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Comment by davidhansen | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure the author reached an entirely fallacious and baseless conclusion. My understanding of the events are thus:

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.

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> 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.

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?"

The whole point of the blog post was to illustrate an incidence of sexism at work. The blog post failed to do so. It seems willfully perverse to turn around and push the burden of proof on those of us who are simply pointing that out.

Indeed. I really don't understand the purpose of the post.

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.

Burden of proof, what? This is not a court proceeding; it's a discussion thread about a blog post.

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.

> 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".

That's fine, but it didn't illustrate sexism at work at all. That's the criticism.

She was not illustrating aggressive sexism where it's blatantly obvious; that's my point. She was covering a more subtle variety, wherein (in this example) the "too emotional" card was played, with her, all the time simply because (it was clear to her) she was a woman. She ran a simple experiment, and in this interaction didn't even volunteer information that might seem critical, just answered questions simply and without elaborating or making any additional comment (like, "yeah, that was kind of frustrating that I had to be woken up to fix this, even though it was X's shift").

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.

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"?

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.

It's possible she could have chosen a better example. But hey, this is what actually happened in the particular event that caused her to decide enough was enough, and leaving the company was the most important part of the post (i.e., this matters to businesses beyond just "ah well, some women may be a bit annoyed"). That made it an important post to make (vs. venting at a random ambiguous event) & discuss (I thought).

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.

That says more about Hacker News than anything. Inciting a flamewar over sexism does not demonstrate the value of the original flamebait.

The claim was "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."

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.

The issue isn't sensitive managers, it is that sensitive managers call men jerks, lazy or assholes, but they'll say that women are "shrill" or "too emotional".

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.

Your examples could just as easily be read the other way -- that "jerk", "lazy" and "asshole" are directed at the person whereas "shrill" or "emotional" are towards behaviour. I don't see what criteria you're using to put these examples in one category or the other.

... it is that managers call men jerks, lazy or assholes, but they'll say that women are shrill or "too emotional".

I don't really see a distinction. To me calling someone an asshole is equally a personal to calling someone shrill.

The distinction is that, in many peoples' eyes, "shrill" as a personal insult is almost always directed at women. There is a stereotype of a shrill woman.

And asshole as a personal insult is almost always directed at men.

I think that's the point, though -- this was emphatically not sexism of the "requests for sex acts" variety.

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.

Whether or not this incident was motivated by sexism, there's absolutely no indication, based on the facts presented, that it was. All that's there is a bare assertion that "wow, you were really hard on S" is somehow equivalent to "you're being too emotional" in terms of sexism, and that we should be offended.

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...

Granted that as an example of sexism in the industry, the post could have been written more thoroughly. In defense of anyone in a situation like this, I often find myself frustrated at a particular thing, and tempted to write about, except that I realize I don't have good enough notes (or often any notes at all) and I don't have a precise enough memory to get enough of the background right to be able to present it well.

> 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.

> We really should try harder to not psychoanalyze people we don't know based on their blog posts.

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.

Again, she worked with the manager, we did not. She was in that situation, we were not. All that we have to go on is words on a screen -- which are affected by our own biases, states of mind, and interpretation.

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.

> I would expect that her opinion of the situation should carry more weight than ours.

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 often find myself frustrated at a particular thing, and tempted to write about, except that I realize I don't have good enough notes (or often any notes at all) and I don't have a precise enough memory to get enough of the background right to be able to present it well.

I would call that a situation that is best left unwritten about.

>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.

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?

> Well, without any evidence that she presented.

Which makes for an ineffectual argument. It doesn't mean her point is wrong, but it means she failed to adequately support it.

It's a blog post. She's not "presenting evidence" or even making an accusation; she's telling a story.

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).

Okay, you do realize 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

If you claim sexism then you need to show sexism. None is shown here that I can see.

Very few if any articles on dealing with situations such as disease need to prove the existence of the disease. It seemed to me that the existence was pre-assumed given the need to consult with others before the meeting. This looks to be the story of the end and not the beginning.

There's nothing gender-specific about that. Men also have personality conflicts at work and are subject to being called out for over-reacting or displays of bad temper. Sometimes such conflicts are isolated and quickly resolved, other times they fester and create a headache for the team's supervisor. I've been in all these situations during my career, as have most people I know. The writer seems to think that men never need or want to consult their friends about how to handle problems in the workplace, which is just nonsense.

I agree, I see nothing gender based here. I'm a guy, and I've had a similar interaction with another guy on a team. He was pretty terrible, and I eventually decided the only way I could deal with him was to limit my interaction to bare minimum ("give him enough rope to hang himself"). It involved clipped matter-of-fact-no-elaboration exchanges like this example. My manager ended up blaming me for the other guy being terrible, manager said it was because I was not supporting this guy enough.

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.

This is interesting. Moving from sexism to generally dealing with crappy coworkers: you can't just limit your interaction and distance yourself from them. Part of giving them enough rope is to make it clear that you're doing your best to help them (without unduly compromising your own productivity), and they're still failing. You have to perfectly walk the line between being nice and not enabling them to come out alive.

I'm still in school. This does not encourage me regarding entering the industry.

These kinds of issues come up in every issue. It's not just tech.

They do not, however, come up in every company. Culture matters.

You don't seem to appreciate the amount of forethought she not only felt she had to commit to, but self-control to execute her communication that way, and that it still didn't work. Only an idiot would provide "evidence" to a subordinate that they were trying to push them out, in any case. Discrimination is very hard to prove, and it's easier to just "get away".

I'm not sure what you're saying here. People who are discriminating against women avoid given evidence of that fact, so a lack of evidence of discrimination is evidence of discrimination?

The idea of evidence is not implied by the article, only by the commenter above. She is describing her experience, and it jibes with other women's experience whom I have heard. If you don't accept the validity of the viewpoint, just do that as such.

Ok. First, I will point out that my appreciation of her effort has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that her conclusion - that the manager or company in question is actively trying trying to force her to quit due to her gender - has zero support.

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.

You're demanding evidence from an article that doesn't state up front that it's trying to present it; it's just telling her story as an anti-pattern. That's all I mean. If she had a legal case, she wouldn't discuss it.

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.

> I'm pretty sure the author reached an entirely fallacious and baseless conclusion.

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?

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.

I saw it as a tactic that can be used against anyone; there's nothing sex-specific about it.

Sure. But it's going to make women on the team much more uncomfortable, because of the stereotype. If I were a blond man, and my manager would reel off a string of blond jokes whenever I made some mistake, it'd be pretty irritating. If I were a blond woman, it'd be probably be still more unpleasant.

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.

It can only be used on women who give a crap about being viewed as emotional. The proper response to such a thing is more long the lines of: "Why does your job description list that you're looking for passionate (or whatever other BS they are feeding people to get them to view the company as anything more than a source of income) people? Passion is an emotion, you've preselected for emotional people and are now complaining about it, you really need to make a decision as to what kind of people you want at your company and act accordingly."

The work environment sounds screwed, good on the OP for moving on.

Contrary to your claim (6) there is plenty of evidence for the likelihood of (5) being higher if the party is female e.g. see [1].

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...

"W" is being a bit unreasonable by going off on one at "S". Both of them kludged a fix, although "W" was a little smarter.

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...

Er, really?

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.

If S's fix is a temporary solution and he/she doesn't notify anyone else - especially the next on-call shift - there is a large bone to pick with S's actions.

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