Companies are definitely looking for applicants there, so it would definitely be discriminatory to ban men from it. That's why it would be illegal to ban men:
"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."
People don’t like hearing about it but I worked at one of the major sponsor of a past conference and my employer openly admitted that they wanted to increase the % of women in the company. I think that is gender discrimination but i also want more women at work so i am not personally against that.
I tried to keep my comment as objective as possible since I was aware that people would not like to hear it. So I made no judgement on wether it's good or bad and actually shared how it's a positive thing for me personally.
when you divert your focus to a specific subset of candidates you have stopped prioritizing the best candidate. therefore that candidate has been discriminated against for not having the specific traits you wanted to prioritize. from a moral perspective it seems that we are passing on chances of getting the best candidates. so this is good for my own feelings, but can't be good for the employer.
Honestly. if I felt i was not good enough to overcome the gender discrimination I would have no qualms identifying as a woman to get the job.
Too often internal biases make men look like the "best candidate," even if a man and woman of equal skills are presented.
And the reason people don't like your "positive" reason for wanting more women in the office is because the way you worded it made you sound like a creep who just wants more women around to ogle at, rather than seeing them as equal.
we are not discussing vague problems with subjective solutions. in tech interviews you either solve the problem correctly or you don't. and the evaluation is not subjective.
just like the person who said that my comments about car haters made me sound like a billionare boot licker, the creep accusations also say something about the accusers for making baseless projections. even more so with the added "ogling at them", I'm sure that came from somewhere, just not from my comment...
Yeah, the assumptions come from somewhere. From having men ogling at me since I began growing breasts. Women are constantly sexualized and I have 100% heard people say that they wouldn't mind their company hiring more women because they like to look at them. I never even said that's what you do, I said that's what your wording made it sound like. So if anyone made assumptions here, it is you.
In regards to the tech interviews - I don't see how you didn't think about the possibility of both a woman and a man answering the question correctly. We then return to the problem of "similar candidates, who will get picked?" Which, in the past, would have always been the man. Assuming they even asked a woman in for an interview.
The best candidate? Based on what? Tell us more of thos egalitarian utopia where everything is based on measurements.
How do you objectively measure the value of an employee's culture or heritage and the effect of those things on their views and habits, and on their productivity? A workforce with diverse backgrounds is valuable in itself, in so many ways, for everyone.