Droves of men showed up
Oh golly gee now who could have seen that coming?
Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech
IT WAS MEANT to be a week for women in tech—but this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration was swamped by men who gate-crashed the event in search of lucrative tech jobs.
The annual conference and career fair aimed at women and non-binary tech workers, which takes its name from a pioneering computer scientist, took place last week in Orlando, Florida.
Wait. Why women and non-binary? Why not just women? Include women who call themselves non-binary and there you go, the conference is still for women. But if you say women and non-binary you’re going to get men who call themselves non-binary…which, of course, they did, along with men who weren’t even that subtle.
The event bills itself as the largest gathering of women in tech worldwide and has sought to unite women in the tech industry for nearly 30 years…
This year, droves of men showed up with résumés in hand. AnitaB.org, the nonprofit that runs the conference, said there was “an increase in participation of self-identifying males” at this year’s event. The nonprofit says it believes allyship from men is important and noted it cannot ban men from attending due to federal nondiscrimination protections in the US.
Invading a conference for women isn’t “allyship.” Those bros were there to hoover up all the jobs.
Cullen White, AnitaB.org’s chief impact officer, said in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, that some registrants had lied about their gender identity when signing up, and men were now taking up space and time with recruiters that should go to women. “All of those are limited resources to which you have no right,” White said.
That just makes it more fun.
Avni Barman, the founder of female-talent focused media platform Gen She, says she immediately noticed “tons” more men and a more chaotic scene this time compared to previous years.
Barman was at the conference to host a meetup. During and after the conference, she heard from a number of women who were sad and frustrated after. “This is a conference for women and non-binary people,” Barman says.
Nelly Azar, a student at The Ohio State University studying computer science and engineering, attended the conference and saw long lines of people waiting to speak to employers. That was entirely different from 2022, they say, when they attended and saw few men.
Sigh. Why is Nelly Azar called “they”? Why have a conference for women and pretend some of the women are not women but “non-binary”? No wonder it gets swamped by men.
And this crap about not being able to exclude people that are by definition not who it’s for if they want federal funds…I do understand the dynamic behind that, but do conferences for people of color have to include white people? Do job fairs for the disabled have to include able-bodied? Do job fairs for college students have to include people who have been in the workforce for twenty years?
Or is it just women who lose funds if they ‘discriminate’ against people who aren’t, by definition, women?
And, if people want to be non-binary, they shouldn’t come to women’s events. They aren’t willing to be women until it is beneficial to them to be women. If they don’t want to be women or men, then let them have their own job fairs for people who hate both sexes.
The reporting on this that I’m seeing is very muddled.
As best as I can tell, the GHC conference, which celebrates and promotes women in computer science and related fields, has never been limited to only women attending. It has naturally mostly attracted women, but men were never banned.
They recently expanded it to celebrating women and nonbinary people, because that’s the kind of stupid thing most organizations are doing.
This has led to the notion that men were sneaking in, claiming to be nonbinary. But they don’t have to sneak in, as they’re allowed in, as men, and so don’t have to pretend to be anything else.
So…a dumb extension of the theme to include nonbinary people and a bunch of jerk men flooding in, but those things don’t seem to necessarily be directly related (maybe there’s some indirect relationship like once it celebrated more than women that changed attitudes?). The idiot men could have come in without without the nonbinary change.
They really need to just limit it to women. They claim they can’t legally do this, but I highly doubt that.