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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

>it was him being nicer to me than to the other men thought he should have been - it was actually him not treating me like a second class citizen

That sounds like you're saying the supervisor didn't do anything wrong, but rather that your coworkers took a reasonable gesture the wrong way? If so, that doesn't really jive with "One day, one of my supervisors jumped to my defense at a team event, in an awkward display of sexism"

I'm really not trying to be confrontational, just trying to understand. Is it that the "jumped to defense" thing was clearly sexist? Not asking for a direct quote, but what was the basis of the defense...something gender related, or the high quality of your work, or something else?

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There is no quote that can translate that context well. And it was sexist, perhaps even meant to be complimentary and not necessary. But it was not evil. What he did was not the point. The point is what followed and how it was handled. And every employee has more than one supervisor. I feel like you are totally missing why I wrote this piece by focusing on one sentence.

Please don't take this as confrontational, but maybe there is a point that you are missing, that maybe you have made an error in your assessment of what happened, of what people's actual motives are. I genuinely feel like you are unnecessarily secretive about the details of this. Of course there often are details that must be kept secret for various reasons, but my intuition is suggesting otherwise.

Personally, I don't just take someone at their word. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, in this case you seem reluctant to give any evidence. Can't you see how that might make some people a little suspicious, especially if they've observed this sort of thing before?

> What he did was not the point.

But the way you talk about him totally is. You shouldn't defend people who give you undeserved favors at the cost of others, if this is what he did. And you absolutely shouldn't be surprised by the consequences, if you do.

Your coworkers may have felt equally threatened by this supervisor as you did by them. Associating yourself with people like him will do you no good.

> I feel like you are totally missing why I wrote this piece by focusing on one sentence.

No doubt. People have their own agendas to play, not everybody will support yours.

> Associating yourself with people like him will do you no good.

that's called "blaming the victim". how do you not "associate" yourself with your own supervisor ??

sigh. i did not take any favors - i want my career to be built on merit and not favoritism - that is why i left the company. but do people realize that's not actually fair ? and this happens to a lot of women, not just me.

Hey, I didn't want to say that you were taking favors from the guy. I reacted to your defense of him here on HN - you initially described him as awkward and sexist but later said that he was just treating you fairly. If he was awkward there's no point pretending he wasn't. If he provoked others to hate you, there's no point pretending he didn't. It's not your fault anyway and coworkers were wrong to retaliate on you even if provoked.

And maybe my yesterday post was too harsh. I take your word that you don't want favors. But be careful with how you present this guy - I doubt that he was exactly awkward, sexist, equal and fair all at the same time :) And you wouldn't want to give appearance of rationalizing somebody who actually happens to be unfair to others, that's what I wanted to say.

I wasn't being defensive - he WAS treating others unfairly too ... you think they would have sprung on me if he had not been an ass to them and they hadn't felt threatened ? I am thinking about following up with another post with more details about the background on that, because that's a separate discussion.

From my response There was no quote because it was him being nicer to me than to the other men thought he should have been - it was actually him not treating me like a second class citizen. It was this "equal" status that made the others feel that I got better treatment. Note "equal" not equal. Note "nicer than they thought he should have been".

tyingq, your line of inquiry reads as a rather aggressive litigation of someone who is a self-identified victim of harassment. I can't speak to your soul, so I don't know if it's intentional or not, but in so doing, you're actually contributing to the harassment in some small way. Other women who read this story and these comments could see the way you're doubting and questioning the author on her experiences, and easily take that as stay silent on her own negative experiences. Think about the effects of your words; defer to empathy over suspicion :)

>Think about the effects of your words

That's fair enough. For what it's worth, I do have sympathy, and I do believe that some people treated her in a sexist manner.

I dont think you read her blog post. she wasn't just treated in a sexist manner. That sparked the issue, which turned into alleged bullying an harassment by most of her team. You dont have to be a woman to understand how badly that would suck.

thanks for the defense. a woman would have to be foolish to create such a ruckus about "just sexism". we just suck that part up as part of our jobs.

> a woman would have to be foolish to create such a ruckus about "just sexism".

I disagree, and that's not what I intended with my use of the word "just". It seemed to me like the poster was saying "look, no sexism here in this sub-incident" and I meant that your post wasn't just about sexism, it was about harassment.

I understand what you meant, but what I said is that public discussions on these issues are career-impacting, and usually negatively. As painful as sexism is, I don't think it is practical to make a public discussion out of it - there is usually a threshold.

as a male, I'm sorry you had to endure any of it.

thanks :-) and i really do appreciate your support of me in the threads. more than one guy has defended my post for me and that has been encouraging to see :-) honestly, not all men at apple are jerks either. its just that the jerks tend to be the loudest.

I think I was being sarcastic. Publishing this post has been a draining experience for me and I don't think I can be trusted to make coherent arguments about this issue for a while now. :-/ I didn't expect it to pick up the way it did since this was a re-post after a barely noticeable first attempt.

For the record, I really appreciate that you took the time to record these events and make clear the sorts of things that you experienced. Even though it's hard to see now, from the commenters in this thread and others, I think stories like yours are important, especially as they contribute to a broader narrative. I hope and believe that we are working towards a sort of inflection point, where the scales tip and this sort of subtle and subversive nonsense is reliably identified, acknowledged, and rejected.

Asking basic factual questions is not "aggressive litigation". It's true that the piece is heavy on prescription and short on detailed accounting of what happened.

Providing detail would actually advance the cause of fighting harassment. It would better help everyone identify its specific forms even at companies that have diversity programs in place. In light of that, absence of detail should absolutely warrant inquiry.

https://mfbt.ca/some-garbage-i-used-to-believe-about-equalit...

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