On Aug 13, 2014 2:14 AM, "Alfred M. Szmidt" <[email protected]> wrote: > You are claiming that women are feeble persons with no means of > standing up and saying their voice in `yesterdays culture' and need > your help in todays, you are also assuming that women are some perfect > beings that never make equally crude, and funny jokes. How is that > not offensive?
As I suggested before, a good sanity check would be to find a woman hacker who you know and respect, and ask her about her experiences attending conferences. (And, you know, listen to what she says, because the purpose of the exercise is to balance out the natural human tendency to discount what you disagree with!) I've been seeking out these conversations for a while, because the drastic underrepresentation of women in programming seems statistically unlikely to me. And the answers I get are similar to what Deb has said here: roughly, "Sure, I can take a joke, but if I have a choice - and I do - I'd rather spend time with people who aren't hitting on me every ten minutes, and who aren't making jokes about me." (For what it's worth: it seems like there are many other factors that filter out women from programming well before they're adults. But the experience of attending hackers' social events is a big issue too.)
