[taroth]

Anyone else find the tone of this article to be condescending?

"Let’s focus on how one teenage girl, Jennie Lamere, defeated a room full of smart, motivated, experienced, full-grown men. This would seem to be instructive to the greater argument about women in technology, and besides, it has the added bonus of being -> based in fact rather than opinion <-"

As if the argument for women is based primarily on opinion.

“It’s also important to note that Jennie’s idea is a completely universal, gender-neutral one"

Is it? Last time I checked gender-biased ideas can be just as valuable as gender-neutral ones. Why does Jennie need to 'prove' herself capable of producing gender-neutral ideas?

[icambron]

I think this misreads the tone in several ways.

> As if the argument for women is based primarily on opinion.

I'm not sure I buy the article's notion that hackathons aren't based on opinion, but your swing misses the mark in the other direction. It's pretty silly to fault someone for pointing out that the evidence is especially strong for a point you agree on. A lot of people really do have question about women in tech, why they're in the position they're in, what could be done to improve it, what successes really count, etc. So inasmuch as this is an objective measure of one girl's ability to succeed on an even playing field, it's pretty interesting. The article isn't expressing shock or anything, just promoting the strength of the data point it's presenting. It's a bit like an article came out saying, "discovery of additional irrefutable evidence that evolution happened" and you're like, "Ha! As if the theory of evolution was based on refutable evidence..."

> “It’s also important to note that Jennie’s idea is a completely universal, gender-neutral one"

I read that to mean that she competed with the men on their own terms, not by building something in a different category that had to be compared apples to oranges. She was running the same race. If she built a system for tracking Barbie dolls, she'd be in the position of, "isn't that cute, she made something no else here cares about..." like it's really the Best Woman Project award. The quote is preemtively shooting down potential "that wasn't real" counters.

[sp332]

As if the argument for women is based primarily on opinion.

Not "the argument", it's just that many arguments for women are based on opinion.

Edit: and yeah I totally agree about the "gender-neutral" thing. I was kind of disappointed actually! I wanted to see something unusual, something the room full of dudes wouldn't have thought of :)

[dmschulman]

I didn't like the author's choice of the word "defeat" to describe Jennie's accomplishment. I didn't know hackathons pitted the men against the women! I understand the connotation (the odds were "against" her in some regard) but I don't feel like it sends the right message.

[hmsimha]

I get that. I agree with you the article is making a big deal out of the fact that it was a girl AND a teenager. In an ideal world, they wouldn't have any reason to do that because people would have their merits weighed without contextualizing to their demographic incidentals.

In this case, however, I think the motivation in pointing out that the winner was a GIRL and a TEENAGER, is to inspire other young women to study programming. On the other hand, I could totally see them reading this article and thinking "man, they are making a huge deal out of this.. guess I should stick to fashion"

[mnicole]

I don't think it's condescending; I think they're just trying to say that anyone can accomplish anything even if it seems the odds are against them. Would you be just as offended if it said "teenage boy?"

The second statement you call out is important because -- and I wish I could find the interviews -- many female entrepreneurs admitted that it was difficult to get funding for projects that didn't have a female skew. That is not to say that gender-biased ideas aren't valuable, but pushing women to work on women-centric issues is already a problem.