Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wetzler 5043 days ago
Thanks for the feedback. I realized the article was confusing so I added an intro.

However, I feel no need to mention my gender or sexuality when introducing myself. If I didn't have a clearly female name, should I have said "Hi, I'm Pat, and I'm a female in the tech industry"?

1 comments

Ahh, yikes. Sorry. I should've been clearer.

I didn't mean (though it certainly sounded that way) that it's necessary for the reader to know your gender. Looking back, in fact, I realize that I weakened my position by even mentioning it (especially in the vague, imprecise way that I did).

I brought up gender because it was confusing (and I, along with other readers here, felt misled) when you – very casually, I might add – mentioned you were engaged to the CEO, up until which point I'd been under the false impression that you were a man.

So, to answer your question: no, you wouldn't have needed to inform the reader of your gender if you had an ambiguous name because what's really important here is not that you're a woman but that you're engaged to the CEO. Whether you're a man or a woman is irrelevant: all that is relevant is that you have a close personal history with the guy you're negotiating with, a fact which, again, completely skews the context of the article.

Cool. Do you think the intro I added resolves the confusion?

"Hi, I’m Michelle. I recently left my job as a technical consulting manager and joined my best friends and my fiancé, Kyle, at Keen.io (I wrote about that here <link>). This is the story of how I negotiated my compensation."

This made things much clearer for me. I just read the blog post for the first time and wasn't confused.
Totally. :)
Yes, thanks. Great article!
Yes, much better. Thanks.