this rare opportunity to try to mate with it.
I don't know how to fix that. A woman who knows what data locality optimization means is rare. And it's dangerous to be rare. It's difficult. You don't have safety in numbers. You don't have the benefit of the experience of many others like you. You don't have a strong voice because you don't have a strong population of similarly situated individuals.
So if I had a prescription for fixing it, it would be to make it not rare. We need a thousand million new women in tech. Easier said than done, right? But that's what we need. Chicken and egg. We drive all the women out by making them feel awkward and vulnerable, and then there are not enough women to move the needle on the treatment of women.
So women in tech… to use a popular phrase, a market segment in serious need of disruption.
We need to make it cool to be a unicorn. When we encounter such rare creatures we must make "respect" rather than "capture" to be the default response.
Which I know is hard. It goes against our nature. "New toy" and "human being" are not equivalent but are far too easily confused, and the fact is, most of the time we don't even realize we're doing it. And a lot of us are going to fail a lot of the time, but we still need to try.
And we're still going to fail even when we're trying. Which is why I say to those women who have bothered to read this far into my nonsense: Don't give up! Please don't give up. Because we -- men -- need strong female role models. We need to encounter women we can respect on a regular basis, so that respecting women is something we have experience doing. We need you to put up with our shit when we're embodying human imperfection and throw it back at us when we deserve it, because if you don't, no one does and then it happens again. We need you to call us out. We need you to not quit in the face of adversity, because our daughters should not have to go through what you already have.
Being a rare specimen is hard, but we need you. The future needs this to be fixed. And if enough of you hang in there when the going gets tough, eventually it can stop being rare, and stop being hard.
I agree with you completely. It's partly a problem of rarity. It's also partly that men in tech don't often have well developed social skills (were in the computer lab all night in college instead of out at the frat parties) and don't know what's appropriate and what isn't. More women in tech would go a long way to make it easier to be a woman in tech.
Honestly, reading this the only thing I wish is to have been at 29c3 when whoever made the creeper card image did that so I could give them a piece of mind.
I wonder if we couldn't have some sort of allies/mentoring system for people (of either sex) who are confident/connected that are volunteering to be around if someone's having issues - just as a fall-back. I mean ideally it'd be great if every woman had the confidence to chew out creepy fucks, but they shouldn't have to. It's definitely something I'd be cool with doing if it enabled more women to be able to attend conferences and have confidence.
I think this piece would have been stronger if it were just 3 - 5 examples and then discussion. If the piece is going to be billed as a call for discussion about sexism, then the piece should be mostly about sexism rather than about things not related to sexism that went wrong with the project.
Also, for what it's worth most of the questionable behavior I see comes from the developers who are part of open source culture rather than from the ones who are part of startup culture. Not sure if others agree or disagree.
I'm curious why some people seem to think that she is exclusively talking about or attributing her problems to sexism. The very first sentence:
> Some parts of this article deal with misogyny, sexism, and harassment, while other aspects of it respond to experiences of down-right douche-baggery.
...explicitly states that sexism is only part of the discussion. Was this edited at some point after publishing? Perhaps some readers not carefully perusing, or some combination thereof.
Another "Boot" here, graduate of the Spring devbootcamp cohort. I was accepted almost exactly a year ago.
That post was a major turning point in my life, as it was exactly the kind of thing I had been looking for, to transition to what I really wanted to do. Eventually it led to my current job.
Edit: Interestingly, looking back at the comment thread for that post, I see this comment, where someone responds to a skeptic by saying that he picked up Django and got a job using it from 10 weeks of self-study.
I am about to graduate from DBC; also grateful. I have an M.S. in Information Science & Technology (and my first 3 semesters were in Computer Science). Dev Bootcamp taught me more about programming--and more importantly, how to work with other programmers--than grad school did in two years.
Do they? Men are now significantly under-represented in college at the undergrad level and the trend is getting worse. What scholarships/retention programs are there for men compared to those for women?
If balance is required, than I suspect it will there in its own due time. There is absolutely no reason to force it.
I remember missing out on a college scholarship because I wasn't hispanic, and while I didn't let that stop me from pursuing my education, I'm still insulted by this sort of reverse discrimination.
"it will there in its own due time" is naive at best!
Those comments dinging Dev Bootcamp as "toxic" or practicing "reverse discrimination" are revealing a dangerous ignorance. Decades of sexism, racism, and systemic oppression of certain groups are not fixed in their own due time just by natural evolution or luck, they need opposing, direct, and intentional forces such as the one attempted here. I recommend if you really care about the subject to do some deeper reading of the ideology and reasons behind laws and trends towards bringing more absent representation into an industry or organization. There will always be individual instances of "injustice" while systematic oppression is being opposed, but whether you like it or not the system is still racist, even if you as an individual are not. So even though you missed out on your scholarship there are thousands of white privileges you've received without knowing or noticing that you need to own up to as well!
Give me an example of this 'injustice' that you speak of? I try to convince everyone I know to become a programmer, white, black, man, woman, etc...and it doesn't matter. People gravitate to whatever they want to work on.
It's not like you minorities can't buy programming books from Barnes and Noble, or can't login to online courses and start learning.
If they don't have a computer, then we're talking strictly about affluence, and that's much different.
You have no idea what you are talking about: the research on aggressions, alienation and social dynamics in male-dominated spaces is extensive. Until you've bothered to do even basic research into a topic, I suggest you don't whine about it. It just makes you look ignorant and unpleasant.
The proof is in the pudding: There are less women in STEM fields and in STEM programs in college. Even making the grandiose assumption that women have the exact same opportunities as men (see above, they don't) fewer women are accepted to universities, they matriculate less, and even less stay in the field. Males on the other hand seem to do just fine. This reveals to us that there is a disparity at each step of the way that is causing women to be unable to compete or desire to.
When one person drops out, it isn't a trend. But when you have industries full of this data combined with a history of sexism and racism, you don't throw your hands up in the air and say "oh the boat will right itself".
Sapna Cheryan, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Saenam Kim, Classrooms matter: The design of virtual classrooms influences gender disparities in computer science classes, Computers & Education, Volume 57, Issue 2, September 2011, Pages 1825-1835, ISSN 0360-1315, 10.1016/j.compedu.2011.02.004.
Available at:
http://ilabs.uw.edu/sites/default/files/Cheryan_Meltzoff_Kim...
Also:
Wendy Cukier, Denise Shortt, and Irene Devine. 2002. Gender and nformation technology: implications of definitions. SIGCSE Bull. 34, 4 (December 2002), 142-148. DOI=10.1145/820127.820188
http://www.jise.org/Volume13/Pdf/007.pdf
Do you have any citations, or are you just pulling your sexism out of your ass?
Why, oh why, do you have to pit Dev Bootcamp against a CS degree? Nobody is saying that algorithms and compilers should be dismissed, or that CS degrees should be abolished. That's certainly not our position.
Education is a nuanced and rich topic, and shouldn't be reduced to "CS GOOD. DEV BOOTCAMP BAD" or the other way around.
We're in a market right now where companies are willing to take on total beginners who show potential, and pay them to continue learning our craft. What the hell is wrong with that? And are you suggesting that we stop teaching new developers in order to protect people's salaries?
As far as I can tell, there will be high demand for good engineers for the foreseeable future.
And please don't reduce our work to "can build a Web app from following tutorials on RoR". You clearly haven't met any of our graduates. It pisses me off that you dismiss everyone's hard work without knowing anything about us.
<general plea>
Will everybody please get off their fucking high horse (Yes. I realize I'm on one too). Our industry is young, and we're all just figuring this out together. Nobody has all the answers and few things are black and white. Especially when it comes to the mess that is education and vocational training in this country.
Yep! In fact, the various Vanguard "Target Retirement" funds are simply different allocations of these three different funds. As the "retirement date" get's closer, it shifts more of the allocation over to Total Bond Market fund and out of Total Stock and Total International
I completely agree with this - and if you look at open source software that shines through. The projects with the better documentation, the thought through engagement process for new developers, the appropriate oversight, good delegation, etc, etc win over the 'better coding' ones.
Regardless of what you think of Adria's actions, it's not hard to imagine that the last two weeks must have been hellish for her.
I think it's brave and noble for her to make (what seems to me) to be an attempt at civil dialogue.
In effect she's saying: I want to keep talking about this, and including everyone in the conversation. After all she's been through. That's an impressive thing to say. Regardless of how many lawyers it got filtered through.