Speaking up | Hacker News Reader

Speaking up

sazzy.co.uk

426 pointspetercooper307 comments

Whenever an instance of blatant sexism comes up, an attempt is invariably made to rationalize away the fact that a sexist act has actually occurred. We have had two such attempts made here so far and I expect more. One commentator is attempting to advance the baseless theory that the bully did not care about the sex of his victim. This particular individual even goes so far to say that "the biggest problem" is the alleged misuse of labels related to racism or sexism, as if this could somehow be worse that the discrimination the disenfranchised experience on a day-to-day basis. Another commentator states that it is because of her popularity not her sex. This too is bunk. There are significantly more males in this industry with significantly more popularity. Yet no evidence is presented that these figures also have received this level of harassment.

There is one word for this behavior mentioned above: denial. Unfortunately, there seems to be a part of our community that refuses to call things what they are. This was an instance of sexism that manifested itself in a nasty way.

There is a LOT of blatant sexism in the tech sector. The more specialized you get, the worse things get. It's a pretty well documented problem (e.g. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/sexual_harassm... for a collection of security related anecdotes). This kind of culture turns away lots of tremendously talented people, and those who choose to endure a culture which seems to be slanted against them generally either end up targets or else silent lurkers.

It's absolutely accurate to call the general reaction 'denial.' People who complain who are on the receiving end of the harassment are 'overly sensitive' and those who aren't who speak up against the status quo are 'apologists' and 'white knights.' It's difficult to address a mindset which a majority of a community is complicit in at best, or active defenders of at worst.

"It's a pretty well documented problem (e.g. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/sexual_harassm.... for a collection of security related anecdotes"

At this point, I'd say it was the opposite of well documented and that's a problem. We do not have the statistics on this since it is not being reported to law enforcement or another body that collects these statistics. Does tech have more incidents than lawyers, plumbers, or actors? Don't know and I wish I did. I believe that it is a problem, but I cannot point to finding or study.

Thank god, someone that gets it.

We are technologist. Many of us are academics. If someone writes or talks about how a compiler is slow, the community will demand more than anecdotes. We expect numbers, tested theories, and verified results. When people come to us with anecdotes, we often use "less than nice" ways to disregard what they say. hmm, I see parallels...

There looks to be a number of excellent evidence to prove that there is a gender equality issue in IT, but there is no scientific research on what the causes are. Is it the general culture in the world and IT has the same level as other industries? Is it because of the question/answer culture of engineers, which is an aspect currently being researched in regard to gender equality. Is it a lack of respect for women in the IT field?

I can think of plentiful number of ways to test those concept, work that anthropology might want to do if we asked them. We could also pay them to do it. Maybe that could be someones kickstarter project?

I have a strong conviction that if someone would bring scientific data on the issue on what the causes are and how to fix them, in a verifiable way, few would object. Can a strong worded policy document have an statistic proven effect in discourage sexism in a conference? If you think so, verify it with data. Get 10 conference to do it, and collect data from it and 10 other without any such document. If its verifyable, every conference should adapt one after that. Do you think negative IRC comments is the problem? Switch a number of projects to a moderated communication channel and test the concept. Compare a unmoderated IRC with a project page like stackoverflow. Bring data, do some science, show it to the community. Its the exact same thing we expect from anyone else when they want to do changes to the things the community care about.

Not to mention the conspiracy theorist positing that it might have been a woman posting the fake porn pictures. The mental gymnastics some people will perform to avoid facing the obvious truth are amazing. How can we solve a problem we don't all admit exists?

Also, it super doesn't matter what the gender of the person posting the pictures was. The gender of the actors does not matter if the gender of the victim obviously does.

Why worry about the meaning of the terms you use when there is an opportunity to call somebody who disagrees with you names?

Well done you. It's about time somebody stood up for men brave enough to pitch improbable edge-case possibilities in order to anonymously undermine a woman reporting her experience of sexual harassment.

If you actually read TFA, you will notice that Sarah Parmenter is consistently using gender neutral pronouns to refer to the person(s) who put online those pictures and male pronouns for the guys wrote her inappropriate messages. That is very conscious use of language.

Put that in contrast to the person who is calling somebody who is stating that the perpetrator might have been one (sic) female a ""conspiracy theorist"" and talks about "obvious truth".

>Put that in contrast to the person who is calling somebody who is stating that the perpetrator might have been one (sic) female a ""conspiracy theorist"" and talks about "obvious truth".

all the while supposing that there is a consipracy among men to make women feel uncomfortable at tech conferences.

If irony had mass, this thread would undergo gravitational collapse and form a singularity.

> Not to mention the conspiracy theorist positing that it might have been a woman posting the fake porn pictures.

Why is that possibility not worth considering?

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She didn't know who it was, did she? I thought that's what it said in TFA.

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Hypothetical is hypothetical. Why not deal with the real instance at hand?

You don't know that the person harassing her is a man, so why assume it is?

Even if it were true that the bully didn't care about the sex of the victim per se, and only attacked her because of her popularity, the nature of what was done is still sexist.

If I were to bash a competitor in public by reference to his homosexuality, it won't make anything better to know that I actually don't have any problem with gay people myself. It's unacceptable and downright evil.

Whenever an instance of blatant sexism comes up

Excuse me, have you even read the article?

Someone uploaded fake porn pictures of her to a forum and then persistently sent the URL to her employers and acquaintances.

This was a targeted attack on her reputation, or perhaps malicious stalking, but how on earth does sexism factor into this?

The porn pictures were merely a vehicle. If the attack had been carried out against a man they would probably have used accusations of child pornography or such.

The parent's point is that she is a target because she is a woman, and society gives such people more tools to abuse women than to abuse men. This makes it a sexist act.

There are significantly more males in this industry with significantly more popularity. Yet no evidence is presented that these figures also have received this level of harassment.

When the OP says that "[women in technology] are scared" it is because they feel that they are in an environment that targets them for harassment and abuse. At this point, we hear arguments like "this could have happened to a guy just as easily" but the fact is that it doesn't. In a world where such events happen with equal frequency across genders then yes, this might be a silly discussion, but we do not live in such a world.

Engineers tend to find it disconcerting that an action's goodness or badness depends on its context. After all, shouldn't we be able to tell just by looking at the inherent properties of the action? What if we can't read the context correctly? Well, the answer is that we frequently do, and the result is these inane argument over whether posting fake porn pictures of a woman is a sexist act.

The fact of the matter is that women in tech are targeted because they are women. They are overwhelmingly more frequently attacked than their male counterparts, and if you think this is silly, then I suggest you go make friends with some women in tech. This attack is another outgrowth of that pervasive sexism, and the fact that it uses a medium that is traditionally associated with denigrating women [1] just makes it even more sexist.

[1] Yes, there is some non-misogynistic porn out there, but it is the exception rather than the rule.

How do we know she was targeted because she's a woman?

This whole jumping to conclusions is just a bit much for me.

Couldn't she just as well be targeted because she rejected some nerd who had a crush on her? Or even by another woman who is jealous of her?

That obviously doesn't make the actions any better, but seems a more plausible motivation to me than "a random guy running a smear-campaign against a random woman, only because she's a woman".

Please, please, please take the blinders off. This is unambiguously a misogynist attack that follows a painfully well-established pattern of targeting and harassing women online - a pattern that nearly every single woman who has a significant online presence experiences.

Please, please do some reading on this - it's not hard to find reports and analyses of online woman abuse, and it's not hard to recognize the recurring themes and motifs, which prominently include image-based harassment.

Please take your blinders of. This attack follows the well-established pattern of targeting and harassing anyone online -- a pattern that nearly everyone with a significant online presence experiences.

That the perpetrator uses the most effective means available doesn't make the attacks misogynist, just because the target is a woman and the means is sex. That's like saying that choosing a knife to stab someone to death is obvious knife-ist behavior by the perpetrator. It's the misogynism of society and culture as a whole that is responsible for this; whether the perpetrator is misogynistic in excess of the culturally given amount is a question that we cannot answer based on the evidence.

>she is a target because she is a woman

We don't know that. This is an assumption made with no meaningful evidence.

Not really. That this doesn't happen to men with the same frequency or degree of severity is enough of a smoking gun to suggest that this is indeed the case.

How do you know that it doesn't happen to men with the same frequency or degree of severity? The internet is littered with reports of/by men being stalked, harassed and slandered.

smoking gun

I don't think that means what you think it means.

> how on earth does sexism factor into this?

According to wikipedia:

> Sexual harassment, rape and other forms of sexual violence can be a part of more extreme, expressive, and emotionally impactive forms of sexism.[10]

what happened to her was obviously sexual harassment and extremely misogynistic, so at least according to wikipedia "sexism" is an appropriate word.

> The porn pictures were merely a vehicle. If the attack had been carried out against a man they would probably have used accusations of child pornography or such.

I don't think that's really how that works. This particular kind of attempted shaming / harassment is intimately tied in with notions of gender roles, patriarchal social norms, etc. I think if you're suggesting that attacking a man with accusations of child pornography is also sexist you might be right.

How do you know the motivation of this person? Every time one of these stories come up, someone tries to call other people out for rationalizing. It's not rationalizing, it's calling it as they see it: someone being an asshole.

If you want blatant sexism, FTA: "no offence, I just don’t relate to girls speaking about the industry at all, I learn better from guys". That's sexism.

It's not denial if you don't know the motivation. Why is it so important to label these actions a certain way when we can just call it as it clearly is?

Trying to label everything that may or may not be sexism doesn't help the cause. Most of us know there is rampant sexism. Arguing about this just detracts from the real problem. There are more than enough obvious instances to demonstrate the problem.

EDIT: for the 2 down-voters so far: the point I'm making is that sexism is a major problem but trying to ascribe motivation to something with uncertainty is intellectual dishonesty that does nothing but detract from the real problem.

Do you legitimately think we could remove gender from the situation and it would've played out in the same way?

Cases of men being stalked do exist.

Exists != happens systematically. Something like fully 1/3-1/4 of women are harassed or raped during the course of their life. ONE IN FOUR. Can you imagine, one out of every four men you know in tech being stalked, harassed, or abused? While men being stalked is terrible, it simply isn't on the same scale as the stalking of women.

Men and women commit rape and are raped in roughly equal numbers, and that is not including prison rape. When do include that, men are the majority of the victims.

The CDC's 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, which looked at society at large and excluded the prison population, found that 1.1% of women and 1.1% or men surveyed were raped in the prior 12 months.

98% of women who had been raped identified a man as their attacker and 80% of the men who had been raped identified a woman as their attacker. This works out to men being 60% of rapists and women being 40% of rapists.

Here is an analysis with all the calculations laid out and tied back to the data tables in the NISVS report: http://www.genderratic.com/p/836/manufacturing-female-victim...

Here is a link to the data tables with the relevant figures circled: http://imgur.com/a/aw0eU

Now, the NISVS's executive summary does not tell this story. It tells the usual story of rape being something men overwhelmingly to do women. The way it does that is by defining rape to be 'being penetrated against your will', excluding 'being made to penetrate', which is what a female rapist would do to a man.

Nevertheless, the study does track how many men were made to penetrate (which it categorizes as 'other, sexual assault'), so it is possible to correct the definition of rape to one that doesn't erase female on male rape ('made to have sex against your will'), and when you do, rape ceases to be a gendered crime.

So yes, I can imagine what it would be like for men to be raped as often as women are. Now, can you imagine what it would be like if female rape victims, like male rape victims, were defined out of existence, and offered no recognition, or help?

1/4 is just dishonest. Its like saying that 1/4 of ALL children starve to death (which is statistics wrapped to the point of uselessness, even without then claiming that 1/4 of all children of people in IT starves to death). When using statistics, please use some kind of reference and try to include what the shortcomings of the said statistics are. At least start with something like <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics>; which gives the reader a starting point.

The question was if a similar scenario could have played out for a man. I don't know what your answer has to do with anything. I am as sorry for women who have been raped as the next guy. Wish I could help prevent such things happening. I actually started researching that a bit. I grant that I am not yet convinced of the 1 in 4 statistics (see http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9502/sommers.html for example), but in any case women do have too many bad experiences, and every rape is one too many.

To be honest I really despise this mobbing attitude that seems to surface here. Somebody has been wronged, so now people on the internet have to be hated that have no connection to the event whatsoever. Just because I didn't join the chorus of "it's all the fault of sexism"?

Edit: also, with respect to the 1 in 4 number, have studies about what men experience even been conducted? Since most of those rapes occur for young people, a lot of men could be affected, too (raped as kids). Also men appear to be much more likely to become victim of violence than women, from what I have found so far.

So do zebras. But in this case, if you hear hooves behind you, bet on the horse, not the zebra.

> How do you know the motivation of this person?

It's irrelevant. If you do sexist things, you are a sexist. Maybe you don't know you're a sexist, but you are.

Stealing a definition from below:

> Sexism definition: Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.

I'm not arguing that this isn't a terrible, unwarranted attack; I'm arguing against the dilution of the term. Not every attack against a person of another race is racist and not every attack against a women is sexist.

Where is the "basis on sex" in this story (genuine question, i.e. did her gender motivate the attack)? Without this, you can call it many things but not sexist.

I am not making any statement about who is or is not sexist in this instance. I am solely talking about the role of intent with regards to actions that may or may not be sexist.

Also, note that that definition is not the one that most people who care about this topic use. That would be 'sexual discrimination.' Sexism is a systemic cultural force of sexual discrimination. That said, it's not particularly relevant to what I'm saying either, but I thought I'd mention it.

> Where is the "basis on sex" in this story

The type of attack (porn) seems gender-specific to me.

And it's plausible to me that the "same old face" critique is more prevalent with women speakers than with men. How many talks does a man have to give, on average, to get that response, vs. OP's total of three?

That confuses 'why the attack works' with 'why the attack was chosen'.

If I wanted to harass a female, I would probably choose sexual shaming as a weapon, because it is obviously one of the most effective weapons available to me, because society is sexist. I would be morally reprehensible for choosing to harass someone, but my motivation for harassing her would not necessarily be sexist. Perhaps she ran over my cat, I believe she did it on purpose and want to punish her. The attack would work because our culture is rife with sexism. The attack was chosen because I'm angry with her for killing my cat: not because I'm sexist.

No, the act is sexist. Your intent surely matters in how you're pigeonholed, no?

Intent is not magic. The hurt caused is not just mended because you didn't mean it.

Maybe this is a better way of putting it: Person A and Person B exist. One of the two means to be sexist, and one does not. They both go around and do the exact same things.

What is the difference between A and B, as far as women or our community are concerned? There effectively isn't any. Now, maybe Person not-sexist is more likely to come to understand how their actions are harming people, and be reformed, but before that point, their intent doesn't mean a damn: they're still hurting others.

It's strategic. It's because we're trying to correct behavior, not just punish offenders. We live in a society together and you can't just push these people out and marginalize them and expect benefits. This has been discussed to death, and the consensus is that you address behavior and not identity because attacking identity accomplishes nothing positive.

Which do you think helps remove the behavior in our society: "that sounded racist, is that really what you meant?" or "you're a racist. I can't believe you said that." One of them gives the person an opportunity to evaluate what they said and how they want to be perceived by others, the other immediately puts them on the defensive and marks you and your cause an enemy to their person.

We can call it misogyny, or using misogynist tools and strategies -- the motivation of whoever did this doesn't make that any less true.

Furthermore, it seems clear that the way she was attacked was specifically designed to exploit at least the following :

- the fact that she is a woman adressing a predominantly male audience (the fake porno)

- the ambient objectification of women in society

How can that not count as sexist?

Excuse my ignorance, just wondering: is it established that porn is sexist? Are they demeaning to the male actors in porn, too? Or is the underlying value that it is demeaning for a woman to have sex? It seems to me a universal judgement isn't easy to come by?

"is it established that porn is sexist?"

It is, yes. The vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of porn panders to a specifically, typically male fantasy (and bravado) of sexual interaction.

That seems to imply that male fantasies would be predominantly about humiliating women?

No, it does not. The following makes no claims about male fantasy or porn; it is merely a means of explaining that you have made an incorrect inference.

Imagine if you will that, hypothetically, 10% of male fantasy is about humiliating women. Imagine also, hypothetically, that all porn is based on that 10%. In this way, you can see that it is possible for all porn to be about humiliating women, but that does not imply that the majority of male fantasy is about that.

Put another way, if all cows are black, it does not mean that everything black is a cow. If all porn is based on a male fantasy, it does not mean that all male fantasy is represented in porn.

At least for a lot of the males who spend money on pornography.

Yes. Mainstream porn is very sexist. Do you know what a woman is assumed to be? bisexual. Do you know what happens when you look up bisexual porn? You find a man. Think about that. Understand what that means and who the assumed audience is. This assumption permeates throughout the rest of the industry. (Hint: straight-male.)

A huge discussion within feminist movements has taken place and continues to take place on the subject, and I cannot do it all justice in a short comment (keywords to research: Sex-positive feminism), but my understanding is that it is best to stick with the idea that women (or any human being really) should be able to choose what they do with their bodies and with their bodies' representations -- the question is the extent of real control women are allowed to have compared to men. I'd say that since you have a general context in society where women are not equal to men and are objectified, it makes it all the more difficult to have a porn creation process that doesn't reinforce this, although exceptions exist in feminist porn.

So the assumptions seems to be that most female porn actors are forced to be porn models (and what about playboy models?)? Because otherwise it seems to me they choose their bodies representation already.

There was a study about porn actresses recently (I think for California) and it turned out that they were not less happy than other women.

That people should be allowed to choose what they do with their bodies seems a pretty basic, true demand. I don't see how women are not allowed to choose, unless they are being raped (which is a crime)?

Most porn so strongly caters to male fantasy that some women turn to gay (male on male) porn and yaoi (a form of male on male gay erotic writing) to meet some of their needs. Porn intended for women is a budding industry. It has to be written and filmed differently. I have seen an interview with a woman director who talked about some of those differences. Most porn is strongly rooted in objectifying women in a way which denies their humanity -- in other words, denies that they have any needs of their own or are anything other than a vehicle for male satisfaction. It is a pretty demeaning stance.

Regardless, I doubt the fake porno was in any way intended respectfully. Sexuality is extremely personal and private. Attacking someone that way is generally a very ugly thing to do. Sexual assault is often included as a part of torture because you can cause enormous physical pain and long term psychological damage without leaving a mark on them.

"Most porn so strongly caters to male fantasy"

That in itself doesn't seem to make it sexist?

"Most porn is strongly rooted in objectifying women in a way which denies their humanity"

Or maybe porn is simply about one, limited aspect of humanity? By chance (might have been YouTube's recommender algorithm) I watched this on Objectification recently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkUhW41Qpjg

I guess I can settle for "sexist porn is sexist", though - obviously there is a huge range of porn out there... Is a picture of a naked woman sexist, for example?

Let me restate that: I think most porn today is sexist, much of it in a manner which is demeaning to women. I also think it is basically irrelevant. Male or female, attacking someone sexually is generally one of the ugliest forms of attack known by humankind.

> This particular individual even goes so far to say that "the biggest problem" is the alleged misuse of labels related to racism or sexism, as if this could somehow be worse that the discrimination the disenfranchised experience on a day-to-day basis.

This is one of the most persistent problems when discussing these issues: the idea that if the victim of discrimination didn't get raped or beaten by people wearing white hoods, then it does not qualify as real discrimination.

To be honest I don't understand what this has to do with sexism. I would think this is actually a crime (stalking?) committed by some deranged individual, whose real motivations we don't know anything about. Even if they were "hatred of women" or whatever, I fail to see what the lesson to be learned from that should be? Is the implied assumption that the deed was encouraged by rampant sexism in the industry?

In the last story I read about stalking the stalkers were people who had personal relations to the victim. No idea if this is common for stalking (as for rape), but I wouldn't be surprised.

I don't mean it to defend anything (what?), just trying to understand the "xyz is sexism" mindset?

Sexism definition: Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.

This was clearly sexism since it was demeaning to the woman and her gender was used as a part of that (e.g. the fact that pictures of naked women were used in the attack).

If the same happened to a man, we would probably call it harassment, not sexism, since men at large are not discriminated against based on their gender. A female posting pictures of a man at the conference wouldn't be signaling that men don't belong in the group, since the group is dominated by men to begin with.

Either gender can be stalked, but there are FAR more female victims, a symptom of sexism at large in society. FAR more women are harassed as well. 1 in 5 college women are raped during their college years.

To take some of your words, the deed was encouraged by and reflective of rampant sexism in society at large.

I don't think I've done a good job explaining this, but hopefully provoked some thoughts on it at least.

"since men at large are not discriminated against based on their gender."

Uh, hello there - that's a huge assumption. I think they are discriminated against very much, but I guess no point to discuss on HN :-/ I'll only say that I don't enjoy having to spend time away from my kid.

"A female posting pictures of a man at the conference wouldn't be signaling that men don't belong in the group"

Very confusing? I thought the problem was that the pictures where fake nudes? In any case I think in general a swath of postings of somebodies picture would be disturbing. Also I don't understand "it's sexism because in the pictures she is a woman"?

"1 in 5 college women are raped during their college years."

This has been debunked, I only googled for that yesterday: http://www.responsibleopposing.com/comment/1in4.html (originally I had a better link but this was the next best I found yesterday - the stats actually seem to go back to some manipulated study in 1985). (Edit: this link from the article is probably the better debunking, but longer http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9502/sommers.html )

"the deed was encouraged by and reflective of rampant sexism in society at large."

They don't even know who did it, so how can they know what inspired it?

Yes, men are discriminated too. I'm sorry about your situation. I encourage you to write about your experience and we can talk about how to help you.

Your experience doesn't mean we shouldn't work together to support women who are being discriminated.

The survey questions used in the study certainly don't reflect what we normally think of as "rape". But even if the statistic were 1 in 10, it is still a huge problem faced by women, and it's indicative of a society that doesn't treat women very well.

I don't understand why the "inspiration" behind the harassment matters. It doesn't even matter if the perpetrator was male or female. A woman was demeaned in a sexual way in front of a mostly male audience of her peers. Does the person have to tweet "I hate women" in order for this to be considered sexist?

"Your experience doesn't mean we shouldn't work together to support women who are being discriminated."

I never said that I wouldn't. In fact I googled those links yesterday because I am interested in the subject and like to research how to help. Understanding what is really going on seems to be an important first step, and throwing false numbers around won't help with that in my opinion.

"I don't understand why the "inspiration" behind the harassment matters."

That was my original question: what does it matter if it was sexist or not? To classify it as "sexist" seems to be an extremely awkward way to describe a crime of harassment. Imagine somebody with a blue shirt was murdered, and the conclusion was "the murderer really didn't like blue".

I thought sexism was bias or discrimination against people based on their gender. How is posting fake nudes of somebody on the internet bias or discrimination? It's just harassment/stalking. Sure, make it a data point in how likely women are to be victim of such a thing. But I don't see the point of calling it sexist. I don't think anybody at that conference applauded those actions, for example - even if they were sexist (except for the perpetrator, if he was indeed among the audience). Because those actions were simply criminal harassment.

"since men at large are not discriminated against based on their gender"

Some examples at random: percentage of males in teaching professions, and/or daycare?

Breast cancer funding and research versus prostate cancer funding and research, despite the relative frequency of each? Hint - 1:6 men will get prostate cancer, 1:8 women will get breast cancer. But the National Cancer Institute allows for $1,318 worth of research into prostate cancer per new case, and $2,596 for breast cancer (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/cancer-funding-does...)

Just some thoughts...

That's totally a valid point. I wish more men would speak out against this and, honestly, that it is not used to diminish the equally valid point of sexism in technology.

But we have to understand that in those situations it is not oppression. And that is a key point. Men are not oppressed by society when they are discriminated, because by-and-large, men make more money, have more opportunity, stay within their industries longer, are (perhaps due to last point) promoted more often, tend to be selected with a gender bias to speak about their subjects. Women currently get more college degrees in general today, yet the gender pay gap remains. That's evidence of systemic oppression. That's why we can say men at large are not discriminated against.

>Women currently get more college degrees in general today, yet the gender pay gap remains. That's evidence of systemic oppression.

No, that's a correlation of two things.

"Women currently get more college degrees in general today, yet the gender pay gap remains. That's evidence of systemic oppression."

That's just bad maths, sorry. First you have to look at what subjects men and women chose and what average pay is for careers in those subjects. Some people graduate in computer science, other people graduate in "do you want fries with that" liberal arts or whatever.

And if a man's wife has the illegitimate child of another man, even while married to the first man, the first man is financially responsible for the child. Cuckolding blames the male victim.

Men die earlier.

Go volunteer at a homeless shelter - they must be sexist as they are full mostly of men.

Go to a morgue in a place of heavy industry - mostly men.

Go on a cargo ship, spending weeks at sea in less than comfortable conditions. Oil rig, mine, etc

"percentage of males in teaching professions, and/or daycare?" I agree it isn't fair. But this can be seen as misogyny/sexism backfiring against men. One main reason why men are discriminated against in these professions is that for a long time many societies have considered that women should only care for children and domestic work. These societies have adapted to that, elevating gender roles and hierarchies, and making it hard for people to escape their grip. And although this has mainly been to the disadvantage of women, many men have also suffered from being limited to male jobs/roles etc.

You did a good job of explaining this, and thank you for doing so.

Was it really rooted in sexism? Or was it just a convenient way to attack? I'm not even sure it matters. It was definitely a cheap tasteless tactic to employ.

I've read all your comments on the various threads and a central theme seems to be the following question: how does sexism fit into all of this, isn't this just harassment/stalking? It's a fair question. Recall that sexism is discrimination based on sex OR behavior that fosters stereotypical/hurtful attitudes and roles. The attacker did both here. He attempted to drown out the technical ability of the victim by, during her technical presentation, spamming pictures that quite literally turned her into an object. This is a manifestation of classic behavior where men value women for their appearance only and everything else is ignored. Had that attacker had his/her way, this would have been the reality; all the attention would have been on her appearance and no attention would have been paid towards her technical presentation. His/her goal could not be more clear. To tie the goal back to sexism: what the attacker wanted is both a distinguishing treatment based on her sex (the first definition) AND a behavior that encourages ignoring the technical ability of women in favor of focusing on their appearance (the second definition).

I hope this makes my use of the word sexism clear. I welcome further communication here in this thread or at my personal email, which can be found in my profile.

Sorry if I only reply now, I was traveling. Also, I can't think of a useful comment. I just see it very differently, and the reason I ask "why has it to be categorized as sexist" is that I worry about the implications. For example if it is assumed that it is demeaning for a nude picture of a woman to be posted, but not if it was a nude picture of a man, the implication seems to be women should somehow be ashamed of the way they look nude.

I probably can't describe it very well, but I sense lots of weird implications of calling it "sexist" which I think are not really what the people calling the sexism flag had in mind.

Halfway through reading this article I had myself really wishing posts like these would just publicly out the perpetrator instead of referring to them anonymously - unfortunately as I finished the article I realized that she hadn't done so because the perpetrator was never found out.

For the cases where there is no question who the perpetrator is - I wonder if it would be beneficial to encourage more public shaming? Part of me knows that if these people are lead to believe their actions are left without consequence they will continue in their wrongdoing. When a blog post tells a story of someone being assaulted, a lot of good people will come to their support but I would be genuinely surprised if a creep is convinced not to be a creep by reading a story in the third person about another anonymous creep.

If we call these people out and kick them out of the community, like when a spouse kicks out a cheating partner, we have more room for responsible, respectable community members.

On the other hand, public shaming at any level _seems_ childish to me, but I can't point out why. Additionally, if someone makes false claims, they can do serious damage very easily. There is probably no easy answer here.

I once criticized Sarah on twitter while agreeing with Robert Hoekman when he wrote a blog post about another person in the UX speaking circuit who did not have a huge amount of work behind them to back up the fact that they are up in front of people, teaching them.

I since regretted my comments on Sarah's success. I believe I apologized on twitter (after being called out). I was embarrassed, but have not contacted her since, I just see her on rosters for speaking at various conferences.

Now, when I read this post of hers my heart sank. Not only because it is utterly sickening someone could do this to another person, but that at one stage I was unkind to her online.

What if she suspected me because of my remarks 2 years ago? What if she called my name out as a suspect. My web development career and reputation would be shattered. Now what if someone decides to play detective and look through twitter history and sees my comments and accuse me publicly. Ruined.

Its not that public shaming is childish, its that that such accusations have huge ramifications if false. It's "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"[0]

This does not mean I hope the person/people involved are not held accountable, it just needs to be handled outside a public internet witch hunt.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstones_formulation

edit: grammar

Thanks, you helped clarify what I was looking to leave as an open question:

How do we hold individuals accountable without encouraging a witch hunt?

The larger developer community is open and unmoderated and as a result we have no organizational "justice system" to fall back on in order to correct behavior (not that I am proposing this).

(Proper link is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation )

And from that same page, "better for whom?"

It takes great care to attempt to apply knowledge from one domain to another domain. Humans are great at seeing patterns and making analogies, but no matter how many times you say "technology is evolving," that won't make it adhere to the Hardy-Weinberg principle[0]. Attempts to actually implement these analogies tend to be problematic[1].

The US justice system, on the federal and state level, has a wide array of checks against it that (nominally) protect people from state abuse. This is necessary because of the vast power imbalance between a nation-state and a private individual. In this case, it's probably far better to have a 10:1 false negative:false positive ratio. The more false positives, the more potential for abuse.

Conventions and the hacker community do not have the power of nation-states. There's no reason to apply the same very stringent and very necessary restrictions that we apply on nation-states to DefCon. DefCon cannot hurt you the same way the US government can.

So, who is this better for? Certainly not the women attacked: they're left with few options, little sympathy, and copious amounts of victim blaming and denial (as the current top comment indicates). It's far better for the abusers -- especially when the potential for system abuse is far less, because conventions and other hacker/tech events are not nation-states.

If we're going to solve this (or any) problem, we need to look past platitudes and into quantified, measured thought towards a solution. This might very well be naming and shaming likely perpetrators, especially when the evidence is more convincing than a few twitter posts two years ago. We might get more false positives, but we have to contrast this with the current status quo of simply denying any justice to the people actually being harassed for their gender. Personally, I think the cost-benefit is overwhelmingly in favor of excluding more maybe/maybe-not abusive men from our communities, if it results in half the human population being allowed to add their talent to the collective pool.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_princip... [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20070818124133/http://www.greythu...

I believe that the people who act like this almost always act out in other ways: tell sexist jokes, make light of rape culture, all that stuff.

One way we can make a difference is to refuse to tolerate that kind of thing in our own circles of acquaintances, because otherwise those individuals will take our silence as implicit affirmation of their worldview. Sometimes it's hard to be "that guy", but if you're not prepared to do it, then you're one of the people that's enabling this kind of behaviour. By not speaking out you're telling these people that what they believe is OK: silence is complicity, like it or not.

We shouldn't allow disfunctional individuals to participate in our communities, but I think at the point where you photoshop nudes to damage someone's reputation, a therapist would be more appropriate than a lynch mob. I think that's why it seems childish to you, you know that shaming wouldn't make anyone change, it would just satiate our thirst for revenge.

Are there any high profile women in this industry who haven't been treated like shit in some way such as this? What a nasty bunch of people we are. Are we (developers) the douchey 80s guy of the 21st century?

On Friday I pitched my company to a room of 150 developers, since my company was a hackathon sponsor. I was the only female speaker out of about 15.

Afterwards, a well-known, elite developer asked me if I programmed. When I said yes, he said that made me 50% less attractive. Then he asked me if I cooked and cleaned. To my face.

You don't have to be high profile to deal with this stuff. Just being in a room where you're 1 female out of 15 males is enough to get this kind of attention.

What the fuck, I really can't wrap my mind around the fact that stuff like this happens. Who are these idiots? It would be pretty useful if there were a way to get these types of things anonymously reported so the accusers could have some way to publicize it, the accuser have their chance to voice their side of the story, and failing to clear the issue up (in your case, there is no excuse for that kind of response) the rest of the entire industry could never, ever hire that person. It's embarrassing that interactions like this happen in a professional setting and there are no good measures in place to report and prevent them.

You know, naming names is probably one of the best ways to combat this. Silence helps the asshole keep doing it.

I understand the reasons why you might not want to. It's tragedy of the commons problem; you get no benefit and possible detriment from naming names - only society as a whole benefits.

Nevertheless you should. It's the right thing to do.

It is indeed tricky. I want to give developers a positive association with our company and with me as an individual. Being confrontational does the opposite.

I think, in this case, being confrontational is the right thing to do (though I don't think you should have to engage in a confrontation if you don't want to).

Most people (despite the arguments here, which are mostly about either semantics or arcane ethical points) think that the way the guy you described behaved is unacceptable. You're one of us, a hacker, and you don't deserve to be treated like that. I can't imagine you'd get anything other than a positive association from standing up for the rights of hackers to get on and live their lives free of that kind of harassment and bullying.

I don't really understand why people don't mention this more often: the kind of bullying that women in tech receive now is pretty much the kind of bullying that male geeks got from non-geeks twenty years ago. It's not really anti-women so much as it's anti-people-being-geeks; society at large may have (grudgingly!) accepted male geeks, but female geeks are still getting abuse for being more interested in computers or science or whatever than in what society thinks they 'should' be doing. As such, this affects all of us and we all need to be pretty damn clear that we won't stand for it.

> I think, in this case, being confrontational is the right thing to do (though I don't think you should have to engage in a confrontation if you don't want to).

I can't agree with that. The situation she describes is where she's acting as a representative of her company, and anything she does is as the face of the company, rather than as a person.

The decision to be confrontational about it is her company's decision, not hers.

Being confrontational also brings the issue to light and may take us one step closer to solving the problem. Simply ignoring the matter (as uncomfortable as it would be to deal with both as a victim and as someone who doesn't want to put their company in a bad light; I can only imagine) quietly indicates that we're ok with this kind of behavior.

I suppose this is one of those "there's a time and place" issues. I wouldn't likely call out such an asshole while I'm on stage (unless this person tried to humiliate me while I was presenting, in which case I'd simply state that's not an appropriate comment for the conference and move on to the next person), but I'd certainly escalate[1] the issue privately.

We need to look into some sort of zero-tolerance[2] policies for this kind of thing until the message that this isn't okay is clearly understood. Certainly if I'm hosting or attending a conference and witness this kind of behavior, I'll be going out of my way to get this person removed from the conference and will also bring it up with their employer.

[1] In the "I'd like to speak with a manager" sense, not throwing a loud tantrum. [2] Not that I generally support zero-tolerance policies, or find them effective. But I think the concept is directionally correct; any attendee making another attendee (including speakers) feel uncomfortable or unsafe should be removed form the event. Maybe they get one strict warning; it depends how obviously offensive they were being.

You are wise. You may have more of an impact with a discreet riposte to the person at the time the incident happens. Not to embarrass him (the first time), but a simple "this sucks and here's why" kind of non-emotional response. It's the kind of thing you have to be prepared to deliver- maybe even rehearsed (we all have those situations in our lives that take us by such surprise that we're stunned for a while).

It's entirely possible that the guy thought he was being funny, has no idea he wasn't and genuinely finds women painful because he's so ignorant. By adopting the role of teacher, you may win a valuable ally.

But there is a more subtle effect here (if you're still reading and haven't thrown something at the monitor yet). This response from you, if you do it the way I have in mind (even if I'm not articulating it properly), will be entirely patronizing, in fact it will be patronizing in exactly the way men like this patronize you (and I know you know what I'm talking about-- see below). It is delivered from a position of strength, not weakness, in the sense that you are giving sage advice: is he smart enough to see it? Some will be, some won't.

Beyond this, remember to trust your gut. Sometimes the guy is just an asshole (a big clue is if other guys think he's an asshole) and words like I've written above are totally off-the-mark for the situation.

My wife is in a male-dominated (at her level) role, and I hear these stories all the time. Sometimes my advice is helpful- often she tells me to just STFU and listen. YMMV.

I think you are right. This guy needs some advice. My best guess is that he thought he was flirting with me. It's called negging.

http://www.seductionscience.com/2010/negging-women/

Just threw up in my mouth a little.

I just don't get this. Do these guys not have moms? Sisters? Wives or girlfriends? Daughters? Women friends? I would be incredibly pissed if anyone said those things to my family members; ergo, I can't imagine saying them to someone else.

For me, it really is as simple as that. I want my daughters to feel as welcome in their careers as I hope my sons will be. Anything less than that is utterly unacceptable.

I'm sorry this happened to you and I hope you believe me that not all guys think this way.

They have moms for sure, and sisters maybe. But that's irrelevant. They are behaving this way because that's how they see their dads treating their moms and sisters growing up. If they see their dad treat the mom with a sexist attitude (such as by expecting her to do the house chores or slapping her ass in front of the kids) then that's how they treat women later in life.

They most likely have a mom, possibly sisters, the rest are unlikely.

I obviously never get comments like this (being a man in a male-dominated field), but I hear about some women in the industry getting it more often than others. I'm sure there's reporting bias, but at least some of the women I've talked to seem to think it's not a common problem for them at least (but happens to others).

I wonder if there are specific things which make it more likely for some women to be harassed like this. And, is relatively mild stupidity like this correlated in any way with more serious issues (either assault or serious job discrimination)?

I think two things make it more likely for me to encounter incidents of sexism:

1) I do some programming for my job, but a majority of it involves going out and meeting other developers, learning about their work, and seeing how we can make our API better for them. I live in SF so I can't get a coffee without bumping into another developer. I bet I have many more interactions than someone who is developing full time in their home or office. More interactions increases chances for good and bad types of interactions.

2) Since I have been researching sexism in the industry, I have started to notice small slights and snubs more. I went for years brushing off countless minor incidents. I still don't get offended easily, but I do notice things more. For example, checkout the gun.io landing page right now (Beards of Experience). I like gun.io, but their homepage is definitely not female-friendly, and I noticed it immediately.

I'd wager that people who have had some kind of experience that really bothered them, or ones who have recently started learning more about gender bias, will suddenly start to notice all the little "micro agressions" more. Even my male colleagues have started noticing them more since we have been discussing it recently.

One of them even said "it's like when you get a new car, you suddenly start to notice how many people drive the same car as you do".

Also I guess people are more likely to either be "careful" or to adapt their behavior successfully if there's one woman on a 5 person team and one or more of the guys are in some way sexist or inappropriate, than if it's a casual interaction with someone at a coffeeshop or conference.

I don't know how I feel about the "Beards of Experience" thing. I guess I'd be annoyed if it were a permanent branding of the site, but as a one-off short campaign, I'm I think I'm fine with it. It does only focus on a specific group (I assume it is "unix neckbeards vs. hipster/corporate/suave designer developers", ignoring women entirely), but for a short marketing message, it's probably better to strongly appeal to a subset vs. be "meh" for everyone. It's not on its face offensive, which would be bad even if 5-10% of people were seriously offended and 50% were approving, just narrowly scoped. But it's obviously bad if that kind of exclusion is the default across the whole industry all the time.

It's stupid crap like "Beards of Experience" though that fall out of the ephemeral "boys club" in our industry which in turn re-enforce it. This ultimately allows morons like that mentioned by the OP to have the balls to stay something overtly sexist. It's all part of the same problem. It's a giant embarrassment and it wasn't always like this. And it's not a "technology" thing or a "software" thing, it's a "startuppy web/mobile application development" thing so it has nothing to do with the actual discipline but more to do with a rotten aspect of the culture that's grown out of control.

The solution, in my view, has less to do with going out of our way to bring women into the fold and more to do with not putting stupid shit like "Beards of Experience" on your homepage.

Concur about "Beards of Experience"; maybe if there were a tastefully done "Braids of Experience" that corresponds to it on a timed slider it may not be as lopsided as just having "Beards of Experience".

It's not offensive, but it is mildly sexist (implying that only those who have beards can be that experienced, and as women cannot generally grow beards…)

I think you're making the mistake of critiquing the beards thing in isolation. The point is that it's a drop in a bucket. You can look at any individual marketing campaign and come up with perfectly valid reasons it's not really sexist, but in aggregate it's problematic.

The key word in mwetzler's comment is "microaggressions". It's the small things which are probably defensible in isolation but when viewed together exhibit some pretty obvious patterns.

Come on, guys (and gals).

If we accepted that "Beards of Experience" is sexist, we would have to accept that it's also racist (many Asian men can't grow beards like the guy on gun.io) and maybe homophobic. Don't you think it would get ridiculous at that point?

What about parenting sites where the design and images are clearly targeted at mothers (and not fathers)? Are they evil? Sexist?

I don't see anything that makes me think it's homophobic? Are you implying that gay men tend to be beardless?

And yes. Parenting sites that assume that fathers can't be parents are sexist. Parenting sites that assume that fathers won't be primary caretakers because their target demographic's culture is sexist and doesn't understand that male parents are important are fence-sitting and sexist by omission.

There's nothing evil or even sexist, IMO, about reinforcing stereotypes. However, given that there is a shortage of tech workers, and there are fewer women in tech than would be predicted based on accomplishment in other fields (bio/chem/pharma/med, specifically), I think it's reasonable to make an effort to be inclusive and try to reach out to women when recruiting or conducting other professional activities.

It's even more wrong to criticize someone aggressively for sexism in this case, but overall I think there would be net gains to everyone by attracting and retaining more women in technology. So, while it's not evil or sexist, "beards in technology" is counter to one's own interests even as a male in technology.

It's not evil. It's not mean-spirited. It is a tad sexist, but not in a super offensive way. Probably the worst thing about it is that it's turning away some women and some feminist men. I doubt Gun.io intended that.

I think it's a good example of an easy thing to change for the tech community to be more inviting to women. If we want to break down stereotypes and gender ratios in tech, one thing we can do is make it more inviting for women to work here.

I wonder what would happen if someone found out who this "elite developer" was.

Probably nothing. There would maybe be a few blog posts about it. Their comments would be filled with men defending his actions and suggesting that anyone calling him out was lying, that the real problem is "women that get offended too easily" or "women that don't get jokes," and straight-up male superiority.

Pretty much. I for one have had it up to here though. The next incidence I encounter will be called out at the very least to the person's face on the spot, if not also online.

I don't know how it works in the US, but it's her face and her name, so can't she just get a lawyer to get a court to order the website to hand over some details? And then get another court to get the ISP to hand over some more details? And then give those to the police?

Oh, I would say "none of his f*cking business". As a woman, you don't need to even be a developer to get this kind of "attention" on a regular basis.

Where did this happen? I'm reading this and I'm a little shocked. I don't understand why people can be such jerks.

Here is SF. I think the guy thought he was flirting with me. It was not effective :)

When I think about it, people in SF should know better; but based on personal experience bad offensive remarks happen a lot more often than most people would think for such a progressive city. It's one reason I hate the thought of working in the city again.

The last part better explains it. It doesn't change the fact that it was sexism, but I categorize this one as stupidity and awkwardness instead of malice.

>>Afterwards, a well-known, elite developer asked me if I programmed. When I said yes, he said that made me 50% less attractive. Then he asked me if I cooked and cleaned. To my face.

You should have smiled and told him no, because you programmed a robot to do all that stuff for you. Then punched him in the face.

Wish I could even be surprised at this.

Join us on #geekfeminism sometime on freenode (if you're not already there) :)

And this is why you need moderated communities, because otherwise the assholes will dominate the discourse in your chosen milieu and drive out anyone they deem unacceptable.

Very often it's women. I don't know why but either there's a class of developers who feel personally threatened by women in their chosen profession, or it's personal: some individual has believed themselves to be entitled to that woman's attention & when it was not forthcoming begin a cruel campaign of punishment to make up for the perceived insult. Maybe even both?

It's been said that sunlight is the best disinfectant: I know that I'd be completely unaware of this behaviour if some of the women involved weren't brave enough to speak out about it. I don't have any good solutions though: the best I can do is to refuse to tolerate any sexism in my own circles, on the grounds that the people who do this kind of thing take other people's silence (not wanting to be "that guy") as implicit affirmation of their actions.

Regarding your second paragraph, I think it's primarily a clash of two situations: software development by its nature attracts men who are socially awkward, and the women that are attracted to software development tend not to be there for the attention.

Software development has a broader appeal now than it did twenty years ago, and in spite of the numerous cases like this one, there seems to still be a growing population of women in the community. (I hope that continues, we need all the talent available.) So, hopefully this will sort itself out in time.

In the meantime, I'm more intrigued by the idea of gated communities than I am of moderated communities. Moderation seems to require a lot of resources and lead to conflict. Gated (online) communities don't seem to have been tried as much, and I'm curious about whether or not a lot of social problems would simply solve themselves if not everyone were invited to participate.

> there seems to still be a growing population of women in the community.

Just keep in mind that, whatever growth you've observed, the number of women in programming now is much lower than it was in the 1980s.

For some historical statistics see http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-08-26/opinions/35268...

The percentage of women is lower, but the total number is higher.

Society was very different in 1980. Maybe we should be very careful to reach these conclusions.

The software development community attracts socially awkward people by accepting them- and consequently accepting behaviors that are not seen as acceptable in most parts of society.

For example, most of the software development community would see a 22yo guy persistently pursuing a girl who clearly isn't interested as innocent, awkward, and empathize with the guy's rejection (or lack there of, since he probably doesn't have the courage to directly ask her out). They wouldn't consider how it feels to the girl have someone watching you, following you, looking up private information online, and invading her space.

I don't think "we" as a community can or should outright reject people who behave badly. We can only reject (or try to change) their behavior. Let's not forget that 8+ hours a day in front of a little glowing box nearly requires a specific personality type. If people who are bad at dealing with other people are blocked from software development, the field would suffer (a lot).

> ...a 22yo guy persistently pursuing a girl who clearly isn't interested...

To be fair, you came >this< close to describing the plot of the average romcom here. The only difference between "sweet" and "creepy" is in judging whether or not the person is interested, or might become interested. A lot of nerds (I use the term with love here) aren't even good at mingling at social events, let alone reading whether or not their advances towards someone are going to turn out well. (This isn't limited to man-woman relationships either, as a recent case shows.)

...I wonder if maybe a huge root cause of this problem is simply that there are few enough women in our field that any attention from men feels like it's too much? I have to imagine that if you got regular, "Hey, are you busy Saturday night?" inquiries from different guys, you'd start to feel a little like chum in shark-infested waters.

I imagine most developers can tell the difference between 'pursuing' and 'stalking'.

I doubt women are generally in professional jobs "for the attention" & I don't think this kind of behaviour is limited to men who are socially awkward unfortunately.

Gated communities still need moderation: someone has to decide whether or not to kick people out if they behave badly!

It has been brought to my attention that I missed a 'not' in your sentence, rendering my previous reply... nonsense.

[deleted]

Keep in mind that sexism exists outside the tech industry as well: correlation doesn't imply causation.

We certainly need to address the problems of sexism within our community, but I think it's a mistake to assume that it's part of the community's particular quirks that produce said sexism. Especially when there are some far more obvious indicators of where the sexism comes from: the larger cultural discourse and ambience, for instance.

Are we (developers) the douchey 80s guy of the 21st century?

To paraphrase Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, one problem is guys believing that they're too smart to be sexist.

I also believe that a lot of people involved can't handle the idea that they're being bullies, and so further attempt to rationalise their actions with terrible analogies and arguments that boil down to "I'm a geek - I'm incapable of oppressing someone!"

I think to a large degree it's also about not understanding group dynamics. Let's say that:

35% or so of geeks are closet sexists in reform: aware that their belief systems are wrong / socially unacceptable and trying to change.

5% or so aren't sexists but misogynists: men who truly feel wronged by women and wish to retaliate.

60% are perfectly stand-up men who wouldn't do a bit of harm

Now the trick is that whenever the sexist and misogynists form a group where they have a significant majority, the closet sexists will give the misogynists a platform to damage women.

Meanwhile the other 60% sees nothing but 95% of perfectly respectful men who would do no harm against women and can't even imagine something like that happening in their company.

This sort of stuff also ties into the whole 'fake geek girl'thing as well: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/fake-geek-g... Or, the pink ghetto: http://tarahunt.com/2011/09/14/a-pink-collar-tech-ghetto/

This isn't a problem with guys or with developers in general.

The vast majority of people who participate in conference are good people. However, it only takes one person (out of thousands!) who has this kind of personality dysfunction to lead an attack, and women are much much more likely to be the target of their dysfunction.

I'm a man. We (male) developers don't have to be like this, and many of us aren't.

But, I've said it before and I'll say it again: men have even more of a responsibility than women to speak up and combat this kind of sexism. We (men) have the utmost responsibility to make sure that we are fighting to allow women a place in our industry, a place where they feel safe enough so that they can be equal participants without worrying about being looked down upon, harassed or concerned for their safety.

The sad reality is, more than having courageous women speaking up about sexism, men speaking up about sexism convinces other men to treat women respectfully.

> But, I've said it before and I'll say it again: men have even more of a responsibility than women to speak up and combat this kind of sexism.

Some advice on how to do this, for anyone looking: http://www.anamardoll.com/2012/11/deconstruction-how-to-be-m...

Seriously. I roll my eyes at some of the white-knighting that goes when a woman is slighted on the Internet but holy crap I get nervous for my girlfriend who's a talented programmer and about to graduate with a CS degree. Is this kind of bullshit in store for her? Sheesh.

Are you sure you aren't confusing "white knight" for "person who doesn't appreciate seeing other people treated like shit"? I originally thought that phrase meant something like "Claiming to represent someone's position or speak for them when they can very well speak for themselves." But assuming that http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/white-knight is a credible source, that phrase actually refers to dudes who argue against misogyny because they want to get laid. I hope that isn't the sense in which you're using it because there are some gaping flaws in that concept:

- Unless you're all using your real names and on the same campus or convention floor, how does that even work, logistically?

- Treating people with basic levels of respect does not magically make them attracted to you, though it will make them more comfortable hanging around you.

- If the only (or even the most notable) reason someone can think of for trying to argue against misogyny or other flavors of assholiery is to get laid, that person needs to go home and rethink their fundamental values in life. Implying this is true of men generally is pretty misadrist.

I suspect you aren't actually using knowyourmeme's definition, so could you clarify the behavior you're referring to when you say "white-knighting"?

Since when have gaping flaws in a concept been a deterrent against people trying to implement it?

Your typical Internet White Knight is most likely not explicitly aiming to get laid, but simply following the classical role model they've absorbed via Hollywood: women are weak and need to be defended, good men defend them (and get the girl in the end).

It can get a bit comical but the real problem is that it takes the form of personal defense in specific cases, and is focused on women. So males getting treated like shit are unlikely to get any help or even sympathy from a White Knight, and they're unlikely to spend any effort on actual solutions to a toxic atmosphere.

There ARE men who jump on others in a showy way for strictly imagined offenses against women. Sometimes (as in perhaps most cases of men fighting in public) the motivation IS at least partly sexual, e.g. to seem attractive, or at least part of an anachronistic image of the chivalrous savior. But the sexual part isn't defining.

This doesn't mean that it is wrong to argue against misogyny.

It just points to a real phenomenon among men, where they are trying to look like they are calling out an asshole when what is really going on is logically much more similar to acting holy in a bar fight over a woman.

If you think observing actual idiotic behavior which occurs sometimes among men is misandrist then I am happy to be a "misandrist" in your perception. I think the condition of men in our society can withstand a small amount of anthropological observation.

Really? Are there? Show me some examples.

What indications do you have that defending a woman is a sexually motivated act?

I think the point he's trying to make with regards to the white knighting going on, is that when a nude of Gabe Newell or Sergey Brin is made it doesn't hit the front page of HN. We respond differently when it's done to a woman.

Your original thought matches my definition.

I think the difference between white-knighting and not is whether it's about the woman or the person who's behaving badly.

"You shouldn't hit a girl!" <-- white knighting "You are being violent; if you do not stop we will ban you from this space." <-- insisting on basic, reasonable standards of behavior.

It's not about women needing special protection, it is about the community not welcoming people who act like assholes. Of course women can defend themselves, but no one should have to defend themselves against that kind of behavior. And the only reason I believe it is important to talk about gender in this context is because women are being targeted because of their gender and using cultural weapons specific to their gender. Again, it is about the people behaving badly, not their targets.

To clarify, it is white-knighting when the woman doesn't care, when there was no actual offense, and it is really just an opportunity for someone to show off about how chivalrous or sensitive they are.

You don't have to be sensitive or show yourself off to shut down misogynists and you definitely don't have to go looking for unclear offenses which the purported victims have no complaint about.

If the behavior makes me uncomfortable, it doesn't matter what the target thinks of it: I have a right to speak up. Even if the target is bothered by it I don't have a right to speak for her, though I can support her if she does speak up. All I can ever say is, "that behavior bothers me; I don't believe it is acceptable. Please stop." It doesn't matter if the offense is unclear to someone else, because it is about my boundaries, not theirs. You can disagree with my perception, but that doesn't make the behavior any more acceptable to me nor does it change how I feel about it.

This, a thousand times this. Misogyny, homophobia, racism, even slurs against programmers on the basis of their tool chocies: These are all offensive to me, and I wish to change that for my own reasons.

If a man hits his wife, I call the police. If she says, "No, it's ok, I provoked him, I deserve it," do I shrug and say, "Well that's all right then?"

Attempting to intimidate me out of speaking up by labelling me a "white knight" and questioning whether my motivation is to seduce women is pretty low and vile, but what I expect from the kind of apologist scum that perpetuate these kinds of social bullying behaviours.

"Reg, shut up, you're just trying to sleep with dykes" is not going to work in this or any century.

I roll my eyes at some of the white-knighting that goes when a woman is slighted on the Internet

I don't give a rat's ass what the definition of "white knighting is. I'm calling you out now to be much more specific about what kind of slighting is involved and what you're rolling your eyes at. Give examples. Justify yourself.

The tone/aggressiveness of your response makes it read like you're projecting a bunch of subtext you're bringing into the conversation onto me. I respect you but/so/and I'm not going to play that game.

If you think the developer community is bad, try advertising / media / sales.

Having worked in both, I actually do not think the developer community is better (or less awful) than the advertising / media / sales community. The former is simply more nuanced and subtle. The sexism in the Ad / Media / Sales world is simply more obvious, unhidden and honest. Both are horrible and grotesque - but to be frank, I think that while there is less respect for women in the Ad / Media / Sales world, there is more women-hating in the Developer community.

If we're going to trade ancedotes: I worked at Microsoft, with lots of female co-workers in technical and non-technical roles.

I never once hear a DE, SDE, SDET, or any other technical person say anything remotely along the lines of "women suck at programming because they're women." Not once, amongst the hundreds of people I worked with there. That's an anecdote - take it for what it's worth.

That's what you would expect to observe if either (a) there were negligible sexism, or (b) the sexism was present, but "more nuanced and subtle" in its form. Therefore your observation does not count as strong evidence for distinguishing between these hypotheses. It counts as stronger evidence against widespread overt sexism.

Ditto for me as well. At least in advertising there are other female project managers, assistants and designers you can go to. I've only worked one other job in dev where I've had another female co-worker, and even still that doesn't mean we're close and can confide in each other if we're concerned about something.

I agree, all the stuff I read it's like going back a century, we are supposed to be on the vanguard of a brave new world, not re-hashing the same dumb ass attitude that has contaminated the past decades. Grow up, get on and be nice.

See, but the fact that you're reading about it at all, that people are arguing about it at all, means we're doing better. The fact that outrage about sexism even exists is progress. It's the (slight) progress of shining a harsh light on the previously unnoticed realities that were always there.

Maybe, but I'm in my 40s and have been reading and arguing about it as well as experiencing it for my whole life.

> What a nasty bunch of people we are.

Why is wondering aloud how sexist/creepy the bulk of male programmers are more acceptable than wondering aloud how untalented the bulk of female programmers are?

I think both behaviors are rather low shaming behaviors.

because discrimination is about power. if two groups have equal amounts of power it really doesn't matter that much (except for social courtesy sake) what they say about each other. discrimination is a problem when it's associated with inequality. it's a big deal when a majority bash a minority. the other way round, not so much. even less so when the criticism is internal to the majority.

I think you are conflating these two statements (the apex fallacy):

1. Most of the those who have power are men.

2. Most of those who are men have power.

They are very different statements and one does not imply the other.

The average man has no more power than the average woman.

    > The average man has no more power than the average woman.

Can the average woman apply for any given technical position with an equal chance of being interviewed by a person of her gender? When the average woman's colleagues organise a social event outside of work, does she feel as powerful as the average man when she's the only female in a room full of inebriated men? When the average woman's colleague accidentally says something sexist and nobody else notices because she has no female colleagues, is she as powerful as the average man?

Can the average man expect to marry a woman with a higher educational attainment than him, who will bear more of the load of providing for the family so he can spend more time with the children? Does a man have an equal chance of getting a college degree (college enrollment and graduation now favors women by 60 to 40 percent)? When a man's wife beats him up and the police not only refuse to take him seriously, but arrest him instead (the primary aggressor doctrine) how does that make him more powerful than the average woman?

first, the apex fallacy is about, say, most ceos (most people at the top) being men - it's about assuming things given the extremes. but in the case of the tech industry, most programmers (most people at all levels) are male. we simply dominate - we are a clear majority. so it's not about bias from extremes. we dominate even in the middle.

second, arguments based on the apex fallacy assumes that power can be treated in some "average" way, so even if the top has power, if the bottom doesn't it somehow "averages out". and that's pretty clearly not a good model for how society works (which is why these kinds of arguments are popular only in fringe anti-feminist groups).

> but in the case of the tech industry, most programmers (most people at all levels) are male. we simply dominate - we are a clear majority. so it's not about bias from extremes. we dominate even in the middle.

I don't get how dominating the tech sector translates into a general dominance of the society, whereby a woman's sexist remark against a man can be thought less damaging than a man's sexist remark against a woman.

>which is why these kinds of arguments are popular only in fringe anti-feminist groups)

I think feminists have a long and proud tradition of employing the apex fallacy, whereby they argue that men have all the power worth talking about because of their representation at the top (CEOs, high government posts, ...) and ignore their over-representation at the bottom (prison, homeless, suicides (3x), high school and college drop outs, lower educational attainment (college enrollement and graduation is skewed 60/40 in favor of women now)).

Which anti-feminist apex fallacy arguments have you run into?

Sexism is alive and well in the 21st Century.

Look at how women are treated in the Middle East. Listen to stories of the rape culture in Delhi. Pay inequality the world over. A media industry which sees young women as commodities to sell their product. What we're seeing here is the thin end of the wedge; the individual who committed this disgusting act would probably have felt entitled to behave this way even were they working in another industry.

It's ugly, but this is a very large societal problem that we're still really struggling to address. As pleased as I was to see President Obama address gay rights in his inauguration, it was equally significant that he addressed gender equality. We've a long way to go before this is fixed, but rather than indulging in self-pity or recrimination, how about we work to be the change we want to see in the world?

I don't like being compared to some random person (of unknown gender) who attacked a woman in an online forum just because I am a developer, thank you very much!

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Your comment is the most surprising thing I've read the whole week. The surprise is due to the fact that you led with a statement I wholeheartedly agreed with (no, it's not okay to generalize that we're all sexist) and that set up an expectation that I would agree with the rest. Instead, you came up with a bunch of archetypal examples of why sexism is still very much a problem.

But it seems if girls are bad at anything in the computer industry, they aren't actually bad at it, it's just because they are girls and developers are sexist and will not accept them.

I don't usually like to be rude, but this particular quote deserves pointing out that you've pulled that stuff out of your ass. Go look on previous HN discussions about sexist treatment and you'll see that most of the time the women's complaints are backed by specific examples of undeniably sexist behavior, such as one of the examples from Sarah's post: "no offence, I just don’t relate to girls speaking about the industry at all, I learn better from guys."

I'm in the domain for some years and never ever saw that happening.

"Works on my machine" logic. If you haven't seen it, then it must be an exaggeration, perpetrated by all those silly lying women who can't measure up to men and conspire to be treated as equals without merit.

You think I'm laying it on too thick? Read the next quote:

Girls should just stop complaining about it for their own good.

Why, because they're crying wolf? Nobody's going to believe them if they keep doing that, right?

I'm being serious here: either you're claiming that they're lying or you're claiming they aren't but they should shut up anyway. From what I've seen in your comment, it seems to be the former, but your mistake is that you're basing it on your anecdotal experience.

Doesn't it strike you at least a little bit arrogant to claim that a whole bunch of people are lying just because you haven't personally seen any evidence of something like that happening in your own environment? I'm not talking about expressing skepticism here, you're actually implying that they're lying. Think about it.

Just because you've never seen it doesn't mean it never happens. Sexism at work requires certain group dynamics to flourish and I'm pretty sure your female boss can identify those and make sure they never come to pass.

Also... why do you refer to men as men and woman as girls?

"NO, WE ARE NOT" followed by a screed that goes to prove you are _exactly_ that. Couldn't have been more beautifully demonstrated.

Sexist misogynistic asshole on a project? Take away his commit access and ban him from all channels of communication, if you have the power and if you don't, don't contribute to the project anymore, make the reason public and create an alternative if possible.

In daily life I don't hang out with those assholes, do you? If not, why the fuck are you doing it online? Just because they have decent skills? How many people do they keep away from your project and from this community who could easily make up for that, who would have better skills and who would bring you project much further?

If you have a project and want to do something against what is currently fashionable in discrimination, stop writing comments, write a code of conduct and let's be honest if you don't, you are not any better than the people you are criticizing.

Worth noting that outing someone requires an immense amount of courage.

I think the more privilege you have, the less courage it takes.

You are probably right but that just makes it more important that we all do it, whether a victim or a witness and especially if we are privileged. Privilege is power and while its existence is bad just as the ways in which it is so often used, I believe we can use it for good as well.

This is absolutely true. It's almost always easier (and certainly less emotionally taxing) to just walk away entirely--especially when [the perception is that] the community will be either passive or against you after you act.

It's somewhat encouraging to read the comments here and note that for a change they are not already overrun by aggressive apologists for the continuing misogyny in software development.

Hmm. The number of apologists is actually quite small, in my experience. I think the problem here is that most of the people here are men, who have no real idea what being on the receiving end of sexual or sexually-motivated harassment is like, but they also don't see what they can or should do about it. I think it goes something like this: "Stories like the OPs are terrible, I get that, but by saying that 'the tech community' is to blame, you're saying I'm to blame, and I've never been sexist to anyone!". Basically, they feel like something is being done or said in bad faith here. A lot of the people who wind up arguing on these threads aren't actually misogynists[1], they just feel they're being told something that doesn't make sense to them, and in a way they're not entirely wrong. There's not much reason to accept that "the tech community has a problem" if you and your friends are members of the tech community, and none of you are sexists, but you feel like you're being accused anyway. We need to make a clearer distinction between the average member of the tech community and, for want of a better word, the 'asshole contingent' who are the source of the problem.

[1] That some people arguing on the 'wrong' side here are not doing so for misogynistic reasons doesn't mean that nobody is; part of the problem is that you can't easily tell the difference.

I think you make a fair point. However:

> We need to make a clearer distinction between the average member of the tech community and, for want of a better word, the 'asshole contingent' who are the source of the problem.

What I'm suggesting is that the average member of the tech community himself needs to do a better job of being distinguishable from the asshole contingent - and the typical pedantic, aggressive, head-buried-in-sand HN reaction to instances of sexism, chauvinism and abuse is a real part of the problem.

I was just about to write the same thing, before I saw your comment. HN is a cesspool in these cases usually, but I'm genuinely happy that it's different this time around.

Don't worry, it's getting worse as time goes on.

It does sicken me sometimes, the attitudes towards women of some of the tech folks I've run into. Not usually out and out misogyny, but stupid jokes and inappropriate comments. Most often made/said when there are no women around, they show how some of my fellow developers still think and it honestly feels to me like I'm working with neanderthals.

On the minor-but-still-horrible end of the scale, female colleagues have complained in the past that their ideas are often not taken seriously until repeated by a man. I hope I'm not guilty of this one (being the repeater or the listener) but I'm not entirely sure.

There have also been incidents where female friends and colleagues have been verbally and physically harassed in the workplace or in learning establishments, and they face an uphill struggle to get anyone to take their claims in the least bit seriously, with witnesses dropping out and the accused making all sorts of bizarre claims.

So no, sat here in the enlightened 21st century, amongst the people at the cutting edge of technology, the people who like to think themselves the vanguard of the new knowledge and tech based society... we're not the vanguard of social enlightenment, we don't operate as the fabled meritocracy, and we need to watch out for this behaviour and encourage women to speak up about it as much as possible.

If nothing else I have no desire to spend my days around sexist arseholes.

Who are these people? I mean, really, what the fuck?

It seems hardly a week goes by without someone bringing forward a genuinely awful case of harassment, abuse, or worse, and that's only the stories horrible enough to make the front page of HN. So, who the fuck is doing this and how do we make them fuck the fuck off?

I kinda understand why some people's response is to doubt that this could really be happening, because it is pretty fucking unbelievable. But it seems that it really is happening, and it's undermining some pretty central notions of the meritocratic, no-bullshit character of the community. This kind of thing is pretty outrageous bullshit.

OK, to a certain extent we must accept that there will always be assholes, and the kind of spite and vindictiveness the OP relates sounds like the behaviour of a disturbed, obsessive individual, but there must be a way of deterring such behaviour. What more can we do here?

When I speak at conferences, it's not unusual for me to receive heckles. It's part of a thing where a lot of people who know me know that I'm pretty good with banter and will usually respond with a put down or your mum joke in good nature. It's mainly because I grew into conference speaking in a hostile conference environment, and also I've done a bit of stand-up now and again so you get used to it.

The problem with all of this that I've realised is that other people in the audience will see me being heckled and will think it's perfectly fine to heckle speakers, and that other people will see me being heckled and might be discouraged from speaking. It's got me thinking quite a bit about this. Any ideas what I should do about it?

Here's one: Instead of engaging them as a standup comic, willing to cross swords with a heckler (which likely encourages them), make up a three line response about how "this is a tech talk at a conference, please don't heckle, it just wrecks things for everyone." In other words, deflate the situation by being bland in your reply, and only bland.

What do we do about less overt sexism? For instance, there's a popular developer who writes useful plugins named after genitalia and sex acts. I find his code useful, and I've asked him publicly and privately to choose nonsexual names for his code, but he and his users see nothing wrong with this. Even consider the "weinre" project that's on the frontpage right now. "Get your weinre out"?!

His assertion is that it's not sexist if his projects are called "testicle" or "foreplay", since those words aren't intrinsically sexist. How do we, as a community, emphasize that sexuality and development can't mix if we want women to feel comfortable, given that they're currently a minority?

If they're open source, you could fork them with better names. You could even set up an rsync type script so it's always up to date. This could nudge him in the right direction. This would fork discussion in that community, forcing everyone to use two names for a while. But it's probably worth it.

Are you talking about Tim Pope, whose work includes vim-foreplay, vim-scriptease, vim-eunuch, vim-speeddating, and hookup?

I am talking about Tim Pope. I have forked his code and renamed it, but instead of the community helping me, I've received a lot of negative feedback about "fragmenting the community" for trying to maintain and evangelize a non-sexist version of the plugin. It is difficult to continue in the face of so little support, but I believe in what I'm doing, and all of my male and female developer friends agree with me.

I think you're right that it's a less overt form of sexism, but I support what you're doing and I hope one day this clicks for Tim and he sees what a minor concession this is and what a positive thing it would be.

I'm a Vim user myself, and a big fan of his work. It's not nice to mention his name in a thread like this, however tangentially related. But given the topic, I thought for once it might be forgiveable to err on the side of those without male privilege.

> it’s about finding female speakers who have enough of a thick skin to want to stand up infront of an audience of twitter-trigger-happy males and public speak

Was this awful incident a one off or is attacking female speakers at tech conferences a thing? I've not noticed it until now. I don't get it, why would you? To what end?

It's a thing. It makes front page on HN once a month or so which implies that it happens more than that.

The motives behind it seem to span a spectrum from straight sexism through to weird stalkerness.

As someone else wrote, sunlight is probably the best way to try and reduce the problem.

Unfortunately, it's a thing: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents

One of the more famous incidents was the twitter backchannel for dana boyd's Web2.0 talk http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/11/24/spectac... (admittedly, she did have a talk that bombed, but that's still no excuse for the angle that the twitter talk took.

Please, tell me, how would comments look if someone did the same thing, but for the guy? The sight of a bunch of guys rushing to fight sexism (often without even understanding what sexism is) and solve women's issues for them is amusing. This is not to say, that there are no problems. But the biggest problem I see is a knee-jerk reaction to anything involving gender or race. Sometimes assholes are just assholes and couldn't care less if their victim is women or black person, or whatever. The bunch of self proclaimed righteous knights however fails to see that and then everything becomes sexims and/or rasism thus diluting real problems.

> Please, tell me, how would comments look if someone did the same thing, but for the guy?

HN is getting better at being less aggressive and at being more constructive with criticism.

Perhaps you can find an example where a male dev had pictures of his face, and pictures of another man's penis, posted to a website with his name and email address. And, when you find it, HN will be supportive of that man and will condemn the anon attacker.

Even if there is such an example, you really need to have your head stuck firmly up your ass if you're willing to argue that it would have anywhere near the same social and emotional impact.

Perhaps "outing" a developer as gay could have a comparable impact for men, but that would only apply in predominantly homophobic communities.

Which in turn says a lot about this community's attitude towards women. If it wasn't hostile to women in the first place, extreme examples like this troll would never have such an impact.

Just read it again, and have to ask: what was the impact of those actions on the community? It obviously had an impact on the targeted woman, but the community? Did anybody really think "gee she looks ugly in those pictures, I guess she sucks as a person" or anything like that?

Maybe female devs saw it, and decided they didn't want to be the target of that behaviour, and decided not to contribute to tech conferences?

What about accusing the guy of being a rapist and a pedophile?

As an actual example, in the GitHub penis incident, HN seemed mostly supportive of the target:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601342

It's interesting that you say "couldn't care less if their victim is a women or black person, or whatever".

Can you come up with a good example of this kind of extreme attacking of a white man? You say "How would this look for a guy", I honestly can't think of any examples where people go anywhere near as far trolling and harassing white men. I may of course just be forgetting some obvious cases.

I would suggest that harassment of white men (and men in general) usually comes in the form of attacking one's mind, rather than body. George W. Bush stands out as a notable example. I don't know of anyone posting supposed pictures of him naked, but the jokes about his intelligence were seemingly never ending.

People questioned and attacked his intelligence because of his actions, not because of his race and/or gender. I'd suggest that people who want to attack someone for whatever reason will go after low-hanging fruit (being some sort of statistical outlier), and should that not exist they'll have to go after something of actual substance. When your goal is belittling someone, an attack that requires people to actually think tends not to be terribly effective.

And contrary to your suggestion, I've certainly received plenty of harassment based on my body as a white male. Less these days as I refuse to work with people who can't act like adults, but I've taken plenty of crap about my height and physical appearance (I'm 25; lots of "oh, when do you finish high school?" kind of stuff)

They surely did: I remember several times when I saw Bush's monkey face mounted on top of a slightly NSFW girl.

I can, unless you mean white straight men.

In tech?

Not that it doesn't happen in day-to-day life, but I can't think of any case where even a white, gay cis man was targeted this way during a conference or subjected to an online harassment campaign. When maddog came out there were a couple comments quoting Leviticus and that was it. Certainly the HN threads about sexual orientation are almost completely free of the sort of "they're lying!" or "they're just manipulative!" or actually any sort of vitriol whatsoever (and what there is is rapidly down-voted.)

This is a good thing! But if you are going to argue that straight gay men in tech are treated similarly, I'd like some citations.

Please, tell me, why there is always one individual who reads an article like this and goes "but what about teh menz!?"

I agree that it's not appropriate here, but in general; people do it because male forced envelopment victims get congratulated, male domestic violence victims that call for help are redirected to a hotline to confess as an abuser, males are ignored in legislation bringing more health care benefits to women, males are more likely to commit suicide, and males are less likely to succeed in lower education or matriculate into college. Also the prisons are full of men (who get longer sentences for similar crimes), where it's also a hilarious joke that they are raped because fuck criminals.

I wouldn't have replied but I hate that "what about the menz" trope. Men and women both have social problems, it wasn't appropriate to discuss men's issues here but that does not mean it is never appropriate. Maybe people need better filters than, "a discussion about gender is occurring, here is my two cents," but it's hard for people who care about these issues to find a good time simply because it's somewhat taboo to say men have problems at all. So they probably just don't mention anything until they really disagree with something being said.

"Sometimes assholes are just assholes"

Good, lets out them and get rid of them whatever their issue is, so the rest of us can get on with our lives.

yep, equality sucks, especially when you're attacked as an equal. The thing is, these idiots that do stuff like this are targeting the woman's sexual attributes, and not her intelligence or skills.

As for the guy that said he learned better from other men - maybe he does, give him the benefit of the doubt - it's not ALL about you.

I worked with Sarah 1.5 years ago and can't imagine why someone would have a grudge with her personally - she's incredibly nice.

Is there becoming a general consensus on what to do about a problem we are becoming aware is worse than most of us thought?

I glean the following from a few of these threads

1. Conferences, conventions, hackathons all should have published "acceptable behaviour" statements, and possibly a red / orange / green card system that everyone understands

2. online examples get red / orange carded though a bitly link posted on a red card site (did I read that?)

3. conferences share blacklists

4. we accept that this shit will continue and get worse in an anonymous internet and that we accept that as a price of freedom and try to mitigate it for those who actually pay that price.

Do conferences really need to post a rule that "spamming the forum with fake porn pictures is inappropriate"?

I do grant though, that a lot of people seem to be missing some education on how to deal with other human beings. I don't think conference rules would be the best place to get the message across, though. Wondering if there should be courses in high school...

I read that the card system turned into a running joke at DEFCON (people giving their buddies cards at the slightest insinuation), which could lead to watering down the purpose or making it somewhat of a joke to receive one in a literal sense. Do any other conferences have in-the-moment/non-confrontational methods of calling people out?

In activist circles, getting called out for racist or sexist behavior means you're kicked out, immediately, no questions asked.

Based on my understanding of it, the red/yellow card system is largely an effort in self-policing, in that they're based on the assumption that someone who receives a red card will learn and change their behavior.

This seems like a bad assumption. A better system might be to have a simple mobile app or website, run by the conference, that allows women (and only women) to report harassment by a particular person, causing that person to be immediately blacklisted.

This is severe enough that you won't see it being used as a joke, and it'll be effective at removing scuzzy people from conferences.

Don't you see the potential for abuse?

The mere idea of abuse creates an incentive to steer clear of any females in the audience, which is sort of the opposite of the desired goal - acceptance.

Of course there's potential for abuse -- that's a feature, not a bug.

By taking the patriarchal power dynamic and turning it on its head, systems like these create radically better environments for collaboration and collective empowerment.

If you're a man who would avoid talking to any women at a convention where women calling you out for harassing/threatening/misogynist behavior, the real problem isn't the system that allows women to hit back harder than their abusers, it's that you have far too high a probability of doing something harassing/threatening/misogynistic, and you should take some time to reconsider your behavior-patterns.

Conferences are a problematic area even if one ignore what kind of community it is. (be that IT, gardening, Sci-Fy, trucks, manufacturing, or furries). The math is not giving out pretty numbers.

Lets compare two conferences. One is 5% females participation, and a other is 50%. We can directly say that the risk of getting sexually assaulted is minimum 20x larger at the 5% conference than the 50%. there is also a number of additional considerations one can add to the risk assessment like age, marital status of people in the conference, and access to alcohol.

Based on what data can you "directly say that the risk of getting sexually assaulted is minimum 20x larger at the 5% conference than the 50%"?

Let's make up some numbers, and let's pick say 200 members conference. Let's also say that each male participant is a equal risk of being a person who commit a sexual assault, and that risk is 10%.

  50%/50% distribution:
  100 male participants, 100 female participants
  number of sexual assaults: 100x10% = 10
  *Risk for each female participant: 10/100 = 0.1

  5%/95% distribution:
  190 males, 10 females
  number of sexual assaults: 190x10% = 19
  *Risk for each female: 19/10 = 1.9

  *Risk compared: 0.1 vs 1.9 = 0.1/1.9 = 19x

Okey, not 20x, I rounded the number 19x to 20x. It also assumes that:

A), Female to Female sexual assault is 0. Not true, but close enough in regard to what is reported.

B), Regardless to number of females, the risk of each male participant stays the same. If the 50%/50% actually has a higher number of assaults in practice, then the risk difference between the two type of conferences actually drop.

Here's to your bravery Sarah. I admire your courage, it's not easy to publicly announce that kind of thing.

What's always very frustrating, some guy may hold a grudge or be sexist... but why does he always find so many supporters, like those who visited his web site and sent this woman emails? People who shouldn't have anything against this woman but just can't keep themselves from attacking her. Frat house? Too many people in this industry don't seem to ever graduate from it.

I constantly wonder if the era of self-centered, socially-awkward developers is coming to an end (hopeful). More often that not the younger developers I see tend to be bucking that trend which should go a long way towards addressing this problem - unless of course they are the primary offenders. Are these instances centered around older or younger developers, I wonder? If younger then perhaps this entire assumption is baseless, in which case the path developers are on in general is indeed alarmingly derailed.

How would you combat this scenario, though? If the person who is doing this has not been caught, then is it really a good idea to publicly state how much of an annoyance he or she is being? (I say she, because seriously, it could be another woman as well. Everybody is assuming it's probably a guy. We've all seen how mean women can be to other women, though. I grew up with 2 sisters and their friends ... I've seen a lot of that.) But, if this person is still anonymous then I'd think this would just fuel the fire and make them go even more full throttle, now. I don't think staying quiet helps either, but this is just that typical internet scenario where somebody is hiding behind anonymity and is enjoying the attention and drama that their actions are creating. I really don't know how I'd combat this, if it were happening to me.

This is nothing against the author of the article, this is just me some what brainstorming out loud about how to combat this scenario. Without trying to take action, and with the antagonist still unknown, what does the author want everybody to do, though? What is the call to action here?

"We've all seen how mean women can be to other women".

Thanks for contributing your "all women are bitches" opinion to a discussion on sexism. Classy.

I think the goal is general awareness about sexism & harassment present in the industry.

Even she doesn't make the specific offender more accountable by speaking up, she raises awareness and hopefully makes everyone less tolerant of this kind of outrageous stupidity.

Sorry about your treatment. :(

(And here I go into down-vote territory... :D)

Before I say anything, let me say clearly I am not sexist; I am a strong advocate of equal rights (key word: equal).

Some of your attacks can definitely be attributed to sex, but it's bad propaganda just to throw them all in the sexism bucket, or treat sexism like it is the norm. I know several females in the industry who are not afraid of anything, and have never been attacked on the basis of their sex (or even been attacked otherwise). Sometimes people attack just because they don't like the cut of your jib. In other words, it can be tempting to project your experiences on the rest of the industry, but I think as a whole the majority of men are "good guys".

The simple truth is the more you open yourself to the public, the more you open yourself for attack, regardless of sex. You have almost 30,000 followers, so statistically speaking at least a few of them are probably psychopaths and/or sexist. Some of the highest profile tweeters, like Notch, get attacks daily (mostly by angry 13 year olds). My $0.02...

And how many speakers have porn created of them distributed during conferences? And when that happened would you expect at least a small percentage to secretly have a little laugh at it?

There was another post on the front-page just minutes ago called The Distress of the Privileged [1] and it makes the very good point that these things are about a difference of scale.

On the one hand we have one of the most high-profile of tweeters facing regular childish threats; on the other hand we have a not all that well known female presenter having to deal with porn 'of her' being distributed during speaking engagements.

[1] http://weeklysift.com/2012/09/10/the-distress-of-the-privile...

Yes, people are going to attack women in very different ways then men. I can't imagine that many people would want to create nude pics of a guy to insult him. But that's not what I am getting at -- I am trying to say that this incident does not reflect the majority of males, nor does it make the whole IT industry sexist. You can't start saying that everyone/everything is sexist just because one incident of it occurred. Maybe people being bored with her talk had nothing to do with her being a woman -- maybe it was just a boring talk.

Its been pointed out a number of places that no, this doesn't represent the majority of male developers. It's established it's a small subset of a larger population.

Even so, the fact that its a minority is irrelevant, its the fact that it happens, and the fact that it happens on a regular basis is the issue.

That it happens regularly is what makes it the norm, not that its perpetrated by the majority of people.

And as people that work in the industry, we do have a responsibility for how others act, and we should act accordingly. Yes, it may not directly be our faults, be we do have a responsibility to react to this kind of behavior, and deal with it.

Otherwise, we are condoning it and then it does become our fault. As cliche'd/dramatic as it is, this is exactly the situation that is talked about in "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"

Seriously? What part of sexism in tech fields occurs more frequently than is reported is hard to understand? For every woman who says something, there are several that don't. For every story any woman is telling on the topic, there are several more stories that she probably has but isn't telling because she'd be there all day. $#@?!

And please, say what you have to say without prefacing it with useless declarations like "I'm not XYZ but", like its some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. If others find your perspective on the topic is warped, then they'll comment accordingly and you won't get a pass. And BTW, issues like sexism tend to exist along a continuum and sometimes even well-meaning people's views may sometimes graze or lie along it, regardless of good intentions.

EDIT: deleted duplicates (was getting error msgs that made me think the comment wasn't being posted).

Nobody said it reflected the majority of males. Nobody said it makes the whole industry sexist. Nobody said everyone is sexist. Nobody is basing their opinion on one incident.

Tell me more about this "straw man fallacy", though.

See his reply to mine above :)

(And here I go into down-vote territory... :D)

The name of the fallacy this demonstrates is "poisoning the well", as in implying that anyone who downvotes you is just afraid to hear the truth, man........

sexism like it is the norm

As we keep discovering, sexism is the norm for women in general and specifically in our industry. Your blindness to this fact is not evidence to the contrary.

I know several females in the industry who are not afraid of anything, and have never been attacked on the basis of their sex (or even been attacked otherwise).

I suspect that if you asked them whether or not this was true, and they trusted you enough to answer honestly (and after reading your blythe dismissal above, I wouldn't), you'd find this is not the case.

Sometimes people attack just because they don't like the cut of your jib.

Can you point to a straight, white male who's suffered the kind of attention Sarah relates, for no other reason than that someone didn't like the cut of his jib?

the majority of men are "good guys"

The majority of men can be good guys generally, and still be guilty of sexist behaviour that's hostile to women, that drives them out of our industry, and that creates a pervasive atmosphere that no one should have to tolerate. Calling out behaviour like this is not a blanket condemnation of us as irredeemably bad guys, and suggesting that it is, is a way of deflecting information that makes us uncomfortable.

Wow talk about fallacies! :)

Here is one for you:

The straw man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

I am accepting that I am going to be down-voted, not challenging people not to do it. See above fallacy.

As we keep discovering, sexism is the norm for women ... We hear about one sexism case every few weeks here on HN. Of the many thousands of females in IT, do you think they are all just playing the silent card? Or maybe sexism is the infrequent case, not the norm? Sexism is rare for a pretty good reason: lawsuits. Of her 30,000 followers, how many have made sexist remarks? Less than 10? Seems like the norm to me...

We seem to have this conspiracy that sexism is all over the place, it's just that 99 percent of women are being silent about it. Does sexism exist? Yes. Is it frequent? Probably not, but everyone is entitled to their opinion on the matter.

I have a suggestion for you: When you have the opportunity to have a conversation with a woman in technology, ask her about sexism in the industry. Ask her if she's experienced it: if she's received the sort of unwanted geek attention for which Linux conferences are famous; if she's received stupid or sexist comments (c.f. mwetzler's comment above); if she's had to fend off inappropriate advances in a professional setting; if she's had to go through the mental gymnastics that an atmosphere of sexism creates.

And here's the crucial part: don't argue with her about it. Do it as a fact-finding thing, a survey. Just say you're trying to learn. Ask questions to draw her out and clarify things, but don't share your opinion (especially those above), because that will interfere with the information gathering, especially if they perceive that you're asking only to dismiss or reject what she's telling you.

Women are very frequently silent about sexism because speaking up about it not only fails to address the issue, but worsens the severity of it. What started as inappropriate flirting turns into sexually abusive comments; or an argument in which an experience in which they feel quite obviously wronged, gets trivialized as a misunderstanding or oversensitivity on their part.

everyone is entitled to their opinion on the matter

Absolutely, but some opinions are backed up by a lot of data, and those opinions tend to be more worth having.

> and have never been attacked on the basis of their sex

Do you really know this, or do they just never ever mention it?

I agree that everyone with enough followers will be the victim of attacks. But those attacks often take the easy route - someone who is Jewish will have anti-semitic rants posted about them; a woman will have graphic depictions (in text or imagery) of what people "want to do to her"; etc. It's fine to call a hateful attack sexist if it's using sexist tactics for the attack.

And it's a fact that women are more likely to be attacked than men. This is easy (but laborious) to prove - you get a list of conferences and speakers in 2012, then ask speakers if they had any attacks, then categorise and finally run some graphing / plotting software.

(I didn't downvote you BTW.)

Thanks - all good points :) As usual, the small sample of women I know is not necessarily indicative of anything, but of all the women I know, not one of them has complained about sexism; for all I know any of them could have been subject to it.

I have been subject to a few attacks myself over the course of my life for being born a Jew (although technically I have always been more of an atheist or agnostic). But it never once bothered me that much, because I know many Jews have had it far worse, both in the past and present. Likewise, I kind of cringe a bit when we complain about these #firstworldproblems, because there are women who are getting stoned to death for cheating on their husbands right now. I don't think that sexism should be ignored, but I do think we have a tendency to focus on the most trivial (relatively speaking) instances of it.

> But it never once bothered me that much,

Yeah, but do you take the time to scold other Jewish people who do get bothered by that stuff?

Also: let's not drag out the Bigger Fish to Fry Fallacy (there's probably a better name for that...). Just because problem B is worse than problem A doesn't mean it's not worth it for some folks to focus on A. Also: what are you doing about either of these problems? That is to say, what is your moral standing to tell others which problems are worth pursuing and which are not?

For glob's sake, I wish people would stop saying "I'm not sexist BUT..." or "I'm not racist BUT..." or "I'm not a homophobe BUT..."

Because:

A) You're setting yourself up for failure.

B) Show, don't tell.

but most importantly C) it's hardly ever useful to denote any one person as racist or sexist or whatever. It's thoughts and ideas and biases which are much more usefully labeled so.

So, great, you are not sexist: you do not willfully do women ill. But do your ideas and unconscious actions support that intention? I would start by reflecting on the need to say "key word: equal", as though there are some politically significant number of people wishing for something beyond that.

No buts, I just wanted to make it apparent from the start that I am not sexist. "Equality" is all that I want, and it bugs me when people start saying things like "the industry is filled with sexism" or "sexism is the norm" or "most males are sexist" because it is simply not true. Or it is true, and 99.999 women just choose to be silent about their cases of sexism. It is insulting when people attack males as a single group based on some edge cases.

> Or it is true, and 99.999 women just choose to be silent about their cases of sexism.

They are far more silent that you think. Ask some actual women about it some time.

> It is insulting when people attack males as a single group based on some edge cases.

You're right, that would be insulting, if it were at all what was actually happening in this plane of reality.

Of course it's true that sexism exists - plenty of women do choose to be silent on issues of sexism. It is an incredibly hard to bring up such a personal thing when you want to be taken seriously professionally.

It is insulting when people attack males as a single group based on some edge cases.

Men are so sensitive about sexist comments when they perceive they're the targets. Lighten up, dude, I'm not sexist :)

Maybe you're not sexist, but I dispute your simple truth. I have been on the same conference speaking circuit that Sarah has for 9 years now, and not once have I been on the receiving end of a similar attack.

I am a male. I have had my ideas challenged, but no one has ever made it personal. Do you really think most female speakers are so lucky?

If you have to preface your comments with "I am not sexist," there's probably something sexist about the words that are going to follow. You're hitting a lot of the derailing for dummies points here...

I think, based only on hunch and not recorded data I can source, that the more attractive the female the more likely they are to become a target of such behavior.

This post is just so sick. I'm sorry that anyone would have to go through all of that. While I think that calling people sexist or racist when it isn't founded is terrible, this is an extremely obvious case of harassment and those involved should be punished. I hope my daughters don't have to deal with this crap when they grow up.

How awful is it that when I see a trending headline on Hacker News titled “Speaking up”, I can make a very good (and in this case accurate) guess on exactly what it is about.

I want to do something about this.

How can I help?

We have to fight for what is right!

Let's keep in mind that the perpetrator of the fake porn pictures might have been a woman

Unlikely (for all the reasons of oppression and power dynamics), but even if that were the case, the people who view said fake porn, and for whom having porn be something that, in their eyes, can break your career, are going to be overwhelmingly male, in all likelihood. If having nude photos of yourself were seen as something we ought reward and celebrate, as opposed to something that makes women look like "sluts," then it almost certainly would not have been the vector this perp would have used for attack. I have a feeling fake porn would be a lot less detrimental to a man's career than a woman's.

Why is that worth keeping in mind? The result is still sexist discouragement.

It's worth keeping in mind because people might assume that men are worth avoiding, or let their guard down among women.

Face it people, Feminism is Evil!

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%20America/Feminism...

An attractive female that makes dorky men do stupid? You don't say...

So apparently, she is a web designer (or a web design agency owner), but it takes an effort to find a link to an actual portfolio. There is the Resources page but it's full of her own photos from every angle. The About page is too full of important aspects of her professional background including how she takes her coffee (apparently 3rd most frequently asked question).

I understand that she is the brand and she's probably doing more public speaking than HTML coding, but I find this sort of "I am the only girl in web design, totally braving it" blatant self-promotion to be very off-putting. It feels calculated and manipulative.

Everyone is too polite or concerned with HN decorum to say so but you're a fucking asshole.

I really hope you don't get hellbanned for this - I absolutely agree with you.

Good for you, guys. A knee-jerk reaction at its best.

We're all just passive-aggressively downvoting that comment into oblivion instead.

IMO that's exactly how it should work. Comment is downvoted, gets grayed out, and then hopefully people don't reply to it.

The graying out is a way of expressing "don't feed this troll". If people start replying and get into a prolonged discussion, what is the point of the graying out in the first place?

I regret that I can only up vote once.

So you are looking at a personal blog (at least, that is what it looks like me), that is also used as a personal site for speaking gigs (press images, bio, et al).

You are not willing to follow the link to her agency, to look for a portfolio there, but you have the "right", quite passive-aggressively, to criticize her in a way, that makes her look not like the victim, she is in the told story, but that it is all her own fault?

cynism on

You feel manipulated, so you are the victim now. If a woman describes her experience with something like this, somehow you become the victim?

OK, sorry, but I really do not get this. I really try to understand it - but maybe I am not intelligent enough. Please try to explain. I really would love to understand your worldview...

cynism off

Jeez. If I am a victim now, then you are no lesser of a victim for being hurt by not being able to fully understand my comment of me not being a victim. Let's not go the soap opera way.

She is a professional public speaker, not a web designer. Whatever she's gotta say, it serves to promote her brand. This is factored into her decision to post. It doesn't make what she has to say any less true, but it does make it far less interesting and it also makes it look far more calculated.

edit on

Editing comments after getting a reply? Oki-doki.

edit off

OK, the passive-aggressive accusation of your part, just pushed me over the edge (Your edit).

To you, sir, I have nothing more to say, but:

"Don't feed the trolls"

For everybody else, that should have been my answer:

Well, first, I am not hurt. I was cynically trying to expose your style of thinking to be exactly aligned with the mindset, that (imho) is the underlying reason, so many (or even just some) women feel treated like shit in this industry.

As I believe, real reasoning might be lost on people expressing their attitude the way you do, I was trying another route, employed by the medieval jesters, called irony. As your mindset really fits the dark ages better than the 21st century, that just seemed fitting.

I know, that, with going that route, I did nothing less then assuming a lot on your position - and maybe I really did wrong you, by assuming, that your passive-aggressive tone of writing was exactly that. Maybe I did you wrong, by totally misunderstanding your point (that I am not able to see, even after your reaction to my comment).

Soap-opera-way? I have really not idea, what you might mean by that.

If I understand you right, everybody, that ever had a professional gig in speaking, is not allowed to post a very terrible personal experience on her/his own blog, telling a story of how someone tried to destroy her reputation? Sorry, but that I really don't get.

That's because it's her personal site, a place people often promote their own personal brand/speaking/photos/achievements/etc. Click on her company name to be taken to http://www.youknowwhodesign.com/ which is a more typical portfolio/agency site.

It's not hard at all. You go to the about page (http://www.sazzy.co.uk/about/), look at the text where it says "Sarah is the owner of design studio You Know Who", you then click through to the company page (http://www.youknowwhodesign.com/) and click on Portfolio.

Pretty sure sazzy.co.uk is a personal site about Sarah, the person. Work is all at http://www.youknowwhodesign.com

Sexism in the tech business "overblown", says anonymous troll who struggles to use a web browser effectively.

I don't see how criticising the formatting of the content without discussing the content adds anything. Was there a point you wanted to make ?

I am not convinced that her motives for posting this are genuine. This sort of deeply personal story has no business of being attached to the Resources and the FAQ pages on how to get her speak at your event.

What are you talking about?

Why wouldn't her motives be genuine? What evidence do you have to suggest it's anything other than that?

She's posted to her PERSONAL blog. How is that "attached" to the Resources and FAQ pages on her site?

The "deeply personal story" is about shit that went down in public. Things you might have seen happening because you saw her speak at a conference. It is perfectly reasonable to "attach" it to any "speaking on conferences"-stuff.

Seriously?!?!?! Ummm.... I'd suggest seeking professional help. It's pretty clear you have some deep-seated issues.

Took me less than a minute to find this: http://www.youknowwhodesign.com/portfolio

This comment is wrong, but it can be a good starting point for what I want to say: it's very likely that in life people will pick on you for what you are. I've been tormented at various degrees because I'm short, or because I'm shy and introvert, or because I sort of like math. I mean I have been called a "pain in the ass" because I said that I don't like dubbed movies (I live in a country were dubbed movies are the norm). And all this in important settings like school and work. And not only by my peers, but also by teachers, boss and managers. But I'm not here to complain. What I want to say is that if you post photos of yourself and you are a nice lady, someone will pick on you for that. That's very sad, but it's the status quo. The hell if I know what are their reasons. But I know why they do it: because it's easy and it hurts. They don't pick on you for your work. It doesn't hurt that much and they could end helping you, pointing out one of your errors. But if it is your body, your beliefs, your personality they will do it. That's an easy bet.

So do I think that ladies shouldn't post beautiful photos? No of course, go on, you are hacking the system. You are getting a lot of good attention for that. But as always there are trade offs. A couple of weeks ago, here on HN someone complained because a young user posted something like: "I'm 14 and I developed an iPhone game". What's wrong with that? You did something and you want to advertise it. Saying that you are a young developer is a very catchy. And posting your photos is very eye-grabbing. Sort of refreshing after the n-th post about "beautiful typography" or whatever. Now, about the state of the industry. The only way to change things is for women to stick out and speak-up. Please don't hide. Soon or later things will change. I can imagine that 150 years ago, female teachers weren't as respected as men. Now, at least in my school experience, men were often the less respected one. While women were feared by students. Thing's will change, hopefully sooner than later.

And you are... Internationally acclaimed developer/designer with years of experience and almost 30, 000 followers? Mmm didn't think so.

sigh clearly we as a community have a long long long way to go if we still have people of even contemplate such a reponse

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