Regarding your second paragraph, I think it's primarily a clash of two situations: software development by its nature attracts men who are socially awkward, and the women that are attracted to software development tend not to be there for the attention.
Software development has a broader appeal now than it did twenty years ago, and in spite of the numerous cases like this one, there seems to still be a growing population of women in the community. (I hope that continues, we need all the talent available.) So, hopefully this will sort itself out in time.
In the meantime, I'm more intrigued by the idea of gated communities than I am of moderated communities. Moderation seems to require a lot of resources and lead to conflict. Gated (online) communities don't seem to have been tried as much, and I'm curious about whether or not a lot of social problems would simply solve themselves if not everyone were invited to participate.
So what? Percentage is the statistic that matters in discussions like this. Unless you are suggesting that there is some upper limit on the number of women that can ever be involved in programming at one time.
How does notion work to you - is there some sort of cosmic female hive-mind that determines the quotas of them that can be part of any given activity? Is it some sort of feedback loop so that we as a species are approaching the limit of $MAX_FEMALE_DEVS?
The software development community attracts socially awkward people by accepting them- and consequently accepting behaviors that are not seen as acceptable in most parts of society.
For example, most of the software development community would see a 22yo guy persistently pursuing a girl who clearly isn't interested as innocent, awkward, and empathize with the guy's rejection (or lack there of, since he probably doesn't have the courage to directly ask her out). They wouldn't consider how it feels to the girl have someone watching you, following you, looking up private information online, and invading her space.
I don't think "we" as a community can or should outright reject people who behave badly. We can only reject (or try to change) their behavior. Let's not forget that 8+ hours a day in front of a little glowing box nearly requires a specific personality type. If people who are bad at dealing with other people are blocked from software development, the field would suffer (a lot).
> ...a 22yo guy persistently pursuing a girl who clearly isn't interested...
To be fair, you came >this< close to describing the plot of the average romcom here. The only difference between "sweet" and "creepy" is in judging whether or not the person is interested, or might become interested. A lot of nerds (I use the term with love here) aren't even good at mingling at social events, let alone reading whether or not their advances towards someone are going to turn out well. (This isn't limited to man-woman relationships either, as a recent case shows.)
...I wonder if maybe a huge root cause of this problem is simply that there are few enough women in our field that any attention from men feels like it's too much? I have to imagine that if you got regular, "Hey, are you busy Saturday night?" inquiries from different guys, you'd start to feel a little like chum in shark-infested waters.
The excuse that this person's stalking behavior would be sweet if she were interested is blaming her discomfort/fear on her because she isn't interested, when in reality no "sweet" guy would act in such a way without clear signs of interest.
The online hacker/development community's continuous excuses and empathy for members of their own community who behave inappropriately towards women makes this a field where prominent women are expected to be harassed on a regular basis.
It isn't even a matter of rejecting the person for bad behavior. You didn't even reject the behavior, you justified it.
> ...is blaming her discomfort/fear on her because she isn't interested...
No, it's not. You misread my comment.
> You didn't even reject the behavior, you justified it.
HN is large enough now that I can't expect you to know that I've never done any such thing, and in fact have said exactly the opposite pretty frequently.
Romcoms are fiction. There are loads of "romantic" movies where, if acted out IRL, the hero would be rightly arrested on felony charges. They're not meant to be taken as instructional.
If you're suggesting that nerds are incapable of "reading" the difference between fantasy and reality, I'm not really sure what to say. Certainly most nerds I know are capable of doing so. That's such a basic thing that I don't even think that falls into the category of social skills anymore. If nerds think that seeing something in fiction is a good reason to try it IRL then the anti-videogame-violence crowd has a lot more going for it than I thought.
I think at this point there's a fairly well-accepted connection between autism spectrum disorders and the software development community. (If you really need citations for this, I'll provide some.) One of the common side-effects of autism spectrum disorders is an impairment in interpreting other people's facial expressions, body language, and vocal tones.
When I mentioned the romcom stuff, it wasn't because I was arguing that it was a how-to or that nerds couldn't distinguish fiction from reality. It was only there to illustrate that the line between "creepy" behavior and behavior that in the ideal sense might be considered "sweet" is really blurry, and that it's dependent largely on receptivity of the people involved, and that as a trend, people in software development have a more difficult time correctly interpreting these situations.
I could go a lot more in-depth on this. I think there's a lot of very interesting cultural stuff happening in the U.S. (and to a larger extent, Japan) in male-female relations, I think there's a lot of uncertainty now about what constitutes "attractive" behavior and what doesn't, and I think that the ability to correctly interpret body language and other subtle cues is the only substantial edge anyone has over other people in this environment.
However, none of that should be read as a defense of behavior like posting fake nudge images of someone or outright harassment or any of the other things that women have recently been rightly complaining about. I was only wondering aloud earlier whether the combination of the ratio of men to women in software, combined with social impairment by a significant number of people in the industry, might be contributing to the problem.
I'm not really sure what else to say to defend my earlier comment; I honestly wasn't expecting it to be controversial. At this point though, if you'd like to continue to disagree, and you expect me to respond, I'd like for you to at least argue against what I actually write (e.g., I did not say, "nerds are incapable of 'reading' the difference between fantasy and reality"), and I'd love it if you bundled some kind of insight or evidence with your argument.
I doubt women are generally in professional jobs "for the attention" & I don't think this kind of behaviour is limited to men who are socially awkward unfortunately.
Gated communities still need moderation: someone has to decide whether or not to kick people out if they behave badly!
Software development has a broader appeal now than it did twenty years ago, and in spite of the numerous cases like this one, there seems to still be a growing population of women in the community. (I hope that continues, we need all the talent available.) So, hopefully this will sort itself out in time.
In the meantime, I'm more intrigued by the idea of gated communities than I am of moderated communities. Moderation seems to require a lot of resources and lead to conflict. Gated (online) communities don't seem to have been tried as much, and I'm curious about whether or not a lot of social problems would simply solve themselves if not everyone were invited to participate.