But for men, the ultimate perk is a good woman. Is there something wrong with wanting women around? I've seen actual sexism in the workplace but I don't think wanting women around a sausage fest is sexist. It's being male.
There's nothing wrong with it, certainly. However, the correct way to have women around at your conference is to make your conference interesting to women in the field, not hire them to serve beer.
From the perspective of wanting women around, this "perk" basically says that they've given up on getting women in the field to want to come to their conference, and the only way to get them there is to hire them. It's pretty lame.
This, I agree with. My job is not to change society though. My job is to enjoy my life and guide my kids. That's it. And I'll enjoy it more with some nice women around.
Who said anything about changing society? There are ways to attract more women to your conference, and hiring beer ladies and playing them up as a perk is almost the exact opposite of that.
I'm saying as an attendee. If the organizers can't do it otherwise, I'll take the servers. Nothing like idle flirting with someone you'll never talk to again.
I'm a man, a mostly hetero-normative one, who disagrees.
The idea that there is something undesirable about a situation that gets it called a sausage fest is not about being male per se, it's part of a very large set of assumptions about gender and sexuality that are fairly pervasive and ingrained and present enough that they are part of identity for a lot of people.
The idea that the term sausage fest, and the idea that it implies -- that there too many penises in the room and not enough vaginas, and that this is making the penises sad, in the context of a hackathon is sexist. It has a sexist nature. It makes crass and sweeping assumptions about a group of people who are passionate about a topic on the basis of their genitalia, when there are plenty of people with other sets of it that share a passion for the topic, and no ones genitalia is relevant whatsoever to the purpose of the event.
Dude, we work all day with a bunch of other men. It's boring as hell.
If we can get some women in the context of our passions, that is awesome.
You sound like someone who is apologetic about their manhood, to be honest. It's unfortunate. Look up Bill Maher's rant about the feminizing of America.
While Bill Maher may or may not make good points, I'm not naive enough to think that he's discovered some sort of thing intrinsic to everyone with a penis, nor to think that he has some great insight on sex, sexuality, gender or much of anything else.
I don't work all day with "a bunch of other men". From a literal standpoint, my workplace is about 1/3 female. It's a small shop, but out of the 4 people writing code there, one of them is female. Even if that wasn't the case, it wouldn't be something I even thought about too much, because when I deal with people I tend to view them as people, not as points on a gender scale.
Maybe I'm just much more left-brained than most people I know. I get absorbed in my work, and I get absorbed in discussing it with peers, regardless of their ... well, anything. A large part of the time, I don't know if the people I'm talking to in those discussions are male or female or whatnot. Their sex is, frankly irrelevant when it comes to the stuff we're doing. Variety and diversity are good to have, but I don't think humans are so static as to be boring because of a ratio skew. Because they're people. Not genders or sexes.
I'm not "apologetic about my manhood". I'm "someone who treats humans in the same manner unless they give me reason not to, and calls out pointless things when he sees them". I also do not happen to fall very much in line with western male stereotypes. I never have. I was not raised in anything near a home that thought that feminism, particularly the more recent waves of feminism, had any sort of legitimacy, I know about that school of thought, and others that have had influence on me because I read a lot of books as a kid.
Something being sexist doesn't mean that someone is necessarily consciously or purposefully stomping on or belittling some other group of people. It means that there are needless disparities about something based on sex. Thinking that a conference would be better just because it had more women or less women or more men or less men or more hot vapid men or women or more people of sex B for no reason other than because there aren't any there is sexist. "Sausage fest" has pejorative terms. It's normally used to refer to keggers, not hackathons. People who go to keggers at least can know that part of the reason people go to alchohol-fueled parties is to find sexual partners, giving at least a reason for the term. Not hackathons.
There's nothing intrinsic about having a penis and testicles that makes me less of a person if I don't fit into the behavioral profile of the ideal western male. There are 7 billion people, even assuming biological trends in behavior directly linked to sex that are unaffected by cultural pressure, that's more than enough for it to be ridiculous to try to shove all of any group of people into an absolutist box, and tell them they sound like they feel sorry about some intrinsic thing about them.
If you're getting bored just because someone with different jibbly bits isn't around, I would suggest finding something that isn't so boring to do. The world's a fascinating place.
but I don't think wanting women around a sausage fest is sexist. It's being male.
Sure, that's being (heterosexual) male, but you are making the same assumption as the original event-planners did: all of our attendees will be male. There is nothing in the subject material of the event (their API discussion or whatever) that would interest a female.
This is the thinking that strikes me as sexist: all developers are male, so we only need to appeal to males to make our events appealing.
Actually, this is one of the things that is so sad about this case - they had already taken a number of steps to get away from the classic hack-a-thon stereotype of a bunch of sweaty fat geeks eating pizza. They were putting on quality food (including, apparently, chocolate and cupcakes, which I would suggest, have quite strong female appeal - not to, you know, stereotype...). They also offer massages and gym passes, which I think extend the appeal of the event outside the traditional geek stereotype in a way that suggests 'women welcome'.....
... right up until the line where they suggest that having female serving staff bring you beer while you code is another perk, on the same level as those others. At which point you reassess the massages and gym-passes in the context of this new information and realise that there might be a totally different vibe to this event than the cupcakes-and-chocolate-with-access-to-a-gym-to-burn-off-the-excess-calories-and-a-nice-massage-at-the-end-of-the-day a female coder might have, up until that point, been imagining...
Seriously, take out the sexism, and I think they were well on their way to figuring out the recipe for creating an event with cross-gender appeal.
Mostly by not doing things like hiring a bunch of women to serve beer and listing it as a perk. It's then appealing to anyone interested in the topic, regardless of anything.
Just don't do things that explicitly cater to "FOO" if your intentions are not to explicitly cater to group "FOO", particularly if those things include offering up people of group "BAR" as an incentive to come.
Should you do things to make your hackathon appealing to programmers? Yes. These things are food, drinks, subject matter/activities and socialization with other programmers. Food and drinks appeal to humans, and you don't want a bunch of people having heatstrokes or diabetic comas. Subject matter/activities and other programmers being there to socialize with appeal to programmers. Pretty much all programmers who would want to attend a hackathon.
