When measurements are taken, there is a clear pattern:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/womensmedia/2017/01/03/gal-inte...
https://hbr.org/2017/04/female-supreme-court-justices-are-in...
http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2015/03/19/google...
(If you look in the articles, they quote studies with 20 participants. At university I would have been destroyed when making fundamental claims on a sample size of 20).
And yes my gut feeling tells me women get interrupted more often. And from this comment you may assume I'm guilty of this, though my bad social habits probably interrupt men as often.
[1] the magazine of business anecdotes.
Another one from 1989 with 186 participants: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250069045_Interrupt...
The other one only say that "both men and women exhibiting higher levels of interruption behavior in male-dominated groups".
Citations is only as good as the ability it provide to verify a claim. Those do not do that as far as summery goes.
The second study directly addresses this discussion: "The odds of a male attempting to interrupt another male (.078) are less than one-half the odds of a male attempting to interrupt a female (.163). Females attempt to interrupt male and female speakers at essentially identical levels (odds of .146 and .141 respectively). In other words, men discriminate in their interruption attempts, interrupting women much more often than men. Women, on the other hand, do not discriminate; they attempt to interrupt men and women equally. Group composition does not appear to influence interruption attempts."
That changes the tone of the issue. A 0.0195 difference from the norm is tiny on the negative discrimination of men interrupting women if we compare it to the norm difference of 0.0655 as positive discrimination for men interrupting men. As a social issue of 13.6% negative discrimination vs 45.7% positive discrimination, its a good time to ask what we want to fix. Is it the negative 13.6%, which mean we want men to interrupt women at the same rate as women interrupt women, or do we want men to treat other men worse by interrupting men as much as women do?
It also raises questions about moderators. Should we favor male moderators over female ones because they will in average interrupt 20% less (.241 vs .287) for a panel of 50% women and 50% men? The original post had a panel of 80% men and 50% men, which given the above numbers would have a male moderator interrupt a panelist at the rate of 0.095 while a female moderator would have interrupted a panelist with the rate of 0.145. A female moderator would be 52% worse than a male moderator in this specific case.
Ironically, the guy's "fuzzy memories" are more accurate than your "research-based" opinions.
I'll buy that. If this disproportionately affects women then I'll buy that too. I don't buy that men interrupt women specifically out of some sort of bias. My experience has been that the more passionate conversationalists among us will interrupt anyone who will let them.
a nice way of saying workplace bullies.
But hey, I mostly rein it in :)
That being said, it seems to me that the broader implication of your position is that when men and women participate in group dialogue the meta-game of the dialogue often leans in favor of the male speakers. I'd need to do more research to prove this but in general, if this was your position, I'd be inclined to agree with it based on my own anecdotal experiences. However, this still doesn't establish the hostile intention or implicit sexism that, from my reading of your posts, is presented in your claims.
You were right in your initial assertion: people talk over people. The people desperately trying to prove that "men talk over women" using statistical analysis are all missing the point.
The first thing to do, before looking for sex differences, is to try and identify the reasons why people interrupt, because there are many of them and sometimes there are conflicting or related motives.
Gathering anecdotal evidence would be a starting point for articulating hypotheses. What are the conditions of the discussion? What is at stake? What is the expertise of the participants? What are the personality factors? What is the general conversational ability of each participant? How long is the attention span of each participant? What is the apparent purpose of each individual interruption?
There are so many factors you could look for before looking at sex differences. And would the sex differences persist when those factors were controlled for?
So even if you can prove there is a pattern, it doesn't invalidate his statement that "it's generally sexless"
Having read the piece, it is by a woman who spoke up and said "Let her speak, please" and that's fine. But I have mixed feelings about the title of this piece and how it looks before you read it, because white knighting is a big problem for women. Men coming to the rescue of some damsel in distress and championing her often just deepens the problem. It often simply reinforces the idea that the only role women are allowed to play is that of victim and any justice that happens will be credited to some heroic guy. It often gets done in a way that in no way empowers her. It is frequently just some guy coming in, playing hero and getting pats on the back and when he goes off stage, her situation remains just as crappy and disempowered as before.
I am a woman and I personally don't have any problem with giving the guys push back and that gets me perceived as incredibly confrontational and fighty. At one time, my account on HN was rate limited. My feeling on that is that simply standing up for myself as a woman who often gets a lot of pushback merely for being a demographic outlier was being punished. That winds up a no win situation for women. If you don't stand up for yourself, you get walked on. If you do, you can be actively punished for it.
To be fair, the current mod team on HN has been great. I am sure they often find me cringe-worthy, but they have made me feel much more like I can report people who are really engaging in bad behavior towards me that is beyond the pale and much more like I can stand my ground without fear that doing so is highly likely to get me banned, no matter how reasonable I am about it.
Hacker News has generally been great about putting up with my outrageous agenda* to open my mouth here and engage in conversation on equal footing with the guys. I am well aware that is a shocking expectation and is simply Not Done in so many spaces, both online and off. I want to thank everyone here for being so good about that.
* http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/11/my-agenda-fo...
Or women, in general, just don't want the bother.
> giving the guys push back
Excellent. Too many women don't, in my experience. In my personal experience, I find women not standing up for themselves in the situation at hand, and then complaining about it for ages after.
> highly likely to get me banned, no matter how reasonable I am about it.
That seems unlikely. If you are getting banned, maybe you're not being reasonable about it?
> If you do, you can be actively punished for it.
This is not a women-only issue. Men get "punished" just as much for unpopular opinions. Just like they get talked over if they let themselves be talked over. etc.
That complaining about it is pushing back. And you whine about it right now.
The "not standing up for themselves" is in the actual situation, against the actual person they need to stand up against.
The "complaining afterward" is after the situation has passed, and complaining to a completely different person not involved in the original interaction.
That is the exact opposite of "standing up for yourself", and it is also not "pushing back", because in order for it to be a push "back", it has to be a push against the original force, not against some random other person.
If I got berated by my boss, which I just let happen, and then reacted by, a while later, berating you, a completely uninvolved third party, would you consider that "standing up for myself" and "pushing back"?
It exactly means standing up, well, for yourself, and not relying on or waiting for others.
Stand up thing worked great in this story. I trust you that your relative could suceed in standing up instead of being treated as crazy bad women. A lot of it is residuum from old times when gender roles were different and some of both genders keep going old way.
Her existence does not excuse dudes who attempt to dominate women more them men. I did won those fights in the past, but the older I am the less I care about whether it was intentional or subconscious. It affects me all the same.
That is why stories like this are good to hear about - it is good role model for women lime your relative - to see that she can stop the dude, not to consider his interest and win.
Maybe you could show her the story to make her inspired for that.
It fundamentally includes "in the face of adversity". And that means that you do it well knowing that there can and likely will be negative consequences. If you only do it under a guarantee of no repercussions, then you're not standing up...for anything, really.
If women have to learn to stand up for themselves as you imply they should, they need to find a way to hurt people who treat them the way they don't like.
This stereotype doesn't come from nowhere.
I found a video of this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er7qPv8jsZo
This "push to Hubeny's field of expertise" seems to start at 1:02:00, "let her speak" is at 1:05:35.
The OP's account is overdramatized and sometimes plain wrong, like the suggestion that Holt didn't let Hubeny speak at all for these three minutes (she had two long blocks) or that there was a dead silence after the OP spoke up (there wasn't). And that's a part of the problem: feminism is routinely being represented by individuals whose subjective perception of events seems to diverge from what others see. FWIW.
Yeah, that must be why blacks got lynched in the Deep South. They just couldn't be bothered to stand up for themselves when the KKK came for them.
/s
This comparison is ridiculous beyond the pale. Show me evidence of women getting lynched for speaking up.
I already said above that I was rate limited. I believe this was essentially because when I first joined, I would get dog piled simply for being a woman opening her mouth here. You ignore that and accuse me of misbehaving as the reason I was concerned that I might wind up banned, no matter how hard I tried to behave. Thankfully, I no longer worry about that like I once did.
That's actually a desirable quality. It means that you are not emotionally attached to your theories (you shouldn't be, it's science not religion) and are willing to contradict them. Still, most people would think that a bad thing.
I would postulate that academia and journalism are still pretty sexist compared to the 'tens of businesses' you observed.
Potentially in support of your perspective: I see the overspeaking roles inverted in the context of reality TV shows, though that could potentially be seen as a counter-action to normal social roles which develops as structure of society is removed... which would imply the sexist paradigm is the prevalent one.
Two industries I have not had the pleasure of engaging with. My coaching experience has been around healthcare, insurance, banking, transportation, energy, construction, software, audit, and a few other random things.
I mean, yeah there's no denying that there exist pushy jerks who are jerks to everyone but guess what? those kinds are more likely to be even greater jerks with women. So either this guy was a regular jerk talking over her because she was a woman or being that special kind of jerk who normally talks over some men but talks over most women. Why is there an difference of opinion about this?
Does anyone really think there is a breed of jerks who talk over some/most men but will never do that/will do less of that to a woman?
What makes you think there aren't women who also like to claim the center of attention, regardless of other men OR women around them?
I don't understand this need to idolize one sex over the other, when the issue is that some people (like this moderator) are just more tone deaf or inconsiderate than others.
Equality between sexes implies treating everyone as a human rather than assuming that this moderator is a stand-in for men in general.
So are you claiming that those sort of jerks are not going to be extra nasty to women that will tolerate it? That they are going to be equally nasty to people of both sexes? If that's what you're claiming, I'll humbly disagree but won't engage any further.
> What makes you think there aren't women who also like to claim the center of attention, regardless of other men OR women around them?
I never claimed that there aren't such women. Indeed there exist women who behave worse with other women than they do with men. But then what's your point? Women being sexist doesn't make it okay for men to continue to be so now, does it?
That is also my observation. We are just vastly more sensitive to aggressive/jerk behavior against women ("protect the women"), and this is highly emotionally charged for most people.
For a rough intro into the phenomenon, check out the youtube videos comparing bystander reactions to the exact same behavior in a woman -> man vs. a man -> woman setting.