In case people read this as some outsider with sour grapes, Caterina (the author) founded Flickr with her now-ex, Stewart, who is the founder of Slack. So whatever she’s exposed to when visiting Finland is the VIP tech star version of how women are treated.
Conference events centered around drinking and gambling, and when I pointed out that women may feel uncomfortable there, the conference organizers shrugged.
This is Finland, where the party culture is different. What did Finnish women say? Altogether, it's an American woman imposing her viewpoint on a culture that isn't hers. Cultural imperialism at its finest. I wish I wasn't serious.
Wow, this totally explains why Torvalds has taken care to become so polite lately, almost to excess. We used to just blame the usual sort of SV-driven "woke" politics, but really-- who would ever want to be mistaken for one of those guys? The stuff that's reported in this article is surprisingly damning, not even due to the sexism itself but the extent to which ego-driven behavior seems to be supplanting any sort of real professionalism among that group.
I’ll keep my comments substantive. That being said, anyone who reads my comment history will conclude that if you were to ban me, it would be your loss, not mine. So do what you will.
He can’t—or, rather, he can’t provide any scientific sources to support his false claim—but a 10-second search on google for some combination of the words “female”, “male”, “infants”, “study”, “preferences”, “toys”, etc will yield an entire literature that lends extremely strong support to the (already obvious) proposition that men and women are—gasp!-innately different. Proceed at your own risk (that is, risk to your feel-good, false beliefs).
There were numerous deconstructions of the sexist manifesto from a (now-ex) Google engineer who made similar claims. I recommend those as a good starting point. I also think that claims such as "men make better engineers" need to be proven, and I've yet to read any evidence that suggests this is the case.
So, I’d heard of the manifesto, but I’d never read it. I just read it, and it seems perfectly reasonable to me. Given that some of the smartest left-leaning individuals in the world—Google employees—apparently read and rejected what is clearly nothing more than a measured call for common sense, I have to wonder if there’s any point to debating you folks online. We—intelligent right-leaning and left-leaning individuals, respectively—appear to have simply parted ways.
If you want to link to a “deconstruction” of the manifesto, I’ll read it, but I’m not expecting much. I’ve already read well-designed studies that show the author’s assertions to be correct. I’m not sure how these alleged “deconstructions” get around such studies, but if I had to guess, I’d say sophistry, probably.
I'm afraid if you read the manifesto and considered it reasonable then there's not much I can do. It's not about the facts (on that front the manifesto has been fully debunked), it's about what's acceptable in how we treat women in tech, and that manifesto was entirely unacceptable.
To me, my friends, my colleagues, and my peers on the internet, it was clearly the writing of a very sexist man with no interest in understanding the experiences of women or other minority groups in tech. He not only had no interest in understanding these experiences, he clearly did not believe they even existed, whitewashing all other experiences with his own, and his very naive and ignorant view of what diversity initiatives do and the reasons they exist.
Studies have shown time and time again, including studies conducted at Google, that diverse teams are higher performing and happier.
I think you need to take a long hard look at your biases, as they are not acceptable in today's society. I hope that you can change your views before you push women out of tech. These views are something that society wholeheartedly rejects today, and if you don't realise that they are wrong, you are going to struggle more and more in life.
>It's not about the facts (on that front the manifesto has been fully debunked)
Indeed, it truly isn’t about the facts for you.
>These views are something that society wholeheartedly rejects today, and if you don’t realise that they are wrong, you are going to struggle more and more in life.
I appreciate your concern, but I’m actually doing quite well, wrongthink and all.
I am not sure how I feel about this article and how seriously I want to take it. As of right now, the author is painting a bleak picture of one side only.
It reads like a petty kid overheard something vulgar over the counter and now wants to write a book about it.
If the author can redo the piece without pointing fingers and playing a victim then I would reconsider reading it again.
