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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

I imagine there's a special extra level of problems that apply when the apology reinforces someone's stereotypical views of the apologizer based on the group they appear to be part of, whether those views are held consciously or unconsciously, which makes especially problematic. Most of those attributes or not readily obvious in an online forum, but some are based on pronoun and/or name (mainly gender and nationality, at least historically, and we're talking about assumptions here, so they don't even have to be accurate).

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It was a homeschooling/parenting list. Those tend to skew female and this one did.

Though the reality is that I have never been on an email list that was mostly female membership that wasn't poisoned by sexism. There is inevitably one or two men who have figured out how to participate in the discussion without the entire group wanting their head on a pike and you can't disagree with these men because a zillion women will jump down your throat and it ends up being seriously ugly (yes, I tend to be the woman daring to disagree with such men and having other women act horribly to me).

A more likely explanation is that when I was younger, before my health went to hell, I was fairly charming and likable. So I tended to be the center of attention and I think some people were jealous.

It was also a situation where (oftentimes) I would read the initial email and give my advice on their problem without first reading any of the replies and then my advice would change the direction of discussion because it was so much better than what had already been said. I tended to stand out and there were some people just hell bent on trying to prove that I "didn't know everything" and "wasn't above making mistakes" and "wasn't always right" and this kind of garbage.

Because I tended to stand out, the discussion on the list would end up revolving around everyone lining up to either be "for" or "against" me/my position and then I would hand everyone their head as the least worst answer because patting people on the head for agreeing with me was only going to deepen such problems.

I've spent a lot of years trying to figure out how to let my comments stand on their own and do what I can to refuse to let it become about me. There is no 100 percent cure for that tendency (of people to make things about the person who said them), but I've learned some best practices.

(Comment has been edited.)

I noticed in this comment that you spent a lot of time talking about yourself and specifically praising yourself and your contributions to this community. Having no other insight other than what you are providing me, it seems like you tend to make yourself the center of discussion and honestly, you come across as high-ego. People like that are often polarizing in communities and tend the shift the conversation from "what" to "who". Perhaps the best practice would be to learn to make your point without personalizing it so much.

Perhaps the best practice would be to learn to make your point without personalizing it so much.

Yes, generally speaking, that's a best practice and one I follow as best I can. Unfortunately, it can't always be followed without hamstringing one's ability to say something meaningful and address more important issues than the tendency of the world to geegaw at me for existing.

I wasn't asking for advice. Giving advice in a situation like this one tends to boil down to blaming the victim rather than trying to understand what they are saying about a larger social issue and patterns of behavior involving many people, not just themselves.

People who are what santoshalper described as "high ego" are usually charismatic, and that makes a difference with everything.

The probably not obvious at this point context is the comment I replied to was an early reply (the first one?) and is probably assuming "The issue is you are a woman and it must have been a male dominant environment -- just like here on HN where DoreenMichele is a woman in a predominantly male environment." In spite of me promptly replying to say "no, that wasn't the issue," there has been at least one other comment assuming it's about my gender -- which is why I added a link to that comment to my initial reply (in hopes of preventing ten other replies assuming it was about my gender).

Sometimes, there are no good answers.

I'm going to go try to do other things now. If other people here want to continue to make it about me that my comment in this discussion happens to have been upvoted by other people, I'm not taking responsibility for that. It was my third comment for the day on HN and the other two have been utterly and completely ignored so far.

I have no control over other people's upvotes and a really poor ability to predict which of my comments will do well on HN. I spend about half my time going "That was brilliant. Why doesn't anyone appreciate me?" and the other half going "God, why is this being upvoted so much???" and maybe one percent of my time going "Yes, this makes total sense to me how this comment is being received." (Comment not intended to be mathematically accurate nor to cover all scenarios of how I feel about HN reactions to my comments.)

0_o

Toodle doo, y'all.

Kudos!

That's because upvotes aren't a true proxy of how valuable a comment is, it's also a proxy for other things like "does this comment provoke thought or further conversation?"

Nevermind that group nonsense. The same phenomena occur on an individual level. People see you as fitting into some position in a social hierarchy or behavior or ability or whatever and confirm their belief whenever you do something that confirms it, while finding excuses when you do something different. "That thing he did turned out surprisingly well. But he's dumb so it must have been a fluke."

If you're only looking at racism or sexism or whatever, you're ignoring the bigger and more insidious social problems that are individual and pervade small groups and families everywhere.

When I first heard about micro-aggressions, I thought, wow, so that's what's been happing. That explains all those subtle insults, unexpected rudeness, quiet exclusions, etc. But I'm not in one of those special "marginalized" groups and being actually marginalized doesn't matter to identitarians because their politics is more important than people's welfare.

> If you're only looking at racism or sexism or whatever, you're ignoring the bigger and more insidious social problems that are individual and pervade small groups and families everywhere.

Oh, I'm not, that's what I meant by an extra level of problems, not that it explains everything, but it may exacerbate it by giving more things for people to key off of that aren't based on rational measures.

What I meant is along the lines of "yes, dealing with groups is annoying because there's all sorts of weird group dynamics and people making assumptions and not re-evaluations based on new evidence, and then it gets worse for those people that have identifying characteristics that allow people to make even more baseless assumptions.

Yes, but that's something overhyped in social media and probably hardly even exists. It's very easy to incorrectly attribute mistreatment to something visible like sex or race. I used to have a workmate who complained everybody hated him at his previous job because he was the only American there. But then most people ended up hating him at his new job too, which was majority American staffed. People might use the obvious feature (eg. male, American, etc.) as an insult but it's often not the actual reason for the mistreatment. Bullies just pick on whatever unique characteristics their victim has as a way to belittle them and that can get misunderstood as sexism/etc.

> Yes, but that's something overhyped in social media and probably hardly even exists.

As someone who has noticed their own knee-jerk reactions based on sex at times (due to a number of factors that mostly boil down to very little exposure to women in my specific field over the decades I've been in it based on small company sizes outside of major markets), I think you're either just entirely unaware of it, lucky enough to not be around it much, or oblivious to it.

To be absolutely clear, I have a bias on on initial interpretation of capability of women before there it information otherwise. This rears its head when I read something about a women in tech having a technical problem and assume it's because of their skill level before knowing anything about them, and it's done in a way that is beyond what I would assume about a man. It's ingrained, but I have noticed it, and try to specifically correct for it now. I would like to think it's made little or no difference in my interactions with women in tech because a) they have been extremely infrequent, and b) I try to not let my assessment of someone's skill affect how I treat them. That's probably optimistic of me though. I don't exactly feel shame about this, it's a natural part of being human. We have biases, we can either try to find them and acknowledge and/or try to work on them, or just live with them.

So what you have here is a very specific counter-example, of someone on the other side saying concretely it has happened at least for once. I doubt I'm unique in this. Most people have biases about all sorts of groups, that come out in large and small ways. Maybe you don't, or your biases are so small it's hard to note them. Forgive me if I think that's unlikely, and you have many biases for many different types of people, as everyone does, and as I do for in many other ways I'm not aware of, I'm sure.

I imagine the other side of this probably feels like people judging you for being underdressed ata group function at all times, no matter how much effort you put into it. People are going to make assumptions if you're the only person in jeans and a t-shirt at a group function of people in suits, and you'll have to prove yourself all the time to overcome people's initial assumptions. My guess is that for women in tech, life is like a bunch of that happening over and over again, unless they get a reputation that proceeds them. That doesn't seem overhyped to me at all, it seems pretty likely to me and a shitty thing to go through life dealing with.

I generally agree with all you've said there. I guess I have so much personal experience with non-sexism prejudice in all kinds of ways that I don't really care about the plight of women as much. It seems like everyone gets it. If someone asks as question on StackOverflow, I judge them for having a default avatar or username. I judge them for having a teenage writing style. If someone writes in 3rd person or 1st person, you can judge them in either direction depending on whether other signals are consistent with it. I try to combat that in myself and treat everyone fairly, but ways to judge people are just overwhelming even without knowing their sex. You get judged by the way you walk, the way to look at people, the timing of your speaking, your age, your clothes, everything. You might say those features aren't innate and people can change them, but it can be incredibly hard for some because they're actually signals of some underlying qualities and if you don't have those qualities, you're struggling to fake the signals which is risky and difficult.

I think women may actually get a better deal overall because so many men are trying not to be sexist that they treat them well, giving them a free pass on all those other judgable signals. Men might not even understand that a woman is revealing her inadequacy by wearing the "wrong" clothes, while they'll openly laugh at a man exhibiting "wrong" behavior.

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