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I've observed this sort of behavior in groups where the group is invested in the allegation not being true.

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.

> 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.

"It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists." -- Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash

First you must stop making offensive blanket generalizations about techies. Even if you're a techie yourself, that doesn't give you license.

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.

What on earth are you talking about?

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.

So great, you're exemplifying the shoot-the-messenger style under discussion. Well done.

Truth hurts.

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.

Truth isn't the only thing that can hurt, though. Ignorance and malice can hurt too, especially when combined... Let me try to explain how I understand this issue.

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.

There is an interesting issue in the philosophy of science regarding the "hard center" of theories. Basically any prediction about a reasonably complicated situation will rely on a large number of premises.

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.

We have data. A brief sampling: http://www.nber.org/papers/w15853.pdf, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1508924, http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2002/FERREIRA/FERREIRA..., http://www.scribd.com/doc/18370009/Sources-of-Financing-for-...

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.

Only the first of those four articles deals with women in IT jobs. It is behind a paywall but I found a freely available copy here: http://www.mcgill.ca/files/economics/leavescience_all.pdf . It's a nice article. I don't think it supports laying the blame on sexism, though.

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 specic 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 field, 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 don't have time to bother to learn about a topic, why do you assume you are more knowledgable on it than people who do spend their time studying the topic at hand? Your theory boils down to "Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that." You can "take apart" as many papers as you want to maintain your ignorance, but all you do is make yourself irrelevant to the discussion.

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 labor statistics: if you say they're all I need, it seems that you dismiss the argument I made above, that disparity of outcome does not imply discrimination all by itself. Why?

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.

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?

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...

My girlfriend is a health visitor and a nurse with 30 years experience. Let me give you a quote from her, solicited over breakfast:

"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.

http://www.nhsconfed.org/Publications/Documents/Management%2...

> 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.

Good, I hope things are getting better. My other half works for Lothian NHS Trust - their board is 17-8 men to women (for a majority female workforce): http://www.nhslothian.scot.nhs.uk/OurOrganisation/BoardCommi...

Do you have an updated answer to bermanoid's question about the nursing community?

Men are over-represented in the management of nursing in relation to their proportion of the workforce.

I am not sure what you want me to say.

That seems to answer a different question, not the one bermanoid asked.

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.

Manicdee said IT is self-absorbed and sexist therefore there are not a lot of women in it.

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.

No, manicdee said "How many women do you work with?" as an argument to prove that IT is sexist and no one should get offended at allegations of sexism. So both cases were "Y therefore X".

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.

> First you must stop making offensive blanket generalizations about techies. Even if you're a techie yourself, that doesn't give you license. But honestly, to me it doesn't sound like you're a techie.

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.

This whole thing seems like a strawman. You're stating that all (or most) 'techies' believe that we're in some sort of utopia where it's impossible for another 'techie' to do any wrong? Really?

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.

Again, really? Who here thinks that 'Joe the Coder' is perfect? Aren't we as a tech community filled with 'colorful' personalities? Don't we constantly have people bickering to the point of ridiculousness over the most trivial thing possible in forums/mailing lists?

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.

You are entirely missing the point. I haven't commented on her post. I have only summarised the responses to it - which is a stream of ad hominem (or indeed ad feminam) invective.

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.

I said 'posts like this' for a reason. I think people here are (probably 'were' by this point) responding to a general idea rather than the specific post (unfortunately).

> I've observed this sort of behavior in groups where the group is invested in the allegation not being true.

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.

>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...

Campos.

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.

I have to admit, the following thought is pretty scary:

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...

It's one thing to recognize a problem exists. It is much harder to accept the ways in which our unintentional actions contribute to that problem. I suggest reading this recent apology at Kotaku for an example of how this can play out: http://kotaku.com/5864134/to-whom-i-have-offended-an-open-le...

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.

This holds true for all kinds of pricks, sexist or not, in tech or not; that's what makes them pricks to begin with - their inability to recognise their flaws and a lack of willingness to change.

> 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.

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.

Phil

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.

The single most negative reaction I've seen to a blog post on HN was directed at Jason Calacanis (with #2 going to Michael Arrington), though I agree only a minority get strong negative comments.

Comments like "I'm pretty sure the author reached an entirely fallacious and baseless conclusion"? In four years, you have never heard anyone say the author of an article is wrong? I'm pretty sure you can find people saying much harsher things in response to any post by Michael Arrington or John Gruber. And if you only want to include bloggers who are also HN members, its seems like Sebastian Marshall (lionhearted) is verbally eviscerated almost every time a post of his makes the front page.

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.

Kindly find me on Hacker News a single discussion thread which contains comments like this about a male writer of a blog post.

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...

> 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.

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.

Obviously discussing with you is completely pointless, because you will only see what you want to see.

What I want to see is a link to a post in which a male poster has been monstered in entirely personal terms with no supporting evidence.

That is precisely what I am not seeing, despite protestations that this behaviour is common, normal, etc, etc...

I tend to not bookmark such comments, in fact they tend to get flagged and buried. There is no easy way to search for them either.

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.

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2010/02/why-diversity-m... http://hoydenabouttown.com//20080723.2001/matthew-garrett-on...

...off the top of my head.

I think you talk about something else. The topic was HN discussions. That there are examples in the industry is no question.

"If you want to get rich, stop being a fucking joker"

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3246259)

It's just the next act of Anti-Pattern Theatre.

  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.

Okay, we should probably tighten it up a bit, but I say we take this show on the road!

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.

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.

> Nearly every post you quoted is a rational opinion which deserves a fair refutation

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.

> They are mostly emotional attacks presented without any evidence.

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).

"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"

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.

It's not that surprising. There's little or no clear evidence in the post that her negative experiences were more motivated by sexism than by more mundane personal issues. Her environment was definitely messed up, but can you point to compelling evidence that it was motivated by sexism?

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.

With all due respect there is precisely no evidence in any of her voluminous writing that (and I quote):

* 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?

There's insufficient evidence both ways. Lack of evidence plus emotional topic equals lots of vehement criticism. I'm not saying it's right, just that you shouldn't be so shocked.

Shocked? No. Willing to quietly sit by while the "vehement criticism" (actually rampent, foul sexism that would never be directed at a male tech blogger) is condoned and defended and is accorded more respect than the original article from a respected blogger? Also no. The latter is happening in public in a documented form so there is more than enough evidence to "prove" it happened.

Her other blog posts are perfectly credible, and she comes across as a somewhat harsh, and typically cynical sysadmin...

...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...

Personally, my evidence of institutional sexism (racism, etc) comes from glancing at rooms full of software developers, knowing a bit about the world (what gender have all the US presidents "coincidentally" been?), and simply asking female-bodied people. Not to mention probing my ideologies, and those of my fellow men.

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 make good points. But...

  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.

That's probably true to an extent. Most people are irrational at least in some areast. In this case, I don't think they're letting their desires determine their beliefs, just demanding better evidence in this case before they allow themselves to believe the unpleasant thought, in particular, before they accept the author's claim of being wronged. Perhaps I, too, am being too generous.

... and, in the method of disbelief they choose to employ, they provide the very evidence they are demanding.

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.

It's sexism. Sexists don't like being called "sexists" because in today's ethical climate, that label is disapproved. Actually being a sexist, however, is not. So they use lightly-coded language like drama, emotional, touchy, frustrated, paranoid and the sexism card. Thus, other sexists can applaud them without admitting to sexism. And on places like Hacker News, sexists can band together to defend themselves against accusations of sexism, using the downvote button to make opponents give up in disgust, leaving them to be sexists together and in mutual acknowledgement that they're not really sexist at all.

It's communism. Communists don't like being called "communists" because in today's political climate, that label is disapproved. Actually being a communist, however, is not. So they use lightly-coded language like 99%, special interests, police brutality, and equality. Thus, other communists can applaud them without admitting to communism. And on places like Reddit, communists can band together to defend themselves against accusations of communism, using the downvote button to make opponents give up in disgust, leaving them to be communists together and in mutual acknowledgement that they're not really communists at all.

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.

Communism as the only opposite to corrupt, massively unequal crony capitalism? Sounds like you're a communist, comrade.

Except of course, that your whole response amounts to "waaah, Julian called me a sexist". Yes, I did. You are a sexist.

I was identifying an unfair rhetorical tactic on your part. Not every criticism of abusive corporate and government practice amounts to communism, not every criticism of religious intolerance amounts to witchcraft, not every criticism of homophobia amounts to pedophilia, and not every criticism of a vague, venting blog post vaguely complaining about sexist treatment without really illustrating it amounts to sexism.

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.

Every word of what I wrote was meant literally and intended to describe the very real phenomenon of sexists who want to avoid the label "sexist" while being sexist, and who use their majority power in vote driven web sites, or their shout-down power in comment threads, to drive away anyone who attempts to apply the label "sexist" to them. And actually the same applies to the various other disapproved labels, such as "racist" and "homophobic" - in all these cases, liberal gains in the last 100 years or thereabouts have made owning the label in public uncomfortable. But so long as you can weasel around the label, the deed itself carries little opprobrium. And so we get this conspiracy of mutual non recognition.

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.

> 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").

You should probably be aware that such statements are bordering on libelous. Be aware of your jurisdiction if you are going say things like that.

I live in Britain, libel capital of the known universe. Calling people names over here is as reckless as smoking while sitting on a ten foot heap of gunpowder. Fear me, for I am fearless.

Part of the issue is that engineers believe they are perfectly rational creatures with no feelings. What this actually means is that they are unaware of their feelings and so their feelings control them without them knowing it.

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.

Engineerist.

What is the difference between criticizing a group and being prejudiced towards a group?

There is a difference.

Here is your argument: If you say "The easiest way to launch an undefendable argument against a person who is a brown elephant from mars is to claim that they have too few stomachs" and then I accuse you of having too few stomachs, obviously I am wrong, or there is something inherently wrong with my argument. This is false.

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.

You write a long post the need for serious evidence in response to a post which documents a series of accusations against Rachel By The Bay for which there is precisely no evidence what so ever.

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 merely pointing out a flaw in your argument (which was not the lack of proof. That was for the author's argument) and then pointing out a flaw in the author's argument (that nonetheless would have not detracted from any point but was confounding the main problem) and then elaborating upon a possible reason why the response from the community was so visceral (which I think is an adequate response to you thinking the situation is unbelievable).

I was not agreeing or disagreeing with any of the community's response.

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.

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.

So Rachel is required to give evidence - but the people attacking her are allowed to allege anything they like with no evidence what so ever

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.

Why would his lack of sufficient stomachs have anything to do with whether or not he is right? It is a green tie argument, or in debate terms, fails to clash. It is just an excuse to avoid engaging with the actual point.

In other words, your analogy still supports his point.

Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would never apply to a guy.

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?

Why do you assume guys are never criticised in this way? HN is full of responses claiming some guy is wrong, overreacting, looking too hard for a certain type of explanation, defending against something that should be ignored, having a chip on ones shoulder re <something>, claiming blanket immunity against X, that there must be 'more history to it', etc. In all cases, these are instances of the guy being perceived as being overly emotionally involved in the subject.