You can choose not to be offended
I have tried my whole life not to be offended, frightened, disturbed, or made uncomfortable by racism. I have failed for forty-six straight years.
I have tried my whole life not to be offended, frightened, disturbed, or made uncomfortable by racism. I have failed for forty-six straight years.
Not claiming that there is no discrimination against women, but I also don't think it is obvious that there is. I highly doubt discrimination is the reason behind the low numbers of women in tech, for example.
>> I highly doubt discrimination is the reason behind the low numbers of women in tech, for example.
I'm guessing you're a young man. Are you sure you're really in a good position to claim that? She often thinks of leaving the field because over time, it wears at her. I can give dozens of other examples.
I am not "claiming", I just resent taking things at face value. Possibly people are not used to competent IT women, because they are rare. But does it really take the form of "no, we don't want this person on the team, she is a woman" (without knowing her)? I doubt that - and if there are companies like that, it is their loss (not all men get hired by all companies, either - and good IT staff is rare in general).
Also, bias against the tech skills is hardly the same as sexism of the "she only is good for porn" kind.
I'd have to be delusional to say that discrimination wasn't a problem. I've cried my tear ducts dry and screamed my lungs out before over the unbelievable things that have happened to me that I never saw happen to any of my male friends just in tech alone. My boyfriend gets tired of hearing my stories of my frustrations over these things - he doesn't deal with anything even close to them except when I'm with him at an event (and THAT is a whole 'nother world of discrimination right there). I had to learn to just deal with some inevitabilities of being female in such an imbalanced industry. I also have to admit that in the course of dealing with these inevitabilities I've pretended to be a guy online very frequently and still do because it's just so much easier. I've also learned this nasty habit of becoming a total jackass in the face of other jackassery usually in the form of sexual harassment by people who think it's okay to harass a girl because they're behind a layer of pseudoanonymity.
Most men are really nice. Most men will hold open doors for me and treat me as a colleague and help me out when I'm having a problem, and I've had male friends who've mentored and supported me and my decisions over the years and more. Most of them, I would not mind working with - in fact, I would be glad to work with. But there is always someone out there somewhere who thinks discrimination and harassment is okay, and eventually, you just get really, really, really, really, really tired of them. It all builds up.
Can't forget that all this is on top of the annoyances in the non-tech world that one deals with every day just by being female, which is enough to drive a lot of women crazy. Once I've fingered my knitting needles and my knife on my keychain to use as weapons because an annoying guy wouldn't stop following me around saying something about taking my clothes off. Just last week, I drove around in circles near my house because there was a creepy guy in an Audi who had been following me by foot from a mall and then in his car for a very random and unlikely 5+ mile drive (think 4 left turns in a row followed by going up and down the same street for half a mile), and I went as far as to call the cops with his license plate #. How many guys can tell you that they've had stuff like THAT happen to them? Pretty rare :(
On the other hand you will find that if you register with a dating web site, you will receive 200 messages without doing anything. If you are a guy (and not Brad Pitt), you would have to write 200 messages to get one or two replies.
So while driving home alone at night would be less fun for you than for men, online dating might be more fun than for men (not saying that is the way things should be, but they are like that, and I don't think discrimination is the right word for that).
If I was a manager I would probably give job applications by female programmers special consideration, because they are so rare. It might even be worth hiring some female programmers with not the greatest skills, just to make the work place more attractive (that would be the cynical point of view).
Also I have to say it would bother me, too, to work in a sexist environment (like having to listen to tasteless jokes about women at lunch or something). The thing to do then is to quit and look for another job.
Too bad you did not give many details about the unpleasant things that happened to you. I generally found a lot of things unpleasant in the IT jobs I had, so I wonder how many of the things you experienced were actual common to men and women, and not just to women. For example, I think most coders thing they are the best coders, you can hardly ever get two coders to agree on the best way to solve a problem. I could imagine that a woman could attribute such criticisms to her being a woman, when it is really just general IT suckiness. (I don't want to belittle your experiences, it would be very interesting to hear more details, because as I said, I have not actually experienced working with many women in IT).
Actually, online dating is a hassle for me :) I have a boyfriend now, but I'm pretty flexible about who I go out with and my relationship with him is open...I've looked around on Craigslist and similar for other women to meet. Did you know that even in the w4w areas, all the women looking for other women are men (not transmen/transwomen, which I would be fine with, but straight up men who pretend to be women because apparently m4w isn't good enough for them or they want to sleep with a bi/lesbian woman?), women with boyfriends who want a mff threesome, women who have husbands/boyfriends and are tired of them and want to just see if they'll have any fun with another woman...no women looking for women who know that they like women, be it for a one night stand or a long term relationship.
Not to mention that there are very little women in tech, and even less likely that they are also interested in other women...and many guys think it's okay to hit on me boyfriend or bi or not. :(
> If I was a manager I would probably give job applications by female programmers special consideration, because they are so rare.
I actually dislike this because it's reverse discrimination. Yes, women are rare. That doesn't mean they need to be treated specially. I for one just want to be treated like anyone else minus any extra discrimination and sexism arising from being of a different sex. I don't want to be hired just because I have boobs. I want to be hired because someone thought that my skills and experience were good for the job. Hiring women because they are women even though they don't necessarily have the skills for the job just ends up in more frustration - remember that xkcd about women and math? That.
> Also I have to say it would bother me, too, to work in a sexist environment (like having to listen to tasteless jokes about women at lunch or something).
It's all about when and why. Like this whole couchdb/rails mess in the first place. My joking around with some friends calling each other whore and slut and worse things and talking about some pretty explicit things while chilling out on IRC? That's fine with me and I don't even think twice about it - I know they are good people, it was in a casual context, these things wouldn't even be considered being said to any one of them to anyone else even half seriously, etc.
But the workplace isn't one where it's appropriate to do that, and public presentations at conferences with the implication that you are ...or at least were... a respected member of the Rails Activists team and that you are a professional in this field is also not the right place, especially when your subject matter has nothing to do with it. Not only that, but that this guy apparently didn't even think twice about the inclusion of porn. How many times have you actually seen anything close to scantily clad women in a conference presentation about something technical that isn't about running an adult entertainment website? couchdb isn't so boring that porn needs to be in there to interest people!
(As for my opinion on this: it was stupid and it is ALL about appropriateness - no need for censorship. Like, I'm not going to crucify the guy or want to crucify him, I just hope he and future presenters understand that porn is not necessarily something that belongs in a presentation. I mean, I would expect to see porn in a presentation about a porn site using Rails that was having problems scaling and meeting the unique demands of their customers. Not CouchDB! It didn't even do anything to help understand the concepts except via the fact that there are women in the slides dressed provocatively. Not that I hate porn, I love watching porn regularly. I still don't want to see it at a conference. Save it for another day please. Imagine what the talk would be like if the kind of porn in the presentation were changed? Something more artistic erotic art-like or softcore gay porn. And how many men would have walked out of the presentation if they saw gay porn. Heh.)
> Too bad you did not give many details about the unpleasant things that happened to you.
Offensive names, my boobs (or, more disturbingly, downstairs) being discussed in public, the assumption that I'm not even doing anything close to technical (by far the most common) - you know, if I were a good designer, I would consider that career, but I'm horrible at designing! And for that matter, caring at all about accessibility doesn't mean I'm a designer. - and being hit on with alarming frequency, people ignoring what I have to say about something, having double standards for the quality and style of code being written. That's about the most common complaints I have.
Some of that is general IT suckiness, but it's suckiness that tends to go away when people understand that you are not totally incompetent at your job. The problem I then have with some of that is that it lasts a lot longer and takes a lot longer for some people to realize that I don't actually totally suck at some things. And for the things that aren't general IT suckiness, it's someone being an asshat in ways that my friends working other jobs would work their ass off to get him fired if it happened to them. That's also sadly another side effect of this all, I've grown a way-thick skin in some areas and I can't believe it.
So far I've had the opportunity to compare with other women working on the same thing, and with other men who joined in at the same time, and I get a bit unhappy about the situation. But like I said: not all places are like this, and most men are good people.
All that being said, I don't think that discrimination or solving that is the ultimate thing to do to fix this imbalance. Sometimes for men and women alike, it's just the lack of a friendly and accessible mentor to help them.
That is very annoying, I can imagine ;-) Actually, when I was on a dating site a couple of years ago, a lot of the women also were men (they just used some pictures they found on the internet). I did not have it in me to play that trick, although I would have been curious about what kind of things other men would write. I guess not all of it is very nice (I have often heard stories about unpleasant photographs...).
"I actually dislike this because it's reverse discrimination."
I completely agree, just think it would be most likely what would happen. Maybe all CVs should be anonymized by default :-/ There was this experiment where they put random names on CVs, and the black sounding names got significantly less invitations, for example :-(
"Sexual jokes"
I can't even recall the kind of jokes I mean, like to forget them asap. I don't think referring to somebody's sexiness is all that bad (it's nature), but I don't like allusions to using somebody. I can only recall the joke from Buffy "what is the difference between a toilet seat and a first year student" - stuff along that lines is unbearable (in Buffy it was delivered by a mean guy, it was not an actual joke ;-)
"details about the unpleasant things that happened to you."
Ouch. Glad you met some nice men, too - it is tantalizing to hear about women's bad experiences at work, not having the chance to set a better example.
Yeah, it's weird - men are men, women are men and children are FBI agents? :p (oh dear, yet another common stereotype. some people i talk to online still refuse to believe i'm female...)
I'm not sure why anyone would pretend to be a member of a different sex like that, especially if they're not gay or transgender (and the latter tend to be upfront if they're pre-op, which is infinitely more courteous than lying outright). I did talk to one who had a random female pic included with the post looking for other women, and the reply back was from a guy who sent along a pic of him naked. I did not need to see that.
> Maybe all CVs should be anonymized by default
That would be an interesting experiment, but I bet there is more on a CV outside of the name that would be discriminated against.
> I don't think referring to somebody's sexiness is all that bad...
It's not. I like to talk about these things too, even more than some guys. But I don't do them in a professional setting, and that is what the whole issue over this presentation is. The porn would have been appropriate (but barely so) at an event like a BarCamp with full disclosure to attendees that you're including some risqué images. But the GoGaRuCo organizer brought up a good point in his apology about the presentation: had anyone from Google or Apple or Microsoft done the same, they would have been fired (if the presentation were allowed at all, which it wouldn't have), and the same standard of what is appropriate would apply here at this ruby conference as much as it would at, say, Google I/O or WWDC or PDC.
> it is tantalizing to hear about women's bad experiences...
No worries, usually the good guys deal with it. :) Unfortunately can't always say the same about things that go on on the internet.