I agree, and have tended to keep a low profile online. Unfortunately, much like the unspoken rule to code in your spare time (the subject of Emily's video), it seems like there's always pressure to have an online non-coding presence including blogs, twitter, etc...
That's why I briefly wrote about side projects at ${myname.tld} when I was on the job market a few years back, and why I suspect I'll be back at it at some point in the future.
In many cases, it's all just a way to stand out in a pile of resumes, which is disheartening in and of itself. That for many women it turns into outright harassment is disgusting and a reflection of the worst that internet anonymity has to offer.
not OP but I've worked construction for a while as well and while blue collar workers tend to be a lot more vulgar, you know not a lot of high society filters and so on, actually I think genuine misogyny and abuse of women is way worse in white collar work.
First off there's simply way fewer women in blue collar work, and if they are there's no real hierarchy. Blue collar workers don't have secretaries.
The stories I've heard from women who were harassed over years at startups or law firms, in particular secretaries or women in other jobs that had lower status is something else.
Reports of sexism in the software field seem pretty common, but that's tough to square with what also seems like a uniquely high tolerance for trans people (moreso than in other field, as far as it seems).
Social media posts for the vast majority are all risk and no reward. Risk comes in all forms. Creepy internet denizens, job loss, and misinterpretation.
Not to make small of her points, as i am sure women may get it more but the point 'Why should a woman have to expect to be harassed every time she puts herself out there online?'.
I agree this is bullshit, but its the same for anyone, if you put yourself out there expect to be harassed.
As a man, I've never experienced something like this (also never went viral) but I think it's at least somewhat comforting that most of those disgusting comments were downvoted and the moderators had an apologetic response.
I wonder how much of the hate was because she was a female programmer vs just because shitty human beings are going to be shitty on the internet regardless of her gender and unfortunately, being a woman in tech is an easy target for them.
> I wonder how much of the hate was because she was a female programmer vs just because shitty human beings...
Your inquiry here is kinda the very basis of intersectionality. No matter where you go, there are shitty people who will harrass you for being different. Only it's not just "different" when there's predominantly violence in a single direction across an axis; some people get way more shit than others, and it's not "just because", it's not just.
You have to remember, we're talking about Reddit, here. Anyone with eyes knows that Reddit is a cesspool and anyone can create an anonymous account with no verification at all. I'm a nobody, and I regularly have people fight with me on there and sometimes get death threats. Never happens anywhere near to that degree on other social media sites.
HN is similarly anonymous, let's not bash privacy support. Cultures breeding bad behavior are born of complex sets of reasons and otoh you get the same kind of thing on FB.
I think there is a chronic plague amongst programmers to act differently around women, it is very unnecessary and that was a very relatable and humorous video that was posted. It is good to see more people being able to relate to the problem of tech recruiting as its closer to changing that way, and that isn't going to come from the maladjusted edge-lords prevalent in this industry.
> And I’m sure most of these kids would have NEVER said any of those things in person, but being anonymous gives you a strange power and a weird desire to say harmful things.
Not to your face, no...
That's where I falter with the lamentations about the toxicity of online forums; to me, it's not that the language or vulgarity is novel or new, because it's not. At least, not in my personal experience.
What is new, and what makes the vulgar abuse more dangerous online, is that it has far greater reach. Many more people will read the forum comments than would have heard the spoken comments.
So, ie, where previously conspiracy theorists were a small community that relied on printed zines, limited run books, and (sometimes) radio; the "scene" took a nosedive when the internet took off.
Where listening to Art Bell and reading the Whole Earth Catalog was humorously enjoyable and rarely offensive, the online forums and facebook groups have given rise to QAnon.
There's something about the medium that's altering the message.
This kind of behavior -- I mean degenerate, human filth online behavior, not specifically the sexist kind -- happens a lot more lately now that it can spread by example over the internet, get learned by teenagers, and mimicked. This didn't generate out of, say, people that spent some teenage years posting on Usenet, or even people playing certain video games at certain times in the past, in my experience.
And you don't imagine 40-year-olds suddenly picking up and enacting this sort of conduct.
Maybe it's also absent in other languages' online behavior.
I think it's the sort of conduct that could be socially engineered out of existence -- or lowered by an order of magnitude -- in one teenage generation, if we figured out a way to do it.
I can't speak for Usenet, but the internet already had more than its fair share of influential shitholes by the early 2000s. 4chan, ebaumsworld, TOTSE, LiveLeak, etc. existed at their very worst at that time, and even websites that are widely considered toxic/unruly today (namely Twitter and Reddit) are quite tame compared to what was going on then. You are definitely better off for having missed them, but that doesn't mean the behavior didn't exist.
Maybe. Nowadays I’ve been invited to a discord in some mainstream topic of interest to me, and in its #off-topic channel, well, my monocle dropped to the floor from the hard n-word dropping casual racism, not some attempt to land a joke or be ironic, and that was not an anonymous message board. I think in the early 2000’s 4chan didn’t exist yet, the internet hadn’t really penetrated into life as much, console games were still not networked, and getting kids exposed to such behavior was not the default situation.
It was pretty common by mid 2000s when Xbox Live came out. And it was pretty common IRL in early 2000s too. I’ve seen plenty of n-word dropping and casual racism IRL as a kid in the early 2000s.
I didn't get the same vibe on, I don't know, Slashdot back in the early 2000's. Misconduct took the form of Goatseing and GNAA posting and such.
In video games and sports it's different. Making a sport of trash-talking in a video game (or, the NFL line of scrimmage) is a different thing than making lame posts on reddit. But with such behavior in video games, with teenagers playing them, combined with other online activity, it seems to have percolated.
I don't know, it could just be blinders. But I had a YouTube video go fairly viral in 2006, and it didn't have the bad "omg the YouTube comments" experience that people started talking about some years later. (On the other hand I could complain it got comments on my clothing, comments about my race, and offers of marriage, except, well, I enjoyed all of them.)
I think it's more demographics shift in reddit and other social media users than percolation of behavior. As in the video game and sports people started using reddit more instead of the old programmer dominated crowd in reddit.
The internet abuse in response to this is disgusting and absolutely predictable.
The video -- spot on. I have a good job today because I was accepted to an internship for students with minimal CS experience, received a return offer, and accepted it. I work hard but have never done a side project in my life, and am terrified of having to apply for a new job.
Who would've thought? If you sort by 'Controversial' and trawl through the downvoted comments, apparently you can find some things that most people consider distasteful.
This lady looked hard enough, and she found exactly what she was searching for.
Ironically, her comments about feeling 'unsafe' and in 'fear' are exactly the type of irrational emotional appeals that damage the perception of women in STEM fields as being unable or unwilling to take criticism, even if unfair.
It's the internet. You'll get nasty comments about your race, gender, orientation, and anything else people can latch on to. This is not unique to your gender and certainly not this industry.
Indeed, you only need to look as far as this lady's own post to find sexist comments against men - "incels".
The cynic in me is tempted to believe that this is little more than an attempted viral post capitalising on the previous.
I, a man, posted a picture of myself on a hardware subreddit with an AWS Snowball and received replies criticising my smile "You're gonna catch flies if you keep your mouth open like that." (+28 Karma right now) as well as a bunch telling me I was fat (really? I had no idea), a couple calling me a "beta" and questioning my testosterone levels (why is that a thing?) and one that declared I was obviously a lizard person. All of them had positive karma but we're removed by mods, days later, so I can't quote them directly.
The internet is just mean, to everyone. I feel like with the negative karma on all this ladies unpleasant comments she really didn't get it that bad.
> The internet is just mean, to everyone. I feel like with the negative karma on all this ladies unpleasant comments she really didn't get it that bad.
I don't think gatekeeping bad experiences on the internet is really helpful here.
I think that ignoring abuse oriented towards men is a common blind spot in our society.
My first upload to Youtube received a comment, "You're nothing but a big fat Jew!" I think that this is quite representative of the hate of the Internet at large.
This sort of blindness towards abuse towards men is not just here on the Internets. In real life, progress made against ritual genital mutilation is happening for women but not for men.
So is using any semi-plausible claim to victimhood as a means of acquiring clout / wealth / power in a moral system with a bias toward unquestioningly exalting victimhood.
Men get called names. Women get people finding their addresses and visiting their houses, their online accounts enumerated, their profiles stalked etc. It wasn't that long ago that there was a Reddit bot which searched posters' submissions for GoneWild posts, which was invoked whenever a commenter revealed themselves as a woman. I'm sorry people were rude to you, but the degree and kind of abuse women face online is so disproportionate that these examples (particularly in a thread full of similar) only serve to diminish and distract from that fact.
The idea that the worst men face is being called names is a bit rediculous. The worst is having the swat team called to your home repeatedly and the phone ringing with death threats.
It may be true that women get harassed more frequently, but if you really get targeted, your gender doesn't seem to matter all that much.
It's demonstrably false that when someone is targeted for harassment, their gender doesn't matter "that much." Emily Kager's post highlights how gendered the harassment is. Here's one citation stating "one in four serious and violent threats directed at women were related to their gender, compared with one in 16 for men." [0] Here's an analysis of comments towards female vs male athletes finding that abuse towards female athletes is three times more likely. [1] Here's another finding that half the women surveyed categorised their abuse as misogynistic. [2]
To clarify, I'm not saying women are "harassed more frequently." That seems not to be the case, and yet here's a study that "showed that while male celebrities, female journalists, and male politicians face the highest likelihood of online hostility, women are significantly more likely to be targeted specifically because of their gender, and men are overwhelmingly those doing the harassing." [3]
The types of online harassment are multiple and varied; we could equally single racist, fatphobic, and, as the earlier comment mentioned, antisemitic abuse out as well. We can even talk about the abuse faced by men -- I've been active online for 30 years, I'm a male, I'm not blind to it -- but that is not what this post is about. It's about the specifically gendered nature of abuse faced by women online. So I reiterate my point that "well, actually"-ing about other kinds of abuse only distracts from the salient topic and undermines what women like Kager are trying to highlight.
FYI, if you want to access a deleted post or comment, just replace 'reddit' in the URL with 'ceddit' or one of the other, similar Reddit archive sites. This works about 99% of the time. The rest of the time is when the comment is deleted too fast for the archive site to pick it up.
Based on the comments above, it seems many people think that everyone who goes viral gets a lot of creepy and unwanted attention, but when it happens to women it gets more sympathy than when it happens to men.
Thus giving special attention to women's plight is at odds with our norms of equality. I concur and feel like this is an example of female privilege, where women in general are given more sympathy than men for similar hardships.
Did you read the same post I read? One of the harassers asserted that she must have traded sexual favors for a CS degree. Do you seriously believe that a male engineer would be sexualized and discredited that aggressively?
Please take some time to reflect. Look up statistics on sexual assault and violence against women. This is not an attempt to bait clicks, its an attempt to stand up against systemic attack.
> Look up statistics on sexual assault and violence against women
Why do I need to limit myself to women? You are claiming that men cannot be victims? Here is what I found:
As of 1998, 2.78 million men in the U.S. had been victims of attempted or completed rape.
About 3% of American men—or 1 in 33—have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime.
1 out of every 10 rape victims are male.
So yes, please stop your sexist arguments: both women and men can be victims. Maybe you should be the one who needs to take some time to reflect.
I'm one of those people who really doesn't give a shit about gender, race, religion, sexual preferences, etc. But it seems nowadays you have take all of these attributes and divide them into "victims" and "predators". I'm really sick of that, and I'm really sick of media playing out that part.
So yeah, there is my reflection on this whole narrative.
You know what basically flawed everything, inducing these toxic behaviours?
Just try to open any social network and navigate to Profiles of women related to coding. As an example, Instagram is full of women in tech writing delightful content but have you seen their pictures? Most of them are in sexy poses, or with full-body perspective, where more sexual recalls are involved, rather than focussing on programming/tech in general. The same happens for TikTok or Facebook.
I think all of this free sexism could have been stopped if someone started focussing really on technical aspects, independently from sexual orientation/gender/race/whatever, rather than exacerbating the narcissism.
Internet, as long as you don't expose your face, allows you to build a powerful identity, which hasn't nothing to do with personal aspect, but with competence, or at least, it was supposed to work so, until someone went out and started posted those pics.
If you stalk the writer and scroll on their Instagram, you will find personal pictures that are very common among Instagram users. It's therefore their fault if you can't control yourself and act professionally? Because they're asking for it?
sure, but differently from common IG users, they write technical comments linked to those pictures. Am I acting unprofessionally or are they, just to catch likes, followers?
Although I am mightily confused about their use of Instagram as a blogging and resume-hosting platform, I have to say there is absolutely nothing "sexy" about any of the photos of these three women I could see, at all. Other than the fact that they happen to be conventionally attractive women, I don't see where you're getting this whole "sexy pics are undermining women in tech's credibility" angle.
I think these accounts are ridiculous and counterproductive. However, they’re obviously different from the type of content that the woman in this article posted. The conflation of the two is part of the problem; this woman cannot show her face in a funny video without being related to ‘sexy instagram posers’. Finding Instagram accounts of men flexing in their underwear while typing some HTML would be just as ludicrous but nobody would be saying “this is why we can’t take men seriously, they don’t focus on technical aspects”.
People are simply creeps. The cesspools that allow them to be creeps are the biggest social networks out there. I know there is a difference between a video of me (male) vs featuring my daughter. The disgusting pigs come out at that time. I think every woman who gets views on social media will be subjected to this. I've personally had 20+ million views on YouTube, these types of comments rarely show up.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 51.2 ms ] threadThat's why I briefly wrote about side projects at ${myname.tld} when I was on the job market a few years back, and why I suspect I'll be back at it at some point in the future.
In many cases, it's all just a way to stand out in a pile of resumes, which is disheartening in and of itself. That for many women it turns into outright harassment is disgusting and a reflection of the worst that internet anonymity has to offer.
First off there's simply way fewer women in blue collar work, and if they are there's no real hierarchy. Blue collar workers don't have secretaries.
The stories I've heard from women who were harassed over years at startups or law firms, in particular secretaries or women in other jobs that had lower status is something else.
I agree this is bullshit, but its the same for anyone, if you put yourself out there expect to be harassed.
I know the internet is full of mean jerks, but they are nowhere near as toxic to me as they are to women.
I wonder how much of the hate was because she was a female programmer vs just because shitty human beings are going to be shitty on the internet regardless of her gender and unfortunately, being a woman in tech is an easy target for them.
Your inquiry here is kinda the very basis of intersectionality. No matter where you go, there are shitty people who will harrass you for being different. Only it's not just "different" when there's predominantly violence in a single direction across an axis; some people get way more shit than others, and it's not "just because", it's not just.
Good effort. I haven't managed to receive a death threat yet.
I think there is a chronic plague amongst programmers to act differently around women, it is very unnecessary and that was a very relatable and humorous video that was posted. It is good to see more people being able to relate to the problem of tech recruiting as its closer to changing that way, and that isn't going to come from the maladjusted edge-lords prevalent in this industry.
Not to your face, no...
That's where I falter with the lamentations about the toxicity of online forums; to me, it's not that the language or vulgarity is novel or new, because it's not. At least, not in my personal experience.
What is new, and what makes the vulgar abuse more dangerous online, is that it has far greater reach. Many more people will read the forum comments than would have heard the spoken comments.
So, ie, where previously conspiracy theorists were a small community that relied on printed zines, limited run books, and (sometimes) radio; the "scene" took a nosedive when the internet took off.
Where listening to Art Bell and reading the Whole Earth Catalog was humorously enjoyable and rarely offensive, the online forums and facebook groups have given rise to QAnon.
There's something about the medium that's altering the message.
And you don't imagine 40-year-olds suddenly picking up and enacting this sort of conduct.
Maybe it's also absent in other languages' online behavior.
I think it's the sort of conduct that could be socially engineered out of existence -- or lowered by an order of magnitude -- in one teenage generation, if we figured out a way to do it.
In video games and sports it's different. Making a sport of trash-talking in a video game (or, the NFL line of scrimmage) is a different thing than making lame posts on reddit. But with such behavior in video games, with teenagers playing them, combined with other online activity, it seems to have percolated.
I don't know, it could just be blinders. But I had a YouTube video go fairly viral in 2006, and it didn't have the bad "omg the YouTube comments" experience that people started talking about some years later. (On the other hand I could complain it got comments on my clothing, comments about my race, and offers of marriage, except, well, I enjoyed all of them.)
The video -- spot on. I have a good job today because I was accepted to an internship for students with minimal CS experience, received a return offer, and accepted it. I work hard but have never done a side project in my life, and am terrified of having to apply for a new job.
This lady looked hard enough, and she found exactly what she was searching for.
Ironically, her comments about feeling 'unsafe' and in 'fear' are exactly the type of irrational emotional appeals that damage the perception of women in STEM fields as being unable or unwilling to take criticism, even if unfair.
It's the internet. You'll get nasty comments about your race, gender, orientation, and anything else people can latch on to. This is not unique to your gender and certainly not this industry.
Indeed, you only need to look as far as this lady's own post to find sexist comments against men - "incels".
The cynic in me is tempted to believe that this is little more than an attempted viral post capitalising on the previous.
The internet is just mean, to everyone. I feel like with the negative karma on all this ladies unpleasant comments she really didn't get it that bad.
I don't think gatekeeping bad experiences on the internet is really helpful here.
My first upload to Youtube received a comment, "You're nothing but a big fat Jew!" I think that this is quite representative of the hate of the Internet at large.
This sort of blindness towards abuse towards men is not just here on the Internets. In real life, progress made against ritual genital mutilation is happening for women but not for men.
It may be true that women get harassed more frequently, but if you really get targeted, your gender doesn't seem to matter all that much.
To clarify, I'm not saying women are "harassed more frequently." That seems not to be the case, and yet here's a study that "showed that while male celebrities, female journalists, and male politicians face the highest likelihood of online hostility, women are significantly more likely to be targeted specifically because of their gender, and men are overwhelmingly those doing the harassing." [3]
The types of online harassment are multiple and varied; we could equally single racist, fatphobic, and, as the earlier comment mentioned, antisemitic abuse out as well. We can even talk about the abuse faced by men -- I've been active online for 30 years, I'm a male, I'm not blind to it -- but that is not what this post is about. It's about the specifically gendered nature of abuse faced by women online. So I reiterate my point that "well, actually"-ing about other kinds of abuse only distracts from the salient topic and undermines what women like Kager are trying to highlight.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/sep/06/higher-proport...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-24/women-receive-three-t...
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2018/03/online-vi...
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/the-u...
I'm also curious as to why this post is currently flagged.
Thus giving special attention to women's plight is at odds with our norms of equality. I concur and feel like this is an example of female privilege, where women in general are given more sympathy than men for similar hardships.
It seems it's just a story that happens to anyone who gets 15 min fame by some post.
But now all of a sudden it's again women in tech that are victims... Come on... please...
But I guess "person gets harassed online" wouldn't make the front page.
Please take some time to reflect. Look up statistics on sexual assault and violence against women. This is not an attempt to bait clicks, its an attempt to stand up against systemic attack.
Why do I need to limit myself to women? You are claiming that men cannot be victims? Here is what I found:
As of 1998, 2.78 million men in the U.S. had been victims of attempted or completed rape. About 3% of American men—or 1 in 33—have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. 1 out of every 10 rape victims are male.
So yes, please stop your sexist arguments: both women and men can be victims. Maybe you should be the one who needs to take some time to reflect.
I'm one of those people who really doesn't give a shit about gender, race, religion, sexual preferences, etc. But it seems nowadays you have take all of these attributes and divide them into "victims" and "predators". I'm really sick of that, and I'm really sick of media playing out that part.
So yeah, there is my reflection on this whole narrative.
It’s disappointing to see the apathy in this thread. I agree with the blogger that we should expect more from mods and commenters.
Just try to open any social network and navigate to Profiles of women related to coding. As an example, Instagram is full of women in tech writing delightful content but have you seen their pictures? Most of them are in sexy poses, or with full-body perspective, where more sexual recalls are involved, rather than focussing on programming/tech in general. The same happens for TikTok or Facebook.
I think all of this free sexism could have been stopped if someone started focussing really on technical aspects, independently from sexual orientation/gender/race/whatever, rather than exacerbating the narcissism.
Internet, as long as you don't expose your face, allows you to build a powerful identity, which hasn't nothing to do with personal aspect, but with competence, or at least, it was supposed to work so, until someone went out and started posted those pics.
As a reference (just a few selection):
- https://www.instagram.com/coding_unicorn/
- https://www.instagram.com/ioana.codes/
- https://www.instagram.com/tech.unicorn/
Maybe "I can't take this woman seriously", but then I didn't see any programming content on the first Instagram page linked, just an attractive woman.