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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

> women in tech are not taken seriously until after they have become successful.

Neither are men, so I don't really see what you are getting at.

No, it's very different. Men often times are taken seriously just because they are men. The odd thing about it however is that if you are a man, then this is not immediately obvious, because you have always been treated this way and have taken it for granted. But ask any woman in a tech field and they will give you lots of data points about how their male counterparts are always praised by their peers and superiors for minor accomplishments whereas women are either not given much credit or the stuff they do are ignored completely.

I was getting lunch with a female coworker/friend last week and we ended up talking about this very topic. We work for a software company and she's in sales. She recounted that back when she first started, other salespeople treated her like crap and blamed her for things that weren't her fault. Even when she exceeded her daily or weekly goals, she didn't receive any praise. Whereas the male salespeople who started around the same time as her were getting rewarded for performing half as well. It was only after she dominated the quarterly metrics over and over that people started to pay her any attention. Nowadays she's very highly regarded, but had to work extra hard to get that.

I have an anecdote about a guy who wasn't given recognition while female coworkers were. Want to anecduel? Or shall we actually look for hard data rather than relying on hand-waving and stories about women we've known?

More importantly, though I agree that women have to fight harder for recognition in many fields, there is no evidence that this means they are more subject to impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome is an internal thing, not something somebody else tells you to have.

This constant insistence on "hard data" is extremely tiresome, and throws a wrench in what would otherwise be interesting debates. I think, as intelligent people, we should be able to reason ourselves out of a disagreement without relying on data that may or may not exist.

Logic is a wonderful vehicle for arriving at good conclusions, but without the fuel of accurate data, it is mostly useless for going anywhere but downhill.

We cannot confidently reason about reality without some hard data to use as a premise. We need that connection to reality. By trying to go without it, we are essentially constructing a fantasy universe. It might be a very elaborate and intelligently constructed fantasy, but it is still ultimately disconnected from reality.

But anyway, there is some hard data for this, so we don't need to worry about it not existing. It's already been offered earlier in the thread.

My post is off topic, but anecdotes are data. Poor data to make decisions about systemic changes, but good data to make decisions about individual choices and policies. A single instance of a wrong is enough to discuss how it might have been avoided.

Yes, it's possible to have a conversation without data. Yes, sometimes it's all you can do, if the hard data doesn't exist, so "hard data or GTFO" is untenable. But you started slinging anecdotes, and that's a path to sloppy reasoning. Either stick to the abstract, or provide data that's useful. No reasonable person would be persuaded by your "I was getting lunch with a female coworker/friend" story. It was obviously selected with bias, by both your friend and yourself. It doesn't make you wrong... it makes your reasoning unconvincing.

>>No reasonable person would be persuaded by your "I was getting lunch with a female coworker/friend" story.

No reasonable person would dismiss it as just an anecdote, because no reasonable person would be so blind to the fact that this type of stuff is extremely common. Providing data to state just how common is unnecessary for a good discussion.

What I find especially tiresome in the sexism discussions here is that hard data only seems to be a requirement for those saying something that questions the status quo.

It's never, "Well, there's no hard data on this, but we are just coming out from a multi-millennial period of discrimination against women, so let's assume we have a little further to go."

Instead, all I see is on the order of, "You have no hard data that women are treated poorly this month so I'm going act like there couldn't possibly be a problem."

>It's never, "Well, there's no hard data on this, but we are just coming out from a multi-millennial period of discrimination against women, so let's assume we have a little further to go."

That's because you have to start with a false premise, and then make a completely arbitrary leap in logic. It seems entirely reasonable to consider the possibility that given the evidence shows equality, that baring evidence to the contrary, things are probably pretty equal.

The evidence shows that there is no gender difference in how seriously people are taken in all professional situations? I look forward to you posting links.

This is about how likely people are to suffer from impostor syndrome, not "how seriously people are taken in all professional situations."

From my comment that you seem to have been calling "tiresome"†:

> though I agree that women have to fight harder for recognition in many fields, there is no evidence that this means they are more subject to impostor syndrome.

† At least, it was the parent of the comment you were sympathizing with.

It shows that men and women have equal prevalence of imposter syndrome, which is the discussion at hand. Links had already been provided before you posted.

That is not in fact the discussion at hand.

Enraged_camel complained that men are taken more seriously than women, and gave an anectote in support:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5280061

Chc responded that anecdotes were not hard data:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5280329

Enraged_camel called requests like that tiresome:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5280329

I agreed and shared my observation that on HN, requests for data in sexism discussions are generally used to defend the status quo:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5281860

Then you chimed in to suggest that evidence showed equality.

Do you have it? I'm guessing not.

>That is not in fact the discussion at hand

Yes it is.

>Then you chimed in to suggest that evidence showed equality.

Read the post I replied to again.

>>>> Men often times are taken seriously just because they are men

That doesn't sound right. Given that pretty much everybody in certain fields are men, that would imply anybody there is taken seriously. But it seems to be obviously wrong - no one would just accept just any guy coming from the street as a master in any domain just because he's male. If somebody pretends to be a serious practitioner of the field, he would never be accepted as such without demonstrating some proof. I can come in and say, e.g., "I am a seasoned game developer", but people would immediately as "nice, which games did you develop?", not say "are you male? oh, then we believe you".

>>>> how their male counterparts are always praised by their peers and superiors for minor accomplishments

Being praised for minor accomplishments does not actually mean one is taken seriously - children are often praised for the smallest of accomplishments, but treating one like a child is exactly the opposite of taking seriously.

Perhaps I am being too literal here. But plenty of men are men, and yet are not taken seriously. So merely being a man does not mean you are taken seriously. In other words, no, men are not taken seriously "just because they are men".

Perhaps it would help to think of it this way: Most men are accorded a neutral rating from the get go and proving themselves puts them ahead of that. Women tend to start with a negative rating and have to work their way up to neutral. Yes, if a man screws up he can drop into the negatives. But he is much less likely to start there.

I'm sorry, but this just isn't true. (White) men in general are given the benefit of the doubt. They are assumed to be competent until proven otherwise. Women and minorities often times have to prove competence before being taken seriously. I have witnessed this first hand in many forms.

> (White) men in general are given the benefit of the doubt. They are assumed to be competent until proven otherwise.

Based on everything I have ever seen in my life, you are either completely off-base or overstating your case so wildly it's almost unrecognizable. If this were true, I could walk into any company around here that is hiring, tell them I'd like the job and instantly land it without so much as an interview because I'm white and male and thus "assumed to be competent." That is very much not the case. I have to prove competence first.

No. The benefit of the doubt is that you get an interview, and that if you get the job they'll offer you more money.

cite 1: male names on an application vs female names: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/201...

cite 2: 'white' names on an application vs 'black' names: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...

Deleted comment

Do I have to read these studies to you aloud?

"Results found that the “female” applicants were rated significantly lower than the “males” in competence, "

The bar for you is much lower. It may not even occur at the interview stage -- many studies have been done that demonstrate a lower rate of interviews granted to identical applications with a "foreign-sounding" name.

The insistence on "hard data" and derision of anecdotes (when, unlike e.g. sending out resumes with different names on them, most of this is essentially impossible to study) when discussing the very real experiences of women and minorities is a mechanism to deny the reality of their experiences -- a way of saying that their perception of the world is incorrect and yours, as a privileged individual, is correct. It's not a rebuttal of racism or sexism, it's a symptom of it.

These studies do not show that white men are assumed to be competent until proven otherwise. It shows that people are less inclined to give interviews to racial minorities.

You seem to think I'm denying the existence of discrimination. I'm not. That was not the topic of my comment at all. I was responding to a specific comment that I felt vastly overstated its case, not to a broad issue.

See the studies I cited and quoted from on another branch of this thread.

""Results found that the “female” applicants were rated significantly lower than the “males” in competence, "

This is getting a little tiring. Does this prove the claim "White men are assumed to be competent"? No, it does not. People really seem to want me to be arguing something other than what I actually said, but I'm not. My comment was very specific and not all that grand in its claims, and I find it amazing that people are this desperate to fight over it.

In case you have forgotten, my claim this whole time has just been that hackinthebochs was overstating his case — that the situation is not so crazy that being white exempts you from the need to demonstrate competence. Anything that does not prove white men are generally assumed to be competent is a red herring.

Well, hackinthebochs never said that the assumption of competence was strong enough to prompt a job offer, you introduced that as a silly hyperbolic statement, so ridiculously grand in its claim - that 'an assumption of competence' can only be shown if it results in an instant job offer - that it appeared you were building a strawman with which to attack the idea that anyone had any kind of bias in favour of white males.

An assumption of competence doesn't imply that it will be allowed to stand untested in a high stakes scenario such as offering a job. However it will far too often stand untested in smaller scenarios, and it is exactly this assumption behind statements like "did you have your boyfriend help you with that assignment?" addressed to female students and not males, "you must be the graphic designer!" etc etc.

Your mistake was that you were arguing against my point as if my statement included a universal qualifier. Somehow in these discussions, the nuances and implied ambiguities of language go out the window and every statement is taken to the absolute extreme.

You were arguing against a universal statement that I never intended to make, and now people are arguing against you as if you were denying that white men are generally assumed to be competent compared to other groups.

These discussions could go a lot more smoothly if we would all just cut each other a little slack and assume good faith.

Are you being serious? Yes, when you're trying to get a job, you generally still have to prove competency (in tech fields at least). But the assumptions are still comparatively in your favor. What I'm referring to is more about casual settings, where there isn't already a process in place to judge competency. When people must make a snap judgement based on little or no information, a white man will have all the assumptions in his favor.

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