Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech
Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech
The Grace Hopper Celebration is meant to unite women in tech. This year droves of men came looking for jobs.
The Grace Hopper Celebration is meant to unite women in tech. This year droves of men came looking for jobs.
ITT: men who can't ever admit they might be the problem. So many excuses here it's pathetic.
edit: I love the "not all men" and "not me". As always, it's not all men. But it's enough. And the men here getting so defensive really prove the point. And before anyone gets into it, it's not really the sex or gender. It's the societal expectations and allowances that encourage men to engage in abusive shit like we see in the article here. I.e. the patriarchy and those who support it.
1Problem for what?
I exist, I need a job to live, I have job, I try my best not to be an asshole, I fight (and vote) for a better society, for social and civil rights.
Why exactly I - since I am a man I feel included in your statement - should be THE problem?
0I try my best not to be an asshole
Maybe people are getting too in the weeds with this because muh culture war
But it is an asshole move to show up to an event meant for one group of people when the original issue is how over represented your group is. I'm a developer. The grind sucks. But I would be an asshole to show up to this.
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Tangentially related, but are job fairs even worth it? In my limited experience, you wait in a long line for someone to tell you to apply online. I was better off getting a list of employers who were attending, and then looking through each of their websites.
1Women 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.”
0If we reverse the genders in the story it sounds kinda sexist....
0The 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.
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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.
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How dare workers in (potentially desperate?) need of a job to look for jobs. They are men and belonging to that category automatically makes them rich and privileged. The working class should be united against common enemies, not divided because of gender. While it's obvious that women in tech are discriminated, alienating fellow victims, even if males, is not the answer to the problem.
Capital really won the class war...
0I know you didn't mean it like this, but the result from this line of thinking is that we only try to put women on equal footing with men in tech when it's convenient for men because times are good. Which in turn means we never put women on equal footing because the needs of men always come first.
Put differently women have to deal with being women in tech on top of times being desperate, men only have to deal with times being desperate. Things like this are why spaces like these are necessary in the first place, and if you break them down at the first discomfort you're not a working class hero fighting the capital, you're tearing down women and setting everyone back.
1Gender is absolutely not the only nor the most important discriminating factor in tech. Being a foreigner and, probably most commonly, being old is an extreme disadvantage in tech. Similarly, a woman coming from a wealthy family might be a privileged compared to a man coming from a poor background (which translates into lower access to education, resources, etc.).
Look at the video in the article, and tell me you don't notice some commonalities among the men in the queues.
I see mostly foreigners, who most likely have no network of support, and need a job to maintain a VISA before getting kicked out of the country. Are they in a better or worse position compared to a local woman? Does it even make sense to start asking these questions?
I want to challenge this vision where discriminations are only looked at through the lens of gender division. This is shortsighted because discrimination on the workplace is extremely diverse and it exists for the benefit of those same sponsors of this event.
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This really sounds like a failure of the organizers more than anything- first off, lumping in non-binary is a catch all that anyone will take advantage of, and second and most importantly, everyone was complaining about long lines. Long lines means lots of people. Lots of people means the event over-sold their $600-$1000 tickets.
Sounds like the event organizers were more interested in making money than helping women in tech- women would have had the same problems had it been 100% women.
Edit: I’m not bashing non binary people, I’m just saying that people will take advantage of it, that’s all.
-1Including non-binary people was not the problem. Relevant quote:
"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."
They identified as male, not non-binary, and the event allowed men to come.
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