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You did the absolute right thing in that situation. I was in a meeting once with a CIO, middle management, and two female developers. At one point, the CIO got bored with the tech-talk and drove the conversation to his recently taking his son around to visit college campuses... and then onto the topic of which campuses had the hottest female students. The middle-managers immediately joined in the conversation, while the female techs stared at their hands uncomfortably until the meeting was over. The CIO was eventually dismissed for incompetence, but I will always regret not standing up to such incredibly unprofessional behavior.

In the 1990s, working for various government contractors, it was common for techs with military backgrounds to accuse male coworkers of behaving "like a woman" as a means of short-cutting discussions. As a nerd, I was often victim to those kinds of attacks. I'm incredibly thankful that increasing diversity in the workforce is creating a culture where those kinds of statements are no longer tolerated. Fostering a workplace that's good for women also fosters a workplace for men who don't fit traditional cultural norms of masculinity.

Honestly, it would have been fine if it was just guys in the room that knew eachother. That is a strange conversation to have around women that you don't know.

A lot of this stuff is basic understanding of what is appropriate for the given situation. It is simply understanding what is polite in the given context. It seems so simple, but maybe a lot of people aren't tuned into the feelings of others.

I can't speak on the military thing. That is an entirely different culture that I don't have any understanding of. I do remember people saying things like "stop acting like a girl" when I was young, but that seems to have gone away. I know that I don't use phrases like that - and I am not making a conscious decision not to use them. They just seem innapropriate.

Wow I don't have anywhere near the empathy for those yokels mouthing off, that others seem to have. Real dipshits. No way they are innocently unthoughtful or unconsidered. They seem to have issues.

I don't blame them for personally considering, reflecting on it, and adopting a view of women that permits sexism. I think the culture is still deeply sexist. I think that's the default position. I think they were just aping the world around them, unthinkingly.

I do blame them for not paying attention to all the women in the world saying "look guys there is a problem that we are experiencing," but you know what? That's part of the sexist worldview again!

Dismiss the woman, she's just a hysterical baby, whatever, do anything but listen because you might be made temporarily uncomfortable as you realize you've been part of the problem, and need to change your thinking and behaviors if you want to make the world more just.

I fault them for being shallow, unthinking people, but that's a big part of the human condition. :/

> I think the culture is still deeply sexist

What's also deeply embedded in many circles is that acknowledging any difference between men and women is "sexist". I've seen people called sexist for acknowledging that using attractive women in advertising leads to increased clickthrough rates. Should we deny the evidence of our own eyes?

You're complaining about people "aping the world around them". Isn't that just called acknowledging reality? I understand and sympathize with the desire to make the world more fair. I think cultural crusaders have gone well past that point, however, and are now asking people to deny real facts. They're applying social pressure to make people make false claims about the world.

Don't these people realize that using the thread of ostracism and unemployment to suppress earnestly-held, non-malicious beliefs rooted in honest observations of the real world is just going to lead to resentment and a massive backlash against not only the overreach, but against any actual bias?

People who call everything "sexist" are bringing about a world where everything will be sexist.

You'd probably be more empathetic in person; the Internet has a funny way of making people forget that not every ill-considered action is a window into a person's soul.

Or thought all of our souls are dark and twisted, such is life.

Or is it just me?

sorry...

I don't think anyone on this thread is expressing empathy for them, or approving of their behavior. They were clearly being disrespectful and immature (i.e., dipshits) during someone's talk, even if the rhetorical mechanic being used came across as silly.

The objection is to the too-easily-made assumption that a male presenter using the same setup wouldn't be mocked by these guys. The most you can conclude about that story is that two douches exist and mock someone who put themselves out there to make a public presentation, instead of trying to force a gender narrative onto every bit of rudeness in the world.

Yeah, I agree with you. I attended a similar talk by a woman framing the talk about the time when her mom died, and, guess what. Nobody said that her mom or sister sounded like a bitch. Does that mean sexism doesn't exist? It probably just means that there were no assholes in the audience, like the GP's comment just means that there were a few assholes there.

> yokels

A yokel is, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, "an uneducated and unsophisticated person from the countryside". Do you have any reason to actually believe they were from the countryside, or do you just assume that if someone is a dipshit they obviously must be country people?

Semantics aside, how do you feel about these individual's behavior?

They were dipshits.

Granted, people should not be distracting class clowns during a conference. The line about the daughter? It's impossible to tell if it was funny without knowing what the speaker had just said.

This entire post appears to be a statement about how female speakers are unfairly treated at tech conferences, but in reality it is the poster saying "look everyone, I'm a hero"

The entire post appears to be about female speakers being unfairly treated is because because it's a story about a female speaker who was being unfairly treated.

The "look everyone" jab is completely unwarranted.

If you think shushing some jerks at a conference is heroism, I submit to you that you have set the bar too low.

I also shush kids who talk in movie theaters and tell irate customers to back down when they're yelling at store clerks. None of that is heroic, either, it's what I would hope is basic human decency.

I don't want to live in a world where the guys sitting next to me are calling a conference speaker's daughter a bitch. Do you?

There is an element of revolt among techies too. When you tell people (men or women) not to do X , you should always expect them to do more X out of defiance. Techies get preached on a regular basis about women in tech nowadays.

As an experiment, try to do the same preaching about latinos and watch the racist remarks rise.

> I also don't think they'd have sat there, chattering away, if a man had used the same framing story (father and son, father and daughter).

What would you have said if they had?

I'm sure I would have said the same thing. Thing is, they didn't do that for the previous male speaker. (And they didn't make a sound for the remainder of her talk, or at all through the following talk, which I got up and left from halfway through.)

I get it, there's no air-tight way to prove that these guys were talking shit just because it was a woman on stage, and rudeness is rudeness no matter who it's directed at. I just saw it directed at a female speaker talking about her daughter, using language that is hostile to women, called it out, and it stopped.

I would agree. I'm not quite sure talks about "being a woman in tech" really solve the problem unfortunately (And I think that was the intent of the article), but clearly there is a problem that has to be fixed. That said, I think the other comments just show how this behavior is allowed, which is really sad. Imagine if the men in your story were making comments about the speaker and their child being black - I doubt the comments here would be as 'kindly' as they're being to these men.

I perfectly understand that it could have been a joke - but if you're going to make a joke like that in a public setting, then you make sure others around you can't hear it. If you're wiling to say something like that loud enough that others can hear you, then it's not really a joke anymore.

If you're wiling to say something like that loud enough that others can hear you, then it's not really a joke anymore.

You sure have a strange concept of joke. I define a joke by its contents, not the number of people who hear it.

> You sure have a strange concept of joke. I define a joke by its contents, not the number of people who hear it.

If you define it by its contents, then how is "your daughter sounds like a real bitch!" a joke? Context obviously matters. If you're willing to say something like that loud enough that others can hear it who obviously won't know the context, then you're clearly not that worried about it not coming off as a joke.

I'm not entirely sure you can tell if this group was biased or not with this one interaction with them. As you mentioned:

> I also don't think they'd have sat there, chattering away, if a man had used the same framing story (father and son, father and daughter).

If you didn't observe them sit quietly for a talk before this given by a man, who's to say they didn't just do this to every presenter (man or woman) for the whole day until you told them to knock it off? I've met plenty of people who got their kicks from being loud when someone else was supposed to have the stage, and who it was didn't matter.

It's not that I don't believe in anecdotes as helpful reminders to be better people, but I'm not sure this is a great anecdote for your point.

You must go to a very different type of conference to me. I've never heard anyone being heckled at a professional programming conference.

My anecdote was a little further reaching. I don't go to many conferences, so I referenced the sum of my experiences, professional or not.

You're right, though. Professional conferences should at least be better than the average of all of my experiences.

Same here. I have never heard heckling at a conference. If anything, people get too nervous to say anything at all.

>When one of them says loudly enough for me and others to hear, "Your daughter sounds like a real bitch! hur hur", I turned to them and said, "You guys need to knock this off now."

/r/thathappened category

This really sound so fake that I actually created an account to call this out.

>The thing is, I don't think those guys were bad people, I don't think they sat there in their minds thinking, "let's tear the woman down". I really don't think they thought about it at all. I also don't think they'd have sat there, chattering away, if a man had used the same framing story (father and son, father and daughter).

.....

> This really sound so fake that I actually created an account to call this out

Do you remember Adria Richards.

When did she actually confront anyone in person?

>Of course, I'm a tall well-built, well-dressed white guy, i.e. all the things that automatically command respect.

? None of those things automatically command respect.

Except they do, because they signal wealth, power, and authority - at least in European/European-descended countries.

Yes, they do. Tall people make more money and are more successful in the workplace [1]. Wearing higher-class clothing elicits more responsiveness and lowers the perceived social status of others [2]. And of course, leadership is associated with being white and male, which leads to better responsiveness in work-type environments to white males [3]. I also seem to recall a talk by a professor at Berkeley showing that having some gray hair and wearing glasses commands more respect as well, though I can't find the research to back that up at the moment.

[1] http://timothy-judge.com/Height%20paper--JAP%20published.pdf

[2] http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/xge0...

[3] http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2013-w50-research-sym...

The role of prejudice and discrimination in Americans?

None of that seems to make a case for "automatic respect".

Policing speech like that just breeds resentment. You not only guaranteed that these people later made the same comments to each other in private, but also inched a bit closer to resenting people like you and your entire cause.

Mind your own business. You have no right to interfere in a conversation among friends, even one that triggers you. If you want to encourage change in the world, be the change and set an example. You're not going to change how people feel by suppressing expressions of those feelings.

Not once in human history has this censorious approach actually worked. But it's created powder kegs plenty of times.

> you and your entire cause

It's entirely possible his "cause" was polite interaction in social gatherings, with a specific focus on audience behavior and how not to ruin the experience for everyone around you.

> Mind your own business. You have no right to interfere in a conversation among friends, even one that triggers you.

When people are making public comments in a forum that is detracting from the reason people are assembled and you are there for that reason, it is your business.

That's just dumb. It would be one thing if they were having a quiet conversation among themselves whispering back and forth and were told to stop. But clearly OP could hear them, they weren't being quiet. And allowing such behavior to go on where people can clearly hear it is the same thing as condoning it. That's besides the fact that if you're going to act like that during a talk, you shouldn't be in the room anyway because you're being a distraction to everybody else.

> allowing such behavior to go on where people can clearly hear it is the same thing as condoning it

Toleration is what allows people who have different views to work together toward common goals. You can't have civilization without it, because no two people will agree on everything. If these people were really as boorish as the OP described, the best approach would have been to let them embarrass themselves.

What's next, hushing someone who dares admit he voted for a Republican? (I can imagine the rationale now: "you're enabling war and bigotry by proxy! Public GOPism is unacceptable!")

The paradox of intolerance has been largely derided since the 1940s, and for good reason. If you do not confront and quell threats to your community, they only ever fester. They don't go away, they get worse--see GamerGate and the rest of the reactionaries happily SWATting female academics and game developers in the name of "ethics in games journalism," and how that didn't magically appear when Adam Baldwin put a name on it (but the name legitimized them and let them act openly, for a time, before everyone else caught up).

Allowing people to be sexist jerks (let's not dress it up as "boorish") doesn't just let them "embarrass" themselves, it creates an effect within a subculture that gives that activity preferential status because few people want to use their limited public credibility to counteract it--thereby over time letting sexist behavior become the expected norm of that subculture. That's not OK, and speaking up directly confronts the issue and prevents it from becoming a social norm, or becoming further entrenched because we live in a profoundly sexist society to begin with, in that subculture.

What? OF COURSE he has a right to interfere, he can say whatever he damn well pleases. Furthermore, all he said was to knock it off; you seem to imply he lectured them or something similar.

He set an example by demonstrating their behavior was not socially acceptable.

Yup. Where I come from, this is what leadership looks like. Create the community in which you want to live and work--and if it the community in which you want to live and work doesn't have sexist dudes ripping on people for the fun of it, then make sure that they don't.

How dare you police his speech by telling him he shouldn't have said anything.