> If only I got a penny for every time someone said: you don’t look like a computer scientist
I’m a guy and I’ve been told multiple times I don’t look like a software developer. I think it can happen to anyone who doesn’t fit the stereotype of nerdy person portrayed in films and TV.
But I don't think it injures you. And I see why it's harmful to classes of people where there is a really some likelihood they don't fit in, unlike most dudes.
I have been told I look like a software engineer or a maths teacher all the time.
I'm fairly sure it has nothing to do with how I dress or look but simply because of stereotypes associated with Indians. If I was whiter, people would say fitness coach.
I have been told many times that I do not look like an engineer because I do not present as a nerdy anime type. I can say with absolute certainty that this perception has caused harm because they believe that my interest in science and computers is purely superficial/for profit, and thus believe that I must not be as skilled as the dungeons and dragons people. This happened when I was in school and continues to happen 20 years later. The upside is I probably get more speaking and social invites and opportunities. The downside is that they chose me because they think I am less skilled, and therefore am more suited to bridge the gap between engineering and non-technical roles.
Personal attacks are not allowed here and personal+gender attacks are especially not allowed here. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't do it again.
Yes? I took this to be a general discussion site like reddit, but for technical news of interest to nerds and assumed that there is some kind of community based decision making process when it comes to disputed context. My bad, let me spread the word to anyone who might be similarly confused. Again, not acting entitled, people should just know if their content will be evaluated by a single guy or a community and invest or not invest their time accordingly. Like these days, if you post on Twitter/X you know it's up to Elon Musk of your post stays up. Sounds like a similar situation here. People who want more democratic decision making should probably research where that is available.
Hey - I'm sorry it wasn't clear that I was posting as a mod (or even that I am a mod here). It's true that HN can be a bit cryptic and there are a surprising number of users who have been here for years and have no idea that the site is even moderated at all.
In any case, you're welcome here and I'm sorry for any misunderstanding.
The title initially put me off but I’m glad I read this article as it reminds me that the work isn’t even close to finished when it comes to equality in our field.
And of course the first two comments on the article proved the article’s point…
> “every man hates women” (literally in the second paragraph!)
(from parent)
In case anybody wondered, the article says nothing of the sorts:
> Kate defines misogyny as the enforcement branch of the patriarchy. While sexism is a set of beliefs, misogyny is a set of actions. As such, it is much more damaging to women. Worse, misogyny enforces a patriarchical worldview that the majority of the world holds as the morally correct one. Thus, when women break this norm (i.e., by demanding authority, recognition, space and not providing goods that men feel entitled to like domestic, emotional and mental labor), they are in the wrong. The men are seen as the victims, while the women enduring the misogyny are the bad actors. This viewpoint leads to justification of a number of vile behaviors perpetuated by men – even those men that claim to support and love women.
Well domestic, emotional and mental labor aren't goods, they're services. And I didn't know what emotional labor was supposed to mean, so I read the linked blog post, and it seems to be saying that women who are angry because men won't listen to them have no duty to listen to men who are angry because women were angry at them; also that the author is in principle prepared to have a reasonable and constructive discussion about this under theoretical circumstances. So, I don't know, that's probably true, but the whole business is rotten from start to finish and I'm going to the park now to feed peanuts to squirrels and crows, until some angry human tells me I shouldn't.
Emotional labor, per the feminist that originally coined the term, is actual paid work (“labor” in the traditional sense) that involves presenting or maintaining certain emotions: think a customer service rep, or a waitress.
It has been repurposed by the radfem movement to mean something else. That something else is not super well defined but it has something to do with the coddling that unstable men presumably require to not retaliate against women.
Just to be clear what happened here, he made the point that if such sweeping negative stereotypes of other groups were thrown about it would be shocking and unacceptable, and your rebuttal(?) is that his examples are shocking and unacceptable and so you won't respond..? QED, I guess.
When I read things like this it feels like reading fiction. Not because I don't believe it (I do), but because it is so far from my lived experience or anything I have perceived.
It makes me wonder if I just so happen to run in circles that are ostensibly devoid of misogyny or if I am blind to it.
Misogyny spoken out loud is very rare, but actions speak louder than words, and as the first bulleted point in the article mentions, male advantage begins at a very early age. It’s possible for there to be near-zero misogyny in the workplace, and yet for women to be systematically disadvantaged by the opportunities foregone in their upbringing.
I'm in a similar situation and I'd guess in my case it's 1/4 blindness and 3/4 working with decent people.
For most of my career I've worked in mixed teams and can't recall seeing overt misogyny at all within the team. However, there's been a client or two who want to "talk it man-to-man", or simply not believing anything our female technical subject expert was saying before someone with a male name confirmed it, qualifications be damned. I'm sure for every such case there's been 10 I've just not heard about.
Meanwhile my wife, also in IT, hasn't really experienced any harassment or misogyny at all in the past 20 years or so.
A one place I worked, one of the interviews we gave had a hidden test that wasn't part of the official interview. The candidate is introduced to the person officially giving the interview, who happens to be a woman, and there was a man, whom the candidate is told is new and just shadowing the interviewer so ignore them. If the candidate only talked with the man, they didn't get an offer.
Even if you're open to seeing it, it often doesn't happen in a setting where you would be able to observe it.
A close friend of mine went to a top math/science/engineering college. A professor called her into his office to tell her that she was doing well above average, and that she should find a non-technical line of education and work. His rationale was that she had to be 10x as good as men to make it in a technical field. But she's not 10x as good, so give up now.
She went on to work on highly technical software on the campus of another elite technical college. While walking around that campus in a sweatshirt from her alma mater, a man stopped her and asked her where she got the sweatshirt. She said she graduated from that college. He laughed and said, "No, really, where did you get it?"
Another friend of mine was an intern at a FAANG and her manager said he'd make her a full-time offer if she slept with him. She didn't. On her first day at the company she ended up joining after college, she was asked out by a man more than twice her age. Given her internship experience and not knowing how powerful this man was at the new company, this was complicated to navigate.
It turns out that man was asking out every woman of East Asian descent that was single and that came into contact with him, many during their first interaction with him. That included teenage interns. He managed to get one of those interns to drink a bit too much and walk over to his apartment alone with him. Luckily, she figured out what was going on before he could get what he wanted, but the experience still resulted in significant trauma for her.
These kinds of things are still horrifically common. But all of these examples happened in relative privacy, so it's easy to not notice it if you're not on the receiving end of it and don't have friends that want to talk about it. Understandably, many don't want to talk about it, especially with coworkers.
>His rationale was that she had to be 10x as good as men to make it in a technical field. But she's not 10x as good, so give up now.
Uhmmm, there is strong evidence that women have an easier time in tech to receive responses to their job applications, to get invited to interviews and actually get the job. There is no competence "DPS check" and tech competence doesn't shield you from being manipulated.
Then there is the well kept secret that you get most of your tech competence from working 40 hours a week, every week. Not from side projects at home, not from 4 to 5 years of university. Getting your foot in the door is far more important than your academic background.
I started feminizing hormone therapy about 4 years ago and I've noticed that I still get angry but that it's way easier to maintain my composure and it's less likely to build to a point where I lose control of myself.
Of course it is sarcasm. The real meaning is closer to "because men are widely believed, and indeed widely believe themselves to be, better at emotional self-regulation, without real evidence for this, what often happens when they can no longer contain their negative emotions (e.g. anger), they thus project these emotions and fail to regulate them effectively, but maintain denial of being emotional."
Cf: "honestly the best marketing scheme in history is men successfully getting away with calling women the "more emotional" gender for like, EONS, because they've successfully rebranded anger as Not An Emotion"
Having read the article, I still can't relate to the choice of the adjective in the title and subtitles ("moral"). The author also uses the term "moral framework" for some outdated views. These are societal stereotypes and expectations, not moral norms or frameworks. Can someone explain this particular word choice?
“Moral philosophy” is another word for ethics, and in that branch of philosophy existing/entrenched societal stereotypes and expectations are the moral norms (and framework) of that society. The word “moral” isn’t being used here in the sense of theistic morality, where there’s a formal dogma and explicit bias, but instead in the sense of one’s implicit biases about what actions are more or less moral (ethically good).
> existing/entrenched societal stereotypes and expectations are the moral norms (and framework) of that society.
That's interesting, I've never thought about it in this way. In the culture I was born, there was an visible split between societal norms (hypocrisy, lying, trying to conceal unfavorable things, expecting people to behave in a certain way) and moral norms (integrity, speaking the truth, behave in a completely different way than most people would).
I believe this split is also identified in the WP article you linked:
> Morality is about what people ought to do rather than what they actually do, what they want to do, or what social conventions require
So in the context of the original article, the fallacies like expecting women not do tech jobs, to be more emotional than rational etc. - all these things seem more like societal biases that are more against morality rather than in line with any moral system I can think of.
Herein lies one of the inherent problems of linguistics, words have meaning only within a narrow context. Moral philosophy (aka ethics) is a branch (with numerous sub-branches) of philosophy that tries to discover or design a heuristic by which one reliably tends to lean from the less moral towards the more moral, to build a system of ethics (rules that lead to moral actions) rather than a system of morals (rules that delineate moral actions). So society might provide you with a moral (lying is bad) but leave you with the burden of having to discern ways of actuating that moral value (say you’re presented with a situation in which lying protects someone from harm), well ethics is the body of thought meant to guide you to a rational (hopefully) and consistent (also hopefully) system where by you weigh actions to determine which to take because the action you take is relatively more moral than the action you don’t take.
And yes, these societal biases must be critically examined and exposed in order that we can evolve our moral systems to better fit our (collective) needs. There are moral systems in the world right now that see chattel slavery as morally right, and where a woman having even the most basic knowledge required to have a tech job is deeply and perversely immoral. Moral systems have a way of outlasting both utility and developments in our understanding of ethics and what it means to be humane. Sadly only by pushing those would-be moralists towards (hopefully) taking up ethics can we get them to put down the cudgel of their morals, but the problem is that without a great deal of thought the ideas of ethics can be used to leave one active ethically within your moral system but unethically to anyone outside your moral system. That’s why meta-ethics exist… if my system of ethics only works within a less moral system of morals, am I required to abandon my system of ethics and forge a new one?
I wouldn’t say it’s the only way — if only because that implies there’s just another binary outside the binary — but certainly making room for the idea that the assumed gender binary isn’t real makes it much easier to set aside the lens of patriarchy.
This is nonsense that only makes sense if you think of “the patriarchy” as a conscious behavior pattern. You might as well argue that being nonbinary means you escaped capitalism.
In your example about escaping capitalism. If you are a business owner, it requires a lot of mental effort. Keep up with laws, pay taxes on time, find customers... and you may loose everything, if you make a mistake. And benefits are not that great.
I have bad news for you, then: women are part of the patriarchy, too, as many of them also enforce destructive norms for both men and women.
For example: despite being a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat all her life and pretty far left on most issues, my grandmother couldn't fathom electing women to any positions of political power. I can only imagine what her reaction to the current election would have been. I mostly gave her a pass on that, though, since she was born in 1920, but I've also known much younger women with the same hang-up.
In other words: your gender really has no bearing on whether you are part of the patriarchy.
I think, when you’re not a bigot, and you’re not the target of bigotry, it is very very difficult to really get a sense of how perniciously powerful bigotry is, precisely because it makes no sense - bigots can’t really believe what they claim, can they? They won’t really go so far as to act on those beliefs, will they?
And even when they do, if they don’t do it to you, or do it while you’re watching, you find yourself incredulous that someone would really go and do such a thing.
Anyway. This is the sort of situation that births subreddits with titles like “are the straights okay?”
I had a short consulting gig in Istanbul once. The meeting room that became my temporary office was right next to their dev department. To my surprise, it was almost entirely comprised by women, including the department manager. I wonder if that was a fluke and if it wasn't, what is the reason why computer science is dominated by men in our culture.
Probably the Nordic gender equality paradox. Or in short - women generally don't like working with computers as much as men but will tolerate it if they have to.
Turkey over the decades has been a mixed bag of misogyny, particularly when viewed by outsiders.
Computer science being female orientated is traditionally consistent; women are expected to work or be ornaments (or both) and carting water, weaving, tallying stock, and desk work is "womens work" Vs the machismo pick swinging, gun carrying, construction building "mens work".
Having computer science seen as "desk work" is useful for women in such cultures, it's an interesting income stream in a bubble free from hassle.
Boundaries blur, of course, and exceptions are all over - but that's a rough guide.
Not to mention strong man patriarchies can also hide a core matriarchy .. and yet not embrace equality for all women, just for the few mothers that earned it and outlived their husbands.
In ancient Rome, widows and orphans were perhaps the only people (other than the patriarchs themselves) who were outside someone else's patriarchal clan, and hence more, rather than less, financially independent.
By Elizabeth Barber's rules for traditional women's work during the first 20,000 years: (a) can it be done at home (or, in a pinch, with kids in tow), and (b) is it easily interruptible (due to emergencies among aforementioned kids), computer science is defo traditionally consistent.
I think I saw the 1982 movie with that scene, but for some reason they'd gender-swapped the heroine?
And she raced him down the cliffside like a torrent down its bed,
While victims in the surf watched in very fear.
She sent the red stones flying, but the old grey kept his feet,
He cleared the tangled bushes in his stride,
And the girl from Marg'ret River never shifted in her seat -
It was grand to see that western horseman ride.
I am getting nothing from your comment, so could perhaps elaborate: Which community is moribund? What is the nature of terminal illness? and why is the community so vulnerable to this, is it fragile?
I have zero issues with raising this sort of dialog, and shining light into cracks that shouldn't exist.
One problem I have though, is presumed sexism. An example is, this article states:
Now that I have managed to make men feel embarrassed and insecure, they blame these feelings on me. No one else has made them feel this way before, and because men are famously good at emotional self-regulation, I must be the problem.
Now first, I 100% agree than in some cases there may be an innate, sexist response here. Some cases. But at the same time, men arguing with men can elicit a response in this way! "No, you're at fault for challenging my ideas! And successfully! How dare you!"
My point is, I very much believe some of these interactions are laced with sexism, even unrealised or unknown to those perpetrating the act. Yet at the same time, it can just be two humans interacting, and one taking the outcome poorly. Again as a male, I've seen this type of response when established ideas are challenged... including the established hierarchy in a workplace somehow blaming me. Often, I've been told I was too "blunt", or that I "shouldn't publicly embarrass someone". Meanwhile, that embarrassment was derived from someone trying to shut me down, and I simply responded moderately in kind, with fact, not emotion.
(I'm a contractor, so I engage in new workspaces often, as a being not integrated into the social structure of that workplace.)
I'm sure this has happened to all of us. Human interaction is not an API with strict protocols. It's very squishy.
Another issue here is that some humans are just assholes. We've all met them. In such people their assholish behaviour comes out as whatever is most direct and upsetting. With a woman, it's probably targeted as sexism, a place to "hang their attack" on. With a man, it's still there... just personal attacks of a different narrative. You can almost see such asshat's brains working, trying to find the best button to push, the best place to lay a personal attack... because that's all they have.
I guess what I'm saying is, if you're a woman and currently being hit with what appears to be a sexist narrative, try to keep in mind the "asshole" component, or "things that seem sexist but are just people interacting poorly" aren't sexism.
And I say that fully without blame. Any human hit over and over and over with something such as sexism, is going to naturally default to this as a reason. But when I read articles like this one, where the dialog is patriarchy and innate male culture, it really doesn't help. It doesn't help, because many men do their best to police such behaviour around them, and in themselves.
And there are more of us than you think.
If there weren't, all of the attempts at legislating equality would never have happened.
So take some solace in this, if you're a woman. We're trying. Some of us, in fact many of us are, so much so that we try to pass laws, we try to stamp things out.
So, everyone agrees that assholes exist. Let’s pretend we also all agree that some of them are sexiest assholes who display this behavior preferentially to women. When you see one such interaction, it is indistinguishable from any randomly chosen non-sexist asshole interaction. And if you’re a guy, you see both men and women subjected to assholes and think that’s just part of equality, there’s no sexism around to police.
Meanwhile, if men and women are equally hurt by each asshole attack, there are many men, few women, several equal opportunity assholes and a few assholes who target women: asshole attacks will be directed at women at a much greater rate than men. You can either say “everyone has to cope with assholes, this isn’t sexism” or you can think about what could make assholery disproportionately hurt women in the field even though men also experience it.
I relate to much of the article, as a man, and in situations where I was wronged by women. I never saw it as a battle of the sexes but rather some people having ridiculous egos.
A short, worthwhile read. A mostly irrelvant comment: I think that when writing, it is fine to use ≠ and =. We can be reasonably sure that = means equals and not assignment.
“The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small.” Henry Kissinger
Many things kept me out of academia but the number one was not wanting to spent my life arguing with people who do little else. The politics in these orgs are insane and it would be of no surprise that the petty assholes are also misogynistic. But take away the misogyny and they’re still petty assholes which while less bad still isn’t very good. I’m not sure how to fix it. I think this structure of research org is not destined to last anyway so the point is probably moot. Perhaps we will see an era of independent scientists.
Thanks, I quickly googled where it came from and looked no further.
Some of academia is important, and I did try to do important things while I was there. That was the main thing I was fighting over, the permission to do important things. Often it would take me far longer to get the permission than to do the thing. I did find that the bulk of the people preferred to squabble and the bulk of the research doesn’t work, and the bulk of the research that does work buried. And since so much work is buried a lot of research is simply rediscovering what already should have been known.
I think the selection criteria bias on what we know from the fruits of research gives a false sense of what it is like to be a researcher.
> Men, do better! If you are in a position of power and want to be an ally, educate yourself by reading Entitled [3] and doing training on inclusive governance [5]. Even if you think you are a nice guy, there are plenty of other guys out there that are not so nice and dealing with the aftermath is much worse than preventing the harassment in the first place
I find statements like this frustrating. I do all I can to counter-act sexist behaviour and speech around me. There's not much else I can do. I'm not in a position of power. The people who need to do better are never going to read this and they aren't going to care. So they continue being assholes and I continue to get to share in the blame. It's just demoralising. Whatever I do is never enough.
I personally find the attitude of guilt by association to be unfair.
There’s of course the argument that you can’t be racist or sexist or whatever-ist against the dominant group. I am not sure if I subscribe to that belief.
100% agree. And this antagonizing attitude may lead some men to change their stance from supportive to neutral or worse. It's like you said, what's the point if you still get called sexist or other derogative. On social media being misogynist gets you banned and being misandric gets you upvotes. What a time to be alive.
This needs more upvotes and is a lot more important than apples latest iphone or the newest AI feature.
I can't judge any of this because I won the gene lottery and don't have to deal with problems like that. It just baffles me that there are humans who get treated like that.
> For example, my very existence as a moderately young, moderately successful computer scientist threatens some men’s sense of identity, thus making them uncomfortable and/or lash out.
I'm not a woman, but I faced this soooo many times in my career that now I believe that it's just insecure men feeling threatened by other people's knowledge or capabilities. Usually these people are hiding something and they are not as smart as perceived. Having someone in the room that can potentially unmask that makes them insecure.
You have to address the behavior the first time it occurs by establishing boundaries otherwise it keeps happening more and more.
And that is a leadership/management failure to address these behaviors. In all occasions the insecure men were so loud and obnoxious that management prefers not to deal with it and take the easy route by firing the target of the abuse, reinforcing the behavior more and more.
>I'm not a woman, but I faced this soooo many times in my career that now I believe that it's just insecure men feeling threatened by other people's knowledge or capabilities. Usually these people are hiding something and they are not as smart as perceived. Having someone in the room that can potentially unmask that makes them insecure.
Funny you mention this. The worst career experience I ever had was with a woman who was insecure about herself. She routinely gave me a hard time and butted heads with me on issues where I was actually right many times. By the way, she got promoted to be my manager (something that one more senior guy expected from the first time he met her years before). I wasn't the only one who couldn't stand her. Arrogance is not a uniquely or even predominantly masculine trait in this industry. It's a relatively common thing among programmers, especially young ones.
And if you're gonna blame the upper management for my experience, I've just gotta say that you are naive. They are the ones who put that woman in place and were biased in her favor. Nothing I could have said about her obnoxious behavior would have made a bit of difference. More likely than not, I would have been targetted for even more frustrating BS.
And if you're gonna accuse me of not liking women somehow, my current manager is a woman and she's one of the better ones I've had. I'm talking about the assumption that all toxic personalities are owned by men, and that women are inherently disadvantaged. They are not as a whole. In this industry, there is more variance among members of each gender than there is between genders. Men and women want different things out of life generally. But if you look at similar types of people, their gender hardly matters.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadI’m a guy and I’ve been told multiple times I don’t look like a software developer. I think it can happen to anyone who doesn’t fit the stereotype of nerdy person portrayed in films and TV.
I'm fairly sure it has nothing to do with how I dress or look but simply because of stereotypes associated with Indians. If I was whiter, people would say fitness coach.
Personal attacks are not allowed here and personal+gender attacks are especially not allowed here. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't do it again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In any case, you're welcome here and I'm sorry for any misunderstanding.
And of course the first two comments on the article proved the article’s point…
(from parent)
In case anybody wondered, the article says nothing of the sorts:
> Kate defines misogyny as the enforcement branch of the patriarchy. While sexism is a set of beliefs, misogyny is a set of actions. As such, it is much more damaging to women. Worse, misogyny enforces a patriarchical worldview that the majority of the world holds as the morally correct one. Thus, when women break this norm (i.e., by demanding authority, recognition, space and not providing goods that men feel entitled to like domestic, emotional and mental labor), they are in the wrong. The men are seen as the victims, while the women enduring the misogyny are the bad actors. This viewpoint leads to justification of a number of vile behaviors perpetuated by men – even those men that claim to support and love women.
(second paragraph from TFA)
Get you quantifiers straight, Tom.
> behaviors perpetuated by men – even those men
Blaming all men, twice!
If you’re still confused, compare:
> violence perpetuated by blacks - even those blacks
> terrorism perpetuated by Muslims - even those Muslims
> world controlled by Jews - even those Jews
Society is blind to sexism against men, but quite sensitive to bigotry against blacks and Jews, so it’s easier to see if you replace a few words…
It has been repurposed by the radfem movement to mean something else. That something else is not super well defined but it has something to do with the coddling that unstable men presumably require to not retaliate against women.
It makes me wonder if I just so happen to run in circles that are ostensibly devoid of misogyny or if I am blind to it.
For most of my career I've worked in mixed teams and can't recall seeing overt misogyny at all within the team. However, there's been a client or two who want to "talk it man-to-man", or simply not believing anything our female technical subject expert was saying before someone with a male name confirmed it, qualifications be damned. I'm sure for every such case there's been 10 I've just not heard about.
Meanwhile my wife, also in IT, hasn't really experienced any harassment or misogyny at all in the past 20 years or so.
There’s an unbelievable number of false positives I’d expect from such an inane setup
A close friend of mine went to a top math/science/engineering college. A professor called her into his office to tell her that she was doing well above average, and that she should find a non-technical line of education and work. His rationale was that she had to be 10x as good as men to make it in a technical field. But she's not 10x as good, so give up now.
She went on to work on highly technical software on the campus of another elite technical college. While walking around that campus in a sweatshirt from her alma mater, a man stopped her and asked her where she got the sweatshirt. She said she graduated from that college. He laughed and said, "No, really, where did you get it?"
Another friend of mine was an intern at a FAANG and her manager said he'd make her a full-time offer if she slept with him. She didn't. On her first day at the company she ended up joining after college, she was asked out by a man more than twice her age. Given her internship experience and not knowing how powerful this man was at the new company, this was complicated to navigate.
It turns out that man was asking out every woman of East Asian descent that was single and that came into contact with him, many during their first interaction with him. That included teenage interns. He managed to get one of those interns to drink a bit too much and walk over to his apartment alone with him. Luckily, she figured out what was going on before he could get what he wanted, but the experience still resulted in significant trauma for her.
These kinds of things are still horrifically common. But all of these examples happened in relative privacy, so it's easy to not notice it if you're not on the receiving end of it and don't have friends that want to talk about it. Understandably, many don't want to talk about it, especially with coworkers.
Uhmmm, there is strong evidence that women have an easier time in tech to receive responses to their job applications, to get invited to interviews and actually get the job. There is no competence "DPS check" and tech competence doesn't shield you from being manipulated.
Then there is the well kept secret that you get most of your tech competence from working 40 hours a week, every week. Not from side projects at home, not from 4 to 5 years of university. Getting your foot in the door is far more important than your academic background.
> because men are famously good at emotional self-regulation
Anecdotally, estrogen has done nothing for my anger issues :(
It's very much sarcasm, and very much warranted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics
That's interesting, I've never thought about it in this way. In the culture I was born, there was an visible split between societal norms (hypocrisy, lying, trying to conceal unfavorable things, expecting people to behave in a certain way) and moral norms (integrity, speaking the truth, behave in a completely different way than most people would).
I believe this split is also identified in the WP article you linked:
> Morality is about what people ought to do rather than what they actually do, what they want to do, or what social conventions require
So in the context of the original article, the fallacies like expecting women not do tech jobs, to be more emotional than rational etc. - all these things seem more like societal biases that are more against morality rather than in line with any moral system I can think of.
And yes, these societal biases must be critically examined and exposed in order that we can evolve our moral systems to better fit our (collective) needs. There are moral systems in the world right now that see chattel slavery as morally right, and where a woman having even the most basic knowledge required to have a tech job is deeply and perversely immoral. Moral systems have a way of outlasting both utility and developments in our understanding of ethics and what it means to be humane. Sadly only by pushing those would-be moralists towards (hopefully) taking up ethics can we get them to put down the cudgel of their morals, but the problem is that without a great deal of thought the ideas of ethics can be used to leave one active ethically within your moral system but unethically to anyone outside your moral system. That’s why meta-ethics exist… if my system of ethics only works within a less moral system of morals, am I required to abandon my system of ethics and forge a new one?
Something you can select on a job application form.
But my point is: by identifying as nonbinary, I do not have to listen to this stuff. It is yet another checkbox, to satisfy HR from California.
In your example about escaping capitalism. If you are a business owner, it requires a lot of mental effort. Keep up with laws, pay taxes on time, find customers... and you may loose everything, if you make a mistake. And benefits are not that great.
Some people just prefer to be employees.
For example: despite being a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat all her life and pretty far left on most issues, my grandmother couldn't fathom electing women to any positions of political power. I can only imagine what her reaction to the current election would have been. I mostly gave her a pass on that, though, since she was born in 1920, but I've also known much younger women with the same hang-up.
In other words: your gender really has no bearing on whether you are part of the patriarchy.
And even when they do, if they don’t do it to you, or do it while you’re watching, you find yourself incredulous that someone would really go and do such a thing.
Anyway. This is the sort of situation that births subreddits with titles like “are the straights okay?”
Computer science being female orientated is traditionally consistent; women are expected to work or be ornaments (or both) and carting water, weaving, tallying stock, and desk work is "womens work" Vs the machismo pick swinging, gun carrying, construction building "mens work".
Having computer science seen as "desk work" is useful for women in such cultures, it's an interesting income stream in a bubble free from hassle.
Boundaries blur, of course, and exceptions are all over - but that's a rough guide.
Not to mention strong man patriarchies can also hide a core matriarchy .. and yet not embrace equality for all women, just for the few mothers that earned it and outlived their husbands.
By Elizabeth Barber's rules for traditional women's work during the first 20,000 years: (a) can it be done at home (or, in a pinch, with kids in tow), and (b) is it easily interruptible (due to emergencies among aforementioned kids), computer science is defo traditionally consistent.
In the telling of history it's often the case, for a good while at least, that the only thing less seen than a woman is a woman's black servant; Sam Isaacs eventually made the pages: https://tracesmagazine.com.au/2013/11/saving-grace-western-a...
I think I saw the 1982 movie with that scene, but for some reason they'd gender-swapped the heroine?
(well, at least that's how it went if one believes the Inquirer and Commercial News account over Isaacs', anyway: https://mrdhs.com.au/the-isaacs-family/ )One problem I have though, is presumed sexism. An example is, this article states:
Now that I have managed to make men feel embarrassed and insecure, they blame these feelings on me. No one else has made them feel this way before, and because men are famously good at emotional self-regulation, I must be the problem.
Now first, I 100% agree than in some cases there may be an innate, sexist response here. Some cases. But at the same time, men arguing with men can elicit a response in this way! "No, you're at fault for challenging my ideas! And successfully! How dare you!"
My point is, I very much believe some of these interactions are laced with sexism, even unrealised or unknown to those perpetrating the act. Yet at the same time, it can just be two humans interacting, and one taking the outcome poorly. Again as a male, I've seen this type of response when established ideas are challenged... including the established hierarchy in a workplace somehow blaming me. Often, I've been told I was too "blunt", or that I "shouldn't publicly embarrass someone". Meanwhile, that embarrassment was derived from someone trying to shut me down, and I simply responded moderately in kind, with fact, not emotion.
(I'm a contractor, so I engage in new workspaces often, as a being not integrated into the social structure of that workplace.)
I'm sure this has happened to all of us. Human interaction is not an API with strict protocols. It's very squishy.
Another issue here is that some humans are just assholes. We've all met them. In such people their assholish behaviour comes out as whatever is most direct and upsetting. With a woman, it's probably targeted as sexism, a place to "hang their attack" on. With a man, it's still there... just personal attacks of a different narrative. You can almost see such asshat's brains working, trying to find the best button to push, the best place to lay a personal attack... because that's all they have.
I guess what I'm saying is, if you're a woman and currently being hit with what appears to be a sexist narrative, try to keep in mind the "asshole" component, or "things that seem sexist but are just people interacting poorly" aren't sexism.
And I say that fully without blame. Any human hit over and over and over with something such as sexism, is going to naturally default to this as a reason. But when I read articles like this one, where the dialog is patriarchy and innate male culture, it really doesn't help. It doesn't help, because many men do their best to police such behaviour around them, and in themselves.
And there are more of us than you think.
If there weren't, all of the attempts at legislating equality would never have happened.
So take some solace in this, if you're a woman. We're trying. Some of us, in fact many of us are, so much so that we try to pass laws, we try to stamp things out.
Take comfort to know it's not all of us.
Meanwhile, if men and women are equally hurt by each asshole attack, there are many men, few women, several equal opportunity assholes and a few assholes who target women: asshole attacks will be directed at women at a much greater rate than men. You can either say “everyone has to cope with assholes, this isn’t sexism” or you can think about what could make assholery disproportionately hurt women in the field even though men also experience it.
Many things kept me out of academia but the number one was not wanting to spent my life arguing with people who do little else. The politics in these orgs are insane and it would be of no surprise that the petty assholes are also misogynistic. But take away the misogyny and they’re still petty assholes which while less bad still isn’t very good. I’m not sure how to fix it. I think this structure of research org is not destined to last anyway so the point is probably moot. Perhaps we will see an era of independent scientists.
Misattributed to him. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger#Misattributed
It points out https://archive.org/details/americanuniversi0000unse_w2i7/pa... from 1970: "We can no longer use our little joke that campus politics are so nasty because the stakes are so small. They are now so nasty because the stakes are so large."
Some of academia is important, and I did try to do important things while I was there. That was the main thing I was fighting over, the permission to do important things. Often it would take me far longer to get the permission than to do the thing. I did find that the bulk of the people preferred to squabble and the bulk of the research doesn’t work, and the bulk of the research that does work buried. And since so much work is buried a lot of research is simply rediscovering what already should have been known.
I think the selection criteria bias on what we know from the fruits of research gives a false sense of what it is like to be a researcher.
I find statements like this frustrating. I do all I can to counter-act sexist behaviour and speech around me. There's not much else I can do. I'm not in a position of power. The people who need to do better are never going to read this and they aren't going to care. So they continue being assholes and I continue to get to share in the blame. It's just demoralising. Whatever I do is never enough.
There’s of course the argument that you can’t be racist or sexist or whatever-ist against the dominant group. I am not sure if I subscribe to that belief.
I can't judge any of this because I won the gene lottery and don't have to deal with problems like that. It just baffles me that there are humans who get treated like that.
I'm not a woman, but I faced this soooo many times in my career that now I believe that it's just insecure men feeling threatened by other people's knowledge or capabilities. Usually these people are hiding something and they are not as smart as perceived. Having someone in the room that can potentially unmask that makes them insecure.
You have to address the behavior the first time it occurs by establishing boundaries otherwise it keeps happening more and more.
And that is a leadership/management failure to address these behaviors. In all occasions the insecure men were so loud and obnoxious that management prefers not to deal with it and take the easy route by firing the target of the abuse, reinforcing the behavior more and more.
Funny you mention this. The worst career experience I ever had was with a woman who was insecure about herself. She routinely gave me a hard time and butted heads with me on issues where I was actually right many times. By the way, she got promoted to be my manager (something that one more senior guy expected from the first time he met her years before). I wasn't the only one who couldn't stand her. Arrogance is not a uniquely or even predominantly masculine trait in this industry. It's a relatively common thing among programmers, especially young ones.
And if you're gonna blame the upper management for my experience, I've just gotta say that you are naive. They are the ones who put that woman in place and were biased in her favor. Nothing I could have said about her obnoxious behavior would have made a bit of difference. More likely than not, I would have been targetted for even more frustrating BS.
And if you're gonna accuse me of not liking women somehow, my current manager is a woman and she's one of the better ones I've had. I'm talking about the assumption that all toxic personalities are owned by men, and that women are inherently disadvantaged. They are not as a whole. In this industry, there is more variance among members of each gender than there is between genders. Men and women want different things out of life generally. But if you look at similar types of people, their gender hardly matters.
Gender nor race are requirements for these experiences. They likely emerge from corporate bureaucracy and human insecurity.