"Put down the crack pipes" doesn't go so well

A small anecdote. An acquaintance related a story of fixing the 'drainage' in their back yard. They were trying to grow some plants that were sensitive to excessive moisture, and the plants were dying. Not watering them, watering them a little, didn't seem to change. They died. A professional gardner suggested that their problem was drainage. So they dug down about 3' (where the soil was very very wet) and tried to build in better drainage. As they were on the side of a hill, water table issues were not considered. It turned out their "problem" was that the water main that fed their house and the houses up the hill, was so pressurized at their property (because it had maintain pressure at the top of the hill too) that the pipe seams were leaking and it was pumping gallons of water into the ground underneath their property. The problem wasn't their garden, the problem was that the city water supply was poorly designed.

While I have never been asked if I was an engineer on the phone, I have experienced similar things to Rachel in meetings and with regard to suggestions. Co-workers will create an internal assessment of your value and then respond based on that assessment. If they have written you off they will ignore you, if you prove their assessment wrong in a public forum they will attack you. These are management issues, and something which was sorely lacking in the stories.

If you are the "owner" of a meeting, and someone is trying to be heard and isn't. It is incumbent on you to let them be heard. By your position power as "the boss" you can naturally interrupt a discussion to collect more data from other members. Its also important to ask questions like "does anyone have any concerns?" to draw out people who have valid input but are too timid to share it.

In a highly political environment there are two ways to create change, one is through overt manipulation, which is to collect political power to yourself and then exert it to enact change, and the other is covert manipulation, which is to enact change subtly enough that the political organism doesn't react. (sometimes called "triggering the antibodies").

The problem with the latter is that if you help make positive change while keeping everyone not pissed off, no one attributes it to you (which is good for the change agent because if they knew the anti-bodies would react, but bad if your manager doesn't recognize it). I asked my manager what change he wanted to be 'true' yet he (or others) had been unsuccessful making true, he gave me one, and 18 months later that change was in place. He didn't believe that I was the one who had made the change. I suggested he pick a change he wanted to happen and not tell me, then in 18 months we could see if that one happened :-). But he also didn't understand enough about organizational dynamics to know that making change without having the source of that change point back at you was even possible.

The point is that one of the very important jobs of managers is to make sure that people who work for them are contributing as much positive to the company as they can, and when they are being held back from that contribution by people who are oblivious, willful or otherwise, they jump in and fix that.

Just another way that "managing" is different than "engineering" I suspect.

Later that afternoon, my boss came in and said, "Ry, you don't know what other people are going through in their lives." The lead of the other team (who was in the meeting) had been to rehab for his crack addiction.

In place of gender, I could easily chalk most of these things up to ethnic discrimination and be done with it, but that would be doing myself a huge disservice.

Likewise, I think the author is doing herself a disservice by seemingly looking for bias as a first and only explanation in each case.

It's exactly this kind of hasty generalizing [1] that is surely the root of much discrimination.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization

Honestly? This is the best you can do? It would be fantastic if people would take a step back for a moment and try and deeply consider why your initial reaction is not disappointment and anger, but an attempt to deflect or belittle the problem, regardless of whether you made a conscious decision to do so. Of course you're not all sexists/racists/homophobes, but tending towards trusting people would probably benefit us all.

* Dress nicely - like a force to be reckoned with.

* Stop holding back and seek a bit of glory.

* Let others know the importance of what you do - "Oracle DB Admin for company's product line" vs "I just fix the database"

* Don't help jerks - if a jerk asks for a problem to be solved, solve it but report the solution to the jerk's boss so that they don't get the glory.

* Don't train jerks - keep your domain knowledge close to the vest.

* Wear heals - there's an odd correlation with hight and perceived stature.

You are a PROFESSIONAL. A professional does not lose her cool or insult others. When two people have entered into an increasingly intense discussion, they WON'T notice anyone else unless actively interrupted. Once you understand this, the solution to stopping the recursive loop is to force a non-maskable interrupt, like so:

"Uh, guys... Guys. Guys! Hey! Stop! Listen!" You raise your voice just enough to ensure that they hear you, with no irritation present in your voice. Once they're interrupted, you tell them the news. Insulting them with the quip about crack pipes is absolutely the wrong thing to do, and your boss is right in chastising you.

It's a problem and you might do some of these things inadvertently, so maybe listen a bit more and figure out how to keep yourself from not doing things like assuming women at a tech conference are in marketing instead of engineering.

The fact this thread is filled with a bunch of guys mansplaining how this wasn't sexist behavior is very telling.

To bring the topic to a more constructive angle, does anyone have any techniques that might help in these cases?

My default is either extreme ambivalence, or raging hard ass. It's hard to find the middle ground.

So I've said this in meetings, hasn't everyone?

(And I bet I would say something like "Put down the crack pipe")

I can certainly believe there would be managers (and companies) that might take exception to this, but it would be justified only if their meetings were exceedingly well run. I'd hate to work for a manager or a company that took exception to that though to the point of dinging me on a performance review.

Most people work at their company's location 8, 10, 12 hours per day. It's one thing to ask employees to not harass other employees. It another thing to demand of all employees they act like robots or be accused of unprofessional behavior.

The first few time it happened, I thought it was just kind of odd and my fault in someway, but after 10 years in the industry, I can tell you categorically that its not a fluke. Reminds me of this quote ...

"White men have to prove their incompetence. Everyone else has to prove their competence"

--- Mike Perham

That is not to say that everyone in tech is racist and/or sexist, I think its more of an unconscious bias, much the same way someone (even women) might walk into a car parts store and walk right past the female attendant to a male one to ask a question about car parts or how a white kid on a basketball court might be picked last because there are black kids on the court.

I think it is pretty insidious and eventually I think we will figure out a way to help our industry get rid of these unconscious biases

I mean, what's a perf score? Why does everyone bureaucratize everything?

We have such finite lives, why are we putting ourselves through this?

Join a startup, go freelance, take the pay cut and enjoy life.

You have a skill that is highly sought after, you'll find a job where you're happier, if you don't, move on.

I swear, I know of so many notable startups (that are real companies with real revenues, with real benefits, great locations) that are dying to have more tech talent.

What I'm saying is that if you're going to be miserable in your work place, move on with your life!

The OP's anecdote sounds genuinely sexist and in a really bad way, but I can also imagine a situation where someone says he has never been asked if he's an engineer because the question was not confrontational e.g. casually at the beginning of an interview "So what's your role at COMPANY X, engineer?"

Having to use drastic measures such as saying: "Put down the crack pipes" shows insecurity. If she had simply stood up, maybe consistently told the guys:"Hey, hey we don't have these...EXCUSE ME!" and then explained in a calm manner what was wrong, she would have earned respect.

However, this way she more looked like a hysteric, loose cannon.

You have to really be confident (full) of yourself as a woman with a massive personality to guide men in a male-dominated environment and that takes lots of practice and time.

Marissa Mayer I'd say is an alpha.

That being said, it's pretty common for the female engineers I know to not be taken seriously, especially at the start of their careers.

At one point I learned that the best way to get a certain coworker of mine to finally get what I was saying was to pull another person in front if them, explain myself to the third party, let them acknowledge that I'm right, and then finally ask the original coworker once more if their plan was reaaally the right way to go. Only then would they realize that I had a point. It sucks, but if you have to get someone they trust to repeat what you're saying, you might as well have a reliable backup ready.

As for speaking up in meetings, I was recently told in my review that I needed to be more assertive, because I feared I'd experience the same thing you did. Hopefully I can find a good middle ground between meekly watching people march down the wrong road, and shouting about crack pipes... I haven't found it yet, though.

In my experience it's not a curse of being a woman or even being a quiet person, it's a curse of being the most competent person in the room. Congrats on that.

Seriously, if you want your company to do well, you don't punish people who speak up to prevent problems. I don't care if it's discrimination, because of her gender, whatever. It's bad for the business.

In general, discrimination is bad for business because it means people do things they shouldn't, like ignore engineers who know their shit, or take extra time to get a second opinion when the first was from a knowledgeable source.

Discrimination costs your business money, and not because of some theoretical lawsuits.

Now, sure people will get ignored when they shouldn't be. People will get second opinions for a variety of reasons when they don't need to. There is no perfect company.

But we know logically, WE KNOW, that it's stupid to discount someone because of their gender. So while we may not be able to prevent all such screwups where smart people aren't heeded, here is an obvious case where this shit shouldn't happen.

And that's the lesson to take away from this. Here is something that is fixable that hurts the business, leads to pointless meetings and the cause is known. If it was an engineering problem in your stack, you'd be fixing it by now.

This is probably going to get buried, sadly. Maybe it deserves it's own post.

The other issues I think are relatively common and apply to most people, at least at some point in their careers. Having constructive arguments and listening to others' is a pretty rare skill, generally speaking.

Now the article seems to present these issues as if they were solely caused by misogyny. I think it's more about general stereotyping, but also about affected people not knowing how to stand their ground. I got pushed around and ignored for a while, like most people will endure at some point. Getting bitter won't resolve anything, it'll just give people around you a wrong justification for their behavior, making you even more frustrated and bitter.

Standing your ground in my opinion is being able to show you didn't get where you are by mistake. And if you happen to be the victim of stereotyping or any kind of discrimination, making a firm point of it will make people think that's all you're about, not your skills or your hard work. It's sad but I guess you can only rise above the bickering, and that in itself can be quite empowering.

And if that sort of behavior is common-place in your workplace (as opposed to isolated in which case simply ignoring it works wonders), then you most definitely aren't working for the right people. I despise ignorant discrimination but I can't support people who make it the source of all their problems either.

One of the funniest moments in the whole series.

The guy that listened to someone else before accepting the OP's opinion might have done so because he knew the other person better or respected him more for a non-gender based reason. Or maybe the idea didn't sink in until he heard it twice.

Getting attention in a meeting where several loud confident people are pontificating can be difficult if you are not a loud, self-confident person, or if they don't already respect you.

But I don't think the OP needed to escalate to crack pipes right away, although it's a great line. A "Guys, we don't use type-two data!" loud enough to be heard over everybody else's voices and repeated until it worked probably would have done the trick without affecting perf scores. It depends on the culture of the group. There is usually some accepted way in a group to interrupt conversations that are going nowhere. My guess is that anyone would have been dinged by that boss for the crack comment, just because that's his way of dealing with things.

Also, filling unappreciated and oppressed can become a self-fulfilling prophesy in men as well as women. If you go in there unsure they will pay attention to you, they probably won't. If you go in there thinking, "I'm not going to say much, but when I do, they had better pay attention, because I know what I'm talking about," they will sense it and listen, no matter who you are.

One thing I think isn't understood by the women who post things like this is that men are always in competition. It's like a wolf pack where a pecking order must be established.

In any meeting some guys who are trying to be alpha are going talk over or ignore other people they perceive as beneath them, or who they want to put beneath them, men as well as women. It's not a gender thing as much as it's a power thing. The way to overcome it is stand up for yourself and to establish your competence in whatever the group respects whether it be fisticuffs in the Army or technical skill in a company.

I suspect that the crack pipes remark, coupled with her obviously correct understanding of the problem at hand, won her respect points with her co-workers that will make them more likely to listen to her later on, no matter what the boss thought.

In the same way, having her opinion confirmed by another respected person probably made the coworker in the second example more likely to accept her opinion without confirmation the next time.

Basically, nobody gets respect right away. It doesn't come with a title, or even because you are a man. If you don't have the type of personality that immediately commands respect, you'll have to earn it step-by-step. Even if you do immediately command it, you can lose it very quickly if you don't show yourself worthy of it.

Also men test each other and especially newcomers by teasing or pointed jokes. The ability to "take a joke" is highly respected. It's not an attractive trait, but it happens. You can just ignore it (recommended), or you can do it better than they do. Depends on your personality. It usually stops after a while. Complaining about it usually makes it worse. In one sense, if men are doing this to a woman among them, it means they have accepted her to some extent. Now all she has to do is start working her way up the pecking order. A sardonic smile and a comeback (even a dumb one) can work wonders in this situation.

None of this, however should be taken as a reason to accept actual sexual harassment by word or deed. If that happens, a clear, sharp "I'm sorry, what did you just say???" or "Get your hands off me!" is called for, followed by a trip to that person's supervisor or higher until the matter is resolved.

Another way of asking the question: If we constructed a perfectly unbiased Bayesian robot and fed it the true distributions of X and Y, would we observe its predictions about Y based on given values of X and conclude that the robot is Xist?

I interrupt people all the time, male and female alike. (Hey -- if you're paying my rates, you might want to actually hear what I have to say. :D) It does seem more necessary to then go back and ask the women afterwards what they were trying to say; the men generally don't need that kind of prompting.

I fully accept that sexism could be driving all of the incidents laid out.

But ...

If one person tells you r=2 is a bad idea, maybe you listen.  If two people say it, then three.  Well at some point you are an idiot if you keep ignoring.  And Google(?) is not known for employing idiots.

If you have to interrupt your co-workers discussion with "put down the crack pipes", I would like to suggest that it might be worth considering that being blanked in the aggressive and frustrating way described is really unprofessional.  I mean deeply revealing of a lot of anger and problems.  Which means her team is made of of men who have some serious issues, life-crippling levels of sexism.

Or

Well, maybe being prepared to shout that the team is so wrong they are smoking crack, indicates that it is worth looking at the glass house around us.  

Getting on with others is hard.  In a high pressure work environment it's very hard, in one where Aspergers is just next door for most of the industry, then its even harder.

Running good technical teams is hard and we get it wrong more often than not.  Which is why "don't flip the bozo bit" is a vital piece of advice.

But I would also suggest that don't flip the -ism bit without looking deeply at our own behaviour is important.

We live and we die.  I was born in 1971, the year of a sitcom called "Love thy neighbour" where the 'joke' was a black family moved in next door.  The range of deep seated -isms in my head is vast.  But it is a fallacy to think that my head is the only broken one on the planet.

I take my steer from a man with a truly broken head - John Nash was right - we live in a Game Theory world, where actions breed reactions and re-reactions.

In some egregious cases the -ism is so bad it is clearly offensive, and clearly intolerable.  Let's say it's order of magnitude out of whack.  

In other cases, less so.  Women, ethnic minorities, LBGTG and others are at disadvantages because of who they are  thats got to be wrong.  But we are in a ever shifting game.  And the secret of winning the game is not winning, it's improving - changing us.

Want my opinion on the best path to business success.  Therapy.  Seriously.

I have met billionaires and tramps, people who sold all their possession dn people who have ten of everything,  the ones I am jealous of are the ones who have peace.  They were not the ones with the money.

There is sexism, racism and every other ism around.  It seeps into every day life and it is never acceptable to just let it lie.  But just as challenging something there and then is cause for for ing those responsible to look at and question their base assumptions about how they behave, there is always room to look at our own assumptions, for we are all playing a game called life, there is no umpire, no final score, no second round play offs.  

Sometimes other people's problems are an opportunity for us.  Sometimes just move on.

Edit: I got a bit carried away sorry

How could you not ask this question of your interviewer and expect it to go well?

edit: looking back on how many interviews where I've done this. I hope I've not offended anyone by not assuming they were a certain <status_jobtitle>. Frankly, I just don't know enough about them to guess. So I have to ask. If they're the type that gets bent out of shape because I couldn't tell job title from their halo then perhaps we aren't a good fit anyway.

Yeah, sometimes people won't believe you. And then they'll ask someone else. And eventually they'll believe someone else, maybe. And that someone else will probably be a guy.... because almost everyone in tech is a guy. I'm constantly getting ignored, and then some guy gets listened to (I'm a guy). And as for the "crack pipes" story, we don't really have enough details, but it's VERY easy to read that story and think "damn right you screwed up". And I've been ignored and talked over (I'm a loud guy). So, yeah, that stuff happens to men.

Of course, the real question is not "do these things happen to women and not men". That's like saying "[all] men are taller than [all] women", it's obviously false, because sometimes I meet women over 6' tall. But of course we know that both mean and median female heights are lower than male... the whole curve is offset by like 5" in the USA. It's totally plausible that the distribution of respect at technical skill discriminates in favour of males. It's plausible that it doesn't, or that the effect is pretty small. If you want to convince an unbeliever, a few examples of moderate disrespect are like pointing out a few examples of 5'6" guys (taller than the median US female). It's just not persuasive!

And, in fact, in my opinion, it's worse than non-persuasive. It gives the people who don't believe you (and don't want to) a straw man to fixate on. "That shit happened to me too [and it did!] and therefore her claim about privilege is wrong [wait, what]." If you want to advance a cause, you would do well to make sure you only emit Grade-A arguments.

I don't know whether there is a "cat food factory" chopping up "fish" in the tech industry. I would guess rachelbythebay knows better than me (she's closer to the issue, and IIRC she's logged more time in the industry), but I am skeptical about whether or not she really knows either. Maybe I'm wrong and she has attempted to do science on the subject. But if she has only her own experience (as I have only my own), then her interpretive bias will be a huge factor in her conclusions (as mine is in mine). Just as my ego benefits when I fool myself into believing that my privilege plays only a tiny role in my success (mock me here, please), her ego would benefit if she were to fool herself into overstating the benefits of the privilege that she does not have (and understating the benefits of the privileges she does have).

No one said which direction the effect went.

Fuck them. And fuck you if you think there's some sort of more workplace appropriate way to get someone to pay attention when you're being ignored.

Yet last I looked Google was still standing up on its own hind legs without her. Just a little more than that, in fact. Maybe they just didn't want to work with a smart asshole with a perpetual chip on her shoulder.