This is what happens when you include `"non-binary" at a womens conference

[KnittedCardi]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12595177/women-tech-conference-overrun-nonbinary-men.html

Basically hordes of men claiming to be non-binary pushed aside women at a tech conference, specifically set up to help recruit women as under-represented in tech.

I really needed a good laugh and this is it. I wonder when the message will land that gender identity is a big load of bat do and only fit for academics to have something to debate. Unfortunately they debated themselves into ridicule. Long may it continue 😆

Most role models for technical women are not there

I think this is an important point. A lot of the women in tech initiatives are worse than useless. Often entirely the wrong people are running everything and all weirdly celebrating each other (through weird loops of ‘awards’ that go to people for nothing more than being professional ‘women in tech’).

For example, the leadership of my local WiT groups is all the same people - they just cycle around positions. But none of them have any significant tech experience. They have plenty of experience of posting on SM about WiT though. There’s one woman who is really active and keeps being given all these awards. But she’s got one single year of experience in user research, and hasn’t even worked with devs in that year! She did do one of those free coding for girls bootcamps though. That’s it. But she’s positioned herself all over LinkedIn as an expert tech leader - and keeps posting about the awards she’s getting. She’s a nice enough woman but she has no meaningful experience or industry knowledge to lead anything.

There are plenty of women in this region working in tech. Plenty of them doing fantastic work. But they rent the ones driving the WiT mutual appreciation societies.

So I wonder if all the male pretenders will now be disappointed when they realise that gatecrashing largely decorative WiT support activities aren’t going to give them the leg up they were imagining.

Working in tech too, I recognise all of that

I also think that is very much part of the point of the post. Is successfully ensuring that the attendees of such an event is exclusively or vast majority female mission complete? I don't think it is, women won't be retained and there won't be a change the balance of those working within the industry at all levels without a change in workplace environment. On its own, it's virtue signalling. It's only real when its accepted that there are genuine reasons why many women don't go into tech, and those reasons are addressed. If they don't take responsibility and address this issue, then they don't understand the problem. Calling out the liars is a failure to do that, it should be seen as a negative not a positive. It's deflecting the responsibility away from themselves. Responsibility lies with those who set the rules

Its a travesty that these events are even necessary

Sounds familiar... are you in the North West by any chance? 'Loops of awards' is exactly right.
Not only are the wrong people being recognised it's also damaging to women when companies jump on the bandwagon and want these things organised - the more time women spend on it the less time they have for things that actually matter. Nobody has ever hired someone into a technical role on the basis of winning a 'woman in tech' award.

The way to get your name out there is to write blogs, contribute to the open source community, talk to other engineers but our female grads are being encouraged to do this rubbish that does nothing for them. I told my boss that it's actually sexist. Why should the women not be encouraged to do the same things as the men? Why, solely because of their sex, should they be pushed towards encouraging others of their sex into the profession (and spending lots of time doing so) instead of working on the skills that will put them on par with the men?
It's self sabotage.

Furthermore the people who do these things have loads of free time I wonder when they do any actual work. I'm an engineer and work live incidents, similarly my work bestie who's a PM is overseeing lots of moving parts at any given time - we both get given the side-eye when we tell people that we can't just 'block our calendars' for a half day long women in tech event. Our diaries depend on how things progress... which we can't always tell in advance.

We are the few women in our dept so always get asked to do these things.

Not the NW @PikachuChickenRice - but I suspect it’s the same everywhere.

I totally agree with you that it is pretty sexist - channelling women into distractions and handing out shiny gold stars left right and centre.

Meanwhile, the men are using their available networking time to go to domain specific events and give talks to position themselves as experts in their technical field. Or other activities that do contribute to meaningful professional progression.

I just find the WiT-type stuff depressing. Tbh, when I am recruiting I actually view being very active on LinkedIn and focusing on promotional rubbish as a red flag.

FWIW I don't think a space for women to network is bad - exchange tips on professional development, job progression etc. Recognising that tech has loads of job roles - 'women in security engineering' for example would have the relevant people and those who, like us are turned off because it attracts the useless promotion types might actually attend.

But it seems politically incorrect to divide up by job roles... and by extension go on to acknowledge that each has different challenges. Everyone's so keen to jump on the women in tech bandwagon that quite a lot of the 'women in Tech' people for example work in roles like general HR! Just for a tech company. That's like saying a hospital HR admin is a 'woman in medicine'.

The need for big flashy events is another thing when @spookehtooth talked about are these events necessary? I notice a lot of men form contacts through work, like they engage with people on their GitHub repos, people contribute to papers on best practice for example. There are low cost ways to connect and share ideas.

The trouble is there's no money in that. A ticket at GHC costs several hundred pounds (bet the men were disappointed actually at paying that much only to get nothing out of it) And sponsors/exhibitors are charged thousands of dollars for a booth!

https://www.reddit.com/r/girlsgonewired/comments/h0ff03/gracehopperis_charging_599_for_their_virtual/
This post sums it up quite well but that sub usually goes wild for the conference every year I suspect very few of them are actual seasoned women in tech. Reddit in general though does have generic subs being flooded by early careers people who oversell themselves and their experience.

I would agree that supporting meaningful and effective networking for women is very desirable. But it really does need to be much more role specific. And the female role models do need to be meaningful.

Almost no one benefits from it when WiT stuff gets turned into decorative distraction.

This post sums it up quite well but that sub usually goes wild for the conference every year I suspect very few of them are actual seasoned women in tech.

The only post about this year's conference that is still up appears to be from one of the subreddit's TRA mods blaming "TERFs" and whinging that Reddit took the original thread down, presumably to deal with multiple reports of "transphobia".

reddit.com/r/girlsgonewired/s/o6rjYZ0kmM