So my girlfriend invited me to speak at this local women in tech event she helps run. We both work in tech and have CS degrees. She has a bachelors and works as a product manager and I am a senior software engineer with a masters. I work on a newer kind of system that is meant to rapidly accelerate STEM work by offloading a lot of the heavy lifting. Its still in a stage where you get the most out of it if you already know the field, especially when it comes to modifying designs. Right now most people use it for coding stuff.
Anyway I presented it in a pretty agnostic way. Not a plug for my company or anything. More about how it works, the societal impact, all that. It was going great and since the event was about women in tech I tried to cater it a bit. I talked about how these kinds of tools could help the cause by making it easier for more women to get into the more complicated parts of the field. Sort of like in the old days where you kind of had to be an electrical engineer to code but now abstractions make a lot of things easier.
One person got real upset and said I was implying that women need the hard math simplified because they cant do it. I got defensive and said I never said that at all and she was putting words in my mouth. Since she spoke up a few others got upset too. I never directly said that.
But then at the mixer after a few people told me they actually liked my talk and it was the best one but yeah maybe I shouldnt have said that particular part. So mixed signals.
Now my girlfriend is telling me to apologiz. She wants me to email the organizers and say sorry. I refused because I honestly think it was just that one woman who kicked it off and now my gf is upset and keeps bringing it up. Also having an email record with my name on it saying I said something wrong could easily get taken out of context later and maybe hurt my career if someone wanted to dig up dirt or whatever.
Plus I kind of think my girlfriend is projecting a bit because she told me before she never really enjoyed coding and thats why she became a PM in the first place.
So AITA for refusing to apologize?
YTA for what you said. The implication is absolutely that access issues are down to women not being capable.
You didn’t get mixed signals. Some people told you they disagreed with what you said and called you out. Others said they liked your talk but you shouldn’t have said that part. Both groups are telling you shouldn’t have said that particular thing.
Edit to add: your girlfriend wasn’t even the one who called you out about it. She’s just asking you to apologize for the sake of her job. But you still decided it must just be about her lack of skill. Yeah YTA.
This is a big thing, that is about more than your pride. Sure, maybe you didn’t mean it, you’re trying to do good, so maybe don’t let a chunk of your audience feel insulted because you poorly explained something. If it can help women get into the complicated parts of the field it helps everyone. The consequences created by the lack of support for women’s education decades ago still has lasting effects, and this can hopefully bring those who don’t even know they were affected by this, up to speed, not the women AT the conference you were speaking at, they presumably got the education already.
Edit: YTA in this situation
Edit 2: Apologize, you won’t die
>I talked about how these kinds of tools could help the cause by making it easier for more women to get into the more complicated parts of the field
Even before reading the rest of your post, this came off as condescending to me.
>a few people told me they actually liked my talk and it was the best one but yeah maybe I shouldnt have said that particular part. So mixed signals
That’s not a mixed signal. Even the people who liked your speech overall thought that part was unnecessary.
YTA, you need to learn from this and apologize.
Yta you did imply that women have trouble (more than men) with complicated things
YTA. You absolutely should not have said that and the fact that you even thought it would be okay shows just how much inequity is in the system.
And the fact that you think apologizing is a bad idea because you want to deny it ever happened later makes you a double asshole.
P.S. you’re still saying it. *My girlfriend doesn’t like to code so she became a PM* implies that she couldn’t hack it so she look an easier role that’s more appropriate for a girl.
YTA
The person who complained was right. You did imply women needed help with the harder stuff.
Apologize.
YTA for implying that ability is the reason why women are not in stem… There are structural reasons that begin early in life and carry through academia. I’m not saying you’re YTA for not knowing this stuff, but your YTA for refusing to admit that maybe you don’t have as good a grasp on these issues as you thought you did
YTA. So you’re a man asked to speak at a women in tech event, you said something that offended women there, and now you’re trying to insist what you said was not offensive to women? It would’ve been SO insanely easy to say “oh sorry, that’s not how I meant it to come across” in the moment and move on. Except that from your post I’m fairly certain you DID mean it to come across that way.
AND you’re condescending to your girlfriend about her job in the same post, stellar. Your ego was allowed to grow this big because you’re extremely self-centered and don’t even notice when people try to correct your mistakes.
You may not have meant to be, but I’d have to say YTA for saying:
>I talked about how these kinds of tools could help the cause by making it easier for more women to get into the more complicated parts of the field.
I can understand why someone would have translated that statement into *this makes it easy enough for a woman to understand.*
Maybe you don’t think you meant it that way, but it sounds a lot like the soft misogyny of low expectations.
Whether or not you should apologize is up to you. Maybe think a little harder about how what you said sounds to others and ask yourself if they have a point.
YTA. You absolutely implied that “women struggle to understand difficult things with their ickle wickle brains”
I am saying this as an EE woman that did bare metal. Real time. Embedded. I spent most of my career with R&D and first of kind projects.
YTA
Like it or not, you implied that women needed an easier entry point than men. That one woman was brave enough to raise the topic. Once raised, others agreed.
Tech does not need to be made easier for women to enter. Tech needs to eliminate gender bias for women to enter. Your assumption that things need to be made easier for women is a part of that bias.
>a newer kind of system that is meant to rapidly accelerate STEM work by offloading a lot of the heavy lifting
…The tech you’re talking about is AI, right?
YTA for sure for being condescending as hell (why would helping with “more complicated parts of the field” help women in particular? If it could help men and women equally, why frame it that way?), but I’m just curious.
We are using AI to make CS easy so women can do it too! Am I the asshole?
Yeah, obviously YTA. I’m sure you gave a wonderful talk and the work you are doing is important, but you shouldn’t have said that particular sentence, even if you believe it.