Can we please just bury the folks out there doing treating their peers this way?
Throw them all out like the trash they are. It is so fucking stupid how we human beings have to insert our stupid thoughts and desires into everything. You'll never get rid of aggressive behavior because once people start intuitively judging people, especially over those they think are below them, it is impossible to get them to stop.
And jesus has nobody learned to not shit where you eat? Save it for Tinder.
They’ve learned that every time women speak up, there will be a dozen people with “theories” about why they’re lying, why it doesn’t matter, or why they’re not involved. Another dozen will opine about “inherent differences” in the sexes to explain differences in STEM employment, and another dozen will divert the conversation to some flavor of, “well that happens to guys too!” There’s a script that plays out, an exhausting and predictable script of denial, dismissive commentary, and deflection.
So what people learn is that they can get away with it, because usually they do. Not only can they get away with it, but dozens will leap to their defense. Watch how this thread unfolds, and compare them to previous ones. Look at the eagerness with which any suggestion that women are less suited for STEM than men is gobbled up and reposted to death. After a while people realize that STEM is full of people who use their brains to make disingenuous arguments to cover their ideological asses.
Edit: ...And now you’ve been flagged to death, meaning 10+ people flagged you in 10 minutes or less. I’m not even a little surprised.
You're right, it would be more constructive for them to respond with name-calling and vitriol instead. But that sort of thing tends to get flagged here.
Intron, you were right. Two hours later the HN front page has replaced this sexism story with a story about discrimination against men in favour of women.
I wish I hadn’t called it accurately, but yeah, the pattern once seen is hard to unsee. Taken individually it can be mistaken for sincerity gone awry, but in an ensemble over time, boom. The system here works really well for a lot of things; spam is often DOA for example! The mods though, can’t change the character of the people themselves.
I try to tell myself that a lot of the predictable, negative outcomes amount to blowback in the face of real and inevitable change though. I hope I’m right about that too.
In addition to IntronExon's points, the very headline of the article points out that these experiences don't happen as often to men. And they generally happen out of the sight of other men.
Thus even the men who are aware of the presence of bad actors are sometimes blind to how many of them there are, just how horrible their actions are, and more importantly who the bad actors are.
And because of this, a) it's harder to grasp the extent and severity of the problem; b) they may not know whose behavior needs to be corrected; and c) they may rationalize or deny a bad actor's misbehavior when someone does point it out because their experiences with him have been positive, so the accusation causes cognitive dissonance.
> And they generally happen out of the sight of other men.
Some does. Others don't. In my experience it is very common for privileged folks who feel that they are of lower status to try to exert some (generally undue) authority or dominance in group settings, usually by ha-ha-only-serious'ing nasty jokes at people who they feel that can be superior towards. Women, ESL folks, ethnic minorities--you get the idea. And the article makes mention of this--calling another employee "token", that sort of thing.
On the other end of the ladder, I've tangled with quite a few people in managerial and executive roles that thought that their, again, ha-ha-only-serious racism and sexism was somehow Not A Problem.
It's not just that it's pervasive--it's that we've allowed, for a very long time, the sorts of social shittiness that are sometimes termed "microaggressions" to set the tone for the social arrangements (and work is a social arrangement) in which we all participate with varying degrees of willingness and autonomy. The little stuff in public creates permission structures for the big nasty stuff in private.
> Thus even the men who are aware of the presence of bad actors are sometimes blind to how many of them there are, just how horrible their actions are, and more importantly who the bad actors are.
This. And as a man I am sick of it. I want nothing but the best for the women in my life, and the powerlessness of this situation makes me angry. We men are stubborn motherfuckers and it is rare for to meet someone like what is described in the post and also who seems ready/willing/able to changeinto treating others respectfully. Hence the trash bit -- just fucking throw them out.
So many of us want to get back to solving relevant problems. Interpersonal shit like this keeps coming up in our community and it needs to just. fucking. stop.
> So many of us want to get back to solving relevant problems
With respect: digging out from beneath literal millenia of unjust treatment (I mean, this behavior didn't start when we decided women were allowed to have jobs) is probably a relevant problem for decent humans in general.
I just wish that when people talk about these stories, they would highlight the country where they are writing them from.
As someone living in Europe (who lived and worked in one of more country), some of these "cultural" aspects against a certain gender feel so much out of place. In particular, expecting someone who is pregnant to quit the job is just unthinkable. Most engineering work places in Europe expect the person to take paternity/maternity leave and take care of the children but the job will be secured.
I'm not saying that gender descrimination doesn't happen in Europe but I feel that the US have a lot of more of these extreme and ridiculous scenarios.
this is in part due to the lack of legal requirements around parental leave in the US (don't think that I'm apologizing for this behavior - but I do think that is one contributing factor)
Speaking as a Swede, that is not entirely true in my experience. It's still expensive for employers and they don't like hiring women who will soon be pregnant.Or their men for that matter, but those are harder to spot :) I have female friends who changed jobs just before getting pregnant or visibly pregnant, and those employers were not happy.
Well I'm going to play the devil's advocate: How would you feel about looking for an employee for months, spending tremendous amounts of money on recruiting them, training them afterwards, only to find out that they're not going to work for you for several years and didn't even mention that, possibly messing up your financial situation, screwing up any long term planning, etc? How do you feel when someone takes an unplanned vacation (and that's just for a few weeks)?
The other cases of harassment are terrible. But I can sympathize with the managers/business owners on this one - not that I support them. I see their point.
How do you feel doesn't go into it. You probably feel like shit, granted. But we as a society have decided that it's more important that women can feel at least a little bit safer having a family as well as a career and we've regulated this so that they can be protected from losing their job.
In some more advanced countries than the US or Papua New Guinea there is even mandatory paid leave, go figure.
As an exercise you can take the pregnant woman in your example and replace with a cyclist in a bike accident or someone who was just diagnosed with cancer.
I live in one of these 'more advanced countries'. The system is bad, expensive and has many issues, but that doesn't matter for this discussion. What matters is that in these more advanced countries, for example in the one where I live, it's actually very normal to tell your manager about this so they can plan for that - and then there are no issues on either side.
BTW the paid leave is not paid by the employer, it's paid out of mandatory government insurance.
EDIT: please reply and discuss before downvoting. Downvoting adds nothing to the discussion.
Reaction to your edit with a cyclist, I have no idea how that relates to this case. That's an accident, something that no one knew will happen, and everyone understands that. On the other hand it doesn't seem nice to purposefully not tell someone information that might be extremely important to them and might even mean if they do or do not lose their business.
The position here is that it's not information that might be extremely important to them. Legally (and ethically!) this information literally can not, must not influence any of their decisions regarding that employee in any way whatsoever. What is the employer going to do if they tell them if they can't use that information or act on it? They might do something, but they should not; they likely want to do something, but they should be prevented from doing so.
In essence, the applicant has a right to demand treatment as if the employer didn't know that information. By not telling them, they're exercising that right, taking precautions so that it wouldn't be violated in a way that's illegal but hard to prove.
What? That an employee will be away for several years is not an important information? Since when?
The employee has right to be treated as if the information was unknown, I never said the opposite and never wanted to even imply that (and I'm pretty sure that I did not). That doesn't mean that the employer shouldn't have an opportunity to plan accordingly (e.g. start looking for a temporary replacement, stop accepting new projects and so on).
Okay, yes, there are some reasonable and legal actions that can be taken with that information, so it is valuable, I was apparently exaggerating.
However, giving that information right before a decision point (i.e. when changing jobs, getting a promotion, etc) is just inviting it to be misused, it's a risk they shouldn't be required or always expected to take.
For some context, some time ago I was involved in handling quite a few maternity/replacement situations. Our local laws are quite generous with maternity leave, so for existing employees we (in that company) had often started planning replacements as early as 6 months before start of their leave. However, this is a bit tricky - if there was some promotion issue in the middle of that period (3 months after I'd known but 3 months before she'd leave), I could try acting as if that information was unknown, but it's difficult, I can't magically unlearn things, I couldn't be sure myself if I wasn't biased one way or another (unless we had extremely dry formal procedure based on some arbitrary "objective" metrics that mismeasure as much as they measure), and I definitely couldn't prove that I wasn't influenced if that was contested. So in such an situation I might have even preferred not to know, despite the extra hassle it would cause.
It's probably a question of trust. If an employee is working in a trustworthy environment, they'd likely volunteer that information (which I've seen happen) and the employer would benefit from having created such an environment. But if employees feel a lack of trust, they would likely want to protect themselves and keep it a secret (which I've also seen happen), and IMHO they have (or should have) a right to do so if they really feel the need. The employer's reputation and trustworthiness is their own fault or achievement based on their previous actions, so in some sense they deserve what they get, whether it's trust or lack of it.
Why do you think that women who forced to constantly experience all kinds of problems and overload because of their gender, should be concerned about well being of groups and institutions (that tend to force them into these problems) at the expense of their own safety? Maybe you imply some ideal situation in which it is totally safe for an average woman to communicate openly like you suggest, but how often is it really the case given a huge problem of sexism we are discussing here and multiple evidence of which you were just presented?
Well as I said in another comment, I live in Europe, so it's definitely very different here.
I have several points. Let's not blame organizations for the actions of individuals (given that the organization properly deals with said individual). Let's not blame the whole industry or the whole society for the actions of individuals. If something happened to me at a conference, I won't blame my manager who is not connected to the individual that did it in any way for that - and I won't make them suffer because of that.
Of course there might be a reason to not communicate that and that's completely alright, it's business after all, but let's not make it a default choice, please - let's stay human and be nice to each other.
There are no countries where the problem of sexism is solved. Maybe it is better in Europe, but it still exists everywhere and still huge. And in the most countries it is times worse. It is reasonable to protect oneself from that behavior with all legal means and it would be strange to expect anything else of a person facing high probability of being discriminated against.
It is sad to see that even after many good explanations by other users you're in complete denial of facts that 1) normally it is dangerous for women to report openly 2) they have right to not do so 3) they are not responsible for companies's mismanagement of this possibility 4) given all this, what matters significantly more here is a woman's safety and not awareness of a company.
It is sad that after so many good explanations by me you're in complete denial of facts that
1) normally it isn't (in Europe at least), but I said that I definitely can see situations when it is (in Europe as well as elsewhere) and I never suggested nor said that there aren't any such situations or that it's negligible
2) I'm not talking about them not having a right to do so nor I'm suggesting they shouldn't; I'm saying that using this right should be properly considered before doing so instead of taking it as a default
3) Most companies (again, in Europe, but I'm pretty sure that in the USA as well) don't have any way to do anything about this mismanagement, most companies are small businesses that don't have enough money for that. Not telling them information like this will mean that they will prefer men or risk going under (because the risk of being catched illegally preferring men could be smaller than that). Do you realise that this directly contributes to pay inequality because hiring woman is more riskful than hiring a man (and no, the risk is not the maternal leave itself, the risk lies in being in a situation that you couldn't properly plan for beforehand)?
4) the business is owned by people, possibly women with exactly the same issues as well, but you suggest they don't have the same rights for safety?
I'm sorry to be rude, but did you read what I wrote? Maybe do it again, more carefully? You sound like I suggest depriving women of that right, but I explicitly said that this is not something I want to suggest.
Seems like people completely forgot that having millions of dollars in investments is not common.
Agree
Let's face facts, it's stupid to care for some random company morally in that case. And let's face some more facts, even if you don't believe in morals or agree with that one, it's way more important at the societal level for women to be able to have children then for some rando company to be guaranteed a profit
That "rando company" you're talking about is most probably an ordinary citizen just like you (most businesses are sole entrepreneurs and SMBs) and that "profit" is their living, they pay their food, shelter and healthcare for their kids and themselves with that. How would you feel like if someone said these things about women? Are you aware there are woman business owners as well and how would you feel if a woman-owned small business would go under because of this; what if the woman owner is pregnant and/or recently had a child and/or is single mother? Do you realize that you're literally surrounded by businesspeople on this site - do you think they're something less? How did you get the impression that businesses are not primarily humans? How can you say these awful things about others?
There of course are some "faceless corporations", I agree, but I'm not talking about these - the cost of an employee going on a leave is a fraction of their monthly budget. But most of businesses are small and can get into serious trouble easily.
And lastly, no one is talking about guaranteeing a profit at all.
> Well I'm going to play the devil's advocate: How would you feel about looking for an employee for months, spending tremendous amounts of money on recruiting them, training them afterwards, only to find out that they're not going to work for you for several years and didn't even mention that, possibly messing up your financial situation, screwing up any long term planning, etc?
Were I hiring in an environment where that was a legally protected right, I'd probably work it into my hiring planning in advance, then if it was occurring more often than I had accounted for, try to evaluate whether my planning was bad.
If you planned to hire based on an immediate need, it would require you to discriminate against pregnant women though. For example, if you need someone to do x immediately for the next y months, hiring someone who you know would need leave during that would be a pretty major issue.
So maybe you could simply hire her as well as another person who would be less likely to require leave during that period, but then your payroll needs grow - not a great business decision for a startup or whatever.
I think it's easy to see how this could be a predicament for a business without extra money and "get over it" isn't a very good answer IMO - at the very least you'll have discrimination being done in disguise until there's a better answer.
As a male in a professional industry in the US, it's also unthinkable to expect someone who is pregnant to quit their job.
But apparently it happens.
These stories wouldn't get the attention they're getting if they weren't shocking to many (men?). So I'd be careful of believing too strongly that it's that different where you are just because you don't see it.
> But apparently it happens.
> These stories wouldn't get the attention they're getting if they weren't shocking to many (men?). So I'd be careful of believing too strongly that it's that different where you are just because you don't see it.
In my experience and previous industries, women getting pregnant usually means baby showers and then going away parties. Marriages not so much but considering the amount of time and care a new baby incurs it is reasonable for a new mother to desire to stay at home, bond, nurse, etc. In fact my wife normally asks that very question with she encounters an expectant mother.
My wife, and quite a number of friends are from Europe (Austria, Germany, and Hungary mainly), and from anecdotes from them it is fairly clear to me that, at least in hiring practices, Europe is not a better environment than the U.S. in this regard.
For example, almost every European woman I have talked to about this has been asked either outright or strongly implied whether they were likely to have kids while employed. They have usually followed up with stories of women who were denied employment because of that. In some of those cases it was just because they were in the right age range, and despite their protestation the interviewer thought that they would.
In the U.S. I have never heard of someone being asked things like that (it is specifically illegal, and easy grounds for very expensive lawsuits).
It should be said that maternity leave (especially paid portions of it) is much longer in large parts of Europe. My sister-in-law has been on paid maternity leave now for 4 years. That ended a few weeks ago, but her employer informed her that during that leave she had build up x-and-x vacation, so she decided to take that, so she has been on "vacation" now for about a month.
That huge cost may be part of the push there. For people outside the U.S.: there is no national requirement for any paid leave, but it does require 12-weeks of non-paid leave (at least for larger companies). California was the first state to require 6 weeks of partially paid leave, but I am not aware of any states that have followed suit. It also should be said that many companied have their own more-generous policies, but those are more often the larger companies, especially ones with a mostly high-skilled workforce.
The root cause of all this is that we're all competing with an infinite supply of poor Asian people on the other side of the world that will work for pennies on the dollar.
Are you sure? USA has more of a culture of speaking out about problems instead of hushing up about them. And one of the points of the OP article is that even in the USA, men don't understand how common these stories are, because they aren't paying attention.
My father's former boss (in Germany) has fired women when they became pregnant and just paid the settlement when they sued. As soon as the employer becomes aware that somebody is pregnant they can't fire them and need to guarantee the position or a similar one for when they return from maternity leave.
I understand where you're coming from, but my guess would be that the situation is much more similar between the US, Europe and other countries than you think.
I don't like how they buried what I consider the lede.
"For the authors of this article, each negative story is overshadowed by dozens of positive experiences, where someone went out of their way to offer support, provide opportunities, and encourage us."
I think this matters to encouraging both women and men. Yes, jerks exist. Sometimes its good people having bad days, some people are monsters hiding under a veneer (ex Hollywood's Weinstein).
We need to stop dehumanizing each other, and understand all humans have the full expanse of positive and negative emotions.
Most people in technology are not bros, sjws, ceos, and whatever.
Does it matter to a woman whether their harasser is a "real" bad guy or they're just accidentally doing a good job at playing one? The idea that us 'good' men can have a bad day, misstep, or misinterpret things is definitely true, but the following idea that it some how disqualifies the action as harassment is very much not. If you don't want to be put in a bucket with Harvey Weinstein, then you need to realize that everyone has the capability to be the villain sometimes, and if you've found yourself toeing that line, you need to strongly consider what brought you there and you need to make amends in the right way.
You need not abuse women to bear some responsibility for the culture where it's tacitly okay to do so. #MeToo was nothing new; these problems were obvious to me as far back as my first job and while I've done what I've been able to do when it's arisen it has certainly not been an effort about which I have seen more than token work from the male-dominated, male-directed structures of power in tech and elsewhere. Doing nothing makes you complicit; to not be complicit, you need to do some work.
But, then, your username has an obvious allusion in it that made me look at your posting history--and suddenly I understand what you are trying to project when you Just Ask Questions on this one.
I believe parent comment's point was that there's a difference between "Every man in comparch (or insert field here) is Harvey Weinstein" and "x% of men in comparch are y% of Harvey Weinstein" realities.
With substantially different suggestions on how to make things better for each. (Respectively, 'murder all the men' and 'be aware of and active against misogyny and sexism around you')
I agree with everything you said but it still leaves me with nowhere to go in terms of combating the pervasive culture that results in sexist violence. Sure, everyone has struggles in their lives but certain groups have added difficulties that cant be fought without solidarity.
Not sure we can have this conversation productively on HN but I will say that I'd encourage you not to read what I'm saying as "all men are rapists," but more that we live in a culture that does many subtle things that encourage behaviors and thinkings that leads to violence against women.
First, if you peruse the crime statistics, you will find that the vast majority of victims of violent crime are male.
Second, if you actually look a bit more closely, you will find that our culture is vastly predisposed towards protecting women. So much so, in fact, that our perception is warped sufficiently that we think there is more violence towards women when in fact it is the other way around, by a large margin.
And of course the public narrative is almost exclusively "violence against women", and again, this is taken as gospel so much that even mentioning that there might be men who are victims is viewed as offensive.
Just as small illustrations (not "proof"), think back if you will of the story of Boko Haram kidnapping 200 girls.
It caused a huge outcry and activism from all quarters. Since there was no reporting, you might think that the boys were unharmed. Not so. The boys were actually either burned alive or forced into military service. This happened repeatedly, whereas the incident with the girls was a one-off. Media? Silence. Nobody cares. It's not a story.
There have also been numerous experiments comparing public reaction to violence man vs. woman. If a woman is being abusive towards a man, there will usually be bemusement or laughter, and comments along the lines of "I wonder what he did to deserve it". If it's the other way around, people will intervene. Quickly and fairly decisively. For example:
This is actually even more skewed as she abuses him (no reaction) and when he starts to defend himself, people immediately intervene.
So in our culture that is supposedly so supportive of violence towards women, a man isn't even allowed to defend himself against an abusive woman.
Closer to home, the whole idea of "what happens to us does not happen to you" is actually wrong. Sure, it's not the same things, we don't get asked about our pregnancies, but horrible bosses and working environment affect men just as much as women, and quite probably more, but when it's men that are affected nobody gives a crap.
Case in point, if I told you the things that happened to me over my career and told you that they happened to a woman, you'd be appalled at the horrible treatment women receive and see it as definitive proof of the misogyny of the industry.
"We are sharing these experiences in part because of encouragement by male colleagues who found them shocking. We are all still here because the rewards and great colleagues out weigh the bad experiences. However, we want to raise community awareness and instigate change."
And, the support of their male colleagues exercising what should be common human decency is not the lede of this article.
What's your intention in writing this? I'm struggling to identify a good motive, because it looks like concern-trolling to delegitimize the stories of the terrible behavior these women experienced.
I really do not consider that the lede. It’s not even 95% of what the story is about.
It was literally a collection of very negative experiences that women in tech faced because of their gender by men. It’s many examples of things men would never experience. It doesn’t matter if they’ve had many positive experiences — the consistent negatives are prevalent across most women in tech (and probably non-tech), not just isolated examples of a few.
Most of these jerks probably don’t even understand what they’re doing or the impact they’re having. It’s important to raise awareness to prevent as much of this as possible, and I applaud the author for sticking her neck out and being willing to put her name on it.
During my PhD work I often accompanied my advisor in presenting her lab's research (not only or even mainly mine) to interested companies and governments. She was an incredibly accomplished, tenured faculty member who had pulled together a massive research team (and budget) at a top research University. I was a 22 year old white guy with a BS. But many many times, I found government and industry types addressing comments, questions, and even follow-up requests almost exclusively to me.
I tried to imagine what it was like to tough out that culture back when she was a grad student or junior faculty, long before this was a even a major topic of discussion. I wussed out of the grind I would have faced as a junior faculty, even sporting all the right aesthetics. To those who have stuck it out against major challenges: you are tough as nails, you are improving the system, and it is noticed by and impacts more people than you think.
These stories upset me deeply. But as much as they upset me, they surprise me. And that's because until it was just recently, after 20+ years in the computer industry, that I discovered how pervasive such behavior is.
I'm not happy that such stories take place. But I am happy that a growing number of women are telling their stories, shocking those of us who were able to be blissfully ignorant of what was going on, and forcing us to realize just how poorly our female colleagues are sometimes being treated.
Let's even assume that 90% of the time, things are great for women in high tech. How many women are willing to put up with even 10% (or even 1%) of their time dealing with such behavior? I'm not sure if I would. And then we wonder why so many women aren't interested in technology careers, or leave after a short period of time.
I hope that these stories eventually end. But in order for them to end, we need to hear more of them, to realize just how bad things are, and to make it completely unacceptable, in every way, for things to continue as they currently are.
> Let's even assume that 90% of the time, things are great for women in high tech. How many women are willing to put up with even 10% (or even 1%) of their time dealing with such behavior? I'm not sure if I would. And then we wonder why so many women aren't interested in technology careers, or leave after a short period of time.
This is backwards. In fields women are interested in (say, dancing), they face much more harassment, because their greater interest and the increased competition from other women raise the bar for behavior that will drive them away.
Donald Trump has been accused of walking into the changing rooms at his beauty pageants. How many female engineers do you think would tolerate the boss repeatedly walking in on them naked? But a lot of girls would really, really like to be beauty queens.
> to make it completely unacceptable, in every way, for things to continue as they currently are
This seems key. Especially if it's "relatively rare but intensely negative events" (as seems to be the case).
Imagine if for every one of these stories, a colleague of the person dealing with discrimination or peer of the discriminator had tapped them on the shoulder and said, "Professor, what the fuck are you doing? That's sexist, and you're a terrible human for having done that."
And imagine if after three times of the above their peers had said "This is a pattern of behavior with you. We'd feel better if the department were headed by someone with different values."
>Imagine if for every one of these stories, a colleague of the person dealing with discrimination or peer of the discriminator had tapped them on the shoulder and said,
I think the problem is that this stuff can be very hard to detect. If there's even the slightest chance of negative repercussions then the few responsible will stop talking.
I'll respectively disagree. Granted, my personal experience is with antiquated southern racism, but I'd hazard most of the people in the OPs' stories do these things because they don't realize they're wrong.
In the "Well, why wouldn't you comment on a woman's pregnancy when evaluating her for a job?" sense.
There are certainly overt, aggressive, predatory stories included. But the bulk are things I can see being said in social or professional company.
Or as Colleague B puts it: "When asked for a paragraph, my first reaction was that I didn’t have the sort of big bombshell stories being looked for."
Borderline, casual sexism is important to vocally fight too.
> Borderline, casual sexism is important to vocally fight too.
Perhaps. Ideally. Eventually. But in a choose-your-battles context, borderline casual cases are fodder for contrarian denialists to minimize the over-the-line serious cases.
Focus on vocally fighting the most important or most fixable problem first, to make progress.
I get that bringing the slightest offenses to the forefront feeds into denialists arguing that everybody is just too sensitive. That being said, I would bet that women suffer more frequently from these borderline, casual cases than violent, overt ones and I'm much more likely to see the former in broad daylight, especially in a professional context. It's hard to accept that I should brush off sexist comments and hold my tongue until I witness an assault (or whatever the threshold is for intervention-worthy).
Can you imagine how stressed and miserable you’d be, how untrusting and isolated, if your every interaction carried significant and unknown risk of turning out as described in the article? How many of the self-styled introverts here would be able to get out of bed after the hundredth time someone they thought was a colleague or a friend acted as described in the article?
What you’re saying was said to black people during civil rights, and women trying to get the vote. What you miss is the pervasive and cumulative effect of casual, constant shit, peppered with outright abuse.
Why do so many people keep insisting on believing that the problem is specific to the technology fields? Women face these kind of problems everywhere that they have to interact with men.
Does me talking about 4 somehow imply all the other real numbers aren't real?
Yes, women face these kinds of problems in more than just computer science or technology in general. However this article and this post are talking specifically. Perhaps they feel that they cannot fix a problem that exists "everywhere" and are focused on their narrow slice of the domain. This does not prevent you from talking about other slices of the domain, or the entire domain, or working to reduce the problems women and others face in whatever piece of the domain you choose.
Also, at the risk of producing a defensive reaction -- why do you believe that the poster believes the problem is specific to the technology fields? What in their statement leads you to the conclusion that they think this is an isolated problem?
While I think you're right that people generally like to pick on tech, I think the portion of the comment you're quoting was only referencing tech to make the hypothetical case more relatable to members of this community.
If you know some women who trust you, you should ask them if they'd be happier being underpaid, professionally ignored, or groped in public my more attractive men.
because nearly everyone in this discussion is in tech; while sexism in the hang-gliding community might be as bad or worse, I'm not part of the hang-gliding community so I can do less to affect it.
> Why do so many people keep insisting on believing that the problem is specific to the technology fields? Women face these kind of problems everywhere that they have to interact with men.
Straw man? I prefer to think of it as "I work in tech and I am glad these issues are being publicised and (I hope) enough people think it's a big enough problem that finally it's being addressed, I hope seriously."
I can't do anything about, say, mining, construction, advertising, film, retail...but I can have some influence in tech and life sciences businesses.
I didn't mean to say that it only happens in high tech. But:
(1) I'm in technology for 20+ years, and didn't know this sort of thing happens, and
(2) Technology people often like to think that we're in a meritocracy, in which smart/good people do well, regardless of whether they're male or female.
These stories, along with many others, have shattered my naivete. We're just as bad as everyone else -- and maybe worse -- and need to actively combat it.
I think the reason that a lot of men are surprised about this is that they don’t personally engage in this kind of behavior and have only seen people they know engage in it occasionally, so that can’t believe it’s this widespread, but it really doesn’t take that many aggressively harassing men in an environment to create a completely oppressive environment for women. Especially when they report it and there are absolutely no consequences.
I think it's important to come up with some hard and fast rules pretty quickly and make sure it's clear to everyone. There was some pretty crappy stuff in those stories. At the same time, we need to be sympathetic to people who make mildly insensitive mistakes but at least appear to be trying to do the right thing.
For example, there's a difference between some of those guys getting physically aggressive and the one guy who basically said he'd never worked with a woman and didn't know how to talk to her.
Is the latter example okay? No, not really, but we must find a way to not lump that guy in with the physically aggressive guy. The second guy appears to be simply ignorant, but at least open minded enough to admit ignorance and try to awkwardly break the ice to move forward cooperatively.
Men and women have only worked together for about 40 years, which in anthropological/cultural time is basically nothing. We haven't figured out the rules yet. Is dating colleagues completely banned? Doubtful. That means we're going to have to accept some awkwardness between people who are trying to figure out if they like each other. But we can simultaneously say it's inappropriate to grope someone, it's not okay to call someone the "token" whatever, etc.
> Is the latter example okay? No, not really, but we must find a way to not lump that guy in with the physically aggressive guy.
Yes, it's important not to conflate those two very different behaviors. At the same time, however, we need to recognize that both are symptoms of the same underlying issue — and that's the thing that we ultimately have to change, not its case-specific behavioral expressions.
My point is that the "I don't know how to talk to you" guy is participating in the conversation of how we move towards equality. It's as important to be sensitive to confused likely allies as it is to be sensitive to victims of inequality. Obviously you don't know a person by just a couple lines of a story, but it seems very likely he wants to be a positive influence he just doesn't know what to do. It's so very important to assist him in taking the right path while avoiding condemnation. Pointing at him and calling him the same names we call the physically aggressive guys is going to be counter-productive. It's just as easy to consider him part of the problem as it is to consider him a likely part of the solution whose ignorance is the result of the problem.
I think we're agreeing past one another here. I'm merely encouraging looking at these different behaviors, which of course warrant different responses, from a broader perspective. That keeps us in mind of why we're engaging with them differently — to guide how we do that.
Maybe that's implicit in what you're saying, but I think it's likely to be more effective when considered consciously. It frames how we think about the interaction.
I don't believe they warrant just different responses, but opposite responses. The opening line of the article makes it clear that this encounter is placed squarely under the label of sexist. It sucks to be a de-facto ambassador because you're in the minority, but any time a person starts a conversation by openly admitting their ignorance and making it clear they want to move forward in a positive way should be counted as a win. This type of interaction is an essential and positive step in our transition towards equality. Scoffing at him by responding, "just talk to me like a person" or having all of us label him a sexist is going to do nothing but shut him down and turn away a likely ally.
We need something else to call this guy other than sexist. Something at least slightly positive like likely ally.
I'm curious why you use "scoffing" when The Fine Article simply says "suggested" to describe the manner of her response. What, in her two-sentence account of this experience, suggests she was overtly dismissive of his efforts?
Overt is strong, but it does seem dismissive. And the fact that it's listed in her experiences of having to deal with sexism makes it clear how the interaction was perceived.
He's making a reference to women joining the modern work force in the western world since WW2.
It's not quite the same thing as how men and women worked together historically. There was probably more segregation back then too (and rampant sexism).
Every indication has always been that this was the problem with tech and how women are treated in it (and many other fields). They are constantly having to prove themselves, they are constantly denigrated by their coworkers and colleagues, they are routinely made to feel unsafe through sexual harassment of varying severity. Overall they're just treated like second class citizens in the field. And that results in women leaving the field routinely and at basically every transitional step, that's why you see a continual diminishment in the representation of women in the field as you go towards greater positions of seniority and authority. It's not that women can't hack it, that they can't do the work, they just get tired of being shit on constantly and they go somewhere else to make their life better.
And yet for years and years and years the constant refrain from the establishment has always been "nah, it must be that women are just bad at this job" or "nah, it must be a pipeline problem". Nobody wants to look themselves in the face and ask whether or not they are part of the problem. Either through not taking women seriously in the workplace, always questioning the work and fitness of women in a way that men don't experience, or allowing a hostile work environment where sexual harassment happens and everyone just sweeps it under the rug or looks the other way.
Women have been telling each other these stories about what it was like to work in tech for decades, and they've been telling anyone, including guys, who would listen for years and years as well. Why has it taken so much work for people to actually pay attention?
> Every indication has always been that this was the problem with tech ...
I agree completely, and it's incredible that so many people with exceptional critical thinking skills could dismiss the universal, consistent reports of the witnesses to these events, in favor of the analysis of people who have no experience at all - themselves and other men. And that includes me: WTF was I thinking? Everyone who experienced these things said the same thing, people who had no direct experience said otherwise, and I believed the latter? If everyone in Honolulu said the grass in Hawaii is dewy in the mornings, and everyone in Ohio said it isn't - why would you even ask the Ohioans?
The same applies to the treatment of African-Americans by law enforcement. African-Americans have been talking about it for generations, the same stories over time and across the U.S. Why did it take videos for me to believe it?
My guess is that it comes from accepting social norms of the people around me, and dismissing people I didn't interact with. The solution, IMHO, is interacting with people outside your group and people telling their stories, as they did in this article. If you want to know what's really happening on issues like these, forget all your theories - just ask and listen (and zip it). The most ardent theories suddenly become insubstantial in the face of evidence.
Maybe it's because I'm in Israel, where I'd like to think that things are better than the US (although I'm far from sure that's true).
Maybe it's because I'm self employed, so I don't have regular "colleagues" to tell me these things.
Mybe it's because I (and other men) didn't make it clear that we were willing to listen, although I sure hope not.
For whatever reason, I believed that sexual harassment is occasional. Not as pervasive, and not as constant as the growing number of stories has made clear.
The more stories we hear, the better (I think) things will be. So keep telling these stories.
For what it's worth (I'm in Israel too), I also recently gained a new perspective on the problem of sexual harassment, though not specifically in the hi-tech industry. This was a few years before the #MeToo movement.
In my case, it was because I had a frank conversation with a female friend, where she told me a few typical stories. Things like her sitting on the bus, and the guy next to her will suddenly start touching her, or trying to kiss her. With her giving absolutely no sign of interest and not knowing the person beforehand (she's actually gay). And similar stories in other situations.
She said it happened to her about 10 times already. This is the kind of clear-cut sexual harassment which I naively thought was rare, but apparently is so common, that it's just shrugged off as a nuisance in many cases. It completely changed my perspective on just how common this is for women, even if I believe only a minority of men act in this way.
To be sure, some of this is inappropriate. Asking if someone is the "token woman" is wrong on many levels. But not all of the stories are "shocking". For example, one woman in this article complains that at conferences, men tend to not approach groups of women that are talking to each other, interrupt them, and begin talking to them. Is that unusual or discriminatory? I wouldn't do that, regardless of the sex of the participants in a group chat.
Further, in the era of #MeToo, the chasm between men and women in the workplace will grow wider simply because of liability issues. One man's innocent, casual conversation with a female coworker can these days become that woman's #MeToo moment, aired publicly, both in the court of public opinion and in courts of law. This ultimately causes fewer interactions between men and women in the workplace - especially between direct reports and their managers - which can easily lead to fewer advancement opportunities. This is borne out in data. According to a recent study, almost 30% of male managers say they are not comfortable working alone with a woman — more than twice as many as before, according to the same study [1].
I would suggest that articles like this focus on incidents that everyone can agree is atrocious and actionable behavior. If failure to interrupt a group of women talking amongst themselves at a conference is now a #MeToo moment, it's just going to cause deeper concerns about liability, which will in turn cause even more backlash.
I can see the Buzzfeed story now: “White Tech Bro Rudely Interrupts Women To Mansplain Something”. There is absolutely a chilling effect. I mean, do you want men to approach you when you’re having a conversation or do you want them to stay away from your space? At this point, it’s easiest to just retreat and not talk to people. At least then you don’t risk becoming a hashtag.
Here's a catch-22 comment from elsewhere on this post:
> Avoiding women in workplace is essentially sexist. And for non-sexists there is no reason to do so.
So you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Given how easy it is for public opinion to shift, I certainly wouldn't want to take that chance. Who would want to interact with people like that in a professional setting? I wouldn't, and I try not to.
It's very unlikely to get blamed for polite respectful attention to females if you don't confuse it with any shades of sexist moves. You don't apply this logic to men, which is sexist, even considering that male jerks are a far more often thing than female ones. So why you just dont't stop contacting them first?
I think the point they're trying to make is that the risk is close to zero for this for a straight male approaching other men, and that what you call "unlikely" is still likely enough with such a severe degree that the positive upside on such interactions is dwindling.
Why bother about side effects that are unavoidable but statistically insignificant? You can say it about any type of cryme that you can be wrongfully accused of it. So what do you suggest, gust stop punishing any crimes because of it and go back to chaos? These cases are just not a valid argument. Sexism should be punished and should be stopped, side effects shouldn't stay in the way of measures against it. Our whole legal system works like that, why is it suddenly a problem exclusively when it comes to dealing with sexism.
The issue isnt that the group is jerks (which is easy, you just stop and move on) but that they may bring down career ending social attacks on you. Unlikely with males even if superjerks.
It's not #MeToo causing problems for sure since it attempts to battle sexism by raising awareness. It is sexism which causes all types of problems that you mention. Avoiding women in workplace is essentially sexist. And for non-sexists there is no reason to do so.
This assessment naively assumes that only sexists can possibly become targets of #MeToo. Since #MeToo exists purely on a social level and without due process, the above is not the case.
Avoiding women in workplace is essentially sexist. And for non-sexists there is no reason to do so.
I disagree with you that there is no reason to do so for “non-sexists”. Because no one knows how a given person may interpret a given conversation or activity, combined with the severe consequences from the social media mob that even something as simple as an unsubstantiated tweet can inflict on one’s career or an entire company these days, the only way to avoid liability is to minimize interaction between opposite sexes in the workplace. In this environment, it’s the only rational thing to do.
We have unleashed a virtual lynch mob, ready to instantly torch the life of anyone that stands accused of even moderately inappropriate or questionable behavior. Worse, there is no statute of limitations or standard of proof required to activate the mob - a tweet is enough. That is wrong and creates a toxic environment for everyone.
You dont't apply this logic to men somehow, despite the fact that male jerks can equally destroy you career. How about stopping your interactions with men as well then? essentially you suggest to ignore and reinforce a huge problem of sexism instead of learning how to behave correctly. This approach is harmful and stinks in both moral and professional sence. Sexism and discrimination create toxic environment, not people and actions attempting to battle it.
To quote Nietzsche, "Those who fight Monsters should look to it that they do not become Monsters themselves".
In other words, people who "battle sexism and discrimination" can very well tip over and become sexist and discriminatory in the attempt to fix those exact issues.
They can become Monsters too.
The second part of this quote applies to. "If you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you".
If you fight sexism and discrimination long enough, you yourself will go under the spotlight and you'll eventually be judged for what you did. Whether good or evil.
A recent reading of Nietzsche made me view what is currently going on socially through the lens of his master/slave morality...it makes watching the "Oppression Olympics" more entertaining anyway...you can really see the "resentment" play out in full view.
"Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be 'blamed' for one's own inferiority/failure. Thus, one was thwarted not by a failure in oneself, but rather by an external 'evil'...Ressentiment comes from reactiveness: the weaker someone is, the less their capability to suppress reaction. According to Nietzsche, the more a person is active, strong-willed, and dynamic, the less place and time is left for contemplating all that is done to them, and their reactions (like imagining they are actually better) become less compulsive. The reaction of a strong-willed person (a "wild beast"), when it happens, is ideally a short action: it is not a prolonged filling of their intellect." [1]
It's impossible to tip over fighting against institutionalized injustice. The whole history of fighting sexism, racism, discrimination didn't lead to getting rid of these problems yet and there is still a very long way to go.
It is certainly possible to "tip over fighting", as you describe it.
History is filled with people who fought for a just cause, only to then turn around and become unjust themselves (IIRC from history, the french were really good at it).
It doesn't matter how much of the way you got and how much of it has yet to be walked, it's completely irrelevant to "becoming the monster".
>How about stopping your interactions with men as well then?
If a man accuses me of sexual harassment, that would be pretty easy to disprove (I’m straight) and most people would believe me. If a woman accuses me of that, in a MeToo world, my career is over, even if there is no evidence and I didn’t do it (being that we are living in the MeToo world, I guess I should say that for the record I have not ever knowingly sexually harassed anyone, and have never been accused of it).
A man doesn't need to accuse you exactly of harrasment, there are pretty other easier ways to destroy your career. You just prefer to stay sexist, not educate yourself on this matter and be a typical part of the problem. Instead of defending this disgusting attitude you could actually learn about the subject honestly and see that your position is just wrong and harmful.
It's quite impressive how completely you miss the point.
What downandout meant was that it is dangerously easy for a woman, if she were so inclined, to destroy a man's career with unsubstantiated claims of sexual harassment. It is much harder for a man to do that to another man, if both are straight.
I'm really not sure where the sexism comes in. Perhaps you could enlighten everyone.
Your knee-jerk reactions, calling people names ("sexist", "disgusting", "wrong and harmful" etc.) are the problem, not downandout's measured observation, and in fact it is exactly what he is talking about. When there's so many people like you, where is the debate? It's just pitchforks and lynching.
No, it's you who is missing the fact that ability to destroy someone's career is not gender related, but sexism is. You also don't bother to find that statistically cases of false accusations are very rare while numbers of ppl who perform all kinds of discrimination and harassment and get away with it are huge, and exactly this is the main and many times more important problem than statistically small cases of side effects like you describe. Again, learn something about the problem first, you get it backwards and ignore the most important facts.
> I wouldn't do that, regardless of the sex of the participants in a group chat.
That's what I thought initially as well. But the proper way to frame this is to ask: out of the population of men who would join a group of 3 men, how many would also join a group of 3 women? You and I aren't even part of the first group.
> This ultimately causes fewer interactions between men and women in the workplace
That's a real problem. The #metoo movement is great in getting the word out, but the backlash suppresses any men of trying to get it right. You can't expect people to make progress if they don't try, and if they try, they will make mistakes. It should be ok to make them and not get demonized in the process.
"My “mentor” told me he had never worked with a woman before and wasn’t sure how to talk to me. I suggested he try talking to me like a person."
Tbf, because of stories like this, I feel almost uncomfortable talking to my female coworkers - I immediately tense up and I have no idea what I can or cannot say, I carefully weigh up my every word to make sure it doesn't, even accidentally, have a double meaning or something that could be seen as patronizing, offensive, or flirty. As a consequence, I would genuinely rather not talk with women in the workplace and just avoid the risk altogether, which I am sure is just making the problem worse.
I think you can relax. Most of these stories are not about subtle or accidental sexism. She says her teammate introduced her as a token female. That's obviously inappropriate, right? I don't think I'd need to monitor my words carefully to avoid saying something so outright belittling to a coworker.
She says team members would openly express that they wouldn't hire women because they would just get married. I don't know about you, but that seems like something obviously dated and wrong. Growing up, both my parents worked, and that was the norm. It's been the norm for a long time. Women aren't new to the work force. So why do people think this? In any case, it should be obvious not to say things like this.
Then she says a professor followed her beck to her room and tried to forcibly kiss her. That's something obviously wrong, right? It should be easy to say "I won't follow and forcibly kiss anyone." That's like good manners 101. Basic stuff we learn in 1st grade.
The sexism described here isn't the sort of thing you'd let slip by accident. There's no double meanings here. It's just bare faced disrespect for women. So please, relax. You don't need to walk on eggshells to avoid being a complete jerk.
And if you still aren't sure how to talk to women, I would take the articles own advice: Try talking to them like a person.
> ”I would suggest that articles like this focus on incidents that everyone can agree is atrocious and actionable behavior. If failure to interrupt a group of women talking amongst themselves at a conference is now a #MeToo moment, it's just going to cause deeper concerns about liability, which will in turn cause even more backlash.”
I’m reading this on the phone, so it’s likely I might have missed it, but does the article mention #MeToo in the context of the men vs. women groups complaint you mention? If not, it’s uncharitable to imply that the complainer here is trying to equate sexual assault with discrimination.
IMO the main problem with contemporary gender conflicts isn’t going to be “incidents that everyone can agree is atrocious and actionable behavior”. Because it’s not hard for society (usually) to act on such egregious incidents. It’s I guess a good thing that professional women don’t have to constantly worry about violent sexual assault, but the author is raising the issue that seemingly innocuous behavior can still be substantially harmful.
What is innocuous and what is not can still be a matter of healthy debate. But it’s worth noting how difficult it can be for even egregious behavior to get called out.
I think many people can agree that Susan Fowler’s blog post about her time at Uber constituted outright horrible behavior. HN commenters seemed very united in this sentiment [0] and I think many tech observers would agree that it wasn’t one very huge chip that set off the clusterfuck that was 2017 for Uber.
It may seem looking back that Fowler’s whistleblowing would inevitably cause such massive outrage. But re-read her post, which is almost as nostalgic as it is outraged. It’s not just about the harassment she faced, but the institutional resistance and denial that she, and more than a few other women faced — clearly, their complaints back then were not the level of clear cut incidents that you think should be focused on. And Fowler’s whistleblowing was just a personal blog post — not a big NYTimes expose —- written months after her departure, and likely only possible because she had the time and means to think about things and not worry about career implications. It’s very easy to imagine an alternate timeline in which she just didn’t get around to writing about Uber because even she, as she says herself in that post, was incredibly thankful and fulfilled from her work at Uber, sexual harassment aside.
2. Matt Lauer - Fired for inappropriate sexual relationship with a coworker. Not an isolated incedent, as many women came forward through his career with reports of sexual assault and unwanted sexual advances.
3. Mario Batali - Accused of sexual misconduct by multiple female employees. Repeated reports of Batali groping the breasts of women who worked for him.
The "innocent conversation" is the prior coworker of mine who was reprimanded by HR and put on a PIP for "bullying" a coworker when he tried to hold her accountable for work she was supposed to deliver under his lead.
I was present, as were a handful of other women. None of us were ever followed up with to ask if this was a legitimate accusation. The accuser was given a red carpet to a choice team. The accusee was given additional workload to carry and taken out of a position of authority and placed in a punitive program.
I have seen this happen twice in the last 3 years.
Do not take this as defense of the examples you mention, but as a warning against unintended consequences that simply don't ever show up in the press because they aren't highly visible and won't draw clicks, especially if they go against the status quo. If you need further evidence, look at the speed to which a concrete, evidence backed accusation with respect to google's hiring practices got flagged off the front page, whereas this thread is still much higher ranked after much longer time and fewer votes.
> where is this "innocent conversation" you mention?
Not those cherry-picked examples obviously? Do you have access to every single report in the world? Is it impossible that some might not be completely legitimate and can act as a way to retaliate?
As a man, I'm clueless on how to help. I certainly don't make any comments of similar nature or perform actions described in the stories.
However, if I were to observe such an event happening, I'd be frozen. One half of me thinks, the woman is an individual and can stand up for herself. If she's uncomfortable, she'll say or do something. She's of equal standing.
The other half of me, I feel like I should say something. But by doing so, that asserts my male patriarchy views, protecting women from the danger. Women wouldn't be considered an equal in this scenario.
I feel exactly the same way and have faced similar thoughts.
If nothing happens I assume no offense was taken and move on I guess... but sometimes that bothers me more.
Noting how if two women are talking to each other at a conference, it becomes highly unlikely any guys will walk up and join us. If three women are talking, forget about it.
I would feel intimidated walking up to a group of women because I might be criticized for anything I did. And wouldn't a woman feel intimidated walking up to a group of men too?
> The other half of me, I feel like I should say something. But by doing so, that asserts my male patriarchy views
When I have been in these situations, the root problem has been someone being shitty to a friend/colleague/co-worker/whatever. Saying "that's shitty, stop" doesn't mean you're speaking for any particular person or that you're defending her person specifically--what you are doing, and you can explain if asked, is that you are establishing social norms with your behavior that you are telling the group that you expect everybody to follow.
There are many axes along which one can be shitty, and it is not a reinforcement of patriarchal structures to set expectations that people be decent to one another--so long, of course, as you're doing so evenly. I have gone hard at co-workers who were shitty to women. I have also gone hard at co-workers who were jerks in code reviews.
What I quoted strikes me as perhaps a misapplication of the idea of patriarchy and what it does to society--at least, in the sort of case you're describing. Could this be taken to an extreme that would validate your concerns? Totally. But in practice? It never has been the case for me (and I am solicitous about asking if I am out of my lane). It is important to be willing to listen, in case that, yes, you are out of your lane--but I have never seen a default posture of "no, we don't allow shitty behavior up in here" cause friction with anybody it shouldn't cause friction with.
"But, y'know, thanks for being the dude chiming in with unnecessary remarks intended to undermine both my point, and the plaintiff's lawsuit, while we discuss the topic of gender-based discrimination and harassment.
Super helpful and appreciated."
akay:
"not at all what I was trying to do, sorry if it came across that way. I just don't see how confirming the existence of nerf guns within that team helps the discussion in any way.
Still it’s good to see thst your first instinct is military grade handwaving. I have to wonder if you have similarly high standards in all cssss, or if your skepticism is reserved primarily as a means of deflection.
All of which is to say thst you could actually trust the people telling you their stories in the article, or discuss the underlying issues, rather than deflect via nitpicking. It’s grotesque. This whole thread, the voting patterns, the flagging of the article, and the sheer force of whining from people who feel put upon by hearing about this is also grotesque... More than it would be on another site, where at least stupidity and lack of education could be an excuse.
> All of which is to say thst you could actually trust the people telling you their stories in the article, or discuss the underlying issues
As in the last time you hijacked a thread as an excuse to complain about other people expressing an opinion you personally disagree with, you haven't discussed, or shown any interest in discussing, a single issue in the article.
You flag people left right and center, simply because they don't happen share your personal views.
When that doesn't remove their posts, you throw around insults like "stupidity", "childishly", "asinine points", "crazy" and accusations of intellectual dishonesty.
Again, all because other people don't happen to share your personal views, which you seem to think are the last and only word on any issue.
You complain that the article is flagged, despite also complaining that articles like this produce "utterly predictable" comments.
Despite the "grotesque" and "depressing" nature of the thread, you can't help but wade into it yourself, where in multiple posts the only one where you don't post insults or complain about people with different opinions is this, straight out of Python[1]:
Remarkable that in both threads two other usernames specifically namecheck you, "IntronExon", the 40 day old account (with ~3000 karma, that posts like a veteran).
Going on a rant implying that there is somehow a grand conspiracy at foot while also attacking the user personally is not doing you any particular favors, considering you're doing exactly the same thing you're purporting he's doing.
>As in the last time you hijacked a thread as an excuse to complain about other people expressing an opinion you personally disagree with, you haven't discussed, or shown any interest in discussing, a single issue in the article.
>You flag people left right and center, simply because they don't happen share your personal views.
These are personal attacks.
>Remarkable that in both threads two other usernames specifically namecheck you, "IntronExon", the 40 day old account (with ~3000 karma, that posts like a veteran).
No, they're statements about behavior, and no more "personal attacks" than you falsely accusing me of making personal attacks, or of falsely accusing me of "ranting" about a "grand conspiracy at foot".
> This is an allusion to conspiracy.
So it's no longer a "grand conspiracy", just a mere "allusion to conspiracy"?
What's the "conspiracy" you claim I'm alluding to then?
It’s funny you say that because my workplace is EXACTLY the dumpster fire known as Twitter. No, I don’t work there. Rather, all issues of “diversity” are pretty much the same ridiculous identity politics stuff you find on Twitter. The straight, white men at the office regularly post content that is denigrating to those very same groups (usually in the form of pithy memes; it isn’t even intellectual content). I don’t know how common this is in SV or elsewhere, but it’s certainly prevelant where I am now. And I don’t care how someone feels about “cishet white boys”: that kind of thing is not appropriate for work. Ever. At all.
Agreed, I no more want to hear hate from the far Left tham I do from the far Right. Neither side seems to understand that the existence of the other isn’t license to drag people into the mud. Fortunately I think the loud minority is a minority; most conservatives I know aren’t hateful bigots, and most liberals I know aren’t “kill the white men” crazy.
...and frankly work can be stressful enough without crazy in both ears. It’s important to distinguish between hate/crazy and a real and present issue within the workplace though.
It's unfortunate that often the loudest advocates for a cause are not its best advocates, and this leads to backlash. Sometimes people who take on roles that require extreme confidence forget they are fallible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing
I think this is a really honest point. I'd also like to springboard off of it. As the authors point out, many men are shocked by these stories. I am too. I've been in tech 10 years or so (mostly startups) and have a lot of semi-abusive stuff to report, but none of it that I've seen is gender/sex related.
I agree it's good to share awareness of these problems. However, I think there's nothing more for me to do. None of my female coworkers have ever reported something fishy, and if they did I'd simply report it to HR where I know the situation would be handled.
I also wonder if it'd be productive to stop singling out tech (which seems much less sexist than say, finance).
The single most powerful thing you can do is engage women as serious professionals.
My biggest frustration is not with the guys who want to talk to me to hit on me. It is with the countless others who will not engage me in a substantive manner for fear of it being misconstrued. They de facto leave me alone with the creeps, trolls and assholes and are, on some level, equally guilty of treating me as nothing but a vagina. It gives far too much weight to my gender and far too little to my education, skills, competence, interests and character.
Whether a man is talking to me solely in hopes of a hookup or avoiding me for fear of offending or something, he is equally guilty of treating me like the single most important thing about me, the thing that drives all social decisions, is what bits are between my legs. This is the essence of sexism.
Your statement and the one above are part of the problem, not part of the solution. My mind boggles that you are fine with arguing that your guilt is lesser, thus somehow apparently okay in your mind.
This is exactly why progress is so painfully slow. For every one man pushing a woman into the river to intentionally drown her, a thousand more stand idly by and say "Not my problem" and then worry vastly more about defending their right to do nothing than about the injustice they witness daily.
If a woman wants to come talk to me as a professional, I’m all for it. I love it when women take initiative to come talk to me, and not in some creep way like people may think, but rather because it instantly makes me a lot less anxious. I can’t be readily accused of hitting on her if she came to me first.
However, I can probably count on one hand the number of times a woman has come up to me in my professional career to talk to me about anything of professional significance.
Every time I approach a woman first however, there’s always an anxiety that I’ll be perceived as a creep, trying to play a really long game of hooking up with her. I know women must think this, because I constantly hear their stories about the various ways men hit on them in nearly any situation, and there always seems to be a bit of an awkwardness that isn’t there when they approach me first.
And if the woman I approach happens to be attractive and younger than me? It looks real bad. Indeed, if someone could have any reasonable doubt that my professional conversation with a woman is anything more than platonic, I would be uncomfortable in that conversation. Men would look at this and think “Yea he’s probably trying to get with her”.
I do not get the same anxiety when talking to a woman with her husband or boyfriend, or a woman who is much older than me, or homosexual women.
The thing about standing by and saying this is “not my problem” is that it really isn’t my problem. My problem is completely different from yours, even though it’s in the same domain, and nobody helps me with it either. As a basic straight white male, I’m a dime a dozen and if I voice any kind of problem the response is to go fuck myself.
This has nothing to do with you being a woman, there are also men with problems that I do nothing for. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.
Yeah, that's what I already do-do but your suggestion doesn't help with any of the situations mentioned in the linked post. The post describes interactions that are non-work related between people.
Work-wise, I have my "go-to" people when I need something done. I don't care what their gender is, I just know they've performed well in the past and get it done in time to help me make my deliverable date. Once a person demonstrates reliable performance of getting the right answer, I don't need to go to others. How does that help solve the problems mentioned in the post? Not really clear to me.
How does that help solve the problems mentioned in the post?
It sets an example. Examples are far more powerful than most people recognize.
Currently, if a man is talking to a woman, he is probably hitting on her. This becomes self reinforcing behavior. Women assume that men talking to them are hitting on them. Observers assume it is a personal relationship, not a professional one. Men avoid talking to women unless they are hitting on them because they don't want a problematic misunderstanding. This helps entrench sexism.
Meaty engagement as a professional breaks that expectation. If enough men will do it, good will crowd out bad.
Currently, women are overly vulnerable because they are professionally isolated. They get insufficient legitimate interest. This leaves them in a needy position. They can't easily afford to turn away the creeps if the only people talking to them are the creeps. They hold out hope that maybe this time it will be different.
If there are people they can reliably access who are taking them seriously, it gets vastly easier to walk away from the creeps. It also can help signal to the creeps (or the non creepy clueless) "This is how you talk to a female colleague."
I have enormous difficulty establishing professional connections. I have been on HN 8.5 years. I have zero strong professional ties. There are about 3 people who email occasionally.
Networking was one of the things I hoped to get here. There are men who network via HN. It has not worked for me.
I was homeless for 5.7 years. I remain dirt poor. My attempts to point out that my gender is a barrier to making strong professional connections is a root cause of my poverty have largely fallen on deaf ears for years and what minimal headway I have made is extremely recent.
One outcome related to that: I let some young punk talk to me for some weeks who was pretending to be my friend because he was basically the only person talking to me and I desperately need professional connections. Ultimately, he let me know he needed a shoulder to cry on because his marriage was falling apart.
I did the decent thing and was supportive for a time. Then he resumed sleeping with his wife, repeating things to her that I had told him in confidence and talking at me as if we were lovers, a thing I told him was absolutely a non starter.
The relationship made me uncomfortable from the start. There were a lot of weird issues with it that suddenly made sense after I learned he was married and hiding it from me.
I took a no harm, no foul position on it initially. The more I think about it, the more I feel I was used, deceived and set up. He had no plans to ever take me seriously. He withheld his age and marital status knowing he could not get close to me romantically if I did know those things.
All the uncomfortable red flag stuff got ignored by me because I have literally zero strong professional connections to anyone at all. I simply don't know what that looks like. Further, I am dirt poor. I am in very desperate need of connections and opportunities and cannot get that.
If I had plenty of professional connections, I would have never let this guy string me along and set me up to be his shoulder to cry on.
Can't say I have many professional connections either, not a big fan of "networking" in general. However, the people I do consider connections are those from college and those from former groups at previous jobs. Maybe someone from another group, but it's rare. My career jobs have lasted a few years (4-6) so that has provided time to develop these relationships. I suppose it would be much more difficult in the gig economy to establish these relationships. I try to offer value or different perspectives at my jobs that nobody else can. Work hard, deliver, and if I can't... let them know ahead of time and what help is needed. I try to let my work network for me rather than being active about it. Do you have any projects you've worked on? Might be a good source of networking connections, keep up with former coworkers, coffee, lunch, referrals, etc.
To try to put it in a nutshell: However many professional connections you have, you are probably confident they are, in fact, professional connections and not just giving lip service to the idea until they can spring it on you that what they were really hoping for is romance.
Anyway, thanking you for engaging with me. It's been a good exchange.
Being misconstrued is a consequence of the way society has run men down over the last few decades. Feminism has been no help here. I don't care if my colleagues are men or women. What I do care about is when I am a man and do not act or communicate in the manner of a woman, I am then considered sexist.
Men and women think differently, see differently, communicate different and that is all good. But to be treated as a low-life male (which is quite common) by many women only reinforces the idea that women should not be engaged in any substantive way.
Your attitude of thinking that men who are avoiding you because you are a women are guilty of sexism is no less a sexist attitude and is part of the problem that you do not want to accept as part of your responsibility to solve.
Your words exhibit a prickly attitude that is a strong warning sign that, irrespective of how talented and professional you are, you are to be avoided because you will likely be the cause of accusations of sexism against those men avoiding you. It's a two way street. The problem is on both sides. There are men who need a complete mental readjustment because they consider women as things and there are women who need a complete mental readjustment because they treat men as low-lifes.
Stop treating men who avoid you as sexist and you might just find out how well you will be treated in return as a serious professional by those same men.
Maybe people don't want to interact with you because of your behavior?
If, as a man, I am basically an asshole to you, then maybe I don't want to interact with you, period.
And let's be clear: I don't know you, I don't know whether you are a robot or whatever, I just know what you wrote here. And what you wrote here makes me hope not to have to interact with you in real life.
Maybe people don't want to interact with you because of your behavior?
I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of HN (under a different handle). As far as I can tell, other women are not generally being more warmly welcomed with open arms by the community than I am.
I do everything in my power to examine my behavior and correct any defects I can find. This only goes so far because there are, in fact, larger societal forces at work.
If all women are incapable of getting the results they need, it is disingenuous to blame them as individuals and deny that society has some problem.
What happened to just letting people deal with their own problems? A lot of people work with managers and coworkers who treat them unfairly, and you can't do anything about it besides be a good person yourself. Sure, women have an even harder time, but that's going to change as society continues to shift as more culturally progressive. Until then, sexist people are going to continue to be sexist.
I would appreciate if you would explain to me why it is acceptable to ignore injustice because there are other injustices you think you can't do anything about.
These are relatively small and very personal problems. The media portrays it as some great social injustice when it's really just a few people making rude comments. The author claims that we should all be more supportive of women in CS, but there's already a lot of support. At some point, you just have to wait for people to help themselves.
Women having it harder and sexism are small and very personal problems? It's just not true, things are right the opposite. If there was enough support the described situations would not be the norm. It is not enough support until it completely stops. And even then, women will not be compensated for huge damage already done to them, and will still need support due to this fact.
Simply work to continue educating yourself and try adding new helpful behaviors one at a time. For example, women are much more likely to be interrupted when they are speaking. Learn to recognize this, learn to stop doing it if you're doing so but more importantly learn to stand up for women when it happens. All it takes is "excuse me, I believe X was talking, I'd like to hear what she has to say before moving on". Just like that.
As for being clueless, well, here is a suggestion. If you see some man hitting on or trying to dominate a woman, you can approach both and just intrude yourself into the conversation. It should be possible to change the course of the interaction by redirecting things (including asking about some relevant conference or workplace activities). Do it in a way that says to the man that you are ignorant of goals, frustrate the living daylights out of him.
It is irrelevant if the recipient of the unwanted attention is a women or a man, protection and respect is something that should be applied to all. Protecting women (children and other men) from danger is a characteristic of what it is to be a man, that is one of our functions. This is not a function of equality. The same goes for women - if they are in a position to provide protection for other women, children or men, then do so. It is a part of who women are.
Men are deadly and rightly so, they should be. Deadly to protect those who need protecting. Women are fierce and dangerous and rightly so, they should be. Fierce and dangerous to protect those who need protecting.
Men and women are different and that is a good thing. Without each other, this world would be a sadder, darker and more injurious place.
There will be those who have no care for anyone other than themselves, these will abuse and destroy anyone else they can to get ahead. It is up to all of us to counteract these individuals when we have the opportunity.
The base problem is that people do not know how to respect and protect one another. Respect is not about equality, it is about recognising the differences between people (including the differences between men and women) and honouring each other. Equality of the sexes is a farcical mindset. Men and women are complimentary, each providing what the other doesn't have to produce a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Each looks at things in a different light and that is to the advantage of us all.
Most of the time it's not even reacting to something; simply taking the time and effort in mentoring a bright lady is another shield in the bulwark to this nonsense.
As a personal example, I have the deepest respect for one of my former (male, obviously) bosses who took a chance on me and fed me high-profile projects despite being a double/triple minority. (I hate the need to disclaim that last bit, but y'know, take it as illustrating the situation). Not a single interaction was awkward - there were group meetings aplenty, professional one-on-ones, silly one-on-ones where we were both cracking up at corporate shenanigans, water-cooler chats to triage the crazy amount of work we were getting, y'know, normal stuff. Good people exist, and there can be light moments too. Not all of this has to be The Most Srs.
He left a few years later due to natural company reorgs, but that extra limb out is something that's remembered quite dearly. Just standing by wouldn't have cut it.
> a manager at Microsoft told me I was only hired because I was a woman.
> “You must have had a lot of offers because you are black.”
I’m not in any way condoning this sexist/racist behaviour.
But statements like these reflect the fact that “affirmative action,” “positive discrimination,” quotas etc are HURTING women, by creating prejudice against them.
Some want to solve tech gender disparity by “engineering” an equality of outcome.
The harm done by these social engineers will last for generations.
I think I agree. Often I can't really tell the difference between affirmative action and reverse racism. I'll admit that I am often ignorant, but if the quest is equality (which I am all for) then affirmative action (or essentially making two people of different races not equal for only the reason of race) seems damaging.
Those are my honest thoughts, please don't destroy me. I see you were flagged and I'm not sure why, I think you present thought provoking points, and while I tend to agree, I would even like to see the views of those who disagree, not sure why they wouldn't want to see yours ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m really sad at the deterioration of the HN community into a place where reasonable and inoffensive comments are flagged and downvoted simply because people disagree on a political level.
I’ve found myself spending less time on HN. Other discussion communities are more inclusive and more diverse - and by that I mean the only meaningful flavour of diversity - diversity of opinion.
> Other discussion communities are more inclusive and more diverse - and by that I mean the only meaningful flavour of diversity - diversity of opinion.
Would you mind sharing. The HN hive-mind has started getting to me lately. If I wanted to see well-intentioned, well-reasoned but fairly unpopular conversations being flagged and shut down, and illogical popular opinions up-voted to the top, I'd rather go to FB or some other place.
> "Often I can't really tell the difference between affirmative action and reverse racism."
There is a good reason for that...its because there isn't a difference. You have to do a lot of linguistic gymnastics in order to somehow come to the conclusion that affirmative action isn't racist.
Sounds about right to me. I think that there are many terrible things that have happened and even continue to happen that stem from racism and sexism, but I don't think a solution will come from the same thing that spouted so much evil.
Despite it not being the only problem, there is a "pipeline" problem.
I believe that affirmative action can help speed up solving the pipeline problem.
If nothing else, just having X% women in tech a few years sooner can help us to hit the critical mass of women where things like "I have never worked with a woman before" become something that no senior person could say.
On top of that it provides role-models for children, who pattern match themselves against where they might be in the future.
The core problem is that for a woman working in tech is a shitty job, compared to what it is for a man. It means a much harder uphill battle for recognition, for jobs, for seniority, for autonomy in their work, for being treated like a basic human being in the workplace, etc. It's a fantasy to imagine that women don't notice this or haven't been noticing this, they do, they have. That's why so many women leave the field, and that's also why so many decide not to enter it.
You make tech an inviting and rewarding field for women to work in and the "pipeline problem" goes away on its own. Right now the story "women will be rewarded for working in tech" is a hard one to sell to little girls because substantially it is a lie.
I think little girls are more strongly affected by the fact that there are so few women in tech than the fact that it is shitty for women in tech (though obviously one affects the other). My evidence for this is purely anecdotal though.
Making it less shitty decreases those leaving and affirmative action increases those entering.
In addition, part of what has made it so easy for the environment to be so shitty is the low percentage of women (obviously rampant sexism plays a big part too, but the "I've never worked with a woman" "You're a woman so you must be non-technical" &c. are sustainable largely because of the low percentage of women).
I think it's a bit disingenuous to imply the commenter above thinks "centuries of active discrimination is not the main problem". From what I can tell, they were suggesting that programs trying to actively balance gender/race/cultural/etc ratios do more harm than good. If they didn't care for the _goal_ of rectifying gender/race/cultural/etc discrimination, they probably wouldn't be posting in a thread about it.
Your comment is a bit like the reaction one gets when suggesting maybe the department of education is a flawed institution: "So, you don't want children to be educated?"
Most people don't understand the purpose of "affirmative action" style hiring. It's not to implement a quota and to enforce an "equality of outcome", that's basically unworkable. Rather it's a form of "kentucky windage" to compensate for a system that has a known series of institutional biases across the board. It's a crude tool but if the alternative is waiting until all of those biases naturally bleed out of the system over generations then it's generally preferable.
The comment section on this one is both depressing, and utterly predictable. The brigading, the “but’s” and the use of the article as a flimsy ideological springboard to make really asinine points. It’s good to see people expressing their dismay and surprise too, and hopefully over time those voices will become louder.
We’re still a ways from an article like this being met with something more constructive than the usual deflections, excuses, and ideological fights. We’re still stuck with arguments that wouldn’t have been out of place during various civil rights and suffragette movements.
It’s coming though, and I for one can’t wait. It’s just sad that we’re missing out on the talents of many women who make a rational choice to avoid STEM and it’s frequn toxic culture of asocial/antisocial asses. It’s sad that a site full of bright, educated poeple can still so frequtmly come off as a pack of deflecting, equivocating, terrified boys. Everyone involved deserves better than this.
So speak up, take a risk, and most of all act like and be someone that other people know would stand up for them. Be the kind of person who an absuive prick would never think of saying or doing what’s described in this article, around. Talk to and listen to your coworkers, and try to have some ideals beyond personal advancement.
There are a lot of disturbing things in these stories, but I also see a lot of remarks about situations that have a number of alternative explanations besides sexism.
For instance:
> Noting how if two women are talking to each other at a conference, it becomes highly unlikely any guys will walk up and join us. If three women are talking, forget about it.
Yes, indeed, and there are a number of reasons for this. From my point of view, I would avoid approaching a group of women talking by themselves since I'd be the odd one out.
> My “mentor” told me he had never worked with a woman before and wasn’t sure how to talk to me. I suggested he try talking to me like a person.
Depending on the tone, it may mean something completely different than what you are trying to say.
In fact, to me, it looks to me like he was talking about an insecurity he has, and it's not directly related to you... and you are tagging this as sexism.
Long story short, there is a clear line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and that is respect. It's clear that this line was crossed in a number of times in these stories, but just because you are in a position where you didn't like something doesn't mean the line was automatically crossed.
> From my point of view, I would avoid approaching a group of women talking by themselves since I'd be the odd one out.
Women in male-dominated workplaces already feel like this every day.
I would submit that, while it is important to be cognizant that there are cases in which you may be intruding[0], the overwhelming majority of situations that's really not likely to be the case. It's work. You're working. Joining co-workers to talk about work is fine and overthinking it will bite you.
[0] - and yes, this may be identity-based and that may in a vacuum feel unfair, but we've held most of the cards for the run of human history and we can deal with it.
That section begins "But it’s important to portray the drip-drip-drip of smaller stories as well, so here goes."
> I would avoid approaching a group of women talking by themselves since I'd be the odd one out.
In what world is that not sexism? It's at least "sex-separatist", which isn't a good thing either. The fact that it is theoretically symmetrical doesn't make it OK. (And in practice it's not symmetrical, since women are an extreme minority at these events.) That is treating people differently because of gender, in a situation where gender is irrelevant.
The thing though is men are seen as potential harassers, which women virtually never have to deal with. Even though we aren't, enough men are to color relations with women and add wariness to interactions; women would see us approaching, and not see us as professionals alone. And guys know they see us that way, and its not unwarranted; they don't know we won't be creepy tech guy, and there's a lot of proving on our end to assure them we wont be.
> Yes, indeed, and there are a number of reasons for this. From my point of view, I would avoid approaching a group of women talking by themselves since I'd be the odd one out.
That's really weird. Why would you assume--in a professional environment, specifically--that it's less acceptable to approach a pair of strangers based exclusively on their gender?
> In fact, to me, it looks to me like he was talking about an insecurity he has, and it's not directly related to you... and you are tagging this as sexism.
How would you feel if the mentor had said they'd never worked with black people before, and weren't sure how to talk to them?
You mentioned "alternative explanations besides sexism," but I don't see any way that these explanations aren't sexism.
I wonder if you're assuming that "sexist" only applies to harassers and open bigots. If you mean well but are unable to treat colleagues equally because of their gender, that's sexist. It doesn't mean you're a monster or a bad person, but it does mean that you have some real problems that you need to address.
Isn't a person who refuses to acknowledge and change his toxic behavior despite all warning signs a definition of a bad person (which also often transitions to monster)?
I wouldn't, because his learning time means his victims's time in hell. It also doesn't work like this legally, in case of committing a crime, not fully realizing one's own problematic behavior is not quite an argument.
It still applies, although on a smaller scale. Some person will feel uncomfortable because of another person's learning process. It's obvious that learning will take place, but it should happen as an established and guided process like training or curation, this kind of learning is ok.
>> Noting how if two women are talking to each other at a conference, it becomes highly unlikely any guys will walk up and join us. If three women are talking, forget about it.
> Yes, indeed, and there are a number of reasons for this. From my point of view, I would avoid approaching a group of women talking by themselves since I'd be the odd one out.
The outcome for the women is similar regardless of the motivations behind the behavior. The motivations matter in terms of how to solve the problem, but do not indicate there isn't a problem.
>> My “mentor” told me he had never worked with a woman before and wasn’t sure how to talk to me. I suggested he try talking to me like a person.
> Depending on the tone, it may mean something completely different than what you are trying to say.
I can't read this as not implying that the individual believes that the way he talks with male students is inappropriate for talking with female students. This implication is worrisome no matter which direction you take it in.
> In fact, to me, it looks to me like he was talking about an insecurity he has, and it's not directly related to you... and you are tagging this as sexism.
If I say "I've never performed trigonometric substitution before so I'm not sure how to solve this math problem." m I may be talking about an insecurity I have, but it certainly is directly related to them math problem.
> From my point of view, I would avoid approaching a group of women talking by themselves since I'd be the odd one out.
That is exactly sexism – the subtle, insidious kind that us men tend not to even notice. You aren't the odd one out; you and them are all professionals at a conference.
That many men – the majority of attendees at most tech conferences – make decisions like yours is a major reason why it is more difficult for women to advance in tech fields than men. Behavior like this is exactly what people mean when they talk about "patriarchy". That it's subtle and "innocent" – "I'd be the odd one out" – is what makes us not recognize it in ourselves.
> That is exactly sexism – the subtle, insidious kind that us men tend not to even notice
Suppose there is a group of girls at a high school is approached by a single guy that doesn't know them. What is the odds of being welcomed into the conversation without any questioning looks? At least at the high school I went to, it'd pretty low odds. As a consequence, guys learned not to do that.
That stuff carries forward, even if the situation has changed somewhat. You have a population of men trying to be polite. They're not going to approach groups that have given them negative feedback before, because they don't want to be a jerk.
Once again: "you and them are all professionals at a conference."
You aren't in high school.
You aren't facing a clique of girls who happen to all live in the same neighborhood and have radically different interests likes and dislikes from you.
You're facing a group of top industry professionals self-selected from around the region/country/world (depending on how large/prestigious of a conference it is).
And the fact that you don't understand this distinction, the fact that you think it's legitimate for a man to categories "groups of women" as "cliques of mean girls" from high school onwards without reflecting or reevaluating the changing circumstances is why society (and more specifically YOU) still have a long way to go to understand what sexism is and is not.
Kindly think a little deeper into what you're reading instead of leaping to insult people.
There is a difference between explaining why people do things and approving of it? I was literally explaining why the "insidious" sexism existed. I even quoted what I wanted to elaborate on.
See, that's where we disagree: I'd probably not approach any group talking by themselves in a conference if I was the odd one - the only latino, the only man... you name it.
Maybe I would if I had something to add to the conversation, but to simply socialize? No.
In another context, a social one, maybe... but otherwise I don't see how that would work out.
And that says nothing about any bias, at least I cannot see it that way. Maybe it reflects some sort of insecurity, fear of rejection? Yes for sure. But that goes really far from sexism.
I don't think the tech industry can really change unless it makes gender balance a priority.
How many tech CEOs will stand up and say: "I have an 80% (or 90% or a 100%) male tech team because there are not enough qualified women to achieve gender balance."
No CEO will be caught dead saying that explicitly but they are saying it implicitly every single day with how they are staffing their companies.
From reading HN it seems like a large percentage of people here believe that the gender gap is due to a qualifications gap and they might dump on people like James Damore for being dumb enough to say it in public but most of them believe it and the way they act shows it.
The bottom line is that if you are not achieving gender balance on your teams what you are telling women and what you are telling the world is that you believe men are superior to women and that women are not qualified for these jobs.
Actions speak louder than words and as long as the actions of companies and individuals reflect this attitude no amount of words is going to change anything.
Achieving gender balance in tech is possible and is only a matter of choice.
There are more than enough qualified women to fill tech jobs in roughly equal proportion with men.
It doesn't happen because (among other reasons):
1) The people doing the hiring are overwhelmingly men and set rules and standards for hiring that discriminate against women
2) Companies believe that young men are more profitable employees and so they do nothing to seriously discourage discrimination
Unless this changes the experience of women in tech will be a negative one.
All a woman has to do to know that she is undervalued and seen as an inferior is walk into a company that has a overwhelmingly male tech team and that is most of them.
While I can't speak for others, I'm not sure that most people here think there is a gender gap because of inability on the part of women, but instead maybe a difference in general interests between the sexes.
I'm also not so sure about your claim that "there are more than enough qualified women to fill tech jobs in roughly equal proportion with men." I rarely have the chance to talk to women who are similarly interested in computers, and at my university there are very few women who are in any of my CS classes, despite that I feel that those who are there feel welcome (hopefully. I am not all-knowing, this is my best guess).
I think a better solution to the problem than pressuring people into hiring women simply for the virtue of being female and aiming for 50% would be to call sexism what it is. Call out when people who do the bad of hiring a less qualified man instead of a woman (this is a contrived example, hopefully you're understanding my point).
Solving sexism with more sexism probably won't work.
> I rarely have the chance to talk to women who are similarly interested in computers
This is probably true, but the idea that you have to be "passionate about computers" to do the job is one of those things that men have made up to exclude women.
In order to have gender equality you have to identify these areas of gender difference and eliminate them from hiring criteria.
> pressuring people into hiring women simply for the virtue of being female
That is the mischaracterization that everyone falls back on. They assume that if you have a gender balanced team it is because you hired people "because they are women."
That logic implies that those women are not qualified for the job and that you could never build a gender balanced team with qualified women.
Until we make gender balanced teams the norm people are going to keep thinking like that, which is why it is so important to take corrective action.
> the idea that you have to be "passionate about computers" to do the job is one of those things that men have made up to exclude women.
I didn't say that they need passion. I am saying, however, that I am less likely to go into medicine because I am not interested in it. Maybe the same could be the case for women? (meaning, if there is a general trend that less women are interested, then less will join said field of work, because it is their choice not to).
> That logic implies that those women are not qualified for the job and that you could never build a gender balanced team with qualified women.
You have a good point. This sentence does have a negative connotation as you say, but it is not exclusively said. Could it also be possible that a push to hire more females (explicitly because of needed gender balance, something that is, in my opinion, contrived) has happened enough recently that people's minds go there first?
> Until we make gender balanced teams the norm people are going to keep thinking like that, which is why it is so important to take corrective action.
Interesting point. I'm not willing to say you're wrong, because you might be right. I'll admit, I thought that less women graduate with CS degrees than men though. Am I wrong? If not, how do we get more women to enter that major? And what if they don't want to simply because they're not interested?
edit: I appreciate that we can talk about this btw, and that you seem to respect my opinion. I think this is a valuable part of this discussion. Thanks.
> thought that less women graduate with CS degrees than men though
This is absolutely true but it is also true that there are many successful people working in the tech industry at all levels with very little formal comp sci education.
If men can get software engineering jobs with no formal comp sci education, which they certainly can, then the fact that there is an imbalance in degrees does not mean that we have to have an imbalance in employment.
The low representation of women in CS at university level needs to be addressed as well but the best way to do that is by making software development a job that women want and believe that they can succeed in.
People go to college to get training for a career and so if women feel like software development is a profession that excludes women they aren't going to waste their time and money training for it.
"the percentage of CS-degree holders who were women peaked in the 1980s at 34% and has been on a downward trend ever since, even though women currently earn 57% of all undergraduate degrees."
The fact that there has been a sharp decline in female participation in CS in just the past few decades demonstrates that this is a temporary anomaly and not some "fundamental difference between genders" and further demonstrates that large changes are possible with the correct policies.
> the idea that you have to be "passionate about computers" to do the job is one of those things that men have made up to exclude women.
I mean if you've been programming since you were 8 and consider it your identity its not that far to go into believing that anyone who is good has to have the same background. Gender doesn't have anything to do with it.
For what its worth I thought this way until it was proven otherwise to me after enough time in the industry.
50:50 is not going to happen as long as there are cultural and also indisputable biological biases toward women being child-rearers, but getting from 90:10 to 80:20 or 70:30 would relieve a lot of the pressures of minority -- diffusing harassment, reducing loneliness, and the like.
It is just a matter of choice. If companies make it a priority they can do it.
I don't think companies should ever hire someone based on anything other than their qualifications for the job so of course the actual distribution should vary from company to company but if it is 60:40 m/f at one company then it should be 40:60 m/f at another (SHOCKING CRAZY IDEA) and the average should come out somewhere near the middle..
This is assuming, however, that the work force has an equal number of women and men. Some women choose to and want to be stay-at-home moms. Should we try to persuade them otherwise?
The US DOL says that 47% of the labor force is female and there is a significant gap in educational attainment between women and men in younger cohorts so the available pool of college educated women under 30-35 probably exceeds men.
> There are more than enough qualified women to fill tech jobs in roughly equal proportion with men
Even if that was true, having enough qualified women is not sufficient. You need enough women who are both qualified AND want to fill tech jobs.
When you look at measurements of STEM ability and of reading comprehension in high school students in the US and Europe, an interesting pattern emerges. For boys who are good in STEM, STEM tends to be what they are best at. For girls who good in STEM, they tend to be even better at reading comprehension [1] [2].
Scoring high on reading comprehension correlates well with being good at things that are important in various non-STEM fields (or in the "soft" sciences part of STEM).
People generally have to narrow their focus as they move on to college, maybe graduate school, and into a career. They strongly tend to narrow that focus to what they are best at. That means we lose a lot of those "good at STEM" in high school girls because they are even better at non-STEM.
I had two separate preliminary phone interviews today (different companies) that both left me fuming, and I've experienced similar many times in the past. My resume says, to summarize drastically, 1999-2015: C++; 2015-present: C#. These interviews were for C++ positions. Both interviewers specifically used the term 'red flag' referring to the C# part. Either they believed one section of the resume and disbelieved the other, or they believe I only know C# now and the C++ went completely out of my head and isn't coming back. Both interviewers spent the whole interview tsk tsking and communicating the lament "Yeah we really need a C++ person, and I'm just not seeing that you have that."
The conduct of interviewers when hiring cold is stunningly asinine for everybody, so I have the utmost sympathy for women who have to deal with gender bias on top of that. Talent shortage my ass. Interviewers make up their mind based on something - some kind of projection that isn't you - and then make clowns of themselves while trying to rationalize whatever the prejudice was. Take this gem, from the lead engineer: "Well we get a lot of applicants who know C#, but they don't understand low-level." And? How is that my problem? Now how many idiotic interviewers out there are secretly thinking, "Yeah actually all the hardcore low-level coders I know are men, so..."
I've been ranting for years about how there is no talent shortage. It's just that hiring is broken, asinine, and fear-driven. I think I'll pivot to: There is no shortage of talented women. Not to the extent that it is made out to be. TL;DR: parent is correct. It isn't that they aren't there; it's that whoever isn't hiring them.
It's depressing that I remember exactly this shit from my time in US academia. Not about me, being a man, but what I saw, and what my woman friends shared with me. I recall a woman who didn't get tenure, because she was the only woman in the department, and had no friends to support her. I recall female grad students who were sexually assaulted by their advisers. Some of whom were on my thesis committee, and were great mentors. It's just so fucking sad that it's still so common, decades later :(
I’m sad at the deterioration of the HN community into a place where reasonable and inoffensive comments are flagged and downvoted simply because people disagree on a political level.
I’ve found myself spending less time on HN due to this behaviour in the comments section.
Other discussion communities are more inclusive and more diverse - and by that I mean the only meaningful flavour of diversity - diversity of opinion.
I think there are two broad camps of thinking processes, one that fits people into stereotypes and does system 1 type of thinking. This camp believes in built in traits always lead to certain biases. They perpetuate those biases as well. While its true that exposure in young adulthood to certain things leads to bias to a certain extent, the main driver is YOU, your camp, which created those biases. Remember all those women that dropped out of the Software workforce in the 70's? Someone MADE those conditions happen.
The lack of understanding that those biases can be reversed is what needs to be corrected. This is the other camp, the camp that understands this and proactively fixes things, that needs to be made bigger.
I think, such things start very young. They starts in pre-schools where girls are given a doll and boys are given the lego blocks or children are not sensitized to color of the skin issues.
A lot of the early CS-related workforce was actually made of women, because dealing with mainframes was originally seen as an extension of typing and shorthand (secretarial work traditionally reserved to women) with some math on top. Sometime around the early '70s / early '80s, the field morphed into the male-dominated world we see today.
This has been discussed on HN in the past, usually in threads about female CS pioneers working at NASA and so on. I believe the consensus is that there wasn't a single individual cause for the change, but rather a number of conditions changed around the same time, discouraging women from CS-related jobs.
The field morphing in to being male dominated and the existing women dropping out are two different things. Sure, what you're saying has been discussed plenty on HN. As far as I know the other posters statement hasn't.
I'm not sure how you made this HN post, but I presume it required internet access. The self-same internet that can be used to search for a wide variety of information and educate yourself on many subjects with only a few minutes of effort. Have you tried doing that?
It's been shown that when a baby grips the finger of an adult, the adult tugs the baby's arm if they think the baby is male and hold their hand static if they think the baby is female.
As a man I have no equivalent experience, so it's very difficult to judge. However, being in a mostly male environment the probabilities of encountering a 'dick' are very good. Should all 'dicks' be sent to the gulags? How can we stop them becoming/acting like 'dicks'? Enact tougher 'dick' laws?
I really don't understand how this could ever be resolved. Talking about it seems like a start, but it really makes me feel like I am part of the problem as a man, and I don't feel this is positive tone to this conversation.
Being a man does not make you a part of the problem any more than being a woman makes you a victim. The behavior is what's bad, not being a male. This thought process is actually what we are trying to battle: being of one sex or race does not make you inherently better or worse than anyone else.
I hope that there is a positive to find: that socially we can empower those who would otherwise be victims through our support. I'm not sure what exactly that looks like yet, but we're figuring that out. We're talking about it. That's positive :)
I'm a guy (not that it matters in this context). You deal with all of this inappropriate behavior in the same way: you shit can the people responsible. They get a verbal warning the first time, and the second time they're gone. If people aren't fired or disciplined harshly for bad social behavior, it's sending the message that the behavior is an accepted part of the culture. At the end of the day, no one irreplaceable, and people internalize this message extremely quickly after 1-2 firings.
Step 2. Think about if you might accidentally disrespecting people. Read stories like OP and think if you'd done something that was unintentionally hurtful.
Step 3. Look out for abuse, and call it out where you see it.
Step 4. Look out for people being overlooked and ignored, and give them a platform and a microphone (figuratively or literally).
Take it with a grain of salt. There are two sides to every story and in the current climate if you speak out as a man you get fired or have your image ruined. See Google, see Aziz.
It's a fair question, but if #MeToo has done anything it's been to highlight that a reasonably high percentage of men will misuse positions of authority for sexual reasons.
Many of these experiences are definitely ranging from unfortunate to terrible for women trying to simply have a productive career in a made dominated workplace.
I just wanted to make a simple mathematical point, which the article kind of alludes to: the more X-dominated a field is, the more you would have run-ins with X, and thus more stories of inappropriate behavior by X.
I wonder what stories guys have of joining female-dominated fields. Are they called the token guy? Do women make sexual remarks about them? The degree to which the answer is "yes" will be greatly affected by the imbalance in the first place. The bigger it is, the more likely they are to bump up against something bad in everyday life.
Not saying we just have to accept this. Just saying we have to understand that no matter how much we all personally make an effort to act better, these stories will continue. So don't beat yourself up over it and continue to treat everyone as a fellow human being. And don't take it as a criticism of all men.
The same phenomenon happens if you turn on the news and see crimes and murders all the time. That doesn't mean the city is overrun by crime but rather that the stories merited special attention. It doesn't mean YOU necessarily have to constantly keep in mind not to rob or murder someone.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadThrow them all out like the trash they are. It is so fucking stupid how we human beings have to insert our stupid thoughts and desires into everything. You'll never get rid of aggressive behavior because once people start intuitively judging people, especially over those they think are below them, it is impossible to get them to stop.
And jesus has nobody learned to not shit where you eat? Save it for Tinder.
So what people learn is that they can get away with it, because usually they do. Not only can they get away with it, but dozens will leap to their defense. Watch how this thread unfolds, and compare them to previous ones. Look at the eagerness with which any suggestion that women are less suited for STEM than men is gobbled up and reposted to death. After a while people realize that STEM is full of people who use their brains to make disingenuous arguments to cover their ideological asses.
Edit: ...And now you’ve been flagged to death, meaning 10+ people flagged you in 10 minutes or less. I’m not even a little surprised.
And yet another dozen will opine about how there are no such inherent differences, a far more evidence-free assertion.
Of course I got flagged. That's how the passive-aggressive asshole brigade fights back
I try to tell myself that a lot of the predictable, negative outcomes amount to blowback in the face of real and inevitable change though. I hope I’m right about that too.
I commented on the other thread to give you props. For what it's worth.
Oh look, it’s back again and already has 6 points. lol
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16506914
Jesus Christ.
Thus even the men who are aware of the presence of bad actors are sometimes blind to how many of them there are, just how horrible their actions are, and more importantly who the bad actors are.
And because of this, a) it's harder to grasp the extent and severity of the problem; b) they may not know whose behavior needs to be corrected; and c) they may rationalize or deny a bad actor's misbehavior when someone does point it out because their experiences with him have been positive, so the accusation causes cognitive dissonance.
Some does. Others don't. In my experience it is very common for privileged folks who feel that they are of lower status to try to exert some (generally undue) authority or dominance in group settings, usually by ha-ha-only-serious'ing nasty jokes at people who they feel that can be superior towards. Women, ESL folks, ethnic minorities--you get the idea. And the article makes mention of this--calling another employee "token", that sort of thing.
On the other end of the ladder, I've tangled with quite a few people in managerial and executive roles that thought that their, again, ha-ha-only-serious racism and sexism was somehow Not A Problem.
It's not just that it's pervasive--it's that we've allowed, for a very long time, the sorts of social shittiness that are sometimes termed "microaggressions" to set the tone for the social arrangements (and work is a social arrangement) in which we all participate with varying degrees of willingness and autonomy. The little stuff in public creates permission structures for the big nasty stuff in private.
This. And as a man I am sick of it. I want nothing but the best for the women in my life, and the powerlessness of this situation makes me angry. We men are stubborn motherfuckers and it is rare for to meet someone like what is described in the post and also who seems ready/willing/able to changeinto treating others respectfully. Hence the trash bit -- just fucking throw them out.
So many of us want to get back to solving relevant problems. Interpersonal shit like this keeps coming up in our community and it needs to just. fucking. stop.
With respect: digging out from beneath literal millenia of unjust treatment (I mean, this behavior didn't start when we decided women were allowed to have jobs) is probably a relevant problem for decent humans in general.
As someone living in Europe (who lived and worked in one of more country), some of these "cultural" aspects against a certain gender feel so much out of place. In particular, expecting someone who is pregnant to quit the job is just unthinkable. Most engineering work places in Europe expect the person to take paternity/maternity leave and take care of the children but the job will be secured.
I'm not saying that gender descrimination doesn't happen in Europe but I feel that the US have a lot of more of these extreme and ridiculous scenarios.
If people don't mention their country, they're American.
The other cases of harassment are terrible. But I can sympathize with the managers/business owners on this one - not that I support them. I see their point.
In some more advanced countries than the US or Papua New Guinea there is even mandatory paid leave, go figure.
As an exercise you can take the pregnant woman in your example and replace with a cyclist in a bike accident or someone who was just diagnosed with cancer.
BTW the paid leave is not paid by the employer, it's paid out of mandatory government insurance.
EDIT: please reply and discuss before downvoting. Downvoting adds nothing to the discussion.
In essence, the applicant has a right to demand treatment as if the employer didn't know that information. By not telling them, they're exercising that right, taking precautions so that it wouldn't be violated in a way that's illegal but hard to prove.
The employee has right to be treated as if the information was unknown, I never said the opposite and never wanted to even imply that (and I'm pretty sure that I did not). That doesn't mean that the employer shouldn't have an opportunity to plan accordingly (e.g. start looking for a temporary replacement, stop accepting new projects and so on).
However, giving that information right before a decision point (i.e. when changing jobs, getting a promotion, etc) is just inviting it to be misused, it's a risk they shouldn't be required or always expected to take.
For some context, some time ago I was involved in handling quite a few maternity/replacement situations. Our local laws are quite generous with maternity leave, so for existing employees we (in that company) had often started planning replacements as early as 6 months before start of their leave. However, this is a bit tricky - if there was some promotion issue in the middle of that period (3 months after I'd known but 3 months before she'd leave), I could try acting as if that information was unknown, but it's difficult, I can't magically unlearn things, I couldn't be sure myself if I wasn't biased one way or another (unless we had extremely dry formal procedure based on some arbitrary "objective" metrics that mismeasure as much as they measure), and I definitely couldn't prove that I wasn't influenced if that was contested. So in such an situation I might have even preferred not to know, despite the extra hassle it would cause.
It's probably a question of trust. If an employee is working in a trustworthy environment, they'd likely volunteer that information (which I've seen happen) and the employer would benefit from having created such an environment. But if employees feel a lack of trust, they would likely want to protect themselves and keep it a secret (which I've also seen happen), and IMHO they have (or should have) a right to do so if they really feel the need. The employer's reputation and trustworthiness is their own fault or achievement based on their previous actions, so in some sense they deserve what they get, whether it's trust or lack of it.
I have several points. Let's not blame organizations for the actions of individuals (given that the organization properly deals with said individual). Let's not blame the whole industry or the whole society for the actions of individuals. If something happened to me at a conference, I won't blame my manager who is not connected to the individual that did it in any way for that - and I won't make them suffer because of that.
Of course there might be a reason to not communicate that and that's completely alright, it's business after all, but let's not make it a default choice, please - let's stay human and be nice to each other.
As a growing number have pointed out in response to that claim, no... no it isn’t.
1) normally it isn't (in Europe at least), but I said that I definitely can see situations when it is (in Europe as well as elsewhere) and I never suggested nor said that there aren't any such situations or that it's negligible
2) I'm not talking about them not having a right to do so nor I'm suggesting they shouldn't; I'm saying that using this right should be properly considered before doing so instead of taking it as a default
3) Most companies (again, in Europe, but I'm pretty sure that in the USA as well) don't have any way to do anything about this mismanagement, most companies are small businesses that don't have enough money for that. Not telling them information like this will mean that they will prefer men or risk going under (because the risk of being catched illegally preferring men could be smaller than that). Do you realise that this directly contributes to pay inequality because hiring woman is more riskful than hiring a man (and no, the risk is not the maternal leave itself, the risk lies in being in a situation that you couldn't properly plan for beforehand)?
4) the business is owned by people, possibly women with exactly the same issues as well, but you suggest they don't have the same rights for safety?
I'm sorry to be rude, but did you read what I wrote? Maybe do it again, more carefully? You sound like I suggest depriving women of that right, but I explicitly said that this is not something I want to suggest.
Seems like people completely forgot that having millions of dollars in investments is not common.
The average business in the Czech Republic makes $900 in profit per month.
There of course are some "faceless corporations", I agree, but I'm not talking about these - the cost of an employee going on a leave is a fraction of their monthly budget. But most of businesses are small and can get into serious trouble easily.
And lastly, no one is talking about guaranteeing a profit at all.
Were I hiring in an environment where that was a legally protected right, I'd probably work it into my hiring planning in advance, then if it was occurring more often than I had accounted for, try to evaluate whether my planning was bad.
Can't see the point in getting upset about it.
So maybe you could simply hire her as well as another person who would be less likely to require leave during that period, but then your payroll needs grow - not a great business decision for a startup or whatever.
I think it's easy to see how this could be a predicament for a business without extra money and "get over it" isn't a very good answer IMO - at the very least you'll have discrimination being done in disguise until there's a better answer.
I have a friend whose wife did that in the UK. The employer then let her go. They sued and either won or settled (can't remember which).
I think it was for an executive type role.
But apparently it happens.
These stories wouldn't get the attention they're getting if they weren't shocking to many (men?). So I'd be careful of believing too strongly that it's that different where you are just because you don't see it.
In my experience and previous industries, women getting pregnant usually means baby showers and then going away parties. Marriages not so much but considering the amount of time and care a new baby incurs it is reasonable for a new mother to desire to stay at home, bond, nurse, etc. In fact my wife normally asks that very question with she encounters an expectant mother.
For example, almost every European woman I have talked to about this has been asked either outright or strongly implied whether they were likely to have kids while employed. They have usually followed up with stories of women who were denied employment because of that. In some of those cases it was just because they were in the right age range, and despite their protestation the interviewer thought that they would.
In the U.S. I have never heard of someone being asked things like that (it is specifically illegal, and easy grounds for very expensive lawsuits).
It should be said that maternity leave (especially paid portions of it) is much longer in large parts of Europe. My sister-in-law has been on paid maternity leave now for 4 years. That ended a few weeks ago, but her employer informed her that during that leave she had build up x-and-x vacation, so she decided to take that, so she has been on "vacation" now for about a month.
That huge cost may be part of the push there. For people outside the U.S.: there is no national requirement for any paid leave, but it does require 12-weeks of non-paid leave (at least for larger companies). California was the first state to require 6 weeks of partially paid leave, but I am not aware of any states that have followed suit. It also should be said that many companied have their own more-generous policies, but those are more often the larger companies, especially ones with a mostly high-skilled workforce.
I understand where you're coming from, but my guess would be that the situation is much more similar between the US, Europe and other countries than you think.
"For the authors of this article, each negative story is overshadowed by dozens of positive experiences, where someone went out of their way to offer support, provide opportunities, and encourage us."
I think this matters to encouraging both women and men. Yes, jerks exist. Sometimes its good people having bad days, some people are monsters hiding under a veneer (ex Hollywood's Weinstein).
We need to stop dehumanizing each other, and understand all humans have the full expanse of positive and negative emotions.
Most people in technology are not bros, sjws, ceos, and whatever.
They are just people trying to get by.
But, then, your username has an obvious allusion in it that made me look at your posting history--and suddenly I understand what you are trying to project when you Just Ask Questions on this one.
With substantially different suggestions on how to make things better for each. (Respectively, 'murder all the men' and 'be aware of and active against misogyny and sexism around you')
How about: it's not the pervasive culture!?
First, if you peruse the crime statistics, you will find that the vast majority of victims of violent crime are male.
Second, if you actually look a bit more closely, you will find that our culture is vastly predisposed towards protecting women. So much so, in fact, that our perception is warped sufficiently that we think there is more violence towards women when in fact it is the other way around, by a large margin.
And of course the public narrative is almost exclusively "violence against women", and again, this is taken as gospel so much that even mentioning that there might be men who are victims is viewed as offensive.
Just as small illustrations (not "proof"), think back if you will of the story of Boko Haram kidnapping 200 girls.
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/15/world/africa/nigeria-girl...
It caused a huge outcry and activism from all quarters. Since there was no reporting, you might think that the boys were unharmed. Not so. The boys were actually either burned alive or forced into military service. This happened repeatedly, whereas the incident with the girls was a one-off. Media? Silence. Nobody cares. It's not a story.
There have also been numerous experiments comparing public reaction to violence man vs. woman. If a woman is being abusive towards a man, there will usually be bemusement or laughter, and comments along the lines of "I wonder what he did to deserve it". If it's the other way around, people will intervene. Quickly and fairly decisively. For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlHVANXh-yg
This is actually even more skewed as she abuses him (no reaction) and when he starts to defend himself, people immediately intervene.
So in our culture that is supposedly so supportive of violence towards women, a man isn't even allowed to defend himself against an abusive woman.
Closer to home, the whole idea of "what happens to us does not happen to you" is actually wrong. Sure, it's not the same things, we don't get asked about our pregnancies, but horrible bosses and working environment affect men just as much as women, and quite probably more, but when it's men that are affected nobody gives a crap.
Case in point, if I told you the things that happened to me over my career and told you that they happened to a woman, you'd be appalled at the horrible treatment women receive and see it as definitive proof of the misogyny of the industry.
"We are sharing these experiences in part because of encouragement by male colleagues who found them shocking. We are all still here because the rewards and great colleagues out weigh the bad experiences. However, we want to raise community awareness and instigate change."
And, the support of their male colleagues exercising what should be common human decency is not the lede of this article.
Would you please stop creating accounts to break HN's rules with?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It was literally a collection of very negative experiences that women in tech faced because of their gender by men. It’s many examples of things men would never experience. It doesn’t matter if they’ve had many positive experiences — the consistent negatives are prevalent across most women in tech (and probably non-tech), not just isolated examples of a few.
Most of these jerks probably don’t even understand what they’re doing or the impact they’re having. It’s important to raise awareness to prevent as much of this as possible, and I applaud the author for sticking her neck out and being willing to put her name on it.
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/women-reportedly-unciv...
I tried to imagine what it was like to tough out that culture back when she was a grad student or junior faculty, long before this was a even a major topic of discussion. I wussed out of the grind I would have faced as a junior faculty, even sporting all the right aesthetics. To those who have stuck it out against major challenges: you are tough as nails, you are improving the system, and it is noticed by and impacts more people than you think.
I'm not happy that such stories take place. But I am happy that a growing number of women are telling their stories, shocking those of us who were able to be blissfully ignorant of what was going on, and forcing us to realize just how poorly our female colleagues are sometimes being treated.
Let's even assume that 90% of the time, things are great for women in high tech. How many women are willing to put up with even 10% (or even 1%) of their time dealing with such behavior? I'm not sure if I would. And then we wonder why so many women aren't interested in technology careers, or leave after a short period of time.
I hope that these stories eventually end. But in order for them to end, we need to hear more of them, to realize just how bad things are, and to make it completely unacceptable, in every way, for things to continue as they currently are.
This is backwards. In fields women are interested in (say, dancing), they face much more harassment, because their greater interest and the increased competition from other women raise the bar for behavior that will drive them away.
Donald Trump has been accused of walking into the changing rooms at his beauty pageants. How many female engineers do you think would tolerate the boss repeatedly walking in on them naked? But a lot of girls would really, really like to be beauty queens.
This seems key. Especially if it's "relatively rare but intensely negative events" (as seems to be the case).
Imagine if for every one of these stories, a colleague of the person dealing with discrimination or peer of the discriminator had tapped them on the shoulder and said, "Professor, what the fuck are you doing? That's sexist, and you're a terrible human for having done that."
And imagine if after three times of the above their peers had said "This is a pattern of behavior with you. We'd feel better if the department were headed by someone with different values."
Discrimination survives on awkward tolerance.
I think the problem is that this stuff can be very hard to detect. If there's even the slightest chance of negative repercussions then the few responsible will stop talking.
In the "Well, why wouldn't you comment on a woman's pregnancy when evaluating her for a job?" sense.
There are certainly overt, aggressive, predatory stories included. But the bulk are things I can see being said in social or professional company.
Or as Colleague B puts it: "When asked for a paragraph, my first reaction was that I didn’t have the sort of big bombshell stories being looked for."
Borderline, casual sexism is important to vocally fight too.
Perhaps. Ideally. Eventually. But in a choose-your-battles context, borderline casual cases are fodder for contrarian denialists to minimize the over-the-line serious cases.
Focus on vocally fighting the most important or most fixable problem first, to make progress.
Can you imagine how stressed and miserable you’d be, how untrusting and isolated, if your every interaction carried significant and unknown risk of turning out as described in the article? How many of the self-styled introverts here would be able to get out of bed after the hundredth time someone they thought was a colleague or a friend acted as described in the article?
What you’re saying was said to black people during civil rights, and women trying to get the vote. What you miss is the pervasive and cumulative effect of casual, constant shit, peppered with outright abuse.
Why do so many people keep insisting on believing that the problem is specific to the technology fields? Women face these kind of problems everywhere that they have to interact with men.
Does me talking about 4 somehow imply all the other real numbers aren't real?
Yes, women face these kinds of problems in more than just computer science or technology in general. However this article and this post are talking specifically. Perhaps they feel that they cannot fix a problem that exists "everywhere" and are focused on their narrow slice of the domain. This does not prevent you from talking about other slices of the domain, or the entire domain, or working to reduce the problems women and others face in whatever piece of the domain you choose.
Also, at the risk of producing a defensive reaction -- why do you believe that the poster believes the problem is specific to the technology fields? What in their statement leads you to the conclusion that they think this is an isolated problem?
"Look, we were harassed and discriminated against all through high school! We would never treat anyone like that."
Straw man? I prefer to think of it as "I work in tech and I am glad these issues are being publicised and (I hope) enough people think it's a big enough problem that finally it's being addressed, I hope seriously."
I can't do anything about, say, mining, construction, advertising, film, retail...but I can have some influence in tech and life sciences businesses.
(1) I'm in technology for 20+ years, and didn't know this sort of thing happens, and
(2) Technology people often like to think that we're in a meritocracy, in which smart/good people do well, regardless of whether they're male or female.
These stories, along with many others, have shattered my naivete. We're just as bad as everyone else -- and maybe worse -- and need to actively combat it.
For example, there's a difference between some of those guys getting physically aggressive and the one guy who basically said he'd never worked with a woman and didn't know how to talk to her.
Is the latter example okay? No, not really, but we must find a way to not lump that guy in with the physically aggressive guy. The second guy appears to be simply ignorant, but at least open minded enough to admit ignorance and try to awkwardly break the ice to move forward cooperatively.
Men and women have only worked together for about 40 years, which in anthropological/cultural time is basically nothing. We haven't figured out the rules yet. Is dating colleagues completely banned? Doubtful. That means we're going to have to accept some awkwardness between people who are trying to figure out if they like each other. But we can simultaneously say it's inappropriate to grope someone, it's not okay to call someone the "token" whatever, etc.
Yes, it's important not to conflate those two very different behaviors. At the same time, however, we need to recognize that both are symptoms of the same underlying issue — and that's the thing that we ultimately have to change, not its case-specific behavioral expressions.
"Not as bad as" is a fallacy.
Maybe that's implicit in what you're saying, but I think it's likely to be more effective when considered consciously. It frames how we think about the interaction.
We need something else to call this guy other than sexist. Something at least slightly positive like likely ally.
It's not quite the same thing as how men and women worked together historically. There was probably more segregation back then too (and rampant sexism).
And yet for years and years and years the constant refrain from the establishment has always been "nah, it must be that women are just bad at this job" or "nah, it must be a pipeline problem". Nobody wants to look themselves in the face and ask whether or not they are part of the problem. Either through not taking women seriously in the workplace, always questioning the work and fitness of women in a way that men don't experience, or allowing a hostile work environment where sexual harassment happens and everyone just sweeps it under the rug or looks the other way.
Women have been telling each other these stories about what it was like to work in tech for decades, and they've been telling anyone, including guys, who would listen for years and years as well. Why has it taken so much work for people to actually pay attention?
I agree completely, and it's incredible that so many people with exceptional critical thinking skills could dismiss the universal, consistent reports of the witnesses to these events, in favor of the analysis of people who have no experience at all - themselves and other men. And that includes me: WTF was I thinking? Everyone who experienced these things said the same thing, people who had no direct experience said otherwise, and I believed the latter? If everyone in Honolulu said the grass in Hawaii is dewy in the mornings, and everyone in Ohio said it isn't - why would you even ask the Ohioans?
The same applies to the treatment of African-Americans by law enforcement. African-Americans have been talking about it for generations, the same stories over time and across the U.S. Why did it take videos for me to believe it?
My guess is that it comes from accepting social norms of the people around me, and dismissing people I didn't interact with. The solution, IMHO, is interacting with people outside your group and people telling their stories, as they did in this article. If you want to know what's really happening on issues like these, forget all your theories - just ask and listen (and zip it). The most ardent theories suddenly become insubstantial in the face of evidence.
Maybe it's because I'm self employed, so I don't have regular "colleagues" to tell me these things.
Mybe it's because I (and other men) didn't make it clear that we were willing to listen, although I sure hope not.
For whatever reason, I believed that sexual harassment is occasional. Not as pervasive, and not as constant as the growing number of stories has made clear.
The more stories we hear, the better (I think) things will be. So keep telling these stories.
In my case, it was because I had a frank conversation with a female friend, where she told me a few typical stories. Things like her sitting on the bus, and the guy next to her will suddenly start touching her, or trying to kiss her. With her giving absolutely no sign of interest and not knowing the person beforehand (she's actually gay). And similar stories in other situations.
She said it happened to her about 10 times already. This is the kind of clear-cut sexual harassment which I naively thought was rare, but apparently is so common, that it's just shrugged off as a nuisance in many cases. It completely changed my perspective on just how common this is for women, even if I believe only a minority of men act in this way.
Further, in the era of #MeToo, the chasm between men and women in the workplace will grow wider simply because of liability issues. One man's innocent, casual conversation with a female coworker can these days become that woman's #MeToo moment, aired publicly, both in the court of public opinion and in courts of law. This ultimately causes fewer interactions between men and women in the workplace - especially between direct reports and their managers - which can easily lead to fewer advancement opportunities. This is borne out in data. According to a recent study, almost 30% of male managers say they are not comfortable working alone with a woman — more than twice as many as before, according to the same study [1].
I would suggest that articles like this focus on incidents that everyone can agree is atrocious and actionable behavior. If failure to interrupt a group of women talking amongst themselves at a conference is now a #MeToo moment, it's just going to cause deeper concerns about liability, which will in turn cause even more backlash.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2018/02/06/amid...
It's of course rude to insert yourself into many conversations. That's just a social convention.
> Avoiding women in workplace is essentially sexist. And for non-sexists there is no reason to do so.
So you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Given how easy it is for public opinion to shift, I certainly wouldn't want to take that chance. Who would want to interact with people like that in a professional setting? I wouldn't, and I try not to.
I disagree with you that there is no reason to do so for “non-sexists”. Because no one knows how a given person may interpret a given conversation or activity, combined with the severe consequences from the social media mob that even something as simple as an unsubstantiated tweet can inflict on one’s career or an entire company these days, the only way to avoid liability is to minimize interaction between opposite sexes in the workplace. In this environment, it’s the only rational thing to do.
We have unleashed a virtual lynch mob, ready to instantly torch the life of anyone that stands accused of even moderately inappropriate or questionable behavior. Worse, there is no statute of limitations or standard of proof required to activate the mob - a tweet is enough. That is wrong and creates a toxic environment for everyone.
In other words, people who "battle sexism and discrimination" can very well tip over and become sexist and discriminatory in the attempt to fix those exact issues.
They can become Monsters too.
The second part of this quote applies to. "If you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you".
If you fight sexism and discrimination long enough, you yourself will go under the spotlight and you'll eventually be judged for what you did. Whether good or evil.
"Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be 'blamed' for one's own inferiority/failure. Thus, one was thwarted not by a failure in oneself, but rather by an external 'evil'...Ressentiment comes from reactiveness: the weaker someone is, the less their capability to suppress reaction. According to Nietzsche, the more a person is active, strong-willed, and dynamic, the less place and time is left for contemplating all that is done to them, and their reactions (like imagining they are actually better) become less compulsive. The reaction of a strong-willed person (a "wild beast"), when it happens, is ideally a short action: it is not a prolonged filling of their intellect." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment#Kierkegaard_and_N...
History is filled with people who fought for a just cause, only to then turn around and become unjust themselves (IIRC from history, the french were really good at it).
It doesn't matter how much of the way you got and how much of it has yet to be walked, it's completely irrelevant to "becoming the monster".
If a man accuses me of sexual harassment, that would be pretty easy to disprove (I’m straight) and most people would believe me. If a woman accuses me of that, in a MeToo world, my career is over, even if there is no evidence and I didn’t do it (being that we are living in the MeToo world, I guess I should say that for the record I have not ever knowingly sexually harassed anyone, and have never been accused of it).
What downandout meant was that it is dangerously easy for a woman, if she were so inclined, to destroy a man's career with unsubstantiated claims of sexual harassment. It is much harder for a man to do that to another man, if both are straight.
I'm really not sure where the sexism comes in. Perhaps you could enlighten everyone.
Your knee-jerk reactions, calling people names ("sexist", "disgusting", "wrong and harmful" etc.) are the problem, not downandout's measured observation, and in fact it is exactly what he is talking about. When there's so many people like you, where is the debate? It's just pitchforks and lynching.
That's what I thought initially as well. But the proper way to frame this is to ask: out of the population of men who would join a group of 3 men, how many would also join a group of 3 women? You and I aren't even part of the first group.
> This ultimately causes fewer interactions between men and women in the workplace
That's a real problem. The #metoo movement is great in getting the word out, but the backlash suppresses any men of trying to get it right. You can't expect people to make progress if they don't try, and if they try, they will make mistakes. It should be ok to make them and not get demonized in the process.
Tbf, because of stories like this, I feel almost uncomfortable talking to my female coworkers - I immediately tense up and I have no idea what I can or cannot say, I carefully weigh up my every word to make sure it doesn't, even accidentally, have a double meaning or something that could be seen as patronizing, offensive, or flirty. As a consequence, I would genuinely rather not talk with women in the workplace and just avoid the risk altogether, which I am sure is just making the problem worse.
She says team members would openly express that they wouldn't hire women because they would just get married. I don't know about you, but that seems like something obviously dated and wrong. Growing up, both my parents worked, and that was the norm. It's been the norm for a long time. Women aren't new to the work force. So why do people think this? In any case, it should be obvious not to say things like this.
Then she says a professor followed her beck to her room and tried to forcibly kiss her. That's something obviously wrong, right? It should be easy to say "I won't follow and forcibly kiss anyone." That's like good manners 101. Basic stuff we learn in 1st grade.
The sexism described here isn't the sort of thing you'd let slip by accident. There's no double meanings here. It's just bare faced disrespect for women. So please, relax. You don't need to walk on eggshells to avoid being a complete jerk.
And if you still aren't sure how to talk to women, I would take the articles own advice: Try talking to them like a person.
I’m reading this on the phone, so it’s likely I might have missed it, but does the article mention #MeToo in the context of the men vs. women groups complaint you mention? If not, it’s uncharitable to imply that the complainer here is trying to equate sexual assault with discrimination.
IMO the main problem with contemporary gender conflicts isn’t going to be “incidents that everyone can agree is atrocious and actionable behavior”. Because it’s not hard for society (usually) to act on such egregious incidents. It’s I guess a good thing that professional women don’t have to constantly worry about violent sexual assault, but the author is raising the issue that seemingly innocuous behavior can still be substantially harmful.
What is innocuous and what is not can still be a matter of healthy debate. But it’s worth noting how difficult it can be for even egregious behavior to get called out.
I think many people can agree that Susan Fowler’s blog post about her time at Uber constituted outright horrible behavior. HN commenters seemed very united in this sentiment [0] and I think many tech observers would agree that it wasn’t one very huge chip that set off the clusterfuck that was 2017 for Uber.
It may seem looking back that Fowler’s whistleblowing would inevitably cause such massive outrage. But re-read her post, which is almost as nostalgic as it is outraged. It’s not just about the harassment she faced, but the institutional resistance and denial that she, and more than a few other women faced — clearly, their complaints back then were not the level of clear cut incidents that you think should be focused on. And Fowler’s whistleblowing was just a personal blog post — not a big NYTimes expose —- written months after her departure, and likely only possible because she had the time and means to think about things and not worry about career implications. It’s very easy to imagine an alternate timeline in which she just didn’t get around to writing about Uber because even she, as she says herself in that post, was incredibly thankful and fulfilled from her work at Uber, sexual harassment aside.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022
Do you have any verified example of this happening?
Lets look at some notable #MeToo cases in the last year
1. Harvey Weinstein - Dozens of women accused Weinstein of assaulting, harassing, or raping them.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-ove...
2. Matt Lauer - Fired for inappropriate sexual relationship with a coworker. Not an isolated incedent, as many women came forward through his career with reports of sexual assault and unwanted sexual advances.
http://people.com/tv/matt-lauer-sexual-harassment-assault-al...
3. Mario Batali - Accused of sexual misconduct by multiple female employees. Repeated reports of Batali groping the breasts of women who worked for him.
https://ny.eater.com/2017/12/11/16759540/mario-batali-sexual...
So where is this "innocent conversation" you mention?
I was present, as were a handful of other women. None of us were ever followed up with to ask if this was a legitimate accusation. The accuser was given a red carpet to a choice team. The accusee was given additional workload to carry and taken out of a position of authority and placed in a punitive program.
I have seen this happen twice in the last 3 years.
Do not take this as defense of the examples you mention, but as a warning against unintended consequences that simply don't ever show up in the press because they aren't highly visible and won't draw clicks, especially if they go against the status quo. If you need further evidence, look at the speed to which a concrete, evidence backed accusation with respect to google's hiring practices got flagged off the front page, whereas this thread is still much higher ranked after much longer time and fewer votes.
Not those cherry-picked examples obviously? Do you have access to every single report in the world? Is it impossible that some might not be completely legitimate and can act as a way to retaliate?
However, if I were to observe such an event happening, I'd be frozen. One half of me thinks, the woman is an individual and can stand up for herself. If she's uncomfortable, she'll say or do something. She's of equal standing.
The other half of me, I feel like I should say something. But by doing so, that asserts my male patriarchy views, protecting women from the danger. Women wouldn't be considered an equal in this scenario.
Edit: I am absolutely baffled by the downvotes. What am I missing?
I would feel intimidated walking up to a group of women because I might be criticized for anything I did. And wouldn't a woman feel intimidated walking up to a group of men too?
When I have been in these situations, the root problem has been someone being shitty to a friend/colleague/co-worker/whatever. Saying "that's shitty, stop" doesn't mean you're speaking for any particular person or that you're defending her person specifically--what you are doing, and you can explain if asked, is that you are establishing social norms with your behavior that you are telling the group that you expect everybody to follow.
There are many axes along which one can be shitty, and it is not a reinforcement of patriarchal structures to set expectations that people be decent to one another--so long, of course, as you're doing so evenly. I have gone hard at co-workers who were shitty to women. I have also gone hard at co-workers who were jerks in code reviews.
What I quoted strikes me as perhaps a misapplication of the idea of patriarchy and what it does to society--at least, in the sort of case you're describing. Could this be taken to an extreme that would validate your concerns? Totally. But in practice? It never has been the case for me (and I am solicitous about asking if I am out of my lane). It is important to be willing to listen, in case that, yes, you are out of your lane--but I have never seen a default posture of "no, we don't allow shitty behavior up in here" cause friction with anybody it shouldn't cause friction with.
https://twitter.com/akaij/status/968968751063490562
Kelly Ellis:
"But, y'know, thanks for being the dude chiming in with unnecessary remarks intended to undermine both my point, and the plaintiff's lawsuit, while we discuss the topic of gender-based discrimination and harassment.
Super helpful and appreciated."
akay:
"not at all what I was trying to do, sorry if it came across that way. I just don't see how confirming the existence of nerf guns within that team helps the discussion in any way.
unnecessarily harsh, this tweet."
So sometimes we men just remain silent.
Dumpster fire: http://variety.com/2018/digital/news/twitter-ceo-abuse-12027...
Still it’s good to see thst your first instinct is military grade handwaving. I have to wonder if you have similarly high standards in all cssss, or if your skepticism is reserved primarily as a means of deflection.
All of which is to say thst you could actually trust the people telling you their stories in the article, or discuss the underlying issues, rather than deflect via nitpicking. It’s grotesque. This whole thread, the voting patterns, the flagging of the article, and the sheer force of whining from people who feel put upon by hearing about this is also grotesque... More than it would be on another site, where at least stupidity and lack of education could be an excuse.
Edit: I mean, look at this thread and compare it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551
It would be funny, if it weren’t so childishly obvious.
As in the last time you hijacked a thread as an excuse to complain about other people expressing an opinion you personally disagree with, you haven't discussed, or shown any interest in discussing, a single issue in the article.
You flag people left right and center, simply because they don't happen share your personal views.
When that doesn't remove their posts, you throw around insults like "stupidity", "childishly", "asinine points", "crazy" and accusations of intellectual dishonesty.
Again, all because other people don't happen to share your personal views, which you seem to think are the last and only word on any issue.
You complain that the article is flagged, despite also complaining that articles like this produce "utterly predictable" comments.
Despite the "grotesque" and "depressing" nature of the thread, you can't help but wade into it yourself, where in multiple posts the only one where you don't post insults or complain about people with different opinions is this, straight out of Python[1]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497538
> Edit: I mean, look at this thread and compare it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551
Remarkable that in both threads two other usernames specifically namecheck you, "IntronExon", the 40 day old account (with ~3000 karma, that posts like a veteran).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497946
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16496993
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvcnx6-0GhA
Quote me ranting about a "grand conspiracy".
Quote me "attacking the user personally".
> considering you're doing exactly the same thing you're purporting he's doing.
What is it you imagine you're doing with this post, exactly?
>You flag people left right and center, simply because they don't happen share your personal views.
These are personal attacks.
>Remarkable that in both threads two other usernames specifically namecheck you, "IntronExon", the 40 day old account (with ~3000 karma, that posts like a veteran).
This is an allusion to conspiracy.
No, they're statements about behavior, and no more "personal attacks" than you falsely accusing me of making personal attacks, or of falsely accusing me of "ranting" about a "grand conspiracy at foot".
> This is an allusion to conspiracy.
So it's no longer a "grand conspiracy", just a mere "allusion to conspiracy"?
What's the "conspiracy" you claim I'm alluding to then?
...and frankly work can be stressful enough without crazy in both ears. It’s important to distinguish between hate/crazy and a real and present issue within the workplace though.
I agree it's good to share awareness of these problems. However, I think there's nothing more for me to do. None of my female coworkers have ever reported something fishy, and if they did I'd simply report it to HR where I know the situation would be handled.
I also wonder if it'd be productive to stop singling out tech (which seems much less sexist than say, finance).
The single most powerful thing you can do is engage women as serious professionals.
My biggest frustration is not with the guys who want to talk to me to hit on me. It is with the countless others who will not engage me in a substantive manner for fear of it being misconstrued. They de facto leave me alone with the creeps, trolls and assholes and are, on some level, equally guilty of treating me as nothing but a vagina. It gives far too much weight to my gender and far too little to my education, skills, competence, interests and character.
Whether a man is talking to me solely in hopes of a hookup or avoiding me for fear of offending or something, he is equally guilty of treating me like the single most important thing about me, the thing that drives all social decisions, is what bits are between my legs. This is the essence of sexism.
I have a problem with that statement.
This is exactly why progress is so painfully slow. For every one man pushing a woman into the river to intentionally drown her, a thousand more stand idly by and say "Not my problem" and then worry vastly more about defending their right to do nothing than about the injustice they witness daily.
However, I can probably count on one hand the number of times a woman has come up to me in my professional career to talk to me about anything of professional significance.
Every time I approach a woman first however, there’s always an anxiety that I’ll be perceived as a creep, trying to play a really long game of hooking up with her. I know women must think this, because I constantly hear their stories about the various ways men hit on them in nearly any situation, and there always seems to be a bit of an awkwardness that isn’t there when they approach me first.
And if the woman I approach happens to be attractive and younger than me? It looks real bad. Indeed, if someone could have any reasonable doubt that my professional conversation with a woman is anything more than platonic, I would be uncomfortable in that conversation. Men would look at this and think “Yea he’s probably trying to get with her”.
I do not get the same anxiety when talking to a woman with her husband or boyfriend, or a woman who is much older than me, or homosexual women.
The thing about standing by and saying this is “not my problem” is that it really isn’t my problem. My problem is completely different from yours, even though it’s in the same domain, and nobody helps me with it either. As a basic straight white male, I’m a dime a dozen and if I voice any kind of problem the response is to go fuck myself.
This has nothing to do with you being a woman, there are also men with problems that I do nothing for. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.
Work-wise, I have my "go-to" people when I need something done. I don't care what their gender is, I just know they've performed well in the past and get it done in time to help me make my deliverable date. Once a person demonstrates reliable performance of getting the right answer, I don't need to go to others. How does that help solve the problems mentioned in the post? Not really clear to me.
It sets an example. Examples are far more powerful than most people recognize.
Currently, if a man is talking to a woman, he is probably hitting on her. This becomes self reinforcing behavior. Women assume that men talking to them are hitting on them. Observers assume it is a personal relationship, not a professional one. Men avoid talking to women unless they are hitting on them because they don't want a problematic misunderstanding. This helps entrench sexism.
Meaty engagement as a professional breaks that expectation. If enough men will do it, good will crowd out bad.
Currently, women are overly vulnerable because they are professionally isolated. They get insufficient legitimate interest. This leaves them in a needy position. They can't easily afford to turn away the creeps if the only people talking to them are the creeps. They hold out hope that maybe this time it will be different.
If there are people they can reliably access who are taking them seriously, it gets vastly easier to walk away from the creeps. It also can help signal to the creeps (or the non creepy clueless) "This is how you talk to a female colleague."
What do you mean by that?
Networking was one of the things I hoped to get here. There are men who network via HN. It has not worked for me.
I was homeless for 5.7 years. I remain dirt poor. My attempts to point out that my gender is a barrier to making strong professional connections is a root cause of my poverty have largely fallen on deaf ears for years and what minimal headway I have made is extremely recent.
One outcome related to that: I let some young punk talk to me for some weeks who was pretending to be my friend because he was basically the only person talking to me and I desperately need professional connections. Ultimately, he let me know he needed a shoulder to cry on because his marriage was falling apart.
I did the decent thing and was supportive for a time. Then he resumed sleeping with his wife, repeating things to her that I had told him in confidence and talking at me as if we were lovers, a thing I told him was absolutely a non starter.
The relationship made me uncomfortable from the start. There were a lot of weird issues with it that suddenly made sense after I learned he was married and hiding it from me.
I took a no harm, no foul position on it initially. The more I think about it, the more I feel I was used, deceived and set up. He had no plans to ever take me seriously. He withheld his age and marital status knowing he could not get close to me romantically if I did know those things.
All the uncomfortable red flag stuff got ignored by me because I have literally zero strong professional connections to anyone at all. I simply don't know what that looks like. Further, I am dirt poor. I am in very desperate need of connections and opportunities and cannot get that.
If I had plenty of professional connections, I would have never let this guy string me along and set me up to be his shoulder to cry on.
Anyway, thanking you for engaging with me. It's been a good exchange.
Best.
> I have been on HN 8.5 years.
I think I can solve that conundrum for you: HN is not the right place for looking for professional connections.
So maybe your problem with getting professional connections is looking for same where none are to be had.
Look elsewhere.
Nothing to do with gender.
Men and women think differently, see differently, communicate different and that is all good. But to be treated as a low-life male (which is quite common) by many women only reinforces the idea that women should not be engaged in any substantive way.
Your attitude of thinking that men who are avoiding you because you are a women are guilty of sexism is no less a sexist attitude and is part of the problem that you do not want to accept as part of your responsibility to solve.
Your words exhibit a prickly attitude that is a strong warning sign that, irrespective of how talented and professional you are, you are to be avoided because you will likely be the cause of accusations of sexism against those men avoiding you. It's a two way street. The problem is on both sides. There are men who need a complete mental readjustment because they consider women as things and there are women who need a complete mental readjustment because they treat men as low-lifes.
Stop treating men who avoid you as sexist and you might just find out how well you will be treated in return as a serious professional by those same men.
If, as a man, I am basically an asshole to you, then maybe I don't want to interact with you, period.
And let's be clear: I don't know you, I don't know whether you are a robot or whatever, I just know what you wrote here. And what you wrote here makes me hope not to have to interact with you in real life.
I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of HN (under a different handle). As far as I can tell, other women are not generally being more warmly welcomed with open arms by the community than I am.
I do everything in my power to examine my behavior and correct any defects I can find. This only goes so far because there are, in fact, larger societal forces at work.
If all women are incapable of getting the results they need, it is disingenuous to blame them as individuals and deny that society has some problem.
If you witness this kind of behaviour, denounce it publicly.
As for being clueless, well, here is a suggestion. If you see some man hitting on or trying to dominate a woman, you can approach both and just intrude yourself into the conversation. It should be possible to change the course of the interaction by redirecting things (including asking about some relevant conference or workplace activities). Do it in a way that says to the man that you are ignorant of goals, frustrate the living daylights out of him.
It is irrelevant if the recipient of the unwanted attention is a women or a man, protection and respect is something that should be applied to all. Protecting women (children and other men) from danger is a characteristic of what it is to be a man, that is one of our functions. This is not a function of equality. The same goes for women - if they are in a position to provide protection for other women, children or men, then do so. It is a part of who women are.
Men are deadly and rightly so, they should be. Deadly to protect those who need protecting. Women are fierce and dangerous and rightly so, they should be. Fierce and dangerous to protect those who need protecting.
Men and women are different and that is a good thing. Without each other, this world would be a sadder, darker and more injurious place.
There will be those who have no care for anyone other than themselves, these will abuse and destroy anyone else they can to get ahead. It is up to all of us to counteract these individuals when we have the opportunity.
The base problem is that people do not know how to respect and protect one another. Respect is not about equality, it is about recognising the differences between people (including the differences between men and women) and honouring each other. Equality of the sexes is a farcical mindset. Men and women are complimentary, each providing what the other doesn't have to produce a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Each looks at things in a different light and that is to the advantage of us all.
As a personal example, I have the deepest respect for one of my former (male, obviously) bosses who took a chance on me and fed me high-profile projects despite being a double/triple minority. (I hate the need to disclaim that last bit, but y'know, take it as illustrating the situation). Not a single interaction was awkward - there were group meetings aplenty, professional one-on-ones, silly one-on-ones where we were both cracking up at corporate shenanigans, water-cooler chats to triage the crazy amount of work we were getting, y'know, normal stuff. Good people exist, and there can be light moments too. Not all of this has to be The Most Srs.
He left a few years later due to natural company reorgs, but that extra limb out is something that's remembered quite dearly. Just standing by wouldn't have cut it.
> a manager at Microsoft told me I was only hired because I was a woman.
> “You must have had a lot of offers because you are black.”
I’m not in any way condoning this sexist/racist behaviour.
But statements like these reflect the fact that “affirmative action,” “positive discrimination,” quotas etc are HURTING women, by creating prejudice against them.
Some want to solve tech gender disparity by “engineering” an equality of outcome.
The harm done by these social engineers will last for generations.
Those are my honest thoughts, please don't destroy me. I see you were flagged and I'm not sure why, I think you present thought provoking points, and while I tend to agree, I would even like to see the views of those who disagree, not sure why they wouldn't want to see yours ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve found myself spending less time on HN. Other discussion communities are more inclusive and more diverse - and by that I mean the only meaningful flavour of diversity - diversity of opinion.
Would you mind sharing. The HN hive-mind has started getting to me lately. If I wanted to see well-intentioned, well-reasoned but fairly unpopular conversations being flagged and shut down, and illogical popular opinions up-voted to the top, I'd rather go to FB or some other place.
There is a good reason for that...its because there isn't a difference. You have to do a lot of linguistic gymnastics in order to somehow come to the conclusion that affirmative action isn't racist.
I believe that affirmative action can help speed up solving the pipeline problem.
If nothing else, just having X% women in tech a few years sooner can help us to hit the critical mass of women where things like "I have never worked with a woman before" become something that no senior person could say.
On top of that it provides role-models for children, who pattern match themselves against where they might be in the future.
The core problem is that for a woman working in tech is a shitty job, compared to what it is for a man. It means a much harder uphill battle for recognition, for jobs, for seniority, for autonomy in their work, for being treated like a basic human being in the workplace, etc. It's a fantasy to imagine that women don't notice this or haven't been noticing this, they do, they have. That's why so many women leave the field, and that's also why so many decide not to enter it.
You make tech an inviting and rewarding field for women to work in and the "pipeline problem" goes away on its own. Right now the story "women will be rewarded for working in tech" is a hard one to sell to little girls because substantially it is a lie.
Making it less shitty decreases those leaving and affirmative action increases those entering.
In addition, part of what has made it so easy for the environment to be so shitty is the low percentage of women (obviously rampant sexism plays a big part too, but the "I've never worked with a woman" "You're a woman so you must be non-technical" &c. are sustainable largely because of the low percentage of women).
Your comment is a bit like the reaction one gets when suggesting maybe the department of education is a flawed institution: "So, you don't want children to be educated?"
We’re still a ways from an article like this being met with something more constructive than the usual deflections, excuses, and ideological fights. We’re still stuck with arguments that wouldn’t have been out of place during various civil rights and suffragette movements.
It’s coming though, and I for one can’t wait. It’s just sad that we’re missing out on the talents of many women who make a rational choice to avoid STEM and it’s frequn toxic culture of asocial/antisocial asses. It’s sad that a site full of bright, educated poeple can still so frequtmly come off as a pack of deflecting, equivocating, terrified boys. Everyone involved deserves better than this.
So speak up, take a risk, and most of all act like and be someone that other people know would stand up for them. Be the kind of person who an absuive prick would never think of saying or doing what’s described in this article, around. Talk to and listen to your coworkers, and try to have some ideals beyond personal advancement.
For instance:
> Noting how if two women are talking to each other at a conference, it becomes highly unlikely any guys will walk up and join us. If three women are talking, forget about it.
Yes, indeed, and there are a number of reasons for this. From my point of view, I would avoid approaching a group of women talking by themselves since I'd be the odd one out.
> My “mentor” told me he had never worked with a woman before and wasn’t sure how to talk to me. I suggested he try talking to me like a person.
Depending on the tone, it may mean something completely different than what you are trying to say.
In fact, to me, it looks to me like he was talking about an insecurity he has, and it's not directly related to you... and you are tagging this as sexism.
Long story short, there is a clear line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and that is respect. It's clear that this line was crossed in a number of times in these stories, but just because you are in a position where you didn't like something doesn't mean the line was automatically crossed.
Women in male-dominated workplaces already feel like this every day.
I would submit that, while it is important to be cognizant that there are cases in which you may be intruding[0], the overwhelming majority of situations that's really not likely to be the case. It's work. You're working. Joining co-workers to talk about work is fine and overthinking it will bite you.
[0] - and yes, this may be identity-based and that may in a vacuum feel unfair, but we've held most of the cards for the run of human history and we can deal with it.
Note that "work" and "conference" are two very different environments. I have no problem joining co-workers in a conversation.
That section begins "But it’s important to portray the drip-drip-drip of smaller stories as well, so here goes."
> I would avoid approaching a group of women talking by themselves since I'd be the odd one out.
In what world is that not sexism? It's at least "sex-separatist", which isn't a good thing either. The fact that it is theoretically symmetrical doesn't make it OK. (And in practice it's not symmetrical, since women are an extreme minority at these events.) That is treating people differently because of gender, in a situation where gender is irrelevant.
That extra subtext isn't there as much with men.
That's really weird. Why would you assume--in a professional environment, specifically--that it's less acceptable to approach a pair of strangers based exclusively on their gender?
> In fact, to me, it looks to me like he was talking about an insecurity he has, and it's not directly related to you... and you are tagging this as sexism.
How would you feel if the mentor had said they'd never worked with black people before, and weren't sure how to talk to them?
You mentioned "alternative explanations besides sexism," but I don't see any way that these explanations aren't sexism.
I wonder if you're assuming that "sexist" only applies to harassers and open bigots. If you mean well but are unable to treat colleagues equally because of their gender, that's sexist. It doesn't mean you're a monster or a bad person, but it does mean that you have some real problems that you need to address.
> Yes, indeed, and there are a number of reasons for this. From my point of view, I would avoid approaching a group of women talking by themselves since I'd be the odd one out.
The outcome for the women is similar regardless of the motivations behind the behavior. The motivations matter in terms of how to solve the problem, but do not indicate there isn't a problem.
>> My “mentor” told me he had never worked with a woman before and wasn’t sure how to talk to me. I suggested he try talking to me like a person.
> Depending on the tone, it may mean something completely different than what you are trying to say.
I can't read this as not implying that the individual believes that the way he talks with male students is inappropriate for talking with female students. This implication is worrisome no matter which direction you take it in.
> In fact, to me, it looks to me like he was talking about an insecurity he has, and it's not directly related to you... and you are tagging this as sexism.
If I say "I've never performed trigonometric substitution before so I'm not sure how to solve this math problem." m I may be talking about an insecurity I have, but it certainly is directly related to them math problem.
That is exactly sexism – the subtle, insidious kind that us men tend not to even notice. You aren't the odd one out; you and them are all professionals at a conference.
That many men – the majority of attendees at most tech conferences – make decisions like yours is a major reason why it is more difficult for women to advance in tech fields than men. Behavior like this is exactly what people mean when they talk about "patriarchy". That it's subtle and "innocent" – "I'd be the odd one out" – is what makes us not recognize it in ourselves.
Suppose there is a group of girls at a high school is approached by a single guy that doesn't know them. What is the odds of being welcomed into the conversation without any questioning looks? At least at the high school I went to, it'd pretty low odds. As a consequence, guys learned not to do that.
That stuff carries forward, even if the situation has changed somewhat. You have a population of men trying to be polite. They're not going to approach groups that have given them negative feedback before, because they don't want to be a jerk.
You aren't in high school.
You aren't facing a clique of girls who happen to all live in the same neighborhood and have radically different interests likes and dislikes from you.
You're facing a group of top industry professionals self-selected from around the region/country/world (depending on how large/prestigious of a conference it is).
And the fact that you don't understand this distinction, the fact that you think it's legitimate for a man to categories "groups of women" as "cliques of mean girls" from high school onwards without reflecting or reevaluating the changing circumstances is why society (and more specifically YOU) still have a long way to go to understand what sexism is and is not.
There is a difference between explaining why people do things and approving of it? I was literally explaining why the "insidious" sexism existed. I even quoted what I wanted to elaborate on.
Maybe I would if I had something to add to the conversation, but to simply socialize? No.
In another context, a social one, maybe... but otherwise I don't see how that would work out.
And that says nothing about any bias, at least I cannot see it that way. Maybe it reflects some sort of insecurity, fear of rejection? Yes for sure. But that goes really far from sexism.
How many tech CEOs will stand up and say: "I have an 80% (or 90% or a 100%) male tech team because there are not enough qualified women to achieve gender balance."
No CEO will be caught dead saying that explicitly but they are saying it implicitly every single day with how they are staffing their companies.
From reading HN it seems like a large percentage of people here believe that the gender gap is due to a qualifications gap and they might dump on people like James Damore for being dumb enough to say it in public but most of them believe it and the way they act shows it.
The bottom line is that if you are not achieving gender balance on your teams what you are telling women and what you are telling the world is that you believe men are superior to women and that women are not qualified for these jobs.
Actions speak louder than words and as long as the actions of companies and individuals reflect this attitude no amount of words is going to change anything.
Achieving gender balance in tech is possible and is only a matter of choice.
There are more than enough qualified women to fill tech jobs in roughly equal proportion with men.
It doesn't happen because (among other reasons):
1) The people doing the hiring are overwhelmingly men and set rules and standards for hiring that discriminate against women
2) Companies believe that young men are more profitable employees and so they do nothing to seriously discourage discrimination
Unless this changes the experience of women in tech will be a negative one.
All a woman has to do to know that she is undervalued and seen as an inferior is walk into a company that has a overwhelmingly male tech team and that is most of them.
I'm also not so sure about your claim that "there are more than enough qualified women to fill tech jobs in roughly equal proportion with men." I rarely have the chance to talk to women who are similarly interested in computers, and at my university there are very few women who are in any of my CS classes, despite that I feel that those who are there feel welcome (hopefully. I am not all-knowing, this is my best guess).
I think a better solution to the problem than pressuring people into hiring women simply for the virtue of being female and aiming for 50% would be to call sexism what it is. Call out when people who do the bad of hiring a less qualified man instead of a woman (this is a contrived example, hopefully you're understanding my point).
Solving sexism with more sexism probably won't work.
These are my honest thoughts, hope that's ok.
This is probably true, but the idea that you have to be "passionate about computers" to do the job is one of those things that men have made up to exclude women.
In order to have gender equality you have to identify these areas of gender difference and eliminate them from hiring criteria.
> pressuring people into hiring women simply for the virtue of being female
That is the mischaracterization that everyone falls back on. They assume that if you have a gender balanced team it is because you hired people "because they are women."
That logic implies that those women are not qualified for the job and that you could never build a gender balanced team with qualified women.
Until we make gender balanced teams the norm people are going to keep thinking like that, which is why it is so important to take corrective action.
I didn't say that they need passion. I am saying, however, that I am less likely to go into medicine because I am not interested in it. Maybe the same could be the case for women? (meaning, if there is a general trend that less women are interested, then less will join said field of work, because it is their choice not to).
> That logic implies that those women are not qualified for the job and that you could never build a gender balanced team with qualified women.
You have a good point. This sentence does have a negative connotation as you say, but it is not exclusively said. Could it also be possible that a push to hire more females (explicitly because of needed gender balance, something that is, in my opinion, contrived) has happened enough recently that people's minds go there first?
> Until we make gender balanced teams the norm people are going to keep thinking like that, which is why it is so important to take corrective action.
Interesting point. I'm not willing to say you're wrong, because you might be right. I'll admit, I thought that less women graduate with CS degrees than men though. Am I wrong? If not, how do we get more women to enter that major? And what if they don't want to simply because they're not interested?
edit: I appreciate that we can talk about this btw, and that you seem to respect my opinion. I think this is a valuable part of this discussion. Thanks.
This is absolutely true but it is also true that there are many successful people working in the tech industry at all levels with very little formal comp sci education.
If men can get software engineering jobs with no formal comp sci education, which they certainly can, then the fact that there is an imbalance in degrees does not mean that we have to have an imbalance in employment.
The low representation of women in CS at university level needs to be addressed as well but the best way to do that is by making software development a job that women want and believe that they can succeed in.
People go to college to get training for a career and so if women feel like software development is a profession that excludes women they aren't going to waste their time and money training for it.
"the percentage of CS-degree holders who were women peaked in the 1980s at 34% and has been on a downward trend ever since, even though women currently earn 57% of all undergraduate degrees."
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code:-why-aren...
The fact that there has been a sharp decline in female participation in CS in just the past few decades demonstrates that this is a temporary anomaly and not some "fundamental difference between genders" and further demonstrates that large changes are possible with the correct policies.
I mean if you've been programming since you were 8 and consider it your identity its not that far to go into believing that anyone who is good has to have the same background. Gender doesn't have anything to do with it.
For what its worth I thought this way until it was proven otherwise to me after enough time in the industry.
It is just a matter of choice. If companies make it a priority they can do it.
I don't think companies should ever hire someone based on anything other than their qualifications for the job so of course the actual distribution should vary from company to company but if it is 60:40 m/f at one company then it should be 40:60 m/f at another (SHOCKING CRAZY IDEA) and the average should come out somewhere near the middle..
https://blog.dol.gov/2017/03/01/12-stats-about-working-women https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
Even if that was true, having enough qualified women is not sufficient. You need enough women who are both qualified AND want to fill tech jobs.
When you look at measurements of STEM ability and of reading comprehension in high school students in the US and Europe, an interesting pattern emerges. For boys who are good in STEM, STEM tends to be what they are best at. For girls who good in STEM, they tend to be even better at reading comprehension [1] [2].
Scoring high on reading comprehension correlates well with being good at things that are important in various non-STEM fields (or in the "soft" sciences part of STEM).
People generally have to narrow their focus as they move on to college, maybe graduate school, and into a career. They strongly tend to narrow that focus to what they are best at. That means we lose a lot of those "good at STEM" in high school girls because they are even better at non-STEM.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180214150132.h...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
The conduct of interviewers when hiring cold is stunningly asinine for everybody, so I have the utmost sympathy for women who have to deal with gender bias on top of that. Talent shortage my ass. Interviewers make up their mind based on something - some kind of projection that isn't you - and then make clowns of themselves while trying to rationalize whatever the prejudice was. Take this gem, from the lead engineer: "Well we get a lot of applicants who know C#, but they don't understand low-level." And? How is that my problem? Now how many idiotic interviewers out there are secretly thinking, "Yeah actually all the hardcore low-level coders I know are men, so..."
I've been ranting for years about how there is no talent shortage. It's just that hiring is broken, asinine, and fear-driven. I think I'll pivot to: There is no shortage of talented women. Not to the extent that it is made out to be. TL;DR: parent is correct. It isn't that they aren't there; it's that whoever isn't hiring them.
I’m sad at the deterioration of the HN community into a place where reasonable and inoffensive comments are flagged and downvoted simply because people disagree on a political level.
I’ve found myself spending less time on HN due to this behaviour in the comments section.
Other discussion communities are more inclusive and more diverse - and by that I mean the only meaningful flavour of diversity - diversity of opinion.
The lack of understanding that those biases can be reversed is what needs to be corrected. This is the other camp, the camp that understands this and proactively fixes things, that needs to be made bigger.
I think, such things start very young. They starts in pre-schools where girls are given a doll and boys are given the lego blocks or children are not sensitized to color of the skin issues.
What's this?
This has been discussed on HN in the past, usually in threads about female CS pioneers working at NASA and so on. I believe the consensus is that there wasn't a single individual cause for the change, but rather a number of conditions changed around the same time, discouraging women from CS-related jobs.
https://youtu.be/4vCDHJ4-D80 https://youtu.be/WTLJ7saIV3o
It starts before then. Babies only a few days old show a preference for Duplo or dolls depending on their biological sex.
I can't find the paper, though.
I really don't understand how this could ever be resolved. Talking about it seems like a start, but it really makes me feel like I am part of the problem as a man, and I don't feel this is positive tone to this conversation.
Help?
I hope that there is a positive to find: that socially we can empower those who would otherwise be victims through our support. I'm not sure what exactly that looks like yet, but we're figuring that out. We're talking about it. That's positive :)
Step 2. Think about if you might accidentally disrespecting people. Read stories like OP and think if you'd done something that was unintentionally hurtful.
Step 3. Look out for abuse, and call it out where you see it.
Step 4. Look out for people being overlooked and ignored, and give them a platform and a microphone (figuratively or literally).
Yes? I'd rather not work with dicks and I will do whatever I can in my professional capacity to ensure that dicks are not hired or promoted.
Who tf are these people?
The answer is: some of our colleagues.
I just wanted to make a simple mathematical point, which the article kind of alludes to: the more X-dominated a field is, the more you would have run-ins with X, and thus more stories of inappropriate behavior by X.
I wonder what stories guys have of joining female-dominated fields. Are they called the token guy? Do women make sexual remarks about them? The degree to which the answer is "yes" will be greatly affected by the imbalance in the first place. The bigger it is, the more likely they are to bump up against something bad in everyday life.
Not saying we just have to accept this. Just saying we have to understand that no matter how much we all personally make an effort to act better, these stories will continue. So don't beat yourself up over it and continue to treat everyone as a fellow human being. And don't take it as a criticism of all men.
The same phenomenon happens if you turn on the news and see crimes and murders all the time. That doesn't mean the city is overrun by crime but rather that the stories merited special attention. It doesn't mean YOU necessarily have to constantly keep in mind not to rob or murder someone.