Moral implications of being moderately successful computer scientist and a woman
sigops.org
sigops.org
It makes me wonder if I just so happen to run in circles that are ostensibly devoid of misogyny or if I am blind to it.
A close friend of mine went to a top math/science/engineering college. A professor called her into his office to tell her that she was doing well above average, and that she should find a non-technical line of education and work. His rationale was that she had to be 10x as good as men to make it in a technical field. But she's not 10x as good, so give up now.
She went on to work on highly technical software on the campus of another elite technical college. While walking around that campus in a sweatshirt from her alma mater, a man stopped her and asked her where she got the sweatshirt. She said she graduated from that college. He laughed and said, "No, really, where did you get it?"
Another friend of mine was an intern at a FAANG and her manager said he'd make her a full-time offer if she slept with him. She didn't. On her first day at the company she ended up joining after college, she was asked out by a man more than twice her age. Given her internship experience and not knowing how powerful this man was at the new company, this was complicated to navigate.
It turns out that man was asking out every woman of East Asian descent that was single and that came into contact with him, many during their first interaction with him. That included teenage interns. He managed to get one of those interns to drink a bit too much and walk over to his apartment alone with him. Luckily, she figured out what was going on before he could get what he wanted, but the experience still resulted in significant trauma for her.
These kinds of things are still horrifically common. But all of these examples happened in relative privacy, so it's easy to not notice it if you're not on the receiving end of it and don't have friends that want to talk about it. Understandably, many don't want to talk about it, especially with coworkers.
Uhmmm, there is strong evidence that women have an easier time in tech to receive responses to their job applications, to get invited to interviews and actually get the job. There is no competence "DPS check" and tech competence doesn't shield you from being manipulated.
Then there is the well kept secret that you get most of your tech competence from working 40 hours a week, every week. Not from side projects at home, not from 4 to 5 years of university. Getting your foot in the door is far more important than your academic background.
For most of my career I've worked in mixed teams and can't recall seeing overt misogyny at all within the team. However, there's been a client or two who want to "talk it man-to-man", or simply not believing anything our female technical subject expert was saying before someone with a male name confirmed it, qualifications be damned. I'm sure for every such case there's been 10 I've just not heard about.
Meanwhile my wife, also in IT, hasn't really experienced any harassment or misogyny at all in the past 20 years or so.
There’s an unbelievable number of false positives I’d expect from such an inane setup
I'm not a woman, but I faced this soooo many times in my career that now I believe that it's just insecure men feeling threatened by other people's knowledge or capabilities. Usually these people are hiding something and they are not as smart as perceived. Having someone in the room that can potentially unmask that makes them insecure.
You have to address the behavior the first time it occurs by establishing boundaries otherwise it keeps happening more and more.
And that is a leadership/management failure to address these behaviors. In all occasions the insecure men were so loud and obnoxious that management prefers not to deal with it and take the easy route by firing the target of the abuse, reinforcing the behavior more and more.
Funny you mention this. The worst career experience I ever had was with a woman who was insecure about herself. She routinely gave me a hard time and butted heads with me on issues where I was actually right many times. By the way, she got promoted to be my manager (something that one more senior guy expected from the first time he met her years before). I wasn't the only one who couldn't stand her. Arrogance is not a uniquely or even predominantly masculine trait in this industry. It's a relatively common thing among programmers, especially young ones.
And if you're gonna blame the upper management for my experience, I've just gotta say that you are naive. They are the ones who put that woman in place and were biased in her favor. Nothing I could have said about her obnoxious behavior would have made a bit of difference. More likely than not, I would have been targetted for even more frustrating BS.
And if you're gonna accuse me of not liking women somehow, my current manager is a woman and she's one of the better ones I've had. I'm talking about the assumption that all toxic personalities are owned by men, and that women are inherently disadvantaged. They are not as a whole. In this industry, there is more variance among members of each gender than there is between genders. Men and women want different things out of life generally. But if you look at similar types of people, their gender hardly matters.
And of course the first two comments on the article proved the article’s point…
I can't judge any of this because I won the gene lottery and don't have to deal with problems like that. It just baffles me that there are humans who get treated like that.
Many things kept me out of academia but the number one was not wanting to spent my life arguing with people who do little else. The politics in these orgs are insane and it would be of no surprise that the petty assholes are also misogynistic. But take away the misogyny and they’re still petty assholes which while less bad still isn’t very good. I’m not sure how to fix it. I think this structure of research org is not destined to last anyway so the point is probably moot. Perhaps we will see an era of independent scientists.
Misattributed to him. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger#Misattributed
It points out https://archive.org/details/americanuniversi0000unse_w2i7/pa... from 1970: "We can no longer use our little joke that campus politics are so nasty because the stakes are so small. They are now so nasty because the stakes are so large."
Some of academia is important, and I did try to do important things while I was there. That was the main thing I was fighting over, the permission to do important things. Often it would take me far longer to get the permission than to do the thing. I did find that the bulk of the people preferred to squabble and the bulk of the research doesn’t work, and the bulk of the research that does work buried. And since so much work is buried a lot of research is simply rediscovering what already should have been known.
I think the selection criteria bias on what we know from the fruits of research gives a false sense of what it is like to be a researcher.
I find statements like this frustrating. I do all I can to counter-act sexist behaviour and speech around me. There's not much else I can do. I'm not in a position of power. The people who need to do better are never going to read this and they aren't going to care. So they continue being assholes and I continue to get to share in the blame. It's just demoralising. Whatever I do is never enough.
There’s of course the argument that you can’t be racist or sexist or whatever-ist against the dominant group. I am not sure if I subscribe to that belief.
Computer science being female orientated is traditionally consistent; women are expected to work or be ornaments (or both) and carting water, weaving, tallying stock, and desk work is "womens work" Vs the machismo pick swinging, gun carrying, construction building "mens work".
Having computer science seen as "desk work" is useful for women in such cultures, it's an interesting income stream in a bubble free from hassle.
Boundaries blur, of course, and exceptions are all over - but that's a rough guide.
Not to mention strong man patriarchies can also hide a core matriarchy .. and yet not embrace equality for all women, just for the few mothers that earned it and outlived their husbands.
By Elizabeth Barber's rules for traditional women's work during the first 20,000 years: (a) can it be done at home (or, in a pinch, with kids in tow), and (b) is it easily interruptible (due to emergencies among aforementioned kids), computer science is defo traditionally consistent.
In the telling of history it's often the case, for a good while at least, that the only thing less seen than a woman is a woman's black servant; Sam Isaacs eventually made the pages: https://tracesmagazine.com.au/2013/11/saving-grace-western-a...
I think I saw the 1982 movie with that scene, but for some reason they'd gender-swapped the heroine?
And she raced him down the cliffside like a torrent down its bed,
While victims in the surf watched in very fear.
She sent the red stones flying, but the old grey kept his feet,
He cleared the tangled bushes in his stride,
And the girl from Marg'ret River never shifted in her seat -
It was grand to see that western horseman ride.
That's interesting, I've never thought about it in this way. In the culture I was born, there was an visible split between societal norms (hypocrisy, lying, trying to conceal unfavorable things, expecting people to behave in a certain way) and moral norms (integrity, speaking the truth, behave in a completely different way than most people would).
I believe this split is also identified in the WP article you linked:
> Morality is about what people ought to do rather than what they actually do, what they want to do, or what social conventions require
So in the context of the original article, the fallacies like expecting women not do tech jobs, to be more emotional than rational etc. - all these things seem more like societal biases that are more against morality rather than in line with any moral system I can think of.
And yes, these societal biases must be critically examined and exposed in order that we can evolve our moral systems to better fit our (collective) needs. There are moral systems in the world right now that see chattel slavery as morally right, and where a woman having even the most basic knowledge required to have a tech job is deeply and perversely immoral. Moral systems have a way of outlasting both utility and developments in our understanding of ethics and what it means to be humane. Sadly only by pushing those would-be moralists towards (hopefully) taking up ethics can we get them to put down the cudgel of their morals, but the problem is that without a great deal of thought the ideas of ethics can be used to leave one active ethically within your moral system but unethically to anyone outside your moral system. That’s why meta-ethics exist… if my system of ethics only works within a less moral system of morals, am I required to abandon my system of ethics and forge a new one?
For example: despite being a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat all her life and pretty far left on most issues, my grandmother couldn't fathom electing women to any positions of political power. I can only imagine what her reaction to the current election would have been. I mostly gave her a pass on that, though, since she was born in 1920, but I've also known much younger women with the same hang-up.
In other words: your gender really has no bearing on whether you are part of the patriarchy.
Something you can select on a job application form.
But my point is: by identifying as nonbinary, I do not have to listen to this stuff. It is yet another checkbox, to satisfy HR from California.
In your example about escaping capitalism. If you are a business owner, it requires a lot of mental effort. Keep up with laws, pay taxes on time, find customers... and you may loose everything, if you make a mistake. And benefits are not that great.
Some people just prefer to be employees.
> because men are famously good at emotional self-regulation
Anecdotally, estrogen has done nothing for my anger issues :(
It's very much sarcasm, and very much warranted.
One problem I have though, is presumed sexism. An example is, this article states:
Now that I have managed to make men feel embarrassed and insecure, they blame these feelings on me. No one else has made them feel this way before, and because men are famously good at emotional self-regulation, I must be the problem.
Now first, I 100% agree than in some cases there may be an innate, sexist response here. Some cases. But at the same time, men arguing with men can elicit a response in this way! "No, you're at fault for challenging my ideas! And successfully! How dare you!"
My point is, I very much believe some of these interactions are laced with sexism, even unrealised or unknown to those perpetrating the act. Yet at the same time, it can just be two humans interacting, and one taking the outcome poorly. Again as a male, I've seen this type of response when established ideas are challenged... including the established hierarchy in a workplace somehow blaming me. Often, I've been told I was too "blunt", or that I "shouldn't publicly embarrass someone". Meanwhile, that embarrassment was derived from someone trying to shut me down, and I simply responded moderately in kind, with fact, not emotion.
(I'm a contractor, so I engage in new workspaces often, as a being not integrated into the social structure of that workplace.)
I'm sure this has happened to all of us. Human interaction is not an API with strict protocols. It's very squishy.
Another issue here is that some humans are just assholes. We've all met them. In such people their assholish behaviour comes out as whatever is most direct and upsetting. With a woman, it's probably targeted as sexism, a place to "hang their attack" on. With a man, it's still there... just personal attacks of a different narrative. You can almost see such asshat's brains working, trying to find the best button to push, the best place to lay a personal attack... because that's all they have.
I guess what I'm saying is, if you're a woman and currently being hit with what appears to be a sexist narrative, try to keep in mind the "asshole" component, or "things that seem sexist but are just people interacting poorly" aren't sexism.
And I say that fully without blame. Any human hit over and over and over with something such as sexism, is going to naturally default to this as a reason. But when I read articles like this one, where the dialog is patriarchy and innate male culture, it really doesn't help. It doesn't help, because many men do their best to police such behaviour around them, and in themselves.
And there are more of us than you think.
If there weren't, all of the attempts at legislating equality would never have happened.
So take some solace in this, if you're a woman. We're trying. Some of us, in fact many of us are, so much so that we try to pass laws, we try to stamp things out.
Take comfort to know it's not all of us.
Meanwhile, if men and women are equally hurt by each asshole attack, there are many men, few women, several equal opportunity assholes and a few assholes who target women: asshole attacks will be directed at women at a much greater rate than men. You can either say “everyone has to cope with assholes, this isn’t sexism” or you can think about what could make assholery disproportionately hurt women in the field even though men also experience it.
Gender nor race are requirements for these experiences. They likely emerge from corporate bureaucracy and human insecurity.
And even when they do, if they don’t do it to you, or do it while you’re watching, you find yourself incredulous that someone would really go and do such a thing.
Anyway. This is the sort of situation that births subreddits with titles like “are the straights okay?”
I’m a guy and I’ve been told multiple times I don’t look like a software developer. I think it can happen to anyone who doesn’t fit the stereotype of nerdy person portrayed in films and TV.
I'm fairly sure it has nothing to do with how I dress or look but simply because of stereotypes associated with Indians. If I was whiter, people would say fitness coach.