Friday, July 13, 2012

Note to Women: If you Don't want to get Hit On, then Don't Dress in a Way that Communicates the Opposite

Some of you may be familiar with Hackernews. It's a news aggregator for stories relevant to the IT industry, with a slight bent towards the sensationalist. Some headlines would even make FARK proud. Apart from the usual success porn about startups and arousing details about new hardware or software products, stories about the alleged difficulties of women in a male centric field are another mainstay of this site. As with all sites, once they reach a certain level of popularity, quality takes a nose dive. As you can imagine, the amount of politically correct White Knights and Manginas trying to defend erroneous female reasoning is rather high nowadays.

A recent story was about a woman, calling herself "kdotcot", who attended Defcon, which is "the world's longest running and largest underground hacking conference". What would you expect if you were a woman and attended a conference that attracts a mostly male crowd? Well, plenty of attention, for starters. And what do you do if you are a woman who is going to attend such a conference, and who doesn't want to get hit on? Well, you'd of course you keep the push-up bras, high-heels and skimpy skirt at home and wear something more professional. You know, the kind of outfit you'd expect from, say, a female attorney or accountant.