Going Viral as a Woman in Tech
emilykager.com
emilykager.com
Good effort. I haven't managed to receive a death threat yet.
I wonder how much of the hate was because she was a female programmer vs just because shitty human beings are going to be shitty on the internet regardless of her gender and unfortunately, being a woman in tech is an easy target for them.
Your inquiry here is kinda the very basis of intersectionality. No matter where you go, there are shitty people who will harrass you for being different. Only it's not just "different" when there's predominantly violence in a single direction across an axis; some people get way more shit than others, and it's not "just because", it's not just.
It seems it's just a story that happens to anyone who gets 15 min fame by some post.
But now all of a sudden it's again women in tech that are victims... Come on... please...
But I guess "person gets harassed online" wouldn't make the front page.
Please take some time to reflect. Look up statistics on sexual assault and violence against women. This is not an attempt to bait clicks, its an attempt to stand up against systemic attack.
Why do I need to limit myself to women? You are claiming that men cannot be victims? Here is what I found:
As of 1998, 2.78 million men in the U.S. had been victims of attempted or completed rape. About 3% of American men—or 1 in 33—have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. 1 out of every 10 rape victims are male.
So yes, please stop your sexist arguments: both women and men can be victims. Maybe you should be the one who needs to take some time to reflect.
I'm one of those people who really doesn't give a shit about gender, race, religion, sexual preferences, etc. But it seems nowadays you have take all of these attributes and divide them into "victims" and "predators". I'm really sick of that, and I'm really sick of media playing out that part.
So yeah, there is my reflection on this whole narrative.
Just try to open any social network and navigate to Profiles of women related to coding. As an example, Instagram is full of women in tech writing delightful content but have you seen their pictures? Most of them are in sexy poses, or with full-body perspective, where more sexual recalls are involved, rather than focussing on programming/tech in general. The same happens for TikTok or Facebook.
I think all of this free sexism could have been stopped if someone started focussing really on technical aspects, independently from sexual orientation/gender/race/whatever, rather than exacerbating the narcissism.
Internet, as long as you don't expose your face, allows you to build a powerful identity, which hasn't nothing to do with personal aspect, but with competence, or at least, it was supposed to work so, until someone went out and started posted those pics.
As a reference (just a few selection):
- https://www.instagram.com/coding_unicorn/
Maybe "I can't take this woman seriously", but then I didn't see any programming content on the first Instagram page linked, just an attractive woman.
I agree this is bullshit, but its the same for anyone, if you put yourself out there expect to be harassed.
I know the internet is full of mean jerks, but they are nowhere near as toxic to me as they are to women.
The internet is just mean, to everyone. I feel like with the negative karma on all this ladies unpleasant comments she really didn't get it that bad.
I don't think gatekeeping bad experiences on the internet is really helpful here.
My first upload to Youtube received a comment, "You're nothing but a big fat Jew!" I think that this is quite representative of the hate of the Internet at large.
This sort of blindness towards abuse towards men is not just here on the Internets. In real life, progress made against ritual genital mutilation is happening for women but not for men.
It may be true that women get harassed more frequently, but if you really get targeted, your gender doesn't seem to matter all that much.
To clarify, I'm not saying women are "harassed more frequently." That seems not to be the case, and yet here's a study that "showed that while male celebrities, female journalists, and male politicians face the highest likelihood of online hostility, women are significantly more likely to be targeted specifically because of their gender, and men are overwhelmingly those doing the harassing." [3]
The types of online harassment are multiple and varied; we could equally single racist, fatphobic, and, as the earlier comment mentioned, antisemitic abuse out as well. We can even talk about the abuse faced by men -- I've been active online for 30 years, I'm a male, I'm not blind to it -- but that is not what this post is about. It's about the specifically gendered nature of abuse faced by women online. So I reiterate my point that "well, actually"-ing about other kinds of abuse only distracts from the salient topic and undermines what women like Kager are trying to highlight.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/sep/06/higher-proport...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-24/women-receive-three-t...
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2018/03/online-vi...
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/the-u...
It’s disappointing to see the apathy in this thread. I agree with the blogger that we should expect more from mods and commenters.
I think there is a chronic plague amongst programmers to act differently around women, it is very unnecessary and that was a very relatable and humorous video that was posted. It is good to see more people being able to relate to the problem of tech recruiting as its closer to changing that way, and that isn't going to come from the maladjusted edge-lords prevalent in this industry.
The video -- spot on. I have a good job today because I was accepted to an internship for students with minimal CS experience, received a return offer, and accepted it. I work hard but have never done a side project in my life, and am terrified of having to apply for a new job.
That's why I briefly wrote about side projects at ${myname.tld} when I was on the job market a few years back, and why I suspect I'll be back at it at some point in the future.
In many cases, it's all just a way to stand out in a pile of resumes, which is disheartening in and of itself. That for many women it turns into outright harassment is disgusting and a reflection of the worst that internet anonymity has to offer.
And you don't imagine 40-year-olds suddenly picking up and enacting this sort of conduct.
Maybe it's also absent in other languages' online behavior.
I think it's the sort of conduct that could be socially engineered out of existence -- or lowered by an order of magnitude -- in one teenage generation, if we figured out a way to do it.
In video games and sports it's different. Making a sport of trash-talking in a video game (or, the NFL line of scrimmage) is a different thing than making lame posts on reddit. But with such behavior in video games, with teenagers playing them, combined with other online activity, it seems to have percolated.
I don't know, it could just be blinders. But I had a YouTube video go fairly viral in 2006, and it didn't have the bad "omg the YouTube comments" experience that people started talking about some years later. (On the other hand I could complain it got comments on my clothing, comments about my race, and offers of marriage, except, well, I enjoyed all of them.)
I'm also curious as to why this post is currently flagged.
Thus giving special attention to women's plight is at odds with our norms of equality. I concur and feel like this is an example of female privilege, where women in general are given more sympathy than men for similar hardships.
Not to your face, no...
That's where I falter with the lamentations about the toxicity of online forums; to me, it's not that the language or vulgarity is novel or new, because it's not. At least, not in my personal experience.
What is new, and what makes the vulgar abuse more dangerous online, is that it has far greater reach. Many more people will read the forum comments than would have heard the spoken comments.
So, ie, where previously conspiracy theorists were a small community that relied on printed zines, limited run books, and (sometimes) radio; the "scene" took a nosedive when the internet took off.
Where listening to Art Bell and reading the Whole Earth Catalog was humorously enjoyable and rarely offensive, the online forums and facebook groups have given rise to QAnon.
There's something about the medium that's altering the message.
First off there's simply way fewer women in blue collar work, and if they are there's no real hierarchy. Blue collar workers don't have secretaries.
The stories I've heard from women who were harassed over years at startups or law firms, in particular secretaries or women in other jobs that had lower status is something else.