Anti-pattern theater: how to get women to quit
rachelbythebay.com
rachelbythebay.com
B: So I was looking at the pages from this weekend and it looks like we had something bad on Saturday. What happened?
W: There were too many queries failing in the Netherlands. I got a bunch of pages in the middle of the night and finally tracked the problem down to a bug in the new authentication daemon.
B: So is it working now?
W: It's working under a kludge. I wrote a restart script for it, but we need to get a patch to fix it for real.
B: When did this start?
W: Sometime before my shift.
B: Who was on call then?
W: S. He rebooted the machines and the problem went away, but it came back again during my shift so I put in the auto restart as a stopgap measure until we could get a real fix.
Her treatment of S is harsh because she doesn't couch what she says at all to protect him, like you normally do in order to promote office harmony.
It's obvious that she's frustrated from her previous dealings with certain people, and their alleged sexism (which, unfortunately, is not demonstrated in her recounting). Unfortunately, her response is to attack a hornet with a sledgehammer (with corresponding collateral damage) and then blame the result on sexism.
Alternatively:
> How do you piss off a technical woman so she will leave your team? It's easy. Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would never apply to a guy. The easiest one of these is to say "you're being too emotional". Who's going to argue against that?
Making claims like that, in effect, is simply a unilateral claim of immunity against the accusation of being too emotional: it gives one the license to be as emotional as one likes, with any criticism conveniently pre-framed as sexism.
Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that
would never apply to a guy. The easiest one of these is to
say "you're being too emotional".
Here's what you do. After the meeting, you get her on chat
and you say "wow, you were really hard on S".
These kinds of statements reinforce the stereotypes, because they reiterate the perceived status quo, where guys are non-emotional and thus never criticised for it. That whole line of reasoning is just wrong for anyone that wants to push for more equality. More equality does not mean showing women are more like the stereotypical men: it just as often means showing that men are more like stereotypical women.
The President of their company would breeze by the lab. In an effort to keep employee salaries down he would casually mention how everyone in the lab was easily replaceable. I have no idea how one would casually mention this but he somehow managed to work it into the conversation. Needless to say everyone there in the lab got the impression that they weren't wanted. I think in the span of twelve months everyone woman there quit and moved on to better jobs. When my wife moved on she found a job with double the salary and a company that really appreciates her.
For myself (a guy), if I worked someplace where I was often reminded how replaceable I was I;d be looking for a new job all the time. Likewise, if I was often told I was being "too emotional" I'd wonder if a) it was possibly true, and b) consider that perhaps I need to work someplace where my personality is a better fit.
In general, if you want to make anyone quit, keep telling them they are easily replaceable, or frequently lob baseless subjective criticisms at them.
Society in general treats boys and girls differently from the day they are born. Why should it be expected that this divergence in nurture ought to produce similar results?
I think that in contemporary society, men and women are different---not due to simple biology but due to upbringing---and while this difference isn't what's reflected in so-called 'common sense' psychology, it is a valid difference worth exploring through science.
This raises a problem. Should employers speak to both men and women the same way, or should they take sex into account when speaking to people and phrase things differently?
Changing the way you speak to someone based on a single coarse criteria is a poor way to go about social interaction.
You have an entire person in front of you and can guage how to say something based on your past knowledge of their personality, context, the way they're dressed, their current body language, anything else you've gleaned about them.
If all you know about them is that they are male or female, then you'd best just adopt a neutral posture until more information streams in.
Right now the only thing you can guess at with any real degree of accuracy knowing someones gender is which gender they prefer romantically.
In-group variation (when everyone is split up into only two groups...) is pretty enormous.
I've never liked the "Men are from Mars" approach, though it could be a stepping-stone to "many people think quite differently from me". That's a rough way to go, though (thinking a lesson learned about interacting smoothly with a "woman" or, say, a "hispanic person" will apply to everyone else in that group).
"Within six months, they had an actual user-affecting outage directly attributed to things on that team. We hadn't had any of them during my tenure running that service."
"As I've said before, enjoy your pages, guys. "
Maybe this is just typical sysadmin arrogance / all users are ID10Ts.
I also see signs of a paranoid attitude:
"I knew it was going to be a disaster and they'd use it against me".
Playing games of passive-aggressives:
"I was going to be cold and dry and only answer exactly what was asked of me."
Really if you drop of load on a co-worker in a team meeting you are going to get some blowback.
Her blog is also full of complaints of women not being treated fairly eg:
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/23/hiring/
(has to walk across the road to get to her car)
Unleash the white knights!
If your employees have to be at work after dark then you should definitely organise safe conditions for them to get home. Women are more sensitive to this because they get attacked/raped by strangers a lot more often than men. It's the real world. You have to deal with it.
HNers should be able to deal with it when they realise they are wrong and need to change their thoughts and behaviour.
Men are much more likely to be the victim of violence from strangers than women.
The vast majority of violence (including sexual violence and rape) against women is from people they know; "friends", husbands, colleagues.
This is a minor point though; I do agree that employers need to provide a safe environment for employees, and that women feel more at risk in dark car parks.
One night one of our help desk girls (yes she was 18ish) was going home and a 'punter' asked her if 'she was working...'
'No' she says and he then punched her in the face and knocked her unconscious.
Unleash the white knights? Indeed.
That's what's happening here. I'm male, she's female, and it happened exactly the same way. She's taken a common (and bull) occurrence and decided it's sexist, when it's not. It's just a bad situation, possibly with a bad company.
What they're really telling her is that she should have taken one for the team, and they would have expected any other team member to do the same. She actually succeeded in her 'show no emotion' gambit, but had no idea she had done so.
I actually agree with her that women are accused of being emotional more than men are, and it's due to stereotypes.
And I agree with comments here that say men are just as emotional about their work. I certainly am.
But the problem isn't that women are told they are too emotional. It's that mean are -not- told that. And they need to be.
1. The manager was unjustified in saying that W was "too hard on S".
2. Based on the story in the article, it's not fair to say that the manager's unjustified statement was based on sexism. There isn't enough evidence to conclude that.
3. Rachel very well might have experienced sexism in the situation she wrote about and various other ones, and Rachel simply didn't explain it well enough in her article, or could only remember this ambiguous example where it's not entirely clear that there was sexism.
Magically a huge stream of comments arrive:
"the author reached an entirely fallacious and baseless conclusion"
"without any evidence, concludes that the manager said this because she is a woman"
"Whether or not this incident was motivated by sexism, there's absolutely no indication, based on the facts presented, that it was."
"then she is overreacting. Not because she's a woman, mind you. Because she really is too touchy about this"
"she's raging over and reading so much into a statement that is, by normal standards, extremely neutral, leads me to believe that even if she has been directly accused of being too emotional in the past, then maybe there's something to the accusations"
"Playing the sexism card every time you run into a bad manager with a dysfunctional team seems like wasted effort to me."
"to look for gender based explanations just seems overly paranoid"
"It can only be used on women who give a crap about being viewed as emotional."
"I can claim that my business partners are space aliens who read my thoughts and are plotting to colonize the planet all day long, but as long as there's no shred of evidence of this, the fact that nobody appreciates the lengths I go to wear tinfoil hats and research anti-alien combat techniques is meaningless"
"it's related to "W" being a bit of a jerk than it is "W" being female"
"If you have a chip on your shoulder in re sexism, you will perceive every negative interaction through that lens"
"that, in effect, is simply a unilateral claim of immunity against the accusation of being too emotional: it gives one the license to be as emotional as one likes"
"It's obvious that she's frustrated from her previous dealings with certain people, and their alleged sexism (which, unfortunately, is not demonstrated in her recounting). Unfortunately, her response is to attack a hornet with a sledgehammer (with corresponding collateral damage) and then blame the result on sexism."
"this blog post brings to mind a different female stereotype: too much drama"
"that author's emotions are out of control in both cases - during the described incident and when she writes the post. She fails by refusing to recognize that"
"It seems overly emotional to me to write this article. (Maybe it is perfectly sensible, but to me, it seems overly emotional)."
The actual article begins with the paragraph:
"How do you piss off a technical woman so she will leave your team? It's easy. Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would never apply to a guy. The easiest one of these is to say "you're being too emotional"
This entire discussion is unbelievable - Rachel By The Bay ought to be a respected member of this community based on her blog - instead she is being attacked in a bizarre way.
Nobody wants to believe there's sexism in their industry. It's not surprising to see skepticism in the absence of strong evidence, even if it's not right either. It's much the same standard that would be applied to any controversial issue.
* she is overreacting
* she really is too touchy
* she's raging
* playing the sexism card every time you run into a bad manager
* overly paranoid
* a bit of a jerk
* [has] a chip on your shoulder in re sexism
* [has] license to be as emotional as one likes
* she's frustrated
* too much drama
* emotions are out of control
> can you point to compelling evidence that it was motivated by sexism
I haven't mentioned sexism - I have only mentioned the unbelievable response to her blog post. All her other blog posts are credible - why isn't this one?
...from which most of the things you've quoted follow pretty naturally, whether the author is male or female.
You're right, you don't need to mention sexism to make any judgements. So why should we assume that sexism is to blame when people dislike her? I've disliked most sysadmins that I've interacted with, regardless of sex, and that includes myself, when I've been forced into that role...it's a shitty job, and while somebody's got to do it, we never like the "assholes" that end up complaining to us about how our dev practices affect ops people. But the rest of us don't try to pin that on X-ism, we just accept that it's an unpopular position within any company...
Learning is an active process. You probably wouldn't be impressed by someone who demands that each Erlang blogger (in each random post) convinces them of Erlang's merits. Instead, they earn an informed opinion by actively exploring it and confronting their own prejudices.
You mention, "Nobody wants to believe there's sexism in their industry." If true, we're irrational men whose emotional wants strongly determine our beliefs.
A more rational approach is to want to believe the truth. I believe every society I know is fundamentally sexist, and the guys in them (including me) are sexist, growing up benefitting from our gender's privileges and being led to act in strange ways.
When I read this article, I can't demand that it convince me. (It's not her burden to convince sexist men of their sexism. Instead, it is up to ethical men to dismantle their privilege.) Rather, it has helpful nuggets on What Not to Do.)
You mention, "Nobody wants to believe there's sexism in
their industry." If true, we're irrational men whose
emotional wants strongly determine our beliefs.
Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing, and leads to fantastic piles of irony. Humans are all irrational; anyone who claims to be rational is, in fact, irrationally rejecting the overwhelming preponderance of evidence.
The best we can do is be aware of our irrationality and attempt to compensate with tools like checklists, blind resume screening, empirical data, and awareness of biases to inform cultural and personal behavioral modifications to minimize the harm that irrationality can do to our field, our businesses and people around us.
For example, any time a human has a defensive reaction to something and lashes out with an attempt to dismiss or discredit the speaker rather than the argument it is probably because they interpreted the statement as a personal attack on their identity. That is, if someone says "bicyclists who run red lights endanger their own lives and the lives of people around them" the people who respond angrily probably went through this unconscious thought process: "Endangering lives is bad! People who do so are bad people!" "I run red lights on my bike, so the speaker is accusing me of being a bad person!" "Well, they probably aren't even a bicyclist/don't know my specific commute/don't understand how hard it is to cycle to work every day, so what would they know?" "Whew, I'm not a bad person after all!"
And then they will probably feel superior because they rejected a poorly supported argument, or an insufficiently supported argument, no matter how much evidence is presented. What should have been evidence against their behavior instead strengthened their commitment to it. I recommend the recent book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" for a more complete explanation of this process and the relevant citations.
The practical implication of this is that whenever one's first reaction is defensive dismissal of someone's report of their personal, first-person experience of the world, it isn't because they are wrong: it is because their experience being true threatens one's own self-image. That they may be wrong or purposefully lying are merely post-hock justifications for an initial emotional response.
Act I: In which a woman explains how and why she feels excluded.
Act II: In which the male community excludes her in precisely the way she described.
Act III: In which nothing has changed.
My sixth grade 'safety patrol' volunteer group had a member who was very popular in school, but didn't do his 'shift' on the cross walk three times and was thus eligible for expulsion. Clear fact, clear rule, but a lot of people in the group didn't want to believe that the group tolerated incompetence in order to share popularity, and so many attacks were made on the methodology of taking attendance, scheduling shifts, and the definitions of responsibilities. As the 'weird' guy in the group it made perfect sense to me, here is a rule, here is a consequence, rule gets broken, consequence gets enacted. Picked up a lot of flack for that point of view.
So here we have someone who describes an experience she had a place that considers itself hip, cool, and generally superior to other places one might work. Her experience, and more importantly her interpretation of the experience, if accepted as true, reflects badly on that place. If you still work at that place, or hold it in high esteem, you have three choices:
1) Shoot the messenger - most common response seems to be this one, shoot the bearer of bad news and you can pretend bad news doesn't exist.
2) Shoot the process - this is where people who recognize that their first instinct is to shoot the messenger but are 'above all that' and yet do not reconcile the information with their own view of the world, attack the transmission channel and accuse the channel of being broken, biased, or both.
3) Hear the message, understand the brokeness it represents, and seek out ways to figure out where the system is broken and to fix it. Of course that doesn't necessarily involve a response directly to the channel so observers outside the conversation may not see the results at all.
This community is pretty small relative to the overall community of technologists, and it has some biases with respect to places, people, and concepts. I believe you are simply seeing one of those biases emerge as a side effect of the conversation.
I don't think so. I think the tech community is pretty much up its own arse and thinks it is god-like and precious.
Techies really buy into the 'we are pure', 'we only deal with evidence', 'we are the best', blah-blah. All the great myth of meritocracy and guff like that.
Anything that points out this is not true and that Joe Coder might not be perfect and it just kicks off. Oh, yeah and plain sexism as well.
But honestly, to me it doesn't sound like you're a techie. Or maybe you're just not very self-aware? Because you're exhibiting a very familiar thought pattern: "bluuuuh, those guys over there think they're so smart, let's whoop them". Every nerd who's ever been bullied for being a nerd can recognize this sort of person from a mile away. One of the dreams of the original nerd community was to get away from people like you, yet here you are, fresh as ever.
Parent was making some general observations about the nature of sexism in the tech industry and its causes. How did you get from that to this 'you're not a real techie' nonsense and jocks beating up nerds in school?
I'll tell you that I am a 'real techie' (but not a true Scotsman) and I am pretty much in agreement with what gordonguthrie said.
If you took offence to the characterisation of the IT community as generally self-absorbed and sexist, you really need to look around. How many women do you work with?
It's not the type of work that drives women out of IT, it's the people they have to work with.
When some subgroup is underrepresented in some area even though there's no statistical difference in innate ability, many people tend to automatically blame discrimination. I don't see how that can be right. For example, you could notice that Asians are overrepresented in US universities. The theory concludes that either all US universities are racist in favor of Asians (obvious bullshit), or Asians are innately smarter than whites (more obvious bullshit). Hmm. Isn't it more likely that the theory is mistaken and there can be other factors at work?
Same goes for the small number of women programmers. Sorry, you don't get to attack me for sexism until you have data proving sexism is the real culprit. Otherwise it's like blaming witchcraft.
If you happen to be committed to one premise more than the others, you will always blame one of the other premises when an observation doesn't fit your hypothesis.
In the case of sexism there are so many confounding factors that you'll never be able to say with certainty that sexism is the root cause, only that there is a good chance that it is.
If there is a good chance that something bad is happening then it seems like you could reasonably be expected to produce a non-zero amount of effort in avoiding it.
There is plenty more out there, all suggesting that women are promoted differently, treated differently, more likely to experience active gender-based harassment and are more likely to be excluded from the camaraderie and informal networking that leads to job satisfaction. Don't assume that just because you are ignorant everyone else is too. Some of us have been engaging with, measuring, quantifying and attempting to change these destructive culturally-sanctioned behaviors for a very long time.
The paper focuses on something called the "exit rate", that is, how many people with a certain education are working at a job unrelated to their education. The average exit rate over all professions and both genders is 21%. Female engineers have a pretty low exit rate of 12.9% - that is, 12.9% of women who studied engineering now work in other areas. Male engineers, on the other hand, have an extremely low exit rate of 9.8%.
The author then tries to explain the difference between "pretty low" for women and "extremely low" for men. She observes that the differentials in exit rate, across all fields including engineering, can be mostly predicted by the gender makeup of the field. Quote from the paper's conclusion:
> The results would appear to point to problems for women speci c to the engineering profession. However, I show that the excess exits of women trained as engineers, as well as their excess exits for pay and promotion reasons, are no larger than would be expected given the share of men in the field: the higher the male share, the greater the excess female exits from the fi eld, both in total and for pay and promotion reasons.
Then the author hypothesizes that improving mentoring and reducing "possible discrimination" might help reduce the gap, without giving any specific arguments.
It seems to me that the really important figure in the paper is 9.8%, not 12.9%-9.8%. That is, more males are behaving abnormally by staying programmers despite possible problems with pay and promotion, while the behavior of female engineers is closer to the average rational human being. What do you think?
Also, I'd be really interested in seeing what you think are the best papers proving that the lack of women of IT is due to sexism. Taking apart random vaguely related papers is fun, but I don't have infinite time.
If you want to "prove" that the disparity is due to men and women experiencing different cultural dynamics in male-dominated spaces (which is why research regarding male-dominated scientific fields and financial firms are relevant to the question at hand) all you need is the Census Bureau's labor statistics. The interesting research questions are what specific dynamics are at play and how we can disrupt them.
Lest you assume my contemptuous response to your willful ignorance can be ignored due to a [citation needed] tag, one paper that perhaps offers more of the background you are looking for would be the FLOSSPOLS overview of their gender-related findings in Open Source communities: http://www.flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_I... For background on the mechanisms involved on a micro level I'd suggest the book Thinking, Fast and Slow, and on a more macro level specifically regarding gender, I recommend Pink Brain, Blue Brain.
If you want to claim that the highly statistically-unlikely and culturally-variable gender disparities in pay, promotion and participation are not due to sexist dynamics, you need to provide both an alternative theory and evidence to support it. Given that the only evidence required to prove that sexist behavior is present in technical spaces are the comments to this article, the burden of proof is on those who disregard the published research on the topic and claim those behaviors are either isolated aberrations or have no effect on women's willingness to be employed in the field.
About the paper: it looks much more sloppy to me than the previous one you linked. This quote from p.12 is at the root of my dislike:
> Unlike the survey data, where claims to generality can be made via mathematical operations, generalising from ethnographic work is done via interpretation as in the humanities.
The humanities haven't been scientifically tested, so we don't know if their method leads to truth. For example, on pp. 16-17 the authors note that many women are computer users but few become IT professionals - and immediately conclude, from that fact alone, that hostile work environment must be the reason. It's fishy that there are no intermediate steps of reasoning and no alternative hypotheses. There are many such examples in the paper.
About the books: I'm already a big fan of Kahneman. Why specifically do you mention his book as support? Pink Brain, Blue Brain seems to deal with the development of children rather than with sexism in mostly-adult fields like IT, and if its conclusions are right, then sexism of male IT workers is not required to explain the small number of women in IT because differences in development are already enough. Why are you mentioning it as support?
Also, do you disagree with what I said about the previous paper? It's a little frustrating when people abandon lines of argument to start new ones.
The fact that there are few women in tech does not necessarily mean that IT is self-absorbed and sexist.
Do you look at the nursing community and assume that it is self-absorbed and misandrist simply because there are not many men in it?
Then again, personally I work at an office that is a 50/50 male/female split, so perhaps I'm not the best one to comment on these matters, I don't know what it's like at a "real" tech shop...
"Men, like shit, rise to the top".
The NHS is largely a female institution - the managers are overwhelmingly men.
I worked in Direct/Call Centre banking. The overwhelming majority of the staff were women, the senior staff were overwhelmingly men.
> 59 per cent of managers and senior manages are female and three quarters of entrants onto the NHS Management Training Scheme over the past five years have been women.
I am not sure what you want me to say.
To recap, bermanoid's question was a reply to manicdee's comment which claimed that underrepresentation of women in the tech industry, in and of itself, is evidence of sexism. Since men are underrepresented at all levels of the NHS, manicdee's theory would allow us to conclude that the NHS is sexist against men, without the need to look at any other evidence. Possible valid replies could be a) disagreeing with manicdee's argument about sexism in the tech industry, b) agreeing that the NHS is sexist against men, or c) pointing out some flaw in the above reasoning. I guess that you would answer c), but your comments so far don't seem to point out any specific flaw.
Bermanoid said there are not a lot of men in nursing therefore nursing is sexist.
'X therefore Y' does not equal 'Y therefore X' your premise is invalid.
I believe, based on many years experience of this industry that it is self-absorbed and sexist. I agree with manicdee.
I think you are really stupid. Are you sure you are a techie? What kind of techie? Do you know Haskell?
ETA: Gordon and I took this conversation offline and he seems a nice enough guy, but I will still leave my rudeness here for posterity.
I started programming in 1979. Prior to that people used to beat me up big style. I can techie-you up anyway you like.
What we had here was a group of people beating up Rachel By The Bay, and I don't like it because I was a bullied nerd.
> Techies really buy into the 'we are pure', 'we only deal with evidence',
> 'we are the best', blah-blah. All the great myth of meritocracy and guff
> like that.
So no one that qualifies as a 'techie':
* Hates Bill Gates and rails against proprietary software?
* Hates Steve Jobs and rails against propietary/close platforms?
* Trolls online forums just for the 'lulz?'
* Has every commited a 'morally wrong' crime (dodging the "hacking shouldn't be a crime if I don't really mean it"-type arguments)?
> Anything that points out this is not true and that Joe Coder might not be
> perfect and it just kicks off. Oh, yeah and plain sexism as well.
Personally, I think that the reactions here boil down to:
1) Nothing in that post comes off as out-right sexism. None of the dialog even refers directly to the fact that she's a woman.
2) Posts like this rail against 'males in the tech community' as a group.
If you're a male in the tech community, you read a post like this. Maybe you see some dialog in the post. Dialog that is claimed to be sexist. Dialog that you could see yourself saying to a woman, while in no way trying to be sexist (e.g. "you're being a little hard on person A"). You feel the need to push back against this becuase it seems like it could just be a mis-understanding.
This seems likely to be the simplest (and more probably right) explanation of the behaviour.
A respected blogger makes an observation about the industry and is howled down.
The idea that her post 'rails against males in tech community' is supported by what evidence? She left that team for another team. She has a long set of blog posts. Find the railing thing please, with evidence.
Bingo. Men in tech are supposed to be evolved, egalitarian, meritocratic, all that.
So it stings a lot to have to face the fact that many of them are sexist pricks. Better instead to find some way to deflate that so they can continue celebrating themselves without interruption.
Though I'm one of the horrible woman-hating-assholes quoted a few times above, I have no interest in denying this allegation, as I actually believe that many people in this field are sexist pricks. I've seen it many times myself, and it disgusts me, I'm always shocked when I see it, and I have, on several occasions, shouted people down for their lewd and unacceptable comments. I'm not shy when it comes to sexism, and I really try to be on the lookout for it, as I want women to feel comfortable in our field, I very much enjoy working with them.
But it's counterproductive when people try to twist normal interactions and present them as if they're motivated by sexism, and that offends me because it takes away from the attention that the problematic incidents should receive. In this case, all the guy actually said was "wow, you were really hard on S", and that just doesn't bother me that much.
Are you, danilocampus, really going to say that without any other evidence you think that alone is enough that we should scream "Sexist!" and get up in arms? Because that's all the evidence we have. To me, it sounds like the real issue is that the manager didn't want to bother figuring out who was really to blame for the problem and just wanted the incident to not have happened. I can see bosses of mine saying similar things to me after an incident in the name of smoothing over a dispute while avoiding the need to go through an expensive fire/hire cycle...
And I dunno where you're getting... Well, all of that up there.
My only point is that there are significant incentives to discredit anyone whose position points out inconvenient, unpleasant realities.
You have some coworkers who were shaped by society, their parents and friends for most of their lives and now work with/for you. One of them says something that could maybe be a tiny little bit sexist, in a private email of all places (where you can't even intervene) and the women scream "Sexist" and run away.
Makes you with the women weren't so bloody sensitive, right? It is not the picture rachelbythebay is painting, however.
Her point is that by the time this happened, she was expecting her coworkers to use the "you're too emotional". So over the weekend she prepared the most matter-of-fact way to describe the weekend incident, and still the accusation came.
There are two explanations for this: a) She was paranoid/oversensitive and overreacted, or b) There was an established pattern of such accusations, used to disregard her opinion no matter what she said and how she said it.
She called the incident the last straw. I know how I would interpret that.
If I have one gripe with what she wrote, it's that she only hints at what this pattern looked like, making it difficult to see unless you already know it's there...
Don't get defensive. No one is accusing you of being a terrible human being for having the same reaction as hundreds of other people who also live in a society and a particular field infused with sexism. Rather, they are asking you to take a step back from that first defensive reaction and think about the dynamic at play her.
Her post described men covering for their incompetence by relying on sexism to dismiss her opinion. You took that incident personally for some reason, and used the exact same sexist strategy to dismiss and belittle her opinion. All the commenter above is doing is pointing out the irony.
She has plenty of evidence that this dynamic is real and happens repeatedly: the responses to her post prove that. The only question here is whether or not people in tech who stoop to using these sexist dismissals are willing to accept any amount of evidence that they contribute to a sexist, alienating and hostile culture.
She's being "attacked" purely on the merits of what she wrote, which is exactly the way any man would be treated, exactly the way in which we treat each other in the comments, and exactly the way in which you are "attacking" us.
I actually find your comment far more "unbelievable"--though it doesn't come out and say it, and though it doesn't actually address any of the criticisms you cite, it has the strong implication that any accusation of sexism, baseless and flawed as it may be, is immune to criticism, implicitly because any such criticism is itself sexist. Which is the moral and rhetorical equivalent of suspecting any person who defends a suspected witch of themselves being a witch.
Kindly find me on Hacker News a single discussion thread which contains comments like this about a male writer of a blog post.
I signed up to this site 1557 days ago and I have never seen the like.
Choice comment about one of those people: "I would go even further and say that 'The Idiocy and Tragedy of XX' is that he thinks earnings are some measure of a human being's self worth." (Name censored because I don't want to bring up an old mean discussion.)
Here's a bonus one I found on another of his posts: "Fuck guys like this". (Neither of these comments was downvoted, bTW.)
By contrast, the commenters on Rachel's post mostly said things which amounted to "This doesn't establish what it set out to" and "It sounds like the boss you're complaining about here is a jerk." Now, you can say they're blind to the truth in front of them, but for the most part, I wouldn't describe them as harsh.
Are you kidding me?
Just about every post that touches on any remotely controversial issue engenders dozens of negative responses.
Post something about how Git's the shit? You'll get a bunch of responses about how crummy Git's error messages are, or about how user-hostile the interface is.
Post something about how Jave programmers suck balls? You'll get a bunch of comments about how bad Lisp-lifers perform when they're thrust into situations where they have to code Java.
Post about NoSQL, and you'll get a bunch of people telling you that you're an idiot for even considering MongoDB when PostgreSQL would do just fine.
Hell, post something about how some obscure paper about brane theory resolves the OPERA experiment and FTL neutrinos, and I'll probably personally tell you a tale about what an idiot the author of the paper is, and why his PhD should be stripped from him for publishing such drivel.
People here are hostile. They criticize by default, and that's the strength of the community. We never accept articles that don't offer evidence for their points, whether it's politically correct or not.
I've seen far nastier responses to most anti-Apple and anti-Google blog posts than to this one...
Critical comments about Git, indeed.
> Post something about how Jave programmers suck balls? You'll get a bunch of comments about how bad Lisp-lifers perform when they're thrust into situations where they have to code Java.
Critical comments about Java, indeed.
> Post about NoSQL, and you'll get a bunch of people telling you that you're an idiot for even considering MongoDB when PostgreSQL would do just fine.
Finally critical comments about you the poster.
I return to my original question:
Kindly find me on Hacker News a single discussion thread which contains comments like this about a male writer of a blog post.
A respected technical author writes a blog post and the response is a stream of ad hominem attacks on them with no supporting evidence.
That is precisely what I am not seeing, despite protestations that this behaviour is common, normal, etc, etc...
Except for this thread (not saying it qualifies, but it probably does in your estimation), can you point to other posts were women were being "monstered" for no reason? Although candidates for those are easier to search for because they have the word "female" in the title. Incidentally all the posts I remember that deal with women in IT are written by women.
It's witchcraft. Witches don't like being called "witches" because in today's political climate, that label is disapproved. Actually being a witch, however, is not. So they use lightly-coded language like religious tolerance, atheism, rationalism, skepticism. Thus, other witches can applaud them without admitting to witchcraft.
It's pedophilia. Pedophiles don't like being called "pedophiles" because in today's political climate, that label is disapproved. Actually being a pedophile, however, is not. So they use lightly-coded language like equal rights, LGBT, gay marriage. Thus, other pedophiles can applaud them without admitting to pedophilia.
Except of course, that your whole response amounts to "waaah, Julian called me a sexist". Yes, I did. You are a sexist.
I really don't give a shit whether you think I'm a sexist or not: frankly, the fact that you jump to that rather than actually engaging any of my points says more about you than about me. What I do give a shit about is people like you outright sabotaging reasonable discourse through nothing more than personal attacks.
It's pretty clear, given that, that your picks for "scary label" are nonsense and evidence failed comprehension, or refused comprehension. Witches are not on the upside of a power gap, seeking to continue their witchy abuses while avoiding the label "witch". Sexists are.
"My witch-hunt is just, because in my case, the witches actually exist and really do secretly control society."
The real problem is that complicated issues like this turn into exercises of identity. It happens on both sides; your side is filled with self-identified feminists immediately siding with anyone who makes an accusation of sexism. Straightforward statements pointing out that no sexism has actually been demonstrated or that it's rhetorically unfair to shield oneself from criticism for being emotional are themselves taken as expressions of sexism, in much the same way that anyone calling for moderation or pacifism was, in the Cold War, accused of being in cahoots with the communists.
The result of this is that you alienate thoughtful people. On several occasions I've spoken out on HN against genuine sexism and in favor of genuine feminist interests. But I'm not interested in getting caught up in a tribalist ideological groupthink, and I have thoughtful criticism for dishonest rhetoric, and so you read me as "sexist", in the classic "you're either with us or against us" mindset (rephrased by contemporary leftists as "you're either part of the solution or part of the problem").
Engineers can rarely see their own sexism precisely because, as a group, they lack self-knowledge and emotional intelligence.
Groups that lack emotional intelligence are always the most oblivious to their own prejudice. Outsiders consider it obvious that engineers are sexist. Engineers themselves are oblivious.
On top of that, engineers in general tend to have really inflated self-images. Many engineers just flat out think they are better than non-technical people. This arrogance means they are unwilling to accept criticism from non-engineers. Usually they deflect the criticism by claiming the person has no evidence or is making logical errors. What the engineer is really doing is missing the forest for the trees, being overly literal, failing to see things from the eyes of others, and demanding perfect evidence in situations where perfect evidence is unreasonable and unattainable.
There is a difference.
In addition, the fact that she was accused of being too emotional is supposed to a) only apply to women b) be a bogus argument in general and c) indicate sexism.
I know a) and b) are false because I have seen tons of men being too emotional and this causing real damage. A very very common example is when a product that has tons of hours, blood, sweat and tears invested into it has to be tossed because of strategic reasons. Employee X will not have any of that and will relentlessly lobby and defend the product, because the product is their baby. X is being too emotional.
In the author's defense, it didn't seem to me that the author was being too emotional in the incident. From the information provided, that is a false accusation.
About c), nothing in the story as it is seems to indicate sexism to me. Make no mistake, it looks like an unfair attack on the author. Maybe everyone hated her for some other reason, or maybe it was really sexist. We, as readers, do not know. Maybe there were other elements to the story, other events / conversations / attitudes that did not make it to the post. Who knows? If those did exist and were in there, maybe the sexism argument would be valid. Being unfair towards a person who happens to be a woman is not the same thing as sexism. The latter is a subset of the former.
When everyone in the comments accuse the author of being too emotional, they are probably referring to the fact that she is telling a story where sexism is not apparent (from the given evidence) and she is immediately attributing it to sexism.
This is a feared situation. People are afraid when someone who is in the abused side of an anything-ism call other people abusers without apparent reason. For example, I am middle eastern, and it's scary to other people when I start calling people who I don't get along with racists. This is similar to the sort of trump card argument that the author hates. It villifies the alleged abuser, even if they were not guilty, and the alleged abuser is in a disadvantaged situation to properly defend themselves. If I do this, inadvertently or not, this is considered a low blow.
You will see people all around you bending over backwards to avoid this sort of dynamic: Sheltered white people may act all nervous and awkward around people of other races because they try to act nice but come off overly fake, german people may do the same when conversation is started about jewish people (as if it was them, not other people, that caused the holocaust or as if they were guilty by association) and hell, even some MIT students will not say where they graduated from unless specifically prompted, because they are afraid to be percieved as the stereotype of high and mighty jackasses and not fairly as themselves.
The point is, sexism is a serious accusation that is not to be thrown around lightly these days. If it is to be made, there needs to be serious evidence. Otherwise, it's just foul play. Unfair attitude towards a person who is a woman is not the same as sexism.
The posters didn't say (as you did) nothing in the story seems to indicate sexism to me. They said a whole load of other stuff for which there was no evidence.
Perhaps you would like to take it up with them?
I was not agreeing or disagreeing with any of the community's response.
As part of your hit-parade, you specifically quoted me, where I said:
Whether or not this incident was motivated by sexism, there's absolutely no indication, based on the facts presented, that it was.
...which was the premise on which I based my comment (quoted) that she was overreacting, and my other comment (also quoted) that perhaps she was, in fact, overly sensitive, if she chose to interpret such a neutral act as overtly sexist.
If you disagree, and think that the author did, in fact, make a semi-plausible case that she experienced sexism at her job, then please say so and try to defend that case, but realize that the rest of us that you quoted have (quite reasonably, IMO) taken it as an obviously verifiable given that she hasn't, and our comments have been made based on that assumption.
That doesn't make us sexists, it just makes us literate.
Let me quote you:
> Quite frankly, the fact that she's raging over and reading so much into a statement that is, by normal standards, extremely neutral, leads me to believe that even if she has been directly accused of being too emotional in the past, then maybe there's something to the accusations. Some people really are overly sensitive to perceived slights, and the fact that they're women doesn't necessarily mean the criticism is unfair...
You have whipped up a fair confection here from precisely no evidence.
In other words, your analogy still supports his point.
She is not being attacked. If you disagree with the items you quoted then you should present your counter-arguments. Nearly every post you quoted is a rational opinion which deserves a fair refutation. It's insulting for you to aggregate these comments and then pass over them with blanket disregard under the defense that she is a respected member of the community, as if we should all put on the kid gloves when applying criticism to her blog post. Ironic.
Not they are not. They are mostly emotional attacks presented without any evidence.
> It's insulting for you to aggregate these comments
How so?
> as if we should all put on the kid gloves when applying criticism to her blog post
The comments I quoted weren't criticising her blog post they were attacking her as a person.
Oh, but they use such extremely formal and legal-sounding language. Doesn't that mean they're being purely logical?
Sarcasm aside, some years back I noticed that I started using language like that when I was feeling angry & defensive. "How could they say that!? I'll take 'em apart with my razor-sharp rhetoric..." I figured out after a while that whatever I was writing was probably best thrown out, and the conversation saved for when I had a cooler head (and a bit of perspective).
If that is the entire point of your blog post, then you'd best make damn sure that you're not "being too emotional" in your accusations therein.
A lot of people, myself included, think that she was being too emotional, and hence unreasonable, in her accusation of sexism in this post, without ample justification. The fact that she paid lip service to the criticism beforehand and tried to chalk it up to sexism does not absolve her from it.
Similarly, even if I say "Some people will call me racist, but they're just minority-lovers..." before I launch into a tirade about how much black people annoy me, I'm still spouting bullshit. The fact that the present author is taking an oppressed viewpoint rather than a majority one does not change the burden of proof.
But I would totally tell a man that he was being over-emotional about something. I've done so numerous times, in numerous contexts, and I've let my own emotions get in the way of my judgment on several occasions. It's a normal thing; I think most people would prefer not to work with someone who's an unreadable robot, but friction and frayed tempers can cause problems of their own from time to time. Criticizing a colleague is always awkward, and most managers would try to mediate away such conflicts within their team. Why does the writer think this is an exclusively female issue?
Not saying the tech industry is a bed of roses. But "this sucks for everyone" doesn't mean "so she shouldn't complain". It means "we should fix this for everyone."
Women have all the problems men have there, plus they are isolated, subject to sexist behavior and criticized heavily if they ever speak about their experiences. This is a case of "yes, and..." not "yes, but..."
If men don't like the way other men are treating them it is not women's responsibility or even possibly under their control. It definitely shouldn't be proposed as an excuse to dismiss or ignore women's feedback on how men treat them (which is both women's and men's problems, and is under men's control).
It just sometimes seems as if when women say "men", what they mean is actually only the top 5% of alpha males they actually recognize as men. The rest of the male population and their plight does not even register on the radar.
Yes, the problems should be fixed for everyone, and I also can imagine there are problems specific to women. Not sure they are always sexist, though. For example I also face problems as a father when I take care of my child alone at times. It occurred to me it might have parallels to the situation of women in IT. Namely, usually mothers meet other mothers (on the playground, at home, wherever). Now, if I want to meet other kids on my "daddy day", I feel a bit awkward. I haven't created the same networks that my wife did - hooking up with mothers starting from birth courses to frequent playground and mother group visits. I suppose I could call her "other mother" friends and visit them with my son, too. But it would feel a bit weird, at least at first (haven't actually tried it yet), because I am not directly their friend, I am only the friend of their friend. I wouldn't blame it on sexism, though, it is simply evolved historically, because they went to more kid related courses than I did. Even if I change the diapers once per day and my wife does it 6 times a day, it creates a distortion.
I am all for fixing the problem, but blaming the wrong reason is very counterproductive to that. Just saying "it must be sexism" prevents people from looking at other possible causes.
I'm nor sure this would never apply to a guy. Saying someone is illogical or "motivated by emotion, not reason", or is "overly sentimental" seems to be a common attack during geek flamewars.
It's also a fairly common attack during corporate shark feeding frenzies.
That it was once used to attack women in general (as opposed to individually) actually makes it more tenous to use it as an attack against a woman. The speaker in that case can be accused of being sexist, whilst if they called a man "emotional", it would force someone to address the accusation itself.
And for the specifics of the article. I see no explicit accusation of being emotional. "I was being hard on S" does not necessarily mean that the people being hard on another is emotional, since it could also mean almost the opposite: that you do not care about people's emotions. And this argument ("being too hard on") can be and is used on men.
I do not see how this article relates to sexism, rather it relates to various low blow tactics in corporate politics.
She puts this down to sexism. It's not clear why this is sexist. She is wasting his time. If he is like most managers he is very pressed for time and he doesn't need his time wasted.
In this case, sexism is a redundant explanation because other, better, simpler explanations are available. in Bayesian theory this is technically called "explaining away" and it is a good thing. Fact A is not evidence for claim B if explanation C is better.
That something isn't clear to you only means it isn't clear to you. She is in possession of an enormous volume of information about the situation. You aren't. The reasonable conclusion isn't "sexism is a redundant explanation"; it's "perhaps she has not revealed the information the led her to her conclusion".
Now ask yourself: why did you so quickly leap to the particular erroneous conclusion that sexism was not the problem? There are a lot of erroneous conclusions to come to. Or you could have come to none at all.
That or just leave.
As it appears that the blog author was in the right, framing is critical to put attitude in perspective.
I'm not a woman, I have been in situations similar to these and made similar responses and gotten different but functionally similar reactions (i.e., don't put blame where it belongs, you might make the incompetent person feel bad).
After trying to connect the success of that particular task to the project success and company welfare and getting nowhere, I eventually left.
* Explain she overreacted; tell her she is wrong.
* Claim her feelings have no merit; tell her she is wrong.
* Tell her you know how she should feel; tell her she is wrong.
* Flatly deny she encountered sexism; tell her she is wrong
* Change the discussion to center on men; minimize her response by associating it with a trivial issue "everyone" has to deal with
If she's wrong, that's what they should be engaging with. If she's treating them badly, that's what they should be engaging with. If they are just providing excuses not to take her seriously, they aren't dealing with a situation at all; they are just being jerks.
Basically, any approach should lead to concrete suggestions for changed behavior that would improve the bottom line of the company. "You are too emotional" is neither actionable nor measurable, so it is entirely unhelpful. "You were rough on S in there" is also neither actionable or measurable: if she didn't get any of the facts wrong and S looked bad, it's S's fault he acted in ways that looked bad, especially if she was responding to direct questions.
Any culture that prioritizes covering up responsibility rather than failing transparently, finding the root causes and fixing them is doomed in the long run anyway.
Because that's where I question her. This situation reeked to me of one engineer trying to shovel shit onto another one, and the response seemed to be that of a more level headed manager trying to defuse the situation so that nobody ended up fired.
Which is not something that I'm willing to pin on sexism without some evidence. Especially having been the relatively-level-headed manager (in a male-v-male situation) in the unfortunate position of being between one engineer and his rival, which is unfortunately not a very rare situation, given the types of personalities that take on sysadmin jobs. It's not pleasant, and given the expense of finding new engineers, trust me, you're willing to do anything to avoid having to fire the (seemingly competent, despite the intra-office-feuds that might arise) ones that you have, including telling the better sysadmins to shut the fuck up and stop complaining about their colleagues.
The problem with this discussion, and the reason I'm not otherwise participating in it, is that because I have a penis I'll automatically be accused of sexism if I do not agree with the author's claims.
This isn't about getting at what happened, this is about everyone needing to tip-toe on eggshells because whenever this topic is raised, everyone is automatically wrong. If you're a woman who brings up sexism, you're automatically too emotional or oversensitive. If you're a man who dares question a particular case of alleged sexism, you're sexist, but you're just too sexist to know that you're sexist.
I dislike your insinuation that someone who claims sexism can't be wrong. I also dislike the amount of psychoanalysis that's going on in this whole thread, including yours.
Everything in this thread eventually boils down to: you're a woman, you're emotional. You're a man, you're pig-headed. The whole thing is a gigantic exercise in absurd extremes that have little basis in reality.
And what if she is? Debating the correctness of her interpretation only distracts from her point that If you act in the way described towards an engineer you could make her feel like the author.
>I dislike your insinuation that someone who claims sexism can't be wrong.
The comments here focus on the event itself rather than dealing with the actual topic of the blog post. People care more about inconsequential details than the social and professional implications the author describes.
It's perfectly plausible, if you take for granted the context that she mentions -- in total & over time, it was frustrating enough that she left the job.
But the topic is "sensitive", so suddenly everyone turns into lawyers and now it's very important to find out if that particular experience is really sexism, because if not we don't have to have this excruciating conversation.
Who knew you could be sexist without, you know, groping someone or constantly making blonde jokes? This subtlety thing sucks; you have to actually think to avoid sexism, apparently.
I've personally seen
- a boss with a policy to only hire ugly or fat girls, because pretty girls distract the geeks
- a level 2 engineer passed over multiple times for promotions, because she wouldn't say fuck in the presence of three or more members of the senior engineers group
- a systems engineer bumped to team lead, then project lead, then solutions architect, generally held to be the best boss anyone in her group had every worked for and one of the highest delivering tech leadership resources in the company, quit and start a business outside of IT when guys who were consistently performing below her metrics in other teams were getting better bonuses and better base salaries, and she was being told that there wasn't money to go around for her.
- an enterprise architect come back from maternity leave (10 months) where she had been effectively part timing (10 to 30 hours a week) because the incompetent guy who'd taken over from her was hopeless and kept calling her for help, who was told that because she'd been out of the current technology scope for so long she'd have to go back to the help desk for 6 months to come up to speed and she'd then be eligible to apply for a promotion, if she did a good job. The incompetent guy who'd been badgering her for her time through her maternity leave was made permanent in her old job.
- Company christmas parties organized behind the girl's backs - so that they could be held at a strip club, while the girls got stuck holding the fort while everyone else got paid to go to the pub.
The christmas party incident, the three girls who got stuck in the office were told to their face that it was a random selection and they just happened to come up. Three girls in a pool of 40 resources, and they happened to all come up? For a party that they hadn't been told about, at a strip club?
I worked with a girl once who probably wasn't as talented/knowledgable as most of the guys in the tech pool. But she was by far the hardest worker. Absolutely crushed our ticket system metrics consistently. But could never get a promotion. At first it was just air excuses 'oh, Dave just deserved it this time.' and things that were maybe plausible. Then they got thin - guys with less experience who weren't very good and way under performing compared to her getting promotions? They just did better in the interview. She started to get pissed about it - as she was passed over for about a dozen different promotions opportunities when the majority of her peers in the tech pool agreed that she should have had the promotion - she worked her ass off. Then she got a reputation for being hard to work with and a complainer - because she had the temerity to be pissed about the blatant discrimination. Any guy who had to put up with that crap would have been just as hard to work with.
My experience has certainly been that competent girls get fucked over in IT. And yeah, everyone in IT will be on the shitty end of a bad management decision if you hang around long enough. But almost every IT job I've had, and every competent girl I've worked with has had a laundry list of bullshit like that.
When your job is diagnostic investigation and repair - you learn to start looking for linking factors and commonalities. You get good at root analysis. It's not hard for anyone who isn't an asshole to see that the crap women go through in enterprise IT, almost certainly has something to do with their gender.
Almost every guy in IT I've ever worked with gets emotional, angry, sarcastic, abrasive, abusive or annoyed when stupid and inconsiderate people (ie users, coworkers, bosses, jerks in general) waste their time or make them deal with unnecessary stupidity). I've never heard anyone suggest that those guys were menstral, or unsuited to working in IT because of it. Guys working on call after often short tempered, upset, frustrated and generally emotional from the lack of sleep after a lot of call outs - but when a girl goes through the same thing, guys in IT are often and consistently dicks about it, and act like they don't behave the exact same way.
Girls cop a huge amount of gender biased abuse in enterprise IT (in my experience and observation) and generally take it with at least as much grace as any guy takes user stupidity - and then has to put up with user stupidity as well.
I'd never have survived in IT with the shit the girls I know have had to put up with. I'd have found another career very early. When a woman with legit tech chops and a decent length career behind her in IT isn't a man hating bitch - I generally think she should get a lot of leeway for having a bit of a temper - not the kind of lynch mob response that showed up in a lot of the conversations about Rachel.
Whether or not the incident described was, in fact, sexism, it could have been and similar events should be avoided.
1. An authentication daemon crashes periodically due to a bug.
2. "S" discovers that rebooting the daemon's host prevents this from happening for a while, and does so.
3. The author is paged( 5 times ), discovers the problem, and writes a kludge script to keep the systems running until the bug can be fixed.
4. During the post-mortem meeting, she identifies "S" for his role in the events.
5. A thin-skinned manager suggests the author was too hard on "S".
6. The author, without any evidence, concludes that the manager said this because she is a woman, and is hellbent on "pushing [her] out" of the team.
The reality is that thin-skinned managers and managers overly sensitive to maintaining office decorum exist everywhere, and they don't do this based on your sex. Citing anecdotal evidence, I can say that having a penis does not shield you from accusations of being "too hard", and that hearing this from managers, coworkers, or employees, likely has nothing at all to do with sexism or a desire to "push out" women.
I can claim that my business partners are space aliens who read my thoughts and are plotting to colonize the planet all day long, but as long as there's no shred of evidence of this, the fact that nobody appreciates the lengths I go to wear tinfoil hats and research anti-alien combat techniques is meaningless.
Second, it "didn't work" likely because many extroverted bubbly manager types tend to perceive purely factual means of communication to be hostile. In fact, most human beings do this. This is the primary reason nerds with low or no psychological affect have a difficult time making friends, and are labeled "assholes" despite their lack of intention to actually be mean.
Also, this wouldn't be a story if she didn't feel that other teams didn't work that way. This implies a difference in culture, and I have had this difference pointed out to me by many women in the tech industry.
Well, without any evidence that she presented. She's been working with this particular group, and we haven't. It's not unbelievable that there have been numerous other minor instances of some form of preferential treatment or sexism. She did, after all, consult with friends, with some foresight of what was coming. While some amount of skepticism on our part might be prudent, there's also no reason to outright disbelieve her, either.
> The reality is that thin-skinned managers and managers overly sensitive to maintaining office decorum exist everywhere, and they don't do this based on your sex.
Woah. That's a lot of certainty right there. How are you able to be so assertively positive that managers -- indeed, in this context, no managers anywhere -- do this based on gender? Even subconsciously? Even without meaning to maintain a tight-knit good ol' boys drinking group?
This is what never fails to amaze me, that enough people are so certain that there's no such thing as sexism in the technology industry. Meanwhile, someone else on Reddit or elsewhere posts a picture of a co-worker and the majority of the comments are, "she's hot, you bang her yet?"
What seems to be annoying most people here is that the comments could apply equally to men or women, yet the author assumes the issue is sexism without explaining why. By doing so, the author effectively dismisses the experience and opinions of men who have been in similar situations (based on the description) and believe the issue to have a different root cause. She's making the claim that this would never happen to a guy which is clearly directly contrary to the experience of many male readers, and it's unsurprising this is going to piss people off.
Note that I'm not disputing that the post MIGHT have represented a case of sexism, just that since the post doesn't explain how the author determined their position it's useless to myself and other readers.
Let's flip the question around: how do you know when your manager is being sexist and when they're just presenting their opinion, which is fair criticism? The post appears to imply the answer is: "If the recipient of criticism is a woman, then it's sexism; men never receive this kind of criticism." This is a bold claim, and if accepted, it's impossible to disprove because any attempt to disagree will see you labelled as sexist - which is the second source of frustration among people with a different opinion on this thread.
The whole point was to illustrate how sexism at work can come in far more subtle forms than "my boss keeps pinching my ass" or "I can't stay late because that's when the guys all gather around the biggest monitor and watch porn" or even "too many fsck jokes".
I read the post; that's the point I came away with, and I came back to the HN discussion to see if anyone else in the community had similar experiences to share, suggestions about how to wrestle with this kind of subtle sexism, etc..
Why in the world would I need to be convinced that her particular example could be proven to be part of a pattern of sexism? Why, in a blog post, would she take the time to document all of the other experiences that created the context that convinced her this was sexism at work?
Maybe some of you know the company & are even working there? I didn't feel there was any accusation against me. I don't know anyone involved (the author included), so even if somehow she was some weirdo who invented the whole story, or drastically misintepreted the situation/context, that's completely beside the point.
The point was to start a conversation; that this experience could be part of a subtle version of sexism is perfectly plausible; and yet somehow so many commenters here are completely avoiding that conversation, and instead reverting to this overly-formal stilted legal language and demanding incontrovertible proof that this specific incident can be validly ascribed to sexism.
Who cares? She sounds like she has a reasonable grasp of the situation; why shouldn't she have the benefit of the doubt? (What's the horrible cost to avoid?)
And the few people who seem aware of what's happening here are too busy pointing this out to have the conversation.
That's fine, but it didn't illustrate sexism at work at all. That's the criticism.
The card was played anyway.
Are you in the club of people saying she needs to document all of the times that card was played against her in the past (and not played against male coworkers), or "it wasn't sexism"?
She explained the context. The card is played all the time. She tried this little experiment, and did everything she could think of to avoid it short of speaking in a robot voice. No dice.
Is this some kind of "proof" that it was sexism and couldn't be anything else? Of course not; but she was convinced enough (from her total experience) that she left the job. "The straw that broke the camel's back" is just a tiny straw. The expression assumes there is already a massive bale already on board.
Hell, even if further investigation (video footage, I guess?) somehow showed that this case was most likely not related to her gender at all, the problem is still there: the environment felt unpleasantly sexist to the woman working in it.
Is this not worth talking about? It's a deep subject, and many companies are affected in non-trivial ways; main point #2 of the blog post was that because she was forced out by this discomfort, the company is suffering real losses. Good IT workers are not interchangeable, and you might lose a cornerstone of your business due to seemingly-trivial mistakes repeated many times.
I'm in the club of people who don't think she told a convincing story in this blog post. All she illustrated was a scenario where she felt she was treated unfairly, annotated with her opinion that it was out of sexism. There isn't much to learn about there--certainly less than I've learned from other stories of sexism in technology. There's a difference between picking out a subtle instance of sexism and picking out a completely ambiguous situation where one person feels they've been mistreated and assuming it's sexism.
Really, I'm not especially critical of the author here. She was probably just venting. For something to be Hacker News material, it should probably be a little more than merely an instance of venting.
AFAIK, you didn't even get a chance to bring up any of those other, better examples; the discussion of the actual topic didn't happen. Maybe if you'd coupled those stories with the point that "companies can crumble because of these mistakes" that would have been a good starting point?
Larger point -- there are many hundreds of HN stories that just drift past every day with few votes and little to no discussion; their arguments are weak, they aren't interesting enough, they're just rehashing old ideas, etc..
Obviously, that's not what happened here -- this discussion now has ~175 comments that are emphatically not lukewarm suggestions that maybe there's a better post out there to serve as a lynchpin for a discussion of subtle sexism.
I'm a man and I've also been in the situation of overly sensitive office managers. Maybe this problem does happen to women more often than men, but to say that it never happens to men is completely untrue.
Playing the sexism card every time you run into a bad manager with a dysfunctional team seems like wasted effort to me. In the case above it's really hard for me to get past this developer's sour grapes to know if there was real sexism or just inability to recognize her (or anyone's) competence.
I'd rather see some thoughts on how a reasonably competent team loses a solid female developer.
There's a difference there -- with the woman, the manager is attacking her as a person. With the guy, he is directing the commentary towards the man's behavior.
I don't really see a distinction. To me calling someone an asshole is equally a personal to calling someone shrill.
This is why I found this interesting -- these are mistakes that can happen in perfectly competent teams, and men on the team may be unaware that they're doing things that would be annoying to a targeted male co-worker, but will make a female co-worker feel like she's trapped in a sexist environment (and may irritate her enough that she leaves the company).
Even more enlightened folks tend to have some layer of X-ism built in to their thinking; it's hard to avoid. It takes a lot of training to avoid expressing it in subtle ways, and to see others expressing it.
Seriously, I had my (white, upper-middle class) uncle tell me racial discrimination didn't exist anymore in many parts of the US anymore, based on what he saw around him.
Unfortunately, if you're in the less-favored group, you don't have that luxury of blindness, and (especially after a few really blatant cases) you'll tend to see it everywhere.
Here's the relevant part, from the post:
It's a very bizarre and stunted conversation. The woman is clearly going to great lengths to not elaborate. She's answering things as succinctly as possible so as not to give you any way to claim that she's being emotional. It doesn't matter! You can still play that card!
Here's what you do. After the meeting, you get her on chat and you say "wow, you were really hard on S". It doesn't matter that she was answering direct questions posed by the boss and had to answer them. The more you accuse, the more it becomes true, so stay at it!
I don't see any hint of missing context, I plainly see the claim that "wow, you were really hard on S" is an accusation of "being emotional." Which is bollocks, plain and simple.
If there was more to the story, then it should have been presented if the author wanted to rack up page views by blogging about sexism in the field.
If there's not, then she is overreacting. Not because she's a woman, mind you. Because she really is too touchy about this.
Quite frankly, the fact that she's raging over and reading so much into a statement that is, by normal standards, extremely neutral, leads me to believe that even if she has been directly accused of being too emotional in the past, then maybe there's something to the accusations. Some people really are overly sensitive to perceived slights, and the fact that they're women doesn't necessarily mean the criticism is unfair...
> Quite frankly, the fact that she's raging over...
"Raging" seems loaded to me. Tone-wise, her post struck me as more sardonic than anything -- detached.
> ...leads me to believe that even if she has been directly accused of being too emotional in the past, then maybe there's something to the accusations. Some people really are overly sensitive to perceived slights...
We really should try harder to not psychoanalyze people we don't know based on their blog posts. Clearly she was in a frustrating situation, and that situation culminated in this particular event, which she felt was unfair. I'd be inclined to leave it at that at this point -- sort of an Occam's Razor Of Psychology.
Not the parent, but I don't psycho-analyze people based on their blog posts unless their blog posts are devoted to psycho-analyzing someone else.
If you open that door in your discussion, then its not unreasonable to have people walk through it.
I would expect that her opinion of the situation should carry more weight than ours.
If she had written a post psychoanalyzing someone else's blog post, I might agree with you. But, that's not what happened, so I do not think she opened this particular door for us.
It probably would to the other people involved in her company, but to us---3rd party obvservers, we have to suspect bias from the self-proclaimed "whistle blower".
We at least know what our own biases are, and can try to avoid them, but regarding her bias which might be baked into her statements and recollection all we can do is speculate.
Now we can disregard that notion if her actions suggest that she is both unbiased, and correct but no one should naively take someone else's word on a topic simply because they have a first hand account.
Final rejoinder: she psycho-analyzed the manger in claiming that saying X implied hidden sexism or a sexist culture even though on its own X is not sexist (i.e. saying someone is "too hard" on another is motivated by the thought that women are "too emotional").
If reading hidden motives isn't an open door to psycho-analysis, then I don't know what is. Apologies, if I misunderstood her writing.
I would call that a situation that is best left unwritten about.
But you're claiming we should "leave it at" the point where she's assumed to be correct, and telling it as it is, assuming that her anecdote was, in fact, an instance of gross sexism, indicative of a problem within the IT community.
Personally, I consider "leaving it" via Occam's Razor to mean assuming nothing new, which in this case would mean discarding her anecdote. Hell, I'm even willing to accept her anecdote as true, I merely reject the consequent, the conclusion that because some guy thought she was being harsh to a co-worker that means that the guy was sexist. Fine, she was upset, but I see no reason to assume that anything here had any relation to her being female rather than male, certainly nothing she related would support that fact.
Really, do you think that's so unreasonable?
Which makes for an ineffectual argument. It doesn't mean her point is wrong, but it means she failed to adequately support it.
Who "adequately supports" an anecdote in a blog post? You just tell your story as you saw it, and if the topic is interesting, it can be a base for good conversation.
Here's another viewpoint no one seems to be discussing: the fact that she was seeing a pattern of sexism that was serious enough for her to leave the company is not disputed. WTF happened there, eh? I venture to suggest that it wasn't all in her head, and that it's a problem worth a better discussion than "is her evidence adequate".
I suppose because of the "sensitive" topic, she should be proving that this particular story is 100% factually true, and pack those few paragraphs with footnotes to the dozens of other events that would show that her interpretation is sufficiently supported?
This is all so silly. The stilted legal-defense language exploding everywhere isn't helping anyone.
(Side note: no intention to rail on your comment in particular; this started as a one-liner).
People can tell when you have an issue with someone on a team, even if you are very careful to do nothing 'wrong', because your behavior changes due to the being very careful. And managers don't necessarily assign fault in a manner that you would agree with, such as the terrible person is terrible is the root of the problem. The proper solution is to get out, which I did, and I'm glad to hear the author did. But to look for gender based explanations just seems overly paranoid.
I'm still in school. This does not encourage me regarding entering the industry.
They do not, however, come up in every company. Culture matters.
I read the article as demonstrating a particular dirty trick and it demonstrated it well. To me the fact that the trick can be used to discriminate against women was just a part of the background, not an essential part of the article.
That's why it doesn't bother me that the author omitted the proof of connection between her being female and the trick being used on her. By the way, what kind of proof would you accept?
I saw it as a tactic that can be used against anyone; there's nothing sex-specific about it.
That's the point of the article. She found her particular string of experiences (and all of the other similar experiences not listed in the post) frustrating enough that she needed to leave the job, and the team suffered her loss (probably without ever understanding why she left, or how they could retain another equally-talented female techie).
This is not going to be intuitive to every manager or techie. It's worth discussing.
The work environment sounds screwed, good on the OP for moving on.
But it sounds like "W" is the kind of antisocial geek who just has to explain how stupid their colleague is, and how much better they are.
From what I've read, this sounds more like it's related to "W" being a bit of a jerk than it is "W" being female...
She gave direct, (presumably) factual answers to direct questions about a colleague's solution to a problem and that's "going off"?
Perhaps her tone was snide or condescending, but that information is not supplied in the post, so you can't really judge based on that.
- the point of the post was not to prove that there is sexism in technology, but rather to show how sexism can drive away women
- that the existence of sexism in tech is one of the assumptions of the article, which is pretty reasonable given:
- sexism exists everywhere and there's no reason to think tech would be excluded
- the small number of women in tech
- the numerous other women who work in tech who have /said/ they've experienced sexism
- that she worked with these people for however long, and there's obviously numerous other encounters she's had with them that aren't relayed here because that wasn't the point of the article
- that just because men have a problem as well as women doesn't mean women cannot have that problem worse
- that there is definitely a range of social responses that are culturally permissible for men and not women, and that tech workers are not some sort of hyper-enlightened übermenschen who have utterly cast off the shackles of their culture and now see everything with perfect clarity
I'm not saying that we can know for sure that there was sexism involved here, but to call thinking that, "entirely fallacious and baseless" is complete and utter bullshit.
edit: gosh darn markdown
This is management 101 knowledge, so the "thin-skinned manager" (TSM) should've known it.
Which leaves two possibilities: incompetence or malice. However, the former option equates to a discriminatory position by default, so either way the TSM is guilty of sexual discrimination and is party to the constructive dismissal.
Interestingly that is independent of the gender of the TSM but the fact remains that women are more likely to be negatively treated with respect to emotional behaviour.
My disappointment is greatest to see the production of the old canard that "anyone can be treated like this", as though it is somehow acceptable to be an incompetent manager. It isn't.
Systemic and thoughtless sexism is alive and well and thriving in the IT industry. Stamp it out and reap the benefits of a huge and highly competent workforce segment. Ignore it and lose talent. Your call.
[1] Brescoll, V.L. and Uhlmann, E.L. (2008). Can an angry woman get ahead? : Status conferral, gender, and expression of emotion in the workplace. APS. http://socialjudgments.com/docs/Brescoll%20and%20Uhlmann%202...
(Maybe it is perfectly sensible, but to me, it seems overly emotional).
The author appears to be a female sysadmin, in Ireland, with some time in Google, or a contractor for Google.
Really excellent stuff, and you know, sorry for my irrelevant comment, but something, any comment can serve to get a deserved link up onto the front page.
High-tech jobs are very stressful (after all, each of us is immensely smart and is surrounded by morons :) and managing and controlling the stress is a part of the job. Failure to do so is a professional failure, especially when it is support/operations type of the job. Instead of recognizing her problem and trying to deal with it, the author pulls the sexism card. Next time her boss and others may be not that fortunate, and it may cost them job, reputation and/or lawsuit.