Julia Enthoven shared her experience as a Woman in tech, and this thread is filled with nitpicking, asking for sources, disagreement, alternate theories, debates, etc.
There is no empathy here. So I'll start:
Good for her for sharing her thoughts and experiences. It's a tough topic to talk about, and as we see here and elsewhere, people will immediately pick apart everything you say. Individual experiences like these are useful to read about for people like me who recognize that there is a problem but don't really know what to do about it. So thank you, Julia. I'm sorry it is such a difficult topic, but I hope you keep talking about this and that others are encouraged to do so as well.
That attitude doesn't help the cause of women in tech. It makes things worse.
Machines don't have empathy. They do not care about feelings. Code is harsh. So are professional code reviewers. Therefore if you're a programmer, you will in fact spend a lot of time dealing with nitpicking issues, finding sources for claims you make, debating alternative theories and so on.
If women can't even do that in debates they start then they should give up in being programmers. They won't make it and they won't get along with their colleagues.
I don't think they are incapable of such things, as I always get the impression posts like this one ("why can't you just respect her opinion") are actually written by men. But her compiler won't give her opinions automatic respect. Why should anyone else?
There are lots of posts of this nature, but there's also many, many posts that give the other side of the story -- explaining why young men in this field don't engage with women.
So, I think there is a good deal of empathy here. We understand that women feel excluded and have offered insight into why they may be excluded, which in turn can help society figure out how to help the next generation overcome this.
Another way to look at the comments is to look at the audience. HackerNews readers are typically hard problem solvers. They discuss theories and solutions, and can't be afraid of avoiding potential causes because they make people uncomfortable.
So while your post has empathy, it doesn't really push the solution-finding process forward in the way that other, more active (vs passive), posts do.
And passive empathy without action is pointless. How much data needs to be gathered before an action becomes clear? Should we all not take any action until then?
Because the actions that would be obvious outcomes of the identified problems are pointless to suggest, they will never happen.
For example, a key issue identified in this discussion is the perceived career risk of being friends with women at work. Stories have been shared about harmless comments that came back to bite innocent men years later, or being described as creepy, and of course, we've all seen the string of high profile men losing their jobs based on mere tweets.
An obvious action that could address this is for women to stop collectively insisting that they never lie and that they should be able to shoot down the career of any man based on nothing more than a complaint to HR. But there is no sign this will happen, why would people give up such power.
Julia Enthoven shared her experience as a Woman in tech, and this thread is filled with nitpicking, asking for sources, disagreement, alternate theories, debates, etc.
There is no empathy here. So I'll start:
Good for her for sharing her thoughts and experiences. It's a tough topic to talk about, and as we see here and elsewhere, people will immediately pick apart everything you say. Individual experiences like these are useful to read about for people like me who recognize that there is a problem but don't really know what to do about it. So thank you, Julia. I'm sorry it is such a difficult topic, but I hope you keep talking about this and that others are encouraged to do so as well.