When will "brogrammers" join metrosexuals, hippies, the Sharks and the Jets in some corner of a cultural dictionary? (Or perhaps I shouldn't get my hopes up--the expression hipster returned after a 50-year hiatus, if describing a different phenomenon.) How are these guys different from salesmen, flyboys (remember Tailhook), etc., drunk on alcohol and testosterone?
And Marie Claire? Merciful heavens, I hope that Maxim will step up and contribute its perspective.
Are you sure you want the word to disappear as a relic of the 2000's? I ask because relic terms you suggest like metrosexuals, hippies, etc seem to have disappeared as the mainstream began to absorb their ethos.
Rather than address the content of what is being said you try and dismiss it as though Marie Claire could never, ever produce an objective, insightful look at the role of women in the IT industry. And then try and excuse the behaviour with a "but sales guys do it". Nice work.
I spent years at university (at great cost) and countless long hours because I genuinely believe that this is a serious profession on par with a doctor or scientist. And I for one am sick of these stories coming up again and again and being dismissed by people such as yourself again and again.
First, I would refer you to masto's comment some ways up for a hint why I posted.
Second, I do not condone such behavior. It is flat wrong, whether done by a coder or by a pilot or salesman. A conference that lets guys get away with this without losing their credentials is at fault.
Third, I do not think that the seriousness of any occupation is a guarantee against bad behavior by its practitioners. It does not take very wide reading to encounter thoroughly bad--criminal behavior--on the part of doctors, for example.
My experience must differ from yours, but metrosexual and hippie are useful superficial descriptors for many people I encounter. I know many people who would self-identify as either. When I was completing college I also knew several people who would gladly self-identify as brogrammers. The terms do not describe freak phenomena that we can sweep under the carpet.
To me, brogrammer mostly can be reduced to spending too much attention on vanity and not enough on the well-being of others. There are many synonymous terms, but this one is valuable for its succinctness.
I'm always suspicious of these figures about relative male/female earnings. The methodology is rarely given and it usually turns out to be apples to oranges comparison.
That said, what these women have experienced is horrible. As a man in tech my only response is "this stuff is unacceptable, and this isn't me, please try not to tar us all with this brush".
There is a perception amongst some guys in IT that women aren't capable enough to be great programmers. Hence they either don't strive to higher positions (and higher wages) or they are deliberately kept down.
I've seen it happen on a few occasions and it's really disheartening to watch them get screwed over.
I've certainly seen that attitude in a (thankfully) very small number of the engineers I've worked with, and never systemically.
Most of the female engineers I've worked with were of a far higher standard than the people that held those opinions.
--edit-- to be clear I'm not trying to say it can't or doesn't happen systemically, it's just that either I've been lucky in where I've worked or it's not been obvious to me. But then I'm a guy and I've never been in management positions.
I've noticed the same, that all but one of the female engineers I worked with were of a far higher standard.
That is pretty damning to me though - only those that are really dedicated end up staying. I think it goes to show that the environments that I worked in aren't all that great, and that the 'feeder' channels, third level, other companies, aren't that great for women.
The argument that held most sway with me til the recent social media boom was that women were too smart to get involved in IT (more sense to do medicine), but that doesn't seem to hold any water now that other industries are lagging.
Oh I didn't necessarily mean the women I've worked with in the past had to be at a higher than average standard or hugely dedicated to stay in the industry. I've worked with a whole spectrum of abilities of both men and women.
I was more implying that the guys that felt the need to belittle women were usually pretty damn awful themselves.
But you may well be on to something there anyway...
Boys need good women around them to become good men, and girls need good men around them to become good women.
We men should be policing ourselves. If you see this happening, step up and tell them it's not OK. Just stop them, it's that simple. This isn't a women's issue, it's a people issue.
About 90% right but rather than being divisive, as in forming or expressing division or distribution, you could just summarize it as "its a being civilized issue". As in you shouldn't act like a zoo primate, regardless of who is doing what to which gender, etc.
What those cons need is need is a bunch of moms and grannies not just young hotties (and no this is not blame the victim, keep reading) In that old women are a instinctual effective civilizing influence on young boys who are operating at a lower mental age for whatever reason. A stern glance from an old grannie is, oh, probably about 100x more effective at intimidating a jerk than a strongly worded article in Marie Claire. I'm sure that an entire nation of drunken childish frat boys is quaking in their boots knowing that Marie Claire magazine is not so happy with them. The presence of some father figures would help too, fathers of daughters of roughly the age of the harassed hotties tend to be kinda protective. I have no idea how a PR campaign "Take yer mom and grandpa to Defcon this year" would work.
Who would ever have guessed that it takes a cross section of all of society to act civilized, that some kinda weekend long lord of the flies re-enactment doesn't result in the revival of medieval chivalry or the revival of the womens lib movement or whatever.
I'm glad to see a women's magazine that's finally standing up against gender stereotypes. From the sidebar:
what's hot right now
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14 Dresses for Every Type of Wedding
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So you're saying that in keeping with "gender stereotypes" men should be inconsiderate, sexist assholes and women should just shut up and deal with it ?
And for the record trying to equate a fashion/lifestyle magazine with the totality of the female gender is completely and utterly stupid.
Well I'm sure it's not hindering gender stereotypes when Alissa Quart chooses a publication which treats women as objections for fashion, who are desperately insecure about how they keep their man, and what secrets are kept.
I find it funny how she forgets that some of the criticisms of Adria Richards came from women, she phrases it as if the whole negative actions are the sole property of men. Myself I don't find tweeting someone else's conversation, with their photos and identities easily determinable appropriate. Gender and Sex have nothing to do with that.
Guys we need to ban together and remove these mysoginistic "brogrammers" from our profession. If you see guys behaving in this manner - in this case we're talking attempted rape - intervene. Don't just ignore it and hope the problem goes away. It's not, and it appears to only be getting worse.
I don't think Richards should be part of that list of examples. The others named in the article were assaulted and generally treated very badly. So was Richards, eventually, but her original stunt combined with her hypocritical actions beforehand should disqualify her from serving as an example for sexism at tech events. Don't get me wrong, the threats against her after the stunt are just criminal, but they're not exactly perpetrated by brogrammers at trade shows.
That said, the article is a poignant reminder that something is amiss in the software community - as well as in our society at large but I always thought we were better than that. Like most issues, the reasons for this seem to be complex and varied. Bringing more female developers into the mix is only one measure. Clearly, the darker problem is that there are evidently a lot of men out there who like to engage in that kind of behavior. Showing them that this is not OK only covers part of the issue, the scarier part is that apparently considering women to be less-than-human is a prevalent and deep-running attitude.
As an aside, the term brogrammer is probably misapplied here. I always saw brogrammers as beefy, sun-tanned, macho douchebag coders who spit out some front-end code before heading off to the beach. Sure, there's probably some overlap between them and people who commit sexual assaults, but I don't think it's a good descriptor for sexist assholes/predators in general.
TBH, I would guess that "brogrammers" actually comprise a very small number of trade show perpetrators due to the fact that they may generally have more social access to women outside of the work place. Many of the geeks I meet were and are socially very awkward people, social ineptness is (sometimes) correlated with ineptness in interacting with women. I would say (again, a guess) a "brogrammer" has less interest in sexually assaulting a woman at a trade show then a sexually deprived and socially inept geek does; you'll find brogrammers at bars and clubs where it seems the lewd treatment of women that aren't aware of their bodies due to drugs and alcohol is the norm.
Mind you, I'm not nearly saying all geeks are like this - I consider myself to be a reclusive geek but have the utmost respect for women and I have yet to meet another programmer that hasn't shared that mentality with me. (it makes me sad when so many trolls come out to bash - whether justified or not, it isn't a civilized conversation)
I agree with you, but I don't think sex perps are statistically prevalent in either group, they are probably in a group by themselves. While the typical brogrammer is absolutely capable of making lewd remarks, it's unlikely he will engage in aggressive acts, because he is already very successful with women - why would he want to jeopardize that.
Like you, I would also consider myself a reclusive geek, and probably like you I wouldn't even consider that kind of behavior, not only because it's wrong and frowned-upon, but because the thought of doing this would never occur to me. Most geeks I know fall somewhere in this spectrum between "ladies man" and "recluse", but I can see none of them exhibiting the kind of behavior we're talking about.
Hence I believe there must be a third group of people who are, for lack of a better term, insane beneath their fake exterior.
Society is entirely schizophrenic on this point. On the one hand, we use sex to sell everything under the sun. (And, for that matter, the sun itself -- come visit [insert sunny low-latitude vacation destination here]!)
On the other hand, we can't even consider it. At work, in professional circles, etc.
(At least, not "overtly". There's a lot of "covert" use in play, though. From both sexes. Physically attractive people, both anecdote and now studies show, get ahead.)
On the third hand... We are supposed to be "totally committed". (Or, we were supposed to be in the last decade -- I start to lose track.) You're not a quality employee if you aren't putting in 60 hours a week. Wait, you're not worthwhile if you don't own your own company. Work life, personal life -- there is no dichotomy. There can be only one! (Work)
So... radically, almost diametrically opposed viewpoints. And we are supposed to conveniently segregate them depending upon where we are and/or what we are doing. Only... we increasingly aren't supposed to segregate those very activities and locations.
Bah...
I'm all for treating people well. And I think that starts with divorcing ourselves from a lot of this -- both current and perennial -- cultural crap.
The only solution I can really think of is transparency. Don't lie to your kids, students, employees about how the world works. Hopefully, informed people are more likely and more empowered to behave as responsible adults. Respecting both others and themselves.
--
P.S. I wrote this fairly quickly and on the basis of quickly reading the parent comment. I'll have to read through things more carefully, now.
I see that the article starts out describing a literal assault. I do not condone that nor mean to imply with my already-written comment that we can merely... "examine" ourselves out of all such circumstances.
All the same, a lot of the messaging in our society seems, by design or side-effect or both, to misinform. And to omit much needed conversation and correction before we reach the point of assault.
I think of the... scumbag behavior I so often encountered in school and at college.
When you're a young person and without good role models, it can be hard to figure out how to deal with that. And sometimes, even what to think of it. Type A or whatever personalities often make a certain amount of headway just by outright aggressiveness and intimidation.
Also, as a male, I've been in the perhaps somewhat less prevalent position of being manipulated by a world-class female user.
Perhaps we are at the vanguard of having another serious, cultural conversation about all this. Hopefully, for the better. Shine a light on it. Put it in context. Help people to see and find a better way.
I wish the article didn't use the term brogrammers. No one actually considers himself a brogrammmer so it makes it easy to dismiss any responsibility. Every make me a sandwich joke, everytime someone asks "was she hot?" after an interview, every resume tossed in the trash because the candidate was a member of Women in Computer Science (yes someone admitted to that in a comment on hn) enables sexism to flourish. The "innocent" jokes people refuse to take responsibility for enable the more serious trangressers.
Then when visible evidence of how hostile the community can be shows up such as a thousand terrible comments on a blog it's discounted as 4chan, or "trolls". As though a bunch of 14 year olds care about a tech conference implementing a sexual harassment policy.
The "4chan crowd" usually only needs some token amount of motivation, and a target. It doesn't matter of they care about the 'core values' at stake. IIRC, in the case of Adria Richards, it was posted somewhere on 4chan, and that's when things really took off (at least in terms of volume). The '4chan crowd' really only had to take offense to her 'name and shame' attitude, without caring about the larger 'sexual harassment policies at tech conferences' issue.
The first time I ever saw "brogrammer" was in a Facebook ad from Intel. I didn't think of it as negative, I thought it was a way of saying that programming was no longer (at least in the view of the general public) the purview of socially awkward dorks.
Oddly, I've yet to meet one of these "brogrammers" in my life in my past 13 years in the industry.
Maybe I've just been lucky, but I've generally found males in this field to be extremely respectful and welcoming to females, I think partially because of how few of them are in programming and development.
| That has translated into six-figure salaries and over-the-top
| perks like concierges, car service, and free gourmet meals.
| Wall Street's masters of the universe have been supplanted
| by Silicon Valley's big-swinging code jocks.
Really? Maybe I'm just running with the 'wrong' circles to see this, but I don't think that the industry is quite as bad as Wall Street. In Wall Street it's in-grained in the culture, and unofficially encouraged by upper management (especially the lavish lifestyle part, because then you always are dependent on staying with the company and competing for that next $1 million bonus).
Decent article, but it's difficult to take seriously this form of argumentation:
where instances of sexual harassment and assault against women are so rampant there are even websites devoted to cataloging them
The existence of websites? Really? By this standard of evidence, we are also to believe that alien abductions, aspartame-induced brain cancers, and infiltration of the government by subterranean lizard-people are also rampant.
30 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 81.9 ms ] threadAnd Marie Claire? Merciful heavens, I hope that Maxim will step up and contribute its perspective.
I spent years at university (at great cost) and countless long hours because I genuinely believe that this is a serious profession on par with a doctor or scientist. And I for one am sick of these stories coming up again and again and being dismissed by people such as yourself again and again.
Second, I do not condone such behavior. It is flat wrong, whether done by a coder or by a pilot or salesman. A conference that lets guys get away with this without losing their credentials is at fault.
Third, I do not think that the seriousness of any occupation is a guarantee against bad behavior by its practitioners. It does not take very wide reading to encounter thoroughly bad--criminal behavior--on the part of doctors, for example.
To me, brogrammer mostly can be reduced to spending too much attention on vanity and not enough on the well-being of others. There are many synonymous terms, but this one is valuable for its succinctness.
That said, what these women have experienced is horrible. As a man in tech my only response is "this stuff is unacceptable, and this isn't me, please try not to tar us all with this brush".
I've seen it happen on a few occasions and it's really disheartening to watch them get screwed over.
Most of the female engineers I've worked with were of a far higher standard than the people that held those opinions.
--edit-- to be clear I'm not trying to say it can't or doesn't happen systemically, it's just that either I've been lucky in where I've worked or it's not been obvious to me. But then I'm a guy and I've never been in management positions.
I was more implying that the guys that felt the need to belittle women were usually pretty damn awful themselves.
But you may well be on to something there anyway...
We men should be policing ourselves. If you see this happening, step up and tell them it's not OK. Just stop them, it's that simple. This isn't a women's issue, it's a people issue.
What those cons need is need is a bunch of moms and grannies not just young hotties (and no this is not blame the victim, keep reading) In that old women are a instinctual effective civilizing influence on young boys who are operating at a lower mental age for whatever reason. A stern glance from an old grannie is, oh, probably about 100x more effective at intimidating a jerk than a strongly worded article in Marie Claire. I'm sure that an entire nation of drunken childish frat boys is quaking in their boots knowing that Marie Claire magazine is not so happy with them. The presence of some father figures would help too, fathers of daughters of roughly the age of the harassed hotties tend to be kinda protective. I have no idea how a PR campaign "Take yer mom and grandpa to Defcon this year" would work.
Who would ever have guessed that it takes a cross section of all of society to act civilized, that some kinda weekend long lord of the flies re-enactment doesn't result in the revival of medieval chivalry or the revival of the womens lib movement or whatever.
And for the record trying to equate a fashion/lifestyle magazine with the totality of the female gender is completely and utterly stupid.
I find it funny how she forgets that some of the criticisms of Adria Richards came from women, she phrases it as if the whole negative actions are the sole property of men. Myself I don't find tweeting someone else's conversation, with their photos and identities easily determinable appropriate. Gender and Sex have nothing to do with that.
That said, the article is a poignant reminder that something is amiss in the software community - as well as in our society at large but I always thought we were better than that. Like most issues, the reasons for this seem to be complex and varied. Bringing more female developers into the mix is only one measure. Clearly, the darker problem is that there are evidently a lot of men out there who like to engage in that kind of behavior. Showing them that this is not OK only covers part of the issue, the scarier part is that apparently considering women to be less-than-human is a prevalent and deep-running attitude.
As an aside, the term brogrammer is probably misapplied here. I always saw brogrammers as beefy, sun-tanned, macho douchebag coders who spit out some front-end code before heading off to the beach. Sure, there's probably some overlap between them and people who commit sexual assaults, but I don't think it's a good descriptor for sexist assholes/predators in general.
Mind you, I'm not nearly saying all geeks are like this - I consider myself to be a reclusive geek but have the utmost respect for women and I have yet to meet another programmer that hasn't shared that mentality with me. (it makes me sad when so many trolls come out to bash - whether justified or not, it isn't a civilized conversation)
Like you, I would also consider myself a reclusive geek, and probably like you I wouldn't even consider that kind of behavior, not only because it's wrong and frowned-upon, but because the thought of doing this would never occur to me. Most geeks I know fall somewhere in this spectrum between "ladies man" and "recluse", but I can see none of them exhibiting the kind of behavior we're talking about.
Hence I believe there must be a third group of people who are, for lack of a better term, insane beneath their fake exterior.
On the other hand, we can't even consider it. At work, in professional circles, etc.
(At least, not "overtly". There's a lot of "covert" use in play, though. From both sexes. Physically attractive people, both anecdote and now studies show, get ahead.)
On the third hand... We are supposed to be "totally committed". (Or, we were supposed to be in the last decade -- I start to lose track.) You're not a quality employee if you aren't putting in 60 hours a week. Wait, you're not worthwhile if you don't own your own company. Work life, personal life -- there is no dichotomy. There can be only one! (Work)
So... radically, almost diametrically opposed viewpoints. And we are supposed to conveniently segregate them depending upon where we are and/or what we are doing. Only... we increasingly aren't supposed to segregate those very activities and locations.
Bah...
I'm all for treating people well. And I think that starts with divorcing ourselves from a lot of this -- both current and perennial -- cultural crap.
The only solution I can really think of is transparency. Don't lie to your kids, students, employees about how the world works. Hopefully, informed people are more likely and more empowered to behave as responsible adults. Respecting both others and themselves.
--
P.S. I wrote this fairly quickly and on the basis of quickly reading the parent comment. I'll have to read through things more carefully, now.
I see that the article starts out describing a literal assault. I do not condone that nor mean to imply with my already-written comment that we can merely... "examine" ourselves out of all such circumstances.
All the same, a lot of the messaging in our society seems, by design or side-effect or both, to misinform. And to omit much needed conversation and correction before we reach the point of assault.
I think of the... scumbag behavior I so often encountered in school and at college.
When you're a young person and without good role models, it can be hard to figure out how to deal with that. And sometimes, even what to think of it. Type A or whatever personalities often make a certain amount of headway just by outright aggressiveness and intimidation.
Also, as a male, I've been in the perhaps somewhat less prevalent position of being manipulated by a world-class female user.
Perhaps we are at the vanguard of having another serious, cultural conversation about all this. Hopefully, for the better. Shine a light on it. Put it in context. Help people to see and find a better way.
Then when visible evidence of how hostile the community can be shows up such as a thousand terrible comments on a blog it's discounted as 4chan, or "trolls". As though a bunch of 14 year olds care about a tech conference implementing a sexual harassment policy.
Maybe I've just been lucky, but I've generally found males in this field to be extremely respectful and welcoming to females, I think partially because of how few of them are in programming and development.
where instances of sexual harassment and assault against women are so rampant there are even websites devoted to cataloging them
The existence of websites? Really? By this standard of evidence, we are also to believe that alien abductions, aspartame-induced brain cancers, and infiltration of the government by subterranean lizard-people are also rampant.