The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC)-23 for 2023 found out that inviting not just women, but non-binary technologists as well did not give the end result they hoped for.
Promoted by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (AnitaB.org), AnitaB prominently describes themselves as "Driving inclusive technology by serving #womenintech & non-binary technologists 365 days a year."
Starting off my research, at the time of this writing, if one goes to anitab.org, you are blasted first thing with a pop-up rant about being disappointed with recent affirmative action rulings. Ya know, the ones that stopped blatant racism. Then mosey-ing down to the Team Page, The AnitaB.org Senior Leadership Team - AnitaB.org The current CEO Brenda Darden Wilkerson is described as "an advocate for access, opportunity, and social justice for underrepresented communities in technology". These points already give a pretty good insight into the woke factor of this organization. Clearly they were not going to prevent self declared trans women from attending, but since non-binary is such a common label with females now, apparently GHC felt compelled to include them. It turns out apparently self ID with absolutely no requirements can result in penis showing up where penis was not intended, imagine that.
Comically, there were complaints a whole bunch of dudes showed up to the career part of the expo by labeling themselves non-binary and made no effort to present "queer" or non-male in any way. The result put the woke admins in an unwinnable position as they can't suddenly have standards on self ID, but also have to address the complaints of women feeling exploited and less safe. Although the problem was apparently so bad, it was addressed at the conference and on AnitaB's social media; talking a lot of talk and lot of no plan how to actually address the intersectionality jam they put themselves in. We all know there is no way they are going to take it to the level of checking pussies at the door. Hell, just making people confirm their sex by government ID would solve a lot of the problem, but it is clear they can't even make it that far.
Males took over a women in tech career conference by registering as non-binary. pic.twitter.com/CcGByMt4H1
— Ren (@rottengirl) October 3, 2023
It was so bad at the convention that the organizers CIO spoke about it at the convention https://t.co/Sr9nHC9Mxx
— Ren (@rottengirl) October 3, 2023
In response to what happened the organizers released a video ...
— Ren (@rottengirl) October 3, 2023
".Many of you are feeling unsafe, physically, and psychologically, and you’re feeling unheard."https://t.co/aDdrc2KIAx
Besides actual women commenting complaints, troll comments included inquiring why we needed sex segregated tech conferences and how dare the admin question anyone's trans identity ?:
Anyone questioning how anyone else identifies is a bigot. @AnitaB_org and anyone supporting this transphobia should be ashamed of themselves.
— Big Booty Breakfast Taco ? ? ? (@katbritton08) October 4, 2023
This issue greatly relates to trans-women being allowed in women's sports; overly agree-able women allowing their own rights to be trampled trying to prevent being called non-inclusive. This story also brings up odd feminist culture to be obsessed with specific men dominated spaces. For some reason we hear all about how we need more women in games and programming, but not in plumbing and roofing. The reality is more of a sex differences averages numbers game. Most programmers are men, but only a small amount of men are programmers. Very few women are interested in programming to being with and there is no magic patriarchy keeping them out. It will always be impossible to meet these arbitrary "more female" numbers where we all know they wouldn't even be pleased with a 50/50 sex split. Rather than admitting interest just isn't very high in females, males are blamed as the reason.
I can tell you first hand working in tech, it is a sausage party and the fellas are happy to have competent females to work with on the team. There seems to be some imaginary cartoon fantasy that a game studio is a bunch of boyz sitting around at the tree fort declaring "girls are gross, let's keep em out". Unfortunately back to the numbers game, there are plenty of men who suck at their tech occupation, with only the top few really shining. So when you only have 10% or so of that population count in women, the chances of them being not-so-great are quite a bit higher. Add in forced diversity hires on top of that, and you have a recipe of those who earned their position having a poor opinion on women due encountering near exclusively inferior skilled women.
Maybe this has something to do with it. I don't know pic.twitter.com/oTFdaDwbi6
— Metrican☢ (@mutebi_69st) October 3, 2023
======
Bonus zinger, currently the first link on AnitaB's linktree doesn't work due to misspelling (anitb.org) , insert women in tech joke here: @AnitaBOrg | Linktree
