Can confirm. I have this thought about tech on HN about once a week. Though I will say this thread is relatively tame compared to others I've seen today.
What are your feelings the currently-top ranked comment suggesting that the Media Lab is damaging their engineering credentials by embracing social activism? If you are saying that as an engineering-focussed female undergrad this improves your image of the Media Lab, I'd be interested to hear more.
My personal opinion is that the person raises a valid point but I would’ve taken them more seriously if they had left the #MeToo part out of it. I lived in Boston so perhaps I'm more aware of it than most, but Media Lab has a long history of addressing social issues with innovative technology. They even have a research group dedicated to it.[1] It's one thing to dislike Media Lab's involvement in social activism generally, it's another to dislike Media Lab's involvement with feminism. My opinion of Media Lab is pretty unaffected. These “awards” are just PR to help with fundraising. I think Snowden won a few years ago. It’s just about who will drum up the most conversation.
Where I struggle with being a woman in tech is how dismissive many people can be of their female colleagues. As with any discussion that happens behind the safety of a computer screen that attitude seems to be amplified on HN.
In my experience, the assumption seems to be that women have to “prove” their tech competence where men are given the benefit of the doubt until they demonstrate incompetence. For example, I’ve been told that I “wouldn’t understand” code that I wrote. I’ve also found that my StackOverflow account gets better and more productive responses when I use the display name “Andrew” instead of “Andrea.” Just this morning I had a potential investor ask me to name my “silent tech partner.” An odd request considering I was very clear that I had no partners but it was simply inconceivable to him that I had managed on my own.
And that’s on top of the difficulties women face in male-dominated fields generally. In my prior career[2] I’ve had a coworker grab my ass in the elevator because I was wearing “fun pants.” (They were navy blue.) As an accounting student intern I attended a mandatory “Women@Deloitte” event that consisted of a fashion show and tea party while my male counterpart got to do actual work. And as an attorney I once brought a team of my direct-reports (all men) to a Board meeting only to have the new Director that I hadn’t yet met ask me to go to the kitchen to get him a cup of coffee.
As a woman, each of these things in isolation is frustrating, but I have a job to do and I try to brush them aside and let my work speak for itself. Aside from the elevator ass-grab I really, truly, don’t believe that any of these slights demonstrate intentional sexism. But that makes it all the more frustrating to try to tactfully navigate (tolerate?) these realities and then hear conversations and see posts/comments that dismiss or flatly deny that women deal with things like this on a regular basis.
Worse still are the comments that being a woman in tech is “actually easier” or “a hiring advantage.” I can assure you it’s not easier and I challenge anyone who reads this to make a new HN, SO, or even email account that indicates your gender is female and use it for a few weeks to see how differently you’re treated. Most importantly, I think it needs to be said that even if it there were some sort of affirmative action happening in the Valley I don’t want to be hired or funded just because I’m a woman. I simply don’t want to be dismissed because of my gender. Given HN’s obvious skew towards intelligence/education I really struggle to understand how so many of my brilliant colleagues just can’t seem to understand why this is a problem for us.
[2] Full disclosure: I'm a 30-year old self-taught female programmer. My technical knowledge/skillset is probably about that of a recent graduate. Before I quit my job to focus on my start-up full-time I worked on Wall Street as an attorney and also happened to oversee the Information Security team. I suspect I’m more accustomed to working in a male-dominated field than most females. I (wrongly) assumed that Silicon Valley couldn’t be any worse than Wall Street. It seems that Wall Street’s culture has at least had the benefit of a generation of women working with them while Silicon Valley is still adjusting.
I truly sympathise. Hope you hang in there, and wish you all the best.
I can relate to some of this - when I post on math overflow, my questions are heckled for poor English - by French mathematicians, when the reality is that I grew up in India with English in schools from the age of 5, and completed my Ph. D in the US. The hidden condescension, emboldened by my verifiable physical presence in India (from the profile), turns the conversation _that little bit_ nastier than it should be. All the while, the responders evade the perfectly legitimate question entirely. The tone of the responses on mathoverflow, by identifiable researchers, is quite bad and has turned me off the whole thing to a large extent.
It's disappointing (though not surprising) to hear your story about Math Overflow and your location. I think the more we talk about it the more aware people will be so thank you for sharing.
The scientist in me also finds your experience very interesting. For the most part we think of these online platform as "anonymous" because we aren't conversing face to face. Yet our biases find other ways to creep in, often unnoticed.
I'm not OP, but why would an engineer write a "paper on the impact of #MeToo" that anyone would need to "trust" purely on the engineering experience of the author?
> Some recurring themes of work at the Media Lab include [..] designing technology for the developing world.
What about this? Is this not also activism in a way?
IMO, if engineers were just making little toys they in engineering clubs with no impact on wider society, sure, they could have no interest in human affairs for all I care. But insofar they want to draw from and impact on human affairs, they need to assume the responsibility they have anyway, if they accept it or not.
From the 2017 award page:
> Their work shows that science and scholarship are as powerful tools for social change as art and protest, and it challenges those of us in academia to use our powers for good.
And again, this is really not a rhetorical question, what would a paper on "the impact of metoo" by an engineer even look like?
Would there be a personal opinion in it somewhere, if not of the author then of "subjects", or would it be all "objective" and mathematical, employing "best practices" with no judgement calls in sight? I'm totally not seeing it, so my main "opinion" on that is surprise, and interest, like when a program exhibits a really odd bug where I don't even see how that part could possibly affect that other part. I don't have an opinion on it at this point like I would on a program feature because I can't even parse it as such. It seems like a category mistake, if that's the right term.
2 downvotes in 45 minutes on a discussion that's at place 44 on page 2? Hah. Instead, actually answer. The top comment states:
> It's hard to trust a paper you've published on the impact of #MeToo when your department is literally rewarding the founders.
Which does raise the questions
> why would an engineer write a "paper on the impact of #MeToo" that anyone would need to "trust" purely on the engineering experience of the author?
and
> what would a paper on "the impact of metoo" by an engineer even look like
I didn't post that up top precisely because I didn't want to trigger silent downvotes. But some apparently can't even leave something that is at the bottom be. Well, if it's so horrible, let's actually hear it. Anyone who asks anyone to have a opinion on a thing, or downvotes someone for asking what that thing is, should at least have a mental model of said thing they can explain to others. So do that.