(I am a woman. I am sometimes referred to as "he" on HN. I am quite open about my gender and it is specified in my profile. But the default assumption here is that anyone talking must be male -- because tech. This is accepting a stereotype.)
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-fool-be...
I've seen many people make this claim, but I haven't seen anyone back it up with evidence. What do you mean by "harder"? Do you mean "more difficult"? In what way?
Right now, I believe claims that tiny linguistic differences create meaningful barriers to female participation in technology are all specious. I could be convinced otherwise, but have seen no evidence that might move me.
> If you do not know my gender, it takes very little effort to speak in a way that admits you do not know it
English is not structured to be gender-neutral. I'm not going to use awkward circumlocutions to avoid the possibility of offending someone.
Years ago, I joined an urban planning forum. It had been around for 10 years. It was the most prominent forum of its kind in the world. The majority of members were in Canada or the Continental US. The owner was frustrated that he did not have more of a global membership. He was not very socially savvy. He had explicitly stated his desire to have more international participation. I felt okay with kind of fucking with the group culture to hand him his wish. I was there about 6 months and was not a moderator when membership generally began to rise, but in particular international membership went up.
Part of how that happened:
I was a nightowl living in California, so I was often on late at night, like midnight my time, when it was the wee hours of the morning on the East Coast. Most members were not only living in the East Coast to West Coast time zones of the continental US, they were on the East Coast. It was a professional forum of nerds. So they were there mostly during working hours, 8am to 8pm east coast time (8-5 for east coast and west coast inclusive, since it is 8pm on the east coast when it is 5pm here).
So one of the cultural things going on was that if anyone was there during the evening or weekend, they would make ugly comments about clearly not having a life that they were posting there outside of work hours. It was clear to my mind that this was a barrier to participation for anyone living outside of those time zones -- that potential international members would already be self conscious about being "different" and they would be online during their normal work hours, which were outside that 8-8 east coast timeframe. So the ugly comments about how terrible it was to post outside of those times was something I actively hunted down and fucked with. I threw it in everyone's face that I was there after midnight, that I was a woman and a student and so on (ie I emphasized that I was demographically different from the predominantly male employed professionals to help make foreigners more comfortable with being different). I was the only person having real time conversation with our one active Australian member when it all began.
That changed. I successfully killed the "I am here outside those hours, so I must be a lozer" meme and International membership went up.
I cannot "prove" that me going after that small linguistic detail directly caused it. I can tell you the forum existed for 10 years before I arrived. The forum owner had bitched for years about his desire to have more international members. Six months after I joined, international membership went up. I set it as a goal to make it happen as a gift to the forum owner since I felt he was doing good work and had explicitly expressed a desire for it.
So I believe strongly that I am right. I am also, as far as I can tell, the highest ranked woman here in terms of karma score, apparently by quite a stretch. So perhaps I know something about how to make that work here, if you want to believe my performance is in some way indicative that I know what I am talking about. Or you can do what a great many people do to me and wave it off as "luck" or "coincidence" or whatever and not indicative that my mental models have any kind of sound basis. That gets done to me quite a lot.
This experience may have convinced you that language policing is effective, but it doesn't convince me. Bragging about your karma likewise has no effect on my evaluation of the merits of your argument.
> That gets done to me quite a lot.
It happens to everyone a lot. In context, I get the feeling that you're suggesting it happens to you because you're a woman. Am I wrong? These sly implications of sexism where none really exist are extremely offensive and offputting and make me less likely to sympathize with your cause.
Nor did I say it gets done to me because I am a woman. It does get done to me a lot. I don't know that it has anything to do with my gender. It may have more to do with the fact that I have formally and informally studied certain things about social psychology and I have well developed mental models for how these things work that most people are not very familiar with. Since social psychology is a "soft science," it is much harder to convince people that X is true than, say, for physics or math. That doesn't mean there are not studies or established principles, etc, to call upon for drawing conclusions.
Anyway, I have work to do and this seems fruitless, alas.
Have a good day.
> I have formally and informally studied certain things about social psychology
Your continuing reliance on credentials isn't helping your credibility.
I don't imagine there is any hope of educating you as to why your behavior would drive off women and make them reluctant to participate here. But perhaps pointing it out will cast some light on the issue for other people.
Edit: And then you edit your comment to further dismiss my credentials as not helping my credibility. Just icing on the cake of a mountain of dismissiveness.
Everyone is treated in a dismissive fashioned by everyone. Only evidence and careful reasoning can rebut this default policy. You have presented none.
It galls me you interpret treatment that everyone receives as hostility directed toward the group to which you happen to belong. I am under no obligation to give additional weight to your argument merely because you are a woman. That you consider my dismissal of your unsupported claims is intellectually dishonest. You're smart enough to know better.
You're essentially claiming that everyone who doesn't accept your unsupported claims is sexist. You're free to do make this claim, but in doing so, you're crying wolf and weakening your cause.
You're right that I'm being dismissive. I'm also veering toward being disrespectful. That's not because you're a woman, but because you're demanding unearned special treatment. You're a technologist. Gaining status on a technologist's forum is no great accomplishment.
You're smart enough to know better.
Thank you for saying that. But it does not change the fact that men here are routinely asked to show their work and women are routinely told they are simply full of shit. I have tried to show you what I know. You dismiss it and seem unopen to considering additional evidence.
There is a big difference between skepticism or desiring firmer evidence and disrespect. I don't expect you to give me special treatment. The standard on HN is supposed to be civil, respectful discourse. But my history suggests that standard applies to men and not women. It has improved, quite a lot, but there are still differences.
When I joined Hacker News, there was much more collegial respect here -- for the men, not the women. That has deteriorated some over the years. It is perhaps being repaired. My hope is that if it is fully restored, it will apply equally to all members.
(Well, you might imagine that commentators here are _deliberately_ misgendering you, which is a suggestion so preposterous that I can't entertain it. It might also conceivably be the case that you've gained so much karma _because_ you have an androgynous username, but see below.)
As a man, I find it extremely frustrating when advocates for women in technology look at a phenomenon where men and women are imbalanced and immediately jump to sexism as the explanation. I've had a long career in technology. Not once have I seen a woman discriminated against or her ideas held to a higher standard than the ideas of men. I've seen plenty of mentoring, encouragement, and outreach however. I've personally worked to mentor women in computer science. The idea that there is some systemic bias against women on Hacker News or in the workplace is inconsistent with my experience and with the professed views of my colleagues.
I think we need additional empathy here. Maybe it's the case that _everyone's_ ideas are dismissed too quickly. Numerous times in my career, I've proposed $FOO, been told $FOO is impossible, and only been believed after actually _implementing_ $FOO, often on my own time after tending to my official responsibilities. When some women get this treatment, they call it sexism. When I get it, I call it the reality of working in a world that combines empiricism and huge egos. I think a lot of women in technology are genuinely unaware that men get this treatment too. Maybe it's shitty for everyone and not just women.
There are a bunch of people who chose to misgender others, even when they know the preferred terms.
Whether they get flagged or not seems random.
I agree with some of your points. It took me a very long time to conclude my gender was a factor on HN. Compared to other male dominated environments I have spent time in, my treatment here has been spectacularly good. It is one of the reasons I worked my ass off to resolve some of the problems I had here.
I went through a period where I was getting a helluva lot of flack, where it was clear to me that men on the leaderboard were closing ranks to shut me out. But my karma was so far below what qualifies one for the leaderboard, I was baffled by social evidence that I was "prominent -- for a woman." After managing to gather objective data that fit with that fact, I handled things differently here.
Here is a summary, with supporting links, to the data I gathered: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/01/some-raw-dat...
I don't think anyone is consciously, intentionally trying to exclude women. I do think the apparent lack of women on the leaderboard is not a mere happenstance of numbers.
It is possible for your experiences and views to have validity and for mine to also. I have written about this issue previously. I think you and I might agree more than it seems had we not gotten off on the wrong foot. I also think you are bringing personal baggage and frustrations to the discussion that biases your interpretation of my position. You "heard" me accusing you of dismissing it as coincidence because of my gender when that wasn't my intent. That kind of thing does wind up being a problem for women. It ends up being a kind of de facto sexism.
I also did not say I was held to a higher standard. That isn't how I would frame the problem space. But, given that you are not sympathetic to my views or testimony concerning my firsthand experience, I see little point at this time in trying to figure out how to communicate more on that piece of what you said.
Edit:
FYI: You can take my continued engagement as evidence that, while I think you are wrong about a lot of things, I don't think you are simply and intentionally being an asshole. I don't debate people that I think are not engaging in good faith to at least some degree. I stop replying when I think it is straight up assholery.
This is not the first subthread I've seen get detached and marked off-topic because it degenerated into a back-and-forth scrum that doesn't make anyone look good. It's too bad; I was getting a pretty good return of InternetPoints™ for my quip about bronies...
Upon further review, it was not detached at the point of one of my comments. So you are blaming me for something that may have nothing to do with my replies at all.
Citation? I strongly believe this to be false in general; certainly it has been in my experience.
Do you have something more to say than "I would need many thousands more narratives like this to care what you have to say"? Do you have a substantial criticism of what this particular narrative suggests?
I learnt a lot. It was a pretty big flag.
How is this a "small linguistic detail"? It has nothing whatsoever to do with using 'he' as a gender-neutral pronoun; it's on a completely different level.
You're being dishonest by assuming the answer to the question. I don't believe that using 'he' "misgenders" women at all, because it doesn't.
I thought I had a large vocabulary. These days, it is rare that I have to stop reading an internet post and reach for a dictionary (I mean, figuratively, you know... Google). Anyway, thanks for the new word. I can't wait to work it into casual conversation sometime this week.
Using singular they is hardly a "circumlocution", I do it without thinking about it. It's not hard to learn once you actually decide to take responsibility for your own speech.
And it's not a "possibility of offending", it's a "certainty of papercuts". If you habitually use male pronouns you will inevitably refer to women with them, and they will most likely be put off by your apparent assumption.
I accept responsibility for the content of my speech. I do not accept responsibility for feelings of offense others may feel in response to my speech. It's not my job to manage their emotional state.
If you know some people will be offended by a particular usage and you choose to use it anyway, then you are responsible for the resulting offence, whether you accept it or not.
Sometimes there are benefits which make the offence worthwhile, particularly when the offence is exceptionally uncommon. But using gender specific speech in generic/unknown contexts has no such benefits, and will cause offence fairly often. Singular they is easy and idiomatic, and I don't see any real excuse not to use it, other than laziness.
>It's not my job to manage their emotional state.
No, it's just a nice thing to do.
My oldest son is not neurotypical. Raising him was a real challenge. When he was 8, he spent 6 weeks psychologically torturing me. He didn't care about my feelings and he found my reactions amusing. Part of what I told him that finally got him to stop was "The point at which you will care about my feelings is the point at which you want something from me and my reply is No. What have you done for me instead of to me here lately?"
You aren't responsible for anyone else's feelings. But if you routinely disrespect and offend people and then defend your right to crap on others instead of apologizing, that will have consequences for you and they won't be ones you will like. Most people are not as forthright as I am. Most people will never tell you "I am turning down your request because of all the times you were inconsiderate, insensitive, etc." They will just tell you No and not explain why.
I will suggest there may be a connection between how frustrated you seem to feel with other people and your general attitude that their feelings are not your problem. If everyone dislikes you, that can very much be a problem for you.
And the correct way to do the latter, in English, is to use male pronouns. It's different in other languages, no doubt.
There are plenty of ways to speak in a gender neutral way in English that don't involve trying to rationalise using a gender specific pronoun.
My preference is for singular "they". (It's not as clunky as "he or she", and not as confusing for the unfamiliar as "xe" or similar).
But thank you for replying.