I posted it, with a 90% expectation of it going nowhere, and 10% expectation of a few comments that showed the general viewpoint of a community that I felt has some of better elements of humanity in it.
However what we got was, 80+ comments of basically flame war, and over half telling her to 'get over herself'. :(
So based on that, then yes she's right. This Industry is Fucked[1]. And I am ashamed to be part of it these days.
--
[1] And it's not just sexism; The whole industry has been taken over by the suits and wide-boys, who are busily destroying it from the inside out.
I think what you're not getting from this comment is that it's not "a few", but it's "many enough to make this person's life considerably worse".
And that this behavior is partially enabled, because there is a culture that, while not openly condoning it, lets this behavior go on in it's underground.
I think you could easily retitle this as "Men are fucked", or probably closer to the point: "Boys are fucked". It's a male dominated, youth-oriented industry, and all of the sexism and harassment that a woman will encounter is an outgrowth of that.
This isn't to excuse the behaviour, but merely to ask if there are any examples of young-male oriented industries that have better behaviour?
The harassment is not due to being a male/youth dominated industry, but a large one and by definition incredibly well connected. It's easy for a very small percentage of idiots to make a very large noise.
We need to be finding these people and getting them out of our industry on a permanent basis. They can go work on a landfill as far as I'm concerned.
The harassment is not due to being a male/youth dominated industry, but a large one and by definition incredibly well connected. It's easy for a very small percentage of idiots to make a very large noise.
> We need to be finding these people and getting them out of our industry on a permanent basis.
Sadly every time that's tried the freeze peaches crowd descends and claims not being able to send death threats and say that jews should die is persecution, and anyway she was probably a slut asking for it.
To be fair, every time that's tried the social justice crowd takes it too far and tries to kick people out for holding the wrong opinions, even if they never actually harassed anyone.
Good intentions do not protect from being corrupted by power, who knew?
>> We need to be finding these people and getting them out of our industry on a permanent basis. They can go work on a landfill as far as I'm concerned
Exactly this. These people push out men with their behavior as well. I truly doubt any one of these people are worth the 2 or 3 that get fed up with it and leave.
This is the first time I hear about this individual, and even though I believe her when she says she's received the messages she alleges she's received, I doubt any of them had any kind of seriousness to them, and she should know that.
Also if you think getting insulted on IRC is bad, it's because you haven't been packeted out ;P
I doubt any of them had any kind of seriousness to them, and she should know that.
How is she supposed to know that a picture of her covered in blood is a joke? Put yourself in the position of one of the most physically-vulnerable member of society and tell me how you'can find that funny.
I've been on IRC for 15 years and I've seen (and suffered :P) so much worse. I'll just say some parts of the internet are just not meant for everybody.
Is it OK for even just a couple of people to send you death threats? Do you want me to pick through your posts, find out where you work, have a bullet delivered to your desk? Splash blood on your front door? Phone your loved ones and tell them you're going to die? No. No you don't. And it would be a very, very big deal for you if I did.
But it wouldn't be serious, I'd be doing it for shits'n'giggles and you should know that.
This is a complicated question with no right answer. Both sides of it have been in the wrong historically. I personally believe that the people who have been there longer should have the right to determine what is happening, but there are many reasons for why this view may be wrong, such as the lack of alternative spaces, the necessity of work to survive, the principles of equality, and so on.
However, let us be clear about one thing:
If parent does not harass women and does not send death threats, which seems likely, then regardless of which opinion you hold they are not the problem.
Let's not ever kick people out for civilly holding an opinion, even if we find the opinion repugnant. Civility is important. Civility was violated for the woman behind this post, but not afaik by this commenter.
The real problem are not the people who hold controversial opinions. The real problem are the harassers. Let's team up on them without bystanders having to be scared they'll be next.
Please troll elsewhere. This isn't a request on behalf of the community, it's a personal request as I just ate and don't really feel like throwing up in response to a comment.
No matter how trollish or uncivil others behavior may be, please don't be uncivil in return. Encouraging better behavior is one thing. Asking someone to "sort [their] shit out, or leave" is quite another.
Do you really think this way? You may want to ask what happened in your life to end up with this attitude. That one sentence basically precludes you from society.
This is irrelevant to the industry. And I feel offended by attacking the industry. Banking, retail, fashion, you will get such comments everywhere. A lot of men are jerks indeed but this is a social problem, not an industry one.
Programming though attracts all sorts of introverted guys with lacking social skills and a bad track record with relationships (in school etc).
(And to prevent knee-jerk responses, I don't mean that everyone or even most are like that. Just that a lot are like that, which has even made it into developer folklore and is a well known stereotype with basis in reality).
The kind of person who would comment on a woman's developer presentation that they "masturbated watching the video of her presentation" (!!!).
Other industries, such as banking, tend to attract other kinds of people (more jock-ey, or "in-crowd"), which have other issues (more sexual assault, rape, entitlement, etc).
>Banking, retail, fashion, you will get such comments everywhere. A lot of men are jerks indeed but this is a social problem, not an industry one.
This is a moral equivalence fallacy, a red herring of sorts. You are saying this women's frustration with her industry is irrelevant to her industry because a handful of unrelated indusries have problems that could be similar.
This argument ignores that CS/IT is largely male and notorious are for this disgusting behavior. It's one of the only industries that had a greater percentage of women in the 80s than it does now. There are industries that do not suffer from this problem at all or nearly to the same degree.
In full, this women's expirence is directly related to overt mysogeny in industry culture and labeling it as a "social problem" willfully ignores this problem in tech thus perpetuating it further.
Notoriety is not direct evidence. People can be notorious without being guilty. I don't know whether other fields with a similar proportion of men have similar problems.
>Notoriety is not direct evidence. People can be notorious without being guilty.
This argument is a fallacy fallacy. Sure I made a unsubstantiated claim but it doesn't contradict or invalidate my general argument.
>I don't know weather other fields with a similar proportion of men have similar problems.
How is this relevant? I get the feeling that you read my comment looking for some insignificant hyperbole you could attack in order to derail my general argument to perpetuate your willful ignorance enabled by your male priveldge.
>Studies highly welcome
How about listening to the _women_ in tech like the one who wrote the blog post we are commenting on?
Nope a social problem is by definition a social problem which by definition is applicable to all industries. Men will always want women and idiots will always treat women with disrespect no matter if they are programmers, doctors, footballers or dancers.
You don't solve the problem by attacking the tech industry. It's a matter of education, mental health and society principles.
I kinda of agree that you should start from somewhere, but this somewhere should be the schools and the family.
I find this very hard to believe, unless she purposely offended a lot of people in a huge way. Without seeing any proof of her claims other than her own writing, I'm more inclined to believe that this is false and she is just seeking attention and sympathy.
There's no shortage of software engineers, sysadmins, people to fix the coffee holders or whatever - everybody should be working in technology more than you should. Do you get posts from men seeking attention and sympathy? What about black people? Jews? No, of course not, but as soon as a woman's involved it's somehow OK to assume you can dismiss it out of hand.
I wrote this in response to your original comment, which seems to have been deleted, but it's worth posting here anyway.
You exercised your right to free speech by saying "A woman does what woman always do - seeking attention and throwing tantrums without any logical thought put into it"
I am exercising my right to free speech by saying that I consider your statement an abhorrent characterisation of women, and wholly unrepresentative of any of the women I've worked with in my 25 years in the industry at various companies of various sizes.
Of course, I've probably been lucky, because being an asshole isn't gender-specific, and I've worked with enough women that you'd think I'd have encountered one who was an asshole by now.
Maybe your personal experience does indeed encompass thousands of women and they have all genuinely behaved as you described, or maybe either your sample size is too small, or you should ask yourself if maybe there is a reason why you happen to perceive all women in this way.
WRT original comment, HN spits out dupes. I deleted one of them.
I used troll bait with this statement to actually show, in action, double standards on HN.
The OP made a generalisation for whole sex (men, masked as industry). I did the same but I got scrutiny where OP got praise. Get it?
Here's the kicker: I don't believe in both of these generalisations because me beliefs are formed on facts and data – both me and OP provided no such thing. We both just yelled statements.
I've met smart women in the tech industry. None of them would make a post like this (i.e. without any essence, just spitting out poison).
I've also met smart men. None of them would behave like men described by the OP.
On the other hand, my comment that you actually replied to is based on one of cognitive biases humans have.
Just as there can be inappropriate comments, there can be inappropriate submissions. This isn't some double standard. A proper response is not to be uncivil or troll in kind. If you think a submission is ill-suited for HN, just flag and move on.
One charitable hypothesis could be raised that the ratio of harassers in male population is constant, but in male dominated social groups the number of potential victims is lower, thus the the frequency of harassment events females suffer is higher than in social groups with a more balanced ratio.
I have no statistics for or against this.
The test we need is: How often are individuals in social groups with skewed sex ratios who are of the rarer sex in the said group sexually harassed, and is this ratio skewed in software engineering.
Generally, from what I can gather from the anecdotal evidence of my female friends, a certain percentage of us men in general are assholes. It seems that as a matter of fact they have to suffer the real possibility harassment where ever they are (not constantly, but they have to consider it a plausible event). Which to a guy sounds just horrible.
With the life experience I have, I would claim there is a strong gender bias here.
I'm a heterosexual male, pushing 40, not too bad looking. No one has ever asked me to sit in their lap, grabbed my but, catcalled after me, or "jokingly" appraised my breasts or other body parts. I've never been anywhere, where I've had to consider the possibility of rape.
How often do you hear females lurking in dark parks, just to hunt down men who they can rape?
Yes, sexual and psychological violence goes both ways, but still females are more often the victims.
It might be totally symmetric in female dominated groups with males being the victims.
What ever that is, males don't get their buts squeezed in elevators by random strangers. Or I'm missing from some action I'm not aware off.
You have never seen a drunk woman acting unappropriated to a man? Odd, as I see that all the time in the city during weekend nights, or hotels near conferences. I would go as far as saying that its everyday activity in bars.
The reaction is practically always the same, ie that the man ignores it or at worst tells the woman to please stop hitting/yelling/acting inappropriate, and the woman either blowing it off or laugh it off. If the man complains more he will most likely hear "man up" and just take it, which is the cultural image of a male victim of female violence.
"You have never seen a drunk woman acting unappropriated to a man?"
I've used my personal experience, sampled over thirty years as the metric. It's the only data set I can approach with some certainty it's not polluted with observer bias. I've never been personally assaulted in such a way. I did not deny the large spectrum of abusive behaviours that exist.
To quote myself:
"Yes, sexual and psychological violence goes both ways, but still females are more often the victims."
The original post was about experiences of sexual harassment and I stated few statistical reasons that come to my mind that can cause it.
There is a tendency for some reason to disregard these sorts of claims "because that happens to everybody". No. That's just wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right. Like in engineering, in social settings problems need to be tackled one at a time. That some men suffer violent attacks from some women does not make it right that some women are sexually assaulted by some men.
The male to female "sexual predator" pattern is a specific pathology that exists and needs to be taken seriously. Just like female to male "violent abuse without retribution" is another - but different kind.
Men don't need to "man up" just like "boys will be boys" is not an acceptable defence.
I would like to point out that women were more like capital and not like free citizens even in the most progressive countries until hundred years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage.
Values and attitudes travel across generations. These affect stereotypes, which affect our mental processing even if one is against said stereotypes. There is a very good reason females can be still considered statistical underdogs for a while - the fact that can be abused by predatory individuals as a shield with impunity. The fact that these abuses happen, do not mean we should not still be in general vigilant in upholding female rights for a few generations still.
I'll have to inject another comment: a person cannot be condemned for their personality, just for their actions. Actions are specific, and need to be discussed in specific terms. Thus my statement "a percentage of men are assholes" was a too general statement for this discussion.
"Some people are likely to spontaneously sexually abuse members of opposite sex in their vicinity and there are more men than female in this group" would have been more accurate.
Also it's a lot easier to contact someone anonymously with email or throwaway accounts when everyone is online. I bet you most of them wouldn't say those things in person.
>I thought that this old post may no longer be as relevant. Maybe we have made progress.
Since 2013?
Also, in human issues (as opposed to technology) there's no monotonically increasing progress. There periods of the past that are way more tolerant and peaceful than periods that preceded them, and vice versa.
Like the sixties gave way to the selfish seventies and eighties (and macho Reaganism, etc), like the cosmopolitan Europe of the 20s and 30s gave way to the Nazi hell of the late 30s to mid-40s, like the Roman republic decayed into the rule of crazy emperors, etc.
It's not original in tech industry. Probably every girl/woman that has at least a bit significant online presence encounters similar problems. My GF is an amateur photomodel, you should see what messages she constantly receives.
Ever since I started speaking at conferences and contributing to open source projects I have been endlessly harassed. I’ve gotten hundreds of private messages on IRC and emails about sex, rape, and death threats. People emailing me saying they jerked off to my conference talk video (you’re welcome btw) is mild in comparison to sending photoshopped pictures of me covered in blood.
I find that shocking. I know people say things about others to their friends, but to actually direct that to another person is disappointing.
I strongly agree. Some time ago I started recriminating some coworkers sexist attitudes, now I have given up fighting against the current, no more fighting. And in the advertisement industry is far worse.
Sampling bias, exacerbated by what you said. Sampling programmers you see what you observe, but sampling messages received you select for the bad crowd. Especially considering how cheap messages are and the outsize effect a bad apple can have.
A lot of it can be managed. This probably isn't something most people want to hear, but Justin Bieber and Donald Trump don't get harassed. They don't read their Twitter notifications, and have people reading their mail for them. Public figures need to risk-manage, for example you'll never meet the Goldman Sachs CEO at some random bar, for obvious reasons. You also can't send him an email, since you don't know his address.
CEOs, men and women, ancient and contemporary have had to find ways to avoid crowds and their envy/anger/pettiness for centuries. Just make yourself less accessible.
> You also can't send him an email, since you don't know his address
Not true. E-mail addresses of famous people are quite public, and your e-mail to lloyd.blankfein_at_gs.com or billg_at_microsoft.com will get read. Though - like you point out - it will likely be read by a team of secretaries or aides and only flagged to Lloyd if the message is deemed important or you are deemed important enough.
The point is that public figures have always had to shield themselves from the mediocrity of crowds, because it's easier to free yourself up from that than to change the whole society or industry.
I think everyone jumping in to say "it's not the industry it's the people" or "other industries are like this, too" is missing the point.
We tech people tend to think of ourselves as problem-solvers and intellectuals who would welcome anyone interested in the domain, and who was willing to contribute. And yet, many, many women in this industry feel marginalized and/or excluded. Even if that is based on the behaviour of a few bad actors, even if it is somethat that other male-dominated industries (like finance or manufacturing) suffer from, why not try and fix this? Why tolerate the behaviour, or shoot the messenger?
People who get angry at posts like this seem to feel personally attacked somehow, which is a weird reaction. (I mean, unless you also harass women, in which case you should feel guilty and take this peronsally, and you should stop.) Otherwise, why not band together in solidarity with the women who experience it, and help put a stop to it? It will make your industry better, your companies more valuable, your workplaces more pleasant, and your conferences more interesting. And most importantly, people who right now are getting a lot of shit thrown their way will be treated better. There is seriously no downside.
Saying "it's not the industry, it's the people" simply means that you can't fix the problem without fixing the people. Changing a few company policies here and there won't fix anything, especially since we're talking about open-source projects here.
My other comment addresses "if the problem is the people, what's wrong with them exactly, and how can we fix it?"
> I think everyone jumping in to say "it's not the industry it's the people" or "other industries are like this, too" is missing the point.
To the contrary. It's exactly on point. We don't see anyone saying "school industry is fucked" just because some teachers are abusing the students or "airline industry is fucked" because pilots pick up stewardesses.
I find it really repulsive how it's somehow okay in our industry to throw blanket accusations and demand collective responsibility.
This is a huge weakness of our environment. Something that actually makes me consider leaving the industry from time to time.
A major problem with the focus of gender equality in the tech industry is that complete lack of perspective on the work market as a whole and where the tech industry fit on that scale. The more unbalanced the perspective get, the more it looks like political interference for personal gain, and the result will largely be a negative reaction.
To bring in some numbers (from Sweden since our government collects it), only 12.5% of those that are employed work in a profession that are consider gender equal and thus have more than 40% of both women and men. 87.5% of people do not, and the tech industry with its ~79%-21% ratio is very average in that group. In contrast we got 38 different profession with 90%-10% gender distribution which employ a very large portion of all employed.
Maybe a reason why we tend to inflate the tech industry problems are that there simply are more people here that can be marginalized (for which a subset will write a blog post which then has a chance to end up on HN). A profession that is 99,6 women, or male profession with 99,4 men, will simply not have many people complain that they are feeling marginalized, since the minority gender could almost be seen as a statistical error.
Basically you're arguing that we could say that "X" in the US is the norm, because worldwide this amount of "X" is the norm, where in this case X = "gender equality".
And arguments like that in some cases raise a valid point. But when "X" is morally repugnant, your argument appears cold, calculating and statistical.
Sweden and US has similar work markets, and while not identical, the data that Sweden has is simply more available. To my knowledge job titles are not reported in as part of tax collection in the US, which mean that any similar data will be poll based and less reliable. It is common to see data researcher praising the nordic european states for the completeness of the data records.
If you want warm, emotional and opinionated point, let me bring one that also is supported by the available data. 12.5% is horrible, and that the underlying trend today is steadying pointing downwards is nothing less than a complete failure of gender equality politics. A society that speak of gender equality should not accept it, and even more it should be repulsed by the fact that many of the 90%+ profession have the government as the employer. It shows a strong lack of compassion and understanding on what such work environment do to people, and by focusing the political discussion elsewhere it cowardly avoids scrutiny. If we see people feeling marginalized for being one odd in every 5, imagine how exposed it would be to be 1 odd out of every 300.
In short? Because it's not a technical problem, it's a political problem; it involves dealing with people and their motivations, irrationalities, hangups, biases, etc.
It's a common stereotype that most engineers make terrible managers for the very same reason, and it's not an unreasonable stereotype. If we could break this down to a technical problem, it would be solved. It's not a technical problem, and most of us don't know how (or can't afford the massive time cost) to fix it on the larger scale.
So those who care do what we can do best: attempt to fix ourselves: we strive to overcome our internal hangups and biases, to act rationally, to not become part of the problem. And frankly, for most of us, that's the most we could hope to realistically do.
Let's focus on any harassment or bullying. Environments that ensure low likelihood of repercussions encourage it. Social groups with a small proportion of victims will be particularly bad, as the victim pool is smaller and there are more potential perpetrators.
What the author experienced is criminal. Until we treat it as such, and the perpetrators experience consequences for their actions, these problems will continue to plague victims - of all genders.
Hopefully this will be constructive. It's a tough pill to swallow but it's needed:
This is only a problem because of a) the immaturity of the average tech guy, relative to other professions and b) the lack of success with women of the average tech guy, again relative to the overall population.
Tech professions attract mostly left-brained people, and attract some personality types much more than other types. A tech guy is more likely to be an introvert. He's also more likely to have poor social skills, which relates to both A and B. It would be interesting to know if insecure attachment styles are more prevalent in the tech industry (likely), if anxiety disorders are more prevalent (likely; and someone with anxiety might be more likely to spend their free time indoors harassing people than playing football outside) and if low self-esteem is more prevalent (sadly, in my experience, likely; obviously 'harassment behavior' isn't something to be proud of, so doing it, while apparently desirable for some, would just result in lowered self-respect for them).
This is more prevalent in the open-source community, since there are no selection standards. You need neither a degree from MIT or Stanford, or to go through the tough Google interview standards, so you'll end up with the crap that's left on top of the sieve.
This problem will not get fixed anytime soon, and certainly can't get fixed through politics of any kind, since it's founded in personality and psychology. Mandatory pre-school with screening of all children for attachment disorders would help a lot, and hopefully someone reading this will be convinced to promote that as a solution.
To those who would say this is just speculation and ad hominem: it's conjecture, not speculation, and can be debated. It isn't ad hominem: to find a solution, asking "why" is necessary. There's no contempt here, though some of what I said may not be nice, I'm not assigning lower worth to anyone.
Because we're liberals, and liberals are inclusive by default?
Having them is the default case. To exclude them, you have to make a specific argument to that extent. That's the only way civil society can exist without falling into constant tribal battles.
In an organization, you'll have some employees that are more psychologically healthy, and some less. Some will have substance abuse problems. The employees with substance abuse problems will be less productive, on average. In other words, they're dragging the organization down.
There's no "getting rid of them". They'll just burden another company. Same as here, in open-source, you can't "get rid of them", it's logistically impossible.
This problem logistically can't get fixed through exclusion. It can only get fixed by "raising the floor" (in other words, making sure that the most troubled men become less troubled). Raising the median/average won't help. Same as raising the median income won't help the people in poverty, raising the minimum wage will.
In the original metaphor, since substance abuse and attachment disorders are correlated, again the best solution is early detection of attachment disorders in young children, and improving their situation.
Why not help the least fortunate? I can guarantee you, the kinds of guys sending Photoshopped pics of bloody cadavers are not happy people. There's psychological inequality just as much as economic inequality, though for psychology, most people find it harder to be compassionate.
An eye-opening idea for me was the concept that it is not women that are fragile, but men. The slightest indication of a threat to masculinity sends men into a fit of rage.
An eye-opening idea for me was the concept that generalisations that pertain to millions (let alone billions) of people are invariably wrong.
If you'd have worded it "The slightest indication of a threat to masculinity sends some men into a fit of rage" you might have had a point, rather than sounding like a troll.
Yes, many men feel threatened by feminists (which are of course not all women by a long shot).
They have a habit of pushing for policy changes, social changes and the creation of new taboos that artificially tip the world towards themselves, at the expense of men who are typically not sexist or doing very much at all.
In tech, they have successfully created an environment where women have an advantage when getting jobs and especially when not getting fired. They on the other hand are able to get men fired at other companies, merely by claiming to be offended at comments they overhead:
Feminists, and the women who wrote this blog post appears to be one, routinely attack men in all sorts of ways. It triggers reactions back, many of which are unpleasant and nasty.
Important to notice that of course this does not license harassment. The ground truth is that harassing behavior, which is what's called out in this post, must be stopped. But independent of that, some men who are not harassers themselves also have grounds to be afraid of some feminists, and that is also an injustice.
Just because you're a victim doesn't mean you can do no harm.
I think this is a complete red herring. First of all, feminist refers to someone who believes men and women should have equal rights. I don't know anyone who is not a feminist and I would like to know if you can name someone who isn't. Using that label to describe people who routinely attack men seems completely wrong.
Secondly, where is the evidence that people who harass and abuse women online are doing it because they feel their rights and their jobs are under threat? I'm not saying there are not people like that but if you really want to change society as a whole, why would you do it by trying to attack individual women? Could it not be that these men are simply narcissistic assholes who gain pleasure by hurting women?
That's not the definition of feminist I'm using, nor is it the definition I ever see actually in use. That's what it used to mean, maybe, but these days it refers to someone (usually but not always a woman) who has built "women are oppressed and we must fix it" into their identity, such that they support many discriminatory policies as long as they are in favour of women.
In other words it has stopped being about equal rights. Now it's about better rights for women.
where is the evidence that people who harass and abuse women online are doing it because they feel their rights and their jobs are under threat
There is a well established history at this point of outspoken 'feminists' (using the above definition) attracting disproportionate amounts of hate online. The reason is pretty simple: they dish it out themselves.
Bingo. I am really skeptical that this woman attracts trolls because she works in tech. Based on prior experience of these sorts of claims it's probably because she has extreme feminist opinions that upset a lot of people but can't recognise that. Same with gamergate: women who claim women are all horribly oppressed, that all men are beasts etc tend to attract a lot of really bad shit in return.
From taking a gander over Ms Frazelle's Twitter feed she has retweeted this:
A poster that gives women a secret code to call the police because they "feel weird" on a Tinder date? This is the kind of ultra-extremist feminism that is guaranteed to trigger giant shitstorms and it has nothing to do with tech, it's simply that 'women in tech' are more likely to hang out in lots of real time chat systems like IRC and Twitter than women in other industries.
Being upset does also not license this level of harassment. And frankly, people like you make it unpleasant every time I have to make the argument that the SJ crowd cannot be trusted with power, because frankly your behavior is an argument for giving them power. Like, Jesus Christ - know your audience, learn to read the room. Whether you're right or not, it doesn't even matter; this is not the right place and time to behave like this if you want to be effective.
And when is the issue of feminist overreach discussed, except when a feminist's actions have triggered discussion? Do you have a better "room"?
When people like you try to shut down debate by saying now is not the time, all you do is make things worse. That's how Trump wins: he doesn't try and "read the room" or bring things up at the "appropriate" times. He doesn't care about these rules social-justice types try and impose at all, because he knows there is never going to be a time when they're happy for their behaviour to be discussed.
It says that if you're facing a challenging task and under stress, like winning a game, there's an instinct to lose. I think the idea is that winning takes effort, and so we have a bias that makes us go "well, I'll charge all in and see if it works," and then it predictably doesn't work and we retreat into a sort of "hah, I knew I would lose!" because by taking the risk, we sort of licensed losing in our minds. Like, "you didn't beat me, I beat myself!" type of thing.
This is not the place to bring the topic up. I don't know if there is a better place to bring the topic up, but I feel like what motivates you to bring it up here may be something similar to that article, where you know you're going to get downvoted but at least you know why, and expect it, and that makes it acceptable. If you want to actually win, you have to avoid reactions like that. You have to be patient, and wait for the right time, and then use the right level of forcefulness, and signal in the right way, and make the right concessions, and it's hard, nobody is saying it's not, but would you rather lose on your terms or win?
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442281
Judging from the disaster that is this thread, it should probably be flagged into the ground before a flamewar starts.
However what we got was, 80+ comments of basically flame war, and over half telling her to 'get over herself'. :(
So based on that, then yes she's right. This Industry is Fucked[1]. And I am ashamed to be part of it these days.
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[1] And it's not just sexism; The whole industry has been taken over by the suits and wide-boys, who are busily destroying it from the inside out.
I think what you're not getting from this comment is that it's not "a few", but it's "many enough to make this person's life considerably worse".
And that this behavior is partially enabled, because there is a culture that, while not openly condoning it, lets this behavior go on in it's underground.
That means very much the "an industry".
> few people
and
> humans in general
I tend to agree with you - humans in general are awful, and I'm not convinced "the tech industry" is any worse.
This isn't to excuse the behaviour, but merely to ask if there are any examples of young-male oriented industries that have better behaviour?
We need to be finding these people and getting them out of our industry on a permanent basis. They can go work on a landfill as far as I'm concerned.
THIS
Sadly every time that's tried the freeze peaches crowd descends and claims not being able to send death threats and say that jews should die is persecution, and anyway she was probably a slut asking for it.
Good intentions do not protect from being corrupted by power, who knew?
Exactly this. These people push out men with their behavior as well. I truly doubt any one of these people are worth the 2 or 3 that get fed up with it and leave.
Truly f*cked.
Also if you think getting insulted on IRC is bad, it's because you haven't been packeted out ;P
How is she supposed to know that a picture of her covered in blood is a joke? Put yourself in the position of one of the most physically-vulnerable member of society and tell me how you'can find that funny.
But it wouldn't be serious, I'd be doing it for shits'n'giggles and you should know that.
I feel sick and tired of things without any essence being upvoted on this site.
Lastly, if you _really_ feel that this industry is "fucked" then GTFO and do something else. We won't miss you.
However, let us be clear about one thing:
If parent does not harass women and does not send death threats, which seems likely, then regardless of which opinion you hold they are not the problem.
Let's not ever kick people out for civilly holding an opinion, even if we find the opinion repugnant. Civility is important. Civility was violated for the woman behind this post, but not afaik by this commenter.
The real problem are not the people who hold controversial opinions. The real problem are the harassers. Let's team up on them without bystanders having to be scared they'll be next.
You're just here to start shit with a 2 year old shitpost from a attention seeking girl aren'ẗ you.
Please, I beg you, sort your shit out, or leave.
Do you really think this way? You may want to ask what happened in your life to end up with this attitude. That one sentence basically precludes you from society.
All industries are f*cked.
It's the human condition.
Not much of an answer. And not qualified with any metrics either.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442908
(And to prevent knee-jerk responses, I don't mean that everyone or even most are like that. Just that a lot are like that, which has even made it into developer folklore and is a well known stereotype with basis in reality).
The kind of person who would comment on a woman's developer presentation that they "masturbated watching the video of her presentation" (!!!).
Other industries, such as banking, tend to attract other kinds of people (more jock-ey, or "in-crowd"), which have other issues (more sexual assault, rape, entitlement, etc).
This is a moral equivalence fallacy, a red herring of sorts. You are saying this women's frustration with her industry is irrelevant to her industry because a handful of unrelated indusries have problems that could be similar.
This argument ignores that CS/IT is largely male and notorious are for this disgusting behavior. It's one of the only industries that had a greater percentage of women in the 80s than it does now. There are industries that do not suffer from this problem at all or nearly to the same degree.
In full, this women's expirence is directly related to overt mysogeny in industry culture and labeling it as a "social problem" willfully ignores this problem in tech thus perpetuating it further.
Studies highly welcome. Hearsay somewhat less.
This argument is a fallacy fallacy. Sure I made a unsubstantiated claim but it doesn't contradict or invalidate my general argument.
>I don't know weather other fields with a similar proportion of men have similar problems.
How is this relevant? I get the feeling that you read my comment looking for some insignificant hyperbole you could attack in order to derail my general argument to perpetuate your willful ignorance enabled by your male priveldge.
>Studies highly welcome
How about listening to the _women_ in tech like the one who wrote the blog post we are commenting on?
Nope a social problem is by definition a social problem which by definition is applicable to all industries. Men will always want women and idiots will always treat women with disrespect no matter if they are programmers, doctors, footballers or dancers. You don't solve the problem by attacking the tech industry. It's a matter of education, mental health and society principles. I kinda of agree that you should start from somewhere, but this somewhere should be the schools and the family.
There's no shortage of software engineers, sysadmins, people to fix the coffee holders or whatever - everybody should be working in technology more than you should. Do you get posts from men seeking attention and sympathy? What about black people? Jews? No, of course not, but as soon as a woman's involved it's somehow OK to assume you can dismiss it out of hand.
Leave. Get out of our damn industry. Go away.
Being wrong should never justify exclusion. Being wrong gets argument, not punishment.
Parent does not harass women? Parent gets to stay. Otherwise you show you can't be trusted with the power to kick people out.
Parent did not send women sexual messages. Parent did not stalk people. Parent did not photoshop girls with blood.
Parent had an opinion on the internet. If we can't even tolerate that, how can we be trusted to decide who stays and who goes?
(Note: if parent did any of the above, I retract my claim.)
You exercised your right to free speech by saying "A woman does what woman always do - seeking attention and throwing tantrums without any logical thought put into it"
I am exercising my right to free speech by saying that I consider your statement an abhorrent characterisation of women, and wholly unrepresentative of any of the women I've worked with in my 25 years in the industry at various companies of various sizes.
Of course, I've probably been lucky, because being an asshole isn't gender-specific, and I've worked with enough women that you'd think I'd have encountered one who was an asshole by now.
Maybe your personal experience does indeed encompass thousands of women and they have all genuinely behaved as you described, or maybe either your sample size is too small, or you should ask yourself if maybe there is a reason why you happen to perceive all women in this way.
I used troll bait with this statement to actually show, in action, double standards on HN.
The OP made a generalisation for whole sex (men, masked as industry). I did the same but I got scrutiny where OP got praise. Get it?
Here's the kicker: I don't believe in both of these generalisations because me beliefs are formed on facts and data – both me and OP provided no such thing. We both just yelled statements.
I've met smart women in the tech industry. None of them would make a post like this (i.e. without any essence, just spitting out poison).
I've also met smart men. None of them would behave like men described by the OP.
On the other hand, my comment that you actually replied to is based on one of cognitive biases humans have.
I have no statistics for or against this.
The test we need is: How often are individuals in social groups with skewed sex ratios who are of the rarer sex in the said group sexually harassed, and is this ratio skewed in software engineering.
Generally, from what I can gather from the anecdotal evidence of my female friends, a certain percentage of us men in general are assholes. It seems that as a matter of fact they have to suffer the real possibility harassment where ever they are (not constantly, but they have to consider it a plausible event). Which to a guy sounds just horrible.
I'm a heterosexual male, pushing 40, not too bad looking. No one has ever asked me to sit in their lap, grabbed my but, catcalled after me, or "jokingly" appraised my breasts or other body parts. I've never been anywhere, where I've had to consider the possibility of rape.
How often do you hear females lurking in dark parks, just to hunt down men who they can rape?
Yes, sexual and psychological violence goes both ways, but still females are more often the victims.
It might be totally symmetric in female dominated groups with males being the victims.
What ever that is, males don't get their buts squeezed in elevators by random strangers. Or I'm missing from some action I'm not aware off.
The reaction is practically always the same, ie that the man ignores it or at worst tells the woman to please stop hitting/yelling/acting inappropriate, and the woman either blowing it off or laugh it off. If the man complains more he will most likely hear "man up" and just take it, which is the cultural image of a male victim of female violence.
I've used my personal experience, sampled over thirty years as the metric. It's the only data set I can approach with some certainty it's not polluted with observer bias. I've never been personally assaulted in such a way. I did not deny the large spectrum of abusive behaviours that exist.
To quote myself:
"Yes, sexual and psychological violence goes both ways, but still females are more often the victims."
The original post was about experiences of sexual harassment and I stated few statistical reasons that come to my mind that can cause it.
There is a tendency for some reason to disregard these sorts of claims "because that happens to everybody". No. That's just wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right. Like in engineering, in social settings problems need to be tackled one at a time. That some men suffer violent attacks from some women does not make it right that some women are sexually assaulted by some men.
The male to female "sexual predator" pattern is a specific pathology that exists and needs to be taken seriously. Just like female to male "violent abuse without retribution" is another - but different kind.
Men don't need to "man up" just like "boys will be boys" is not an acceptable defence.
I would like to point out that women were more like capital and not like free citizens even in the most progressive countries until hundred years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage.
Values and attitudes travel across generations. These affect stereotypes, which affect our mental processing even if one is against said stereotypes. There is a very good reason females can be still considered statistical underdogs for a while - the fact that can be abused by predatory individuals as a shield with impunity. The fact that these abuses happen, do not mean we should not still be in general vigilant in upholding female rights for a few generations still.
Except, of course, your bias, which is pretty clear. I think you'd be surprised at what we do to our own memories.
"Some people are likely to spontaneously sexually abuse members of opposite sex in their vicinity and there are more men than female in this group" would have been more accurate.
Then I read the comments on this thread. :(
We must do better.
Since 2013?
Also, in human issues (as opposed to technology) there's no monotonically increasing progress. There periods of the past that are way more tolerant and peaceful than periods that preceded them, and vice versa.
Like the sixties gave way to the selfish seventies and eighties (and macho Reaganism, etc), like the cosmopolitan Europe of the 20s and 30s gave way to the Nazi hell of the late 30s to mid-40s, like the Roman republic decayed into the rule of crazy emperors, etc.
I find that shocking. I know people say things about others to their friends, but to actually direct that to another person is disappointing.
CEOs, men and women, ancient and contemporary have had to find ways to avoid crowds and their envy/anger/pettiness for centuries. Just make yourself less accessible.
Not true. E-mail addresses of famous people are quite public, and your e-mail to lloyd.blankfein_at_gs.com or billg_at_microsoft.com will get read. Though - like you point out - it will likely be read by a team of secretaries or aides and only flagged to Lloyd if the message is deemed important or you are deemed important enough.
The point is that public figures have always had to shield themselves from the mediocrity of crowds, because it's easier to free yourself up from that than to change the whole society or industry.
TFA's 5th paragraph states that she will not, in fact, quit the industry. Why would you infer that she'd have quit?
1) Would I do/say this to another male (person of a sex I'm not sexually oriented towards)? If not, don't do it any other person/gender either.
That's basically it.
TLDR; Treat everyone as a person first and foremost, and a potential partner/mate later.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9835375
I know I've received threatening mail from lawyers, and have been advised not to share it publicly. So not sure if it can get you in trouble.
We tech people tend to think of ourselves as problem-solvers and intellectuals who would welcome anyone interested in the domain, and who was willing to contribute. And yet, many, many women in this industry feel marginalized and/or excluded. Even if that is based on the behaviour of a few bad actors, even if it is somethat that other male-dominated industries (like finance or manufacturing) suffer from, why not try and fix this? Why tolerate the behaviour, or shoot the messenger?
People who get angry at posts like this seem to feel personally attacked somehow, which is a weird reaction. (I mean, unless you also harass women, in which case you should feel guilty and take this peronsally, and you should stop.) Otherwise, why not band together in solidarity with the women who experience it, and help put a stop to it? It will make your industry better, your companies more valuable, your workplaces more pleasant, and your conferences more interesting. And most importantly, people who right now are getting a lot of shit thrown their way will be treated better. There is seriously no downside.
My other comment addresses "if the problem is the people, what's wrong with them exactly, and how can we fix it?"
To the contrary. It's exactly on point. We don't see anyone saying "school industry is fucked" just because some teachers are abusing the students or "airline industry is fucked" because pilots pick up stewardesses.
I find it really repulsive how it's somehow okay in our industry to throw blanket accusations and demand collective responsibility.
This is a huge weakness of our environment. Something that actually makes me consider leaving the industry from time to time.
You're right. They don't for the reason you mentioned. They do it for worse things:
http://www.westword.com/news/frontier-airlines-subject-of-ge...
https://bossip.com/1365175/another-one-second-black-female-d...
https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-bullying-intimidation-and-...
To bring in some numbers (from Sweden since our government collects it), only 12.5% of those that are employed work in a profession that are consider gender equal and thus have more than 40% of both women and men. 87.5% of people do not, and the tech industry with its ~79%-21% ratio is very average in that group. In contrast we got 38 different profession with 90%-10% gender distribution which employ a very large portion of all employed.
Maybe a reason why we tend to inflate the tech industry problems are that there simply are more people here that can be marginalized (for which a subset will write a blog post which then has a chance to end up on HN). A profession that is 99,6 women, or male profession with 99,4 men, will simply not have many people complain that they are feeling marginalized, since the minority gender could almost be seen as a statistical error.
Google translation of the statistics: (https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...)
And arguments like that in some cases raise a valid point. But when "X" is morally repugnant, your argument appears cold, calculating and statistical.
If you want warm, emotional and opinionated point, let me bring one that also is supported by the available data. 12.5% is horrible, and that the underlying trend today is steadying pointing downwards is nothing less than a complete failure of gender equality politics. A society that speak of gender equality should not accept it, and even more it should be repulsed by the fact that many of the 90%+ profession have the government as the employer. It shows a strong lack of compassion and understanding on what such work environment do to people, and by focusing the political discussion elsewhere it cowardly avoids scrutiny. If we see people feeling marginalized for being one odd in every 5, imagine how exposed it would be to be 1 odd out of every 300.
In short? Because it's not a technical problem, it's a political problem; it involves dealing with people and their motivations, irrationalities, hangups, biases, etc.
It's a common stereotype that most engineers make terrible managers for the very same reason, and it's not an unreasonable stereotype. If we could break this down to a technical problem, it would be solved. It's not a technical problem, and most of us don't know how (or can't afford the massive time cost) to fix it on the larger scale.
So those who care do what we can do best: attempt to fix ourselves: we strive to overcome our internal hangups and biases, to act rationally, to not become part of the problem. And frankly, for most of us, that's the most we could hope to realistically do.
What the author experienced is criminal. Until we treat it as such, and the perpetrators experience consequences for their actions, these problems will continue to plague victims - of all genders.
This is only a problem because of a) the immaturity of the average tech guy, relative to other professions and b) the lack of success with women of the average tech guy, again relative to the overall population.
Tech professions attract mostly left-brained people, and attract some personality types much more than other types. A tech guy is more likely to be an introvert. He's also more likely to have poor social skills, which relates to both A and B. It would be interesting to know if insecure attachment styles are more prevalent in the tech industry (likely), if anxiety disorders are more prevalent (likely; and someone with anxiety might be more likely to spend their free time indoors harassing people than playing football outside) and if low self-esteem is more prevalent (sadly, in my experience, likely; obviously 'harassment behavior' isn't something to be proud of, so doing it, while apparently desirable for some, would just result in lowered self-respect for them).
This is more prevalent in the open-source community, since there are no selection standards. You need neither a degree from MIT or Stanford, or to go through the tough Google interview standards, so you'll end up with the crap that's left on top of the sieve.
This problem will not get fixed anytime soon, and certainly can't get fixed through politics of any kind, since it's founded in personality and psychology. Mandatory pre-school with screening of all children for attachment disorders would help a lot, and hopefully someone reading this will be convinced to promote that as a solution.
To those who would say this is just speculation and ad hominem: it's conjecture, not speculation, and can be debated. It isn't ad hominem: to find a solution, asking "why" is necessary. There's no contempt here, though some of what I said may not be nice, I'm not assigning lower worth to anyone.
Having them is the default case. To exclude them, you have to make a specific argument to that extent. That's the only way civil society can exist without falling into constant tribal battles.
The problem is exactly the same as the following:
In an organization, you'll have some employees that are more psychologically healthy, and some less. Some will have substance abuse problems. The employees with substance abuse problems will be less productive, on average. In other words, they're dragging the organization down.
There's no "getting rid of them". They'll just burden another company. Same as here, in open-source, you can't "get rid of them", it's logistically impossible.
This problem logistically can't get fixed through exclusion. It can only get fixed by "raising the floor" (in other words, making sure that the most troubled men become less troubled). Raising the median/average won't help. Same as raising the median income won't help the people in poverty, raising the minimum wage will.
In the original metaphor, since substance abuse and attachment disorders are correlated, again the best solution is early detection of attachment disorders in young children, and improving their situation.
Why not help the least fortunate? I can guarantee you, the kinds of guys sending Photoshopped pics of bloody cadavers are not happy people. There's psychological inequality just as much as economic inequality, though for psychology, most people find it harder to be compassionate.
http://www.ted.com/talks/ashley_judd_how_online_abuse_of_wom...
It is beyond me where this level of vitriol is coming from, are women that threatening?
If you'd have worded it "The slightest indication of a threat to masculinity sends some men into a fit of rage" you might have had a point, rather than sounding like a troll.
They have a habit of pushing for policy changes, social changes and the creation of new taboos that artificially tip the world towards themselves, at the expense of men who are typically not sexist or doing very much at all.
In tech, they have successfully created an environment where women have an advantage when getting jobs and especially when not getting fired. They on the other hand are able to get men fired at other companies, merely by claiming to be offended at comments they overhead:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes-...
Feminists, and the women who wrote this blog post appears to be one, routinely attack men in all sorts of ways. It triggers reactions back, many of which are unpleasant and nasty.
Just because you're a victim doesn't mean you can do no harm.
Nothing new here I suppose. Just ridiculous that it happens however, or that this meme is tolerated.
"Yes they get all the good jobs, you can tell because there are so many more women then men working in tech"
Secondly, where is the evidence that people who harass and abuse women online are doing it because they feel their rights and their jobs are under threat? I'm not saying there are not people like that but if you really want to change society as a whole, why would you do it by trying to attack individual women? Could it not be that these men are simply narcissistic assholes who gain pleasure by hurting women?
In other words it has stopped being about equal rights. Now it's about better rights for women.
where is the evidence that people who harass and abuse women online are doing it because they feel their rights and their jobs are under threat
There is a well established history at this point of outspoken 'feminists' (using the above definition) attracting disproportionate amounts of hate online. The reason is pretty simple: they dish it out themselves.
From taking a gander over Ms Frazelle's Twitter feed she has retweeted this:
A poster that gives women a secret code to call the police because they "feel weird" on a Tinder date? This is the kind of ultra-extremist feminism that is guaranteed to trigger giant shitstorms and it has nothing to do with tech, it's simply that 'women in tech' are more likely to hang out in lots of real time chat systems like IRC and Twitter than women in other industries.When people like you try to shut down debate by saying now is not the time, all you do is make things worse. That's how Trump wins: he doesn't try and "read the room" or bring things up at the "appropriate" times. He doesn't care about these rules social-justice types try and impose at all, because he knows there is never going to be a time when they're happy for their behaviour to be discussed.
:sigh:
I see what you're saying, okay? And I can totally empathize.
But look. Here's an apparently unrelated article on Magic the Gathering: http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/2005_Stuck_In_The_Mi...
It says that if you're facing a challenging task and under stress, like winning a game, there's an instinct to lose. I think the idea is that winning takes effort, and so we have a bias that makes us go "well, I'll charge all in and see if it works," and then it predictably doesn't work and we retreat into a sort of "hah, I knew I would lose!" because by taking the risk, we sort of licensed losing in our minds. Like, "you didn't beat me, I beat myself!" type of thing.
This is not the place to bring the topic up. I don't know if there is a better place to bring the topic up, but I feel like what motivates you to bring it up here may be something similar to that article, where you know you're going to get downvoted but at least you know why, and expect it, and that makes it acceptable. If you want to actually win, you have to avoid reactions like that. You have to be patient, and wait for the right time, and then use the right level of forcefulness, and signal in the right way, and make the right concessions, and it's hard, nobody is saying it's not, but would you rather lose on your terms or win?
Also, please stop using HN for ideological battle. That's not what this site is for.