[clug] Announcing: Canberra Google Girl Geek Dinner #3

[Paul Wayper]

On 10/09/09 23:40, Jack Kelly wrote:
> Thought Experiment: take the original post and pipe it through
> sed -e 's/male/female/g' -e 's/Men/Women/g' -e 's/girl/guy/g' -e 's/Girl/Guy/g'
>
> Consider the effect of such a post to the list. Would it make the
> community feel more inclusive? I conjecture that it would not.

Congratulations!  You've just failed the "positive discrimination is not 
negative discrimination" test!

Would you say the Programming SIG is unfairly discriminating because it's only 
for programmers?  If we had a CLUG bike ride (and we have in the past), would 
this be unfairly discriminating against people who don't ride bikes?  No!  Go 
in the opposite direction - is it fair that we, the CLUG, discriminate against 
all those people who love proprietary operating systems?

All of those things share the property that they're appealing to people with a 
particular focussed interest.  The Girl Geek Dinners appeal to women 
interested in 'geeky' technology - technology for its own sake.

The reason they have a policy of only allowing men by invite of a woman is 
precisely because of the 'what a way to meet geeky chicks' problem and other, 
even more annoying and disruptive, phenomona.  Guys already get their 'almost 
exclusively male-only' event - it's called CLUG meetings.

Please don't give me the "oooh, they're discriminating against me, help help 
I'm being repressed" tripe.

Have fun,

Paul