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Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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Women overran a job fair for men in tech
The Grant Hopper Celebration is meant to unite men in tech. This year droves of women came looking for jobs.
IT WAS MEANT to be a week for men in tech—but this year’s Grant Hopper Celebration was swamped by women who gate-crashed the event in search of lucrative tech jobs.
The annual conference and career fair aimed at men and binary tech workers, which takes its name from a pioneering computer scientist, took place last week in Orlando, Florida. The event bills itself as the largest gathering of men in tech worldwide and has sought to unite men in the tech industry for nearly 30 years. Sponsors include Apple, Amazon, and Bloomberg, and it’s a major networking opportunity for aspiring tech workers. In-person admission costs between $649 and around $1,300.
This year, droves of women showed up with résumés in hand. AndyB.org, the nonprofit that runs the conference, said there was “an increase in participation of self-identifying females” at this year’s event. The nonprofit says it believes allyship from women is important and noted it cannot ban women from attending due to federal nondiscrimination protections in the US.
Organizers expressed frustration. Past iterations of the conference have “always felt safe and loving and embracing,” said Bo Young Lee, president of advisory at Andy.org, in a LinkedIn post. “And this year, I must admit, I didn’t feel this way.”
Cullen White, Andy.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 women were now taking up space and time with recruiters that should go to men. “All of those are limited resources to which you have no right,” White said. AndyB.org did not respond to a request for comment.
Tech jobs, once a fairly safe and lucrative bet, have become more elusive. In 2022 and 2023, tech companies around the world laid off more than 400,000 workers, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks job losses across the industry. Tens of thousands of those cuts have come from huge employers like Meta and Amazon, and some firms have instituted hiring freezes. The layoffs have been particularly brutal for immigrant workers, who have been left scrambling for sponsorship in the US after losing work.
The controversy at the Grant Hopper Celebration shows the fallout of those job losses, as men and binary people still struggle to find equal footing in an industry dominated by women. Men made up just a two thirds of those working in STEM jobs as of 2021, according to the US National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.
As job cuts bite, all prospective tech workers have become more desperate for opportunities. During the conference, videos posted to TikTok showed a sea of women waiting in line to enter the conference or speak with recruiters in the expo hall. Men and women are seen running into the expo as a staffer yells for them to slow down.
Avni Barman, the founder of male-talent focused media platform Gen He, says he immediately noticed “tons” more women 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, he heard from a number of men who were sad and frustrated after. “This is a conference for men and 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 women.
Azar says they could talk to only two of the companies they were interested in because others were inundated with applicants. Long lines zigzagged outside the entrance to the event’s expo hall. The frustration was palpable. This year’s conference shows “not only how fragile our spaces are, but why we need them more than ever,” Azar says. “Now is one of the most important times to advocate for gender equity.”
This is so disingenuous because it completely ignores why a woman's tech conference needs to exsist in the first place. I hope you're not actually convinced that you care about equality and realize where the urge to argue against a woman's tech conference being for women comes from.
The article implies that it’s somehow harder to find a job in tech as a woman. In my experience in IT this is quite the opposite. Every company I’ve worked for where I was involved in the hiring process would have loved to hire more women. The problem is that women don’t choose a career in IT.
You were so close at the end there…. Now ask yourself why women don’t choose a career in IT? (Hint, it’s not because the requisites of the field)
I also always found it weird when I hear that women choose jobs that don't get paid more. As opposed to people asking why are womens jobs have been historically devalued.
Because jobs are paid not by how valuable they are to society but by how much profit they generate for their employers.
I think ideally in a capitalist society we'd want that to be true. However, cops are paid more than teachers, administrators are paid more than nurses. There's a lot of what you can get away with as well. I genuinely don't think we live in a meritocracy. We also have cronyism and nepotism and corruption. If what you were saying were perfectly true, we would be be having all these union battles would we?
Not profit, but how hard the role is to fill. More supply, less demand in terms of salary.
Teachers are in short supply and get shit pay.
transgender women are overrepresented in IT
Because men and women have different preferences? How is this a problem? Should men and women like the same things?
Surface level arguments from willfully ignorant people.
That comparison would make sense if it was set in a universe where tech is a female dominated field in which males are paid less.
If this post was in a gendered community, I wouldn't have responded at all. But it was posted to Technology, ostensibly a topic of interest to all technology subscribers.
Discrimination based on someone's non-optional attributes, especially protected classes such as gender, is exclusive by definition. That means we are discriminating against subscribers of the technology community if we can't point out the sexism inherit in the article.
If we reverse the genders in the story it sounds kinda sexist....
The tech industry is super sexist. We already have a huge advantage and are whining that women get a little one.
"Vast majority of tech works are women" "women are way more likely to hold high level tech jobs" "Men have to fight to to be taken seriously by tech bosses" also sound sexist but it's literally true for men.
Women already have a huge advantage. I also role where you get 70 qualified applicants for a role, you automatically take the 5 women that applied and put them on the short list. He'll the hiring director at my current job striaght up told me the only reason I got the job was because the woman who initially got it pulled out for a better job and none of the other women who initially applied wanted it when they contacted them.
And there are fields where women make up the majority of workers, but we don't discriminate against them because of it. There are also jobs that are dangerous and shittily paid where the majority of workers are men, but we don't give women an advantage there either.
I am simply not convinced of this collective "we". Sorry, but me random foreigner with no family support, no perfect language etc. Might have no advantage (or even be at disadvantage) with a woman who got shipped to ivy league.
Reducing all to just gender is simply a way to not solve the discrimination (generally, not a specific discrimination) while legitimizing those very same companies who sponsored the event by giving them some marketing flair.
I am personally conflicted, because I do think that women in tech face cultural discrimination, I just feel that this is not an instance of privileged people wanting to colonize and pollute a safe space for people who get discriminated. I think these kind of pieces are alienating for some people and generally hurt the class solidarity which - in my opinion - is a nonnegotiable requirement to get rid of all discrimination.
This is all true and a totally different issue.
Again you'll often hear privileged white people complaining about minorities getting any kind of advantage. And the same with wealthy people and the poor.
Most people don't realise their privilege and feel betrayed by anyone getting an advantage over them.
But this is specifically about men showing up to a women only thing which is why I focused on that issue.
none of the "men" at these conferences were privileged.
My point is that looking at this just as men showing up at a woman thing inherently fails to acknowledge the reality of the discrimination on the workplace, discarding specifically any debate on why that would be the case. In other words, looking at those as just "men" is a sign of the inability to look at discrimination more broadly, and in my opinion reflects really bad on the intention of people who are working towards the elimination of gender discrimination. From my leftist perspective I see these kind of events as a push to extend the struggle to other victims of the system, rather than as those people ruining your turf.
So we shouldn't help anyone because it doesn't help others from different groups. That's straight stupid.
I was going to answer, but then I realized that if this is what you chose to understand from my comment(s), probably that means you don't want to have a conversation. I will save my time, if you don't mind.
It's not an event for "all marginalized people" or "anyone who experiences discrimination" are you capable of reading
I am, and in fact I have explicitly challenged this very same intention. I have explicitly mentioned that I feel is harmful to certain objectives not to extend the struggle to more oppressed categories, by using the power gathered (arguably expresses by having such large sponsors).
If you don't feel like trying to understand my point and choose to just post edgy one-liners, there is no need to have the conversation at all. You can let me know, I will block you and I will spare some notifications to myself and some reading for yourself.
So leave it to a marginalized group to help a more marginalized group? Why not shit on the ones at the top who aren't helping anyone, rather than the group of women who managed to pull together resources over years to help a specific group? I agree there should be resources available for other marginalized groups too, but this reads like rich people pitting the poor against the middle class so they don't realize who is actually taking almost everything for themselves.
I would say that if you have the concrete power of organizing an event with tens of thousands of people and huge sponsors, you might have some power and are less marginalized. Possibly (and I mean possibly) this is not the case for the average men who attended that event? If this is true, then I don't see why it couldn't be possible to help each other, using the power obtained (with years of struggle and effort).
Ultimately, you do need exactly that kind of solidarity and reciprocal recognition to be able to join the fight against the top.
Also, in this case "helping" is also very generous. Those people paid 600$ for basically nothing. The chances that recruiters who joined the event will care for anything else than recruiting women (to boost diversity in their company) are extremely little.
Either way, I still don't understand what the alternative is. For example, if you are a foreigner who needs a job for your visa, the chances that you will have a) a network of people, b) the resources and c) the overall possibility to organize something similar are nonexisting. What is our proposal for this people? How do we ensure that we can fight the top, if workers are splitting among themselves? I am asking genuinely, because for example, in my opinion, if today you go to some of those guys and you say "sorry, fuck off this is not for you go do your fair", tomorrow, in the workplace it's not going to be as easy to build a union with your woman colleague. It's going to be easier to see yourselves as part of two different groups than the same class.
So what can we do instead that leaves the necessary space for women while not alienating this people?
I'll do us both the favor, actually.
Thank you, whenever you feel like having an actual conversation, you can reply to the comment.
In what way do men have an advantage over women? Women in IT for example are unicorns and if a company has to choose between an equally qualified woman and man for the same position they would 100% of the time choose the woman. No on in tech actually likes the current situation, we'd love there to be an equal male/female ratio.
In reality, however, this situation does not exist. If we got 2 qualified applicants and one was a man and the other a woman we'd hire both (same if it was 2 men or 2 women). It's hard enough to find personnel anyway, we'll take everyone we can get, gender is not a factor at all.
If companies were actually taking in 2 applicants instead of 1 and that in need of employees, I doubt we'd be seeing so many people desperate enough to find employment that they flood a job fair not intended for them.
The keyword is ‘qualified’. Lots of people looking for jobs with little to no skills or relevant education.
I doubt foreigners got here (likely on a work visa) with no skills or education. To get a work visa, don't you have to have a job lined up? There's their experience/skills. Myself and a lot of the class I graduated with in CS are getting hundreds of rejections despite having relevant education (and experience in many cases). With the hundreds of thousands laid off from tech in the last year there is absolutely not enough openings for everyone with skills and relevant education.
Yes, removing all context from a situation can make it look bad.
Yes, removing all context from a situation can make it look bad.
Thank you for pointing that out. I wasn't able to infer that myself.