There are Ladies Present

I feel that to an extent the above article misses the point. It strains to draw this distinction of "remember that women want to be treated like people in a work context but also that women are different than men and you should remember that too." Its exhausting and puts the emphasis on the wrong place.

You know why people like Adria Richards are hypersensitive about dick jokes? Because women are a minority in programming and being a minority sucks. If there were as many female CEOs as male CEOs in tech and we knew as little about Marissa Mayer's child-care situation as we do about Jeff Bezos's, nobody would give a fuck about dick jokes. Women aren't the minority in tech because men make dick jokes--(some) women are sensitive about men making dick jokes because they are in the minority. When people don't feel awkwardly self conscious about their place in the power dynamic, they are free to laugh at jokes like a normal person.

Fix the representation problem and all of this will take care of itself.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fucking fuck.

Women are humans. Some of us (humans) find toilet humour funny and a great way to escape situations, some of us dislike it and find it unprofessional, some of us just don't give a fuck.

Just talk like you talk, be aware of alienating people you care about, fuck those you don't, and do cool shit.

I like toilet humour. It is silly and fun and stupid. It is ironic and whatever fucking poops. Fuck off telling me and other humans how to be.

Immature people can appear sensible and be totally professional in their language. Some of the most interesting, awesome, intelligent and mature people I know are fans of toilet humour.

Shut the fuck up, don't alienate awesome people (by putting tits in slide shows, duh), and keep making awesome code.

The worst thing to come out of the pycon event is that reasonable people like the OP are trying to "get" why this was a case of sexism. The answer is that it wasn't, and many posters, including women, have pointed out why. It's an issue of professionalism, not sexism. This kind of post of is exactly the reason why some have remarked that Adria may have set back her cause.

i disagree. he seems to be saying that the industry needs women because of the new and different, "grown-up, nurturing, ..." perspective they can bring to the table. i think the industry needs women because, well, when you arbitrarily exclude half the human race from contributing, you are unquestionably losing something of significant value.

the thing is this: women have already gotten a raw deal by being socialised to find sex uncomfortable, and by living in cultures where sex has been linked to aggression. the problem with the pycon incident was not that anything was intrinsically wrong with dick jokes, but that it was creating a hostile environment in the context of a playing field that was already tilted.

the critically important thing to take away, in my opinion, is not that "women are different" (because that lumps women into one group and men into another, and posits that there is less variance within the groups than across them), it is that women live in a different environment than men do, and that while men are unaffected when they forget this, women are reminded of it every single day. (look up microaggression theory for a lot more about this.)

Article is of the form:

1. States known facts incorrectly showing poor research (Alex Reid was not the PlayHaven developer fired and so this statement is almost certainly not what he wanted to be saying The event I'm referring to is the fiasco at PyCon involving Adria Richards, Alex Reid, Playhaven, and SendGrid.(http://blog.playhaven.com/addressing-pycon/)

2. Recommends placing women on pedestal

3. Recommends taking women off pedestal

4. Ends by recommending women be placed back on pedestal Perhaps the reason we've had so much trouble maturing is that we don't have enough women to help us make the transition from child to adult. Their attitudes, their ways of thinking, different from ours, may be the very things we need to complete us as an industry, and a profession, and as a craft. It seems to me we need these women in order for our profession to become a profession.

Do a lot of guys approach coding with a conquest mentality? I found this sentiment particularly interesting. I've always had a more creative / constructive mindset while coding and curious / scientific mindset while debugging. As a male programmer, I'm curious if I live out in the tails of the distribution, or if Uncle Bob is less average than he assumes.

Quiet Amy Poehler, no dongle jokes, there are ladies present! http://youtu.be/KgmhhVCLgM8

I'm sorry but I disagree with your opinion. Women are welcome in the tech industry but many parents (not all) simply don't encourage their daughters to be programmers because in truth it can be a very unsocial introverted career path. Who really wants their kid to sit in a chair for 14 hours a day staring at a dull light. At first everyone loves the idea of little genius engineers until their kid is on the machine for a whole week and turns into a techno-zombie. If my kid has a passion for it then fine, if not then I am secretly relieved.

Sales, finance, construction, military, agriculture and religion (if you consider that an industry) could learn more from this lecture than the tech industry. I grew up working in construction and farming, interned for sales reps, and created tools for the finance industry. The tech industry is a woman's best friend compared to those work environments. At least in tech you can commit code and be solely judged by the quality of your work and not your sex, age, race, or physical abilities.

I went to school for a female-dominated profession (yes, there are quite a few out there where the balance goes the other way). I can assure you that if you find the things men say offensive, you haven't heard anything...

I want to add the caveat that I am NOT attempting to appeal to hypocrisy.

While I agree that there is a limit, I don't see how calling languages "estrogen" is offensive and I don't understand how calling a hat "cute" is offensive.

Maybe its because I grew up in the 90s, when the world starting embracing the insanity that is the PC revolution. We've (and I mean "White Men") made it a point to relabel and rename everything to be non-offensive. Blacks are no longer African Americans. Indians are now Native Americans. The guy cleaning your toilet is not a Janitor, but a Maintenance Technician. The Secretary is now a Front Office Assistant. Parents started raising their children on Barney the Dinosaur and that is pretty much when it all fell apart.

For golly, people. We've created a purely insane world, where even mild jokes have become Purely Offensive and Crude. We have to bite our tongues and be careful of everything we say, and I hope you can see how that this attitude has created an unhealthy ecosystem for everyone involved, including the well-meaning welcomers and the curious, ultimately destroying any ability to progress past 2001.

I really don't want to believe that the programming world is so pent up about sexuality. I want to believe the industry as a whole is highly intelligent and mature, and if a women goes on stage and says something silly about a Cute Cowboy Hat some dude is wearing, we don't see it something offensive or threatening to men.

I can't imagine that other industries go through this so much. Certain branches of marketing, spas, hair cutting, anything to do with writing, fashion, among many other professions are female-dominated. The men who enter simply enter and understand that they are entering into a world where yes, they will be told in no uncertain terms that she is not feeling well and just started her period. He will be told in no uncertain terms that size does matter. He will be told things he cares to never hear about again, but he joined into that smallish arena so he has to accept it.

It's all an illusion, people. Men and women both talk smack and say gross stuff. We can't whitewash everything and pretend that we will never say something stupid but if it isn't something that would be offensive on Ellen Degenerous or The Voice -- which say way worse things than you'd hear at a conference -- then it should be fair game to say in your presentation: the trash those people say on those TV shows are more offensive than anything any presenter would consider saying. I'm not saying the PyCon should be Married with Children the Sequel. I'm just saying to let small stupid words go by and don't hang onto every small word as an offense. You can create drama anywhere, and it just so happens that programming is an easy target to fuss up and create drama because the men are so convinced that they are wrong that they've allowed themselves to be put on the defense at all times, and there is really no logical or good reason for it, no matter how much you write about the justifications of this attitude.

Vanilla jokes are exactly that: Vanilla jokes.

I'm curious how these situations are handled in Germany or France or anyplace where sexuality is not as much of a cultural taboo as in the US, though the tech industry may be just as gender-unbalanced.

> Men, can you imagine how hard it would be if all the women were constantly, and openly, talking about tampons, cramps, yeast infections, cheating, being cheated on, Trichomoniasis, faking-it, etc? I don't know about you, but It would make me feel out of place.

You're right--you don't know about me. I fully wish this were the case!

The place I want to work is the place where people are people, not separately "men" and "women": and people like fart jokes, dick jokes, cramping jokes, faking-it jokes, what have you. They also like pictures of cats!

...or, at least, when you ask them by themselves, they do. But something strange happens when you ask them in a sufficiently large group: suddenly they'll say there are certain things that are horribly offensive, even though they're not "personally" offended!

Now, someone with some evolutionary-biology experience can probably give you the full low-down as to why, but here's my (limited) understanding: when we're in a group of people large enough, and who don't know one-another particularly well, we start to think we might have the opportunity to mate with someone else in the group without that becoming a "sore point" for the group later on (especially if the group isn't closed to new people entering/leaving.) So, we start to enforce these "global social norms" on one another, even if we don't agree with them ourselves. We do it so we can show we can "do the dance" of mating, that we're clever enough to avoid slipping up in the complex social machinery we've instantiated, and thus we sort ourselves into rankings of social ability. Both the people in higher and lower rankings subliminally know their position, and so the people in lower rankings are subconsciously proscribed to submit to those of higher rankings when a rivalry springs up for the affection of a potential mate. Thus, the people best at the dance have the most choice, and we call that something like "charisma."

We drop the whole dance when we end up in groups of "just friends." If nobody around us is a potential mate, why bother? Around friends, we tell all the fart jokes we like, and nobody gets offended. But take those same friends and sit them at a fancy banquet--where strangers can hear them--and suddenly they'll be shushing one another to prevent those jokes from slipping out!

Now, in my opinion, the whole etiquette game is a game--and you shouldn't be playing games at work. It's easy enough to avoid when everyone at your workplace are friends--and this seems to be the real goal that employers are trying to foster through "team-building": the ability for everyone to see one-another as someone to goof off with and tell silly jokes, not a potential mate (and especially not a potential rival for mates!) But it rarely succeeds, precisely because humans are intelligent and observant social animals, who notice when, despite the trappings of "friendship", nobody really cares about what anyone else did on the weekend, nobody will actually keep in touch with anyone else after they move on to another job, etc.

I don't know how to solve the problem, other than to form companies solely from people who are already friends (like YC tends to do!) and then not grow them at all beyond that :)

On this kind of situations I usually follow the "vulcan" philosophy described by Wayne D. Dyer in "Your Erroneous Zones".

It comes down to "you choose how you feel". There is nothing I can do to make you choose a different feeling so I dont' need to bother trying.

Needless to say, you gotta be smart and avoid or apologize if you can help it, but in my opinion, the whole pycon situation would not be a big deal if everybody understood that concept.

I didn't like the premise of the article because it made out women to be some kind of foreign entity in the industry, in the author's words, "our industry".

> I do not want the women in our industry to feel unwelcome.

I know it's completely good-natured, but these kind of statements make it seem like males single-handedly have the power to make women feel unwelcome or welcome... which causes a divide even further. The phrase "there are ladies present" is just strange to me, like males should be hyper-aware of the foreign entity that is present. Gives the same effect as "there are elephants present" in the room. No matter - we should be aware that /people/ are present and dick jokes, etc. have no place in a professional setting.

I do agree that the locker talk happens. On numerous occasions, the males around me have talked about seeing breasts and other (straight) male oriented topics.

I think you're actually pretty close to hitting the nail on the head. Of course I'm not even female and I find some of the things you're talking about tiresome... (Perhaps the issue is not exactly sexism, but infantilism?)

Even more draining is the 'treat the customers like sheep' sneering Wall street trader attitude that some of my coworkers seem to have, and which seems to be subtly propagated via attitudes about using analytics and machine learning. We can herd our customers through subtle cues established through artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. Nearly every day there's discussion about manipulating process and appearance and verbiage to get a 1 or 3 or 2.5% higher conversion ratio, or cultivating a community via social media through keeping up appearances - schedule your tweets, re-tweet funny things, know your audience, etc. Analytic your customers 'till the cows come home to understand which navigation items to put where and see 'how' your customers user the 'product.' Create your own market. Etc. But it's all so artificial. I can't remember the last time anybody seriously posted anything looking at fulfilling an actual meaningful need, or their customers as actual people.

Even for employees I think it's very disconcerting to have a public pitch about how you care about customers and are part of a community, then behind closed doors stereotype them like they're some sort of bovine herd who can't tell alfalfa from the compost bin and joke about it. (Maybe this isn't normal? But it feels normal in my experience. To a certain extent I can't even help but participate. What can you do but joke about people still using IE 6 or 7 or who think the Internet's 'Turned Off' or whatever the random point of tech ignorance is for the day? When so much of the world relies and depends on the Internet without understanding it or having a clue or realizing how they're tracked or what legal protections they don't have for their Facebook posts and more, it's really hard to have respect even if you can pay it lip service.)

Quite frankly, I think things might be so bad that plenty of men find things off-putting. But it does fit in pretty well with a narrative of slavery/conquest versus nurture.

(If you're going to downvote maybe say why you think differently? I hate it when it's left as a mystery.)

A question for the guys of HN who know their movies: what would your reaction be to a service called Treehorn with a client program called LogJammer?

I only found out where those names came from much later.

I am getting so sick of this story. How many millions of man-hours were wasted this week by people being offended that Adria Richards was offended? I saw this story on the BBC and CBS today. Before long, one (or both) of the fired employee victims will hire Gloria Allred to file a wrongful termination lawsuit and we'll be subjected to this circus for months.

IMHO this is one of the few thoughtful, productive pieces I've read on the PyCon debacle. I appreciated his last line:

> Of course I'm just Tim Taylor, talking over the fence to Wilson. Women, do I have this right?

I too would love to hear reactions from both male and female members of the community on his thoughts.

This is very simple. Women have an instinctive revulsion of anything that could be construed as sexual. This is no doubt a relic of our early days as a species, where a sexual context that a woman had not pre-approved could mean a costly nine month pregnancy. This is why its not just dick jokes that women consider offensive, but even something as simple as calling a hat cute. If it can be construed from your words that you are a male who sexually desires females, then the words will result in women taking offense. It doesn't matter if its not directed at any woman present, or if the idea of a presenter sexually assaulting a conference-goer is inherently absurd. These are our instincts, and you can't change them.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine why this is your problem to solve.

Is it really that hard? Just talk as if you had your mother, sister, girlfriend, wife ... all in the audience. Maybe one day you will have!

Isn't the solution to the whole thing just Postel's law?

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

I agree with this, fully and unequivocally. I have to wonder if "there are ladies present" might also be construed as sexist. Maybe we just shouldn't use toilet humor in situations where we're not absolutely sure everyone will find it appropriate.

Warning: offensive, but to demonstrate a point...

I once interviewed a guy who decided to wear a t-shirt to the interview that read "Thousands of my potential children died on your daughter's face last night". There were no women there. I was not really even offended (toilet humor is really hard not to giggle at, if for no other reason than I'm still 15 in my head somewhere). I was, however, careful not to let on that I noticed it at all. On the way out, he asked for a tour (he thought he was getting the job). When another coworker commented on his shirt he said "Yeah, I got another one that says 'Swallow it or it goes in your eye'." It was a 5 person company at the time, and none of them were female. Still, he wasn't getting the job; anyone with that much disregard (dare I say arrogance) for other's feelings isn't getting the job.

It's not about having men or ladies or kids present; it's about having a mutual respect for others, and being conservative about what setting they think toilet humor (or any humor) is appropriate.

Lordy, we seem to live in hyper-sensitive times where everyone parses simple humor through a filter of scrutiny looking for some reason to be offended (often to be offended on behalf of some other group). The wisdom I have mostly heard, and agree with, is to be sensitive and respectful when making a joke -- but if they can't handle humor that was intended to elicit fun, then f__k 'em.

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