Women in tech communities are some of the cringiest spaces imaginable. Whether it’s corporate climbers, bootcamp grads, or twitter famous tech posters, the women in tech scene is full of people who have internalised neoliberal tech capitalism to the core of their identity. When people like this imagine a better world, they don’t imagine a world free of exploitation and capitalism, they imagine more women SCRUM masters and backend developers. To manifest their utopia they create grassroots communities, helpfully sponsored by big tech corporations, which help women overcome the barriers to entering the tech world by hosting lighting talks about why it’s great to work at Monzo.
As those in tech know: naming things is the hardest part of coding. And apparently, it’s the hardest part of starting a women in tech community as well. There’s a lot of bad ones out there, but here’s a list of my top 5 most cringe women in tech community names.
5. Triangirls
They position themselves as a “community for women and non-binary people who work in Tech”. Mmmmmm ok but then why put “girls” in your name? This is a 2011 era faux pas. Without straying too deep in to the discourse, calling your community “Triangirls” while saying it’s a space that includes nonbinary people is a pretty good indicator that nonbinary people who are read as female are going to be misgendered in that space.
Also, it’s name makes it sound like it’s a city council funded support group for homeless young women that people only attend because they are giving out free food but you have to stay there an entire hour to get the food because if you stay less than an hour your attendance won’t count and the program will lose funding if no one shows up.
4. Pyladies
Pyladies implies the existence of corrolary “Pylords”, which further implies a heteronormative landowning class in the Python universe. That’s fucked. We don’t need a Pythonic aristocracy. We need a Pyletariat which is pylitically educated in the Immortal Pyence of Marxist Leninism.
3. Code First: Girls
This name makes me think about the excellent anime “Code Geass: Lelouche of the Revolution” which follows a young boy on his quest to exact revenge on a fictionalised future British Empire which has occupied Japan. Historical geopolitics aside, we love to see children engage in violent revolution against all Brits, fictional or otherwise.
But “Code First: Girls” is unfortunately not related to the anime series “Code Geass: Lelouche of the Revolution”. And it’s also not really a women in tech community, although it tries to look like one. It’s a coding bootcamp with massive corporate sponsorship which provides vocational training in order to increase the size of the labour force in order to drive down wages while pretending to be a progressive and feminist grassroots organisation. Considering that some of their sponsors include Blackrock, BAE Systems, and Palantir, I hope Lelouche turns his giant mecha fighting robot on Code First: Girls next.
2. React Girls
“React, girls!” sounds like something my PE coach would shout at the goth girls when playing dodgeball.
I went to one of their events and they had a big banner in the atrium of the venue saying:
Who runs the world?
AmazonGirls”
This is both cringe and catagorically untrue. In fact Google, Facebook, and Amazon do run the world. Girls, on the other hand, are an oppressed class who, contrary to the beliefs of this organisation, will not be liberated from misogyny by learning React.js.
1. Vue Vixens
When I think of a “vixen” the first thing that comes to mind is Vixey from Disney’s The Fox and the Hound, which to me is an incredibly erotic image. I’m not alone in saying that Vixey is the #1 most fuckable cartoon fox of all time, winning in a run off against the more demure, but still fuckable Maid Marian from Robin Hood. Which is part of the problem with this name. Vixen to me evokes the image of sexy furry foxes. And that’s just not what I want people to think about me as I’m learning to use Typescript with Vue 3. It’s also not the image I want in my head when thinking of members of this group. And I think they realised this too, since they seem to have renamed themselves to “Front-end Foxes” despite keeping vuevixens.org as their URL.