"The fact is there are women doing great work and talks. Make noise about them."
And here is a woman who did great work, and Google is making noise about her. Why is this particular case not valid, when it's doing exactly what you recommend?
Work that would be shown regardless of gender. This would not have been show on HN if the dev were a white CIS male because it is basically regular work. Good work, but nothing to show off about. We all do that everyday. It's not a complain, I'm just explaining: you don't want to hear about the regular stuff, for that you have the coffee machine.
There is almost certainly a degree of 'diversity PR' about this post - specifically because this is an intern simply 'doing her job' by implementing an alg she was probably asked to implement. And I'm certain interns are doing all sorts of cool stuff at G that we don't talk about.
But ...
That said, it's probably ok. I do believe that tech is more or less 'meritocratic' ... but surveys on 'why there are not more women in tech' answered by 'men' indicate 'not enough women getting tech degrees' - while answers by 'women' indicate 'not enough role models'. Which is understandable. If women are 'turned off' or less assertively, merely 'not excited' or 'don't think it's for them' because they don't see enough faces doing something, and it affects their choices ... well then it's fair to be a little bit lopsided on what Google choses to promote, especially as it relates to entry-level stuff.
So as long as it isn't flogged too hard, I think that highlighting someone's work is reasonable, and if it helps some 'hey, you can do this too!' communication, that's fine.
When being a geek in the 90 was basically being the less popular people in the area, nobody wanted to be part of the crew. Slowly but surely, with unrecognized hard work, geeks built something, and nobody helped them until shitload of money and cool stuff were made.
They were a minority none helped and that people basically disrespected through media, stereotypes, etc. And you never heard any girl saying they wanted to be part of it.
Now being a geek is cool and well paid. And it becomes a trend to help minorities to be part of it.
I followed some of those efforts, such as pyladies, django-girls... I spent some time in Mali myself to help some people here to become Python dev with NGOS programs. It works. The community is better because of it.
But the feeling of it being unfair can be felt on a lot of forums and comments. This is not sexism.
It's more along the line of "so now you want it ?" and "oh but you want it easy too ?".
