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Comment by fizwhiz | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand. This guy was talking about HIS girlfriend comparing her to Maven and the perceived quirks and similarities. He was not talking about ALL girlfriends or girls in general.

Would there be such a massive uproar if the slide mentioned his baby daughter? Seems like the qualities of "complaining, demanding attention, interrupting while working" could easily apply to a small child regardless of gender. But no, we prefer to be particularly sensitive when he talks about his PERSONAL life, and describes his PERSONAL girlfriend and her qualities. And then we're just saying that he's suggesting that this is characteristic of all girlfriends. That's garbage.

Of course, the easiest thing for Atlassian to do is throw this guy under the bus saying that "immediate action will be taken". Give the guy a public forum and a decent shot to defend himself. This is getting ridiculous.

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> This guy was talking about HIS girlfriend comparing her to Maven and the perceived quirks and similarities. He was not talking about ALL girlfriends or girls in general.

I disagree. The slide presents a strong implication that the audience will empathize with a "clingy girlfriend" stereotype. I personally seriously doubt he is referring to a specific individual here.

Consider if someone had said "This piece of software is like my black friend: It's lazy, eats fried chicken and beats me at basketball"; that's a sentence that clearly

1) Probably isn't talking about a specific person

2) Invokes common stereotypes (both positive and negative)

3) Is racist.

Furthermore it implies a certain amount of objectification, since the only positive thing in the list is "Looks Beautiful"

Finally you just implied that assigning qualities to someone because they are female is equivalent to assigning qualities to someone because they are immature.

[edit] One more point; even if this is about a specific person, rather than a reflexive usage of common stereotypes, it does contain the assumption that the audience empathizes with having a "clingy girlfriend" which expresses an expectation that the audience is straight men.

>> Finally you just implied that assigning qualities to someone because they are female is equivalent to assigning qualities to someone because they are immature.

Are you accusing me of discrimination? See this is the exact sort of thing I take issue with. I was talking about babies as a substitute for the 'girlfriend' analogy where the characteristics the speaker mentioned could apply in order to illustrate that people wouldn't be that upset about it. But instead of viewing it in this light, you've short circuited the discussion to "Oh man, you're implying women are as immature as babies!".

>> The slide presents a strong implication that the audience will empathize with a "clingy girlfriend" stereotype

By virtue of experiencing empathy, are you saying that the audience is in fact sexist? So is the issue that the speaker puts this on the slide or the fact that according to you the audience has sexist proclivities where they stereotype all girlfriends.

It seems to me that If I were to make a presentation to an audience where you were sitting, and have a slide that says that my father, a sexagenarian, tends to not use the latest technology, you would stand up and accuse me of saying "all relatively older people are luddites". That's just plain wrong, and I think this sort of hyper sensitive overreaction needs to be thought through. This developer is question could very easily lose his job, so this is no joking matter.

> Are you accusing me of discrimination? See this is the exact sort of thing I take issue with. I was talking about babies as a substitute for the 'girlfriend' analogy where the characteristics the speaker mentioned could apply in order to illustrate that people wouldn't be that upset about it. But instead of viewing it in this light, you've short circuited the discussion to "Oh man, you're implying women are as immature as babies!".

Perhaps I misunderstand your first post. I interpreted it roughly as saying "Nobody would be offended if you say all these things about babies, so nobody should be offended when you say all these things about women" Based upon your reply, I'm now guessing that's not what you intended. Care to clarify?

>> The slide presents a strong implication that the audience will empathize with a "clingy girlfriend" stereotype

> By virtue of experiencing empathy, are you saying that the audience is in fact sexist?

Sorry, that was a typo, I meant "expectation" rather than "implication." The point is that the presenter is expecting the audience to be those who have been annoyed by and attracted to clingy girlfriends.

In fact, I would guess that the assumption is true for the majority of the audience, but perhaps you can see how it might be exclusionary to the remainder of the audience? Particularly those who are or have been girlfriends of people?

Frankly, I think the only thing that really would have made this exclusionary is if the gentleman speaking had his slide titled "Maven is like a girlfriend" as opposed to "Maven is like my girlfriend; in that case I would in complete agreement that he's making a bad generalization.

But the fact of the matter is that he's not honestly trying to generalize to demean women's characteristics and he's not trying to be sexist. Is he trying to get cheap laughs from the audience (specifically from people that have had girlfriends with similar characteristics)? Sure he is. But that is still different from him suggesting that all girls are like this.

To really get a feel of this, it's important to understand this in the context of other agents; as my above example mentions:

If he talked about his father and said he isn't exactly tech savvy, should we berate him for trying to suggesting that ALL people his father's age aren't 'smart' or 'adaptive' enough to get with the times? The audience could have several older folks who are programmers themselves; do you think they would get absolutely upset at this alleged generalization? They would most likely understand and relate to this because they have friends (or have heard of friends) their age that behave this way. And that's OK.

If he talked about his teenage daughter saying that she likes Lady Gaga and Snapchat, should we berate him for stereotyping ALL teenagers as pop-music loving kids who haven't explored other genres of music and reduce them to app-loving human beings? Seems like that's a very extreme deduction. If there were teenage girls sitting in the audience would they get upset at how he's generalizing their age-group? They would most likely understand that some girls are like that description and relate either through their own personal experience or friends that they have. Whether they fall in the same camp or not is irrelevant; they now know that the gentleman's kid is like that, and it's a story that will stick with them for the purposes of illustration. He's not subtly hating on all female teenagers, and I'd imagine that they understand that.

But no, when we talk about "women" in general, even if they're out significant other, all of a sudden saying anything with a non-positive connotation is remarkably radioactive. That seems like a double standard where we can comfortably mete out opinions and comments about people we PERSONALLY know (within a family, S.O. etc), but when we don't have something outrageously positive to say, we're better off excluding women from the discussion due to this paranoid fear of alienation that political correctness has brought on.

I think this has to do more with a stereotype that women tend to be more clingy in relationships. Now, Although I do not believe such a stereotype exists. Your reasons strongly imply the existence of this stereotype. It is unfortunate if such a stereotype were to exist but I would love to hear otherwise and perhaps a better reason as to why this message is sexist.

(EDIT: for clarity, you can see how an older tech savvy person having to constantly deal with a stereotype of older people being bad at tech might get offended. However, I agree with your conclusion that it would not be that big a deal because that particular stereotype is not that sensitive - and maybe a little less prevalent)

To be clear, I do believe repeating, joking about and/or references to gender stereotypes are sexist.

I still maintain that he wasn't talking about a specific person with that slide; if he was I'm sure she wasn't flattered by it.

"Girlfriend" doesn't mean "female friend", so it's not equivalent to "black friend". Rather, it means "person I'm in a relationship with". And people you're in a relationship with can be annoying (Amiright, ladies? fellas? Tip your waitresses!).

> the audience empathizes with having a "clingy girlfriend" which expresses an expectation that the audience is straight men.

Having a clingy SO is not orientation- or gender-specific.

Argument by analogy[1] (e.g Maven is like <insert thing that is disagreeable here>) is a lazy rhetoric style anyway. We should ban it completely. People should construct their arguments from first principals Elon Musk style. I'm only sort of kidding...

[1] : http://www.unc.edu/~theis/phil32/argsbyanalogy.html

Some say analogies are at the very core of our cognition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8m7lFQ3njk

Even if you don't agree, it's an interesting and fun talk to watch.

If anything, it highlights the insensitivity. Its not that its debatable based on nuance that it was his girlfriend, all girlfriends, or all women.

The point is, women got offended. If the industry was sensitive to this, they wouldn't get offended.

That said, yes, using a baby would have been a much better analogy. One, babies can't get offended. Two, babies have those qualities because they are underdeveloped (which I think was the point trying to be made about Maven), a statement that is much harder to stand behind if you are talking about women, or even a woman, in general.

People got pissed so the line was clearly crossed. Looking at the picture I can easily see why. Its objectifying his girlfriend which, if done, usually implies a consistent mental theme about all women. If this is how you think/treat your girlfriend, what about other women you do not know at all?

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