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Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

A good start is to call out misogyny when you see it, online or anywhere else.

This is disappointingly rare, in my experience.

Edit: what a shotgun blast of downvotes and straw men. People are lining up to say all sorts of utter bullshit. For example:

* "Where does this indicate misogyny?"

* "The paper is about GitHub, which has a reputation for the opposite."

* "A good start is to stop calling things misogyny just because you're bad at reading statistics."

* "Of course it's important to recognize when it's actual misogyny and not just disagreement with the code."

The paper's findings are clear as a fucking bell: women have equal acceptance of pull requests, except when the pull request obviously comes from a woman. Fucking TEXTBOOK misogyny, and you're an idiotic trog if you don't think so. (Looking RIGHT AT YOU here, pluma.)

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074992 and marked it off-topic.

Out of curiosity, at what point am I allowed to start flagging people as trolls?

My comment was substantially more flamewar after the edit. Shame on me for that, but there were some fairly obvious troll comments there.

What do you mean by "flagging people as trolls"? HN doesn't let you flag accounts, only posts.

Please excuse my vagueness - I was referring to flagging posts.

You can flag them now. The karma threshold is 30 and you're well over that.

To flag a comment, you need to click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click the 'flag' link at the top. A couple of restrictions: (1) you can't flag direct replies, and (2) flag links disappear after 2 weeks, which is also when voting expires on a post.

>Our analysis (not in this paper -- we've cut a lot out to keep it crisp) shows that women are harder on other women than they are on men. Men are harder on other men than they are on women.

Did you read the paper? Where does this indicate misogyny?

Conflating gender bias and misogyny is wrong. Gender bias is wrong, but people could have unconscious gender bias, which they need to work on and correct.

However, to call them misogynists is completely wrong and unhelpful and will only cause them to dismiss anything further. Misogyny is when men truly think women are beneath them, like that men's group that recently wanted to legalize rape.

For example, recently someone came into a chat room and announced "Hello gents". I immediately corrected him with "You mean "ladies and gents"" and he apologized profusely. This is unconscious gender bias, it's not misogyny.

Call gender bias what it is, gender bias, but don't overreact and call it misogyny when it's not. There are true misogynists out there, and to put those two people in the same camp is wrong and unhelpful and will only drive people away.

That's a fair distinction, but I feel the core of my point remains - to say that bias doesn't exist or distract from that fact with other arguments is utter hogwash.

The amalgamation of gender bias against women is misogyny. People like to wax poetic about the obviously misogynistic boogeymen like roosh or redpillers, but ignoring the reality of the situation -- that misogyny us upheld unwittingly by people that most would consider 'normal' -- doesn't really help anyone. It's like saying that racism is what the Klan does, not what normal people do!

It is not misogyny, and if you keep conflating them, then you will lose the support of most people with common sense.

Yes, there is gender bias, and yes we need to fight it vigorously. I do not want my daughter living in a world where she is considered an afterthought, or even a single atom inferior to a male. I want her growing up knowing that she is a full equal to any male on every level. And it's an uphill battle because of gender bias.

But not all gender bias is misogyny.

Not all misogyny is gender bias, but I think there is a surjection. It's not an uphill battle because of gender bias -- it wouldn't exist at all without it. Socialization is the primary difference between the sexes, and that is how inequality perpetuates itself.

Of course it's important to recognize when it's actual misogyny and not just disagreement with the code.

Hm, is your hypothesis that code from women who are identifiable as women is more often disagreeable than code from women who are not identifiable as women?

Yes, that seems likely.

Consider the method they used to identify gender - they based it on the email being linked to a Google+ account. This rules out most submissions made as part of corporate work.

So if corporate users submit better code than hobbyists then you would expect a drop. And you do see a significant drop across the board for gender-identifiable vs gender-indeterminate contributions.

However rare it might be, the devastating affects of false positives make this a terrible idea. Just ask Tim Hunt, Matt Taylor, or the men targeted by "donglegate".

Anti-sexist reactions are very rare compared to instances of sexist behavior in my experience. If anti-sexist behavior was as rampant and casual as sexist behavior, those kind of blowups wouldn't happen.

There are only two appropriate ways to handle it: if the offense is not egregious, address the incident with the offender in private. If the offense is egregious, or if you do not feel comfortable enough to discuss it with the offender, then you should report it to whatever authority figures are responsible for the context of the incident.

"Calling out" the behavior consistently creates vigilantism, and puts an unfair burden on the accused. In instances of sexism I have never, ever seen the accused treated as "innocent until proven guilty" in the eyes of the online hate mobs.

Tim Hunt's experience was bad enough that he admitted to thoughts of suicide. This is a man fully respected in his field and has a knighthood, but still had difficulty facing the onslaught of hatred.

Re: donglegate If you're unable to be professional in a professional situation you should be fired.

The paper is about GitHub, which has a reputation for the opposite. Can you point out an instance where you think misogyny wasn't called out on GitHub?

This isn't about GitHub the company, but rather is about GitHub users. I'm not sure if you may be alluding to some of the allegations of misconduct against GitHub employees, but this piece isn't about GitHub employees.

No, I was talking strictly about the users.

A good start is to stop calling things misogyny just because you're bad at reading statistics.

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