Apple places female engineering program manager on administrative leave | Hacker News Reader

Apple places female engineering program manager on administrative leave

theverge.com

41 pointspier2541 comments

To me, her first example of sexism just sounds like ... useful advice?

"When closing sentences in presentations, you finish the sentence in a way that sounds like you're asking a question."

How is that sexist or condescending? I've had the same problem and I was glad that my university supervisor made me aware of it. Speaking in an authoritative way is definitely a useful skill for a "senior engineering program manager" like her. Or at least, it surely is for me. I'm a male senior engineer in a management position.

Is it sexist if people give her the same advice that helped me? How could one have formulated that to be non-sexist but still useful advice?

Contrary to my opinion, she describes that as

"#Apple employee relations confirmed this #tonepolicing is totally ok feedback for me to get from my #bigtech #male leaders & not #sexist."

which I guess will cause a lot of not so friendly people who lurk on the #tonepolicing and #sexist hashtags to contact #Apple. So I totally get why Apple's HR and PR teams consider that tweet a nightmare.

I don't have strong feelings about whether or not the feedback is sexist but one way I'm thinking about it is if you posit that there is such a thing as an authentic self and you posit you should be allowed to be your authentic self at work, then I guess any advise to change your tone is not appropriate, be you man or woman.

But I don't think we live in a society that is exactly behind the idea that men or women get to be their authentic selves as work.

My authentic self wouldn't be caught dead at work. I'm only at work to acquire the means to be my authentic self at places that...aren't work.

The kinds of workplaces where I could be "my authentic self" are the kinds of workplaces that white collar people deride as "toxic"

Being your authentic self never made sense to anybody who wasn't already fully bought into the politics of the majority tribe at that particular employer. If your authentic self deviates from the expected political and cultural lanes, your best bet is to keep your mouth shut and agree with whatever the dominant view is.

I guess it depends on a lot of questions to which I don't personally know the answers. Is that vocal style more common in women than men? When the supervisor says he doesn't find it authoritative, is that because it's not how men talk? Are women conditioned to talk like that specifically because it's less authoritative, because men have not always reacted well to authoritative women?

Basically, I'm not sure whether it's truly a simple "skill" unrelated to gender and how women have been historically perceived and treated.

I read somewhere that it is more common with women in conversation and is meant to garner an affiramitive 'uh-huh' type response in the listener.

Matt Levine (Money Stuff) writes in uptalk and people love it.

But he's trying to be goofy when he does it.

I write in uptalk, not as an affect and people don’t love it, but it helps me get my job done?

According to this paper examining Southern Californian English, https://pages.ucsd.edu/~aritchart/RitchartArvaniti_SpeechPro..., uptalk is about twice as common in women (42%) as in men (20%). Though at 20% it seems common enough in men that reasonable people could debate how gender-specific it is.

> "When closing sentences in presentations, you finish the sentence in a way that sounds like you're asking a question."

This is called 'uptalking'. The name may help folks who are trying to figure out if it's professional or not. I don't see any consensus so far. (but FWIW, I don't like it, myself)

It's like being fat or ugly or unkempt or stuttering. It makes people dislike the person, but those people are morally wrong so it's un-PC to admit that you dislike someone for these reasons, or even to tell people to accomodate the harsh critics, even if it's good advice.

It’s EXACTLY like this because being fat or ugly or unkempt or stuttering is none of your business and has no impact that justifies your judgment. Disliking people for these reasons is harmful and doesn’t have a valid justification.

Anecdotally I have heard this exact same thing from Western Canadians, almost exclusively women or gay men, to the point where I just consider it the default feminine accent of the region.

I have described it to them (friends from the area) directly as "it sounds like you're setting up for the next sentence and never go there. It makes me think '... and?'"

While I wouldn't quite call it sexist to point out, it definitely manifests more as a feminine accent in my experience.

Upspeak and vocal fry are tone and frequency modulations promoted by mass media. It was not widely diffuse 20 years ago. Valley talk was one that came out early -79s I guess. But these two has begun to pervade media. Both men and women are guilty of both. It’s unnatural but it’s an affectation like others.

Indeed raising your tone as to construct a question does inject uncertainty into a declarative sentence. In talking with peers that’s fine. In front of an audience it’s as welcome as the people who spray spit while they talk.

Question. Even if there’s a company that agrees with her take (female owned or female run?) would they take her? Can you predict what her next motivation will be?

Maybe she has a book planned instead.

Yeah this is the kind of beneficial feedback you'd expect from presentation coaching (e.g. Toastmasters) for improving your delivery.

Exactly this, for anybody who's done public speaking training, this is baseline feedback you'd expect to get from your coach. Upspeak, vocal fry, junk speech and all other elements of speech devoid of information are to be minimized within reason, while still sounding human and relatable.

>1. A way of speaking that puts an upward inflection on the last word of a statement that makes it sound like a question when it's not. (Common among teens and surfers.)

lol

I'm not native speaker and when I'm not sure about what to say next or I'm not convinced about what I just said e.g whether it makes sense (in general),

then I tend to talk this way (not intentionally, it just happens), even teacher asked me why I do this years ago but I couldn't answer

I guess I gotta be careful with this

Don’t let this dissuade you. It’s a common mode of speech and your usage is a perfect example of how it’s used. It’s okay to be sincere about uncertainty! It’s not okay for people to pressure against that. Uncertainty is how we learn and grow and address things.

> How is that sexist or condescending?

It isn’t inherently, but context is important. In a culture of sexism, it’s not uncommon for women to use more passive language and more deferential tone than/with their male colleagues; sometimes this is a matter of adjusting communication in an effort to be heard, sometimes it’s a cultural difference where those communication styles are rooted in a broader set of instincts around inclusion and empathy.

None of this is universal, of course. But it’s pervasive enough to be a trope.

> Is it sexist if people give her the same advice that helped me? How could one have formulated that to be non-sexist but still useful advice?

Let’s take another common trope about sexism as an analogy. There are a zillion variations of men giving women advice to “smile more”. One that often comes up in the workplace is “people have said they think you’re angry with them, they might be more receptive if you smiled more.” This is something that (1) is seldom said to men, and (2) would have a totally different connotation if it were.

And bridging back from the analogy, uptalk (ending sentences in a way that sounds like a question) is often already a “smile more” type of effort or instinct. Turning that on its head and also advising against it is damned if you do or don’t, and from the same sexist culture effectively suggests women should really just be seen and not heard.

None of that is implied or in context in the advice you received.

The "smile more" analogy is, I think, a good explanation of it. Women's behavior, including language, is tracked closely, and anything that stands out can be used as a justification for worse treatment. When the solution is "don't do that", rather than changing the culture to treat men and women the same, it's sexist.

Uptalk doesn't actually sound like a question. It's similar, but nobody actually listening to the person is confused by it. Rather, it's singled out because it's a pattern associated with women.

Women are constantly being monitored for gender-specific behavior. Women who don't dress in female-specific ways will be censured for it, but so will those who show too much of their femininity. The same outfit can end up being criticized for showing both too much and too little.

I do feel sorry for the manager, who gets stuck between the rock and the hard place. It's wise to act defensively. But it's also unwise to simply give in to a set of shifting, contradictory demands. It sucks that the manager gets put in a position where the right thing to say was "You talk however you want and I'll fight for you regardless of what you choose". That shouldn't have to be her job, on top of all of the other ways a manager already fights for their employees. It's yet another case where we heap extra burdens on some people and then act surprised when they don't make it to the very top ranks.

So when given the chance to show the sexism she experiences, one would expect she would publish the most egregious and overt incidents. Instead she chooses two examples that are not even sexist?

How can I conclude anything other than this woman is full of crap? How can Apple address something that she cannot even identify?

Imagine having to work with this person, and having them “network” with other staff in the workplace to scheme how to “address” such issues.

If you doubt or question that sexism exists, that will be used as an example of sexism and hostility.

Ive seen it a lot on HN--when sexism is mentioned, any comments that doubt it are themselves hostile. I am not trying to chase anyone away. If you want to tell me I am wrong and explain, go ahead.

Without dipping into this woman's specific situation; I wager the reason they get hostile is because it is continuously explained with studies that include quantitative analysis, qualitative, anecdotal, and longitudinal and yet somehow the question is always "well could you explain it again/differently/more thoroughly"

I believe that's come to be known as Kafkatrapping these last few years: https://listoffallacies.com/kafkatrapping/

I have yet to see anyone claim doubt that sexism of any kind exists. What I've seen a lot of on HN is doubt that sexism against women exists, from people who will then claim that sexism against men is endemic. It's that double standard that leads people to question the good faith of the premise.

I don't think one has to takes sides on the manager vs Apple conflict to ask a much more important question:

"Why is this newsworthy to The Verge and Hacker News?"

At any given moment, several thousand people around the world are likely going through identical complaints with their employers, and have been for multiple decades. What makes this more relevant than any random similar example from a boring business outside Silicon Valley, where a manager might have a similar number of employees and say a similar thing to one of them? Is there a reasonable belief that this is being encouraged by Tim Cook himself? No? Then why is it "Apple does $Thing"?

Corporate HR and the legal system will work this out and get it right for a reasonable % of cases without involving the whole world in each one.

It's a story that fits the kind of narratives that The Verge (and their parent company Vox) specializes in. There's a large and influential chunk of audience out there who loves their confirmation bias reinforced with this kind of content, and The Verge's business model keeps succeeding in the process. Win-win for everybody, except those who might not agree with the story being painted.

By fighting against a hostile work environment her tactics create a hostile work environment.

For those of you who read Radical Candor by Kim Scott, the advice the employee received from her manager is closely resembling the advice that Sheryl Sandberg gave the author of the book. That advice is used as a model example of what "direct, but caring" advice should look like in a corporate environment where there is professional trust between employees.

It's interesting how that same advice is here displayed as an exhibit of overt sexism.

I think it's interesting that these examples are considered [at least by some people] to be examples of sexism.

Even though giving feedback on presentation skills might literally be "tone policing", I'm not sure that it can be considered sexist. Men and women are both guilty of "uptalk", or using high rising terminals. IIRC it's more closely correlated with age and geography. But even if we say that it's correlated with gender I'm not sure that it's sexist to say it detracts from a presentation. It would be super jarring for me if Tim Cook walked out at a keynote and said "this is deadass the best iPhone we've ever made". Even though the word 'deadass' is associated with African-American Vernacular English, I don't think it's racist to say that using AAVE might distract from a presentation given to a wider audience.

The second example also seems odd to me. If you're going to start a political discussion at work, I don't think you should be immune to hearing counterarguments. More generally, the whole concept of needing an email from your CEO for emotional support (on non-work related issues) seems really unhealthy to me. That seems like a way to create a toxic relationship between employer and worker-- your emotional well-being and ability to cope with politicians you despise should not depend on Tim Cook (maybe the culture is different at Apple?). The whole trend of a cookiecutter email for every bad thing that happens in the world seems like it could even emphasize certain divisions. How do you decide what deserves an email without "all lives mattering" a demographic? We see that on a smaller scale here on HN when people argue about what deaths are worthy of a black bar. You also have a VERY difficult tightrope to walk when two marginalized groups are being victimized by each other (e.g. recent violence in the Middle East, which also resulted in bigoted violence here in the US).

> I don't think it's racist to say that using AAVE might distract from a presentation given to a wider audience.

If you actually say “using African-American Vernacular English” and not (say) “using incorrect grammar”, it’s arguably not racist to describe the expectation that way, though expectation itself is arguably racist depending on the specific circumstances of the presentation and other factors.

Similarly, to the extent that rising terminal pitch is a feminine-gender-coded norm for declarative sentences, decribing the problem as rising terminal pitch is itself not sexist, describing it in terms of masculine-coded norms of expression is arguably sexist, and independt of how the deviation from expectation is expressed, an expectation of conforming to masculine-coded expression norms itself may be sexist.

> Similarly, to the extent that rising terminal pitch is a feminine-gender-coded norm for declarative sentences, decribing the problem as rising terminal pitch is itself not sexist, describing it in terms of masculine-coded norms of expression is arguably sexist, and independt of how the deviation from expectation is expressed, an expectation of conforming to masculine-coded expression norms itself may be sexist.

The dilemma here is that authoritativeness is considered a masculine trait in our shared cultural ontology, even (at least traditionally) in feminist philosophy.

Arguably this may be more true today than in prior generations, given the trend among more developed nations for gender roles to sometimes bifurcate even more strongly than before along some dimensions, an unexpected consequence of women being more free to shape feminine gender identity. (It's often a group dynamic, not necessarily something individuals are doing deliberately.)

There's also a whole host of issues regarding cultural competency and the target audience, especially if the target audience themselves are employees, which may have different implications with an exclusively male, exclusively female, or mixed audience, and different again if its an audience of subordinates, higher-level managers, or a mixed audience.

Steve Jobs said silliness like "insanely great". Why is "deadass" bad, except that Black people say it more than White people? I bet Elon Musk says "deadass" nor similar.

He might, but I think if you ranked CEOs by the ratio of presentation skills to market cap, Elon Musk would be one of the worst ones out there. He definitely has room for improvement- some of the TSLA shareholder meetings are borderline painful.

Notwithstanding the cultural appropriation aspect[1], I think you can make an argument that Elon should say things like 'deadass' or 'litty-titty' because it's part of the irreverent personality that he tries to project. But I think it would be a huge stretch to say that suggesting he avoids those terms is racist.

[1]: Elon Musk is technically African-American, but obviously doesn't have the same cultural background as people whose ancestors were brought here in chains

I’m shocked Apple employees are allowed to use Slack. Anyone in the industry long enough knows there is always someone that has full access to everything when they are the provider, regardless of what they claim. Strange that Apple would even take the risk.

How common is it for men to avoid interacting with women at work? Couple of years ago there were Memes and things about men too afraid to talk to women at work for fear of miscommunication.

Has that actually come to anything? Are men reducing their interactions with women at work?

> Are men reducing their interactions with women at work?

Yes - and thats also sexism.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/aug/29/men-wom...

Is this what news is now?

Someone is airing their dirty laundry on Twitter and getting one or two responses, and this is worthy of coverage?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com