This really sounds like a failure of the organizers more than anything- first off, lumping in non-binary is a catch all that anyone will take advantage of, and second and most importantly, everyone was complaining about long lines. Long lines means lots of people. Lots of people means the event over-sold their $600-$1000 tickets.
Sounds like the event organizers were more interested in making money than helping women in tech- women would have had the same problems had it been 100% women.
Edit: I’m not bashing non binary people, I’m just saying that people will take advantage of it, that’s all.
If this group organized and got on the phone to coordinate the employers to show up, they have every right to make the job fair for whoever they like I would think.
I knew it. I felt it the second I typed it that there was something wrong with the analogy and someone who knows birds more than me would come along and point it out. I posted the analogy anyway. That's on me.
Nonbinary is a category of genders much like intersex is a category of sexes. It contains everything from agender to bigender to demigenders and all sorts of others. Much like how intersex can mean anything from completely ambiguous reproductive structures to anomalies of the sex chromosomes to natural hormone imbalance starting at puberty as well as several other traits. Sometimes it’s relevant to narrow it down.
Including non-binary people was not the problem. Relevant quote:
“AnitaB.org, the nonprofit that runs the conference, said there was “an increase in participation of self-identifying males” at this year’s event. The nonprofit says it believes allyship from men is important and noted it cannot ban men from attending due to federal nondiscrimination protections in the US.”
They identified as male, not non-binary, and the event allowed men to come.
the article quotes a bunch of people frustrated at pushing, shoving, line cutting etc at the job fair portion that weren’t visiting presentations - basically people who didn’t want to listen to the speeches but wanted to throw out resumes, fuck everyone else.
IMO they could solve the problem with a stamp system for people who sat through a presentation but its kind of shitty to have to treat everyone like kids because a couple dudes can’t behave themselves.
The entire gender debate is idiotic, policing based on what someone feels like is just stupid to the absolute maximum and will create more problems than it solves (imo it doesn’t even solve any problems, just creates a facade politicians can hide behind). Discriminate based on sex instead if you must, at least that has an objective property that can be checked if needed.
While I’m at the hot takes:
Qutoas for anything are stupid and harm the minority they were made for more than they help (The “they were a quota hire” issue)
Generalizing any group (examples: all feminism is xy, all men are xy, all conservatives are xy) just sabotages whatever you are advocating for because people on the fence about the topic which are part of the group you just generalized will now be sure to absolutely loathe you and reject your arguments even if they are true
Feminism did a lot of harm people are not acknowledging, it is a good thing and was needed but to pretend there never was a downside is a bit silly (mostly wages just freezing in place due to the workforce almost doubling and the repercussions that carries). Ignoring the collateral damage done is extremely harmful and won’t help anyone long term.
The debate about nonbinary people has reached a level where an increasing number of people can’t take it seriously anymore, each time the acronym list of LGBT gets longer more people either check out of supporting it or turn actively hostile to it because they think it’s going off the rails. Find a model that fits all people instead of tacking on more exceptions and special cases and the entire thing would have a lot more support imo.
Organizers expressed frustration. Past iterations of the conference have “always felt safe and loving and embracing,” said Bo Young Lee, president of advisory at AnitaB.org, in a LinkedIn post. “And this year, I must admit, I didn’t feel this way.”
“This group was really accepting until all these unacceptable people showed up”
Dude, have you worked in tech? At all? It’s already horrendously overrun with men who step outside their space and make everyone’s day worse. I don’t begrudge women for being frustrated that it’s happening at the Grace Hopper conference.
This is such a brain dead take. The conference exists to support a group that has been and is actively discriminated against and harassed in the tech industry. All the men crashing the event care not at all about the conference, its mission, and its participants - they’re just desperate to find a job. And while I absolutely sympathize with people suffering unemployment, it’s really shitty (and sadly so typical and indicative of the problem) to flood a space designed for women and non-binary people, completely disregarding them in the race to get ahead.
The conference should have been for females, not women. Transgender women are over represented in tech and the real numerical discrepancy is with the number of females in tech.
Since I am not a woman, transgender or otherwise, I won’t comment on the differences or similarities of their experiences. That said, excluding transgender women from a woman-oriented space does not seem helpful or thoughtful to me, just transphobic.
Also, distinguishing between women and females is not something I’m familiar with and don’t feel good about it. It’s certainly self-evident that afab women and transgender women have on average different lives experiences especially during their formative years in which an interest in tech and CS is likely to be either cultivated or discouraged. Nonetheless, given the significant prejudice against transgender people, I imagine few women would begrudge them participation in this community.
Layoffs are what caused the long queues to begin with. Event organization and operation makes it seem closer to an average American Black Friday event than a job conference.
The nonprofit says it believes allyship from men is important and noted it cannot ban men from attending due to federal nondiscrimination protections in the US.
The day I hear complaints about the lack of men in primary education and the lack of women I coal mining, then I’ll give a shit about the lack of women in tech. I don’t understand why society is deciding tech is sexist but the others are just natural preference.
Its not the same comparison tho. Tech is a far more lucrative career than coal mining/primary ed. Inequity in tech affects a lot more than inequity in those other fields.
Idk if you know what you’re rallying against. People aren’t saying companies should just blindly hire someone. People are saying it’s worrying that the most profitable and culturally relevant industry isn’t attracting a diverse crowd. That could mean there’s rampant gatekeeping, nepotism, sexism, abuse, etc. it’s like when men complain of the ratio of men to women on dating apps—they’re not saying to pretend there’s more women (like scamming numbers or somehow tricking women to joining), they’re alerting people that the app doesn’t provide ideal conditions to attract more women (or I guess less men). Like a skewed dating app (except much much worse) having less diversity on tech hurts everyone.
While getting more women interested in natural science and tech is an important issue, the current approach in the States isn’t working, and one of the major point in you-know-what is that despite the aggressive, well-intentioned push of female representation in traditional male dominated industries in fictional media(it does go too far sometimes), it does not seem to translate into the real world, ans enforcing a female only job fair also seems also well intentioned but unhelpful, because ultimately, you can’t force people to like something.
It’s troubling, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution to this.
Oftentimes what these events actually are for is more about solidarity than recruitment. One of the issues with male dominated fields is that oftentimes they are exhausting to participate in when you are treated as an outsider. Having a community space where people can get together and talk shop, ask frank questions about culture from recruiters and gather strength from visibly seeing other people doing the same thing you do can give a sense of not being so alone.
That and a lot of women require a lot more data on how they compare before they feel like they are actually a viable candidate. They are sort of trained into an almost crippling idea of modesty and more social anxiety in general so a lot of them will only apply if they solidly fit the listed requirements. When they utilize a dialogue based recruitment space they can gain confidence that small missing bits of listed experience desired on their resume don’t fully discount them from being a candidate for a job and gets more of them to apply. Women lean on pack tactics more than men do so these sort of events actually fufill a lot of secondary objectives than just on the day hiring.
This comment section is a perfect example of how capitalists have won the class war. Such hatred for half of the population of the world that people seem to have forgotten that people need jobs to survive.
Seriously… no one should be blamed for trying to earn a living. Instead of being supportive of each other and fucking organizing in unions, we are fighting with each other.
From the title I thought this was an article about men driving vehicles into people at the job fair. I was slightly aghast that the discussion was only about whether or not it’s ok to have a job fair for women in tech.
I can’t wait for this to be posted on Hacker News, get 5 of the worst techbro libertarian nonsense comments, get 3 angry SJW replies to those techbros, then dang shouts at the SJWs about tone, rate limits them, then flags the article off the site.
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