This Is What Tech's Ugly Gender Problem Really Looks Like
wired.com
wired.com
My guess is it's a lot harder to pitch a story about business people discriminating against women (classic glass ceiling story), than it is the current fad of lambasting the tech sector as being misogynistic.
Edit: This may have come off as more critical of the article than I intended. The article is good and does have a point, it just annoys me that it makes it sound like tech is to blame when this is really just a facet of the existing misogyny in business. Change all the occurrences of "tech" with "venture capital" in the article and I'd have no problem with it.
That's not true. A significant difference, after we unkilled it, is that discussion could continue.
User flags cause an item's rank to drop; many flags at once make it drop a lot. I know that some people feel that all user flags they disagree with should be overridden, but it isn't that simple. For one thing, those people disagree among themselves, and for another, the community itself is deeply divided.
I'll probably get downvoted, but I'm just really skeptical of this story. To be clear I have no problem with women and am a strong advocate of equality, but this just sounds fake to make a point.
A) Why does it sound “fake”? B) Why would you have to see this in person to believe it? C) Can you see the metanarratives you constructed in the “I'm willing to believe...” sentence?
Every single woman could list off a number of things that have been said to her over the course of her life that would sound “fake” due to their horrific content, and relative to normative white male experience.
“The most common thing I hear from other women is: ‘Oh the stories I’ll tell once I’m far enough along that I don’t have to worry about being shamed,’”
Misogyny runs deeper than logic in much the same way other ideological constructs lead to cognitive biases.
You haven't experienced anti-female bigotry because you aren't female. I would venture to guess--and I could certainly be wrong--that you've also never experienced anti-black or anti-gay bigotry because you aren't either of those things, either. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. But you need to realize that the fact that it doesn't happen around you doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
It's also because the speaker, and a lot of people around the speaker, assert (possibly correctly) that a) he (or she) does not discriminate against women and b) none of his (or her) colleagues are likely to.
But that downplay, and that dismissiveness, is its own kind of discrimination. Gender bias is not something that I have ever experienced as a man, and not something I have ever seen in the small (usually gender-balanced) companies I have worked in. But, just because I don't see it (I'm not the one getting inappropriately hit on, or denied funding, etc.) doesn't mean it isn't very real. Sure, based on all the information I have of personal experience and the experience in the workplaces I have been in, this isn't a problem -- but of course, it's completely solipsistic to argue that my experience is any evidence of the wider state of things.
The shouting down of these stories is itself a worrying sign. If anyone feels like the culture they work in is treating them unfairly, maybe we should examine that closely, to figure out why they feel that way and what we (all of us) need to do that they don't, rather than dismiss it as delusion or malice, and in so doing free ourselves of addressing it.
The framing of all normative experience as male is one invisible aspect to this that few are willing or able to see.
“Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being.”
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoi...
Specifically with investors, how are you going to legislate against how someone feels about investing their own money? If they don't want to invest in a woman company, it's their right.
"Why do I have to go to gender-specific investors? Our company is pretty gender agnostic, at this point."
Investors are very fickle with their money. The gender-specific investor might have a higher rate of investing in women founded companies. You may not like this, but it may give you a higher chance. There are also investors that are biased against the type of company you have. Some refuse to invest in social networking companies.
"When you’re a single mother, says Sheri Atwood, founder of SupportPay, it’s even tougher to be taken seriously"
I don't think it's because you are a woman. An investor might think that you don't have the time and energy to spend 100% on your company, which is true if you have a child at home with nobody else but you.
"They saw that my being a woman and my age was an asset"
So you spend an entire article talking about how you don't want to be discriminated against because you are a woman..and then conclude that you only got an investment because you are a woman?! How about..they liked your product/company idea and you and think you will succeed?Investors talk money. They want to see an ROI.
"Now, we’re in a time where someone says something horribly racist"
Now we are in a time where you accidentally say something that is construed as racist, and the Twitter mob gets you fired.
The Mozilla CEO even had to step down because he donated a few hundred dollars to a campaign he believed in 10 years ago. If I would have gotten someone fired at a christian owned company for donating to a pro-gay marriage fund, there would be outrage.
It's outrageous to me that free speech is being eroded every day and the same people that write articles like this about discrimination support it, because it coincides with their beliefs.
Free speech is a right given by the government. It does not have anything to do with your employer firing you for making a racist remark. How have any of your examples expressed an erosion of freedom of speech? I see no mention of the government arresting anyone for their comments.
That's not all it is. When you say "free speech" you mean "free speech with regards to government censorship", but many other people just mean "free speech" in general. Like, the ability to freely speak about something without being harshly punished for that speech, regardless of who does the punishing.
Do I have the freedom to tell my boss to go fuck himself without facing any consequence? Of course not. That doesn't mean there is no such concept as "free speech".
I have the freedom to partake in many types of speech without fearing substantial retribution. Some forms of speech are restricted by the government, others are restricted by other things.
And you DO have the freedom to tell your boss to go fuck himself. The government will not stop you and therefore you are free to do that. But, your boss has the freedom to fire you for saying that as well. You are misunderstanding what free speech, and freedom in general, is.
You actually are free to express yourself however you like without violating laws or the civil rights of others. All I heard in the way of a definition is "... and I also want to be free of any consequences I really don't like.". Well, too bad because that doesn't exist and asserting such a "freedom" isn't much different than asserting that unicorns exist. It's a fantasy concocted in your head, not a real thing.
Free speech is a liberty protected from the government by constitution limits.
Part of free speech is also pointing out that people that are wrong are wrong. Shining light on a problem is not the same as demanding legislation.
I have the same intuition, but I'm not sure why. After all, you might have said the same thing about an employer who doesn't want to spend his own money on a woman's salary, etc. (And, of course, many have.) But that hasn't stopped us from passing and enforcing employment discrimination laws.
I think that focusing on the investor's right to spend his money as he pleases is not the most fruitful way of analyzing the problem. It is undisputed that he has that "right," but history has illustrated that this right can/should be made to yield to overriding social ills. Does the situation of female tech founders compare to the broader problem of employment discrimination?
My tentative answer is that it does in terms of pervasiveness, but may not have such a widespread and pernicious effect on the lives of all women that we should be comfortable interfering in private investment decisions in order to combat it.
Who said anything about legislation?
There's this bizarre equivalency that gets pulled out in these discussions where people seem to believe that anything legal must be moral and vice versa, and thus if I say something is morally wrong I must want it banned.
People say and do a lot of shitty things that are (and should be) protected as free speech. That doesn't mean we should either ignore them or try to get them illegalized. The solution is to drag their shitty behavior into the light and let people see that it's a problem. As you've doubtless been informed many times, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from the social consequences of speech.