Letters to the Editor: Kanye West’s antisemitism is sadly familiar. Our response doesn’t have to be.
(In an email, Ms. Moulton, the president of the University of San Diego’s Women’s Leadership Initiatives, did not respond to a request for comment.)
“The Women Who Code Initiative: Women Write, Codes Think” was hosted earlier this year by the Computer Science department at U. San Diego. As part of the program’s celebration of women in computer science, six women were awarded $3,000 scholarships, including a $1,000 award to Ms. Moulton, who co-authored an op-ed about the role of women in technology.
The event was co-sponsored by the Women’s Leadership Initiative, a local program that offers professional development programs for women in technology.
The program was supposed to be an “open source” event, with the students bringing coding events to the campus, with the instructor bringing them to their classrooms for teaching.
But Ms. Moulton, who is Jewish, has repeatedly made anti-Semitic remarks and used anti-Semitic language on our campus.
“How could I write a piece about the role of women in technology if I didn’t mention that women are so oppressed in the technology industry?” she asked during a recent presentation.
The Women Who Code Initiative was supposed to be an open event. But Ms. Moulton decided to hijack it as her own exclusive event. Students were invited to show up as guests, but they were not asked to attend.
During the event, Ms. Moulton told a student who had just won a $1,000 scholarship that “It’s not a secret that there’s been a lot of discrimination against women in the industry.”
She then cited a 2011 study that said that half the U.S. computer science programs in the country don’t have female professors.
She said that the solution was to go “back to where the computer industry began” — the “haves” in the technology world.
“If you look at the history of the computer industry, it was all hords,” she told the student.