My experiences in tech: Death by 1000 paper cuts
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juliepagano.tumblr.com
I too am dealing with death by a thousand cuts of unprofessionalism:
- People swearing in presentations, and then people whining about swearing in presentations.
- Presentations that aren't backed by research or papers or anything of particular engineering note, but instead are a platform for social butterfly developers to build a larger popularity platform.
- Conferences named after beer drinking.
- Constant whining about some sort of offense that someone dealt you, or some social situation that you were unable to handle like an adult.
- Constant wheel re-invention of 1990s engineering dressed up in fancy websites with funny names like "unicorn" or 'nyan rainbow cat daemon'.
- Conference blow-ups about things that SHOULD NOT MATTER. Like dongles. Multiple people losing their jobs and articles in CNN.
- Drama-fests about workplace behavior, cancelled talks, "triggers", t-shirts that make people cry.
I'm sick of this. THIS is what a real conference with real papers look(ed|s) like:
http://static.usenix.org/events/usenix01/technical.html
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/tech-schedule/atc12_proc...
Maybe this is just what happens when a fringe group like technology is re-integrated into the mainstream, but I would like to go just one day without hearing about some other act of stupidity, sexism, tweets, or social anxiety, and instead focus on what actually matters, which is real, hard, respectful, careful, and attentive ENGINEERING.
I liked this.
My patience with this constant caterwauling about it is at its end.
I didn't like this, because it implies that the problem is the caterwauling. You then go on to make it clear that the problem is that people can't handle the industry or the culture, not the industry or the culture.
Well, the correct way forward is for everyone to suck it fucking up and start acting like adults, including respecting each other. Some of that includes being less dramatic about problems, but there is also a HUGE responsibility to eliminate those problems in the first place.
Absolutely nobody should be losing jobs over dongle jokes, but then again, nobody should be making dongle jokes. This isn't an either-or blame situation, just an observation that everybody wins if we don't make dongle jokes.
Yes? Everybody agree? Assuming I didn't lose anybody there.
Onward: tricky business about sex, particularly from men (who I think are programmed in a much more culturally-unfriendly way when it comes to sex; multiple partners, ogling, and so forth), is unfortunately going to happen. Kind of like farting. It's noble that most of us can keep it under control in the workplace. Guarantee that even the quietest, most reserved, shy, never-an-HR-issue male employee, even ones who openly fight for feminist causes here, has occasionally looked at cleavage and thought, "boy, those are great tits." Equally so if the man is gay, just the opposite gender that produces that reaction. It happens. Everybody does it. Women do it too. You are programmed to admire the reproductive and aesthetic traits of the gender(s) that arouse(s) you. You shouldn't be ashamed of it.
Nothing so far has been controversial, I hope. I might have lost a certain group at the end of the last paragraph. Let me finish quickly while they start typing:
It's unreasonable to expect both men and women, biologically, to completely suppress sex in any form whatsoever. That culture expects us to is, I think, a bug in culture(+). There is something broken here on both sides of the gender divide, and I don't know that we understand as a culture how to fix it. Through some horrible perfect storm of social issues among the average programmer, I think we just see this problem amplified to the moon and back. I've been to construction sites. Visit one sometime. Talk to the workers.
I feel like for countless years culture has been at war with humanity. We shame sex across the board, we shame farting and burping, we shame natural odors, we shame hair in certain places for certain genders, we shame vulgarity, we shame picking our noses... the list goes on and on and on. Where's the culture that understands its members are human beings with flaws?
Maybe, just maybe, I feel like political correctness and attempting to 'fix' human beings has done more harm than good. Maybe we're acting appropriately and reacting inappropriately. Fair point?
(+) The source of this bug is a patch committed by a religious working group, and that patch should be reverted, but that's an argument for another time.
Agreed.
'nobody should be making dongle jokes'
What have we come to where I can't sit with a friend and shoot the shit about dongles? I can tell you that some of my best 'that's what she said' moments were in the midst of another woman, who had some of the best of all.
Well, it sounds to me like you've come to a professional environment, such as a workplace, or a technical conference.
That gives me the perspective of two careers: one full of primadonnas, constant whining, arguing over trivialities, pampering, and bizarre celebrity status, and the other one being motion pictures.
(Cheap joke aside, I found film a more calming career. I certainly came home angry less.)
I've heard from traditional game developers that it's worse over there (is it, folks?), but I have a feeling if you step far enough away from "typical Web startup", you find branches of engineering where bros can't study PHP for a weekend and become a CTO, then rage about tits after their third Red Bull.
In cases like this, I think a bit of the hacker manifesto, and some of the things it alludes to.
" "This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all..."
And we enter the world of IRC, email, and text based chat of all sorts. I do not see your sexuality when I talk here via HN. Nor do I see your income level, social status, gender status, religion, political bent, or anything else, unless you tell us. What I know, is: You speak English, you have a computer in front of you, and you're on the Internet.
"Software has apparently become some sort of social cause, instead of an engineering discipline."
There are times when you can ignore the people and focus on the machines. But only for a little while, and only if you do a lot of careful work before and after.
1) Engineering
2) Business
And that's about it.
Conferences has become more about getting a free trip, blowing off steam and asserting yourself in a group than making good software. A bunch of people with similar skill-sets meet and agree that their particular technology choice is great or not so great. That's not how you build great software. We figured this out 20 years ago in the demo scene and it's still true today. Some people are starting to realize this and are calling not only for more women, but for more diversity overall.
This talk really says it better than I can and it should be 'required reading' for anyone in the community: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAOxGjNbp_Y
I'm not going to try to compare my pain with your pain or anyone else's; I just want to say that I've been shit on by almost everyone important in my life from the earliest age. But I found refuge in building software. It became my escape from all the other pain. I found a way to tune out all of that and focus on only 2 things: my customers and the tools they needed. And I found a great equalizer. Not because I had anything to prove, but because I found a natural solution: build what the customer needs and nothing much else matters. Don't build what they need: same thing.
Forget about the conferences (you don't really need them anyway). Forget about Facebook, twitter, Hacker News, reddit, etc., etc., etc. They're definitely more of a distraction than a help. Learn how to separate issues from details (it's amazing how little really matters). Try to tune out the negativity. I know it's hard, but just think of it as "systems analysis applied to people". Once you focus on what's really important to your customer, block out the distractions, and build what they need, all the bullshit will fade into the background.
Please don't allow your aversion to the negativity of others overwhelm your love of building software. Let the love defeat the hate. I did and I know you can too.
Best wishes and please keep us posted.
You are not being helpful here. She clearly points out "That no matter how tough I get, how thick my skin, the paper cuts still hurt." So telling her to get thicker skin really just adds one more papercut to the pile (and the rest of this thread will heap on a few more).
OP your post is well done and paints a clear picture. Hopefully you and others like you will continue to inspire folks to change.
I find this strange. He is potentially suggesting a way for her to avoid around 99% of the paper cuts.
If it's death by 1000 cuts, then it could well be survival by 10.
Women aren't fragile creatures who need constant protecting. The author of the article is not your personal damsel in distress. She is a human who feels she has faced challenges.
So is edw519.
The problem is change in the industry takes time, and so without changing how she personally deals with things currently, she is going to continue to be unhappy. Obviously this is a bad situation and we need to make things better in our industry, but arcing up at people trying to help other people cope with current conditions is hardly helpful.
Yeah, I'm not going to argue with an obvious concern troll. Next time, try to be more subtle.
Of course he is, but it's embarrassing that HN has voted his comment to the top.
Clawed my way up is an excuse for sexism used in some geek discussions: "I clawed my way up all on my own, why can't you?"
Essentially, this argument is a denial of the effect of privilege on success. The person making it argues either that:
they, despite being oppressed in some way (often but not always experiencing poverty in childhood), are now very successful, and anyone who isn't is lazy
they, despite being oppressed in some way, never took advantage of any scheme designed to ameliorate oppression (such as scholarships targeted at certain groups)
there is no such thing as institutional privilege, there's just people who work hard and whining people who don't that natural selection operates at the level of success in society, and by attempting to ameliorate oppression, society is in fact doing itself harm
There are various problems with these arguments:
oppressions don't map perfectly to each other: someone who experienced, say, poverty can't map their experience onto someone who isn't white or is a woman, etc (see Oppression Olympics)
the experience of people with intersecting oppressions is generally discounted
it is unlikely in the extreme that the person speaking did not in some way benefit from privilege: for example, access to enough resources for the child to have a computer (perhaps a cheap secondhand one, but nevertheless), access to a library and time to read any books borrowed from the library, household members who did chores while the person speaking studied, etc.
it is at least unlikely that the person did not in some way benefit from schemes designed to ameliorate oppression, examples include but aren't limited to: free or cheap public schooling and free or cheap healthcare.
You took this opportunity to dismiss his personal experiences, and bizarrely, you implied that one's insight regarding a situation is entirely unwelcome without having personally experienced that exact same situation. If that's the case, take your own advice and leave him alone.
You're poisoning this discussion. Just stop.
When a discussion starts with the experience of sexism, then a post that basically says, "well my life as a guy was also hard" derails the discussion.
Your criticism would be valid if this were a discussion that had started with Ed's personal experiences. It didn't.
My wife isn't a math and science person, and she does not have the aptitude to be a programmer. Does that make me a sexist? Does that mean that all women are just like her?
The answer is no, it doesn't.
People focus on what they want to hear in order to validate their opinions. Who among us that is ambitious hasn't grown up with the pain that is going against the grain?
It sucks to be different, but that's the way it goes.
Edit: Here is an example of what I mean.
"For those of us who aren’t, it’s a regular signal that we’re not considered, that maybe we don’t belong."
Absolutely not true. It's just a speaker trying to build rapport with their audience by talking about something they understand.
"The heavy drinking makes some of us feel unsafe."
So only guys drink heavy? First of all, if you don't want to watch heavy drinking, don't go to an after party at a bar? Second, I've seen just as many wasted females as males at conference parties.
"A paper cut for every conference."
I've been to maybe a dozen conferences in the past 2-3 years and I haven't seen any of this. Maybe I've missed it, or I'm not looking, who knows.
I grew up hearing my father tell me that I wasn't good at math because I was a girl. Yes, he's fucking sexist, and so is everyone else who thinks that women can't be good at STEM fields. Props to you for apparently taking the time to carefully study your wife and decide she sucks at STEM because of who she is, and not because she's a woman, but there are plenty of engineers, like my father, who are not so kind. It's a constant, constant thorn to women in STEM, all the time, and I for one believe it is a miracle that they do not complain more.
Entrepreneurs, especially, get it from all sides. Part of my frustration stems from being tired of the worst class in America - privileged white male that wasn't born in the ghetto, but the rest of it is just tired of people looking for negativity all the time. It doesn't matter who you are, what gender you are, or what the color of your skin is - if you seek to be better than those around you, or different than the paradigm from which they view the world, then they will seek to put you on your ass.
Bringing up alternate social injustices is generally considered a tactic of diversion. It's not that these other injustices aren't important (they are very important) but it happens with such regularity that it's considered de-railing to the conversation.
It really isn't hard to see sexism in technology. It's a shame every time this subject comes up, guys clamor to be the first to post [dismissive reason] or [request for extremely specific example of sexism]. I mean, this submission is about a woman chronicling sexism against her, and there are guys in here just flat out saying, "This isn't sexist."
Sure, some regular shitty stuff applies to everyone and can get conflated with the sexist stuff, but there is still a clear strain of discouraging behaviour directed at women in tech.
Studies that find things such as "Women perform better in math when tested without men"[1] are an indication that something is very wrong at a very fundamental level.
[1] http://brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2000-01/00-023.h...
I know it probably isn't popular, but men and women are biologically different. I find it arrogant to believe that humans of the past decade are so intellectually superior that human physiology is of no consequence.
But she's not the point, anyway.
The point is that you hear of "girls not being good at math and science" much more frequently. But when you control for societal factors, there's nothing that really separates male and female math abilities.
Or possibly you're predisposed to an opinion and only look to reinforce it instead of challenge it?
My point is that I look all around me and I do not see anyone in my circle being sexist to women about their role in tech(or lack thereof). I coach a mixed basketball team and the girls are the best and most poised athletes on the team. Not a single one of the boys has complained or made a comment about it.
I watch my daughter grow up, in her 2nd year of school, as she takes to reading/writing over math. She's good at both, but she prefers the former.
I'm not saying sexism doesn't exist, I'm just saying that I don't see it to the scale that has the entire industry freaking out.
If anything, the SendGrid situation proved that it can go both ways.
What scale do you see it? And what's the acceptable/unacceptable threshold? Right now you are jumping squarely into "this isn't an issue please move on and grow thicker skin", which is a lousy place to start a discussion.
> entire industry freaking out.
I really don't think my or your opinion matters, instead perhaps we should encourage more bloggers like this to speak out so we can see if there really is a problem. You know, encourage more data from the source instead of anecdotes like your wife and math?
Because if there is a problem then we should solve it, right?
Hahaha... this is a joke, right? This reads like a caricature of someone being patronizing.
In case it's not a joke, let me be plain: you are being ridiculously patronizing. "I know it's hard, but..."? This is the way you speak to a child.
"Try to tune out..." Do you honestly think OP doesn't do this on a daily basis; that she hasn't been doing this for years? This is not a rhetorical question, I'm truly interested in whether you think that "tuning out negatvity" is a new, novel concept that never occurred to OP.
Ed: please take a moment to consider the tone of your post next time you are posting.
Now imagine that was on a techie job advert, or it was said to you during an interview. What would us hackers say?
How about this: I'll gather every single programmer in my office. I'll stand there infront of 30 software engineers and I'll tell them:
"The reason women arn't successful in technology is because you are implicitly
denying them the chance! You need to re-evaluate on what criteria you are
using to judge someones actions or opinions."
"But Fish, there are NO female programmers in this office. All 30 of us are male.
We have no one to discriminate against."
"uhh... and ITS YOUR FAULT!"
You know what's weird? Regarding the skill of that one good girl programmer? No one doubted it. No one patronized her, everyone knew she was good.
I can't possibly wake any more up! I'm awake! I swear!
I think it's interesting that in the Adria Richards fiasco, almost everybody focused on the reaction of one person who heard the off-color jokes. But there were probably 5 other people who heard them as well. Adria reacted because she had been sensitized to that sort of thing. But any one of those other guys could have said, "Dude, that's not cool. You're at a conference." And that would have been the end of it, because Adria wouldn't have felt like the burden of enforcement fell on her.
Another thing you could do: carefully examine your recruiting pipeline. 30 male engineers in one company is statistically odd. Last I was recruiting, I was very careful to put the word out in ways that were likely to increase the number of female applicants. We also made sure we had decent benefits and sane working hours. Eventually we also moved our office to a better neighborhood, partly because some women expressed safety concerns there.
Or you could do something like Etsy did: http://allthingsd.com/20120612/inside-etsys-gambit-to-hire-m...
Or you could start volunteering at events designed to get more women into tech. Or just supporting them with cash. I give regularly to the Ada Initiative and Black Girls Code.
The problem is the agendas that ride on the coat-tails of such dialogues. If we could separate the baby from the bath water that'd be great but a culture moulded by P.C zealots does not make the culture a better place.
Instead, I'd like to use your post as another piece of evidence of the problems women face in the tech and programming communities. Hopefully those who do have a chance of understanding will look at your comment and go, "Wow, I can't believe some guy would say such a stupid thing. Perhaps there is a problem..."
I say that because the nice interpretation of what you say i that you genuinely missed most of the story. But it's hard not to think you're just being an ass.
Fill your boots.
The personal attacks on Adria (death threats and all) are disgusting, but they're not the kind of thing that keeps women away from tech. It's the small discouragements, like the one you did when you mocked a stranger's repo (probably without knowing her gender) that keep women from thriving in tech.
I'm really sorry for the ad hominem/tu quoque, but if you want to make tech a better field for women, you have to make some adjustments that can make it better for non-heterosexual people, people with disabilities, foreigners, etc...
It's not enough to be open for women in tech: we should strive to be friendly to people who don't have the same level of proficiency, people with different tastes and opinions, and strangers.
It's not a kid with a DDoS tool and a fake Twitter account who makes a women avoid a career in STEM. It's a well-meaning technologist accidentally being an asshole (http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node).
Actions trump words.
As for Steve (and the others involved in the incident you mentioned), what they did was shitty. Behavior like that can have serious negative consequences as well. I was pretty pissed when that happened, and I really hope it's a mistake they won't make again (and if they do, they'll be getting an earful). However as far as I recall, the offending parties did apologize when called out.
We all fuck up, myself included. Apologies don't make everything better, but it's a world above people making death threats. I value allies who occasionally fuck up that I can call out on their shit over people who are regularly assholes and have no introspection when I call them on it. I've known both. The former has generally provided me with a support system. The latter has just tried to tear me down (see examples in my post).
Absolutely agreed on helping more than women.When I speak about personal experiences, they're mostly about women because that's my lived experience, but I am very much for helping a variety of people. Those who know me recognize me by my catchphrase, "MY TECHNOLOGY WILL BE INTERSECTIONAL OR IT WILL BE BULLSHIT!"
I was considering that before this thing, and am only considering it more after, for what it's worth.
This thread discusses such feelings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5411308
I had to report accounts to Twitter for sending her pictures of decapitated women, and posting her home address.
As for that other situation, as you say, actions speak louder than words. I personally feel that the pluses are bigger than the minuses here, but this thread isn't about me.
How does that make sense? I'm honestly curious.
It's also something that's both new and western. Programming, as an occupation, used to have a much healthier mix of genders. Looking at foreign-born computer scientists at my old grad school and at work, the ratio distortion is pretty unique to here. I donno what the cause is, but it is cultural. And we don't have enough of a culture for it to be anything more substantial than the accumulation of "1000 papercuts."
I think it's happening out of a combination of childishness and laziness. Most of us who repeat the same little phrases like "so easy my mom can do it" over and over just do it because we're too lazy to come up with a metaphor of our own. Here's an example replacement: "So easy a congressman can do it." (I don't think I have to explain the childishness part).
So, as colleges have higher proportions of women in the US, are we going to lose domestic undergraduate CS programs due to a lack of interest?
While tech has some attitudes that are undeniably sexist, comments that would happen in any industry are perceived as more threatening because the gender ratio is so out of whack. If females felt safer in tech, then they wouldn't notice as much the background noise of cultural hyper-sexuality.
It feels unfair or unreasonable to many men to check their American culture at the door in order to make females feel comfortable in tech, which is the source of the recent shitshow over PyCon. Most men are willing to fight blatantly sexist shit - the groping and nasty comments reported from tech conferences over the last few years. I am 100% on PyCon's side with the code of conduct and support resources for women.
But males in tech simply don't know how to have a conversation without "that's what she said". That's what they hear at night on "How I met your mother".
We have a sexually libertine culture. That is viewed as "progress" by some, including many feminists, but it is not without costs. And there is no easy way to silence it.
If only that were the case. We have a long way to go before we're in a sexually libertine culture.
Can't even show breasts on television without half the God damned country flipping its shit. Can only hint at it! And those aren't even sexual by nature. One needs only examine Donglegate to see how 'sexually libertine' we are...
Personally I think we have gone way to far with what we accept in the media and it's only getting worse.
Personally I think we have gone way too far with what we deem "unprofessional" or "inappropriate".
I'm with Louis CK when I find myself being offended by hearing some white lady with nice hair saying the phrase "the N word" on CNN.
I think that's the polar opposite view of walms's comment, but I might be wrong.
I'm not American so I can't comment on how prudish people are there, but I think you are correct people do get offended way to easy. But we live in an age that tells women to value them selves based on their sexual appeal and men to value them selves on the sexual conquests. And saying that is wrong to me has nothing to do with being prudish.
We are in different paragraphs on the same page. Well written.
But that absolutely does not apply to one's job or one's profession. You can't change those in milliseconds, and it's unfair to suggest that people should.
Very useful concept, particularly if you're not someone who has to suffer them daily and can't understand why one individual little incident is still an issue.
I didn't want to. The NUM came in maybe three times a year, for only a couple of minutes. It was just a passing discomfort, but the important thing is this: I never lost tangible power. I didn't work in an environment where it was commonplace. I never felt like I couldn't escape or verbally correct or even physically overpower her if things went too far. There was never a culture of undermining my power that it contributed to. I wasn't seen as more of a 'junior' because of it; it didn't diminish my status.
Separate to that, I wouldn't say men have a higher threshold for not complaining about shit that doesn't matter. In some senses they do, and in others they don't - the recent PyCon event showed vast amounts of men in tech providing plenty of vapid, shrill complaints over stuff that really didn't require that level of passion.
I have too, but it's nowhere near as bad as what women I know tell me they deal with.
> But men have a higher threshold for not complaining about shit that doesn't matter.
This is sexist.
If a person is targeted by multiple "isms" then they can be the victim of people targeted by fewer "isms".
However, it is not possible for a privileged person to be the aggressor in a conflict with a less privileged person.
In that case, there is one clear party who is being (subtly) aggressive.
Situations are rarely black and white.
It is uncivilized to always assume that the person taking offense is automatically correct. We're all people, and people are capable of dishonestly taking advantage of the sympathies of the mob du jour.
It is always okay to discuss whether someone is actually guilty, and it is always okay to discuss whether someone is actually making false accusations.
There is no sharp demarcation, of course. The tech industry is perhaps still not quite at the "everything is subliminal" point.
And yes, a part of the human condition, is that everything is subverted and abused or misapplied, sometime. Because...humans. We're messy.
Equating rape culture with alcohol-consumption culture doesn't solve the root problem, it only alienates the vast majority of those of us who enjoy drinking occasionally who have never raped or assaulted anyone ever.
The solution to "some people are alienated" is not "alienate the dominant group right back".
Recently, I've had the thought that feminists and hardline social conservatives ought to find common ground around the alcohol/party culture. Feminists should also ask themselves - for whom and by whom was this culture made in the first place? Does it work in women's favor? It's unrealistic to think that we can reduce sexual aggression while leaving this culture the same.
I wonder what percent of sexual assault occurs while both parties are sober?
So even when I'm at home on my own watching a great documentary on netflix, and I have a beer or two, you're saying I can only be doing it to lower my inhibitions?
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We should address circumstances that create unsafe places for women and change them. My goal is to reduce violence towards women. What is your goal?
We have a culture that creates situations where women are regularly drunk and defenseless in the presence of drunk and uninhibited males. WHY IS THIS A GOOD IDEA? Why do feminists defend this culture? It's dumb. Let's do less dumb things.
Why is it that anybody who questions the wisdom of the culture is accused of "blaming the victim"? I support feminist goals, but feminist wisdom on these things is bizarre beyond my imagination.
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If we value women's safety, then we should not have drunk fests at our conferences. Many of the worst cases of sexual harassment at conferences reported in the last few years were at the after party.
Am I wrong, or is it that you just don't like me? You certainly seem to enjoy stuffing words into my mouth.
Conferences probably are not the best places to be getting hammered regardless of gender. It's unprofessional and its boring.
The fact that women would even have to think about this stuff in a professional setting disgusts me.
In fact, you are offering non-oppressive behavior of others, and your negative emotional reaction thereto, in the midst of a litany of examples of you being oppressed. It reads as an accusation— aimed at the wrong group.
Why do people drinking heavily make you feel unsafe?
What is your ideal resolution to such a circumstance wherein you are made to feel unsafe because others are drinking heavily?
As these questions hint, my feelings vary on how safe I evaluate the situation to be for myself. I'm not likely to have a fun if I feel unsafe. Why do I evaluate a situation as unsafe sometimes? It's because alcohol lowers inhibitions and can lead to people saying and doing things they might not otherwise. When I'm in a space with people I know, people I can trust to be cool and reasonable even after a few drinks, I feel safe and I can have a drink or two.
In other occasions, I don't feel safe. I can't see the future, and I don't know how strangers will behave when drunk. History tells me that sometimes they'll act badly and sometimes they won't. It's not fun for me to gamble on a hope bad things won't happen this time, so I tend to skip parties with drinking on these occasions.
TLDR: Sometimes drunk people do stupid things. I don't like gambling that this won't be one of them.
before I get hellbanned: I'm trying to make a very real point, sometimes the only solution is to avoid such a situation. short of learning karate and packing a gun I just have to avoid the subway at night.
I'd like to note that I too feel unsafe around heavy drinking, people do stupid things and I wanna meet my grandkids, so I will often not go out with people who I think will get crazy.
I agree though that in general women have to be a lot more careful about their company, and this is true of all cultures and circles. I remember being very surprised in high school when my mother would make me go out to pick up my sister (born a year apart) who was at a friend's house only 3 blocks away at night, when I used to walk twice that (and this wasn't a particularly "bad" neighborhood).
Still, this strikes me as an unreasonable level of fear in response to common social situations.
Yes, rape culture is real. Yes, drunk people are more dangerous, on average, than sober people.
No, this does not mean you should start skipping events where people are drinking because some of them might hurt you.
Just because our western culture is generally terrible doesn't mean that you should go around living in fear. The moment you start equating the median drunk stranger with "someone I should avoid being around", you have crossed the line into pathology, in my opinion.
This isn't really your judgement call to make on behalf of somebody else, is it?
I'm a fairly big guy with some martial arts training, so when it comes to being around a bunch of people who are inebriated, I assess the level of risk to me as being pretty low. If I were a woman, and someone who's less physically imposing than almost everyone at the party, my assessed level of risk would doubtless be higher. Too, if I've been raped or subjected to other sexual violence previously -- as a significant number of women have -- I can't imagine my risk tolerance being very high at all.
Also, I'm not terrified of drinking events at conferences. It's not like it's this super-fun thing I'm so sad I'm missing because I've got this unreasonable fear. They're things I skip sometimes because it's more fun to go do something else than risk dealing with bullshit (or on rare occasions actual risk).
Carrying a firearm makes you think ten steps ahead to avoid dangerous situations, because suddenly, any dangerous situation you may find yourself in is now a dangerous situation with a gun involved.
I've skipped going places when I was carrying (places that I would have gone to, unafraid, unarmed) because of the _potential_ that I would find myself in danger and have to do something I didn't want to do.
This rubs the wrong way when most people that carry concealed tell me "I do it to protect myself". Well, no shit, Sherlock, that means you're going to have to discharge the weapon if you're in danger. And a sufficiently likely conclusion involves someone getting the drop on you and/or taking your weapon, anyway.
Some of us are sufficiently averse to being forced to kill people that we will go to great lengths to avoid potential danger.
I think, even as much as it'd undermine your clever preaching to men here, you'd find that most men consider the venue, who's going to be in it, and escape plans before ordering the first shot.
Sort of like walking down the street on your phone, being oblivious to your surroundings is a ticket to problems.
Note that at a conference, even at the after hours events, you're still at a professional event, surrounded by peers and colleagues, not friends.
That said, I certainly enjoy partaking, just not heavily when in that environment.
That being said, when people are drinking heavily they are more likely to act in an irrational manner. This could lead to situations that would, in fact, be unsafe.
People drinking didn't stand in her way. It's a convenient scapegoat, and I'm sure her feelings of fear were legitimate, but drinking at a conference is not, in any perspective, oppressive behavior.
Just because some people who drink also rape and/or assault, does not mean that "people drinking" creates an unsafe environment.
By that logic (some people who perpetuate sexism also make sexualized jokes), it would be inappropriate to make jokes about dongles at a conference.
I'm a guy and I've learned through personal experience that being around drunks is the least safe situation I'm ever likely to find myself in. (excluding the obvious exceptions: driving in traffic is of course the least safe situation any of us deals with ordinarily)
Belligerent drunks are worrisome enough even to a person who is fully capable of defending himself and they tend to show up when you're dealing with a group of strangers that could be described as "drinking heavily." When the small but finite risks of dealing with a big group of "heavily drinking" people are usually compensated for with noisy, difficult conversation... why bother? Avoiding the whole thing isn't "pathology" as you described elsewhere, it's closer to common sense.
Of course, when he said it, "man" meant "person".
To be maximally fair to the guys, this stuff is really hard to see. Part of it is just that everything is hard to see unless it's somehow personal for you. But the bigger part for me was that really seeing it required a trip down the rabbit hole to seeing all sorts of privilege. All sorts of my privilege, really. Who wants to know that a chunk of one's sense of self-worth is false? It's real work, and I feel lucky that my circumstances disposed me to seeing it more easily than most.
The thing is, I've never heard a woman speaker make a similar joke about her husband/boyfriend or a non-heterosexual speaker make a similar comment about their partner. Maybe I'd feel differently if there was more of a mix.
Well, taking for granted the fact that there are more men than women in computer science and engineering / IT, presumably a higher percentage of women (and homosexual men) in tech have had success finding a significant other who shares their primary interests than vice-versa.
(Assuming you're the author of this blog) obviously much of what you mentioned in this post is flat-out sexism and needs to be addressed. But if I joke or complain that my $SIGNIFICANT_OTHER doesn't get my interests, and that $SIGNIFICANT_OTHER happens to be female makes you feel alienated... really, that's your problem. The fact that you have experienced actual sexism in some contexts is not mutually exclusive with the possibility that you are being oversensitive about this.
As for your comment about me being oversensitive, way to miss the point of the last paragraph of my post.
Just because you can predict a rebuttal doesn't make it wrong. Just because a rebuttal is wrong 90% of the time doesn't make it always wrong. Sometimes feelings ARE baseless. I don't want to get into the semantics of whether they're still 'valid', but everyone occasionally thinks things that are objectively wrong.
I do get your notion of 1,000 paper cuts, or at least I think I do. But let me rephrase that – why should you consider my hypothetical complaint, as a heterosexual male, that my coincidentally female significant other doesn't "get" my interests in technology to be one of those cuts in the first place?
Before I was a programmer I worked in K-12 education, where females rather than males comprise the dominant population, so I think I have the experience to comment on this. There was some actual sexism that I faced there, as a male charged with watching over students. But for all of that, I never allowed myself to feel discomfort about the fact that most of my coworkers were female. Nor that when they complained about their significant others during our lunch breaks, those SOs happened to be overwhelmingly male. It was just something I had to get over.
> The intent of my blog posts (there's a few in the series) was to share my personal experiences and feelings. Not to explicitly label them as sexism or say everyone must share those feelings or say "hey you, you better go fix this" or any other number of things you seem to be attributing to it.
I grant that I may have missed the purpose of your posts (I will read them from the beginning), but when you call these things "paper cuts" it is implied that these are wrongs that have been done unto you, whether or not they fall into the subcategory of sexism. If they are indeed wrongs, then they need to be addressed so that other people do not suffer them as well. Or if they are not wrongs, then they are your own problem, and why complain about them publicly in the first place?
If you think I have no right to say that, you would probably find yourself more comfortable on a private soapbox that in a discussion forum.
You are a special, special snowflake.
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"Suck it up and deal" is a common response to examples of gender discrimination. For example, suppose "Bob" asks "Alice" for an example of why female students may feel unwelcome in computer science classrooms, and "Alice" says, "Suppose you walk into a classroom and the first thing you hear is the lecturer saying 'we need to make our systems so usable that even your mom could use them'; would you feel more or less welcome?" It's common for "Bob" to respond that he wouldn't feel unwelcome in such a situation if he were a woman, because he would just suck it up and deal; after all, "Bob" would say, computer scientists frequently use "so easy your mom could use it" as a benchmark, and anyway, why would he let that stop him from being interested in computer science?
As a rhetorical device, "Suck it up and deal" serves as a double bind: if you fail to give examples of sexist comments or behavior, you're accused of inventing a problem. If you do give examples, almost any example can be dismissed as something women would be able to deal with if they weren't oversensitive / overemotional / not really interested in technology anyway.
"Suck it up and deal" is also a convenient way of disregarding the emotional labor required to, in fact, suck it up and deal (something almost any woman in a technical career already does frequently just to get through the day), the toll that such labor takes on a person over time, and the energy it drains that could otherwise go into work. Like the Male experience trump card, "Suck it up and deal" is a way for people who have never had sexist comments aimed at them to deny the reality that such comments have an effect.
Source: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Suck_it_up_and_deal
One day someone was Wrong On The Internet and I really wanted to make my point and found myself making my point with a "mom" example that had never actually happened with her. Initially it made me a little uncomfortable, and I thought the discomfort came from representing my mother as less capable than she is. But I figured I'm anonymous, and since I could be anyone,I'm not really talking about my mom specifically. "My mom" could be any mom and I was conveying something I figured might happen to lots of moms.
So I posted it anyway. It wasn't until later that I realized how extremely obviously sexist and ageist it was. The ONLY reason I was using "mom" in that example was to enlist the stereotype that older women aren't adept with technology. That made me further realize that even when I was using true anecdotes from my life, I was likely motivated to do so because enlisting the stereotype strengthened whatever point I happened to be making.
When I read the girlfriend/wife line from the OP I thought the same thing as many responders here do: There's nothing wrong with someone sharing a true fact about their experience being in a relationship with someone that doesn't care as much about technology. But that can still be sexist if you are unknowingly choosing to share the fact because the point you are making is made stronger by enlisting a stereotype that women don't care about technology.
"My wife doesn't ..." is a simple descriptive (and presumably accurate unless there's some reason to believe otherwise) statement about a specific person, not a stereotype.
Complaining that your spouse doesn't understand/appreciate something that's important to you is very, very, common—regardless of their sex—because the opinion of one's spouse is something most people value and worry about.
If the person had said "my wife, being a woman, doesn't ..." then it would be a stereotype, and maybe the entry you quoted would be relevant...
[EDIT: reading the original quote in context, it actually makes more sense there: it's easy to imagine that a line intended as a speaker's joke at a conference really is intended to riff off of a common stereotype (and the assumption that the audience shares this experience), rather than being a simple complaint about the speaker's personal situation...]
The real problem here is that the "my wife doesn't understand..." statement implies a camaraderie among men to the exclusion of women. And that type of exclusion over time will lead to feelings of unwelcome. Even if there is no direct offense or exclusion intended.
This particular issue likely wouldn't be an issue at all if there wasn't such a gender disparity in the first place because it would be more difficult to mistakenly imply exclusion when there is no hint of exclusion in the environment. And that's sometimes the problem with these difficult to appreciate minority issues. It's hard to even understand what the issue is without being part of the minority.
It's easy for us as men to feel welcome and comfortable in a group composed almost entirely of men, and I suppose it ends up being sort of self-fulfilling at that point to "keep women out", even if we don't all intend for that to happen. I know that walking into an interview and sitting across from 3 women scares me a little bit, but I can't even imagine how I would feel in an office full of women; definitely out of place.
TL;DR: Please stick with it! The best way to help the female students and interns to be more comfortable in the field is to get as close to a 50:50 gender split as possible.
These women are our people. They are tinkerers and geeks and perfectionists and builders and creators and geniuses and artists. They are who we are and who we aspire to be. There is plenty of imperfection to go around on both sides of the gender divide, but what we all have in common is a desire to be better... Better at our work or our craft, better at our fun. I think if we took just a little bit of that energy and aimed it at being better at relating to and respecting one another, we would all be better off.
We can make progress on this issue of sexism. We can start by practicing a bit more professionalism, even when we think no one is watching. We can make progress by thinking about others first when we think or act. We can make comments with real value, rather than shock value. We can acknowledge that there is no inherent connection between boldness and rightness. We don't need to start treating women differently... We are already doing that and it is only making things worse. We need to hold ourselves to a higher standard when dealing with everyone.
What if we all went to work today and encouraged every good idea, and were constructive toward every bad idea? What if we talked about software like it was software, not a swimsuit model? What if we stopped being so impressed with ourselves at every turn of off-color phrase, and started being impressed with the great things that the men and women we work with are doing to drive our products forward?
What if we spent just one week focusing on that. Maybe some of Julie's paper cuts would get a chance to heal. Maybe then we would learn what we can really accomplish together. Maybe we would never look back.
So I'd encourage you just to keep looking if you continue to run into these issues. All tech companies are not like this.
It doesn't help that it starts early on -- I'm hopeful the millennials will be raising their children differently -- and the infuriating and frustrating preconceptions that women endure now will fade to nothingness.
Sometimes it's a good idea to leave and find something better. Sometimes it's worth it to stay and try to change the situation. It's difficult to say when each action is appropriate, but you can't say that either one is strictly a poor choice.
In other words, yes, she absolutely should if it makes sense.
[1]http://juliepagano.tumblr.com/post/46216419829/my-experience...
What is a minority-only safe space? Is it just a segregated area that implies safety in homogeneity, or is there some other mechanism to ensure "safety"?
I can imagine segregating all of a particular minority into their own area of the office for their own "safety". Hopefully that's not what this is.
Would you consider it sexist if someone started a developer list only for people that identify as male? Would you consider it racist if white people started a conference where only white people could attend?
I can't make the leap to consider female-only developer lists not sexist or exclusionary without setting aside hesitation regarding the concept since my brain wants to consider it a double standard. Even in the face of privilege, another concept I can't really wrap my head around, but which even daring to question or seek explanation of inflicts the wrath of people who hate my privilege. (Nothing has come easy to me in my white male life. Nothing. I hate when people tell me I'm privileged, as it makes me feel like life is pretty hopeless, given the painful career and personal life I've experienced thus far. My life should be easier if I am privileged, right?)
As a man, I'd look down on a male-only mailing list, just like I somewhat look down on female-only mailing lists. How about a mailing list for human beings? I just don't get it. Why do we have to identify so hard with what we are?
Maybe I have a different perspective on privilege because I'm fat and ugly, and only the attractive white men get it, or something. But seriously, if I have privilege, how do I take advantage of it? Is there something I have to do to make it happen? Because I'd sure like to see it since everybody tells me I have it.
(I genuinely loathe "oh, you're a white male, life must be easy for you," just as much as you surely hate people snubbing your gender. I wasn't born into money. I wasn't born attractive. I wasn't born in a great town. I have a felony conviction. This is my second career. I've had to claw my way to success just like everybody else.)
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EDIT: Thanks for having a shot at this, men. I'm interested in OP's answer.
From the perspective of contemporary social justice theory, such things would indeed be considered sexist and/or racist because they are used to support privilege, whereas a women-only context or Black-only context would be used to deconstruct privilege.
(Some people consider this standpoint is completely insane, while others consider it a self-evident truth.)
Marxists have been twisting the language to enhance their own power for too long.
Here's a previous comment I've written in response to this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5340455
I still don't see it. This sentence is going to sound like I'm marginalizing women, but I have no other way to phrase it, so I'll just be blunt: do women want to be treated equally or do women want to be treated specially? Based on the winds of the industry, I sort of expected the former and don't see the place of female-only mailing lists in the world of that.
But in the big picture, there are established privileges for the majority. Not everybody benefits all the time. But there are subtle benefits that often go unnoticed.
I'm not an expert, but from what I've seen minority groups usually want to be treated equally but aren't, given the current pervasive environment. So they create their own environments in the meantime. All the while trying to change the primary environment so that eventually the segregated environments won't be necessary. Personally I'd prefer no segregated environments for any minorities, because I fear they reinforce the idea of segregation ,amplify difference, and encourage resentment. But I understand how it might be nice to have somewhere to get away from the primary environment from time to time.
> Personally I'd prefer no segregated environments for any minorities, because I fear they reinforce the idea of segregation ,amplify difference, and encourage resentment.
This is exactly where I am coming from. To the T.
I think you're still too focused on the individual level here. It's not meant as a personal rejection. It's more like "We are a minority and need a place to get away from all of that sometimes".
Try to think of it as getting away from the troubles and stress that come with being a minority in the environment, rather than a way to get away from specific people.
And that is why a male only hacker group (for example) wouldn't look good. There would be no minority environment to try to get away from. The group would be excluding females simply because they are females. In order to be less offensive, there must be some other reason for the exclusion. A mailing list that only allows men suffering from erectile dysfunction probably wouldn't raise too much scorn from anybody.
So for any minority-only group, the trick is to accept that there are legitimate difficulties inherent with being part of that minority. Sometimes it takes effort to see things that way, especially if you are supposed to be part of the majority and see no benefit from it.
As a result, people frequently come to ask "how could a group that excludes men possibly be ok, especially as a solution to 'sexism'?" The answer is that ethics are not as simple as "X is always bad". Ethics conflict, and then you have to weigh which one it's better to relax in that situation.
Even if you don't agree in this case, I hope most people can acknowledge that a reasonable person who believes that gender should not dictate what one can and cannot do can weigh the pros and cons and determine that the harm of excluding men from certain spaces is outweighed by the good of giving women a safe space where they feel more comfortable speaking and connecting, which may have the power to help erode the gender inequality in our industry and society.
It's a case of competing ethics, both of which most people support, that reasonable people can come down on either side of.
If that makes sense.
EDIT: But the phrasing of that dichotomy I think misses what is really being asked here. If you accept that these passive aggressive acts are a sort of negative reinforcement brought on by neglecting to think about women as people. Then the request would be to keep women in mind while you go about your activities.
Playing "Oppression Olympics" is a common derailing tactic, just FYI. Your personal experiences don't change the difficulties that women face in tech.
"Oppression Olympics" wasn't remotely what I was doing, and if you took the time to read it carefully, you'd see that. Particularly and emphatically the portion that you took the time to quote. (Hint: "You say I have privilege and I don't see it" is not even on the same page of the map as "I go through more than you do". I was presenting a "maybe" scenario to explain away my not seeing privilege, not saying "good Lord the world hates me because I'm ugly, how dare you feel bad for having a vagina!")
It really depends on the context. If the list was started just to encourage juvenile behavior, than yes. If it was started to address real issues that were specific to male developers (perhaps paternity leave/care issues), than no.
There are mens groups in a number of occupations where men are underrepresented (primary school and nursing being the most prominent).
If the same thing were happening to men, then having an exclusive list would be appropriate there as well.
I'm also a white male and still earning nowhere near average wage despite hitting 40 recently, but I'm not blind to having less obstacles to overcome. The thing to remember is that social wealth is not a zero-sum game - we all gain when someone grows.
"Women are the most hostile people I know in groups. That seems counterintuitive."
She said that, not me. I'd say it but the repercussions of doing so should be fairly obvious.
(Better? Really, sorry, I tried to word that one right because I didn't mean it for you and had a feeling you'd take it that way. I didn't mean to offend you. The ambiguity of English sucks. Assume benefit of the doubt?)
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For what it's worth, I spent four months around neo-Nazis when I went to prison. Not what I expected, but that's irrelevant to this point.
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(Full circle!)
As a disclaimer, I'm a programmer, and neither a feminist thinker nor a writer. I'm writing this as an ally. I also have quite a bit of privilege myself. So forgive me (and call me out) if don't make sense or sound ignorant or condescending.
I think you're saying that when someone says, "you have male-privilege," you hear "life must be easy for you." Privilege doesn't mean that you don't also suffer from other forms oppression or discrimination, and it definitely doesn't mean that you have it easy. You mention that you are discriminated against because you are "fat and ugly." It sounds like you've suffered from very real oppression -- every bit as legitimate as the OP's story.
I feel that part of the misunderstanding comes from the difference between the common and jargon meanings. In this context, "privilege" is a jargon word coming from feminist and social justice philosophy.
In common speech, if I say someone is privileged, the implication is that this person is well-off in some way. I imagine a person with money and political influence -- someone who has benefited wildly from their privilege. But in the jargon, it refers to "a set of opportunities, benefits and advantages that some people get and others don’t." (definition quoted from the blog post linked below) Someone recently told me the story of a black stock-trader who noticed he was being passed up for job promotions. When he investigated, he found that his white colleagues were playing golf together -- and becoming friends -- at an all-white country club. The bosses were not intentionally promoting white employees, but, because of the racist policies of an unrelated institution, the white traders got the privilege to build these friendships with their superiors.
I found this blog post really helpful. It gives a very non-judgemental and helpful introduction to privilege: https://sindeloke.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/37/
Here's an excerpt:
"Having privilege isn’t something you can usually change, but that’s okay, because it’s not something you should be ashamed of, or feel bad about. Being told you have privilege, or that you’re privileged, isn’t an insult. It’s a reminder! The key to privilege isn’t worrying about having it, or trying to deny it, or apologize for it, or get rid of it. It’s just paying attention to it, and knowing what it means for you and the people around you. Having privilege is like having big feet. No one hates you for having big feet! They just want you to remember to be careful where you walk."
I hope this helps.
They are wrong. The problem is never jokes.
The point of safe spaces is not to protect people from jokes. The point of safe spaces is that a place exists where, for example, you don't need to explain for the Nth time how $SITUATION is or is not marginalizing against $GROUP, and feel safe that no members of $OPPRESSIVE_GROUP will show up and derail/invade/disrupt/cause harm to the group.
To answer via your original question, it is 'safety in homogeneity.'
This shouldn't be news, this is just life.
Isn't a better response to say that discrimination sucks, and that we should work to end it everywhere?
As a guy in tech, I have it good. But I have never forgotten how, back in the day, being a nerd among normal people sucked. That is part of why I work to end sexism in tech.
But even given what you say, it doesn't match with your earlier point. Saying that sexism isn't news is to suggest that not only do you not want to talk about it, but that we shouldn't either.
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Consider a historical example: doctors. Originally it was an all-male profession. Now it's open to women. Did men benefit from that restriction? Sure. Lower supply would mean higher prices. Cutting out half the potential doctors means that a given amount of talent takes you higher in the professional ranks.
Is that abuse? I'd say no. Is it sexist? Darned tootin'.
Now look at the systemic issues that keep women out of tech. All of those gender-related paper cuts. Did I experience any of those because I was a guy? Nope. Was I at any point encouraged to go into tech because it better fit social stereotypes? Probably. Did it help that my dad was a programmer at a time when the field was even more dude-heavy? Definitely. Has the reduced supply driven up wages and decreased competition at a time of fantastic demand? You bet.
I have benefited from sexism. I don't like that, and aim to stop it.
For me sexism implies discrimination, and discrimination implies abuse. But it's kind of a side topic, so I'll try to stick to sexism.
The reason I think nobody benefits from sexism is that I don't look at it as simply man vs. woman. The healthiest situation is where a man and woman have a balanced relationship with each other. If a man takes some of the woman's power (by abusing his own), that relationship is weakened. Thus, although he may have more power, he actually loses overall because the cost of his imbalanced relationship with her more than offsets the gain in power. That's all I mean. Extrapolate from this as much as you like, ultimately I believe that relationships are what matter.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...
Disclaimer: I grew up in urban and small-town India, in a lower middle-class and middle-class environment. I have no first-hand knowledge of how it is in rural scools. Also, anecdotal evidence, so feel free to take it all with heavy dpo
Math and the sciences in school: Every memory of school I have has girls and boys in equal measure doing well in math and science. The teachers's pets are all the kids who do well in class, the well-behaved ones who were focused on studying. In our early teens though, you could actually see the girls doing better than the boys in every subject. This pattern continued through college as well. Most guys handled this situation by relying on their female classmates for notes and help with schoolwork. I did the same.
College: My engineering class had something like a 40% female to 60% male ratio. This varied by specialization. The mechanical engineering department had a grand total of 3 female students and a 100 male students. (This was because Mechanical Engineering was perceived as something physically demanding, and the jobs involved factory floors in far-flung remote towns and villages.) The computer science department had somewhat more than a 50% female student ratio. On the whole, apart from the Mechanical Engineering department, every department was hovering around a equal distribution of females and males. Note that this was not deliberate on the part of the administration. Engineering school admissions in India are purely a function of score in State-level and National-level entrance exams. For that matter, the faculty was also a fairly even mix of male and female teachers.
From the OP's post : "At an old job, someone in authority pats me on the head to dismiss an argument I’m making about something at work." In an Indian setting, this would be near impossible because Indian culture is terribly touchy about men touching women in general. So the condescension would probably be expressed in some other manner, possibly verbal.
Plus, with close to half the employees being female, there's never really a sense of female co-workers as a minority in the workspace. And even in the few all-male teams I've been a part of, most of the men have spouses or sisters who work in tech. This means that no one thinks of male techies as the norm over female techies.
Conferences: Just like the workplaces, there's a good mix of men and women at these. And alcohol is hardly ever an issue because no one serves alcohol at these events in India, not even beer. It's a bit of a social taboo.
Another thing to note is that in India, engineering, and specifically, software, is something of an aspirational field. It's considered one of the most desirable careers, and everyone wants in.