[brennen]

Yeah.

As I've asserted a few comments over, there's an ample body of detailed, firsthand observation available to men who are sincerely interested in the problem. It's also possible for us to talk to women who work in the field and listen as they describe their experiences. The existing gender imbalance, routine discrimination in hiring and promotion, rampant harassment, and profoundly toxic social dynamics are all recurring themes.

I don't seem to meet a lot of women who feel that there is a dearth of evidence about any of this.

Meanwhile: This embarrassing trainwreck of a thread, ad infinitum.

[said]

> It's also possible for us to talk to women who work in the field and listen as they describe their experiences

When men and boys try to describe experiences—such as watching every girl in their high school computer science class receive amazing internships before any of the boys, regardless of their skill level—they're shamed and ridiculed. They certainly aren't given platforms by influential journalists and CEOs.

We can't give much weight to "experiences" while there are such uneven power dynamics in place regarding sharing them.

[tomjen3]

If we are to solve this, we need data and the plural of anecdotes is not data. Sure when we can point to individuals who are inappropriate and some proof can be provided for their actions, we can and should act on this, but that won't get more women to become CS majors.

[zigzigzag]

This sort of post comes up in every HN discussion of feminism or sexism in programming: someone says "just listen to women" followed by "this entire discussion is embarrassing".

I virtually never downvote on this site, but I did in your case because you're simply trying to make an entire area of discussion taboo, by writing off any views you disagree with as "embarrassing" and a "trainwreck". This is the school of thought that gave the world Trump; telling people their own experiences are wrong and that if they disagree they're just horrible people.

My experience of tech hiring, as someone who has been a tech interviewer hundreds of times, is that discrimination in favour of women is rampant. Invariably recruiters and HR would claim it wasn't illegal as the final decision was unbiased, and there was certainly a lot of truth to that, but they did everything they could to give women a push along the way. Scheduling the most experienced interviewers to women (so reducing the chance of hiring mistakes), systematically allowing women onto the next interview stage even if they failed the previous stages, setting up massive scholarship programmes closed to boys etc. And of course the difficulty in firing women.

I don't need to listen to women to know about these things - I've seen it with my own eyes. It's driven by attitudes like Rob Pike's and eventually it hurts both men and women.

[brennen]

I sort of want to engage with this. I understand that people have good-faith qualms about the fairness of hiring practices intended (implicitly or explicitly) to increase diversity and access. There are problems to wrestle with here, and it's inevitable that some bad actors will take advantage of attitudes like Pike's (or mine).

And yet: I don't have the sense that I'm going to get anywhere by acknowledging the problematics of the thing. There's just too much committed misogyny embedded in this community as a whole. It feels like a safe bet that "I don't need to listen to women" may as well be the entirety of this particular comment, and many of the others in this thread.

I've been feeling conflicted about participating in comment threads on HN. This one is enough to convince me that I should stop investing the energy.

[zigzigzag]

If you go into a discussion convinced that the other side is filled with an illogical hatred for women, you're going to see what you expect to see.

In your case, you chopped off half my sentence which modified the meaning to make me fit your preconceived expectations, and then wrote off the rest of my comment. I might suggest that if that's your approach to debate, committing the energy is indeed worthless. You'll never understand the people who disagree with you like that, so why bother trying? Go back to believing anyone who isn't a feminist is a misogynist, it's wrong but at least it's easily packaged.