I feel like I can't reply because I'm being mass downvoted for saying "I think women should have access to everybody" and being told that that makes me a bad person.

"Nobody is arguing that role models should be limited."

The entire tree I'm responding to is.

I don't actually see where anyone says they should be limited until I read your comments assuming that. The frustrating bit is that you're basically on the same page as your downvoters if your ultimate message is "everyone should have access to everyone".

The father wants to make sure his daughter gets access to both male and female role models at which point she can choose one or two or all or none of them if she wants - that is the complete opposite of _limiting_ role models. People replying to you think it's okay for him to seek out a female engineer specifically because if he doesn't try, she's ending up with a male role model (not a bad thing) out of a pool of only men right now (the bad thing). He's not saying "my daughter will ONLY have female role models or else" or "men can't be role models for my daughter" or "the woman I find from this Ask HN must be my daughter's role model". He's also not asking for male role models because he thinks they make bad role models for women, rather that they're very common as half the men in his social circle can act as one for his daughter. I would also fully expect him and others to care just as much about finding a similar potential role model had he had a son instead of a daughter.

Personally, most of my role models were male, but it would have been nice to encounter more women along the way. I have different conversations with other women than I do with men that aren't my husband in the tech industry. It's also a coping mechanism when I deal with sexism that men don't fully understand because they're not used to or aware of it. (I recognize that the complete opposite happens in some fields and I don't approve of any of the sexism, I just don't see what's wrong with doing what you can and taking advantage of what you can if you need to.)

"The frustrating bit is that you're basically on the same page as your downvoters if your ultimate message is "everyone should have access to everyone".

I agree. :(

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"He's not saying "my daughter will ONLY have female role models or else"

Yeah, I didn't claim he was. What I actually said was "making this selection explicitly by a demographic feature that isn't germane is limiting." It doesn't have to be universal.

If you go to the store and say "I'm going to try a strawberry drink," that's limiting, even if it's only applied to that one store trip.

Everyone seems to be trying to stretch what I said into an infinitive I had no intent of, which isn't actually present in my speech, in order to argue with the infinitive.

It's simpler than that.

Kids don't get a plethora of mentors. I think it's problematic to screw up the first mentorship by adding a criterion that is unnecessary and not particularly productive.

I mean reduce it to absurdity. "I want to give my child access to four mentors, one each from the four elements of the Western Zodiac, to give them the chance to figure out which element they like best."

Except that's dramatically limiting - it constrains which sets of mentors can be made available. If you have Charlie, who's an Aries, you can't also have Dave, who's a Taurus, because they're both fire signs. (They probably aren't; I don't actually know astrology.)

And when you hook it on something we all explicitly don't care about, like astrology, then suddenly the problem becomes really obvious, because it isn't taboo to think it over. "Oh hey, I shouldn't be adding arbitrary constraints to what can be proferred, then observing the range of those constraints as if it's some form of diversification, because constraints are always a reduction against wild card."

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"He's also not asking for male role models because he thinks they make bad role models for women"

I wish people would stop making assumptions about the author's opinions then stuffing words into his mouth this way.

I asked that guy his opinion. Not everybody else reading the thread. You aren't mind readers and you don't know if this is what he meant.

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"I would also fully expect him and others to care just as much about finding a similar potential role model had he had a son instead of a daughter."

I have a hard time reading this, because it seems to me like you're saying you expect his son to be proferred male role models, in the same post as where you're talking about how he doesn't limit who's offered.

Again: I am a man, and I modelled my professional self on a woman. I think that to offer male children preferential access to male role models perpetuates the broken networking and disallows men to learn from women.

I don't understand why this is not obviously a problem.

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"Personally, most of my role models were male, but it would have been nice to encounter more women along the way."

And yet you want to make sure this girl gets childhood mentored by a woman.

I wonder if you're just taking this from the position that a person has several childhood mentors in their life?

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"It's also a coping mechanism when I deal with sexism that men don't fully understand because they're not used to or aware of it."

Which is another great reason that we shouldn't be hiding male mentors from having access to those vanishingly rare female students.

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"The father wants to make sure his daughter gets access to both male and female role models at which point she can choose one or two or all or none of them if she wants - that is the complete opposite of _limiting_ role models."

I don't know that I actually agree here.

If I had a boy, and I wanted to arrange for him one male and one female role model, and it turned out that the two best available were two women, I'd have limited him.

Unfortunately, despite that I'm trying to argue for inclusion and for helping female students, I'm about to be downvoted again :(

> men by far the norm, they have no problem being represented.

For all the HN articles about parent seeking role models for their children, are we really saying that "parent looking for male role model" is highly represented on the HN?

Or is it that no parent will ever need to look for a male role model outside their own social circle?

It is more that for "parent looking for role model" in STEM fields they will by default encounter mostly men, so if for one reason or another you'd like to meet a women you'll probably have to specifically look for someone, esp. when you are looking for people in fields that are outside of your own.