I think it depends on what type of con you're going to, and what you do while you're there. In my experience, there seem to be more women LARP'ing and less women in miniature gaming. My experience was also 10+ years ago, so perhaps things have changed?

An aside: I was having coffee with a co-worker/buddy yesterday, and we were chatting about this issue. My favorite (in a sad, ironic way) quote was: "Well, [Scaramush], thinking about it, I haven't really worked with many technical women. So I don't really know much about your species". My whatnow? ;)

Yeah, I don't buy that excuse either, particularly since it looks like women passed men as a % of internet users ~2000, so clearly there's an interest in using them, of not learning how they work.

BTW, in my career I've seen many woman shunted out of straight up technical positions into management or PM positions. I don't think it malicious or even conscious, but I see it at a much higher rate than men. My current working theory is that girls are praised more for soft/communication skills than boys are, so they tend to develop them more. When a women demonstrates them, they're immediately given an opportunity to do more communication/people stuff, which though opportunity costs means they're not coding/doing straight up technical work. It becomes this feedback loop that slowly pushes women into these positions through unintended consequences.

Yeah, if it was as obvious in RL as it is online, in some ways it would be easier since you'd have fewer people telling you there's no problem :(

Actually, I think it has more to do with the way our brains process language than anything about the subject (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304256404579449180386537694). It works the same way the joke in my sig does, confounding your expectation of what's coming next.

Actually, I think it depends what you mean by "acceptable" and by who. People in the majority have been making minorities the butt of jokes for all of recorded history. It seems to me a relatively recent phenomenon people have decided it's not acceptable to make jokes about minorities at least in public (just look at Bugs Bunny cartoons from the 50s and 60s for examples of stereotypes for humor). Why do you think that changed? Do you think it's a change for the better? I think not shitting on people with less power makes all of us better people, but YMMV.

Hm. If Rodgers shot people because he thought he heard aliens, or because God told him to do it, I might agree with you. But this crime was specifically targeted against women. I'll let Gawker make the argument for me: http://gawker.com/why-is-it-so... (wow, that's a sentence I never thought I'd write)

How about "the way they get to show heroism is by rescuing weak women, and that's fucked up?"

Sure, there are always exceptions. I actually have a pet theory that part of reason for Sci Fi's surge in popularity in my lifetime is because it allows for more strong women characters, which in turn draws women to Sci Fi. The fact that a strong woman character has to be as outlandish as aliens is depressing as shit, but that's a story for another day ;)

This being /., it'd be kind of shocking if you weren't some kind of dork ;) ;) ;) I think this is a self-selecting group of dorks (myself included).

I'm sorry -- I don't get where you're going with this paragraph? Is it that assholes are assholes to everyone? If so, there's a difference between someone shitting on your because of who they are, and someone shitting on you because of who you are. I've experienced both, and the latter is infinitely more painful.

Also, it's good that you call someone out on something in private, but holy shit it's hard when you feel totally unsupported in a situation like that. But I understand that can be a career limiting move. But that's what makes it hard.

I think the larger issue is the pervasive culture that marginalizes women and treats them like prizes rather than people. AFAIK, no one (sane) is saying geeks caused the rampage any more than anyone (sane) is saying that it's the girl's fault for "rejecting" him when she was 10. I think of this as an opportunity to look at our culture (and it is ours -- yours, mine, everyone one slashdot), and look at where it's fucked up. It's a target rich environment :(

Sure. But I gotta say, they jerk:not-jerk ratio of responses is running pretty skewed in this thread. Imagine for a minute you were me, would you want to post anything else? :(

For the record, I don't count you in the jerk category. We don't seem to agree, but that's fine -- you're not calling me names or making it personal, so hey, argue away ;)

I'd argue the military is a harder job than IT, regardless of gender.

Your argument is curious to me: Because there are other places that are bad/worse, we should put up with bad treatment? It's kind of like saying "There are people dying, so don't treat that broken arm, you whiner!".

No problem. Let's see how this goes :)

I cited it as an example of the logical (and terrible) conclusion when women are treated as possessions/trophies, but mostly because it was fresh in my mind (it just happened). Maybe Steubenville would have been a better choice, since being not in the US makes it easier to say "that doesn't happen here"?

And yeah, absolutely: Bad shit happens to all kinds of people all the time. Does that make it any less bad, or any less worthy of being deplored? To me, there's a difference between bad shit happening to you because bad shit is happening to everyone (e.g. Earthquake! Flood!), or because of something you have (robbery, mugging) vs. bad shit happening to you because of who you are. It's infinitely more personal when someone targets you because of your gender, or race and equally bad when it happens to anyone, at any point in time. I think we all lose if we get into an "awful-olympic" -- bad things happening to one group doesn't absolve thinking, rational, caring people from responding strong to a different bad thing.

D'oh. Sorry. The link was supposed to be to the post cover: "Killer Crush: Childhood snub set me off". The image is of the young woman who was named by Rodger in his manifesto.

True, it's a PoS. But it has the 6th highest circulation of all newspapers in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_States_by_circulation). So we're not talking some fringe part of the culture.

I wasn't trying to make a point about what some batshit crazy dude claimed as the source of his problem. I was trying to make a point about how we as a culture are digesting this event, as evidenced by that article. Taking aside the fact that it's abhorrent to me that they'd even try to put the spin on this that she was somehow even aware, let alone culpable for his actions (the label "Killer Crush" next to your picture is pretty pejorative in my book) -- They published her name, her face and where she worked! And then as icing on the cake, they used a picture of her in a bikini to illustrate the article. How is that remotely okay? What does it say about our culture that a paper that reaches 500k people a day thought it was an okay thing to do?

Yeah, I agree. Batshit people latch on to all kinds of weird things -- while kind of curious, it's not the important part to me. It's the response of the rest of us (again, by the 6th largest paper in the US) that depresses the shit out of me.

And I know some people are going to say, "But I didn't think that/react that way! And the post is a rag!". Sure. I'm not trying to attack anyone -- what I'm trying to say through all the noise is "Hey, there's something gross and toxic and pervasive going on. I don't think it's specifically your fault, but I need your help to fix it. If you think the problem doesn't exist, I'll try to help you understand what I'm seeing by the experiences I've had, and why I think there's a problem. Will you listen without shouting me down?". It's a remarkably difficult message to get heard.

Mmmm...What do you think the responses would be if you walked up to random man and called him a slut? Mostly confusion, and probably a little bemusement. Now imagine calling a random woman a slut? Same response? I think it's the difference between racial slurs against minorities and racial slurs against whites. They simply don't carry the same amount of weight.

But I do hope you're right. :)

I can only speak for myself, but: In general little things like "guys who worked on this" vs. "folks" doesn't bother me (although after a while it does feel like death by a thousand tiny cuts).

It's tough, since so much shit happens either behind closed doors or in a non-obvious way, but here's one thought: Why don't you ask the women you work with (if you have any) if they've experienced sexism in the workplace? Maybe they'll have nothing, but their stories might surprise you. A couple of caveats: You should already have a good working relationship with her before you bring it up (if you've never spoken to her before, it could be an off putting icebreaker). And I'd do it in a place where you're not putting her on the spot (IE in a meeting with 15 co-workers) -- a small lunch might be ideal. You can even reference this post if you want to start the conversation.

(This might sound ironic, but I don't actually think online is a great place to have these conversations. Too many trolls, too much shouting. Face to face is infinitely preferable).

I'd start by asking questions about women's thoughts/experiences on sexism in CS and listening to the answers. Going straight for "what do you think I should do about this?" could come across as "well, this is your problem...." (*Not* that I'm saying you intend it this way). I know it can be hard -- but think about it from her point of view -- if you'd been shouted down and belittled for trying to share your experiences for long enough, it can make you hypersensitive to tone and criticism. As a white person, I have a similarly hard time talking about race, because I know my experiences have caused me to have massive blind spots. So when having a conversation about race, I try to approach it with a sense of humility -- I honestly don't know what it's like to be a black man or woman (for example) in America, so I try to listen more than I talk.

At the basic level, I think you help one conversation at a time. Just getting heard is a huge step forward.

I haven't posted on Slashdot in years, but the response to this story made me want to come out of the woodwork.

So far In the comments I've seen:
--He isn't really a nerd! NOFP!
--Nerds don't hit on girls, so NOFP!
--He's using a stereotype! I'm not that guy, so NMFP!

I'm a woman working in a technical field and I've been at this game since 1996. In my current company, the men here outnumber me 9-1. When you add in a love of geeky pursuits (at one convention, I remember counting 3 women in a group of 500 men), I've spent a lot of time being one of the guys.

In the beginning, it was exciting -- thrilling!-- to be the only woman in a meeting. I was the exception! I was going to make it! I was better than those girly-girls with their silly pursuits. But, not only do I realize that was a stupid-ass position that reinforced the perceptions of women's interests being lesser than men, I'm just tired of it. Tired of little backhanded bullshit comments. Tired of having to laugh at stupid sexist shit to be one of the boys. And especially tired of being told there's no problem. And this is not just me. Again, it's necessarily a small data pool (see % above), but I've never met a woman who didn't have at least 3 stories about bullshit at work. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04...

Again, it's not that I can't hack it. I can. This isn't a poor me, come and save me post. At this point, my hide is tempered steel -- fucking bring it, world. It's that I shouldn't have to, and as I said above, it's fucking exhausting.

And it's more than just eating shit at work: We live in a world where literally yesterday a woman was stoned to death by her family for failing to live her life they way they wanted. (http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/28/world/asia/pakistan-pregnant-woman-killed/) . Our culture shames a woman for accepting sexual advances and blames her if she rejects them (http://nypost.com/cover/#covers-1401159702). There is literally no way to win as a woman.

Look, guys. Even if you've done a ton of soul searching, and you genuinely believe you're not part of the problem, go to the next step. The women around you are hurting. They're exhausted. They're being gaslighted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting) left, right and center. So if you genuinely think you're not making things works, figure out how to make it better. Find a woman to mentor. If you're in a meeting, and a woman's voice isn't getting heard, help her (although, please avoid mansplaining (i.e. "What Jane really means to say is...."). If someone say some bullshit about women in your workplace, call them out on it.

Sorry for this long cri de coeur, but you guys are my peeps and the responses broke my heart. You're my guys, my people, my tribe. Can't you back us up?