Sexism in IT - The JavaOne incident
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There are no easy ways to deal with a situation like this - one group will advocate a quiet word with the speaker, and while that educates him, it does little for all the other potential future speakers in the room who learn from that session (or worse, put the joke away for use later on.) A public display of offense makes for an uncomfortable moment, which in turn should lead to at least more awareness that some material is offensive.
Incidentally, one measure of how offensive it is, is to replace the group in question with the most "politically incorrect" group you can. So had the phrase been "explain it to a black man" would it be funny? I think perhaps not.
As a rule you should never make fun of any group, of which you're not a member, from the podium. Just. Don't. Do. It. Self-deprecating humour is almost never offensive, even to the group you're a part of. Well almost. Clearly we can all imagine some exceptions to that rule too.
Yes the computing industry is enormously sexist, and it's behooves both men and women to point out instances of this sexism when they occur. Only by being vigilent can we educate people. Small steps that hopefully will lead to an erradication of this.
well done Shifra.
Incidentally, one measure of how offensive it is, is to replace the group in question with the most "politically incorrect" group you can. So had the phrase been "explain it to a black man" would it be funny? I think perhaps not. "Explain it to Java Programmers" or "Explain it to your mom/dad" are acceptable and are used quite often. The former is considered a really amusing anecdote and used really frequently at Python Conferences. Now, I was a Java developer sitting in a Python conference who was already familiar and decently comfortable with the fundamentals being presented on stage - the presenter was not a Java developer (so not a self deprecating joke) and still if I stand up and make the person apologize and then repeatedly blame him of languagism (?), it would not be welcomed by both Java or Python developers!
[edit: typos]
1. Explain it to X. Where X is known to be a minority should be an acceptable statement. If substituting X with "Black people", "women" etc are the only cases, where the statement becomes offensive - it is unnecessarily tabooed.
2. (Also in reply to the other sarcastic reply to my comment) The mom/dad example is not the one where you have choice. The context of the statement has little to do with the choice and more to do with numbers in the industry.
Using prejudices targeting men == Witty and Feminist.
I am a man. I am not a rapist looking for victim. I am not a bumbling buffoon who can't change a light bulb without falling off a ladder. I do not beat children and women.
I work hard, I go and do risky and unpleasant shit (digging through human excrement to unclog the sewage, etc.) so the rest of my family doesn't have to.
I also make more than I spend and generally try to make myself as useful as possible. I also like kids, though I don't have any of my own yet, I like to hang out with other peoples kids.
And I am sick to tears of my gender being portrayed as monsters preying for our next victim.
>One in nine women admit to having used physical aggression against a husband or male partner (compared to one in ten men)
>14 percent of men say that they have been slapped by a partner (compared to 9 percent of women)
>11 percent of men have had a partner threaten to throw something heavy at them (compared to 8 percent of women)
>Only 4 percent of women explained that their behavior (either verbal or physical) was because of drink or drugs (compared to ten percent of men)
>Nearly half (47 percent) of women say that their behaviour (physical or verbal aggression or verbal reasoning) was because "it was the only way I could get through to him"
>Working class men (20 percent) are more likely to have been subjected to physical agression by a wife or female partner than upper or middle class men (15 percent)
>Here and Now's survey reveals that fifteen percent (6.3 million people) of the population say that they have been subjected to physical agression by a husband/wife or hetrosexual partner.
>MORI interviewed a representitive quota sample of 1,978 adults in Great Britain. 1,865 of whom had ever been in a personal relationship with the opposite sex.
>Field work was conducted from 17-21 November 1994 in 150 constituencies. All interviews were conducted face to face in home employing a self completion technique. Data have been weighted to the known profile of the British population.
[1]: http://www.coeffic.demon.co.uk/descrim.htm
Merely mentioning that in contemporary times, sexism towards men may be more prevalent as vice versa gets one booed off the stage.
And your question is loaded. There are plenty of sexist jokes going around on medical conferences. Mere notion that women, do not make sexist jokes against men, I find offensive. When in reality, a man complaining about it would be seen as a pussy (sexism?).
In the country where I live it is practically impossible to get stewardship of your kid if you are a man and mother also wants it. Hell I know cases where mother doesn't want the kid, but takes him just to spite the father.
There are loads of evidence that modern civilization is doing something very wrong with its men (especially young men). Lack of role models, bias towards women in affirmative action, bias against men in legislative and enforcement action is resulting in a dramatic shift of gender equality.
And in a bad way. I know dozens of attractive, educated, successful women who can't get a proper mate. Its a sellers market out there for ambitious, educated, refined man - lets say a classic gentleman.
On average the top 10% of women are only as strong as the bottom 10% of men. IIRC your average 25 year old woman who goes to the gym is only as strong as a 14/15 year old boy.
The difference between my wife hitting me is at worst a bruise, and me hitting my wife is a fractured skull. The difference between my wife slapping me is a red mark on my face, and me slapping my wife is her being knocked to the floor. I can take my wifes wrist in one hand and I can force her to the ground or I would break her arm if she resisted. If my wife takes my wrist in both hands, she's struggling to even force me to move my arm (this one she tried the other day cause I wouldn't touch the pumpkin goop).
The average woman has around 50% of the upper body strength of a male. Male bones are on average larger and denser than womens. Similarly our skulls are thicker, denser and have features like a bigger brow and stronger jaw than women. Our skin is literally thicker and stronger than women. Men have a naturally higher muscle-to-body-mass ratio than women.
I think on average men tolerate sexism towards them because we can, because we really don't need to defend ourselves from words. Women do need to defend themselves from words, because words are easily turned into actions and women can't easily defend themselves against actions.
I genuinely think that a lot of women are afraid of men, perhaps not consciously. Maybe not rightly so today, but only because of our society and morals. Society and morals put a decline in the male-female spousal abuse rates, to the rape rates.
If it were, it doesn't take a bodybuilder to kill or hurt someone with an axe or a knife.
But that's completely besides the point. The point is that in marital abuse - getting hurt (physiologically or psychologically) by someone that was supposed to care for you is always demeaning and hurtful experience.
And its a point that few women know, that male psyche is way more fragile than male physis. Some know and take advantage of it.
Your statement of men not being hurt by verbal (or other forms of psychological) abuse is frankly, naive. A man puts up with it because, frankly unless he moves away (and that's what every sane person should do in my opinion) there is no way for him to defend himself from his mother/spouse without getting a short end.
Yes, women can (and do) pick up equalizers at times to make up for the typical physical differences in prowess between the sexes. This is part of why (last time I checked such statistics), on average, women who defend themselves with lethal force (usually premeditated and with a weapon) against an abusive husband do more jail time than men who finally beat their wives to death ("heat of the moment", with their bare hands) after years of abusing them.
I think electromagnetic makes some good points. That doesn't justify a woman slapping a man but a) it does put it in a different light and b) there are many forms of abuse, so just focusing on who got slapped hardly tells the whole picture. I will note that I read somewhere (probably many years ago) that when men were asked what they most feared from a woman, the consensus was "being laughed at". When women were asked what they most feared from men, they listed "being murdered".
1) when have you actually encountered sexism as a man outside some women's club meeting? As a man myself, I only get portrayed as a rapist in the minds of male redditors.
2) It's generally considered less offensive to make fun of the people in charge, for obvious reasons. By and large, men still run the country. Politicians, bankers, and judges are all overwhelmingly male. Make fun of a man in a commercial for being stupid? It's funny because the CEO of the advertising is almost certainly a man. Make fun of a woman for being stupid? It's less funny because as recently as when our parents were growing up we actually did make such commercials, except we meant it and actively excluded women from the workforce. We're not far enough removed from "math is hard" Barbie dolls to find humor in poking fun at the intelligence of women. Too soon.
I've done work at various charities, lunch lines for the homeless, etc...
What I've seen in the US is many, many shelters and other charities that will accept women and families but not single men, and I've never even seen one that refuses single women while accepting single men. This is despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the homeless in the country are men.
Whether a person goes in engineering or marketing isn't nearly as important as whether or not a person has food and shelter. Disappointingly, I regularly see high traffic blog postings and news articles about the sex imbalances in CS, and rarely see any concern about those in our charities. I can't help but suspect that if a city somehow did have charities that discriminated in the opposite direction that it would be headline news.
Sexism cuts in both directions. IMHO, M-to-F sexism is much more prevalent, more damaging (for example to women's career prospects), and a more serious issue, but as you complain, F-to-M sexism is real, is (in some circles) more widely socially acceptable, and is sort of insidious. I admire it when men or women stand up to either sort of sexism.
I especially admire this woman's stand. She stood up alone, in a room full of men who had laughed, and calmly demanded to be treated with respect. I submit that she's a role model for anyone who faces discrimination of any type and any severity.
Just because some see it as an acceptable practice to portray men as idiots, doesn't give men the right stereotypes to other groups.
The comment in this case was unacceptable, the response, in my opinion, is warranted. It is far too common and accepted that a comment like this about women is OK. How men are stereotyped has no bearing on whether it is right or wrong.
I like people saying whatever they want to say. If they say stupid shit - then that reflects on them and only on them.
Ok, so the guy doing the presentation and uttering a cleanly well thought out joke is whatever he is. Also Shifra is whatever she is (have you read the thread?).
E.g.: I actually got up and made him apologize for his stupid and offensive joke. On the way out, one woman thanked me and one man told me I should "relax." (I told him he should shut up.)
Statement like that also reflects poorly on the person saying it. I see it as an abuse of power: I am a woman and since I am a woman I will now make you bow down to my might - else I might get all lawyered up on you.
Consider this scenario: It's a JAVA conference and the guy titles his presentation: Explain it to COBOL programmer. And there is a COBOL programmer in the crowd (alog with the rest of the 1% of COBOL programmers) who gets so upset, that he makes a guy apologize for it.
Was the statement offensive? Yes. Was making a fuss worth it? Seriously doubt it.
Like I said, people speak for themselves. Making offensive jokes is highly inappropriate - in any scenario.
I sincerely hope that all the people who are so concerned about morals, do so without discrimination.
When that happens, post about it. But until then, this comment does nothing but derail the conversation.
>"I actually got up and made him apologize for his stupid and offensive joke. On the way out, one woman thanked me and one man told me I should "relax." (I told him he should shut up.)"
I would never, ever want this sort of person at a conference or a workplace. Equating the communication with opposite sex to an alien is a common, common theme. Reaching down, coming up with the worst possible way to take it and then cutting him off, disrupting the conference, gloating online is just bad behavior. She even recounts her belligerence to a fellow member of the audience who probably just wanted to hear the presentation.
Explaining to the speaker afterwards how his words could be taken would probably have had a genuinely beneficial effect. He might even feel some empathy for what she had to say and come up with a new joke. But he probably feels very little empathy for her at all after her attempt to turn a molehill into a shitstorm.
It's exactly this sort of PC-motivated antagonism that I miss least about America.
I like jokes like these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BxckAMaTDc
By all means women speakers should make similar jokes instead of overreacting.
I get the feeling that some women just can't take a joke. Of course there are more serious cases, but stuff like this should be ignored.
I understand that the lack of women in tech(especially open source) is a barrier to entry for women, but reactions like these only make that barrier wider. I once read a story about someone who said will never hire a black person, because if he ever fires him for some reason, the guy will come back with his lawyer and say he was fired because he was black.
>> I get the feeling that some women just can't take a joke.
Your sentiment will no doubt be shared by many. The point with offense though is it's not up to the joke-teller to determine if a joke is offensive or not. It either offends a group, or it does not.
You're right, Adam just made a silly joke. You see it as a silly joke. However, and this is the point, now that you've been educated to the fact that the joke was offensive, what is your response?
Your reaction, that they should not have been offended, is unreasonable, because the joke was not at your expense. Would you become the aribter for racial jokes? Native American jokes? How about child pornography jokes? Religious jokes? Why then jokes about a minority gender group?
I suspect, and I mean this with respect, we could find some sensitive area in your life, or anyone's life which would be "just a funny joke" to some, but which are deeply offensive to others. Yes, we live in a "politically correct" world, but there are still lines as to what is ok, and what is not.
And the receiver is the one that determines those lines, not the sender.
I honestly propose that some people should realize, that life is not all unicorns and cute puppies.
Or as it goes: If you think that I have an attitude problem, perhaps you should check that you don't have a perception problem.
But I think the fear behind "political correctness", which I used to share, is that whether one's behavior is rude is arbitrary and completely decided by other people.
I think "you've been educated to the fact that the joke was offensive" is misleadingly simple. What's true is that many people, including me, think such jokes are offensive. But more importantly, one can think about these issues from a neutral point of view. When I was prodded, as a teenager, to think deeply about such issues, consider other points of view, and talk to a lot of people about sexism -- I agreed with the conclusion that these jokes are indeed offensive. I believe that anyone who goes through the same process will inevitably reach the same conclusion.
That said, as with any contentious issue, in the end it's everyone's privilege to decide for themselves.
What I found funny about the talk's comment after listening to it, was the reference to tons of conferences getting freaked out over potential sexism. I believe for OSCon some speakers were threatening to withdraw their talks since O'Reilly hadn't put out an official "Sexism--not okay" statement yet. (Which they promptly got around to.) The note to the reactions was the real joke for me, not the sexism.
Nope. It's joke after joke after joke, and also inappropriate behavior in the workplace, in conferences, in pubs. Day after day. What is just one post in HN for us happens constantly to a lot of women in our industry.
Such bringers of the future we are.
No one cares if one idiot is sexist, racist or whatever. They care that the industry is a boys club for men with the social maturity of 12 year olds and it's absolutely pathetic when there's guys on HN saying essentially "I don't get whats wrong with that joke".
I don't care if I get downmodded for saying this: HN is the best community on the web because of the sheer intelligence displayed on a daily basis by our regular commenters. If our regulars genuinely think there's something okay with this Adam guys public idiocy then I've lost a huge amount of respect for this community. In fact if the IT community really thinks this way, then PG should probably quit his efforts to better it and use his great talent elsewhere that needs it.
You're a scumbag when you make fun of the vast minority. You're a comedian when you make fun of the vast majority. Adam isn't a comedian, he wasn't telling a joke he was making a public display of patheticness.
Making an official compliant to the organizers for story about a mildly offensive joke that was never actually made at said conference - Bordering on overreaction but maybe ok
Writing a G+ post "...JavaOne Incident" publicly slamming said person repeatedly in spite of multiple apologies - Overreaction gone nuts (possibly hurting the original cause - leading to - "this woman can't take a harmless joke" in the minds of more than a few people)
Ageism/sexism/*ism needs to be certainly discouraged but proportional response has its own merits.
And if you are (p.s. they're not), then what relevance does it have to this topic?
Should the original author not have taken offence the 'joke' she heard during a work conference because at various points history an unspecified number of women laughed at the shirt you were wearing?
As an aside, would you be cool with this sort of advertising in 2011: http://www.oddee.com/_media/imgs/articles2/a96674_ifyourhusb...
http://www.oddee.com/_media/imgs/articles2/a96674_Blowher.jp...
Or do you accept that the world has moved on from these sort of visuals in advertising, and thus it is not unreasonable to expect the same to apply to the telling of [____]ist jokes in professional/work settings?
He wasn't slighting the general intellect of women, he was slighting their intellect in regards to java best practices. Saying a gender isn't knowledgeable about java best practices seems equitable to saying a gender isn't knowledgeable about color/design complements. Please explain how they are not so.
Anyway, my main point was that introducing the existence of another perceived injustice is completely irrelevant to whether a wrong was perpetuated in this case.
Or are you suggesting that the underlying premise of the initial comment was not: "man up love, you lot are just as bad"?
Both are bad but the second is far worse. "The JavaOne incident" is probably the wrong battle to fight. Regardless of whether Adam's joke was appropriate, attacking him for it provokes a defensive reaction from the frat boy culture (I'm going to keep calling it frat boy culture for lack of a better term). Some people won't see the big deal about how the joke was offensive and will instead be repulsed by the reaction to it. In fact, Adam's joke seems to be just the kind of push back you would expect from a frat boy tired of being told to be more sensitive to his female colleagues.
Most men are like this. We make inappropriate jokes to our friends and aren't afraid of offending them because they give as good as they get. When a woman complains about this the hypothetical frat boy gets defensive because now he can't "be himself". It creates a culture of us vs. them which is not at all healthy.
The real creeps thrive in an us vs. them environment. Now they feel justified to harras women. They go out of their way not to hire women, because "all women do is complain". They can get away with, because the average rank and file frat guy doesn't feel any need to stand up for the feminist who has aligned herself against him.
Argument to symmetry is only effective if both groups are equal. That's clearly not the case here. If you want symmetry, ask male nurses whether they think they find jokes about them having somehow given up their masculinity for their career are amusing.
Two of my martial arts instructors (as well as a student) work as male nurses for their day job. They make such jokes themselves, so I assume they find them amusing.
Of course, it's easier to laugh at such jokes when they obviously don't apply to you.
No one really cared since it was all in good fun and Indian's don't have the same culture of victimhood that we do in the US.
[1] "Don't make fun of Chris, Americans will sue you if you tell a joke."
If your specific social situation allows this kind of behaviour, then that's fine. I really don't have any complaints at all. But if there are people who are in your social situation who are unhappy about it, you don't get to just tell them that they're oversensitive. That's not actually something that makes things better.
I couldn't respond to the thread directly on google because I was uncomfortable expressing any sympathy for Adam. I felt people I know would judge me in a negative light if they saw it in their feed. I feel here, the thin layer of anonymity/indirection is enough to say this small tidbit.
I don't think Adam woke up that morning, or any morning in fact, and thought to himself that he wants to hurt or harm anyone, physically or emotionally. I think Adam is a good person as are the vastly overwhelming majority of the human population.
I feel the continuation of being hostile towards him by some posters (including Shifra despite accepting the apology) after he apologized is unwarranted and furthermore, unproductive. Adam ate a huge piece of humble pie by posting that, regardless of whether the joke was meant in good faith or not and for others to come back with more negativity just encourages others that make a similar mistake in the future to not acknowledge it as such. People that want to participate in a reasonable debate focused on results can have their voices oppressed by a feeling of discomfort.
I'm not sure if I have anything of real value to add to the women in IT issue (and I'm sure most people that do also doubt the value of their own ideas), but I can say I am one person who is dissuaded of trying to help the issue because I don't want to offend people or alienate them and make them uncomfortable.
I went through 22 months of withdrawal from medication fairly publicly while a member of an email list. I was incapable of keeping both feet out of my mouth and it seemed to not matter how hard I tried, things just came out all wrong. I wrote many heart-felt, sincere apologies. I had no agenda in terms of my public reputation or whatever. My only intent was to take genuine responsibility for my actions in spite of the burden I was living with and to try to take away whatever hurt I had done.
The result? I became the list scapegoat and if some asshole attacked me out of the blue for no apparent reason on some flimsy excuse, the entire list went "there she goes again!" It's been, oh, maybe six or eight years since then. Some of those folks have never forgiven me. I no longer feel responsible for their on-going hostility. They have a personal issue.
I'm a lot less apologetic than I used to be. Someone once said (in essence) that real justice must mean justice for both sides.
The speaker should recognize that and simply say as much. Not a lot more needs to be said. There's no way to defend or explain the comment.
And as for @DuncanIdaho who thinks this is vilifying all men. No, it's just calling out a recurring trend at tech conferences to do things which make women feel unwelcome. That's wrong and needs to stop.
If you tell 10 people and you get enough shit that you have to change a title. Don't tell 1000 and expect a better response. I don't think the big news here is that this guy is sexist, because I honestly doubt he is. I think the big news is that this guy is a fucking idiot.
Here's a heads up to everyone who doesn't know "why the women are offended". It's not that he made the joke, it's that people laughed. Sexism isn't offensive, it's the culture that's offensive. 1 guy thinking women are stupid is just pathetic, it's that people agree with him and think there's nothing wrong with it.
Every time I hear of incidents like this all I can think is that these are pathetic little men who haven't grown up socially since middle school. It's that they've allowed themselves to be so socially isolated that in their group they get away with sexism.
I work in construction, it's a 99% male industry and yes sexist jokes get made between the guys. What happens though when a woman comes along who can do the job is that they get 10 times the respect. Why? Because when you physically are the weaker sex, it takes a lot of character to balls up and get the job done. I like when women come into the industry because they actually want to learn and work. I don't like when guys come into the industry because they're lazy idiots looking for enough cash to buy more drugs or to work enough time to get on unemployment for another 6 months.
Women coming into IT should be exalted, because when they're the 1% it means that 99% of them got into the business to try to become great. When you're 99% of the people in the industry, it means 98% of you are simply there to earn a pay check.
A friend of mine put it perfectly - "when you're amongst the dominant group, you can get away with being mediocre" (i.e. the 98% you're referring to). Meaning that when you're the minority group - your every move will probably be scrutinised/analysed/categorised more closely.
That said - I'm not sure if the personal attacks ("fucking idiot") are completely warranted here (though I suspect you wrote that in the heat of the moment). We all go through learning experiences, some of our learnings just happen to be on a much larger scale than others (and for Adam this was unfortunate). I know I've certainly offended people without meaning to ("it wouldn't have offended my friend Joe - and he's Asian too!"), but now I've learnt the fine art of holding my tongue with regard to such jokes amongst crowds that I don't know too well... sure, I guess I was an "idiot" too in that moment, but no more or less of an idiot than Adam here - despite the difference in scale.
You had a learning opportunity, and you self-admittedly learnt. You didn't then go in front of a hundred-fold bigger crowd and repeat the same mistake.
Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.
I've been an idiot, many many times. I don't repeat mistakes on a much grander scale expecting a better result. I don't try putting out a candle with my fingers and burn myself and then try to snuff out my gas stove with my hand. There's a logical progression that if a small scale attempt fails, just abandon it.
What I'm wondering is whats wrong with this guys brain that he got burned in his small scale and then thought "I know, this will surely go down great in a convention hall!"
Sexist behavior is wrong, whoever does it.
It's easier to see it when it's outside of our own culture. It's often very hard to see the significance when it's coming from the people that we identify with.
I was not at the JavaOne talk but the statement made is clear. I understand why these statements can be made. If a technical person is boring and goes on enough dates, it is easier to blame the opposite sex rather than blaming himself or herself. If a person is comparing women to space aliens, that probably says it all. It's easier to say that 'they' are space aliens rather than admitting that dating makes him feel like a space alien.
He could have easily made his point without reference to a space alien. He could have said: explain it to a nontechnical person or explain it to a child. These points become more clear, if we focus on the point on hand and the best way to express it in a non-offensive way.
This should apply equally to both men AND women (and transgender etc). People are naive, if they think only men make sexist jokes.
However, if someone apologizes for stupid behavior, I don't see a point in continuously making noise about his/her behavior, even after the apology. This only adds noise, and doesn't contribute anything.
In the field of law (which is my original background) you can pretty much walk into any sizeable firm, look around for the female partners and know you have identified the family law or employment law team.
Is this because all women who become lawyers have a burning desire to handle divorces or employment tribunals?
Perhaps?
Or perhaps was it the case that historically law firms (then run exclusively by men) were most willing to admit females into the partnership in areas deemed "feminine" before they did likewise for macho stuff like construction or commercial litigation. Thereafter, a meaningful % of female trainees looked around on their first day and figured out where their most likely root to a partnership lay. And so the cycle perpetuated.
That this cycle is increasingly being broken in the legal sector is, I'd argue, as much because of the sheer weight of numbers (more than 50% of law grads are women), as it is down to a more enlightened approach by male partners.
In the abstract, I'd argue that it is not sexism that puts people off choosing a career path, but rather it is a combination of not wanting to fight against the current (not everyone fancies being a trailblazer) as well as the innate human desire to belong to a tribe that physically resembles themselves.
Or to put it another way, I greatly enjoy the company of women, but if I had walked into a lecture theatre and been the only guy present, I'd have felt very much that I was in the wrong room no matter how much I loved the subject (or the attention!)
(Edit: Despite what I wrote in the last paragraph, I must acknowledge that currently I am working in a 4 person startup, three of whom are female including the technical lead.)
My wife is a surgeon. Surgery twenty years ago was far more sexist than IT ever was. But in medical school she was taught by some incredibly badass female surgeons who dealt with far worse sexism than bad jokes. They inspired her to be a surgeon while most of her peer went into pediatrics.
Surgery can still be sexist. While interviewing for residency, my then fiance was advised to take off her engagement ring. Apparently some programs won't hire a woman they think will take time off for pregnancy. But it is getting a lot better. Her current residency class is majority female.
IT needs some badass women who can ignore the sexism and just write awesome code. It is the only way to change the culture.