Female Entrepreneur Says Google’s ‘Women in Tech’ Program Ostracized Her for Being Conservative

by Allum Bokhari, Breitbart:

A female tech entrepreneur alleges she faced character assassination and career sabotage by two “women in tech” groups over her conservative beliefs, including Google’s Women Techmakers.

Senior software engineer and co-founder of Polyglot Programming Marlene Jaeckel says that Martin Omander, Google Developer Group program manager for North America, formally banned her from the Google Developer Group and Google Women Techmakers after complaints from a feminist activist who objected to her moderate conservative positions.

According to Jaeckel , Omander “declined to provide me with any details of the complaints against me or the rules that I’d allegedly violated.”

In a Medium post published earlier this week, Jaeckel explained that the two Atlanta-based feminists who reported her to Google, local Women Who Code director Alicia Carr and Atlanta Google Women Techmakers organizer Maggie Kane, had become hostile to her after a series of disagreements over politics, and repeatedly sought to damage her career.

The publicly-stated objectives of both Women Who Code and Google Women Techmakers are, ostensibly, non-partisan. Women Who Code says their goal is to “inspire women to excel in technology careers,” while Google Women Techmakers says they merely wish for “visibility, community, and resources for women in technology.”

None of these organizations openly say that Republican or conservative women are excluded from their goals. Yet Jaeckel , a senior software engineer and co-founder of a tech company, says that is the reason why Carr and Kane sought to both exclude her from the groups and sabotage her career in tech.

According to Jaeckel ‘s account, which can be read in full at Medium, she had a falling-out with Carr over a number of issues, including her opposition to gender-segregated classes. Jaeckel says she was also banned from two other coding workshops in Atlanta because the founders “strongly objected” to her conservative political views.

Unfortunately, during the Women Who Code hackathon, it became clear to me that this event focused on marketing strategies, creativity, and the discussion of gender politics, and not on the development of technical skills. At the group presentations and award ceremony, I observed that my group of mentees were being discouraged from discussing any of the technical details of the fully-functional application they had developed in less than two days, and I expressed my frustration about it on Twitter, stating that “when you’re a mentor and your mentees don’t get the recognition they deserve, you go to bat.”

In August 2016, Alicia reached out me via email and private Slack messages. She proposed forming a class for female coders who were interested in learning iOS development and asked me to tutor these students. I told her that I’d be glad to teach if the class also included males. She refused, stating that “I need everybody and anybody to help my Women and I’m sorry there is a gender issues [sic] but right now it [sic] about my ladies.” We were unable to reach an agreement, so I declined.

In September 2016, I again crossed paths with Alicia at a monthly meeting of the Atlanta iOS Developers group. She was extremely irate over my Twitter comment and my refusal to teach women-only classes. She became loud and disruptive during the meeting and the event’s organizer had to intervene repeatedly.

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