There's a lot of things besides nudity that can render an image inappropriate for use in a conference presentation, and judging from the description in the linked article (There was one image of a pig indulging in sexual activity with a goose...), I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to be offended.
Sure; but if you are presenting in public, it isn't your own 'offended' threshold that should be operative, it is that of your audience. And, even there, you probably don't want to shoot for the middle of the pack there-- offending, say, half of your audience wouldn't be much of a success in most contexts. So, while you might not want to scrub down your presentation to a point where no one is offended, you still probably want to stay away from sexual images involving farm animals. Just sayin'.
And a third person kept phoning various people's workplaces and accusing them of being involved in child pornography.
Seriously? I'm having a hard time believing that this was instigated purely because she's a female developer. Surely there was more to it than her gender for someone to stoop that low?
"Bayley wrote, in a blog entry for the Geek Feminist website, which she founded..."
"This kind of harassment and bullying is endemic in many circles, including towards women in technical communities, particularly if they _complain about community norms_."
So no, she wasn't harassed to this degree just because of her gender. She was harassed because she had spoken up about other, less disgustingly over the top issues.
That story started as a female blogger attacked for being a successful female in tech. It's an easy simplification. Meanwhile, I followed that story and it turns out (unrelated to tech, success, or being female) she was involved in breaking up a marriage (being the other woman) which lead to harassment from a Christian fundamentalist relative.
While I have no doubt individuals can be hostile towards women in tech, I generally find posts from people heavily involved in a cause tend to re-contextualize stories to fit their narrative. If you read a blog post from feminists in tech you are going to read a post about how women are mistreated in tech.
Which turns a story about an former partner calling up the work place to harass his ex girlfriend into an attack on women in tech.
No disagreement with the basic, point, but was a bit surprised by this quote:
"So, here's our situation. We have a man (presumably; at any rate he appears to want to be identified as such) in the Australian Linux community, who targets women by sending them private abusive emails from a throwaway address and with a name that can't readily be connected to any publicly known member of the community. His ISP won't hand out information about him without a court order, his abuse doesn’t present the kind of imminent threat to physical safety that might interest law enforcement, and despite Linux Australia’s diversity statement and Linux.conf.au's anti-harassment policies, it's not clear that there’s any practical thing that either of those groups can do about him."
Is it Bayley's position that ISP's should give out information on their users in response to warrantless requests -- from private individuals, no less?
Is it likewise Bayley's position that law enforcement should be going after people for making lewd comments online?
Unless he's swapping IP addresses on a regular basis, or hiding on a highly shared server, figuring out who this actually is without any help from an ISP or law enforcement shouldn't be that hard (this is the same way that "why the lucky stiff" was outed), assuming that the person is also an active contributor on other lists.
MikeeUSA abuses open proxies and tor like mad. He also comes onto IRC channels with random nicks. Soon as he opens his mouth, though, he usually has outed himself.
I have referred to that same PA comic in the Darkplaces IRC channel (which hosts frequent games of "ban the MikeeUSA").
MikeeUSA frequently states dumb shit like "oh, women deserve to be raped since the day they first bleed because this is what God created women for" and other shit.
He does it purely for the sake of trolling, and people periodically bite the trollbait.
Is this illegal? No. Should he be beaten with in an inch of his life? Yes. Is that going to happen outside of a prison? Probably not, no one is quite sure of his exact address.
Not that I'm sticking up for those who take the bait, feeding the troll is always bad, but MikeeUSA and his ilk should just stay on /b/ where they belong.
If you said things to me / my family in person, there is the added threat of violence.
Online, there is no such threat. You could just as easily be a bot spewing hate, as a real human being. And being offended by a bot is pretty irrational.
Online, there is "data". If I know you, or have formed attachment to you via ongoing conversations etc or divulging details about myself, then the data becomes more meaningful and has emotion attached to it. But random data? No point being offended by that.
FWIW If someone I didn't know said that to my wife/mother/etc we'd just ignore them and walk away.
If that person kept coming back again and again with the same or similar comments, would you see the threat, this is what is happening here if you care to actually read the articles
If you ignore him, he'll move on to someone else soon enough.
Citation needed. You are assuming the trolling person is moderately rational and will go somewhere else if his selected target isn't yielding sufficient lulz. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to find stories of irrational people who escalate their harassment under such circumstances. Every few weeks there's a news story about some marginal person who loses the plot and goes on a shooting spree, so the risk of escalation is clearly non-zero.
If you want to change the statu quo, you have to speak up. Saying the solution to sexism is to shut up is not helping to solve the problem (and there is a problem, I witnessed it several times in real life, it is not just a "troll problem".)
You are right. Casual threats of violence get me about as riled up as casual sexism so this was both a perfect storm and an overreaction on my part. I should have silently grumbled and ignored it.
While better than actual violence I also don’t want to live in a society where threats of violence are common. That seems like an irrational and barbaric way of solving problems.
Violence is a tiny bit too serious for to just discount the threat of it as a nice rhetorical flourish.
Well, a measured quantity of violence ('violence' being a very broad category) targeted at someone who is clearly causing harm is sometimes the only effective way of stopping a greater amount of harm. No-violence is clearly better, but assuming that (say) a rape is being committed, some degree of violence is a reasonable response to stop things from happening or deter other things.
Anybody can decide to attack you, whenever they want. We have police, courts, etc to settle disagreements, but if they are not interested in getting involved in your case, you two are on your own.
A number of women have been beaten, raped and/or murdered by men making identical noises. MikeeUSA wasn't trolling, he was threatening to murder those women he was stalking, and justifying it.
As MikeeUSA himself wrote:
> The women of the "geek feminism" movement will be just as effective at excising men from the movement as Nina was at systematically destroying Hans Reiser's life untill he saw no reason, nothing left in his life, that could hold him back from striking back.
Hans was convicted in 2008 of murdering his wife Nina. MikeeUSA is saying categorically that Nina deserved to die, just like MikeeUSA's targets.
But thats just part of his troll persona. He's like 14, lives in his parent's basement, and hates the bright light of the daystar in the big blue room.
If a woman said hi to him, he'd spooge his pants and pass out, complete with nosebleed.
I think from what I have followed of this, there have been some pretty lewd and targeted comments made, not only on blog comments but via direct email.
While I dont know Bayley at all, from what I can gather she is highlighting the fact that people have to put up with such harassment due to the fact that ISP's or Police will not act on it.
Being that the comments were made via direct email, I guess you could liken it to someone calling you at home and telling you to "F!?K off out of your house", I think anyone would be creeped out at that. But as there are no actual threats of harm made, the law is useless to do anything.
"Is it Bayley's position that ISP's should give out information on their users in response to warrantless requests -- from private individuals, no less?"
Of course, because there is no worse crime than harassing women and any and all civil rights are second to all efforts to punish those who do. Let's not forget that the OP is identifying with a movement where it is commonly advocated to reverse the burden of proof in rape cases.
It distresses me that "political correctness" has become a dirty "four letter" word rather than simply a shared understanding that people who address others in a hate-filled, bullying, disrepectful and demeaning way should be actively shunned and censured (i.e. not "censored").
Perhaps political correctness didn't used to mean that. But for a while now the term has mostly only been used as an ingredient of the defensive protestations of people who get called out for displays of bigotry. Consequently, its meaning has shifted.
No, because you can offend people without bigotry, and you can be entirely respectful without being PC. The scope of things that can offend the people around you is essentially limitless. Failure to tip toe around your audience's sensitivities is not bigotry, but failure to respect your audience as an equal human being is.
Well, the general reason for this attitude goes back to the old phrase "sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never harm me".
When someone initiates physical force against you, it is an action being done to you, the consequences of which you cannot avoid due to the laws of physics. We take actual threats of physical violence seriously because of this.
When someone says mean things, the above attitude presumes that the consequences to you are entirely within your own mind. One can either be offended or not offended, angry or not angry, etc. The presumption is that the onus of response is on the trollee, not the troll.
Modern psychology and neuroscience have some things to say about the degree of distinction that the human mind makes between physical and verbal "forces". It also has some things to say about how much control we actually have over our responses to these forces. But so long as humans like to believe that they are in full control of their own actions, and that lacking this control is a personal fault, the mentality you describe will persist.
the daily life of most women is filled with navigating a hostile space that may break out into sexual violence at any time.
having an obsessed troll on the internet following you around, or threatening you before you show up to a conference, goes way beyond what you're talking about here.
your whole point comes from a place of the privilege of relative security. imagine that is not the case.
Seems they think about it somewhat less often than I do. But you said "hostile" which I think is not true, and you said "may break out into sexual violence at any time" which (putting aside the fact that anyone around us could rape us at any time) seems pretty unlikely both to me and to the women I asked.
Are you talking about women in a particular place or subculture? You do know that men are more often victims of violence than women in the US, right?
"the daily life of most women is filled with navigating a hostile space that may break out into sexual violence at any time."
If you live in a warzone in Africa, maybe. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you're talking about. I'd ask the women around me if they feel that way but I'm afraid they'll think I'm nuts if I were to ask them such clearly outrageous things.
After reading this article, twice... huh? All I can tell is she is bitching that she didn't get respect purely out of being a woman in tech and nothing else actually substantial.
I personally encourage woman to enter various tech industry roles (programming, IT, etc), and women like this push Woman's Rights 2.0 back a decade every time they do this.
Also, MikeeUSA is a known troll, and anyone who is stupid enough to fall for his shit rather deserves it. He tends to hang out (and by hang out, I mean banned frequently) in the IRC channel for DarkPlaces, a Quake engine used by many games including Nexuiz and Xonotic, and we can't stand him either.
tl;dr: Geek men support Women's Rights; one specific geek woman didn't and suddenly its a new story and somehow its the men's fault.
I think you're being downvoted for poor reading comprehension and for the entirely unnecessary and contextually-inappropriate use of the term "bitching".
Bitching is bitching no matter if a guy or a woman does it. If you let political correctness run your life, you are no different than the people who think women should be kitchen slaves.
Your public support for woman's rights is undermined by your implication that she is "stupid" for "falling for his shit". It's not like she got duped into giving her bank account information to a Nigerian Prince. She's become a target for bigotry.
I also wouldn't call harassing emails, phoning people's work places, and changing an employer's online database as "nothing substantial".
I support equal rights. If a guy fell for troll bait, I say hes stupid for falling for it. If a woman does it, should I not treat her the same way? If I did, I myself would be undermining woman's rights.
There is also insufficient proof such things happened. If they did, why has she not gone to the police and legally pursued it? I'm not seeing that she has done so at all.
I guess I am stuck on what it is you mean by "falling for troll bait". In my mind it means that you get sucked into an internet argument by someone who clearly just wants to cause trouble, not have discussion.
The fault for this guy's escalation to the point of calling people's place of business , etc.lies entirely with him. So I'd agree that you treating men and women equally, but I would argue that you would be equally wrong.
It is possible that things have never happened but there seems to be enough evidence amongst others. From her original post, it appears she has gone to the police but they did not do anything. There is a rather expansive area of behavior that is clearly intimidating and inappropriate that is not technically illegal.
MikeeUSA is a troll. He has no means to actually harm anyone, and he does it purely for the lulz.
Thus, MikeeUSA trolled a woman, and she took the bait. I just don't get why this is news, I've been trolled before, I don't get a news story.
This isn't blaming the victim, this is blaming someone who allowed a troll to win and just made it that much harder for every other woman on the Internet to be taken seriously.
And yes, I have a problem with that. I would love to see more women involved in FOSS, and Skud's actions have only served to scare more women away and make them think and guys in FOSS are are trolls and/or potential rapists.
People need to grow a backbone and stand up for themselves. This advice is equally as valid for both men and women.
No, no he is not. A troll is someone who advances an exaggerated position they do not hold, for the entertainment value of watching the commotion it causes.
A troll is not someone who:
- creates misogynistic game content glorifying the rape and oppression of women
- repeatedly creates throw-away email accounts with new names in order to ensure his hateful message is heard in forums from which he has been banned
- hosts his personal website in Canada because he knows it's more difficult to shut him down across international borders
- bounces all of his traffic through TOR to avoid prosecution for his behavior
MikeeUSA has done all of these things. He is not a troll. He is a sad little manchild with an inferiority complex and he is a boil on the butt of humanity, but he is not a troll.
Nor are people who harrass their targets at their place of work "trolls".
It's very easy to dismiss inappropriate behavior as "trolling". When you dismiss harrassment as "trolling" and suggest that it should be ignored, you are part of the problem. When you blame Skud for "letting the trolls win," you are part of the problem.
It's absurd and offensive for you to claim that Skud is "scaring more women away" by talking about her experience or for deciding to leave the tech industry. What scares women away from FOSS are their actual personal experiences of harrassment. You don't want women to shy away from high profile positions in the FOSS community? Worry instead about finding a solution to the problem that women who do are subjected to the kind of abuse that makes them decide it's not worth the pain to be involved in this community.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time this sort of reprehensible behavior has cost the tech community good talent. Kathy Sierra comes to mind.
Other notables (male and female) have recently removed their presence from the internet. Although it isn't always clear why, I'd speculate some sort of harassment was at play there too.
Welcome to the Internet. As Paul Vixie pointed out ages ago: "The Internet is not for sissies."
Trolls are almost as old as the net, and they are not going to disappear without something short of a big-brother state that makes the Great Firewall Of China look like kids play.
So better get used to it.
Also remember:
"Liberty resides in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious." — John Stuart Mill
[Disclaimer: I have often been labeled a troll, and I'm not offended by this label.]
I think unfortunately, in this particular case, you can't fix what seems to be the single biggest problem--- one person who is already widely condemned, banned from forums/IRC when people see him, but nonetheless persists, and keeps reappearing in new guises.
I can imagine fixing the more common problems, like pervasive stupid sexist comments everywhere, and inappropriate content in conference presentations, but stamping out every single rare-but-extant crazy stalker seems unlikely. A number of high-profile bloggers, Usenet posters, and forum admins of both genders have attracted unhinged people of that sort, and discussion about what to do about the problem dates back at least 20 years.
Saying "that's just the way things are" is no excuse for tolerating the sort of behavior under discussion here.
You're correct that it comes with the territory, but that doesn't absolve organizations (and governments) of writing and enforcing policies to mitigate the damage done by harassment. Nor should we excuse away an obligation to repudiate harassment when we encounter it. Saying it's status quo won't fix anything.
Regarding the John Stuart Mill quote above: I agree. It's not the views of the people in question that offend me, it's their alleged actions. Harassment is not free speech; it doesn't attack ideas, it attacks people.
By the same reasoning, we could argue that thieves and murderers are almost as old as civilization and we should just get used to it. Sorry, but no. They will always exist, sure, but the only thing we should get used to is hunting them fiercely. I will not surrender my right to be happy, productive, and helpful because a minority of socially-dysfunctional people are trying hard to ruin it for me and for others. Nobody should.
Moreover, to equate harassment of women to mere trolling is of complete ignorance. The fact that you accept the label of "troll" just reinforces that you should not put the two in the same level. Would you be OK if people often called you an abuser of women?
The women involved in this shitty situation have already written pages and pages of how terrible it is—particularly for women—to be the target of harassment. If anyone cannot understand that, they must be really stupid.
Would you be OK if people often called you an abuser of women?
MikeeUSA is not (as far as we know) an abuser of women. He is a person who sends unpleasant nonthreatening emails while peacefully sitting in his home.
Your attempt to conflate people who initiate violence and people who express unpleasant opinions is dishonest.
Further, you don't have any "right to be happy". No one does. You have the right to pursue happiness in a manner which doesn't involve violence against others, but you don't have the "right to be happy". If I have a "right to be happy", then you are violating my rights by not buying me some whisky and hookers.
The problem with your assumption is that (as any abuse counselor will tell you) abusive words are very often the precursor to violent physical action.
As someone whose wife repeatedly received abusive and threatening phone calls and emails from a former co-worker who eventually showed up at her workplace waving a gun (and luckily was restrained by a security guard in the lobby!), I can assure you that Ms Bayley should not take this lightly.
The problem with the assumption that muslims are not terrorists is that (as any terrorism investigator will tell you) fundamentalist islamic words are very often a precursor to violent physical action.
See the problem with this logic? You can't paint all people holding certain beliefs with the brush of the small subset who engage in violent acts.
No, your logic actually implies that we shouldn't paint people who say "I will come to your country and blow up your buildings" with the same brush as people who come to our country and blow up our buildings. I don't think I'm out of line to say that threats like that ought to be taken pretty seriously.
You don't have a right to happiness, but nor do you have a right to inflict emotional distress on people. And when someone is emailing unpleasant thoughts to a specific individual as opposed to expressing them on a public blog, that's crossing a line from self-expression to harassment. It is, literally, making it personal.
MikeeUSA is not (as far as we know) an abuser of women.
I understand that people usually think of abuse as sexual abuse, especially if it is toward women. But verbal or moral abuse is abuse just the same.
To express an opinion is what we're doing right now, as civilized people, openly, in a mildly non-anonymous way. To harass anonymously, without giving the other part the chance to reply and playing on their weaknesses is violence. For me, at least, it is.
Further, you don't have any "right to be happy".
I do have, as we all do. You are mixing the right to be happy with the right of being granted happiness unconditionally. Maybe it's just semantics. I would also say that everyone has the right to drive a car, expecting that I'm not implying that they can bypass the necessary tests. There is a "potential tense" that gets lost in translation.
I dunno. I'm sympathetic and all, but this seems to boil down to:
"Nasty person A keeps harassing nice person B via email in ways which do not warrant the involvement of law enforcement."
Which is terrible and all - especially for person getting the nasty emails - but this really doesn't seem to have any real relevance to anyone who isn't involved.
If such a thing does not exist yet, and if standard spam filters can't do the job for some reason, I would be interested in creating a filter that can identify harassment mails (or trying to create one...). If the need really exists, let me know.
So perhaps it would be generally beneficial to simply oppose online "dickery" and bullying across the board, particularly in cases where there's a component of implied threat beyond the virtual world. "Men are treated unfairly" is an unsympathetic point, even when true.
It’s rough on the internet, sure, but were I a woman I would think long and hard about revealing my gender. Women are quite visibly treated differently and everyone being oblivious to this sexism (or even belittling it) doesn’t really help.
Stacy Horn has some good examples applied to both genders, even in the 1990s, in her book Cyberville (http://www.amazon.com/dp/044651909X), an account of her time running ECHO. Even if only a small percentage of your users are insane, a large community seems to get a few.
I do agree women are visibly treated differently, especially in the sense of pervasive weird harassment, like random sexual or hostile comments from dozens/hundreds of users for no reason. The specific issue of crazy stalkers trying to get you fired may also apply to women more frequently, but I'm less sure of that--- 4chan has a history of doing that sort of stuff, mostly to males, and bloggers and website admins who piss people off get it all the time. Both Richard Kyanka of SomethingAwful and Rusty Foster of Kuro5hin have writeups floating around somewhere of some of the harassment they and their families have received due to running popular forums (in rusty's case it more or less caused him to check out).
Not really sure what to do about the stalker problem, since that appears (in this case, at least) to have been a single person, and problems that one-in-a-million people can cause are difficult to stamp out. The pervasive harassment problem, of course, could and should be fixed.
No. No, we don't. I've been online for years, and men never get this particular kind of tripe thrown in their faces. It's a pretty unique kind of anger that comes out.
There are lots of bad apples but I'm kind of surprised Skud would just give up on the "whole" industry.
I hope someone encourages Skud to continue developing. Even though the tech industry is still majority male I have to think there are many more industries (in particular certain horizontals like sales) that are even worse when it comes to sexual harassment.
The problem is that some of the 'bad apples' are senior members of the community who are or were respected and widely listened to. The fact that Eric Raymond is/was taken seriously ought to be hugely embarrassing to the open source community.
EDIT: since I got downvoted already I may as well add: ESR is a vile pathetic excuse for a human being. I don't say that lightly, he really is obnoxious. I know he has a big fanbase among the libertarians here but at some point people are going to have to face up to how unacceptable his views are to most people.
"quits tech industry"
Quits tech industry because of one troll??? Does this mean she will never hack or never program (for money)?
Interesting. I have seen lots of trolls and falemwars on the internet but I could not quit programming for thousands of trolls. This is the only thing I am good at, this is what I fell in love at 12, this is what I do to earn money to support my family... Also trolls have nothing to do with my own projects and the projects of my employer...
Maybe she meant she will quit tech politics? (Then she will probably enter another kind of politics, because she is seemingly a 'political person'.)
Somebody sends her an email that she doesn't like to her publicly available email address and she decides to quit working in the community? I hate to say this, but attitudes like this will only make the situation worse.
Anybody, anywhere can write an email. You really shouldn't take them to seriously. I am honestly surprised that she let her real email address be publicly available anyway.
It's important for community leaders to stand up for this sort of thing and publicly disown discrimination. But unless she gives them a chance, i.e. unless the community is anti-female, I can't see this as a good move on her part.
It wasn't just emails, it was a sustain campaign of public comments on blogs and videos. Other colleagues received phonecalls to their workplaces making accusations about child pornography. The harassment was affecting her ability to do her day job.
I am apparently not allowed to edit something that has been downvoted but here is my edit:
Martin Luther King Jr stood up for his rights and was shot. As we all are, I am very saddened by his loss. However I think that this brings up a very important point. If you stand up for an unpopular belief, you can expect abuse.
Should you expect abuse? Should you be forced to endure unpleasantries because you expect the same rights as any one else? No, but you will receive it. And if you are really committed to your cause you will stand up for yourself anyway. Reading about the protests of the past. When people stood up against the war in Vietnam and participated in legal protests they were beaten by police. By police. I would like to let that sink in for a moment.
So forgive me for expressing my disappointment when an activist decides to back down from their cause. And not because she was beaten by police or because she was beaten by people with opposing viewpoints. Not because she was shot. But because she was receiving emails, comments on a blog, and prank phone calls.
Maybe I am a hypocrite because I have done nothing. I am. But I still look at something like this and say to myself "I wish someone would stand up for those rights." I mean really stand up for them. Not just run away because of a few bad eggs. I don't think we can expect change otherwise.
Well, I kind of agree with this in part, but it is often trotted out as a reason why it's the victim's fault. Let's see what's badly wrong with it by looking at things another way.
Standing up for what is right is not something that we weaker mortals should leave to the heroes. We have a breaking point, a point above which we can't take it. That does not mean we should not take risks to do what we find right. You should not be "disappointed" with the victim, but supportive, and we should be encouraging others to take these risks to do what is right as well. The more of us there are, the more we achieve.
Should you expect abuse? Should you be forced to endure unpleasantries because you expect the same rights as any one else? No, but you will receive it. And if you are really committed to your cause you will stand up for yourself anyway.
Oy. I beg to differ.
I have a medical condition. Doctors told me "people like you don't get well". I got well. Stating that fact is enormously controversial. Since people think you can't get well, stating that you have done so is frequently taken as proof you either don't have the condition or are otherwise a teller of tall tales. I handle controversy fairly well. But being a lightening rod for controversy doesn't get people to think or try new things. I've worked hard at backing away from the controversy and have left a lot of the online forums I used to participate in. I leave my website up and reply privately to some of the questions that come up on the email lists I remain on. Replying publicly makes it about fighting with groupthink and about my ego, when that is not what I want. So it's proven to be mostly counterproductive to take a public stand. Replying privately makes it about trying to help people who are suffering and dying and might be willing to try something new because they are all out of options. One by one, people are trying new things. And this is gradually changing the conversation in group settings.
I plan to win the war. For my cause, the fewer public "heroic" battles, the better. Winning hearts and minds and making real change does not require all kinds of sturm and drang. I'm also a woman and post on Hacker News as very openly female. In my experience, "the battle of the sexes" is equally counterproductive. I'd rather "dance" with men than fight, so to speak. Learning to do this dance without stepping on too many toes is a more humane and productive pursuit in my experience.
I will also add that she is "standing up" for herself in much the same way I am standing up for myself: By looking out for our own best interests and concluding that subjecting ourselves to abuse is not in our best interests.
That is too bad. It sounds like she was constantly harassed by some crazy troll psycho. Unfortunately leaving tech may not make him stop if he's that dedicated.
Trolls exist on the internet. Bayley is just supporting negative stereotypes about how women can't handle the pressure when she lets a troll get the best of her and changes her whole life because of him.
Excuse me? At what point do you stop calling someone a "troll" and start calling them a "stalker"? Perhaps the harassment she received was so much that changing her whole life greatly improves her quality of life. Is she still "just supporting negative stereotypes" then?
No, I don't think they do. And if you think they do, I don't think you understand the scale of what she's talking about. It's linked several times in this thread. Please read it.
So it's her fault that a continued campaign of harassment "bothered" her? Have you ever experienced anything like that, or are you just guessing what it would feel like?
Well, she didn't do herself any favors by talking at conferences about women in tech, or setting up a feminist movement. If you wanted to attract abuse, that's a good way to go about it. It should be expected.
I'm not sure if you're joking and I hope so, but she did give talks on coding, and then after giving one talk about women in tech that was quite successful and changed a lot of people's thinking, a lot of other conferences invited her to give similar talks in an attempt to make their own environments more diverse/welcoming, and in fact she turned down many more. I shouldn't even have to say that but apparently someone does. And if setting up a movement to support other women means that we're setting ourselves up as targets "to attract abuse" then you know what, count me in, because that only means we need MORE activism.
The harassment women get is much, much worse than men.
Me and my wife are both computer scientists, and have both given talks at many conferences. My wife and our female friends consistently get much more, and much worse, harassment than me and our male friends. There is no comparison, and over time I've seen it grind several women down to the point where they just give up (fortunately not my wife yet).
I think everyone should help to reduce the often hostile attitude in IT and FOSS in particular, and a fairly obvious part of that is to stop treating women so badly. Just treating them like everyone else would be a fine start.
If it's at that point, wouldn't it be more prudent to get the police involved? Restraining orders exist for this exact reason.
The article(and blog post) imply that this has been a long-term issue, and the level of threats are pretty terrible, even to the level where most good forum admins would seriously think of tipping off the police if these messages were brought to their attention.
Restraining orders don't work. They're rarely enforced. Police don't have the bandwidth, at least in the US, to care. As a friend in law enforcement told me -- restraining orders exist as a paper trail for police to be able to point out how bad the person was when something does happen. It's not there to actually protect the victim.
The fundamental problem with stalking is no one in law enforcement cares until you're actually dead or physically hurt. If I were the potential victim I'd probably care at a slightly earlier stage.
We don't know the full details. There're probably more going on in her life than just the stated incidents in this one article. Your argument, however, is blaming the victim for her unsolicited suffering.
Bayley is just supporting negative stereotypes about how women can't handle the pressure when she lets a troll get the best of her and changes her whole life because of him.
No, you're helping to perpetrate such a myth by writing a comment like this without taking into account all the facts. Unless you label people who repeatedly phone your employer and make accusations of paedophilia as mere trolls.
She mentions in her blog post that she is not completely quitting tech. From her blog,
>>I’m particularly interested in using open tech to preserve and promote independent music, so you’ll continue to see me around in many of my usual tech haunts.
I read a private blog of a lady in the games industry, and the level of ordure and harassment she gets is simply unbelievable. It's well beyond anything in the 'people are jerks, suck it up' level.
I can well believe Skud got sick of it and is doing other things with her life.
I'm going to come right out and say it - if you, or someone you know - has a penchant for writing these sorts of harassing emails, it needs to stop. Quite possibly, professional help needs to be sought. It's simply wrong.
Foul language and harassment in the games industry? I'm shocked. Perhaps it's just due to white male privilege that I've never been called a "gaaaayyyy nig faggz" while playing online games?
[edit: sarcasm. Like anyone who's ever delivered a headshot, I've been told "fu homo chink".]
The games industry does not refer to anybody who plays games but refers to the development of games; in the same way the automobile industry does not refer to anybody who drives a car.
I don't get it. I worked with many female developers, female CTOs, female IT directors. In 10 years I've not seen any harassment towards them. I've never even heard general statements from male developers, like "women can't code".
Am I oblivious, or maybe a different sub-industry?
If you're close to any of them, it may be interesting to ask them. A lot of women in technology (and women in general, and also people in general) choose to not talk much about bad experiences, for many reasons, so there is an underreporting effect - and a lot of harassment also isn't in obvious forms witnessed by other people. Some women are fortunate to not have had a lot of problems, of course - but if you ask a few, especially ones who speak or write publicly about their work, you'll probably hear some painful stories.
So true. In a similar but infinitely more serious vein, men often don't hear about women's experiences of violence at the hands of men. Unless you're a particularly approachable man, you might, like me, be surprised at how many women you know have been touched by this problem.
I'm not sure if this statistic is global, but for actual abuse, one in four women has been a victim. If the rate is so high for close-up abuse, you can imagine how it will be when you add online anonimity to the problem.
OK, so give me some real examples of what she/you consider 'harassment' and 'ordure'. Maybe I live in a bubble, I don't know, I just can't picture things that I would qualify as such and that wouldn't be illegal.
I'm not going to repeat them here. They are the same class of statements that Skud got. Plus, among other things, they aren't SFW to type, and if an HR person saw them, I'd be yanked into the HR office.
If you spend a little time looking around comment threads on unmoderated forums, you can see the behavior, unironically acted out.
I was going to start a rant about how this behavior is encouraged by the macho men online, but this was just one guy harassing her. "Due to harassment" reads as due to harassment from the community, but she gave in to one idiot. She let him win.
This sort of behavior coming from members of the Australian FOSS community is unfortunately somewhat of a consistent underbelly.
I used to help run and host the local LUG chapter in Sydney for a few years. One particular meeting I had to ask a speaker to leave the premises (hosted in my employers building) for displaying bared breasts during his talk. Unsurprisingly, people walked out. So much of this sort of shit goes on and it's ugly, ugly, ugly.
Skimming over the comments here, once again I find myself distressed at the large number of men in the tech community who just don't get it.
Whether it's sexist jokes, inappropriate language or illustrations, or plain old stereotypes, it sometimes feels like the tech community's firmly stuck in the 70s.
The worst thing is that none of this is difficult to solve, it just involves growing up, frankly.
It's because they don't intend to be offensive. For example: in the US, holding up two fingers is cool. In the UK, it's offensive. So one group of people can have a set of behaviors that another group finds offensive, but the first group has no idea why the second group is offended because they don't intend offense.
I know there are a lot of actually misogynistic people in tech. I'm only talking about the guys who "don't get it."
I don't think or have the mindset that women are living in some sort of separate culture from us or there are stark differences between us. It's the trolls, misogynists, etc that treat them differently only because they are women.
Well perhaps there's some social responsibility and generally being an adult involved in not offending people?
For instance, I'm no huge fan of Islam (or any religion), however, my beef is with the doctrine and the leaders, not the average day to day Muslim, so I'll actively speak out against Islamophobia and try not to offend the average Muslim. It's called actively not being a jerk.
If I'm in the US, and I see that some Arab guy got offended by someone trying to congratulate him by giving him a thumbs-up, I might be completely at a loss as to what exactly he was offended by, or how to avoid it in future.
Conflict avoidance isn't always the adult thing to do. If people are strongly opposed to some views, or some aspects of some culture then why shouldn't they speak out about it? If that means they're jerks, so what? Ridicule or rudeness is just a tool in the toolbox and it can be more effective than reason.
The society we've built is by no means adult or responsible. Millions starve, get killed in genocides. Slavery is still rampant. Atrocities happen all across the world. Animals are treated inhumanely. The 1st world doesn't make much of an effort at addressing these problems. Why? Because people rather not talk about it or know the details about the truly horrendous things going on in this world. Ignorance really is bliss.
This status quo is only possible because we, responsible adults, choose to stick our collective heads in the sand. We need to get confronted with many things we disagree with and we have to stop passively supporting the status quo (unless we really think this is the best we can do as a species). In the big scheme of things hurt feelings don't matter.
If a vegan tells me with a smirk "If you knew where that steak came from you wouldn't be eating it" it's easy for me to get upset at the vegan for being a jerk, for ruining my appetite. But I wouldn't get offended if the vegan were simply wrong. I get upset because I know, deep down, that I would never set foot in a beef processing plant. Sure, the vegan is a jerk, but is he wrong?
Going with your example; substitute characters if necessary: You may not have a beef with the average day to day Muslim, but you do have a beef with people who have a beef with the average day to day Muslim. Even though your adult tolerance may just be based the comforting belief that the average Muslim is not the problem and that a few religious leaders are. The jerk probably believes that the average day to day Muslim is part of the problem. Who is right? That's a factual question about the world. And if it turns out, for whatever reason, that the jerk is right and you are wrong would you then change your mind? Would being a jerk then be justified? Or would you still choose the non-confrontational route and avoid giving offense? Is your true objection that only the Muslims leaders are the problem or is it a mere rationalization for politeness and civility?
(Questions are rhetorical. I'm not defending the sexism in the FOSS world, nor do I judge you for being tolerant.)
Have there been any articles/studies about what gender relations are like in other equally "divided" industries? I'm wondering if it's related to a certain type of person naturally attracted to software/tech, or if it can develop naturally in any industry split pretty starkly along gender lines.
It would be interesting- whether it's job ads comparing programmers to ninjas and rock stars, to using sexual images in slides at conferences, the tech industry seems sort of unique with regards to behavior that might be seen as juvenile in other industries.
It seems to develop naturally in any industry/community with a strong gender imbalance (cf. the "elevatorgate" in the skeptic community.) The situation seems to improve as populations approach parity.
The situation seems to improve as populations approach parity.
This can appear to be true even if men don't, on average, change their behavior at all.
Think about it: if 10% of the people in a field are female, that means that 90% of a woman's interactions in the field are with men. If the field becomes more balanced, that will come down towards 50%.
Even if men in the field individually keep acting the same, that's almost a 50% reduction in the amount of sexism a woman will experience, because she's interacting with fewer men and more women. We tend to notice offensive things by counting them, not by figuring out expected values based on sample sizes, so things would appear to improve, even though the men will not have changed their behavior at all.
The real WTF odd fact is that as the field tips towards 50/50 women, the amount of sexism that (non-sexist) men will observe will actually go up, because a higher proportion of the interactions they observe will be male/female (whereas with a highly tilted sex ratio, they usually mainly see male/male conversations taking place).
IMO the real problem with the lopsided male/female ratio in tech is that women experience almost double the harassment they would if it was 50/50, so they think things are much worse than "average", and meanwhile men witness a much smaller amount (almost 3:1), so they think things are better.
Then both sides clash, and argue about whether there's a problem or not, relative to other industries. Based on their observations, both men an women could probably be forgiven for jumping to the conclusions that they do; unfortunately, I haven't seen any sort of actual numbers that might help pin down whether men in tech are actually worse, better, or the same as men in other fields. That women experience more harassment does not necessarily mean individual men are more likely to harass.
I can barely believe the things I'm reading on this page. Lots of comments similar to "It's just trolling, get over it." And "she's just reinforcing negative stereotypes of women by not being strong enough to handle the internet." And "men deal with negative comments all the time and don't whine about it."
These are the exact attitudes that are the problem! Why can they not see this?
When she complains about the trolling, there is nothing we can do about that. It's a completely different mindset to just try to empathize without trying to solve the problem.
By definition, privilege is a lack of perspective--that includes [straight] [white] male privilege. That's why it's so hard for many guys (not just programmers) to understand.
I'm pretty sure the definition of privilege is not lack of perspective.
Maybe Zed Shaw should quit too, he seems to get a lot of online harassment, too bad his white straight male privilege isn't stopping it. There are a lot of shitty things in any community, lets focus on fixing the community and not trying to figure out which genders / sexual orientations / races are to blame.
Maybe people should stop trolling everyone and not just women.
Have you considered that the troll is anonymous because the community would never put up with this kind of behavior? This isn't an issue of community standards, it's an issue of someone being an asshole who possibly happens to share a gender / race with myself.
Yeah, men have absolutely never been accused of being fat, ugly, or accused of having a societally unacceptable number of sexual partners.
What exactly is wrong with the idea that we shouldn't harass anyone?
What is wrong with the idea that all people are created equal and that people don't need special privileges or protections based on gender/race/sexual orientation?
Sorry, I should have written that a little more clearly. I wrote "By definition, privilege is a lack of perspective," but what I meant was, "By definition, privilege implies a lack of perspective."
I feel like you may have misinterpreted my intention, though. You wrote "[let's not focus on] trying to figure out which genders / sexual orientations / races are to blame." I certainly wasn't trying to blame any particular demographic. My response was specifically aimed at addressing the grandparent poster's confusion. I agree that it's more important to focus on fixing the community.
Privilege and perspective are important to talk about because they're part and parcel of the solution.
It was actually a little unfair of me to throw out a term like "privilege" on this forum; it's a common idea in feminist rhetoric, but as a result it carries a lot of meaning that isn't included in its casual usage.
Zed Shaw's straight white male privilege doesn't stop the trolls. What it does prevent is dysphoric emotional reactions on his part. I'm feeling a little awkward about presuming so much about Zed's emotions here, so let us instead discuss a prototypical straight white male public figure in the tech community named Shed Zaw. Shed gets trolled a lot, but he doesn't quit the community. Why not?
Why is it fair for Shed Zaw to get trolled and not Alex Bayley?
Let me rephrase that.
Why is it rude & kind of silly (but "acceptable") for Shed to get trolled, but abhorrent & destructive (eg. "unacceptable") when it happens to Alex?
Well, "acceptable" and "unacceptable" are still blunt instruments. I happen to think that Shed Zaw shouldn't be trolled either. But I do think that we ought to prioritize addressing the kind of trolling that happens to Alex Bayley first.
Shed Zaw can probably count on one hand how many times he's been afraid of being beaten, killed or raped--if the count is even greater than zero. Not so for most women. Remember, this is about emotions. It's "more OK" for Shed Zaw to get trolled because he has a better support structure in place: he's a straight, white male. He generally doesn't have to worry about whether it's safe to be walking alone right now, or whether the guy grinning lasciviously is actually a stalker-rapist, or whether it's worth the conflict to confront his boss about grabbing his ass whenever they pass each other in the hallway. In those specific ways, Shed Zaw's life is just straight-up EASIER than Alex Bayley's. This doesn't mean Shed Zaw never suffers, feels shame, or fears for his well-being. It just means that there are a disproportionate amount of situations which Shed simply does not need to deal with. Indeed, their lack of abundance for him--and thus his inability to understand how they affect Ms. Bayley--is part of what is referred to as "male privilege".
It's about context. Us guys have trouble empathizing with women being harassed because we mentally put ourselves in their shoes, and it doesn't seem that bad. "Why are women offended by guys slapping their ass on the street? If a random woman slapped my ass on the street, I'd be flattered! Thrilled, even!" The context is different--the perspective is different.
Imagine if everyone except you had metal jaws. Fierce steel chompers that require oiling and can bite through concrete. Except you--you just have a regular old human jaw made of flesh, muscle and bone. Now in this incredible world, people greet each other with a lively punch to the mouth. Just right in the kisser. If you don't punch hard enough, well, what's your problem, buddy? Not feeling up to a greeting? Of course, this puts you at risk of having a broken jaw every time you leave the house. An innocent walk to the grocery store could turn into an expensive trip to the hospital; all it takes is running into a coworker! The real problem is that no one else seems to notice that your jaw isn't made of metal. Maybe their jaws are really well-made, and they look complete...
Some of what has happened to Zed Shaw really isn't acceptable, it is straight up harassment and not funny trolling. It is considered acceptable to threaten men with violence because they are men; it's the same as the pervasive belief that men cannot be raped and the idea is funny.
If you haven't ever been afraid of being beaten, killed, or raped, that doesn't make you a man, that means you have had a very safe life. There is no necessary reason why women must think that. I am certainly not doing ANYTHING to make women rationally afraid of being beaten, killed, or raped, so why should my penis make me responsible for that? Some vague handwavey notion of 'privilege'?
What's up with the jaw thing? Women don't have especially fragile jaws. I guess you are saying that women have especially fragile emotions?
> What's up with the jaw thing? Women don't have especially fragile jaws. I guess you are saying that women have especially fragile emotions?
Other way around. It's a bit of a tortured metaphor, but it's not about women being weaker. Men are emotionally insulated by their privilege--it's an extra layer of resilience (the metal jaws) that we take for granted which makes it difficult for us to understand why people without it are having problems.
> Shed Zaw can probably count on one hand how many times he's been afraid of being beaten, killed or raped--if the count is even greater than zero. Not so for most women. Remember, this is about emotions.
Is it really about emotions? I'm looking at the statistics for 2009/10 in my country[1] and it seems men are more than twice as likely to be murdered as women. I don't have statistics but I'd be quite surprised if women were actually more likely to be assaulted than men, particularly by non-partners, which is what we're talking about. Is the actual level of hazard not somewhat relevant, as well as the emotions? If (and you may disagree) the level of fear doesn't correspond to the level of hazard, is it not counterproductive to expound the idea that women are at constant risk of violence?
I see what you're saying--if (and it seems likely) women really aren't at greater risk, we don't want to go around saying that they are. But, that's what I meant by "this is about emotions". For the purposes of this issue, it doesn't matter what the actual risk level is--the most relevant fact is that, for most women, it feels (emotionally) like they are constantly at risk. In the same way that a PR problem is still a problem, a perceived danger is still something that needs to be addressed. This is why perspective is important: because we don't perceive the danger, it's hard for us to empathize (or even sympathize), and you get comments like "just get over it".
Also, my focus on the terms "beaten, killed or raped" may have been more distracting than necessary, because we are talking about more than just physical oppression; there is also shaming, ostracism, objectification, and a host of other emotional attacks.
Based on what has been posted, it's hard for me to clearly see a problem beyond "in a society with free speech, some people will speak in ways that others dislike." That is a legitimate (unsolvable) problem, but I don't think it's the problem you are referring to.
The problem is people's unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that free speech has boundaries, and that some people abuse their free speech rights in ways that go far beyond being disagreeable. For example:
Go to the local women’s group office and liquidate it (kill the feminist women there). Wear a dark suit and drive an expensive car (these are more likely not to be suspect). Continue destroying the people who have helped to destroy countless of your fellow Men untill you are killed. Go from women’s rights organisation’s office to women’s rights organisation’s office, maybe throw in a few domestic violence shelters and abortion clinics if you wish.
This isn't illegal speech, but it's getting perilously close to that threshold. If similar sentiments were sent via email rather than posted on a blog, it would be reasonable to classify it under 'death threats,' and that does cross the threshold of criminality in some jurisdictions. Free speech is not unlimited, either in theory or in practice.
Reading a variety of MikeeUSA's online proclamations suggests he's a rather disturbed, and disturbing, individual. I'm not a psychiatrist, but he presents as someone with a high potential for violent behavior. It's a problem to dismiss that behavior or insist that it be tolerated in the name of free speech. In the US, the constitution protects him from governmental censorship, but it does not mean he's entitled to a platform for promoting his themes of violent aggression or that other people's concern about the dangers he presents is dismissable. Sure, there is lots of sexism on the internet and much of it is silly, harmless, and ultimately inconsequential. But there's a significant qualitative difference between sexism of the 'LOL boobs' variety and indirect threats of terrorism. To pretend that the latter is of no more concern than the former, or that the concept of free speech validates all utterances equally, is to provide such threatening language with your implicit endorsement.
Ok, I believe I now understand what you believe to be the problem: many people disagree with you on what should be the boundary of free speech. It's a little unkind to categorize disagreement as "the problem", but whatever.
If that's what mootothemax and airlocksoftware meant, then I'd suggest they are wrong. Most of the people reading this page do "get it", but disagree because they assign a higher value to free speech than mootothemax and airlocksoftware do.
This is good - we are all on the same page regarding the facts, we merely disagree on the underlying values.
No, you do not understand. You think my problem is that 'many people disagree with [me] on what should be the boundary of free speech.' This is incorrect.
I am not making a normative argument about what the boundaries of free speech should be. Frankly, I don't know exactly where they should be; where many people see boundaries I tend to see a grey area, and my ideas on this tend to shift around a bit. It is much easier to be like Justice Potter Stewart and say 'I know it when I see it' than to identify and articulate some objective standard for what is an isn't acceptable. For mathematical reasons, I'm not altogether sure that it's possible to define such things consistently.
The argument I'm making is not about where I think boundaries should be, but where boundaries actually are, as drawn in different jurisdiction by statute or precedent. Certain kinds of speech are actually illegal even in the US where speech is sheltered by the 1st amendment and the large legal umbrella that provides. It is not legal for you to incite a riot, or utter threats of imminent physical harm, or carry out blackmail, to name but a few examples. There are conduct laws that limit the freedom of speech but which are nonetheless held to be constitutional. The problem I refer to is the invocation of 'free speech' to dismiss complaints about all undesirable speech, inclusive of that which may qualify as criminal.
We don't really know what kind of communications Skud received via email. Some have asserted that it could not have been so bad, on the bases that the blogger did not explicitly complain about it and that the police did not consider they warranted an investigation. This inference is unjustified. First, the blogger might abstain from citing the content of personal emails from fear, humiliation, or strategic reasons; the assumption that she would have taken such content public is just that, an assumption. Secondly, the police might well feel the complaints warranted an investigation, but be unable to proceed for want of actionable evidence. to the extent that MikeeUSA is able to cover his digital tracks using anonymizing protocols (something that Skud might well have explained to the police as part of her complaint), they may decline to proceed because the time and trouble required to obtain that information might exceed available resources; or because the police themselves are a sexist bunch in Australia; or because they know from experience that prosecuting such a crime across international borders is a non-starter and that the danger is too remote to justify the use of the extradition process.
You stated above that you did not see a problem 'beyond "in a society with free speech, some people will speak in ways that others dislike."' But it is a fact that some speech is not merely dislikeable, but criminal (whether or not we agree on whether it should be); and it is a fact that some kinds of criminal activity are difficult to prosecute because they are forensically obscure (eg by using anonymizing protocols to cover one's tracks); and it is a fact that sexual violence is a risk that disproportionately affects women. While we should not assume that 'sextremism + stalking behavior + fact of rape = proof of mikeeUSA's inherent criminality,' because it most certainly does not amount to that, nor should we assume that 'free speech = no cognizable risk' and casually dismiss incitement to violence and focused personal aggression as mere disagreeability.
The problem I refer to is the invocation of 'free speech' to dismiss complaints about all undesirable speech, inclusive of that which may qualify as criminal.
Who has done this? I'd be curious to see which posts you believe do this.
I suspect all you will find is a set of posts which assume MikeeUSA committed no criminal acts. This is the assumption I'm working under, based mainly on the fact that no one has even accused him of doing so.
Perhaps the real problem you have is that the rest of us are assigning a lower probability of guilt (of crimes he has not been accused of) than you are?
When we document what MikeeUSA does, or participating in documenting his emails and actions and talking in public (or possibly in private) about being one of his targets, makes us more his target. It makes us more of a target for other harassers too. It is like declaring a security vulnerability, which then draws more attention and thus attacks. If you have been going around as we have at geekfeminism.org, and asking people if they've been targeted by MikeeUSA, then you'd hear more stories of the reasons people have for not revealing and exposing every incident like this and every detail of it.
Also, when women report harassment, they get a wide range of scrutiny and criticism of every aspect of their life, personality, personal history, looks, and so on. The way they've reported the harassment is always criticized as being too private, too public, not official enough, or overreacting by going through official channels too quickly rather than trying to solve things informally. If you as a man watch a person you know go through this process, as their confidante perhaps, you might see some of these patterns crop up.
It can be disheartening to find that so many harassing incidents, assaults, and rapes go unreported because women don't want to put themselves in a position where they will be subject to even more attack.
To you all it's like a quirky little exercise in logic or something, and you get to have fun with your academic debate over whether harassment really exists or not. You don't have to think, not only will MikeeUSA stick you in his trolly, psychotic, rapey crosshairs on his pedophile message boards, nor do you have to know that you probably have just filtered yourself out of several possible future jobs since someone won't hire you because you are a known troublemaker who might accuse someone of sexual harassment at work. It is so deeply offensive to have you all debate the existence of our oppression while you understand about 1% of its surface. But, obviously, it is a learning experience people need to go through. I just wish that some of you all would bother to listen more, go do some reading, and actually try to educate yourselves in a significant way rather than waiting for the magic feminism fairy to bless you with enlightenment. Cheers!!!
Yeah, sure, I'll try to clarify. I'm not advocating that we should stop them from speaking with any kind of legal measure. I value free speech too highly for that. I'm referring to the specific comments that I paraphrased. I don't think those posters have any specific malice towards women. I don't know them, but they're probably smart, generally respectable guys.
But they are an example of people who are apparently unwilling to acknowledge that maybe the harassment some women receive online or in the workplace could possibly be outside the realm of their experience. We have one group of people, women in tech, who are saying that they are being harassed (and providing examples of specific threats against them). Then we have a certain subset of men in tech who are saying "I know better than you do, and I say that you aren't being harassed any more than men are." That attitude is the problem (as well as the people in the community who don't immediately call them on it).
People with no personal experience in the matter saying it's not a problem and ignoring the fact that those who do have personal experience are saying that it is. And I think you could make a case that the underlying cause is that somewhere deep down they believe themselves "smarter" (or something) than women. How else can you tell someone that their own interpretation of how they are treated is incorrect?
So the problem is, near as I can tell, that some people don't accept personal experiences and want harder evidence. Is that right?
Incidentally, your comment exhibits some bias of it's own: People with no personal experience in the matter saying it's not a problem and ignoring the fact that those who do have personal experience are saying that it is.
Wait a second - women have no personal experience being a male public figure. So how can women know what level of harassment a male public figure would receive? Do women really believe that "I know better than you do, and I say that you aren't being harassed as much as women are"?
I'd totally be up for more research into this area. The comments I'm talking about are not asking for harder evidence. They're saying "my personal experience is worth more than yours."
And there aren't any women (that I know of) who are telling men that they can't complain about their treatment as public figures. So you've created a false dichotomy. Plus there's the fact that there are male public figures in this thread saying that women are harassed more than they are. So really, we've got people who aren't might not be public figures of any kind telling women who are to suck it up.
This is mostly nerds wanting to have something to argue about. For reasons I can't put my fingers on, nothing seems to irritate nerds more than the idea that they're oppressing people; it probably has something to do with the fact that so many of them were picked on growing up.
The reality is that the stuff we're talking about here would, for the most part, be a firing offense at most companies.
From personal experience, my impression is that this kind of defensiveness comes from a lack of perspective. Especially when you realize you're hurting someone (and perhaps yourself). I don't know whether it's confined to nerds -- there are a lot of regressive, defensive people out there. :-)
For people who pride themselves on being analytical and meritocratic, it can be a difficult thing to realize that no amount of detailed analysis is going to help because you've been living in a bubble for most of your life -- you have only a small amount real data to work with. It can be even more startling when your meritocracy not ends up not only not really being one, but possibly impossible to achieve given the constraints of human nature.
[tl;dr: With a lopsided sex ratio in a field, women are more likely to experience sexism, and men are less likely to witness it, than if the ratio was closer to equal, regardless of the actual frequency of sexist behavior. The fact that you (male) don't see much of it doesn't necessarily mean that it's not happening, and the fact that you (female) experience a lot of it doesn't necessarily mean that the men in the field are worse than elsewhere.]
I'd like to just add a bit (edit: okay, a rather long-ish bit...) about how a reasonable, non-sexist guy could end up assuming that things are not that bad in the industry, whereas a reasonable women can have experienced more sexism than in other industries, and both can be "right". All without the typical (and IMO, rather cynical) assumption that guys are just playing along, encouraging it, or putting on blinders. And also (more importantly) without the assumption that men in the industry are any better or worse than in any other.
This should make both sides pause a bit before they scream about how unreasonable people on the other side are being...
For a lot of men, the skepticism is not over whether actions are sexist or not, but over how often they actually happen.
My argument is that this difference in perception is almost exclusively due to the extremely lopsided sex ratio in tech, not due to people in tech being any better or worse: I don't know exact numbers, but let's say somewhere around 10% of tech workers are female (in my experience it's even worse than that, but I don't know for sure, industry-wide).
Going with that number, that means that out of a random sample of interactions between other people that you (let's assume "you" are a non-sexist guy that can accurately recognize sexism when you see it) personally witness over the course of a career, only 18% will be between a man and a woman. As for the percentage of sexist guys (I'm making the simplifying assumption that a guy is either sexist or not-sexist - I could easily remove this restriction and replace it with a probability distribution, but it would needlessly complicate things)...I'm not sure about that, but let's aim high and say it's 20% (I don't think more than 20% of us would, for instance, show pantless pictures of ourselves, send harassing e-mails, proposition an intern, ask about kids at an interview, etc.). Even when a sexist guy interacts with a woman, we should probably assume that it's a reasonably small percentage of those interactions, maybe 10%, where he'd actually say or do something offensive, especially with someone else present.
[Again, all these numbers are pure fiction, placeholders for the purpose of demonstrating the extreme effect that the sex-ratio has, rather than figuring out anything in detail]
Put that all together, and let's say that you, a not-sexist guy, witness 1000 interactions between other people at work during some time period. By these estimates, only 3 of those interactions would be "sexist interactions." The problem seems rather small when you look at it that way, and in fact, it's small enough that statistical variation could mean that you never end up witnessing such interactions at all, even if they are happening at your place of work.
Now, the meat of the argument: consider, instead, the point of view of a woman. 18% of all of her interactions are with sexist men, and 1.8% of her interactions involve a guy acting sexist towards her. By the percentages, that's a sixfold increase over what you would notice as a man, even though the actual frequency of sexist behavior is the same.
I think that's where this sort of discussion breaks down: those of us that are not sexist, but are not women, see an apparent level of sexism that is six times lower than what women observe in their own work interactions, and that's arguably the difference between the perception that sexism is pervasive and oppressive, versus barely worth considering. And it's all due to the sex ratio - if it was 50/50, then the percent of interactions that ...
Further, many of the more blatant sexist actions are intentionally undertaken without the presence of witnesses. Assuming 1/3 of sexist actions are of this type, the non-sexist guy might only see 2 minor "sexist actions", while the woman might see 18 "sexist actions", including 6 of the more blatant type. This is going to skew the different perspectives even further.
Another factor that contributes to male skepticism is that many of us have experience in companies that are extremely intolerant of sexism. Like Thomas said, most of what we're talking about would be firing offenses at most companies. I know if my wife ever witnessed this sort of thing at BigCo, the guy would've been fired on the spot.
Hmm. I read the whole thing and was surprised and saddened to find it seems genuine. There are some beastly women operating under the flag of feminism, but if I'm any judge of character I don't think Bayley is one of them.
I am curious about the removal of code issue, but I'm sorry to say it's a morbid curiosity. I would like to see if my opinion of ESR's judgement of human issues can get any lower.
344 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadSadly, I fear it's still going to take a lot more progress before people can speak up without a reasonable expectation of retaliation.
It depends what context the images were used in the talk, and if they made sense being there IMHO.
Seriously? I'm having a hard time believing that this was instigated purely because she's a female developer. Surely there was more to it than her gender for someone to stoop that low?
Sadly this is not limited to the tech community; feminist bloggers in general have to deal with an unbelievable amount of shit.
"This kind of harassment and bullying is endemic in many circles, including towards women in technical communities, particularly if they _complain about community norms_."
So no, she wasn't harassed to this degree just because of her gender. She was harassed because she had spoken up about other, less disgustingly over the top issues.
That story started as a female blogger attacked for being a successful female in tech. It's an easy simplification. Meanwhile, I followed that story and it turns out (unrelated to tech, success, or being female) she was involved in breaking up a marriage (being the other woman) which lead to harassment from a Christian fundamentalist relative.
While I have no doubt individuals can be hostile towards women in tech, I generally find posts from people heavily involved in a cause tend to re-contextualize stories to fit their narrative. If you read a blog post from feminists in tech you are going to read a post about how women are mistreated in tech.
Which turns a story about an former partner calling up the work place to harass his ex girlfriend into an attack on women in tech.
"So, here's our situation. We have a man (presumably; at any rate he appears to want to be identified as such) in the Australian Linux community, who targets women by sending them private abusive emails from a throwaway address and with a name that can't readily be connected to any publicly known member of the community. His ISP won't hand out information about him without a court order, his abuse doesn’t present the kind of imminent threat to physical safety that might interest law enforcement, and despite Linux Australia’s diversity statement and Linux.conf.au's anti-harassment policies, it's not clear that there’s any practical thing that either of those groups can do about him."
Is it Bayley's position that ISP's should give out information on their users in response to warrantless requests -- from private individuals, no less?
Is it likewise Bayley's position that law enforcement should be going after people for making lewd comments online?
I tend to view this as another example of how anonymity allows people to be jerks (with the requisite comic: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/ ).
I have referred to that same PA comic in the Darkplaces IRC channel (which hosts frequent games of "ban the MikeeUSA").
He does it purely for the sake of trolling, and people periodically bite the trollbait.
Is this illegal? No. Should he be beaten with in an inch of his life? Yes. Is that going to happen outside of a prison? Probably not, no one is quite sure of his exact address.
Ban, ignore, report, shun etc...
Setting up a geek feminist movement is pretty much the worst thing you could do if you wanted the abuse to stop.
Not that I'm sticking up for those who take the bait, feeding the troll is always bad, but MikeeUSA and his ilk should just stay on /b/ where they belong.
If someone said that to my wife in person I would break their nose, so why should online be any different.
Online, there is no such threat. You could just as easily be a bot spewing hate, as a real human being. And being offended by a bot is pretty irrational.
Online, there is "data". If I know you, or have formed attachment to you via ongoing conversations etc or divulging details about myself, then the data becomes more meaningful and has emotion attached to it. But random data? No point being offended by that.
FWIW If someone I didn't know said that to my wife/mother/etc we'd just ignore them and walk away.
If you ignore him, he'll move on to someone else soon enough. It looks from the article that he wasn't being ignored at all.
Citation needed. You are assuming the trolling person is moderately rational and will go somewhere else if his selected target isn't yielding sufficient lulz. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to find stories of irrational people who escalate their harassment under such circumstances. Every few weeks there's a news story about some marginal person who loses the plot and goes on a shooting spree, so the risk of escalation is clearly non-zero.
I would be a bit unhappy and would try and get away from the guy, but I wouldn't challenge him on it and try and start an altercation.
No. No. Definitly not. Are you crazy?
Is that a good enough reason for you?
Violence is a tiny bit too serious for to just discount the threat of it as a nice rhetorical flourish.
I don't think that's going to change any time soon. Unless they legalize it, that is.
Sounds like a step backward in civilization to me.
Should we ignore this kind of problem? No. Should we go full vigilante on it? No.
As MikeeUSA himself wrote:
> The women of the "geek feminism" movement will be just as effective at excising men from the movement as Nina was at systematically destroying Hans Reiser's life untill he saw no reason, nothing left in his life, that could hold him back from striking back.
Hans was convicted in 2008 of murdering his wife Nina. MikeeUSA is saying categorically that Nina deserved to die, just like MikeeUSA's targets.
http://geekfeminism.org/2011/10/13/on-being-harassed-a-littl...
If a woman said hi to him, he'd spooge his pants and pass out, complete with nosebleed.
While I dont know Bayley at all, from what I can gather she is highlighting the fact that people have to put up with such harassment due to the fact that ISP's or Police will not act on it.
Being that the comments were made via direct email, I guess you could liken it to someone calling you at home and telling you to "F!?K off out of your house", I think anyone would be creeped out at that. But as there are no actual threats of harm made, the law is useless to do anything.
I see this site has info by state. Dunno if this kind of thing exists in Australia...
http://www.haltabuse.org/resources/laws/index.shtml
Of course, because there is no worse crime than harassing women and any and all civil rights are second to all efforts to punish those who do. Let's not forget that the OP is identifying with a movement where it is commonly advocated to reverse the burden of proof in rape cases.
When someone initiates physical force against you, it is an action being done to you, the consequences of which you cannot avoid due to the laws of physics. We take actual threats of physical violence seriously because of this.
When someone says mean things, the above attitude presumes that the consequences to you are entirely within your own mind. One can either be offended or not offended, angry or not angry, etc. The presumption is that the onus of response is on the trollee, not the troll.
Modern psychology and neuroscience have some things to say about the degree of distinction that the human mind makes between physical and verbal "forces". It also has some things to say about how much control we actually have over our responses to these forces. But so long as humans like to believe that they are in full control of their own actions, and that lacking this control is a personal fault, the mentality you describe will persist.
having an obsessed troll on the internet following you around, or threatening you before you show up to a conference, goes way beyond what you're talking about here.
your whole point comes from a place of the privilege of relative security. imagine that is not the case.
Who are you talking about?
Are you talking about women in a particular place or subculture? You do know that men are more often victims of violence than women in the US, right?
If you live in a warzone in Africa, maybe. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you're talking about. I'd ask the women around me if they feel that way but I'm afraid they'll think I'm nuts if I were to ask them such clearly outrageous things.
I personally encourage woman to enter various tech industry roles (programming, IT, etc), and women like this push Woman's Rights 2.0 back a decade every time they do this.
Also, MikeeUSA is a known troll, and anyone who is stupid enough to fall for his shit rather deserves it. He tends to hang out (and by hang out, I mean banned frequently) in the IRC channel for DarkPlaces, a Quake engine used by many games including Nexuiz and Xonotic, and we can't stand him either.
tl;dr: Geek men support Women's Rights; one specific geek woman didn't and suddenly its a new story and somehow its the men's fault.
Welp, I have karma to burn, I'm not going anywhere.
I also wouldn't call harassing emails, phoning people's work places, and changing an employer's online database as "nothing substantial".
There is also insufficient proof such things happened. If they did, why has she not gone to the police and legally pursued it? I'm not seeing that she has done so at all.
The fault for this guy's escalation to the point of calling people's place of business , etc.lies entirely with him. So I'd agree that you treating men and women equally, but I would argue that you would be equally wrong.
It is possible that things have never happened but there seems to be enough evidence amongst others. From her original post, it appears she has gone to the police but they did not do anything. There is a rather expansive area of behavior that is clearly intimidating and inappropriate that is not technically illegal.
Thus, MikeeUSA trolled a woman, and she took the bait. I just don't get why this is news, I've been trolled before, I don't get a news story.
This isn't blaming the victim, this is blaming someone who allowed a troll to win and just made it that much harder for every other woman on the Internet to be taken seriously.
And yes, I have a problem with that. I would love to see more women involved in FOSS, and Skud's actions have only served to scare more women away and make them think and guys in FOSS are are trolls and/or potential rapists.
People need to grow a backbone and stand up for themselves. This advice is equally as valid for both men and women.
No, no he is not. A troll is someone who advances an exaggerated position they do not hold, for the entertainment value of watching the commotion it causes.
A troll is not someone who:
- creates misogynistic game content glorifying the rape and oppression of women
- repeatedly creates throw-away email accounts with new names in order to ensure his hateful message is heard in forums from which he has been banned
- hosts his personal website in Canada because he knows it's more difficult to shut him down across international borders
- bounces all of his traffic through TOR to avoid prosecution for his behavior
MikeeUSA has done all of these things. He is not a troll. He is a sad little manchild with an inferiority complex and he is a boil on the butt of humanity, but he is not a troll.
Nor are people who harrass their targets at their place of work "trolls".
It's very easy to dismiss inappropriate behavior as "trolling". When you dismiss harrassment as "trolling" and suggest that it should be ignored, you are part of the problem. When you blame Skud for "letting the trolls win," you are part of the problem.
It's absurd and offensive for you to claim that Skud is "scaring more women away" by talking about her experience or for deciding to leave the tech industry. What scares women away from FOSS are their actual personal experiences of harrassment. You don't want women to shy away from high profile positions in the FOSS community? Worry instead about finding a solution to the problem that women who do are subjected to the kind of abuse that makes them decide it's not worth the pain to be involved in this community.
We deleted his comments here, of course. At first we did so quietly, not wanting to "feed the troll"
Other notables (male and female) have recently removed their presence from the internet. Although it isn't always clear why, I'd speculate some sort of harassment was at play there too.
Trolls are almost as old as the net, and they are not going to disappear without something short of a big-brother state that makes the Great Firewall Of China look like kids play.
So better get used to it.
Also remember:
"Liberty resides in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious." — John Stuart Mill
[Disclaimer: I have often been labeled a troll, and I'm not offended by this label.]
I can imagine fixing the more common problems, like pervasive stupid sexist comments everywhere, and inappropriate content in conference presentations, but stamping out every single rare-but-extant crazy stalker seems unlikely. A number of high-profile bloggers, Usenet posters, and forum admins of both genders have attracted unhinged people of that sort, and discussion about what to do about the problem dates back at least 20 years.
I respectfully disagree. Sometimes you really just can't fix stupid.
You're correct that it comes with the territory, but that doesn't absolve organizations (and governments) of writing and enforcing policies to mitigate the damage done by harassment. Nor should we excuse away an obligation to repudiate harassment when we encounter it. Saying it's status quo won't fix anything.
Regarding the John Stuart Mill quote above: I agree. It's not the views of the people in question that offend me, it's their alleged actions. Harassment is not free speech; it doesn't attack ideas, it attacks people.
Moreover, to equate harassment of women to mere trolling is of complete ignorance. The fact that you accept the label of "troll" just reinforces that you should not put the two in the same level. Would you be OK if people often called you an abuser of women?
The women involved in this shitty situation have already written pages and pages of how terrible it is—particularly for women—to be the target of harassment. If anyone cannot understand that, they must be really stupid.
Also remember:
"A witty saying proves nothing." — Voltaire
MikeeUSA is not (as far as we know) an abuser of women. He is a person who sends unpleasant nonthreatening emails while peacefully sitting in his home.
Your attempt to conflate people who initiate violence and people who express unpleasant opinions is dishonest.
Further, you don't have any "right to be happy". No one does. You have the right to pursue happiness in a manner which doesn't involve violence against others, but you don't have the "right to be happy". If I have a "right to be happy", then you are violating my rights by not buying me some whisky and hookers.
Also, harassment goes far beyond trolling.
As someone whose wife repeatedly received abusive and threatening phone calls and emails from a former co-worker who eventually showed up at her workplace waving a gun (and luckily was restrained by a security guard in the lobby!), I can assure you that Ms Bayley should not take this lightly.
See the problem with this logic? You can't paint all people holding certain beliefs with the brush of the small subset who engage in violent acts.
I understand that people usually think of abuse as sexual abuse, especially if it is toward women. But verbal or moral abuse is abuse just the same.
To express an opinion is what we're doing right now, as civilized people, openly, in a mildly non-anonymous way. To harass anonymously, without giving the other part the chance to reply and playing on their weaknesses is violence. For me, at least, it is.
Further, you don't have any "right to be happy".
I do have, as we all do. You are mixing the right to be happy with the right of being granted happiness unconditionally. Maybe it's just semantics. I would also say that everyone has the right to drive a car, expecting that I'm not implying that they can bypass the necessary tests. There is a "potential tense" that gets lost in translation.
"A short saying oft contains much wisdom." -- Sophocles
"Nasty person A keeps harassing nice person B via email in ways which do not warrant the involvement of law enforcement."
Which is terrible and all - especially for person getting the nasty emails - but this really doesn't seem to have any real relevance to anyone who isn't involved.
Unfortunately us men can't just play the "sexism" card.
It’s rough on the internet, sure, but were I a woman I would think long and hard about revealing my gender. Women are quite visibly treated differently and everyone being oblivious to this sexism (or even belittling it) doesn’t really help.
I do agree women are visibly treated differently, especially in the sense of pervasive weird harassment, like random sexual or hostile comments from dozens/hundreds of users for no reason. The specific issue of crazy stalkers trying to get you fired may also apply to women more frequently, but I'm less sure of that--- 4chan has a history of doing that sort of stuff, mostly to males, and bloggers and website admins who piss people off get it all the time. Both Richard Kyanka of SomethingAwful and Rusty Foster of Kuro5hin have writeups floating around somewhere of some of the harassment they and their families have received due to running popular forums (in rusty's case it more or less caused him to check out).
Not really sure what to do about the stalker problem, since that appears (in this case, at least) to have been a single person, and problems that one-in-a-million people can cause are difficult to stamp out. The pervasive harassment problem, of course, could and should be fixed.
I never saw a troll on freenode, for example. Not a very frequent visitor, but still.
On the other hand, #vim is absolutely lovely, so the problem is clearly not systemic.
I hope someone encourages Skud to continue developing. Even though the tech industry is still majority male I have to think there are many more industries (in particular certain horizontals like sales) that are even worse when it comes to sexual harassment.
EDIT: since I got downvoted already I may as well add: ESR is a vile pathetic excuse for a human being. I don't say that lightly, he really is obnoxious. I know he has a big fanbase among the libertarians here but at some point people are going to have to face up to how unacceptable his views are to most people.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/04/msg00201.html
Edit: his response to receiving one threatening email is pretty revealing, too:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=290
Anybody, anywhere can write an email. You really shouldn't take them to seriously. I am honestly surprised that she let her real email address be publicly available anyway.
It's important for community leaders to stand up for this sort of thing and publicly disown discrimination. But unless she gives them a chance, i.e. unless the community is anti-female, I can't see this as a good move on her part.
This is called "blaming the victim". It is bad, and you should consider researching it.
If you get offended by random emails, don't have a public email address.
It's a lot more than one email. It's a pattern of harassment by multiple people that's gone on for years.
It wasn't just emails, it was a sustain campaign of public comments on blogs and videos. Other colleagues received phonecalls to their workplaces making accusations about child pornography. The harassment was affecting her ability to do her day job.
Martin Luther King Jr stood up for his rights and was shot. As we all are, I am very saddened by his loss. However I think that this brings up a very important point. If you stand up for an unpopular belief, you can expect abuse.
Should you expect abuse? Should you be forced to endure unpleasantries because you expect the same rights as any one else? No, but you will receive it. And if you are really committed to your cause you will stand up for yourself anyway. Reading about the protests of the past. When people stood up against the war in Vietnam and participated in legal protests they were beaten by police. By police. I would like to let that sink in for a moment.
So forgive me for expressing my disappointment when an activist decides to back down from their cause. And not because she was beaten by police or because she was beaten by people with opposing viewpoints. Not because she was shot. But because she was receiving emails, comments on a blog, and prank phone calls.
Maybe I am a hypocrite because I have done nothing. I am. But I still look at something like this and say to myself "I wish someone would stand up for those rights." I mean really stand up for them. Not just run away because of a few bad eggs. I don't think we can expect change otherwise.
It's because the post is more than 2(?) hours old, not because it was downvoted.
Standing up for what is right is not something that we weaker mortals should leave to the heroes. We have a breaking point, a point above which we can't take it. That does not mean we should not take risks to do what we find right. You should not be "disappointed" with the victim, but supportive, and we should be encouraging others to take these risks to do what is right as well. The more of us there are, the more we achieve.
Oy. I beg to differ.
I have a medical condition. Doctors told me "people like you don't get well". I got well. Stating that fact is enormously controversial. Since people think you can't get well, stating that you have done so is frequently taken as proof you either don't have the condition or are otherwise a teller of tall tales. I handle controversy fairly well. But being a lightening rod for controversy doesn't get people to think or try new things. I've worked hard at backing away from the controversy and have left a lot of the online forums I used to participate in. I leave my website up and reply privately to some of the questions that come up on the email lists I remain on. Replying publicly makes it about fighting with groupthink and about my ego, when that is not what I want. So it's proven to be mostly counterproductive to take a public stand. Replying privately makes it about trying to help people who are suffering and dying and might be willing to try something new because they are all out of options. One by one, people are trying new things. And this is gradually changing the conversation in group settings.
I plan to win the war. For my cause, the fewer public "heroic" battles, the better. Winning hearts and minds and making real change does not require all kinds of sturm and drang. I'm also a woman and post on Hacker News as very openly female. In my experience, "the battle of the sexes" is equally counterproductive. I'd rather "dance" with men than fight, so to speak. Learning to do this dance without stepping on too many toes is a more humane and productive pursuit in my experience.
I will also add that she is "standing up" for herself in much the same way I am standing up for myself: By looking out for our own best interests and concluding that subjecting ourselves to abuse is not in our best interests.
The ad has an attractive woman in classes standing next to a laptop at a hosting facility with the title "The Solution: Comcast Metro Ethernet."
It's a shame she let it bother her.
White-knighting aside, have you?
Why didn't she talk at conferences about code?
The harassment women get is much, much worse than men.
Me and my wife are both computer scientists, and have both given talks at many conferences. My wife and our female friends consistently get much more, and much worse, harassment than me and our male friends. There is no comparison, and over time I've seen it grind several women down to the point where they just give up (fortunately not my wife yet).
I think everyone should help to reduce the often hostile attitude in IT and FOSS in particular, and a fairly obvious part of that is to stop treating women so badly. Just treating them like everyone else would be a fine start.
The article(and blog post) imply that this has been a long-term issue, and the level of threats are pretty terrible, even to the level where most good forum admins would seriously think of tipping off the police if these messages were brought to their attention.
The fundamental problem with stalking is no one in law enforcement cares until you're actually dead or physically hurt. If I were the potential victim I'd probably care at a slightly earlier stage.
With that said, mocking the police online will get you a fullscale investigation: http://www.kirotv.com/news/28758502/detail.html
Oh wait, she did, and they weren't interested because it didn't rise to that level.
But there are dicks out there in the world. How we deal with them is indeed up to us.
No, you're helping to perpetrate such a myth by writing a comment like this without taking into account all the facts. Unless you label people who repeatedly phone your employer and make accusations of paedophilia as mere trolls.
>>I’m particularly interested in using open tech to preserve and promote independent music, so you’ll continue to see me around in many of my usual tech haunts.
I can well believe Skud got sick of it and is doing other things with her life.
I'm going to come right out and say it - if you, or someone you know - has a penchant for writing these sorts of harassing emails, it needs to stop. Quite possibly, professional help needs to be sought. It's simply wrong.
[edit: sarcasm. Like anyone who's ever delivered a headshot, I've been told "fu homo chink".]
Am I oblivious, or maybe a different sub-industry?
If you spend a little time looking around comment threads on unmoderated forums, you can see the behavior, unironically acted out.
I used to help run and host the local LUG chapter in Sydney for a few years. One particular meeting I had to ask a speaker to leave the premises (hosted in my employers building) for displaying bared breasts during his talk. Unsurprisingly, people walked out. So much of this sort of shit goes on and it's ugly, ugly, ugly.
Whether it's sexist jokes, inappropriate language or illustrations, or plain old stereotypes, it sometimes feels like the tech community's firmly stuck in the 70s.
The worst thing is that none of this is difficult to solve, it just involves growing up, frankly.
I know there are a lot of actually misogynistic people in tech. I'm only talking about the guys who "don't get it."
Despite the numerous people who try to educate the guys who "don't get it", they continue their immature ways. I'm not going to give them a free pass.
Wouldn't this be more analogous to people from the UK coming into a typically US-centric area and complaining about US people holding up two fingers?
I agree that it's wrong, but change will probably be slow...
For instance, I'm no huge fan of Islam (or any religion), however, my beef is with the doctrine and the leaders, not the average day to day Muslim, so I'll actively speak out against Islamophobia and try not to offend the average Muslim. It's called actively not being a jerk.
The society we've built is by no means adult or responsible. Millions starve, get killed in genocides. Slavery is still rampant. Atrocities happen all across the world. Animals are treated inhumanely. The 1st world doesn't make much of an effort at addressing these problems. Why? Because people rather not talk about it or know the details about the truly horrendous things going on in this world. Ignorance really is bliss.
This status quo is only possible because we, responsible adults, choose to stick our collective heads in the sand. We need to get confronted with many things we disagree with and we have to stop passively supporting the status quo (unless we really think this is the best we can do as a species). In the big scheme of things hurt feelings don't matter.
If a vegan tells me with a smirk "If you knew where that steak came from you wouldn't be eating it" it's easy for me to get upset at the vegan for being a jerk, for ruining my appetite. But I wouldn't get offended if the vegan were simply wrong. I get upset because I know, deep down, that I would never set foot in a beef processing plant. Sure, the vegan is a jerk, but is he wrong?
Going with your example; substitute characters if necessary: You may not have a beef with the average day to day Muslim, but you do have a beef with people who have a beef with the average day to day Muslim. Even though your adult tolerance may just be based the comforting belief that the average Muslim is not the problem and that a few religious leaders are. The jerk probably believes that the average day to day Muslim is part of the problem. Who is right? That's a factual question about the world. And if it turns out, for whatever reason, that the jerk is right and you are wrong would you then change your mind? Would being a jerk then be justified? Or would you still choose the non-confrontational route and avoid giving offense? Is your true objection that only the Muslims leaders are the problem or is it a mere rationalization for politeness and civility?
(Questions are rhetorical. I'm not defending the sexism in the FOSS world, nor do I judge you for being tolerant.)
This can appear to be true even if men don't, on average, change their behavior at all.
Think about it: if 10% of the people in a field are female, that means that 90% of a woman's interactions in the field are with men. If the field becomes more balanced, that will come down towards 50%.
Even if men in the field individually keep acting the same, that's almost a 50% reduction in the amount of sexism a woman will experience, because she's interacting with fewer men and more women. We tend to notice offensive things by counting them, not by figuring out expected values based on sample sizes, so things would appear to improve, even though the men will not have changed their behavior at all.
The real WTF odd fact is that as the field tips towards 50/50 women, the amount of sexism that (non-sexist) men will observe will actually go up, because a higher proportion of the interactions they observe will be male/female (whereas with a highly tilted sex ratio, they usually mainly see male/male conversations taking place).
IMO the real problem with the lopsided male/female ratio in tech is that women experience almost double the harassment they would if it was 50/50, so they think things are much worse than "average", and meanwhile men witness a much smaller amount (almost 3:1), so they think things are better.
Then both sides clash, and argue about whether there's a problem or not, relative to other industries. Based on their observations, both men an women could probably be forgiven for jumping to the conclusions that they do; unfortunately, I haven't seen any sort of actual numbers that might help pin down whether men in tech are actually worse, better, or the same as men in other fields. That women experience more harassment does not necessarily mean individual men are more likely to harass.
These are the exact attitudes that are the problem! Why can they not see this?
Maybe Zed Shaw should quit too, he seems to get a lot of online harassment, too bad his white straight male privilege isn't stopping it. There are a lot of shitty things in any community, lets focus on fixing the community and not trying to figure out which genders / sexual orientations / races are to blame.
Maybe people should stop trolling everyone and not just women.
Have you considered that the troll is anonymous because the community would never put up with this kind of behavior? This isn't an issue of community standards, it's an issue of someone being an asshole who possibly happens to share a gender / race with myself.
For a gaming-centered sample, look at http://fatuglyorslutty.com/ .
What exactly is wrong with the idea that we shouldn't harass anyone?
What is wrong with the idea that all people are created equal and that people don't need special privileges or protections based on gender/race/sexual orientation?
I feel like you may have misinterpreted my intention, though. You wrote "[let's not focus on] trying to figure out which genders / sexual orientations / races are to blame." I certainly wasn't trying to blame any particular demographic. My response was specifically aimed at addressing the grandparent poster's confusion. I agree that it's more important to focus on fixing the community.
Privilege and perspective are important to talk about because they're part and parcel of the solution.
It was actually a little unfair of me to throw out a term like "privilege" on this forum; it's a common idea in feminist rhetoric, but as a result it carries a lot of meaning that isn't included in its casual usage.
Zed Shaw's straight white male privilege doesn't stop the trolls. What it does prevent is dysphoric emotional reactions on his part. I'm feeling a little awkward about presuming so much about Zed's emotions here, so let us instead discuss a prototypical straight white male public figure in the tech community named Shed Zaw. Shed gets trolled a lot, but he doesn't quit the community. Why not?
Why is it fair for Shed Zaw to get trolled and not Alex Bayley?
Let me rephrase that.
Why is it rude & kind of silly (but "acceptable") for Shed to get trolled, but abhorrent & destructive (eg. "unacceptable") when it happens to Alex?
Well, "acceptable" and "unacceptable" are still blunt instruments. I happen to think that Shed Zaw shouldn't be trolled either. But I do think that we ought to prioritize addressing the kind of trolling that happens to Alex Bayley first.
Shed Zaw can probably count on one hand how many times he's been afraid of being beaten, killed or raped--if the count is even greater than zero. Not so for most women. Remember, this is about emotions. It's "more OK" for Shed Zaw to get trolled because he has a better support structure in place: he's a straight, white male. He generally doesn't have to worry about whether it's safe to be walking alone right now, or whether the guy grinning lasciviously is actually a stalker-rapist, or whether it's worth the conflict to confront his boss about grabbing his ass whenever they pass each other in the hallway. In those specific ways, Shed Zaw's life is just straight-up EASIER than Alex Bayley's. This doesn't mean Shed Zaw never suffers, feels shame, or fears for his well-being. It just means that there are a disproportionate amount of situations which Shed simply does not need to deal with. Indeed, their lack of abundance for him--and thus his inability to understand how they affect Ms. Bayley--is part of what is referred to as "male privilege".
It's about context. Us guys have trouble empathizing with women being harassed because we mentally put ourselves in their shoes, and it doesn't seem that bad. "Why are women offended by guys slapping their ass on the street? If a random woman slapped my ass on the street, I'd be flattered! Thrilled, even!" The context is different--the perspective is different.
Imagine if everyone except you had metal jaws. Fierce steel chompers that require oiling and can bite through concrete. Except you--you just have a regular old human jaw made of flesh, muscle and bone. Now in this incredible world, people greet each other with a lively punch to the mouth. Just right in the kisser. If you don't punch hard enough, well, what's your problem, buddy? Not feeling up to a greeting? Of course, this puts you at risk of having a broken jaw every time you leave the house. An innocent walk to the grocery store could turn into an expensive trip to the hospital; all it takes is running into a coworker! The real problem is that no one else seems to notice that your jaw isn't made of metal. Maybe their jaws are really well-made, and they look complete...
If you haven't ever been afraid of being beaten, killed, or raped, that doesn't make you a man, that means you have had a very safe life. There is no necessary reason why women must think that. I am certainly not doing ANYTHING to make women rationally afraid of being beaten, killed, or raped, so why should my penis make me responsible for that? Some vague handwavey notion of 'privilege'?
What's up with the jaw thing? Women don't have especially fragile jaws. I guess you are saying that women have especially fragile emotions?
Other way around. It's a bit of a tortured metaphor, but it's not about women being weaker. Men are emotionally insulated by their privilege--it's an extra layer of resilience (the metal jaws) that we take for granted which makes it difficult for us to understand why people without it are having problems.
Is it really about emotions? I'm looking at the statistics for 2009/10 in my country[1] and it seems men are more than twice as likely to be murdered as women. I don't have statistics but I'd be quite surprised if women were actually more likely to be assaulted than men, particularly by non-partners, which is what we're talking about. Is the actual level of hazard not somewhat relevant, as well as the emotions? If (and you may disagree) the level of fear doesn't correspond to the level of hazard, is it not counterproductive to expound the idea that women are at constant risk of violence?
[1] http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-s...
Also, my focus on the terms "beaten, killed or raped" may have been more distracting than necessary, because we are talking about more than just physical oppression; there is also shaming, ostracism, objectification, and a host of other emotional attacks.
Based on what has been posted, it's hard for me to clearly see a problem beyond "in a society with free speech, some people will speak in ways that others dislike." That is a legitimate (unsolvable) problem, but I don't think it's the problem you are referring to.
Go to the local women’s group office and liquidate it (kill the feminist women there). Wear a dark suit and drive an expensive car (these are more likely not to be suspect). Continue destroying the people who have helped to destroy countless of your fellow Men untill you are killed. Go from women’s rights organisation’s office to women’s rights organisation’s office, maybe throw in a few domestic violence shelters and abortion clinics if you wish.
This isn't illegal speech, but it's getting perilously close to that threshold. If similar sentiments were sent via email rather than posted on a blog, it would be reasonable to classify it under 'death threats,' and that does cross the threshold of criminality in some jurisdictions. Free speech is not unlimited, either in theory or in practice.
Reading a variety of MikeeUSA's online proclamations suggests he's a rather disturbed, and disturbing, individual. I'm not a psychiatrist, but he presents as someone with a high potential for violent behavior. It's a problem to dismiss that behavior or insist that it be tolerated in the name of free speech. In the US, the constitution protects him from governmental censorship, but it does not mean he's entitled to a platform for promoting his themes of violent aggression or that other people's concern about the dangers he presents is dismissable. Sure, there is lots of sexism on the internet and much of it is silly, harmless, and ultimately inconsequential. But there's a significant qualitative difference between sexism of the 'LOL boobs' variety and indirect threats of terrorism. To pretend that the latter is of no more concern than the former, or that the concept of free speech validates all utterances equally, is to provide such threatening language with your implicit endorsement.
If that's what mootothemax and airlocksoftware meant, then I'd suggest they are wrong. Most of the people reading this page do "get it", but disagree because they assign a higher value to free speech than mootothemax and airlocksoftware do.
This is good - we are all on the same page regarding the facts, we merely disagree on the underlying values.
I am not making a normative argument about what the boundaries of free speech should be. Frankly, I don't know exactly where they should be; where many people see boundaries I tend to see a grey area, and my ideas on this tend to shift around a bit. It is much easier to be like Justice Potter Stewart and say 'I know it when I see it' than to identify and articulate some objective standard for what is an isn't acceptable. For mathematical reasons, I'm not altogether sure that it's possible to define such things consistently.
The argument I'm making is not about where I think boundaries should be, but where boundaries actually are, as drawn in different jurisdiction by statute or precedent. Certain kinds of speech are actually illegal even in the US where speech is sheltered by the 1st amendment and the large legal umbrella that provides. It is not legal for you to incite a riot, or utter threats of imminent physical harm, or carry out blackmail, to name but a few examples. There are conduct laws that limit the freedom of speech but which are nonetheless held to be constitutional. The problem I refer to is the invocation of 'free speech' to dismiss complaints about all undesirable speech, inclusive of that which may qualify as criminal.
We don't really know what kind of communications Skud received via email. Some have asserted that it could not have been so bad, on the bases that the blogger did not explicitly complain about it and that the police did not consider they warranted an investigation. This inference is unjustified. First, the blogger might abstain from citing the content of personal emails from fear, humiliation, or strategic reasons; the assumption that she would have taken such content public is just that, an assumption. Secondly, the police might well feel the complaints warranted an investigation, but be unable to proceed for want of actionable evidence. to the extent that MikeeUSA is able to cover his digital tracks using anonymizing protocols (something that Skud might well have explained to the police as part of her complaint), they may decline to proceed because the time and trouble required to obtain that information might exceed available resources; or because the police themselves are a sexist bunch in Australia; or because they know from experience that prosecuting such a crime across international borders is a non-starter and that the danger is too remote to justify the use of the extradition process.
You stated above that you did not see a problem 'beyond "in a society with free speech, some people will speak in ways that others dislike."' But it is a fact that some speech is not merely dislikeable, but criminal (whether or not we agree on whether it should be); and it is a fact that some kinds of criminal activity are difficult to prosecute because they are forensically obscure (eg by using anonymizing protocols to cover one's tracks); and it is a fact that sexual violence is a risk that disproportionately affects women. While we should not assume that 'sextremism + stalking behavior + fact of rape = proof of mikeeUSA's inherent criminality,' because it most certainly does not amount to that, nor should we assume that 'free speech = no cognizable risk' and casually dismiss incitement to violence and focused personal aggression as mere disagreeability.
Who has done this? I'd be curious to see which posts you believe do this.
I suspect all you will find is a set of posts which assume MikeeUSA committed no criminal acts. This is the assumption I'm working under, based mainly on the fact that no one has even accused him of doing so.
Perhaps the real problem you have is that the rest of us are assigning a lower probability of guilt (of crimes he has not been accused of) than you are?
Also, when women report harassment, they get a wide range of scrutiny and criticism of every aspect of their life, personality, personal history, looks, and so on. The way they've reported the harassment is always criticized as being too private, too public, not official enough, or overreacting by going through official channels too quickly rather than trying to solve things informally. If you as a man watch a person you know go through this process, as their confidante perhaps, you might see some of these patterns crop up.
It can be disheartening to find that so many harassing incidents, assaults, and rapes go unreported because women don't want to put themselves in a position where they will be subject to even more attack.
To you all it's like a quirky little exercise in logic or something, and you get to have fun with your academic debate over whether harassment really exists or not. You don't have to think, not only will MikeeUSA stick you in his trolly, psychotic, rapey crosshairs on his pedophile message boards, nor do you have to know that you probably have just filtered yourself out of several possible future jobs since someone won't hire you because you are a known troublemaker who might accuse someone of sexual harassment at work. It is so deeply offensive to have you all debate the existence of our oppression while you understand about 1% of its surface. But, obviously, it is a learning experience people need to go through. I just wish that some of you all would bother to listen more, go do some reading, and actually try to educate yourselves in a significant way rather than waiting for the magic feminism fairy to bless you with enlightenment. Cheers!!!
But they are an example of people who are apparently unwilling to acknowledge that maybe the harassment some women receive online or in the workplace could possibly be outside the realm of their experience. We have one group of people, women in tech, who are saying that they are being harassed (and providing examples of specific threats against them). Then we have a certain subset of men in tech who are saying "I know better than you do, and I say that you aren't being harassed any more than men are." That attitude is the problem (as well as the people in the community who don't immediately call them on it).
People with no personal experience in the matter saying it's not a problem and ignoring the fact that those who do have personal experience are saying that it is. And I think you could make a case that the underlying cause is that somewhere deep down they believe themselves "smarter" (or something) than women. How else can you tell someone that their own interpretation of how they are treated is incorrect?
Does that make sense?
Incidentally, your comment exhibits some bias of it's own: People with no personal experience in the matter saying it's not a problem and ignoring the fact that those who do have personal experience are saying that it is.
Wait a second - women have no personal experience being a male public figure. So how can women know what level of harassment a male public figure would receive? Do women really believe that "I know better than you do, and I say that you aren't being harassed as much as women are"?
Is this attitude among women also a problem?
And there aren't any women (that I know of) who are telling men that they can't complain about their treatment as public figures. So you've created a false dichotomy. Plus there's the fact that there are male public figures in this thread saying that women are harassed more than they are. So really, we've got people who aren't might not be public figures of any kind telling women who are to suck it up.
The reality is that the stuff we're talking about here would, for the most part, be a firing offense at most companies.
For people who pride themselves on being analytical and meritocratic, it can be a difficult thing to realize that no amount of detailed analysis is going to help because you've been living in a bubble for most of your life -- you have only a small amount real data to work with. It can be even more startling when your meritocracy not ends up not only not really being one, but possibly impossible to achieve given the constraints of human nature.
and here we're talking about how perpetrating of stereotypes is a bad thing
edit: found a word for it in English - hypocrisy.
I'd like to just add a bit (edit: okay, a rather long-ish bit...) about how a reasonable, non-sexist guy could end up assuming that things are not that bad in the industry, whereas a reasonable women can have experienced more sexism than in other industries, and both can be "right". All without the typical (and IMO, rather cynical) assumption that guys are just playing along, encouraging it, or putting on blinders. And also (more importantly) without the assumption that men in the industry are any better or worse than in any other.
This should make both sides pause a bit before they scream about how unreasonable people on the other side are being...
For a lot of men, the skepticism is not over whether actions are sexist or not, but over how often they actually happen.
My argument is that this difference in perception is almost exclusively due to the extremely lopsided sex ratio in tech, not due to people in tech being any better or worse: I don't know exact numbers, but let's say somewhere around 10% of tech workers are female (in my experience it's even worse than that, but I don't know for sure, industry-wide).
Going with that number, that means that out of a random sample of interactions between other people that you (let's assume "you" are a non-sexist guy that can accurately recognize sexism when you see it) personally witness over the course of a career, only 18% will be between a man and a woman. As for the percentage of sexist guys (I'm making the simplifying assumption that a guy is either sexist or not-sexist - I could easily remove this restriction and replace it with a probability distribution, but it would needlessly complicate things)...I'm not sure about that, but let's aim high and say it's 20% (I don't think more than 20% of us would, for instance, show pantless pictures of ourselves, send harassing e-mails, proposition an intern, ask about kids at an interview, etc.). Even when a sexist guy interacts with a woman, we should probably assume that it's a reasonably small percentage of those interactions, maybe 10%, where he'd actually say or do something offensive, especially with someone else present.
[Again, all these numbers are pure fiction, placeholders for the purpose of demonstrating the extreme effect that the sex-ratio has, rather than figuring out anything in detail]
Put that all together, and let's say that you, a not-sexist guy, witness 1000 interactions between other people at work during some time period. By these estimates, only 3 of those interactions would be "sexist interactions." The problem seems rather small when you look at it that way, and in fact, it's small enough that statistical variation could mean that you never end up witnessing such interactions at all, even if they are happening at your place of work.
Now, the meat of the argument: consider, instead, the point of view of a woman. 18% of all of her interactions are with sexist men, and 1.8% of her interactions involve a guy acting sexist towards her. By the percentages, that's a sixfold increase over what you would notice as a man, even though the actual frequency of sexist behavior is the same.
I think that's where this sort of discussion breaks down: those of us that are not sexist, but are not women, see an apparent level of sexism that is six times lower than what women observe in their own work interactions, and that's arguably the difference between the perception that sexism is pervasive and oppressive, versus barely worth considering. And it's all due to the sex ratio - if it was 50/50, then the percent of interactions that ...
Another factor that contributes to male skepticism is that many of us have experience in companies that are extremely intolerant of sexism. Like Thomas said, most of what we're talking about would be firing offenses at most companies. I know if my wife ever witnessed this sort of thing at BigCo, the guy would've been fired on the spot.
I am curious about the removal of code issue, but I'm sorry to say it's a morbid curiosity. I would like to see if my opinion of ESR's judgement of human issues can get any lower.