How many more instances of this happening do we need before people believe there's actually a problem in society surrounding sexism? Honestly I expect to see equivocation more than indictment in the comments section here.
Its more than sexism. It's misogyny. Or sarcastic emulation of misogyny, for trolling. Which has the same impact on targets.
However, it's hard to know how prevalent these attitudes and behavior are. Because observations aren't independent. One asshole posts on some chan about a fun target, and then his friends compete with each other. And it could even be scripted.
I keep seeing this word being used, and I don't think it's apt. I don't think we're seeing "dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women", much less "hatred of women".
I think it's much closer to the truth to say that people everywhere are extremely interested in and enamored of women, but that women provide some kind of easy target for expression of bad feelings or trolling.
As a former troll, I can say nobody really wants to mess with Eric Lu because there's just no troll juice there. A guy would just laugh at those "mean" comments. I certainly have laughed at comments like that. Nobody wants to troll me because the comments just can't get any purchase.
So, please, let's stop with the myth that people hate women. People love women, guys have been dying for women since forever, and it's certainly not because they have contempt for them or hate them. There's clearly a discriminatory thing going on here, but its root is not hatred of women.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of domestic violence victims, and the victims of murders where the assailant was in a relationship with the murderer, are women. This idea that "people love women" is not reality based.
Plenty of men have spoken out about how toxic and awful online culture can be. It's not too hard to find examples.
I have personally laughed at comments much worse than those in the post, directed at me, and so have my friends. All my male friends and my dad and my friends' dads and so forth love women -- they would die for women.
What I'm trying to say is, people bring out this word "misogyny" to make a claim about the origin of a problem, when the origin is unclear, or at least much more complicated than "hatred of women". Let's just agree about the clear evidence that there is discriminatory behavior and not insist on absolute certainty as to why it is happening.
Wew lad, I can't believe I'm saying this, but you either don't understand women or don't understand love.
Women dont want you to die for them. That's your own need for chivalrious purpose, you selfishly romanticizing your own (or your male friends') sacrifice. I dont know if you've ever had someone sacrificing themselves for you, but lemme tell you first hand, it's not nice, and it makes you feel like shit. Women, and everyone for that matter, are adults, so they don't need someone sacrificing themselves for them. Why would you die for someone, when that person is capable of complete independance? The "love you to death" love isn't really love, it's obsession, and it's unhealthy. And it's either "women are an easy target for trolling" or "people love women". I dont know what kind of twisted love makes you harass your object of desire online.
I can think of a million different ways to harass Eric. Everyday men are also harassed online, usually for not being "masculine" enough. So why are people more likely to harass Julia or Rachel and not Eric?
I'm not talking about what women want, I'm saying that I know firsthand that many men I know love the women in their lives very much, much more than life itself. That's all.
There certainly are men out there who hate women, but it doesn't seem to me to be very many. Try it, enumerate the men you know and ask yourself, or even ask them directly, if they love the women in their lives. What fraction of women haters do you find? I think you'll find it's very low. And that's my point, that we are not actually facing an epidemic of misogyny ("hatred of women"), that it is actually something else, or at least much more complicated.
Personally I don't find it hard to come up with another explanation: miserable people want other people to be miserable too. And to make people miserable, you do whatever will be effective. Over the internet, mean words work a lot better against women than against men.
Your last paragraph is totally correct, in my opinion.
(It is probably also true that many people who use "racist" insults are not really being "racist"; they are just insulting in an effective, target-specific way. If they couldn't come up with a racist insult, but the target has glasses, they'd probably resort to "four-eyes". I'm talking about the UK here, by the way.)
If someone is being "just insulting in an effective, target-specific way" that comes across as racist, then they're being racist, no matter what they may really feel, or what they may think that they really feel. And it's the same for sexism or any other *ism.
You may choose to use words in a way that deliberately obscures an important distinction in the real world but please accept that other people may choose not to.
> I think it's much closer to the truth to say that people everywhere are extremely interested in and enamored of women, but that women provide some kind of easy target for expression of bad feelings or trolling.
You're not even convincing yourself here, dude. If you feel that women just are an outlet for your bad feelings, and you somehow can't keep a lid on that - you're a misogynist, whatever the shade.
The point is that if there is some reason bullies mistreat other children other than hatred of children, maybe there is some reason people mistreat women other than hatred of women.
If we assume that all mistreatment has the same source. I wouldn't make that assumption, but if you want to explain away the possibility of misogyny being a problem then you certainly can.
> If we assume that all mistreatment has the same source.
What I said doesn't require that, and I didn't assume that.
Actually I think it would be more reasonable if the people who are certain misogyny (again, just so we don't forget what this word actually means: "hatred of women") rules the world would provide evidence of the widespread hatred of women. If anything, I think the evidence is much stronger that people hate men.
That is an impressive strawman you've built. Yes, if you assume that people you disagree with take the most extreme position possible ("are certain that misogyny rules the world") then yes, you can always be right! Good luck, I'm sure you can just make up some words of mine to argue against if needed.
I don't think this is anything new at all in itself. Chats, anonymous comments, forums, public walls, etc just allow these weirdos to express themselves out of that place of theirs that is unattached to reality.
Already in the 90's there were a few handfuls of pesterers of the similar kind on IRC. There would've been more but IRC was such a nerdy tool underground that only a few of them ever found themselves there.
But the phenomenon has there for a long time: it's just that before internet there were few places where you could do this in public. I think most of the similar chatter must have happened between male friends of young age, hanging out and exchanging comments on hot-looking passer-bys and maybe wooing after some or alternatively yelling bitchy remarks.
Even this wouldn't be tolerated in better parts of the town. But on the internet, all you need is a text input box.
There are plenty of people out there who think the legal inequalities faced by women are now completely removed, and everything is therefore ok. Not only is that an incorrect premise, but its an incorrect conclusion - women face significant societal obstacles and pain just because they're women.
So do men (hint: children are more important than money). This case might not be sexism though. It looks like they have a bias in their experiment that skews the results.
Your interjection here isn't answering a question I asked. Are you saying that because men are more likely to face harassment, that women are not harassed more when they present as women online?
I think it answers the question quite well. Since men are harrassed more online, they tend to be unsympathetical when women complain of online harrasment, knowing women already experience somewhat less harrasment than men.
The only direct question in your original comment is a rhetorical one. Do you really expect people to answer to that and not to your further comment wondering about the disparity between your expectation and reality?
Either you have people replying to your rhetorical question and generating exactly zero discussion of value, or explaining to you why your expectation differs from reality. Clearly no one will do the first.
Your comment doesn't make sense. If the self-reported harassment numbers are correct, it means this case is an exception, not the rule. As for why is it an exception, see other comments about bots, fake photos, and target audience of the site.
> How many more instances of this happening do we need before people believe there's actually a problem in society surrounding sexism?
I believe there is rampant sexism; what I don't believe is that the approach of treating all men as potential rapists and claiming that masculinity is toxic is working out (in fact, I think it exacerbates the problem; practically all mass shootings are a result of boys/men being systematically imbued with toxic shame).
But yeah, go wear those pussy hats if it makes you feel good.
There always seems to be a good crowd of people that start with the assumption that there is actually no problem in society with sexism, and therefore there must be some other explanation. That's when the "But what if" and "Maybe the sample was" get dragged out.
I always assumed these messages were automated helper bots, I didn't realize they are people on the other end. Now I feel a little bad about being so curt when I use them like I'm searching an FAQ.
I would wager most people would think these are bots, especially when photos are used. Internet users are a little too accustomed to stock photos of happy company employees gathering and customer support smiling for the camera.
Then they want to see how the bot responds to stupid memes.
TBH even when I see a chatbox that isn't a bot (aside the automated greeting) I assume it's a minimum wage tech support drone in some low cost country. Especially when they have a cliché American name ("Dave", "John", "Adam", etc).
I'm not the kind of person that routinely insults chatbots but if I'd see a portrait photo of a woman I'd likely assume it's a bot, simply because too many companies use fake photos of smiling women because someone told them it's good for business (though this article makes me wonder if that trend might finally change).
Yes, I noticed that people hated when they thought they were talking to a bot. [This is Julia, the OC.] Sometimes I would respond to a sequence of four or five messages from a user, and they would immediately stop messaging, as if they didn’t realize a human was there. I tried that tactic for a while - a user would message me or Rachel some inappropriate demand and I would respond with “Absolutley not.” Many users would stop messaging, but some would get even more fired up and become really aggresssive or threatening.
So I stopped responding to any message that was inappropriate, mean, or nonsense. It’s a waste of time and energy when you’re trying to grow the company.
Thanks for the article, really good to see, and reaffirm what most of us guessed already.
Might I suggest another round of trials but changing up the message when someone joins? It reads quite like a bot/automated system/interactive FAQ, as others point out.
I know that personally if I join one of those with a bot you can usually get a real human on the other end if you curtly answer questions and voice dissatisfaction with the bot answers (e.g. "this doesn't help") at which point it offers to give a human.
What I'm saying is I wonder how this gender effect would interact with a 'bot-like' variable—if people would react this way if the message was more along the lines of "hi, I'm Rachel and I'm a real human working for…'
I'm male and I suppose this kind of problems happen much less often than to you, but I also came to the conclusion that not answering to meanness, nonsense, rudeness etc is the best tactic.
Was thinking about this ... I reflexively hate bots, but it might be a UX thing -- maybe it's the popup. The pop diverts my attention from where I was looking on the site and feels like an intrusion. Same as if someone comes to your desk and grabs your mouse. So .. maybe an improvement would be to have a status-line or ticker-like text field that doesn't pop up or obscure any part of the underlying page design.
Also, IRL anecdote. My ex-wife used to get heckled and cat-called all the time when walking alone (even pushing baby pram). Number of times it happened when she was walking with me? 0. I'm amused and saddened by all the incredulity on display here. I could have said "well I've never seen it, so it's not happening..."
EDIT> You have to be a special kind of ignorant or inexperienced to not have noticed that this is how people talk to women when there are no consequences.
> Was thinking about this ... I reflexively hate bots, but it might be a UX thing -- maybe it's the popup. The pop diverts my attention from where I was looking on the site and feels like an intrusion. Same as if someone comes to your desk and grabs your mouse. So .. maybe an improvement would be to have a status-line or ticker-like text field that doesn't pop up or obscure any part of the underlying page design.
I almost entirely agree with this. Chat pop-ups are _incredibly_ annoying. Many websites have a livechat tab at the bottom, or at the side of the screen that you can click to initiate a chat, and that's fine, but the chat should _never_ be initiated automatically (or appear to be). Once the page loads, any change in the main area of a website should _only_ be initiated by user interaction, such as clicking the 'chat' tab at the bottom. Otherwise, for the interruption it generates in my thought process, you might as well just load another page entirely.
>Was thinking about this ... I reflexively hate bots, but it might be a UX thing -- maybe it's the popup. The pop diverts my attention from where I was looking on the site and feels like an intrusion. Same as if someone comes to your desk and grabs your mouse. So .. maybe an improvement would be to have a status-line or ticker-like text field that doesn't pop up or obscure any part of the underlying page design.
But it wasn't nearly as bad when the avatar was male or nonhuman.
Without reading this article, I would never, in a million years, have believed there was an actual human being manually operating any of these "chat popups". I probably still won't believe it, but now when I see these things I have to think there's a 99.9% chance it's a bot rather than 100% chance it's a bot.
I hate those chat popups so much. There are better and worse implementations, but mainly the best ones are the least obtrusive, and the absolute best are not having these at all. Even if I did want to contact the company, this is not how I'd do it, as there are no guarantees made about who will see the message, how it will be handled, etc. (email with a ticketing, or some other form where I'm clearly submitting something and a process exists to handle it, sure.)
Still not as bad as surveys ("Yes, your website was fine until you popped up a modal for this survey which broke my interaction...")
After reading through the entire post, what I found lacking is a break down of what percentage of actual visitors & unique message senders were abusive.
It appears to be extraorinarily low. One in a thousand visitors or so. There's no question she was being abused because she was a woman. From what I can tell by their stats, that abuse appears to be coming from literally a handful of bad actors over a month's time, with many of the messages deriving from single persons.
So the question is: how do you deal with one bad person out of a thousand? I can't imagine there's any scenario, any technical implementation, that can eliminate abuse down much further than that no matter what you do. If you assume that even 1 in 100 men are going to be assholes, abusive, whatever, it's nearly impossible to stop them from behaving badly. You can take action after the fact, including in both anonymous and registered account situations. I also see no cultural scenario where you can pre-emptively stop that guy from being an asshole until he identifies himself through behavior.
One consideration would be pre-screening the chat for abusive language, abusive actors. That might catch a couple of the particularly bad examples. When a post is sent, you have to check it before it reaches the support agent. That's not difficult to do, except in the most heavily dodged scenarios of character replacement (s3x etc., some of which can still be pretty easily caught). Monsters will be monsters, there are at least a few options for dealing with them.
I suspect that you're deliberately missing the point, but I'll tell it to you anyway.
It's not about the percentage of visitors that were abusive. It's the number of people who were abusive when they thought they were talking to a female vs. a male.
A lot of this has to do with the target audience you're drawing: meme makers.
Meme makers are all pretty much going to be unsocialized and autistic douche boys & gamers and who seek to make memes for 4chan or Reddit. They're trolling, so obviously you're going to draw terrible people.
If your site was selling expensive fashion items, you're going to see a completely different reaction.
I think anyone remotely familiar with the internet won't be surprised by these outcomes. Of course the occasional reality check is always good.
I wonder to what extent plucky startups expect abuse when they put pop-up chat dialogs in their products. I imagine it's inescapable that some percentage of your user base is going to see it as an invitation to respond poorly. Something door-to-door salespeople and telemarketers learned long ago. I suppose abuse filtering is still an unsolved problem waiting to make someone rich.
I'm using the net (As a guy) for 20 years now, and I was surprised.
This is taking place at an alarming scale. Some parents really missed the mark in teaching their kids basic human manners, and I'm not even talking about the golden rule...
I am really curious. You say you have used the net for 20 years now, so how can you be surprised about this? Have you not exposed yourself to other anonymous forums? They're all filled with vitriol and disrespect.
As another surprised guy I'm aware people post bad things on the internet but I wasn't aware of the degree of difference between having a male and female picture as I haven't tried that.
Surprised here also (I'm a guy in my 40s; 25 years online) - I know there are people online with no manners, and I go out of my way not to interact with them, but the sheer level of abuse shown here (and sadly elsewhere too) constantly amazes and upsets me.
The obvious thing to do is to remove anonymity from the Internet. However then what do we do about peoples rights[1] to free speech?
---
[1] Not every country gives this right to it's populous.
Facebook is a fantastic example that lack of anonymity does not solve anything. It takes 5 seconds to find groups where people openly say that all women are bad, immigrants should be shot, black people are responsible for all the crime etc etc......even though all of their friends and family can see those posts. It solves nothing.
China is solving this problem. Every citizen will have it's own score (by 2019 or something) and you get points taken away if any of your online friends or family say bad things about the communist party.
It's a solution... but i'm not sure if it's the right one:)
China is run by a authoritarian oligarchy that wants to suppress any challenge to it's power. The planned "social credit" system is part of that suppression.
FYI, this oligarchy has a list of "perils" that include:
> “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation [1]
It's not trying to solve your problem with people's online lack of manners, and any imputation to the contrary is part of a smokescreen.
> It's a solution... but i'm not sure if it's the right one
> The fact that China as a whole is an authoritarian oligarchy does not mean that they can't do things better than the US.
You're missing the point. The US should not emulate China's authoritarian systems of control, regardless of how well China can do them or how they might seem applicable to some aspect of American life. They are the tools of authoritarianism, and to bring them here is to allow authoritarianism to creep in.
Not sure why you're being down voted. You're absolutely right. The current state of affairs in China should have everyone in a panic. I fully believe that they are leading the way into the future tech-wise, and that before long, all major metropolises will be fully automated with real-time systems that track faces, vehicles, purchases, movements, vacations, etc and then cross-reference all of that data with online activity.
In China right now it's being touted as making everything in life seamless.
To me it's the most terrifying form of the future.
I feel like we've crossed from "Simpsons did it" to "Black Mirror did it", as Black Mirror has an episode (Season 3 Episode 1) which is a similar world that everyone now inhabits.
Whether a country "gives" someone the right to free speech is irrelevant, it is still a right they have as a human being. That's sort of the entire point of "inalienable," in that it's not in the government's power to bestow or take away.
Hi.
Yes. I didn't go to any anonymous forums. I didn't have any reason to go there. For me, It's like visiting the ghetto for the trill of being mugged..
> I'm using the net (As a guy) for 20 years now ...
Early on people said "There are no girls on the internet," and the sentence was supposed to embody the anonymity of the internet and the renaissance notion that a person should be judged by the merits of their arguments and not the labels attached to them. Someone claims to be a girl? No, you are talking to a middle aged dude having a chuckle. Maybe I have rose tinted glasses here, maybe it was always jerks saying there are no girls on the internet.
It morphed into "Tits of GTFO," because, given the anonymity of online dialogue, it seemed to some pernicious few that the only reason to mention being a woman was to seek attention.
Online dialogue grew vitriolic, "Its only the internet," trolls would throw at anyone trying to inject civility and good manners into flame wars. "I f'ed your mom," became a bit of a goto for a general passing derailment since it got to most people. If OP mentioned any detail about themself, (racial, gender, age, relationship status, mental issues) this was used to make more specific insults. Moderators struggled to keep up.
The networks got faster, streaming voice became possible on games. Voice isn't anonymous. The online dialogue started giving away details (age, sex, socioeconomic background), when team mates in pick up groups got frustrated with one another they started to reach for the sexist, the racist, the particular insults. Women learned not to speak up in chat to avoid the onslaught.
A lot of us became inured to that "12 year old claiming to have banged our mom last night", but those ridiculous insults take on a nastier edge when that "12 year old" knows details about your life. If you regularly game with women, you will see it. The mere fact that people believe there are so few women gamers is due to their fear of speaking up, there are more than there appear to be on the surface.
I do think the insults become more frequent when the jerks know you are a woman. They also know you are inured to the generic insults. Few women are inured to rape threats I think. I'm a bit surprised Eric didn't get racist comments in the OP's unscientific study.
I'm happy you haven't experienced the internet as I have, it has always been a nasty place and a lot of us sat by and pretended like it was different than real life as if there weren't real live humans behind the keyboards. I've been guilty of that. I still don't know what to do when I encounter such nastiness, much to my dismay.
> Early on people said "There are no girls on the internet," and the sentence was supposed to embody the anonymity of the internet and the renaissance notion that a person should be judged by the merits of their arguments and not the labels attached to them.
No, it was supposed to embody the fact that there were literally very few women on the majority of online message boards and chat rooms for a long time...
But also, the percentage of the userbase responding poorly also responded almost an order of magnitude more when the person on the other end was a woman.
That's obviously true, but it doesn't detract from the point that women, in this case and many others, are unfairly targeted for abuse, particularly online.
That's not what their data is showing. That would be a valuable break-out to see.
What their data is showing is number of messages. If you look at the chats, it appears they're counting multiple abusive messages (one minute to the next and many within the same minute stamp) from single actors.
If one jerk sends eight abusive messages in one minute, they're counting all of those in the order of a magnitude you're referring to. It makes sense the abusive actors will send as many abuse messages as they can as quickly as they can, as one would expect that to get shut-down.
Simply put, the abuse they're showing, which is about ~14 rude + harrassment messages per week to Julia, could easily consist of just two or three individual jerks sending a burst of messages (which again appears to be the case based on the screenshots). By their numbers, they're getting ~4,500 visitors per week. Out of those, it appears that about 0.1% or less of those visitors are likely a problem.
edit: and for the downvoters, I operate a service in the retail space that is exclusively for women. Information/data/blog posts of this sort are extremely valuable to me, that's why I'm asking for clarification.
Ok, then I'm confused. In the post it shows, for example this:
That says ~14 messages per week. So you're saying the labeling is wrong, that it should say chat sessions per week?
The overall math in that scenario is also confusing me, if that refers to sessions. If the average abusive session contained even just six or seven messages, times 14 abuse sessions per week, upwards of 100 abuse messages contained within the abusive sessions in a week, ~400 per month. Roughly half of your customer interaction messages, or more, at that time, were occuring in abuse threads? Or does "2,100 messages" actually refer to 2,100 individual chat sessions?
Yes, I'm using the word "messages" loosely in the article. Here, "messages" = message threads or sessions.
- We got 2,100 message threads over the last three months.
- We got 14 message threads or abusive sessions per week, a small fraction of the 2,100 overall
The average "abusive session" contained only about three or four messages, not 6-7. Otherwise, your math is right.
There was almost zero abuse on the male cofounder image. So by what this story presents as long as you pretend to be guys plucky startups don't have to worry.
Not really. The cat got the least amount of trolling. What these people are doing is really asking for their time getting wasted by a bot before being transfered to a human customer support operator.
Apart from logical reasoning of this phenomena, and being polite in general, I actually hate it when someone pops up and is like “hey, you have a problem”, on any site. Especially when popup covers content and/or site controls. Multiply that by someone’s low culture and voila.
I’ll not be wondered if this $10M problem solves with help me button at right top of the screen, instead of popups.
Strongly agree. Humans tend to respond negatively to what they perceive as an intrusion.
That said, what surprised me the most about the whole article was learning that sometimes there are in fact real people behind those random annoying chat boxes. I've always assumed I'd only get a self-help bot to reply so I would've never used them.
These chat messenger pop-ups can be quite annoying, the example on the site mentioned is typically 'in your face'.
What's particularly frustrating with this one is that there is already a prominent speech bubble icon in the corner of the screen that suggests they have a chat feature - if I want it. It doesn't need to crack open after a second and slap me.
I am not defending the obvious misogyny here but I think an experiment that starts out by peeing off its subjects can not be fully objective?
Yeh, if it had been framed as "we dealt with Meme makers and low and behold, the 13-30 year old men that used it made lewd, crude and frankly misogynist comments!" would anyone have been surprised?
Hey - I totally agree it can be annoying, especially since Drift asks users to enter their email address and people are worried about spam. So it’s a tradeoff between annoyance at the pop up and the support users get when they have problems. Our website is a video editing tool, so we decided that it’s more important to have someone to answer questions than to avoid “peeing off” users.
And, regardless of how annoying a chat box is, the findings of this article still stand...[This is Julia btw, the author of this post]
Not sure if you're familiar with it, but Ling's Cars is a high-touch website with live-chat elements that ... whilst in a different area than yours, may prove useful.
One of the costliest elements for a car sales outlet is tire-kickers: people who come by, look at vehicles, tie up a salesperson's time, and don't buy anything. More to the point, they never planned to buy anything....
The auto dealership (online or off) wants to sort out the tire-kickers as quickly as possible. If you aren't currently and really shopping for a car, you're a liability. And the chances are the salesperson's missing out on one of the four people who might actually have a real interest in buying that day. The goal is to sort you as quickly as possible.(
Ling'sCars.com is optimized for driving away people who don't really, really, REALLY want to buy a car.*
Not saying you want to drive people away. But you also probably want to not spend much time interacting with anyone that's not really interested in your product.
'Ling'sCars.com is optimized for driving away people who don't really, really, REALLY want to buy a car.'
...and also people who want to preserve their eyesight?
I leased a car from Ling's site once. She's actually very business-like in real-life. At the time she was doing deals way better than the competition - still the early days of business leasing back then. Not sure how competitive she is now but the site certainly looks the same?
>>Why bring up some other site?
Sorry for not being clear. "Drift" is the name of the messaging widget we use to support Kapwing's chat bot. If a user responds to the welcome message on Kapwing, they're automatically prompted for their email (kind of in a side bar to the message box). I feel like this makes the chat bot a bit more annoying to users who choose to respond to the initial message.
>> how does that fact justify using this particular dark UI pattern?
We just made a product call and decided that the benefits, both for us and for our users, of having a chat box outweighed the annoyance. When people have problems using our tool, they really want help, and it isn't that difficult for the rest of our site visitors to swipe away or ignore the chat box.
I disagree. Dark UI is manipulation of the user. For example, hiding 'X' buttons on pop-ups asking for a subscription. (Is refusing to pay for value provided a dark 'pattern' on the part of users?)
This pop-up does not manipulate the user. It is an honest value proposition. So is "Fifty Shades of Grey." I didn't buy it.
The manipulation in this case is that a naive user assumes there's a real person on the other end who has noticed them browsing the site and decided to take some time out of their day to initiate a conversation with them.
It's a classical sales tactics that builds on social pressure, here taken to a more dishonest level - the chat box was initiated by some code, in spite of what the text message implies.
They are absolutely inexcusable. Website developers should make simpler design rather than make everyone search for close button and consider every user an idiot.
Also it can make user feel uncomfortable, as if there is someone behind their back standing and looking what they are doing with the site.
This popup is also deceiving users. For example on the screenshot [1] we can see a human user thinking that a real person wrote a greeting to him and wasting time of his life replying to a bot.
Of course. They're not really asking if you need help, they're trying to interrupt your thinking and pressure you into making a buy decision on the spot.
I worked in a shop shortly after leaving school. Asking someone if they need assistance is almost certain to lead to one single action - the potential customer walking out of the shop at the next available opportunity.
The popup being annoying (to which I personally agree) doesn't change anything about the incredibly clear results. People are placed into all kinds of situations in which they come across as annoying by their employers (inbound tech support being just one example).
The only long term solution is giving women the right to defend themselves in these kind of situations and not having to buckle down because of "business reasons".
We've denied perfectly fine clients because they were fucking misogynists to our all-female sales team, but we're a dime in a dozen.
If you read your own link, you'd find a strawman is refuting "an argument that was not presented by that opponent". Can you tell me how that applies to the post above?
I don't see how this is relevant in any way. I dislike these messenger ups too and finding them utterly annoying, but it's not an article about usability, UX or user engagement. It's about how men see and treat women online when using this specific tool, and I think it presents a huge educational problem of this (my) gender.
As a man, I wouldn't never even think I have to hide my photo online. I've been using the internet for more than 20 years and was never harassed based on my sex (or anything else, really). I find it crucial that we understand these different experiences we're all facing when we go online, if we ever want it to be different.
As far as I see it, this is about educating our boys much more than it is about educating our web designers.
When seeing an annoying popup with what seems to be a bot in it, people just happen to write shit in it. Even if it's just to annoy and waste time of that particular company.
This is basically an A/B test, admittedly on a moderate sample size but the point Julia is making is that the amount of abuse differed depending on the gender of the name and photo. All other variables, such as "annoyingness factor of having a pop-up chat box", were the same in all cases.
Even if the abuse were partly caused by the chat box popping up annoyingly, one could still conclude that a chat box popping up with a woman's name and face annoys people more than with a man's or a generic "team" one.
What I really hate is when they popup immediately upon visiting the site - I only just got here, I haven't even had a chance to read your spiel yet!
I do find these real-time chat boxes useful, I just wish they'd stay discreetly in the bottom right corner so they're there when I actually want them :/
The pissing off part was not a variable in this experiment, and it is your personal opinion. If the box is not intrusive I find it nice to be able to talk to a human directly. I does piss me off when I end up chatting to a dumb bot wasting my time though.
In any case, perhaps it makes the conclusion even more shocking: A male can piss someone off with little to no negative effect, a female can't. I fear for the results when taking this experiment into meat space.
The pissing off part might not be a variable in the experiment, but it still skews the results. You can get any result you want if you pick the right subset of the population and prep them the right way before taking the measurement.
Article: "Here is absolutely convincing evidence of the extreme sexism enabled by/encountered on the internet"
Top comment: "Pop up chat boxes are really annoying. Also I don't know what objective means. But I have added a token: Not defending the sexism sentence."
How can you call this "absolutely convincing evidence"? The data is not available, the methodology is not disclosed, there's little discussion of confounding factors(server outage mentioned once)...
I believe that sexual harassment is a serious problem women have to deal with, thanks to excellent studies like the one done by Pew on survey data in 2014(http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/). Calling this "absolutely convincing evidence" not only undermines your position(because it's easy to poke holes at it), but also diminishes the accomplishments of people who do put in the work to quantify and qualify harassment on the Internet.
It's not evidence at the scientific level, but not far from it either. Raw data would be nice, but given the dramatic effect size reported I don't see it as absolutely crucial (it wouldn't be in a scientific context either). Also the methodology is described reasonably clearly (change the chat avatar and nothing else). Further the blog post even does discuss that this is not a scientific study, and what some of the possible confounders were.
I'll concede that my statement is to general. But the article to me is strong evidence that the women involved experienced a strong sexist reaction from her customers. Are you not convinced that she did?
The set up is as close to perfect for confounding variables as possible in an evolving production environment (as someone noted, it's basically A/B testing).
I'm not saying it's convincing on its own in a vacuum of course. The prior formed by all the other studies (including the one you mentioned) is important in making it convincing. But it's certainly as clear evidence as 99% of what get's posted here.
Put another way: If this was a blog post that shows that one configuration of a database leads to latencies consistently 10 times smaller than another configuration, with experiments run over three months of production use, I would call that convincing evidence.
It's certainly a lot more coherent than the post I was replying to which somehow argues that this is not objective because chat boxes are annoying. (????) Luckily it's no longer the top comment either.
I don't want to trivialize the misogyny and sexism that shines through in the behavior you're seeing, but I think this is a big part of it. By now many users assume that any unsolicited message from a female is a bot, phishing, or both. Definitely becomes a problem when you're an actual person just trying to engage your users.
If its a bot, is it really "male" or "female"? The larger point that many people are trying to make is that if websites and corporations didn't always try to disguise their bots behind the face of a pretty girl then perhaps people would consider that their messages were being sent to actual human beings.
That would still be sexism. Im not sure people care why others are being jerks to them. If people are a jerk to you because you are a woman then that's sexism.
I have a friend that had a _very_ similar experience when changing her LinkedIn profile photo. She's an expert in her industry and the vast difference in the lack of patronizing comments and unsolicited weird messages was pretty striking.
Wow.. Never done it myself, nor any of my friends, I never realized that this was such a huge problem.
I read articles in the past but I always though they were exaggerating.
Like I can't believe boys can be so rude online.
Thanks for making time and writing the article and including the comments.
Don't over extrapolate this one instance to a rule. I think what was interesting was the testing. An audience that is mostly, say, pensioners, will likely have a very different result than a site that has as its first claim:
"Meme Maker
The most popular video meme maker on the Internet. Also works for images!"
I really found the testing and the changes enlightening, and that is what strikes me as really interesting here.
I agree that pensioners don't do this:), I meant people 15-40. I did run a chat on our site, and as one commenter noted, I also took a stock girl photo as profile pic.
The thing that socked me in this article is actually my own ignorance.
I got ,probably, just as many nasty comments, but I blanked them out completely. When someone was being a jerk, i would just close the chat, ban the user, and that's it. It didn't even register as a particular problem, or sexism, for that matter...
Honest question: What's the logic behind being so utterly rude from the first moment to someone you find attractive? Is it supposed to attract them back somehow?
Just guessing based on behaviours I have witnessed amongst school friends and work colleagues.
If you're not an attractive person yourself there are women and girls who are out of your reach. This breeds resentment at an early age, and a weapon of choice, for some, is derogatory language.
Why, because what else can you do to hurt someone so easily without fear of repercussion?
The problem is not just confined to misogynists btw. If you're a man and have an attractive wife or girlfriend the insulting behaviour still goes on, but usually behind your back - these people are generally cowards after all.
I don't have an answer based on any kind of scientific information, but I have a theory about this. I think that young boys who are learning how to behave towards women test their boundaries. Since they are anonymous, they go way too far into aggression. So I think the combination of being at the bottom of the food chain in terms of being a mate combines with their anonymity and their lack of actual social skills in behaving towards women.
Actually, people are colder and more abusive towards those less good-looking. The case described in the article is not due to beauty. It's because people think it's a bot or at least a fake photo. That's what irritates them.
When reading the article my first questions were: do these people think there is a real human at the other end, and, if so, do they think the photo is of that human? It's probably impossible to answer that question directly, but putting up a notice similar to "you are talking to a real person, not a bot" and seeing how that affects the behaviour would give some indication, perhaps.
I wonder if this is a mainly US problem or an international one?
While I could imagine some of the people I know would do this 'for harmless fun', it's only 1-2 idiots (out of all the people I talked to in my life), but those are jerks in real life too...
The article did state comments came from all parts of the globe (presumably they're doing some kind of GeoIP look up)?
I'd love to say it's just 1 or 2 idiots but stories like these are so common that Ive come to the conclusion that there is a very real gender bias at play. Which makes me both sad from the perspective of equality and disappointed as a representative of the male species. :(
All parts of the globe, but I can't imagine comments like this coming from The Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland... you know 'from countries such as Norway' (presidential quote here)
Coming from Germany (the one country in that area you didn't mention), we have a fair share of idiots here. We just don't expose them to the world in the manner America does. Some of it, of course, is due to the language barrier.
One of my more depressing findings in life is that no matter how you slice and dice the population, you'll find an abundance of assholes in every slice.
Well people who think this is fun are jerks (or kids) to start with, real life or not. But the real world has something the internet lacks: social control. The people you evolve with know you, judge you, and you must maintain a certain attitude and appear to adhere to social norms under the threat of contempt, exclusion, or even legal implications. That keeps society together. I think the internet shows the raw human nature without the social control. And it’s not pretty.
I can't relate to her post. We use on purpose attractive female profiles for our support chat avatars (our product is a SaaS) and the cases where a user behaves like this are 0.5% and for us not a problem at all, we just ignore them.
FYI, we tested a while different pics, female, male, average looking, good looking and we just got the best conversion rates with the above mentioned.
0.5% of users behaving like this is not a problem to you, cause you're a guy, and you don't care about sexual harassment cause you're not bombarded apparently all day.
This is exactly how I felt before I read this post.
But even 0.5% seem a very high number to me, cause in my opinion, you have to be mentally retarted to think that this is 'accepted' behaviour in any way, or that it will actually land you a date, a nude pic or a sexchat?!
I expect your downvotes are for the unnecessary and offensive inclusion of, "have to be mentally retarted [sic]." Without that I might have up-voted you for the other points made. (Although they could have been made with a less confrontational tone as well.)
Same way I felt when I was younger and would serve drinks at events, but then was moved to just pouring the drinks because "we now hire actual models for serving".
- your product is enterprise enough to only attract people who are considering speding larger amount of money (and thus are usually more 'adult')
- your users are logged in (and assume you know their identity as they have paid throu their CC)
I think that removing this chat box from the website completely will greatly improve it and solve this problem. Just have a page with a feedback form somewhere, so people who realy want to leave a feedback or a question could contact you. Stop annoying your users and random visitors!
Since the post is framed as a gender issue, let me offer another view that I think is evidently good to remember in the conversation: according to studies, men are more likely to experience online harrasment [1].
There was a great blog post[0] recently regarding the recent Aziz Ansari story about sexual harassement. (If you haven't heard of this case, I encourage you to Google it.)
It made a really great point that I believe -whichever side (if any) you take in the Ansari story- is very enlightening (at least it was for me), and that potentially applies to your study.
I can't possibly explain it as well as the author, so please go read the article, but, in essence, the author explains that women have been conditioned from the beginning of time to endure pain and as such don't report it as much.
The study you linked to, is based on reports of men and women, and indeed, according to this study, men are more likely to experience online harassement.
But now, is it because men report it more because they are more sensitive than women to online harassement, or are they really more likely to be harassed online?
When I ask myself, "have I ever been harassed online?", I can definitely say "absolutely never".
This is of course only my personal experience, but I'm eager to believe the exact opposite the study you linked to concludes: women are definitely more likely to experience online harassement, and OP's article is one demonstration of it.
The study doesn't say that women are less likely to experience sexual harassment online, but harassment overall:
Men and women experience and respond to online harassment in different ways. Overall, men are somewhat more likely to experience any form of harassing behavior online: 44% of men and 37% of women have experienced at least one of the six behaviors this study uses to define online harassment. In terms of specific experiences, men (30%) are modestly more likely than women (23%) to have been called offensive names online or to have received physical threats (12% vs. 8%).
By contrast, women – and especially young women – encounter sexualized forms of abuse at much higher rates than men. Some 21% of women ages 18 to 29 report being sexually harassed online, a figure that is more than double the share among men in the same age group (9%). In addition, roughly half (53%) of young women ages 18 to 29 say that someone has sent them explicit images they did not ask for. For many women, online harassment leaves a strong impression: 35% of women who have experienced any type of online harassment describe their most recent incident as either extremely or very upsetting, about twice the share among men (16%).
TBH if such an annoying chat robot pops up, my answer could also be a very unfriendly 'go away'.
Regarding photo difference this has likely to do with part of the audience which use such a mem maker kapwing site: idiots. An ip lookup who they are and/or coming from would have been interesting.
We didn't include "Go away" or "get out of my way" or even "shut up" in the count of rude messages. I only counted messages where a user swore, called me a name, or said something clearly aggressive or mean.
When I used Windows 10 for the first time and Microsoft's chatbot popped up, the first thing I asked it to do is "f*ck off". This might be the gender bias you are seeing. People assume it's a safe-to-swear chatbot when the photo is a pretty woman.
Well ;-) I didn't want to write what I potentially might have fired away emotionally when such chats appear (something with f* or p* maybe).
But many of the examples in the blog I could never ever imagine to write. No happy man or women would. Thus I'm interested who would? Are there any (aggregated) trends?
That there are idiots is a given. Neverthelesss, I would still present a down to earth real picture (not from you personally of course, but also not some stock foto or robot). Reason: if you spend the time/cost to provide high-quality personal assistance (opposed to some random chat-center no-help) you might as well show it (and filter out the idiots - you wouldn't want to provide services to them anyway!).
Is a grand total of 6 trolling messages in a week statistically significant in the first place?
The number I'm missing is how many legitimate prospect interactions resulted from each avatar. It wouldn't surprise me if the rude/harassing messages came from utter trolls who were not useful user prospects in the first place. If so, it could be worth keeping Rachel around just as a high-level troll trap to weed out the time wasters.
I wonder what is the percent of users who really need help and use the popup for it? If it is a minority than maybe it is better to make the popup closed by default so the majority of the users doesn't get distracted?
It's without a doubt that there is extreme misogyny on the internet and in the real world, but I would be interested in the demographics of the bad responses you got: country, age, gender, etc. This is the natural next step to understand how to solve this problem.
It's not without a doubt. See other comments. It might be that people think the pretty woman photo is fake or that it's all a scripted bot. The sexism might actually go the other way round - some people assuming these web devs are ugly antisocial men hiding behind fake photo of a pretty woman.
You have doubts that sexism and misogyny exist on the internet and the real world? And you think that all sexism exists only because people assume the person they're talking to is a bot? What are your double-blind studies that have confirmed this claim? I'm very interested in your sources.
I don't understand. Why would you ask a random website chat on a date? The chances that you're anywhere near her are nil. Do you intend to fly out to meet her? What is happening in your head, random visitor?
I am male and used to work in a call centre. I apparently have a good voice, and I was repeatedly asked out by random women calling the service desk. I even got a virtual stalker who kept inventing issues and calling daily just to speak with me. Since I am male, I was not threatened but amused, but I can see how a woman would feel vulnerable in the same situation.
In the US, the average guy is five inches taller and about 30 pounds heavier than the average lady. Also, given a particular body weight, men tend to be stronger than women. Furthermore, 80% of people arrested for violent crime are men.
Do you know that the other person isn’t nearby? That they chose not to lookup your office location? That they’ll fail to find or social engineer details about you?
Sure, it doesn’t happen every time but it’s not hard to find examples of people who thought their stalker would remain remote until that person showed up at their home or office.
From an evolutionary biology perspective the stakes are totally different for different for men versus women.
For men reproduction has almost no consequences (biologically speaking) while for women it can be life threatening. Men are biologically advantaged to make as many passes as possible until they are able to mate while women are advantaged to find the best mate possible. I think it is fair that this shapes the lens in which both sexes see unsolicited flirting.
This is a phonecall. Where is reproduction involved ?
I am a female myself and I think this is the kind of deep paternalizing tone that is plain wrong. Being amused and not threatened by something has nothing to do with gender but with personality. Why would a woman be more scared by a phone call than a man? All the suggestions I have here are plain hallucinatory (speaking about physical violence and reproduction over a phonecall ?!) and this issue has imo really nothing to do with gender.
Men are much more likely to be physically violent, in my mind, than women are. So a woman getting creepy calls from a man could actually mean physical danger. A man getting creepy calls from a woman would be much less likely to be dangerous. I want to be clear: I'm talking about perception here. There are women who are just as capable as being violent as men, but women as a group are not perceived as being nearly as violent as men.
> Since I am male, I was not threatened but amused
I think it shouldn't matter what his gender is. If a man got a creepy call from another man, then the danger would be just the same as if a woman got the creepy call from a man. I think the original poster was not taking into the account that a gay man could have stalked him, and that could have been dangerous, hence "I am a man therefor not worried" when really it would have been better to say "I was not worried when I got these calls from women."
Because women are weak and easily scared. They do not stand up for themselves. Look at the messages op received and how she did nothing but write about it and share her problem.
Why. Like several of you have discussed in the thread: I was a young male at the time, filled with testosterone, 6'5" in good shape and recently having my compulsory military service... it's difficult to intimidate me physically. As you said, this was phone calls, but the location was well known and at least the stalker was both aware and nearby so the possibility of real confrontation was possible. I did not think the stalker or anyone else would bring a gun or anything, she was not talking that way. I think the possibility of a physical confrontation generally is more intimidating to a woman due to physical differences such as size and muscle mass, yet I know of female soldiers who would not be scared for anyone. (Generalisations aren't wrong just because there are exceptions, one just have to understand the difference between the two.)
Considering the examples in the thread's article, I am appalled but not really surprised. I think the "beautiful" woman also serves as an example of a woman who would get many favours from her beauty. Both beautiful women and men gets benefits in work from their looks and the lewd comments could be the other side of the coin. (quick google result: https://businessinsider.com/studies-show-the-advantages-of-b...)
I appreciated the article writers diligent comparisons of faces and loved the use of the cat.
I don't know what's worse[0], the fact that Ms. Enthoven has to go through all this simply because she's a woman, or the fact that half the comments on this story are people trying to make excuses[1] for this type of behavior.
Wow!
[0] I do. Obviously what Ms. Enthoven has to go through is worse.
[1] People think it's a bot. People hate chat popups. The photo is fake. Your math is wrong! Etc...
I concur. I am finding the level of conformance rationalisation in here almost as shocking as the original blog post. My previous comment on this thread merely expressing my shock at the article and stating that we would not condone anything even mildly approaching it on our site got downvoted!
And here I was thinking that HN was one of the last bastions of internet civility and manners... SMH indeed...
It would be interesting to know to what extent she would have received the same messages if she had had the message (this matches the style of the message they used):
>Hey! Thanks for visiting Kapwing. I'm Julia [or Rachel], founder of Kapwing. If you run into any issues making your video, feel free to let me know, and I'll do my best to help!
By identifying herself as a founder this would separate the message from the chatbots who use female avatars, as mentioned in our comments here in this thread.
2.
I'd also be interested in an even less breezy version (to make it even less like a chatbot), such as:
>Hello and thank you for visiting Kapwing. I'm Julia [or Rachel], founder of Kapwing. If you run into any issues making your video, please do let me know and I'll investigate the issue.
I don't have a guess as to what the results would be: perhaps exactly the same regardless of style and introduction. But it would be interesting to know.
3.
For comparison it would also have also been interesting to use a male model who matches the same description ("I found a stock photo of a blonde woman who was attractive in an obvious way", so a stock photo of a male model who was attractive in an obvious way.)
For this one I do have a guess:
- I expect that in the article/study, 100% of the rude messages came from heterosexual males.
- But there are homosexual males so my guess is that an equally "obviously attractive" man would get 10% as many lewd messages, i.e. from homosexual males. (if use the old figure of "1 in 10" being gay.)
But as far as it goes the study was extremely interesting and worth reporting.
EDIT: I updated men to males above, actually especially since it's a meme site I bet most of the puerile messages were from teenagers - they show striking levels of immaturity.
Amazing. The author spends a lot of time to tell us a very convincing story how sexism affects people in our industry, and the Hacker News thread is full of people rationalizing it.
- it's only because people think you're a bot
- it's because of your target audience
- it's because chat widgets are annoying
- you don't really have enough data to make any conclusions
How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere?
"Rude people are sexist" or "Sexist people are rude" is about the only conclusion you can draw here (maybe not even that, correlation != causation etc etc)
It doesn't even come close to showing how "sexism is everywhere". For all we know the sample could be entirely edgy 12 year olds.
Tell me again how this self-admittedly "non-rigorous scientific study" proves "sexism is everywhere"?
It could easily be that more attractive profiles result in more interactions and receive the same proportion of sexist responses. Their data measures sexist messages not the proportion of sexist messages over all of their interactions.
A flood of stories on the internet doesn't necessarily prove much either. When there are billions of people on the internet, there could easily be a vocal minority that doesn't represent the majority.
The plural of anecdote is not data. We need real stats about this because individuals complaining vastly outweighs the silent remaining ones.
There are enough murders every day to cover the front page of hacker news with a story about each one. It doesn't mean murder is a rampant problem in our society.
> The plural of anecdote is not data. We need real stats about this
There are mountains of real stats. Have you tried to look? All you have to do is google "sexism statistics". The first hit for me has a link to a real study about online interactions: http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/
> There are enough murders every day to cover the front page of hacker news with a story about each one. It doesn't mean murder is a rampant problem in our society.
What a strange statement. Since there are enough murders every day to cover the front page of HN, doesn't that prove it's a problem? If sexism covered the front page of HN every day, would that mean it's less of a problem than it is now?
Murder is a rampant problem in our society. There are entire countries with less than one tenth the murder rate of the U.S. Are you suggesting that because the problem is everywhere, it's not a problem?
>At some point you can no longer say: "This is an isolated incident".
The problem with this is there's really no such thing as an "anti-sexism" story. No one posts news about how they worked at a company and everyone was just a normal person. That's not news, that's just life. It happens all the time, and in fact it's probably happening right now within a few hundred meters of almost everyone reading the post, yet it will never make the news. Moreover, the vast majority of news articles on this site are analyzable as containing an absence of sexism, but that's not an "anti-sexism" story either.
What I'm trying to get here is that the signal you are listening to is unidirectional. If you're incrementing a mental counter of "how many sexism-related articles have I seen" without any way of decrementing it then yeah, eventually you'll hit a number you dislike. That's not because there's any meaning behind your metric though, it's just because you've structured your metric in a way that means given infinite time, you'll hit /all/ the positive integers.
Anyway, that doesn't mean that sexism isn't a major problem. But it does mean that you, jakobegger, don't know if it's a major problem or not.
The daily newspaper has stories that are interesting because they aren't happening to nearly everyone. They give people a very skewed impression of how likely they are to happen to them.
The newspaper rarely bothers to write stories about things that are likely to happen to you, like dying from a hospital mistake, car crash or a drowning.
The risk of dying in a terrorist incident in the US is essentially zero, but you'd never know that from the flood of newspaper stories about it.
The flood of stories only tells me "We want the power these organizations wield" to have everyone walking on eggshells and start a rioting mob towards anyone not paying respect to the social priest caste.
Believing things based on quantity of internet articles on the topic is how fake news works.
If a proper study of incidents like this is done, with good stats relating to the totality of incidents in context - i.e that takes into account the full picture, we could then conclude something.
Even I, being not good at statistics, got your parent’s point. We do see patterns easily when there is/maybe none due to how our pattern-detection works. It is evolutionally false-positive, because it is easier to label and avoid than explain and manage (and take damage on mistake).
In this light, the “context of thousands of similar things” is one great generalizing bs.
Thousands of similar events, in a ratio with millions upon millions of respectful interactions. It really shouldn't be surprising when the proposed solution to the former is to endlessly harass those doing the latter and accuse them of sexism day in, day out using the largest megaphones our species has ever constructed that the latter get touchy. For which the secondary solution is then to berate them for getting touchy, which as anyone with a basic understanding of human nature could tell you, doesn't do much to endear your arguments to them. The perception that it is being done so that those doing the berating can feel good about how virtuous they are doesn't help either. It's the streetlight effect [1] in social problems; yell at the people whom it is safe and convenient to yell at, who are not (in general) the problem.
It does not help anybody to come on to a place like HN and broadcast how deplorable you think everybody else is. Even the possible benefits it could bring, like setting the tone for making it clear this isn't acceptable, is handily defeated by the amount of anger you create by accusing people willy-nilly of sexism (which, by the way, people are supposed to be angry about, remember; if sexism is one of the True Evils of the world you should not be surprised when people react to accusations of it) and the way it makes those who are behaving well start to wonder "Why, exactly, am I bothering reigning in these impulses if I'm going to be bathed in accusations of sexism anyhow?"
Whatever the solution is, it isn't going to be found in abusing broadcast media like internet discussions.
> harass those doing the latter and accuse them of sexism day in, day out
I’m a man. I feel neither harassed nor accused by this post simply because I don’t harass woman. If you feel accused though, maybe it’s worth taking a closer look at yourself and ask why.
There are plenty of people who are saying implicitly and even a few saying explicitly that it is all men. There are plenty of people who would turn your exact same rhetoric back on you and say that if you think you aren't part of the problem, you just need to look harder, because it is all men, especially the ones who think they have a clean conscience.
So in addition to proving my point about how berating the people who aren't part of the problem is very common by providing an example before the ink was hardly dry on my post, you've set yourself up for attack in the world of today. You need to be more careful.
(Edit: I suspect I'm being downvoted because some people may have a hard time understanding I'm not just being rhetorical about people saying it's all men, and that it's especially men who think they're innocent. To them, I would commend spending 15-30 minutes browsing through the various results at https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=all%20men%20are%... . Not just a scan through the results to confirm your prejudices, but to actually look at the conversations happening, which is why I specified 15-30 minutes and not just "a glance". And while I'd observe it may not be "the new york times" for all those results, it's not just "Joe Bob's Blog & Grill" or Tumblr for those results either. I'm also not saying that every last result will say that, but the existence of results refuting the argument also point to the fact that it is being deployed.)
> There are plenty of people who are saying implicitly
I understand you think they are saying all men, but unless you can read minds over the Internet, that’s just your opinion.
But more than that, saying “men are sexist” does NOT imply “all men”. It means “a large-enough-to-be-generalized number of men are exist”.
If you think it means literally all men (and hence feel attacked by it), in my opinion, on some level, you are sexist and are just trying to avoid discomfort/guilt by spouting #NotAllMen.
I don't think this is how people usually communicate. Referring to a group without a qualifier refers to the majority, or all. Consider the following sentence:
"Women can't code"
Not only is it true for a substantial portion, it's true for the majority of women (and men, for that matter). But would you criticize those who object to the statement?
This "NOT" seems to be overcapitalized, since it is usually "" in a regular context, as other commenter already noted. It is not a private opinion, it is how language rules define it. From complete redefinition of terms on the fly and going to you-are mind reading in just two sentences, it seems very probable that your argument is either purely emotional or projective or lacks enough logic. When using mirrored version of "girls suck at math", don't expect a different reaction from those who may be actually good at it.
Even if someone temporarily accepts this "large-enough-to-be-generalized" definition, it may have a hard time to retain "large" part, because a number on topic is not more than 156/55000, assuming that 156 is a unique set.
That is about as fair an argument as that gag where someone shouts "Hey asshole" loudly in your direction, and makes fun of everyone that turns around, implying that the people that react are assholes.
> Thousands of similar events, in a ratio with millions upon millions of respectful interactions.
No, the number of harassing interactions is in the millions, and the people who acknowledge it's a problem are the majority of people. You are in the minority by denying that this is a real problem.
> It really shouldn't be surprising when the proposed solution to the former is to endlessly harass those doing the latter and accuse them of sexism day in, day out
Did you seriously just claim you're being harassed by this article??
If an article about Julia's experience and not about you or directed to you is harassing you just by existing, how exactly do you think Julia feels about the people calling her names and demanding sex? Do you have any sympathy for what she or other women are going through online?
If reading the topic of sexism bothers you, what about helping to eliminate sexism and harassment? Maybe if we get rid of the sexism, the articles will go away?
> Whatever the solution is, it isn't going to be found in an abusing broadcast media like the internet discussions.
I don't understand this sentence. Where is the solution, and why don't broadcast media help? Public awareness on many topics is going up, due to the internet and broadcast media, for example, public awareness of science. Most people consider this trend a good thing.
Were you forced to read the article? I don't understand the suggestions that the internet & broadcast media are abusing you somehow. Maybe take a break and go outside?
Here are some more stats about the state of sexism in the U.S. and abroad, to help you understand how women, not you, are the victims of this problem.
"No, the number of harassing interactions is in the millions,"
Please consider more deeply the meaning of the word "ratio". You have no idea what the actual number of either harassing interactions is, nor non-harassing interactions, as it isn't even possible to formulate a definition of "an interaction". But there is no scenario in which these interactions are not a vanishing, vanishing minority of interactions. It literally could not be any other way, because if it was, say, the majority of male/female interactions, that would mean literally more than half the time a man passes a woman in the street, the man harasses the woman. Absurd.
"Did you seriously just claim you're being harassed by this article??"
No, I'm claiming that what you are doing, as are many other people, are harassing people, who are on average the wrong people. And then being very, very surprised when they don't take it very well. Well, yeah. You attacked, so what do you expect? Do you seriously think you helped anyone, even if we assumed for the sake of argument you read my post correctly, which you didn't? No, you didn't help anything. You just made it worse.
"I don't understand this sentence."
Well, try reading my post again with these corrections in mind. You may not agree with what I said, but it may help you understand it. Especially if, again, you consider that I consider your post a prime example of what I am talking about.
You keep making this about yourself. Why do you think this relatively civil discussion is hurting you more than Julia was hurt by the disgusting comments people made directly to her?
> Please consider more deeply the meaning of the word "ratio". You have no idea what the actual number of either harassing interactions is, nor non-harassing interactions, as it isn't even possible to formulate a definition of "an interaction".
Yes, I do. I gave you a link to some actual data. You pulled your "ratio" out of your butt. Please investigate the data, or provide your own source, before you claim the ratio is so small it doesn't exist.
"Roughly four-in-ten Americans have personally experienced online harassment."
"women are about twice as likely as men to say they have been targeted as a result of their gender (11% vs. 5%)"
> But there is no scenario in which these interactions are not a vanishing, vanishing minority of interactions.
That statement is flat out wrong, but feel free to prove it.
> No, I'm claiming that what you are doing... You just made it worse.
I harassed you before I commented? I made what worse, exactly? What is the problem you're talking about, and why is it worse than what Julia experienced?
> I consider your post a prime example of what I am talking about.
Please, instead of being hyperbolic and emotional, explain clearly how I or anyone is attacking or harassing you. I am arguing with you, yes, as you are arguing with me. You're acting like you didn't choose to participate here, like something unfair is happening to you. You're acting like your choice to consume media is hurting you, you're acting like your feelings reading about someone else's problems are worse than their feelings about their own problems.
"Rude people are sexist" still means we have a 'systemic' problem of sexism.
In fact, one might argue that rude people being sexist are worse than polite people being sexist. Because the rude people are more disruptive over all.
The statement 'sexism is everywhere' does not mean 'almost all people are sexist'. Instead, it means 'almost all women suffer from sexist attitudes in most areas of their lives.
If 10% of people are sexist, that is easily enough for all women to notice it.
I'd guess the real threshold is more like 3% of people being sexist.
No. The brake line on your car is a very small part of it. If it is cut, the problem is anything but small. That a small percentage of men can have a disproportionately large effect in no way implies that the problem is small.
I think the term "sexist" is being used very lightly here. Sexism implies some sort of discrimination based on sex. Same goes for "sexual harassment"; harassment implies some degree of persistence, not just a single action. I think "indecent" behaviour is the most fitting word for this kind of problem.
You're exactly right. This is a minority of men. Which is why, as a woman, I think we need to examine why this minority has such deep seated issues with women. It's not men in general, it's the fringes of society, and the fringes are very telling of the society as a whole. they represent all our fears and mistakes, because these fears and mistakes become all that they can perceive.
Ok, but do you think those 12 year olds are going to all grow up to be well behaving adults? Or maybe the problems with this kind of sexism are starting very young. If you are right then the solutions still need to be addressed, but we need to start earlier.
> No, society tolerating those vocal trolls does mean that society is sexist.
Actually that just means society tolerates trolls. You're showing your bias by jumping to the conclusion that everything is sexism or that somehow antisocial and immature people only target women.
Furthermore, western society actually holds in high regard concepts such as frer speech, which covers idiots being able to say idiotic things.
Do you remember how sexist were the 70's and the 80's? People who were 12 back then turned out just fine, considering that we're even discussing this, didn't they?
I was 12 in the 70s, and don't remember any boys talking to girls like this. If they did, they'd probably get a slap in the face, if not by the girl then by the teacher if overheard.
One big difference is that there was no access to the sort of degrading pornography that is just freely available today. A 12 year old boy in the 70s might be able to get his hands on a Playboy or maybe even a Hustler but it took some real effort and those magazines were tame compared to the porn today.
Sure, but there were sexist ads everywhere including the TV; every pub, car repair shop etc. had at least one erotic calendar hanging in the public and so on. There's way more, please don't try to say that there is more sexism today than there was in the 70's.
What makes you think they turned out fine? Considering all the high-profile sexual harassment issues over the past few weeks, I get the feeling that many of them did not "grow out of it".
That's a very, very small portion of the population. It's also the part of population known for its crazy parties, abundance of money, drugs and alcohol.
I was thinking just that. Target audience of 12yo boys, who are "parked" by their parents with a tablet, with no control, no supervision, that are left to 'self-educate' in the wild-wild-west of the interwebs, and their responses are quotes and memes, will definitely do that.
On the other hand, a 35yo educated person, that just wants to make something silly for ther corporate 'yammer', will definitely NOT insult or waste time in any other manner.
Kids will be kids.
Uneducated kids will be uneducated kids.
And we should all be patient, as.. ahem.. we were kids one time :)
I am going to speculate that it is incredibly unlikely that those 12 year old are going to grow up to be well behaved adults. I'm also going to speculate that the vast majority of those twelve year olds do not telegraph their wickedness to anyone in their life or their social circles - parents, teachers, relatives, etc because for last several decades US adult population has been playing ostrich pretending that the disgusting behavior of junior is only a problem for the juniors of those unwashed masses from the redneck South and cannot possibly ever come from the home of the NPR listening, PBS supporting, women's march going family.
While I think the other commenter on this post stated their point unhelpfully rudely, I agree that I think you're writing the child off too quickly. I'd imagine that giving up on a kid at this stage would only make it less likely that they realize how terrible they are being.
Even if adults don't know that a kid is being shitty, they can still lead by example towards a happier outcome
If these are really just edgy 12 year olds, then I don't even see the problem in their behaviour itself as much as the fact that it's not possible to identify them as just edgy kids. It's probably not that they need to find out what they are doing is wrong, they probably even know that already, but that they find out that it doesn't make them cool or special or in any way better, which is what they most likely believe when they do stuff like that.
A woman (or man, for that matter) who really gets distressed by being insulted by a 12 year old kid certainly shouldn't be the norm, and I don't believe they are. If every one of those chat messages had a button to "forward this to their parent", they would look completely harmless, but with the anonymity the internet provides, they are just chat messages from what could very well be a 30 year old man, making the dumb prank of an even dumber kid seem like way more than it is.
What I think would be interesting is some sort of age statistic, because I expect at least two thirds if not more of these messages to be from people under 15.
And since somebody will undoubtedly interpret this message like that, no, I am not saying all online harassment can be dismissed, only the large majority of it.
The conclusion we can draw is pretty much what the author says: it's better to present yourself as an anonymous avatar than a real person.
Despite what marketing people tell you about "creating a connection" or "showing that your company is made of real people", often a bit of distance and professionalism is best for your relationship with customers.
It's not just black and white. You will get less rude messages, but you will also get less normal messages. It means you will have smaller conversion ratio and earn less money.
So to answer your question, I would not want to avoid sexist message if it means less money for my business. It's extremely simple to ignore bad people on the Internet. It's hard to earn money.
Of course, there have been studies, including one that found feminine names in chats got 25 times more malicious messages (http://www.ece.umd.edu/News/news_story.php?id=1788), which would seem to support this woman's experience too ... but, surely, we can find some way to dismiss that, too, right?
The important part is that, every time a submission like this comes along, we rush to the comments section to try to shout it down.
There are surely some medium.com posts about experiences that other developers have had that we could upvote instead. Preferably, ones from developers who don't happen to be too feminine.
>I am so glad someone on HN is here to enforce rigorous standards when it comes to this topic, in particular.
I am so glad someone on HN is here to tell us exactly why we aren't allowed to have a rigorous discussion when it comes to this topic, in particular.
It is interesting how you immediately reframe women getting harassed as misogyny. Nevermind women likely get more attention online as well.
Let's have a look at the study [0] you mention. Which measures private messages received from an IRC channel by a bot. Do you honestly not think a female username will receive more attention given the typical gender composition of an online IRC channel? (Who still uses IRC apart from unwashed CS nerds?) 25 times messages likely means there were 25 times more males than females in that particular room.
This point is, without properly establishing a base rate of attention VS harassment, all you can do appeal to emotion. Yes women are being harassed in tech, are they being harassed in at a higher rate than other industries? Is it a specifically a tech problem? Is your solution to the problem to accuse men in the tech industry as misogynists/sexists further alienate both sides from each other when you don't even have proper evidence?
You have some very good points, but your tone comes across as emotional and aggressive enough to inadvertently turn off some of your intended audience. So, in your case a little ‘appeal to emotion’ may help. Maybe you guys can meet in the middle.
The same could be said about the post they replied to though, somebody made a valid point and is met with a sarcastic reply that implicitly equates criticism of a study with trying to invalidate the entire problem the study tries to underline. Let's be honest, be it here on HN, on reddit, or on twitter, this isn't a topic that you can have a conversation about without people on either side getting emotional and somewhat aggressive.
> 25 times messages likely means there were 25 times more males than females in that particular room.
It's somewhat disingenuous to say "messages" when the study is specifically counting only "malicious messages" (and makes no mention of how many non-malicious messages were received.)
No, the point is that you can't assume "unwashed CS nerds" are troglodytes towards women while simultaneously trying to say tech doesn't have a problem with women.
Your final paragraph is particularly telling. Re-read it and think about the equivalences you're trying to draw.
Edit:
>The point is that the distribution of genders are likely overwhelmingly male.
Do you just intentionally ignore the fact that without there being a differential rate of harassment between people on the basis of sex that this doesn't matter in the slightest? Your argument assumes the point you're trying to argue against.
No one said unwashed CS nerds treat women any differently to other men. The point is that the distribution of genders is likely overwhelmingly male. Thus even if a small percentage of that male population exhibit sexist behaviour, the tiny proportation of females would get most of the abuse, and more abuse than the average male.
Work on your reading comprehension before spitting out snark.
The only thing I disagree with is the assertion that women in tech (STEM?) have somehow different/worse experience than women in general. Or at least I can not imagine why that would be the case - are educated and intelligent men more sexist than the average Joe? I think the main difference is that in tech we are much more open to acknowledge the problem and discuss it.
Its not so much that men in tech are worse than men in other industries, but women are far more outnumbered in tech.
If you assume a constant rate of harassment (say 5% of men harass women per year) then a woman who works alongside 20 men and 5 women (a common ratio in tech) will get harassed more than a woman who works with 12 women and 13 men (a more typical non tech ratio).
And in truth I wouldn’t be surprised if as women get more outnumbered the frequency of harassment tends to go up.
> The only thing I disagree with is the assertion that women in tech (STEM?) have somehow different/worse experience than women in general.
I'm not sure that's a statement I'd make. I don't think I know enough to say that.
It's tempting to let myself get nerd-sniped into a longer, less productive discussion comparing different fields and pontificating on different possible causes, but then I'd be making the same mistake as so many other people here.
What we really need in these conversations is fewer people like James DaMore writing dissertations on the subject and more people saying, "hey guys, stop being dumb ass holes."
This is a problem that is better resolved by calling out socially repugnant behavior rather than dissecting it.
The OP is suggesting an important question though: what if the vast majority of this ubiquitous harassment comes from a tiny minority of men whom few others here are even aware of?
Are you male though? These men are everywhere for women. It is a minority of men, definitely, but that minority directs the whole of their psychological issues to women. They won't do this to you, they will rarely do this around you, and if they are around others they do it in a way that's hidden from your eyes. And the thing is, these guys are everywhere on the Internet as well. I think they spawn from 4chan or something. It starts young and the issues just keep building. They are anonymous, consequence-free interactions with women that let them vent their own issues with women. And then they go to echo-chamber forums like 4chan to validate their distorted reality. They won't interact with you because they don't have an issue with you, unless you also advocate for women and make your views public, in which case they will attempt to poke holes in your masculinity.
The conclusion you can draw here is that being female will makes you the target of abuse that you wouldn't receive as another gender (or species in the case of this article). Other people have provided data that supports the case that this is a widespread problem that faces female tech-people (and even that is a subset of a larger problem).
To take it to extremes, that abuse could entirely be the fault of one single person who frequents every forum on the internet (you suggested it was "just 12 year old boys"). That the cause of the problem is only a small subset of men in no way affects the fact that there is a problem that makes being a female tech-person a less pleasant experience than being a male tech person.
I'm not sure that accounts on sexual harassment alone can be used to argue that being a female tech-person is a less pleasant experience than being a male tech-person. Women do experience more sexual harassment in tech industry than men but they do not experience more harassment or workplace bullying overall. The harassment that is not of sexual nature is not necessarily less upsetting than sexual harassment. In fact the opposite might be the case:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bullies-work/workplace-bu...
I'm not sure you can conclude from accounts on sexual harassment alone that being a female tech-person is a less pleasant experience than being a male tech-person. Women do experience more sexual harassment in tech industry than men but they do not experience more harassment or workplace bullying overall. The harassment that is not of sexual nature is not necessarily less upsetting than sexual harassment. In fact the opposite might be the case: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bullies-work/workplace-bu...
> Tell me again how this self-admittedly "non-rigorous scientific study" proves "sexism is everywhere"?
By itself, this article doesn't prove that, it's only one more data point in the vast unending ocean of data points that prove it.
> It could easily by that more attractive profiles results in more interactions and receive the same proportion of sexist responses.
You're imagining something fairly contrary to what the article said, and to what many other examples and studies have shown. The primary factor is the gender of the recipient, and while the article is not rigorous, it demonstrated a greater percentage of sexist comments for the more attractive female photo, and demonstrated a near zero percentage for the male photo.
> For all we know the sample could be entirely edgy 12 year olds.
That, um, doesn't count as sexism? If it's all 12 year olds, we still have a problem. Maybe a worse problem.
Out of curiosity, you seem to be arguing that sexism online might not exist, yet it's a huge problem, easily demonstrable and widely known. What's preventing you from acknowledging the issue?
> It could easily be that more attractive profiles result in more interactions and receive the same proportion of sexist responses.
The male co-founder is an attractive man. He did not receive nearly the same amount of sexual harassment. It's reasonable to suspect that the reason is gender. Your objection is true, it could be that way. But given all of the priors we has in this area, it's quite reasonable to lean towards a gender-bias in receiving sexual harassment.
> For all we know the sample could be entirely edgy 12 year olds.
If 12-year-olds are being sexist to be edgy, that's a problem in itself. Also, if it was people deliberately trying to be edgy, I'd expect way generic, or possibly racist, to be directed at Eric Lu, which does not seem to be the case.
Most people don't witness these kinds of things off the internet, or run with groups who never do this outside of one-to-ones with mostly disconnected people.
I don't dispute her results at all, but I can basically guarantee you that I haven't been around where a woman has said "hi" to someone and they're all "Yea, eff your mom". Only confounding factor I think comes in to play is the assumption that it's a bot, so you can say taboo/antisocial things without repute.
> I haven't been around where a woman has said "hi" to someone and they're all "Yea, eff your mom"
Lucky you, I recently saw this 'interaction' between a guy and a girl on the street:
Guy: Hey cutie!
Guy: Hey sexy!
Guy: Hey girl, come over!
Guy: Hey bitch, come over here.
Guy: Go away you ugly bitch!
The girl just kept walking and the guy turned to more profanities. This wasn't in some shitty part of town, it was at the main station of one of the nicest cities in the Netherlands. It's not just the internet where stuff like this happens.
I’ve heard that before. Guys will get aggressive if a woman ignores them. I don’t get it and it’s sketchy as hell. It shows how superficial so many guys can be - they want to sound sweet until it’s clear they’re not getting anything, and then they become aggressive. It’s always about their satisfaction - they reveal that they were not being nice in order for the woman to feel better, or they wouldn’t have turned aggressive.
Obviously it should be clear that I’m not talking about all men, but I have seen this behavior on occasion before and it’s super unnerving.
Actually anger is a normal reaction to frustration, not to mention to the rude rejection. It shows how the society is broken. Wolves prey on the streets for trusting victims. They won't listen to polite no. People learn to just walk away quietly without saying anything polite. Wolves don't mind it, but ordinary people find such silent treatment infuriating. They respond with more rudeness back.
Ignoring someone in the street is not a rude rejection.
Also I'd expect ordinary people to handle a rejection like that without any problems. (I'm born in Europe and spent most of my time in Europe but would expect this to be the same in North America based on the few times I've worked there.)
Are you serious? There is nothing rude about it, she didn’t owe that random stranger anything and it was incredibly rude of him to make unwanted and unsolicited advancements. Yelling “cutie” and “sexy” at a stranger is incredibly rude.
It's very different. The guy on the street actually wanted the girl. These people on the internet don't want anyone. They just want a victim for abuse. The annoying chatbox just gives them an excuse to vent off.
Words can affect people. People can and do take that "dumb shit" personally. The age-old adage "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never break me." is nowhere near true.
Sure, people think it’s a bot. But what is happening in their brain that makes them so much more likely to be nasty when the chat program looks like a woman? If it’s just because they think it’s a bot, why does gender appear to be so significant?
"Sexism is actually everywhere" is an extremely strong statement. Such a strong statement requires an extraordinary amount of work (going far beyond mere observations) to be proven.
I personally would be very interested to know why "Julia" is being insulted much more than "Eric", but saying "this is because of sexism" is no better than saying that "the sun is bright because it shines".
>”Julia" being insulted more than "Eric" is sexism.
This argument could stand if we knew the exact sexual preferences of site users. If tested auditory was e.g. 100% to-male-attracted, what is your guess about “Eric” getting harassed or attacked vs “Julia”?
> "Julia" isn't being insulted more than "Eric" because of sexism. "Julia" being insulted more than "Eric" is sexism.
How do you jump to that conclusion? For instance, where did you isolated other factors, such as personality or communication style or clients who engaged them? What was the result of placing a man using a female avatar or a woman using a man avatar? Do rude comments directed at woman count as sexism as well?
Most things in life cannot be terated like a scientific experiment. It would be interesting to conduct high quality research to find out if my company is sexist, but there is no time, money or desire to do that. So we have to rely on less formal information.
Also the whole "strong statement requires an extraordinary amount of work" thing is entirely dependant on your outlook. I could just as easily say the opposite statement (that sexisim is minimal) and suggest that it requires extraordinary evidence to prove that. The degree to which you think something is extraordinary depends on your outlook and experience, it is rarely objective.
Both statements - "sexism does not exist" and "sexism is everywhere" are equally extreme.
By saying the former you deny the obvious.
By saying the latter you effectively claim that every single person is sexist, which is a bit unfair.
Except that the extremeness of the statement is subjectively based on your own outlook. And there is an implicit value judgement in making that decision about what you consider "extreme". Arguably all people are sexist, but not in a particularly problamatic or socially unacceptable way. It is human nature to notice gender after all. And applying such logical rules to something so nuanced and subjective is flawed, and will unavoidably lead to an argument over semantics.
> I could just as easily say the opposite statement (that sexisim is minimal) and suggest that it requires extraordinary evidence to prove that
You could, and it does. But it's it matter of opinion/semantics that this is "the opposite statement".
In context, a specific claim is a specific claim, whichever way it goes. The "opposite" in another sense, is to make no claim, and therefor stick to the default position of allowing for either possibility without knowing which (agnostic position?). There is absolutely nothing wrong with that position, and it requires no additional information, as opposed to "less formal information".
Now, if you claim we need to adopt a specific position, and do so with little information, i.e. without the time/money to do so then you'd have to justify that - i.e why isn't it strongly desired, yet still apparently important, to hold a position on the topic?
I think it is mindnumbing that your (very reasonable) questioning of the validity of such a strong and all-encompassing statement is being dismissed, downvoted.
To some extent, I would take it with a grain of salt. Anonymous internet accounts can be fabricated and controlled by groups or individuals. This is also something that should be taught, actively.
Do not let apparent social pressure have you concede rationality, truth.
Sexism might be everywhere (going both ways), but this particular case likely isn't sexism. Even if it is, it's not clear whether this is sexism against women or against men (programmers in particular) assumed to be hiding behind pretty woman's photo.
Female photos, especially the second model photo, look incredibly fake. I guess people use that unwanted box to vent to frustations with what seems to be a bot?
The perception that female photos look fake is still sexism. It suggests people believe it less likely that a woman would be on the other end of the conversation. And you suggesting that perception as an explanation without challenging it kind of demonstrates how this is a pervasive problem.
Now I agree that the model photo looks a little more artificial for reasons beyond gender, and they should probably have compared with a male model photo as well. Though personally I suspect people would still think it more likely that an attractive man was a real person than an attractive woman.
So the gendered assumption is the result of a gendered marketing practice which is based on gender differentiated responses to images (which are proven by stats)? But there's no sexism involved here?
Okay, I'm being glib, but this idea that thinking of a plausible causation with no further critical analysis means it's "not sexism" is kind of exasperating.
That's literal sexism then... As in it's literally made to trigger sexual areas of your brain to get your attention.
If you wan't to insist that it's wrong to be biologically wired like that, Go on. But... idk.
I'm not sure why it matters if they're "a sexist".
Whether they make a decision based on internal biases caused by societal norms, or make a decision by measuring those societal norms directly and responding to them, the decision is still an expression of societal sexism.
They specifically didn't mention the level of "normal" responses:
>Other than the creeps, trolls, and bullies, I didn’t notice a shift in the types of questions people were asking - users with problems on Kapwing still asked Rachel for help. But we didn’t analyze the volume of messages, so I can’t say if Rachel got more or fewer messages overall.
I agree with your conclusion (that this is sexist), but not for the reasons you state. Correlation and causation, and all that.
If crappy programmers make crappy chatbots, and they all have female pictures, then people's disdain would not be caused by a sexist reasoning, but by the widespread practice of using female pictures in crappy chatbots.
I have no idea how would one go about testing this theory, specially when I believe your conclusion to be correct to begin with. But I can see why other commenters would disagree.
Since we know nothing about these strangers, it may be anything from mostly rude boys who like girls (so they target “her”) ... to actually average rude people of all sorts who only attack women. If latter proportion is true, then women get their “cut” asymmetrically.
But people tend to rationalize selectively, and only when it benefits their worldview. The parent comment made that clear, but you sidestepped that point. I don't think the downvotes are necessarily virtue signaling.
I was temped to downvote you, though. I live with a woman, and know many more, and I've been party to the sexism and harassment they deal with on a day to day basis. I've been party to people not believing what they say because of what's between their legs (eg "...take it for pure truth because a woman said it?"). I've been party to my wife being groped on a crowd, and seeing young teenage girls being catcalled by grown men. I've had female friends who have been raped. At this point, the evidence is more than anecdotal to me.
I find myself wondering, when I read comments like yours, if the people who make them have absolutely no connection with any women at all.
I'm strongly convinced that the 'average HN reader' is well aware of this (sexism) problem.
I don't rationalizing it, but I believe, the points you mention are important. And in addition, yes there are idiots on the internet. And not all problems have a easy wrong solution...
The blog post is (for me) shallow and the 'tests' would need to be expanded to be really interesting: what happens if you put on pictures from women from different cultures, ditto men from different cultures? Where are these insulting comments coming from? Does it also happen if you use 'less-into-your-face chat widgets'? etc...
Thanks for the tip about the cup in meetings. Often these implicit rules are not obvious, so making them explicit is very helpful to work around and maybe even fix them.
Humans are guided by stereotypes and superstition and not scepticism and scientific reason. And if there is an individual that is sceptical and demands scientific reason, they are punished socially for it. This makes homo sapiens look a bit bad in my eyes.
Good scientific analysis does require a level of domain knowledge though. Otherwise you will be susceptible to those exact issues of sterotyping and superstition. Especially when we are talking about issues that are so complex and have such a long legacy.
You also have to sip it slower than you normally would with a coke, taking small sips and exhaling slowly after each sip. But I'm sure you already know that.
I've been both sexually harassed at work and groped by strangers when out on the town (by a woman) - but yeah, I agree with your larger point. I think it's certainly more prevalent the other way around.
I got groped by some passing female tailgaters when I was just walking down the street minding my own business listening to a podcast. It was very startling.
> But ask an attractive male bartender or waiter. We shouldn't hand wave those abuses away either.
Was a male bartender for nearly two years. I agree it happens from time to time that customers try to score with you, but it's really incredibly rare compared to the stuff my female colleagues had to endure (maybe twice over my career vs daily).
You say the last sentence like the concept of masculinity varies greatly among different societies. Are there any societies in the world where men aren't more assertive, aggressive, and power-seeking? I kind of thought they were fundamental psychological differences between men and women overall[1].
> It’s okay to treat women as a piece of meat in porn, but suddenly it’s a big deal if people are making sexual comments?
No more or less than it's ok to treat people as units of work in corporations. I rarely see sex-tech on HN anyway, plus not every feminist has a problem with porn.
> The author spends a lot of time to tell us a very convincing story how sexism affects people in our industry, and the Hacker News thread is full of people rationalizing it.
I wonder what you expected. Actually, for most of us its not shocking, as that is exactly the internet we know for some time now. Have you ever been around when some 15ish boys are in a small group? They keep saying such crap the whole day. Some of us eventually grow up some day, but some seem to be stuck in their puberty forever.
I don't like it either, but I haven't found a cure for that disease yet. I mean in some online gaming communities its daily business and when you hear those guys grunting into their microphone you are very happy to have mute buttons and kick/ban vote systems (telling them to stop doesn't seem to have a positive effect on the situation).
The difference here seems to be that, you don't have to play online games, but when you work in our industry you have to cope with such crap.
Btw. whats wrong about 'rationalizing' things? I mean your list just shows quotes of people missing the point.
I’m not sure if the problem is that the average HN reader doesn’t believe that sexism is everywhere or if the problem is that the average HN reader doesn’t believe that sexism as it exists today is a large, interesting problem that needs to be solved.
I would love to see this experiment done as a function of time of day in the user’s IP location. There have already been studies showing higher rates of abusive behavior towards women from low-status males[1] and if internet activity follows general population entertainment consumption trends from television we can infer that there is a higher likelihood of someone being low-status active on the internet during daytime working hours.
You can believe sexual harassment is everywhere and also believe chat widgets are annoying. Sadly, women getting harassed on the internet by anonymous strangers, while unfortunate, is not a novel revelation. Anyone who says it isn’t common has their head in the sand. You can’t help people like that.
A single punch is battery. A single genital grab is sexual assault. A single demand for quid pro quo sexual favors in exchange for professional rewards is sexual harassment. A single message asserting that an individual is not right for their job because of their gender creates a hostile work environment, and that's also sexual harassment.
Just because there can be cases where a single message does not constitute sexual harassment doesn't mean that a single message can never amount to sexual harassment.
A single event can be illegal, immoral, wrong, or any one of a bunch of other words, and a single event is never harassment because harassment requires multiple events.
A single demand for quid pro quo sexual favors in exchange for professional rewards is a sexual offence, a bad one, and alone it is not harassment. IANAL, though the dictionary definition sticks with me, especially the key words: "multiple", "unwanted", and "intentional".
That's why "harassment" as a word exists, it is to indicate that multiple unwanted events have happened intentionally.
Maybe the legal definition of "harassment" differs from the dictionary definition. If so, a new word for single event harassment needs to be chosen.
> A single demand for quid pro quo sexual favors in exchange for professional rewards is a sexual offence, a bad one, and alone it is not harassment.
That's simply wrong -- a single egregious instance can certainly constitute harassment, both in terms of common sense and in terms of legal consequences. What matters is severity -- and though repeating the behavior makes it more likely to be judged as severe, one bad incident can easily exceed the threshold. A quid-pro-quo proposal of sex-for-promotion is a perfect example.
> Aggressive pressure or intimidation. ‘they face daily harassment and assault on the streets’
English doesn't have a definitive dictionary, anyway -- usage determines meaning. It has been the case for decades that a single quid pro quo proposal could be ruled as "harassment" in court. (As it should be!) Is it any wonder that colloquial understanding would reflect legal reality?
If you're talking about the legal definition, that depends largely on your jurisdiction (there are many where a single instance does constitute harassment; perhaps most states in the US require a "culture"). Unfortunately again, common language and legal language overlap but with slightly different meanings.
However, in every case where multiple messages were sent, that's clearly harassment in many jurisdictions. Additionally, the sum of actions by multiple people constitutes harassment. Also many jurisdictions will consider it harassment if there is a single, severe incident. However, many of these laws only apply when a co-worker is the harasser.
In summation: your statement is not necessarily correct.
Somewhat depends on your point of view. A single message sent may not be intended as harassment, but receiving a single message from multiple people can certainly feel like harassment. An individual act might not be harassment, but it can definitely contribute to it.
I'm in the fashion industry. After 10 years and dealing with tens of thousands of people, this type of anonymous behavior doesn't happen. I'm looking at todays emails in the middle of fashion month, and 95% of the names are female. It would be a good way to lose any kind of status you have in the industry if you acted this way.
This is specifically a male-driven tech industry problem, and more specifically, an edge-lord meme-maker audience problem.
Don't be the self-absorbed douche that thinks everyone shares your same problems. That's only an excuse to pass the buck to someone else by blaming society in general instead of your specific group. Own up to it. Other industries have solved this problem by incorporating more women into.
Also, HN story about general experience that isn’t about sexism: “Oh, that’s interesting, I wonder if that’s because of X or Y?”, “gee that most have been awful”, “hey that makes me re-examine a way I behaved once”, “I’ve seen similar behaviour here at Q and Z”
When about sexism: “unless this is a triple-blind study that has been repeated across every continent, let’s not jump to the conclusion that there is a lot of online sexism”.
We should all up our game here. It’s depressing how oblivious a lot of the posts are on these comments.
Clearly, the female avatars received the worst abuse. And the effect was so strong, so immediate, and based on a solid hypothesis. Something has gone very badly wrong with the internet and we should be working out what we can do about it, rather than sticking our fingers in our ears saying “boys will be boys” or “this isn’t scientific!”. Are we all too defensive to admit there is a problem?
> Something has gone very badly wrong with the internet and we should be working out what we can do about it, rather than sticking our fingers in our ears saying “boys will be boys” or “this isn’t scientific!”.
I think the internet has just served to exposed something heinous that has been in our society for eternity. Plenty of men have held these attitudes from time immortal, it's just that the internet gives them an easier means to express those attitudes without consequence.
I don't think people are doing that so much as there's just not much to discuss there - sure, you can yell at people to parent better til the cows come home or talk about how our society is somehow collapsing because of this but no one will care. There's no proven fix, so not much to say on the matter.
Instead, people here are looking for realistic fixes - like making the chat box not automatically open so only those who need support will go out of their way to get it. I think the author would have been much less likely to receive abuse if people were actually there to ask her questions about her service than because they had just searched for a way to to generate a shitty meme. I could be wrong about that, but it'd be an interesting thing to do an A/B test with I think.
Perhaps it makes more sense to put it into security terms - In the same way that it doesn't make sense to don't go around talking about how we could live in a dream world where bots don't scan the internet for weak SSH credentials all day, it doesn't make sense for us to go around talking about a dream world where sexism simply doesn't exist. The author found a good compromise to defend herself against that threat - many people on HN are just suggesting other possible defenses.
On a positive note: Harvey Wienstein issue broke in September and October and there has been a lot of WM-behaving-badly who have lost their jobs as a result.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
The average HN reader is a huge beneficiary of sexism. Most people do not have the mental fortitude to accept that a decent chunk of their good fortune is due to something like this.
> How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere?
Many comments in this thread are lamenting these dismissals, which happen to be languishing at the bottom while this comment as well as the original article are massively upvoted. If I were to draw a conclusion about how the community generally feels about this issue, it would be opposite to yours.
I generally agree with your appraisal here, but it is worth it to note that although those sorts of comments are usually pushed to the bottom of the discussion, they are almost always there on every thread where these sorts of issues are raised. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that a significant portion of the tech worlds holds those sorts of beliefs; there are probably even more people who would post things like that, but don't because they know they'll just get downvoted.
Sure: the community is divided, as is society in general. That's the accurate way to frame this. What's not so accurate are grand claims about HN being massively one way or the other, which people make all the time as a rhetorical device.
Exactly. These "kids" don't randomly harass anyone; they harass very specifically women, and the more attractive the woman is, the more harassment. This is sickening. I can't help but think that as the symptom of a profoundly heinous society towards women. And frankly, I find the sort of lame excuses in this thread quite hard to swallow.
First things first: we do need some solution to the problem that she faced, and it is a real problem, that relates to gender. That said.
> How much will it take to convince the average HN reader
that sexism actually is everywhere?
In a sense, it obviously is. But I want to reflect a bit on what that might entail.
You will note (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16390786) that the amount of sexist threads was 14 per week, which, in the period of 3 months with 2100 messages, gives about 1% of messages.
So, even though this sexism is a societal problem (in the sense that it exists in our society and is hard to extricate from comunities) it is not clear that sexism (or at least the sexism displayed in the article) is a problem with a social solution: teaching children (or people in general, as it may be) that this is not OK probably would not reduce the problem much further.
I predict, therefore, that no amount of society-wide measures against sexism can reduce this (very marginal!) behaviour (if the chat itself remains consequence-free for the users). That is: that fighting sexism is not gonna help this at all, and we'd need other, technical and local-to-the-website solutions.
> How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere?
That it is everywhere, in the sense that some (few) people bring it everywhere, not much. That it is everywhere, in the sense that all of society is guilty of it and each person should try to fix it in themselves, evidence of an entirely different sort.
I wonder if people are more likely to assume it's a bot when a female image is used - I've noticed that a lot of sites that are automated (or at least aren't so directly connected to a real person) use stock photos of female staff. Certainly not a justification, but could be a factor.
I wonder if there's any way you could control for that to get truer data (I'm not doubting the overall conclusion that sexism is rampant) - maybe explicitly say "This is/is not a bot" or trial photos that look like very stereotypical/generic stock photos?
> How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere?
When you use the word "sexism", notice how it was not necessary to say "against women". This little example highlights the strong societal view that there exists sexism against women far more than any against men to require that clarification.
The reasons I find it necessary to highlight this fact is: from the perspective of someone trying to intentionally provoke offence in others, this view is an obvious candidate for exploitation when the target is a women.
I'm talking about trolls of course, but it seems to be so hard to get that point across here... there is a clear bias in the offensive messages, but if they are all trolls (and they certainly look that way), then surely the bias reflects the simple fact that sexism against women is a reaction provoking topic, rather than "wow we have a sexism problem look at all these legitimate sincere comments", I mean isn't the later exactly what the trolls wanted.
665 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 493 ms ] threadHowever, it's hard to know how prevalent these attitudes and behavior are. Because observations aren't independent. One asshole posts on some chan about a fun target, and then his friends compete with each other. And it could even be scripted.
I keep seeing this word being used, and I don't think it's apt. I don't think we're seeing "dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women", much less "hatred of women".
I think it's much closer to the truth to say that people everywhere are extremely interested in and enamored of women, but that women provide some kind of easy target for expression of bad feelings or trolling.
As a former troll, I can say nobody really wants to mess with Eric Lu because there's just no troll juice there. A guy would just laugh at those "mean" comments. I certainly have laughed at comments like that. Nobody wants to troll me because the comments just can't get any purchase.
So, please, let's stop with the myth that people hate women. People love women, guys have been dying for women since forever, and it's certainly not because they have contempt for them or hate them. There's clearly a discriminatory thing going on here, but its root is not hatred of women.
>People love women
What are these statements based on?
Meanwhile, the vast majority of domestic violence victims, and the victims of murders where the assailant was in a relationship with the murderer, are women. This idea that "people love women" is not reality based.
Plenty of men have spoken out about how toxic and awful online culture can be. It's not too hard to find examples.
I have personally laughed at comments much worse than those in the post, directed at me, and so have my friends. All my male friends and my dad and my friends' dads and so forth love women -- they would die for women.
What I'm trying to say is, people bring out this word "misogyny" to make a claim about the origin of a problem, when the origin is unclear, or at least much more complicated than "hatred of women". Let's just agree about the clear evidence that there is discriminatory behavior and not insist on absolute certainty as to why it is happening.
Women dont want you to die for them. That's your own need for chivalrious purpose, you selfishly romanticizing your own (or your male friends') sacrifice. I dont know if you've ever had someone sacrificing themselves for you, but lemme tell you first hand, it's not nice, and it makes you feel like shit. Women, and everyone for that matter, are adults, so they don't need someone sacrificing themselves for them. Why would you die for someone, when that person is capable of complete independance? The "love you to death" love isn't really love, it's obsession, and it's unhealthy. And it's either "women are an easy target for trolling" or "people love women". I dont know what kind of twisted love makes you harass your object of desire online.
I can think of a million different ways to harass Eric. Everyday men are also harassed online, usually for not being "masculine" enough. So why are people more likely to harass Julia or Rachel and not Eric?
There certainly are men out there who hate women, but it doesn't seem to me to be very many. Try it, enumerate the men you know and ask yourself, or even ask them directly, if they love the women in their lives. What fraction of women haters do you find? I think you'll find it's very low. And that's my point, that we are not actually facing an epidemic of misogyny ("hatred of women"), that it is actually something else, or at least much more complicated.
Personally I don't find it hard to come up with another explanation: miserable people want other people to be miserable too. And to make people miserable, you do whatever will be effective. Over the internet, mean words work a lot better against women than against men.
(It is probably also true that many people who use "racist" insults are not really being "racist"; they are just insulting in an effective, target-specific way. If they couldn't come up with a racist insult, but the target has glasses, they'd probably resort to "four-eyes". I'm talking about the UK here, by the way.)
You're not even convincing yourself here, dude. If you feel that women just are an outlet for your bad feelings, and you somehow can't keep a lid on that - you're a misogynist, whatever the shade.
Do bullies mistreat other kids because they hate children?
What I said doesn't require that, and I didn't assume that.
Actually I think it would be more reasonable if the people who are certain misogyny (again, just so we don't forget what this word actually means: "hatred of women") rules the world would provide evidence of the widespread hatred of women. If anything, I think the evidence is much stronger that people hate men.
Already in the 90's there were a few handfuls of pesterers of the similar kind on IRC. There would've been more but IRC was such a nerdy tool underground that only a few of them ever found themselves there.
But the phenomenon has there for a long time: it's just that before internet there were few places where you could do this in public. I think most of the similar chatter must have happened between male friends of young age, hanging out and exchanging comments on hot-looking passer-bys and maybe wooing after some or alternatively yelling bitchy remarks.
Even this wouldn't be tolerated in better parts of the town. But on the internet, all you need is a text input box.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/07/11/online-harassment-2017...
Either you have people replying to your rhetorical question and generating exactly zero discussion of value, or explaining to you why your expectation differs from reality. Clearly no one will do the first.
I think people disagree on the severity of the problem and what more should be done about it, if anything.
I believe there is rampant sexism; what I don't believe is that the approach of treating all men as potential rapists and claiming that masculinity is toxic is working out (in fact, I think it exacerbates the problem; practically all mass shootings are a result of boys/men being systematically imbued with toxic shame).
But yeah, go wear those pussy hats if it makes you feel good.
Then they want to see how the bot responds to stupid memes.
I'm not the kind of person that routinely insults chatbots but if I'd see a portrait photo of a woman I'd likely assume it's a bot, simply because too many companies use fake photos of smiling women because someone told them it's good for business (though this article makes me wonder if that trend might finally change).
So I stopped responding to any message that was inappropriate, mean, or nonsense. It’s a waste of time and energy when you’re trying to grow the company.
Might I suggest another round of trials but changing up the message when someone joins? It reads quite like a bot/automated system/interactive FAQ, as others point out.
I know that personally if I join one of those with a bot you can usually get a real human on the other end if you curtly answer questions and voice dissatisfaction with the bot answers (e.g. "this doesn't help") at which point it offers to give a human.
What I'm saying is I wonder how this gender effect would interact with a 'bot-like' variable—if people would react this way if the message was more along the lines of "hi, I'm Rachel and I'm a real human working for…'
Also, IRL anecdote. My ex-wife used to get heckled and cat-called all the time when walking alone (even pushing baby pram). Number of times it happened when she was walking with me? 0. I'm amused and saddened by all the incredulity on display here. I could have said "well I've never seen it, so it's not happening..."
EDIT> You have to be a special kind of ignorant or inexperienced to not have noticed that this is how people talk to women when there are no consequences.
I almost entirely agree with this. Chat pop-ups are _incredibly_ annoying. Many websites have a livechat tab at the bottom, or at the side of the screen that you can click to initiate a chat, and that's fine, but the chat should _never_ be initiated automatically (or appear to be). Once the page loads, any change in the main area of a website should _only_ be initiated by user interaction, such as clicking the 'chat' tab at the bottom. Otherwise, for the interruption it generates in my thought process, you might as well just load another page entirely.
But it wasn't nearly as bad when the avatar was male or nonhuman.
Still not as bad as surveys ("Yes, your website was fine until you popped up a modal for this survey which broke my interaction...")
It appears to be extraorinarily low. One in a thousand visitors or so. There's no question she was being abused because she was a woman. From what I can tell by their stats, that abuse appears to be coming from literally a handful of bad actors over a month's time, with many of the messages deriving from single persons.
So the question is: how do you deal with one bad person out of a thousand? I can't imagine there's any scenario, any technical implementation, that can eliminate abuse down much further than that no matter what you do. If you assume that even 1 in 100 men are going to be assholes, abusive, whatever, it's nearly impossible to stop them from behaving badly. You can take action after the fact, including in both anonymous and registered account situations. I also see no cultural scenario where you can pre-emptively stop that guy from being an asshole until he identifies himself through behavior.
One consideration would be pre-screening the chat for abusive language, abusive actors. That might catch a couple of the particularly bad examples. When a post is sent, you have to check it before it reaches the support agent. That's not difficult to do, except in the most heavily dodged scenarios of character replacement (s3x etc., some of which can still be pretty easily caught). Monsters will be monsters, there are at least a few options for dealing with them.
It's not about the percentage of visitors that were abusive. It's the number of people who were abusive when they thought they were talking to a female vs. a male.
Psychology would be so much easier if we could directly observe other people's thoughts...
Meme makers are all pretty much going to be unsocialized and autistic douche boys & gamers and who seek to make memes for 4chan or Reddit. They're trolling, so obviously you're going to draw terrible people.
If your site was selling expensive fashion items, you're going to see a completely different reaction.
Know your audience.
I wonder to what extent plucky startups expect abuse when they put pop-up chat dialogs in their products. I imagine it's inescapable that some percentage of your user base is going to see it as an invitation to respond poorly. Something door-to-door salespeople and telemarketers learned long ago. I suppose abuse filtering is still an unsolved problem waiting to make someone rich.
The obvious thing to do is to remove anonymity from the Internet. However then what do we do about peoples rights[1] to free speech?
---
[1] Not every country gives this right to it's populous.
That would force this woman to put her real name and photo up there. I could imagine she might not be comfortable with that.
here's the article: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-cre...
China is run by a authoritarian oligarchy that wants to suppress any challenge to it's power. The planned "social credit" system is part of that suppression.
FYI, this oligarchy has a list of "perils" that include:
> “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation [1]
It's not trying to solve your problem with people's online lack of manners, and any imputation to the contrary is part of a smokescreen.
> It's a solution... but i'm not sure if it's the right one
It's the wrong solution, full stop.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lead...
You're missing the point. The US should not emulate China's authoritarian systems of control, regardless of how well China can do them or how they might seem applicable to some aspect of American life. They are the tools of authoritarianism, and to bring them here is to allow authoritarianism to creep in.
In China right now it's being touted as making everything in life seamless.
To me it's the most terrifying form of the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive (warning, contains spoilers)
Early on people said "There are no girls on the internet," and the sentence was supposed to embody the anonymity of the internet and the renaissance notion that a person should be judged by the merits of their arguments and not the labels attached to them. Someone claims to be a girl? No, you are talking to a middle aged dude having a chuckle. Maybe I have rose tinted glasses here, maybe it was always jerks saying there are no girls on the internet.
It morphed into "Tits of GTFO," because, given the anonymity of online dialogue, it seemed to some pernicious few that the only reason to mention being a woman was to seek attention.
Online dialogue grew vitriolic, "Its only the internet," trolls would throw at anyone trying to inject civility and good manners into flame wars. "I f'ed your mom," became a bit of a goto for a general passing derailment since it got to most people. If OP mentioned any detail about themself, (racial, gender, age, relationship status, mental issues) this was used to make more specific insults. Moderators struggled to keep up.
The networks got faster, streaming voice became possible on games. Voice isn't anonymous. The online dialogue started giving away details (age, sex, socioeconomic background), when team mates in pick up groups got frustrated with one another they started to reach for the sexist, the racist, the particular insults. Women learned not to speak up in chat to avoid the onslaught.
A lot of us became inured to that "12 year old claiming to have banged our mom last night", but those ridiculous insults take on a nastier edge when that "12 year old" knows details about your life. If you regularly game with women, you will see it. The mere fact that people believe there are so few women gamers is due to their fear of speaking up, there are more than there appear to be on the surface.
I do think the insults become more frequent when the jerks know you are a woman. They also know you are inured to the generic insults. Few women are inured to rape threats I think. I'm a bit surprised Eric didn't get racist comments in the OP's unscientific study.
I'm happy you haven't experienced the internet as I have, it has always been a nasty place and a lot of us sat by and pretended like it was different than real life as if there weren't real live humans behind the keyboards. I've been guilty of that. I still don't know what to do when I encounter such nastiness, much to my dismay.
No, it was supposed to embody the fact that there were literally very few women on the majority of online message boards and chat rooms for a long time...
That's not what their data is showing. That would be a valuable break-out to see.
What their data is showing is number of messages. If you look at the chats, it appears they're counting multiple abusive messages (one minute to the next and many within the same minute stamp) from single actors.
If one jerk sends eight abusive messages in one minute, they're counting all of those in the order of a magnitude you're referring to. It makes sense the abusive actors will send as many abuse messages as they can as quickly as they can, as one would expect that to get shut-down.
Simply put, the abuse they're showing, which is about ~14 rude + harrassment messages per week to Julia, could easily consist of just two or three individual jerks sending a burst of messages (which again appears to be the case based on the screenshots). By their numbers, they're getting ~4,500 visitors per week. Out of those, it appears that about 0.1% or less of those visitors are likely a problem.
Ok, then I'm confused. In the post it shows, for example this:
https://i.imgur.com/P4QCWO4.png
That says ~14 messages per week. So you're saying the labeling is wrong, that it should say chat sessions per week?
The overall math in that scenario is also confusing me, if that refers to sessions. If the average abusive session contained even just six or seven messages, times 14 abuse sessions per week, upwards of 100 abuse messages contained within the abusive sessions in a week, ~400 per month. Roughly half of your customer interaction messages, or more, at that time, were occuring in abuse threads? Or does "2,100 messages" actually refer to 2,100 individual chat sessions?
The average "abusive session" contained only about three or four messages, not 6-7. Otherwise, your math is right.
I’ll not be wondered if this $10M problem solves with help me button at right top of the screen, instead of popups.
That said, what surprised me the most about the whole article was learning that sometimes there are in fact real people behind those random annoying chat boxes. I've always assumed I'd only get a self-help bot to reply so I would've never used them.
What's particularly frustrating with this one is that there is already a prominent speech bubble icon in the corner of the screen that suggests they have a chat feature - if I want it. It doesn't need to crack open after a second and slap me.
I am not defending the obvious misogyny here but I think an experiment that starts out by peeing off its subjects can not be fully objective?
And, regardless of how annoying a chat box is, the findings of this article still stand...[This is Julia btw, the author of this post]
The rationale is given by Ling herself here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xZZ1c7diUI
I've written my own theory of the site (it is ... something else...) at Ello:
https://ello.co/ferdiz/post/p3wjs7hvw0zq-7qdrmyvea
(Also submitted to HN a ways back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9574350 )
Nutshell:
One of the costliest elements for a car sales outlet is tire-kickers: people who come by, look at vehicles, tie up a salesperson's time, and don't buy anything. More to the point, they never planned to buy anything....
The auto dealership (online or off) wants to sort out the tire-kickers as quickly as possible. If you aren't currently and really shopping for a car, you're a liability. And the chances are the salesperson's missing out on one of the four people who might actually have a real interest in buying that day. The goal is to sort you as quickly as possible.(
Ling'sCars.com is optimized for driving away people who don't really, really, REALLY want to buy a car.*
Not saying you want to drive people away. But you also probably want to not spend much time interacting with anyone that's not really interested in your product.
...and also people who want to preserve their eyesight?
I leased a car from Ling's site once. She's actually very business-like in real-life. At the time she was doing deals way better than the competition - still the early days of business leasing back then. Not sure how competitive she is now but the site certainly looks the same?
Huh, okay. (Why bring up some other site?)
> Our website is a video editing tool, so we decided ..
I don't quite follow - how does that fact justify using this particular dark UI pattern?
>> how does that fact justify using this particular dark UI pattern? We just made a product call and decided that the benefits, both for us and for our users, of having a chat box outweighed the annoyance. When people have problems using our tool, they really want help, and it isn't that difficult for the rest of our site visitors to swipe away or ignore the chat box.
I disagree. Dark UI is manipulation of the user. For example, hiding 'X' buttons on pop-ups asking for a subscription. (Is refusing to pay for value provided a dark 'pattern' on the part of users?)
This pop-up does not manipulate the user. It is an honest value proposition. So is "Fifty Shades of Grey." I didn't buy it.
It's a classical sales tactics that builds on social pressure, here taken to a more dishonest level - the chat box was initiated by some code, in spite of what the text message implies.
Also it can make user feel uncomfortable, as if there is someone behind their back standing and looking what they are doing with the site.
This popup is also deceiving users. For example on the screenshot [1] we can see a human user thinking that a real person wrote a greeting to him and wasting time of his life replying to a bot.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/yEtgHbr.png?1
You should check out Inspectlet.
Would you call that a dark sales pattern?
Nobody gave a shit when it was the dude or the cat. This whataboutism is absolutely mind-blowing to me.
The popup being annoying (to which I personally agree) doesn't change anything about the incredibly clear results. People are placed into all kinds of situations in which they come across as annoying by their employers (inbound tech support being just one example).
The only long term solution is giving women the right to defend themselves in these kind of situations and not having to buckle down because of "business reasons".
We've denied perfectly fine clients because they were fucking misogynists to our all-female sales team, but we're a dime in a dozen.
As a man, I wouldn't never even think I have to hide my photo online. I've been using the internet for more than 20 years and was never harassed based on my sex (or anything else, really). I find it crucial that we understand these different experiences we're all facing when we go online, if we ever want it to be different.
As far as I see it, this is about educating our boys much more than it is about educating our web designers.
Even if the abuse were partly caused by the chat box popping up annoyingly, one could still conclude that a chat box popping up with a woman's name and face annoys people more than with a man's or a generic "team" one.
I do find these real-time chat boxes useful, I just wish they'd stay discreetly in the bottom right corner so they're there when I actually want them :/
In any case, perhaps it makes the conclusion even more shocking: A male can piss someone off with little to no negative effect, a female can't. I fear for the results when taking this experiment into meat space.
Top comment: "Pop up chat boxes are really annoying. Also I don't know what objective means. But I have added a token: Not defending the sexism sentence."
I believe that sexual harassment is a serious problem women have to deal with, thanks to excellent studies like the one done by Pew on survey data in 2014(http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/). Calling this "absolutely convincing evidence" not only undermines your position(because it's easy to poke holes at it), but also diminishes the accomplishments of people who do put in the work to quantify and qualify harassment on the Internet.
I'll concede that my statement is to general. But the article to me is strong evidence that the women involved experienced a strong sexist reaction from her customers. Are you not convinced that she did?
The set up is as close to perfect for confounding variables as possible in an evolving production environment (as someone noted, it's basically A/B testing).
I'm not saying it's convincing on its own in a vacuum of course. The prior formed by all the other studies (including the one you mentioned) is important in making it convincing. But it's certainly as clear evidence as 99% of what get's posted here.
Put another way: If this was a blog post that shows that one configuration of a database leads to latencies consistently 10 times smaller than another configuration, with experiments run over three months of production use, I would call that convincing evidence.
It's certainly a lot more coherent than the post I was replying to which somehow argues that this is not objective because chat boxes are annoying. (????) Luckily it's no longer the top comment either.
Thanks for making time and writing the article and including the comments.
"Meme Maker The most popular video meme maker on the Internet. Also works for images!"
I really found the testing and the changes enlightening, and that is what strikes me as really interesting here.
If you're not an attractive person yourself there are women and girls who are out of your reach. This breeds resentment at an early age, and a weapon of choice, for some, is derogatory language.
Why, because what else can you do to hurt someone so easily without fear of repercussion?
The problem is not just confined to misogynists btw. If you're a man and have an attractive wife or girlfriend the insulting behaviour still goes on, but usually behind your back - these people are generally cowards after all.
When reading the article my first questions were: do these people think there is a real human at the other end, and, if so, do they think the photo is of that human? It's probably impossible to answer that question directly, but putting up a notice similar to "you are talking to a real person, not a bot" and seeing how that affects the behaviour would give some indication, perhaps.
I'd love to say it's just 1 or 2 idiots but stories like these are so common that Ive come to the conclusion that there is a very real gender bias at play. Which makes me both sad from the perspective of equality and disappointed as a representative of the male species. :(
FYI, we tested a while different pics, female, male, average looking, good looking and we just got the best conversion rates with the above mentioned.
In an ideal world this would be an attempt at irony.
"Your real face is too ugly, sorry."
If that's what they interpret, sucks for them.
I'm a guy, by the way.
- your product is enterprise enough to only attract people who are considering speding larger amount of money (and thus are usually more 'adult') - your users are logged in (and assume you know their identity as they have paid throu their CC)
?
[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/07/11/online-harassment-2017...
It made a really great point that I believe -whichever side (if any) you take in the Ansari story- is very enlightening (at least it was for me), and that potentially applies to your study.
I can't possibly explain it as well as the author, so please go read the article, but, in essence, the author explains that women have been conditioned from the beginning of time to endure pain and as such don't report it as much.
The study you linked to, is based on reports of men and women, and indeed, according to this study, men are more likely to experience online harassement.
But now, is it because men report it more because they are more sensitive than women to online harassement, or are they really more likely to be harassed online?
When I ask myself, "have I ever been harassed online?", I can definitely say "absolutely never".
This is of course only my personal experience, but I'm eager to believe the exact opposite the study you linked to concludes: women are definitely more likely to experience online harassement, and OP's article is one demonstration of it.
[0] http://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasur...
Men and women experience and respond to online harassment in different ways. Overall, men are somewhat more likely to experience any form of harassing behavior online: 44% of men and 37% of women have experienced at least one of the six behaviors this study uses to define online harassment. In terms of specific experiences, men (30%) are modestly more likely than women (23%) to have been called offensive names online or to have received physical threats (12% vs. 8%).
By contrast, women – and especially young women – encounter sexualized forms of abuse at much higher rates than men. Some 21% of women ages 18 to 29 report being sexually harassed online, a figure that is more than double the share among men in the same age group (9%). In addition, roughly half (53%) of young women ages 18 to 29 say that someone has sent them explicit images they did not ask for. For many women, online harassment leaves a strong impression: 35% of women who have experienced any type of online harassment describe their most recent incident as either extremely or very upsetting, about twice the share among men (16%).
Regarding photo difference this has likely to do with part of the audience which use such a mem maker kapwing site: idiots. An ip lookup who they are and/or coming from would have been interesting.
But many of the examples in the blog I could never ever imagine to write. No happy man or women would. Thus I'm interested who would? Are there any (aggregated) trends?
That there are idiots is a given. Neverthelesss, I would still present a down to earth real picture (not from you personally of course, but also not some stock foto or robot). Reason: if you spend the time/cost to provide high-quality personal assistance (opposed to some random chat-center no-help) you might as well show it (and filter out the idiots - you wouldn't want to provide services to them anyway!).
The number I'm missing is how many legitimate prospect interactions resulted from each avatar. It wouldn't surprise me if the rude/harassing messages came from utter trolls who were not useful user prospects in the first place. If so, it could be worth keeping Rachel around just as a high-level troll trap to weed out the time wasters.
> See other comments.
Oh, oh. Nevermind. You already cited.
Why ?
Seems pretty clear to me.
Sure, it doesn’t happen every time but it’s not hard to find examples of people who thought their stalker would remain remote until that person showed up at their home or office.
For men reproduction has almost no consequences (biologically speaking) while for women it can be life threatening. Men are biologically advantaged to make as many passes as possible until they are able to mate while women are advantaged to find the best mate possible. I think it is fair that this shapes the lens in which both sexes see unsolicited flirting.
I am a female myself and I think this is the kind of deep paternalizing tone that is plain wrong. Being amused and not threatened by something has nothing to do with gender but with personality. Why would a woman be more scared by a phone call than a man? All the suggestions I have here are plain hallucinatory (speaking about physical violence and reproduction over a phonecall ?!) and this issue has imo really nothing to do with gender.
> physical violence
Men are much more likely to be physically violent, in my mind, than women are. So a woman getting creepy calls from a man could actually mean physical danger. A man getting creepy calls from a woman would be much less likely to be dangerous. I want to be clear: I'm talking about perception here. There are women who are just as capable as being violent as men, but women as a group are not perceived as being nearly as violent as men.
> Since I am male, I was not threatened but amused
I think it shouldn't matter what his gender is. If a man got a creepy call from another man, then the danger would be just the same as if a woman got the creepy call from a man. I think the original poster was not taking into the account that a gay man could have stalked him, and that could have been dangerous, hence "I am a man therefor not worried" when really it would have been better to say "I was not worried when I got these calls from women."
That's my take on it, anyway.
Considering the examples in the thread's article, I am appalled but not really surprised. I think the "beautiful" woman also serves as an example of a woman who would get many favours from her beauty. Both beautiful women and men gets benefits in work from their looks and the lewd comments could be the other side of the coin. (quick google result: https://businessinsider.com/studies-show-the-advantages-of-b...) I appreciated the article writers diligent comparisons of faces and loved the use of the cat.
Wow!
[0] I do. Obviously what Ms. Enthoven has to go through is worse.
[1] People think it's a bot. People hate chat popups. The photo is fake. Your math is wrong! Etc...
SMH...
And here I was thinking that HN was one of the last bastions of internet civility and manners... SMH indeed...
1.
It would be interesting to know to what extent she would have received the same messages if she had had the message (this matches the style of the message they used):
>Hey! Thanks for visiting Kapwing. I'm Julia [or Rachel], founder of Kapwing. If you run into any issues making your video, feel free to let me know, and I'll do my best to help!
By identifying herself as a founder this would separate the message from the chatbots who use female avatars, as mentioned in our comments here in this thread.
2.
I'd also be interested in an even less breezy version (to make it even less like a chatbot), such as:
>Hello and thank you for visiting Kapwing. I'm Julia [or Rachel], founder of Kapwing. If you run into any issues making your video, please do let me know and I'll investigate the issue.
I don't have a guess as to what the results would be: perhaps exactly the same regardless of style and introduction. But it would be interesting to know.
3.
For comparison it would also have also been interesting to use a male model who matches the same description ("I found a stock photo of a blonde woman who was attractive in an obvious way", so a stock photo of a male model who was attractive in an obvious way.)
For this one I do have a guess:
- I expect that in the article/study, 100% of the rude messages came from heterosexual males.
- But there are homosexual males so my guess is that an equally "obviously attractive" man would get 10% as many lewd messages, i.e. from homosexual males. (if use the old figure of "1 in 10" being gay.)
But as far as it goes the study was extremely interesting and worth reporting.
EDIT: I updated men to males above, actually especially since it's a meme site I bet most of the puerile messages were from teenagers - they show striking levels of immaturity.
- it's only because people think you're a bot
- it's because of your target audience
- it's because chat widgets are annoying
- you don't really have enough data to make any conclusions
How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere?
It doesn't even come close to showing how "sexism is everywhere". For all we know the sample could be entirely edgy 12 year olds.
Tell me again how this self-admittedly "non-rigorous scientific study" proves "sexism is everywhere"?
It could easily be that more attractive profiles result in more interactions and receive the same proportion of sexist responses. Their data measures sexist messages not the proportion of sexist messages over all of their interactions.
A single story like this doesn't prove anything, but the flood of stories just like that paint a pretty clear picture.
At some point you can no longer say: "This is an isolated incident".
A flood of biased anecdotes doesn't become truth or facts after a given count. Oponionated militants don't define reality.
Your comment indicates a profound lack of ratinal and objective thinking.
There are enough murders every day to cover the front page of hacker news with a story about each one. It doesn't mean murder is a rampant problem in our society.
That you personally know of, despite citing even one?
There are mountains of real stats. Have you tried to look? All you have to do is google "sexism statistics". The first hit for me has a link to a real study about online interactions: http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/
> There are enough murders every day to cover the front page of hacker news with a story about each one. It doesn't mean murder is a rampant problem in our society.
What a strange statement. Since there are enough murders every day to cover the front page of HN, doesn't that prove it's a problem? If sexism covered the front page of HN every day, would that mean it's less of a problem than it is now?
Murder is a rampant problem in our society. There are entire countries with less than one tenth the murder rate of the U.S. Are you suggesting that because the problem is everywhere, it's not a problem?
The problem with this is there's really no such thing as an "anti-sexism" story. No one posts news about how they worked at a company and everyone was just a normal person. That's not news, that's just life. It happens all the time, and in fact it's probably happening right now within a few hundred meters of almost everyone reading the post, yet it will never make the news. Moreover, the vast majority of news articles on this site are analyzable as containing an absence of sexism, but that's not an "anti-sexism" story either.
What I'm trying to get here is that the signal you are listening to is unidirectional. If you're incrementing a mental counter of "how many sexism-related articles have I seen" without any way of decrementing it then yeah, eventually you'll hit a number you dislike. That's not because there's any meaning behind your metric though, it's just because you've structured your metric in a way that means given infinite time, you'll hit /all/ the positive integers.
Anyway, that doesn't mean that sexism isn't a major problem. But it does mean that you, jakobegger, don't know if it's a major problem or not.
The newspaper rarely bothers to write stories about things that are likely to happen to you, like dying from a hospital mistake, car crash or a drowning.
The risk of dying in a terrorist incident in the US is essentially zero, but you'd never know that from the flood of newspaper stories about it.
If a proper study of incidents like this is done, with good stats relating to the totality of incidents in context - i.e that takes into account the full picture, we could then conclude something.
In this light, the “context of thousands of similar things” is one great generalizing bs.
It does not help anybody to come on to a place like HN and broadcast how deplorable you think everybody else is. Even the possible benefits it could bring, like setting the tone for making it clear this isn't acceptable, is handily defeated by the amount of anger you create by accusing people willy-nilly of sexism (which, by the way, people are supposed to be angry about, remember; if sexism is one of the True Evils of the world you should not be surprised when people react to accusations of it) and the way it makes those who are behaving well start to wonder "Why, exactly, am I bothering reigning in these impulses if I'm going to be bathed in accusations of sexism anyhow?"
Whatever the solution is, it isn't going to be found in abusing broadcast media like internet discussions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
I’m a man. I feel neither harassed nor accused by this post simply because I don’t harass woman. If you feel accused though, maybe it’s worth taking a closer look at yourself and ask why.
So in addition to proving my point about how berating the people who aren't part of the problem is very common by providing an example before the ink was hardly dry on my post, you've set yourself up for attack in the world of today. You need to be more careful.
(Edit: I suspect I'm being downvoted because some people may have a hard time understanding I'm not just being rhetorical about people saying it's all men, and that it's especially men who think they're innocent. To them, I would commend spending 15-30 minutes browsing through the various results at https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=all%20men%20are%... . Not just a scan through the results to confirm your prejudices, but to actually look at the conversations happening, which is why I specified 15-30 minutes and not just "a glance". And while I'd observe it may not be "the new york times" for all those results, it's not just "Joe Bob's Blog & Grill" or Tumblr for those results either. I'm also not saying that every last result will say that, but the existence of results refuting the argument also point to the fact that it is being deployed.)
I understand you think they are saying all men, but unless you can read minds over the Internet, that’s just your opinion.
But more than that, saying “men are sexist” does NOT imply “all men”. It means “a large-enough-to-be-generalized number of men are exist”.
If you think it means literally all men (and hence feel attacked by it), in my opinion, on some level, you are sexist and are just trying to avoid discomfort/guilt by spouting #NotAllMen.
"Women can't code"
Not only is it true for a substantial portion, it's true for the majority of women (and men, for that matter). But would you criticize those who object to the statement?
Even if someone temporarily accepts this "large-enough-to-be-generalized" definition, it may have a hard time to retain "large" part, because a number on topic is not more than 156/55000, assuming that 156 is a unique set.
No, the number of harassing interactions is in the millions, and the people who acknowledge it's a problem are the majority of people. You are in the minority by denying that this is a real problem.
Data:
http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/07/11/online-harassment-2017...
> It really shouldn't be surprising when the proposed solution to the former is to endlessly harass those doing the latter and accuse them of sexism day in, day out
Did you seriously just claim you're being harassed by this article??
If an article about Julia's experience and not about you or directed to you is harassing you just by existing, how exactly do you think Julia feels about the people calling her names and demanding sex? Do you have any sympathy for what she or other women are going through online?
If reading the topic of sexism bothers you, what about helping to eliminate sexism and harassment? Maybe if we get rid of the sexism, the articles will go away?
> Whatever the solution is, it isn't going to be found in an abusing broadcast media like the internet discussions.
I don't understand this sentence. Where is the solution, and why don't broadcast media help? Public awareness on many topics is going up, due to the internet and broadcast media, for example, public awareness of science. Most people consider this trend a good thing.
Were you forced to read the article? I don't understand the suggestions that the internet & broadcast media are abusing you somehow. Maybe take a break and go outside?
Here are some more stats about the state of sexism in the U.S. and abroad, to help you understand how women, not you, are the victims of this problem.
https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/earnings_2014.htm
https://mic.com/articles/168585/the-next-time-someone-tells-...
https://www.makers.com/blog/21-facts-you-never-knew-about-in...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/09/27/lean-in-stud...
Etc., etc.
Please consider more deeply the meaning of the word "ratio". You have no idea what the actual number of either harassing interactions is, nor non-harassing interactions, as it isn't even possible to formulate a definition of "an interaction". But there is no scenario in which these interactions are not a vanishing, vanishing minority of interactions. It literally could not be any other way, because if it was, say, the majority of male/female interactions, that would mean literally more than half the time a man passes a woman in the street, the man harasses the woman. Absurd.
"Did you seriously just claim you're being harassed by this article??"
No, I'm claiming that what you are doing, as are many other people, are harassing people, who are on average the wrong people. And then being very, very surprised when they don't take it very well. Well, yeah. You attacked, so what do you expect? Do you seriously think you helped anyone, even if we assumed for the sake of argument you read my post correctly, which you didn't? No, you didn't help anything. You just made it worse.
"I don't understand this sentence."
Well, try reading my post again with these corrections in mind. You may not agree with what I said, but it may help you understand it. Especially if, again, you consider that I consider your post a prime example of what I am talking about.
> Please consider more deeply the meaning of the word "ratio". You have no idea what the actual number of either harassing interactions is, nor non-harassing interactions, as it isn't even possible to formulate a definition of "an interaction".
Yes, I do. I gave you a link to some actual data. You pulled your "ratio" out of your butt. Please investigate the data, or provide your own source, before you claim the ratio is so small it doesn't exist.
"Roughly four-in-ten Americans have personally experienced online harassment."
"women are about twice as likely as men to say they have been targeted as a result of their gender (11% vs. 5%)"
http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/07/11/online-harassment-2017...
> But there is no scenario in which these interactions are not a vanishing, vanishing minority of interactions.
That statement is flat out wrong, but feel free to prove it.
> No, I'm claiming that what you are doing... You just made it worse.
I harassed you before I commented? I made what worse, exactly? What is the problem you're talking about, and why is it worse than what Julia experienced?
> I consider your post a prime example of what I am talking about.
Please, instead of being hyperbolic and emotional, explain clearly how I or anyone is attacking or harassing you. I am arguing with you, yes, as you are arguing with me. You're acting like you didn't choose to participate here, like something unfair is happening to you. You're acting like your choice to consume media is hurting you, you're acting like your feelings reading about someone else's problems are worse than their feelings about their own problems.
The statement 'sexism is everywhere' does not mean 'almost all people are sexist'. Instead, it means 'almost all women suffer from sexist attitudes in most areas of their lives. If 10% of people are sexist, that is easily enough for all women to notice it. I'd guess the real threshold is more like 3% of people being sexist.
Rachel’s guess is 0.28%, or roughly 1 of 350.
"The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept" - Lt. Gen. David Morrison
What change in society would count as not tolerating these trolls?
Actually that just means society tolerates trolls. You're showing your bias by jumping to the conclusion that everything is sexism or that somehow antisocial and immature people only target women.
Furthermore, western society actually holds in high regard concepts such as frer speech, which covers idiots being able to say idiotic things.
One big difference is that there was no access to the sort of degrading pornography that is just freely available today. A 12 year old boy in the 70s might be able to get his hands on a Playboy or maybe even a Hustler but it took some real effort and those magazines were tame compared to the porn today.
On the other hand, a 35yo educated person, that just wants to make something silly for ther corporate 'yammer', will definitely NOT insult or waste time in any other manner.
Kids will be kids.
Uneducated kids will be uneducated kids.
And we should all be patient, as.. ahem.. we were kids one time :)
I wouldn't take those odds, if I were you. Being 35 is no guarantee of not-being-an-asshole.
I'm glad you're very unlikely to work in any kind of K-12 educational setting, given how eagerly you write kids off.
Even if adults don't know that a kid is being shitty, they can still lead by example towards a happier outcome
A woman (or man, for that matter) who really gets distressed by being insulted by a 12 year old kid certainly shouldn't be the norm, and I don't believe they are. If every one of those chat messages had a button to "forward this to their parent", they would look completely harmless, but with the anonymity the internet provides, they are just chat messages from what could very well be a 30 year old man, making the dumb prank of an even dumber kid seem like way more than it is.
What I think would be interesting is some sort of age statistic, because I expect at least two thirds if not more of these messages to be from people under 15.
And since somebody will undoubtedly interpret this message like that, no, I am not saying all online harassment can be dismissed, only the large majority of it.
Despite what marketing people tell you about "creating a connection" or "showing that your company is made of real people", often a bit of distance and professionalism is best for your relationship with customers.
Only if you want to avoid rude/sexist messages. You can get more normal messages with good looking girl, and that's what matters for business.
Who wouldn't?!
So to answer your question, I would not want to avoid sexist message if it means less money for my business. It's extremely simple to ignore bad people on the Internet. It's hard to earn money.
> it's better to present yourself as an anonymous avatar than a real person
is not what's implied from the article. Rather it should be:
"it's better to present yourself as an anonymous avatar than a real person if you want to receive less crap"
Note: there's a user in this discussion saying in their case image of good looking woman worked the best.
Because there have been multiple accounts of bad behavior, both subtle and not-subtle, at tech conferences (https://shift.newco.co/what-its-like-to-be-a-woman-at-a-tech..., https://blog.juliaferraioli.com/2014/08/do-you-even.html), but those aren't studies, they're just isolated experiences, so we can ignore those.
And there have been multiple accounts from women who won't use a feminine identity online due to harassment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3411627), and really talented women who have to endure sexist work environments (http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/12/04/meeting/), and, occasionally, even much more lively discussions from women on what it's like to work in tech (https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4ioxw9/as_i_sit_i...). But, again, these aren't studies, so we can ignore them.
Of course, there have been studies, including one that found feminine names in chats got 25 times more malicious messages (http://www.ece.umd.edu/News/news_story.php?id=1788), which would seem to support this woman's experience too ... but, surely, we can find some way to dismiss that, too, right?
The important part is that, every time a submission like this comes along, we rush to the comments section to try to shout it down.
There are surely some medium.com posts about experiences that other developers have had that we could upvote instead. Preferably, ones from developers who don't happen to be too feminine.
I am so glad someone on HN is here to tell us exactly why we aren't allowed to have a rigorous discussion when it comes to this topic, in particular.
It is interesting how you immediately reframe women getting harassed as misogyny. Nevermind women likely get more attention online as well.
Let's have a look at the study [0] you mention. Which measures private messages received from an IRC channel by a bot. Do you honestly not think a female username will receive more attention given the typical gender composition of an online IRC channel? (Who still uses IRC apart from unwashed CS nerds?) 25 times messages likely means there were 25 times more males than females in that particular room.
[0] Meyer, R., & Cukier, M. 2006 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.89....
This point is, without properly establishing a base rate of attention VS harassment, all you can do appeal to emotion. Yes women are being harassed in tech, are they being harassed in at a higher rate than other industries? Is it a specifically a tech problem? Is your solution to the problem to accuse men in the tech industry as misogynists/sexists further alienate both sides from each other when you don't even have proper evidence?
It's somewhat disingenuous to say "messages" when the study is specifically counting only "malicious messages" (and makes no mention of how many non-malicious messages were received.)
Namely because that unstated premise is almost exactly the conclusion of the argument you're trying to argue against.
Your final paragraph is particularly telling. Re-read it and think about the equivalences you're trying to draw.
Edit: >The point is that the distribution of genders are likely overwhelmingly male.
Do you just intentionally ignore the fact that without there being a differential rate of harassment between people on the basis of sex that this doesn't matter in the slightest? Your argument assumes the point you're trying to argue against.
Work on your reading comprehension before spitting out snark.
If you assume a constant rate of harassment (say 5% of men harass women per year) then a woman who works alongside 20 men and 5 women (a common ratio in tech) will get harassed more than a woman who works with 12 women and 13 men (a more typical non tech ratio).
And in truth I wouldn’t be surprised if as women get more outnumbered the frequency of harassment tends to go up.
I'm not sure that's a statement I'd make. I don't think I know enough to say that.
It's tempting to let myself get nerd-sniped into a longer, less productive discussion comparing different fields and pontificating on different possible causes, but then I'd be making the same mistake as so many other people here.
What we really need in these conversations is fewer people like James DaMore writing dissertations on the subject and more people saying, "hey guys, stop being dumb ass holes."
This is a problem that is better resolved by calling out socially repugnant behavior rather than dissecting it.
To take it to extremes, that abuse could entirely be the fault of one single person who frequents every forum on the internet (you suggested it was "just 12 year old boys"). That the cause of the problem is only a small subset of men in no way affects the fact that there is a problem that makes being a female tech-person a less pleasant experience than being a male tech person.
I am aware of no study or plausible anecdotal evidence of a significant issue that men are exposed to that women aren't.
Lacking something to 'balance it out' I find it reasonable to conclude that women have a less pleasant experience.
By itself, this article doesn't prove that, it's only one more data point in the vast unending ocean of data points that prove it.
> It could easily by that more attractive profiles results in more interactions and receive the same proportion of sexist responses.
You're imagining something fairly contrary to what the article said, and to what many other examples and studies have shown. The primary factor is the gender of the recipient, and while the article is not rigorous, it demonstrated a greater percentage of sexist comments for the more attractive female photo, and demonstrated a near zero percentage for the male photo.
> For all we know the sample could be entirely edgy 12 year olds.
That, um, doesn't count as sexism? If it's all 12 year olds, we still have a problem. Maybe a worse problem.
Out of curiosity, you seem to be arguing that sexism online might not exist, yet it's a huge problem, easily demonstrable and widely known. What's preventing you from acknowledging the issue?
The male co-founder is an attractive man. He did not receive nearly the same amount of sexual harassment. It's reasonable to suspect that the reason is gender. Your objection is true, it could be that way. But given all of the priors we has in this area, it's quite reasonable to lean towards a gender-bias in receiving sexual harassment.
If 12-year-olds are being sexist to be edgy, that's a problem in itself. Also, if it was people deliberately trying to be edgy, I'd expect way generic, or possibly racist, to be directed at Eric Lu, which does not seem to be the case.
Most people don't witness these kinds of things off the internet, or run with groups who never do this outside of one-to-ones with mostly disconnected people.
I don't dispute her results at all, but I can basically guarantee you that I haven't been around where a woman has said "hi" to someone and they're all "Yea, eff your mom". Only confounding factor I think comes in to play is the assumption that it's a bot, so you can say taboo/antisocial things without repute.
Lucky you, I recently saw this 'interaction' between a guy and a girl on the street:
Guy: Hey cutie!
Guy: Hey sexy!
Guy: Hey girl, come over!
Guy: Hey bitch, come over here.
Guy: Go away you ugly bitch!
The girl just kept walking and the guy turned to more profanities. This wasn't in some shitty part of town, it was at the main station of one of the nicest cities in the Netherlands. It's not just the internet where stuff like this happens.
Obviously it should be clear that I’m not talking about all men, but I have seen this behavior on occasion before and it’s super unnerving.
Saying "Hi cutie" isn't exactly a polite or respectful way to start a conversation. Ignoring it is frankly the most polite way to deal with it.
Also I'd expect ordinary people to handle a rejection like that without any problems. (I'm born in Europe and spent most of my time in Europe but would expect this to be the same in North America based on the few times I've worked there.)
Are you serious? There is nothing rude about it, she didn’t owe that random stranger anything and it was incredibly rude of him to make unwanted and unsolicited advancements. Yelling “cutie” and “sexy” at a stranger is incredibly rude.
Got it.
I personally would be very interested to know why "Julia" is being insulted much more than "Eric", but saying "this is because of sexism" is no better than saying that "the sun is bright because it shines".
The causes of sexism is another subject. But the first step is to acknowledge sexism is going on in the first place.
This argument could stand if we knew the exact sexual preferences of site users. If tested auditory was e.g. 100% to-male-attracted, what is your guess about “Eric” getting harassed or attacked vs “Julia”?
How do you jump to that conclusion? For instance, where did you isolated other factors, such as personality or communication style or clients who engaged them? What was the result of placing a man using a female avatar or a woman using a man avatar? Do rude comments directed at woman count as sexism as well?
Also the whole "strong statement requires an extraordinary amount of work" thing is entirely dependant on your outlook. I could just as easily say the opposite statement (that sexisim is minimal) and suggest that it requires extraordinary evidence to prove that. The degree to which you think something is extraordinary depends on your outlook and experience, it is rarely objective.
You could, and it does. But it's it matter of opinion/semantics that this is "the opposite statement".
In context, a specific claim is a specific claim, whichever way it goes. The "opposite" in another sense, is to make no claim, and therefor stick to the default position of allowing for either possibility without knowing which (agnostic position?). There is absolutely nothing wrong with that position, and it requires no additional information, as opposed to "less formal information".
Now, if you claim we need to adopt a specific position, and do so with little information, i.e. without the time/money to do so then you'd have to justify that - i.e why isn't it strongly desired, yet still apparently important, to hold a position on the topic?
To some extent, I would take it with a grain of salt. Anonymous internet accounts can be fabricated and controlled by groups or individuals. This is also something that should be taught, actively.
Do not let apparent social pressure have you concede rationality, truth.
Now I agree that the model photo looks a little more artificial for reasons beyond gender, and they should probably have compared with a male model photo as well. Though personally I suspect people would still think it more likely that an attractive man was a real person than an attractive woman.
Except it's not. Stock photos of good looking women are routinely used in marketing to attract users. It's proven by stats from A/B testing.
Okay, I'm being glib, but this idea that thinking of a plausible causation with no further critical analysis means it's "not sexism" is kind of exasperating.
I'm only saying a person using good looking woman as an avatar because of a/b testing does not make him sexist.
Whether they make a decision based on internal biases caused by societal norms, or make a decision by measuring those societal norms directly and responding to them, the decision is still an expression of societal sexism.
They're photos, though. They're real. Not "fake"
>Other than the creeps, trolls, and bullies, I didn’t notice a shift in the types of questions people were asking - users with problems on Kapwing still asked Rachel for help. But we didn’t analyze the volume of messages, so I can’t say if Rachel got more or fewer messages overall.
If crappy programmers make crappy chatbots, and they all have female pictures, then people's disdain would not be caused by a sexist reasoning, but by the widespread practice of using female pictures in crappy chatbots.
I have no idea how would one go about testing this theory, specially when I believe your conclusion to be correct to begin with. But I can see why other commenters would disagree.
Lsh, it is no clear indicator.
Actually NOT. I will not yield to those virtue signaling pricks!
But people tend to rationalize selectively, and only when it benefits their worldview. The parent comment made that clear, but you sidestepped that point. I don't think the downvotes are necessarily virtue signaling.
I was temped to downvote you, though. I live with a woman, and know many more, and I've been party to the sexism and harassment they deal with on a day to day basis. I've been party to people not believing what they say because of what's between their legs (eg "...take it for pure truth because a woman said it?"). I've been party to my wife being groped on a crowd, and seeing young teenage girls being catcalled by grown men. I've had female friends who have been raped. At this point, the evidence is more than anecdotal to me.
I find myself wondering, when I read comments like yours, if the people who make them have absolutely no connection with any women at all.
I don't rationalizing it, but I believe, the points you mention are important. And in addition, yes there are idiots on the internet. And not all problems have a easy wrong solution...
The blog post is (for me) shallow and the 'tests' would need to be expanded to be really interesting: what happens if you put on pictures from women from different cultures, ditto men from different cultures? Where are these insulting comments coming from? Does it also happen if you use 'less-into-your-face chat widgets'? etc...
Humans are guided by stereotypes and superstition and not scepticism and scientific reason. And if there is an individual that is sceptical and demands scientific reason, they are punished socially for it. This makes homo sapiens look a bit bad in my eyes.
Don't think putting a can of Coke in a cup was the problem there.
And
"coke" and "Coke". Different things.
I presume those that think this way either have no female friends or have not asked them about it.
Men generally don't get catcalls or get their body fondled by strangers.
Yeah... I still got it!
or
Something negative?
But vastly more men catcall or grope women than the other way around. That's the issue.
> It's a general projection, "why would anyone do that?".
To assert power and dominance (both attributes that are part of the common definition of "masculinity" in western societies).
Was a male bartender for nearly two years. I agree it happens from time to time that customers try to score with you, but it's really incredibly rare compared to the stuff my female colleagues had to endure (maybe twice over my career vs daily).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
Unfortunately it is one of those things that women and sometimes men will have to sacrafice if they want to live in a free country.
(See burkas)
But why are you surprised about this if the next article on HN may be about technology in PornHub?
It’s okay to treat women as a piece of meat in porn, but suddenly it’s a big deal if people are making sexual comments?
No more or less than it's ok to treat people as units of work in corporations. I rarely see sex-tech on HN anyway, plus not every feminist has a problem with porn.
I wonder what you expected. Actually, for most of us its not shocking, as that is exactly the internet we know for some time now. Have you ever been around when some 15ish boys are in a small group? They keep saying such crap the whole day. Some of us eventually grow up some day, but some seem to be stuck in their puberty forever.
I don't like it either, but I haven't found a cure for that disease yet. I mean in some online gaming communities its daily business and when you hear those guys grunting into their microphone you are very happy to have mute buttons and kick/ban vote systems (telling them to stop doesn't seem to have a positive effect on the situation).
The difference here seems to be that, you don't have to play online games, but when you work in our industry you have to cope with such crap.
Btw. whats wrong about 'rationalizing' things? I mean your list just shows quotes of people missing the point.
I would love to see this experiment done as a function of time of day in the user’s IP location. There have already been studies showing higher rates of abusive behavior towards women from low-status males[1] and if internet activity follows general population entertainment consumption trends from television we can infer that there is a higher likelihood of someone being low-status active on the internet during daytime working hours.
1. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourna...
And this shit is up top
Sigh
A single punch is battery. A single genital grab is sexual assault. A single demand for quid pro quo sexual favors in exchange for professional rewards is sexual harassment. A single message asserting that an individual is not right for their job because of their gender creates a hostile work environment, and that's also sexual harassment.
Just because there can be cases where a single message does not constitute sexual harassment doesn't mean that a single message can never amount to sexual harassment.
A single demand for quid pro quo sexual favors in exchange for professional rewards is a sexual offence, a bad one, and alone it is not harassment. IANAL, though the dictionary definition sticks with me, especially the key words: "multiple", "unwanted", and "intentional".
That's why "harassment" as a word exists, it is to indicate that multiple unwanted events have happened intentionally.
Maybe the legal definition of "harassment" differs from the dictionary definition. If so, a new word for single event harassment needs to be chosen.
That's simply wrong -- a single egregious instance can certainly constitute harassment, both in terms of common sense and in terms of legal consequences. What matters is severity -- and though repeating the behavior makes it more likely to be judged as severe, one bad incident can easily exceed the threshold. A quid-pro-quo proposal of sex-for-promotion is a perfect example.
Unless my understanding of the word "multiple" (and "persistently" and "continually") is completely wrong...
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/harassment
> Aggressive pressure or intimidation. ‘they face daily harassment and assault on the streets’
English doesn't have a definitive dictionary, anyway -- usage determines meaning. It has been the case for decades that a single quid pro quo proposal could be ruled as "harassment" in court. (As it should be!) Is it any wonder that colloquial understanding would reflect legal reality?
However, in every case where multiple messages were sent, that's clearly harassment in many jurisdictions. Additionally, the sum of actions by multiple people constitutes harassment. Also many jurisdictions will consider it harassment if there is a single, severe incident. However, many of these laws only apply when a co-worker is the harasser.
In summation: your statement is not necessarily correct.
I'm in the fashion industry. After 10 years and dealing with tens of thousands of people, this type of anonymous behavior doesn't happen. I'm looking at todays emails in the middle of fashion month, and 95% of the names are female. It would be a good way to lose any kind of status you have in the industry if you acted this way.
This is specifically a male-driven tech industry problem, and more specifically, an edge-lord meme-maker audience problem.
Don't be the self-absorbed douche that thinks everyone shares your same problems. That's only an excuse to pass the buck to someone else by blaming society in general instead of your specific group. Own up to it. Other industries have solved this problem by incorporating more women into.
When about sexism: “unless this is a triple-blind study that has been repeated across every continent, let’s not jump to the conclusion that there is a lot of online sexism”.
We should all up our game here. It’s depressing how oblivious a lot of the posts are on these comments.
Clearly, the female avatars received the worst abuse. And the effect was so strong, so immediate, and based on a solid hypothesis. Something has gone very badly wrong with the internet and we should be working out what we can do about it, rather than sticking our fingers in our ears saying “boys will be boys” or “this isn’t scientific!”. Are we all too defensive to admit there is a problem?
I think the internet has just served to exposed something heinous that has been in our society for eternity. Plenty of men have held these attitudes from time immortal, it's just that the internet gives them an easier means to express those attitudes without consequence.
Instead, people here are looking for realistic fixes - like making the chat box not automatically open so only those who need support will go out of their way to get it. I think the author would have been much less likely to receive abuse if people were actually there to ask her questions about her service than because they had just searched for a way to to generate a shitty meme. I could be wrong about that, but it'd be an interesting thing to do an A/B test with I think.
Perhaps it makes more sense to put it into security terms - In the same way that it doesn't make sense to don't go around talking about how we could live in a dream world where bots don't scan the internet for weak SSH credentials all day, it doesn't make sense for us to go around talking about a dream world where sexism simply doesn't exist. The author found a good compromise to defend herself against that threat - many people on HN are just suggesting other possible defenses.
The average HN reader is a huge beneficiary of sexism. Most people do not have the mental fortitude to accept that a decent chunk of their good fortune is due to something like this.
I dispute that statement. (I will admit that you can find some possible benefit to the majority from sexism. "Huge" is a much larger claim, though.)
Many comments in this thread are lamenting these dismissals, which happen to be languishing at the bottom while this comment as well as the original article are massively upvoted. If I were to draw a conclusion about how the community generally feels about this issue, it would be opposite to yours.
> How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere?
In a sense, it obviously is. But I want to reflect a bit on what that might entail.
You will note (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16390786) that the amount of sexist threads was 14 per week, which, in the period of 3 months with 2100 messages, gives about 1% of messages.
For reference, the DSM gives the prevalence of psychopathy at 3% for males and 1% for females (https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-people-are-psychopa...).
So, even though this sexism is a societal problem (in the sense that it exists in our society and is hard to extricate from comunities) it is not clear that sexism (or at least the sexism displayed in the article) is a problem with a social solution: teaching children (or people in general, as it may be) that this is not OK probably would not reduce the problem much further.
I predict, therefore, that no amount of society-wide measures against sexism can reduce this (very marginal!) behaviour (if the chat itself remains consequence-free for the users). That is: that fighting sexism is not gonna help this at all, and we'd need other, technical and local-to-the-website solutions.
> How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere?
That it is everywhere, in the sense that some (few) people bring it everywhere, not much. That it is everywhere, in the sense that all of society is guilty of it and each person should try to fix it in themselves, evidence of an entirely different sort.
I wonder if people are more likely to assume it's a bot when a female image is used - I've noticed that a lot of sites that are automated (or at least aren't so directly connected to a real person) use stock photos of female staff. Certainly not a justification, but could be a factor.
I wonder if there's any way you could control for that to get truer data (I'm not doubting the overall conclusion that sexism is rampant) - maybe explicitly say "This is/is not a bot" or trial photos that look like very stereotypical/generic stock photos?
When you use the word "sexism", notice how it was not necessary to say "against women". This little example highlights the strong societal view that there exists sexism against women far more than any against men to require that clarification.
The reasons I find it necessary to highlight this fact is: from the perspective of someone trying to intentionally provoke offence in others, this view is an obvious candidate for exploitation when the target is a women.
I'm talking about trolls of course, but it seems to be so hard to get that point across here... there is a clear bias in the offensive messages, but if they are all trolls (and they certainly look that way), then surely the bias reflects the simple fact that sexism against women is a reaction provoking topic, rather than "wow we have a sexism problem look at all these legitimate sincere comments", I mean isn't the later exactly what the trolls wanted.