Speaking While Female
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I've seen similar comments before and even going as far as saying women were harder on women than men when moving up in a career. It's deeper and more complex than men versus women. I've heard my share of anecdotal stories from women who say the same thing, women are their harshest critique and most difficult challenge. It seems daunting, how do you even begin to change that.
"He announced to the writers that he was instituting a no-interruption rule while anyone — male or female — was pitching."
That is excellent, and sad, that we have to go back to grade school etiquette to let people find a voice. It's true though, if a team member isn't trusted to have a voice they shouldn't be a part of the conversation. If they are a part of the conversation they should have the respect of the rest of the team enough for them to shut up and listen, then respond. Spirit sticks!
I doubt there's an easy fix here. My take is that there's a larger aspect not addressed in the article: women simply aren't socialized to be socially aggressive. The same way women often won't negotiate salary and then we wring our hands over women's salaries. How about of instead changing everything to suite these women, we encourage them to be more socially aggressive? Its not like these things are pleasant or easy for men either. I feel like if I didn't learn how to act this way, I wouldn't be competitive at my job. The same way I see loads of shy male techies who never speak up and don't contribute much and don't end up promoted or appreciated. I think its a skill that can be learned and things like "oh I'm INTJ, oh I'm a woman, etc" are excuses. Why aren't some people motivated to learn the proper social skills? As a previous shy person, I know that this is just a learn-able skill.
I don't think we need to make meetings longer and "nicer" and if we did, it would just lead to resentment and fleeing of talent to company B where that talent can thrive without a lot of politically correct baggage holding them back. Now company A is a bunch of quiet milquetoast types unable to engage in argumentation and eventually not be competitive against a more aggressive company.
Lastly, a lot of the more quiet people I've worked with are so because they just don't have a lot of good ideas. They're bureaucrats and desk jockeys or are ultrafocused on their little niche of the world and add the same things over and over regardless of context. Yeah, the TPS reports might be slow to load, but this isn't the time or place for it, yet the TPS manager has literally nothing else to add. Maybe those without much to add should be quiet.
The Harrison Bergeron-ing of all things really isn't the way to go. I really wish more people understood that.
The article makes the point that women are socially penalized when they are aggressive. It's not a lack of socialization into aggressiveness, but rather an active socialization into passiveness.
So the system doesn't work for women, nor for minority groups, nor for many men. Doesn't that suggest that we should be trying to fix the system?
In my experience values drive law more than law drives values. Marijuana has been illegal for some 40 years (or more!) in the US but that didn't make everyone think it was bad. And now the fact that so many people are unconvinced that marijuana is bad is changing the laws and it's being legalized all across the US.
Critical theory is fine but "trying to fix the system" implies that there is some method by which the system can be fixed other than "everyone has to just grow up" since I don't foresee an "everyone must grow up" law being terribly successful.
EDIT: Let me state that I don't necessarily think the current state of affairs is OK, just that it's a fairly intractable problem that won't get solved quickly. I can figure out what's wrong with my car and install replacement parts. I can figure out what's wrong with society but there aren't any replacement parts.
The USSR is also a good example, especially with women's rights. There was a top-down equality decree without any sort of legitimate social movement. In practice, women in the USSR, outside of propaganda, were treated poorly and once the USSR fell, Russians just naturally fell into their deep patriarchal views which are mainstream there. If anything, women have it worse in modern Russia because of the USSR's heavy handed idealistic decrees.
But that doesn't have to be the end of the story. Some of the challenges that women face in the workplace can't be solved simply by those women. I think that was a major point of the article. There are common subconscious biases that businesses would be well served to address. That doesn't have to mean that businesses treat anyone like victims. It means they aren't necessarily maximizing the value of their human resources. I don't think there's a single optimum strategy for running business meetings, but we should certainly better understand the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches.
There are biological factors at work here too - the hormonal balance in a man versus a woman (testosterone, etc) leads to widely divergent levels of observed aggressiveness in almost all contexts (social, physical, etc).
This is probably the one single point I've seen completely overlooked in every men vs. women debate.
As someone who's been in management, I can't count how many times senior executives who were male wanted to promote a woman to a more senior role, only to have other senior women disagree to such an extent, it caused a scene. This is probably one of the more interesting dynamics in this conversation which is often brushed aside.
One of my colleagues once made the comparison how men are always in the "alpha" mode. Always trying to be top dog, always trying to outdo their peers for the top roles. He said this is just as prevalent with women, and most people never see it because women tend to be more, shall I say more "backstabbing" than their male counter parts.
EDIT: I edited my reply to clarify some points just as you responded. I have now addressed your first question, and your second question is based on a misunderstanding due to poor wording on my part.
EDIT EDIT, because I seem to have triggered HN's flamewar detector and it's not letting me post anymore:
>I've been ignoring this premise for the sake of argument, but now it's time to raise an objection: Men aren't harder on other men. Both men and women are harder on women.
Yes, I do believe men are harder on men than on women in the grand scheme of life, even if I concede that men can be harder on women in business and the workplace. Men are significantly more likely to be victims of violence from men than women are, whether in public life or in war. Far more men than women are incarcerated in the United States, where they are subject to worse treatment at the hands of guards and other prisoners alike than women are. A woman being raped is a tragedy, a man being raped is a literally a joke, a timeless staple of "edgy" comedians. Fathers expect significantly more from their sons than their daughters. A young woman living with her parents after college is natural; a young man is ridiculed. Men with problems are often not taken seriously by their peers; instead of lending an understanding ear, they're told to simply "man up" and bear it. Their problems are certainly not taken seriously by the media, which claims that their problems are insignificant compared to those faced by women and that they need to "check their privilege." Perhaps it should not be surprising that men are more likely to commit suicide than women.
Some of those ideas, especially one about the expectations of fathers for a man's success, hint at another element of sexism: the patronizing way that men can expect less of women. If you agree that this element exists and sucks, then you are conceding that men are more critical of men than women. I'm not trying to sound like a "men's rights activist" or anything, but it boggles the mind how people can believe or disbelieve the same fact depending on when it suits their argument.
>>dssacco
>I have to disagree however. Most insults that men give other men attack their masculinity, which is implicitly sexist.
That's a great point historically, but in my experience it hasn't been true for a while, and the majority of middle-class men wouldn't tell a man to "stop acting like a woman" these days. When a man is told to "be a man," the subtext is not "because you're acting feminine," but rather "because you're acting childish," or perhaps "because men are not allowed to express weakness." You can choose to interpret this as "all men are sexist because they're holding men to a higher standard here," or you can interpret as "men are not allowed to do something natural that is extremely important for mental health." Yet you don't hear anyone complaining about "interalized misandry," people always manage to reframe everything negative about the male experience as a matter of misogyny. As if we aren't allowed to have our own problems unless they involve women.
Edit: I've been ignoring this premise for the sake of argument, but now it's time to raise an objection: Men aren't harder on other men. Both men and women are harder on women. This article itself demonstrates this. (It's more complex than just "being harder on." But, in the context of this article I take "being harder/easier on" to be short for "tending to respond negatively/positively to verbal contributions, regardless of the contribution's merit.")
Don't get me wrong, misogyny and bias are on that list, but I don't have nearly enough information to even reason about how much of an impact they have compared to all the others.
I have to disagree however. Most insults that men direct to other men attack their masculinity, which is implicitly sexist. When men put other men down by likening them to females or female behavior, they are putting down both men and women, but under this model I'd have to say females appear to suffer more, if only because a man can (and is encouraged) to change his behavior to align with masculine values. A woman cannot do this (or cannot easily do this) because she is ultimately perceived as female regardless of her behavior.
You can argue that men are more openly critical of other men than women, but under the model I explained above, men are overwhelmingly more critical of other women, which really gets down to another core issue - men conflating sexism with open, explicit criticism ("it's okay for me to do this with guys but not girls") and ignoring the vast underbelly that is subconscious, unexpressed (but no less acted upon) sexism.
I'm open to arguments refuting this, but this seems to be about the size of it - ultimately, many men innately regard females to be lesser to the extent that they use femininity as an insult.
These insults work both ways - males use them to encourage other males to adhere to the stereotype, but so do females (in a less direct way perhaps).
And if you would sound like one, would that be bad in any way? Really, what's the problem with that word? Caring for Men's rights is bad?
Look up Karen Straughan on Youtube. She's an MRA and very intelligent woman. She raises many good points in the current, toxic debate.
I don't mean the majorities do it intentionally. Some of them, when reminded they are interrupting, apologize sincerely. It could be deep in human's conscience.
Seen similar behaviour in many minorities (gender, race, religion, nationality)
In my formative years, the rule for proper behavior seemed very simple: treat everyone the same, no matter their demographics or background. Now it seems there is a different ruleset for every demographic group. It all seems very retrograde and divisive.
No interruptions rule no matter who is talking worked and the team became stronger.
The other was anonymously submitted ideas which were ranked prior to the meetings and the best ones adopted.
In the past people were probably more divided on racial, sexual orientation, or other lines.
You are failing to accept the measured fact that people who think they are giving out equal treatment, are mistaken.
Privilege blinds you. There are problems you never see, that if you knew about you'd be all like "Shit, seriously? that really happens? That's awful". But because you never know, you fill in the blanks with your own privileged experience and so erase them. There are problems, like this one, where your eyes believe they have seen equality, but a camera and stopwatch measures unfair treatment.
You need to stop being so trusting of your own inputs.
Those "different rules for every demographic" are there to (crudely) rebalance the scales. They aren't really different rules. They are compensating for the fact that supposed neutrality is skewed hard. Think of them as komi in go.
And the concept of privilege is there to teach you how the real world works, because unaided, you'll never see it.
Maybe: Do your best to treat everyone equally, and be aware of just how insanely hard this is for ANY human being to do.
It's similar to how, as a rule of thumb, we would do well to "over-document" our code. We're so close to the source that things that we consider "obvious" (due to constant exposure) are absolute headscratchers for people reading the code for the first time.
For your example to be relevant, shouldn't the programmer reserve her superb documentation skills for members of repressed groups?
How about: "Try for equality, and understand that due to your own biases this might just feel like overcompensating."
I put "overcompensate" in quotes because our brains are poorly equipped to judge equity objectively. We have to use hacks like "You cut the cake, and I'll choose which half is mine" for that reason.
We're saying that privileged people are often blind to their own privilege and others' disadvantages. To them (and I'm in this group), and thanks to things like hedonic adaption, a position of privilege feels like their "natural" state. To have some of that privilege taken away feels like a loss, even though it was nothing they earned on their own in the first place. To illustrate: How often do people hear heterosexuality applied as a pejorative label?
I meant the promotion of empathy is being unfairly reserved. Empathy is a universally virtuous principle. To preach it at cis white males excludes others from the joys of this enlightenment.
> To them (and I'm in this group)
This is what confuses me. Why is privilege seen as a membership of a group rather than a behavioral fact about human existence? If you took someone you considered "under privileged" and gave them "excess privilege", surely they too would employ "hedonic adaption". Point being, it seems privilege can be reasoned about in principle without employing group mentality.
> To illustrate: How often do people hear heterosexuality applied as a pejorative label?
On the surface we can reason that pejoratives are bad. Beneath that we can reason that some people are victimized for being different. And beneath that we can reason that empathizing with others helps us act in more caring ways.
I think the promotion of kind language is valid and good, but I feel like it's less useful than the promotion of empathy, because the result of empathizing most likely encompasses the benefits of kind language and much more.
People who try to be good are sometimes bad. How does that negate the original intent?
> Privilege blinds you. There are problems you never see, that if you knew about you'd be all like "Shit, seriously?
It's odd that people who preach about privilege fail to reason about it in principle. Privilege isn't something everyone has and fails to recognize. Instead, privilege is allotted to a select few - who without the help of the underprivileged would remain blissfully ignorant of their position.
Privilege, much like justice, has become a loaded word to signify ones vigilance against another group of people without sounding like a bigot. There's nothing wrong with trying to treat everyone with excellence. No one is obligated to engage in this speculative oppression olympics in order to reserve preferential treatment for the victors. That kind of nonsense is a fools errand.
I don't see why this is something to worry about. Perhaps you mean that you worry we're now viewing all of society's interactions exclusively through a prism of demographics and privilege. That would indeed be a problem, but I don't see any reason to believe that it is actually happening. It seems to me that that make-your-own-destiny, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps narrative is still alive and well.
Ideally we would want to keep both things in mind: people can make their own destinies but we need to respond to social dynamics that make it harder for some people to self determine than others. It's not about different rulesets, its trying to build a ruleset that achieves a certain equilibrium between giving everyone equal, unearned, social advantages and trying to maximize the aggregate social advantages conferred.
It's just that people are starting to recognise it, and try to counter act it.
When you're a kid, you believe in fairy tales like that. But the fact is, your brain is a heuristic machine. It comes to snap conclusions, and you often don't even know why it is you feel a certain way or believe something you do. And studies back this up over and over again. If you just commit to "treat everyone the same" you are de facto committing to making life unfair for women.
By all means, we should confront our biases, but for me the answer isn't layering new biases on top of old biases.
There also seems to be, for males, a certain prestige to espousing this type of ideology, and it seems to increasingly be being used as a form of social signalling (not in the least because it is oppressive to males not occupying the very highest social strata, incurring a real cost for them, hence being a somewhat honest signal).
Not sure how these two phenomena interact.
I think that I was banned for what I said backs up your statement and my original comment.
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Very good observation. It's unfortunate that this topic seems to allow for zero debate. There are quite a few reasons that someone wouldn't want genders treated different, but even stating that is an invitation to massive down voting.
I'm still sad we lost meritocracy. I come from a poor background and am a minority but today I'm a successful developer. I fought my way up the chain with hard work, self-study and being good at what I do. It's sad that now a lot of the same people who didn't like that I was advancing are now espousing the urgent need to eliminate meritocracy (which is really the only thing I can call the ladder I climbed up) in favor of identity politics.
Not saying this is a conscious thing, but this seems to be where incentives are leading people.
If you want to be treated better, then perhaps not tar everyone who disagrees with you (or even all feminists) with that brush you're using. You say you're talented, so perhaps use that talent to focus your commentary appropriately, rather than engage in silly us vs them 'sides'.
> If you want to be treated better, then perhaps not tar everyone who disagrees with you (or even all feminists) with that brush you're using.
I'm just disagreeing. I'm also not complaining about down voting. I was BANNED; that's the type of reaction I was talking about. I'm not saying we should ban feminists from discussion. I don't have to agree with people to allow them to speak their mind. Apparently that doesn't work for non-feminists though. That's precisely my point.
In male dominated workplaces, women find it difficult to adapt to how men do things.
In female dominated schools, boys find it difficult to adapt to how girls do things. When 98.1% of pre-school and kindergarten teachers are female it's no surprise that boys are disciplined more often, disciplined more harshly and test poorer on reading and other academic achievement measures than girls. Elementary school as a whole isn't much better with 90% of teachers being female. The first 6 years of each boy's academic life is spent trying to adapt him to how girls behave and how girls learn.
Failing to adapt in such a manner leads to punishment and recommendations of holding him back until he is as mature as his younger female peers despite his academic ability.
†probably
One strategy that I've found is sometimes helpful that recognizes this fact is to start group decision making by having everyone write ideas down independently on sticky notes for, say, 5 minutes. This means every person present ends up with a physical representation of the fact that they have ideas, sitting in front of them on the table.
Then, in a second phase, you can put them on a board and organize them, evaluate them, vote on them, etc. Since the ideas are now sticky notes on a board, they can be evaluated (more) independently of the person who articulated them.
The first time I participated in something like this, it felt like Kindergarten, and I didn't really appreciate it. But after some practice, I've come to appreciate that it gives every member of a group the chance to contribute ideas, without having to simultaneously finesse the holding-the-floor game.
There was one trans man who is a scientist and has published under female and male names. Someone, who didn't know, remarked that he was much better than his sister.
I say this because I could _totally_ see making that transition to male representing a removal of a big chunk of subconscious stress about how he was "lying to the world" about his gender by presenting as female. This could translate into an improvement in the quality of his post-transition work.
Or it could be entirely gender-bias at play.
I suspect a better (and likely cheaper/easier) test is to take the same papers and present them under a male and female author name.
Yep, there are ancedotes about trans women just as you predict:
> Joan Roughgarden is a biologist at Stanford who lived and worked as Jonathan Roughgarden until her early fifties, and her experience was almost the mirror image of Barres’s. In her words, “men are assumed to be competent until proven otherwise, whereas a woman is assumed to be incompetent until she proves otherwise.” In an interview, Roughgarden also noted that if she questioned a mathematical idea, people assumed it was because she didn’t understand it.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119239/transgender-people...
> I suspect a better (and likely cheaper/easier) test is to take the same papers and present them under a male and female author name.
There have been published scientific papers looking at (sort of) this. Send out job applications for a lab manager, and randomly assign a male or female name. Same job application otherwise. Male applications get more job offers and more money.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/201... http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474
We might give out to Creationists who don't want to accept reality about evolution, but well...
0: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract
1: http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.htm...
[1] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119239/transgender-people... [2] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119239/transgender-people...
Well, they do have significantly more testosterone in their bodies than they did before...
Now I'm not saying that these issues aren't real. Or that women don't run into issues that men don't have or have with less frequency. What I am saying is that these tales are anecdotal and we need more objective assessments if we have any hope of making any improvements.
EDIT, because HN isn't letting me submit new replies: It was hyperbole. I don't care if it's an actual stopwatch, if you record everything on cassette and tally up the minutes later, or if you use some hip new cloud SaaS bespoke locally-grown web-scale meeting management software. When you implement patronizing means of policing human interaction like this, you stifle conversation and make people feel like children.
I'm especially aware of this at the moment, because HN is patronizingly preventing me from making any new posts because I happened to submit some replies too quickly. A dumb algorithm intended to police flamewars is making discussions ITT needlessly difficult to read, and preventing me from posting suggestions for the HN Algolia Search people in another thread. It is just as annoying and counter-productive to "rate limit" people in real life for the crime of impassioned discussion.
Another suggestion mentioned in the article is that of anonymously submitting and "ranking" ideas prior to the meeting. This is literally an "upvote" mechanism with all the familiar flaws of groupthink and trying to assign quantitative value to ideas. This works poorly enough on the internet, let alone in person.
Nobody is proposing that the remedial social rule itself rely on a stopwatch.
It seems supported by the article's last example:
"Professor Burris and his colleagues studied a credit union where women made up 74 percent of supervisors and 84 percent of front-line employees. Sure enough, when women spoke up there, they were more likely to be heard THAN men."
We all have the right to self-define, and then brutally ostracize people who reject our self-definitions.
Since the issue being discussed was gender, not species, that's appropriate.
It was using "female" as the adjective. If it was being used as a noun, it would have to be "Driving while a female".
>>The long-term solution to the double bind of speaking while female is to increase the number of women in leadership roles.
TV would never lie to me :^(
It's a meeting. Speak up, run with ideas, contribute. If you're gonna be mousey you're gonna get run over. Male or female.
What if we started believing women when they tell us their experiences?
I have a ratio of around 1:10 female:male from my tech staff. I have not seen this "powerful women speak less consciously because of negative reactions" from women any more or less than I see in men. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I am saying it's natural for variation to exist and it's not exclusive to women.
But whatever, keep pushing that narrative. It hasn't worked in 12 months, but maybe today eh.
I have. I am not just pushing narrative here.
It's so irritating that not being gregarious is called mousey, because it's definitely being stated as a knock. As if people can't make excellent contributions without yelling the loudest.
I'm not a woman, and I'm not a minority, but being around my wife (an extremely intelligent, introverted engineer), it's easy to watch the implicit privilege that men use when relating to her. It's easy for them to steal her ideas. She is constantly, constantly challenged by every young man with something to prove, no matter how right she is, no matter how much experience she has in the matter ("Are you sure? Why don't we do it this way?"). It's downright exhausting. If she calls someone out on it, men think of her as "a bitch". If I point it out to them, they often say things like, "Oh wow, I didn't realize I was doing that". Or, they say something defensive like, "Why can't she stand up for herself?"
Sorry for the rant, but this logic is so defeating for actually creating a positive workplace that encourages contributions from everyone, not just 24 year old Messiah-in-training.
What your wife needs is not someone white knighting for her (you or this article). She needs to take lessons in assertiveness to build her confidence so she can get her views across and not be ignored from basics like a weak voice or poor posture. It's not rocket science and it's not a huge male conspiracy against women.
What is true is women are less likely to be assertive, in life and in the workplace. And that can be fixed. It just won't be easy.
How could you possibly know that from what he posted? You're introducing your own conception of her, and attributing things to her that were no where in his post. Her lack of assertiveness, confidence, weak voice, poor posture, etc were created purely in your mind.
Lack of confidence, weak voice, poor posture are highly likely based on my experiences with people who lack assertiveness.
I'm not saying I'm right, but it's highly unlikely I'm wrong.
Not only do women face more adversity in this area than men, but you're also writing-off valuable contributions from entire personality types. What if someone in your org has information that is useful that doesn't get shared because they aren't comfortable in the meeting setting you outlined?
Also, think of the talent that you're not able to acquire or retain because this is how meetings are run. I, for one, probably wouldn't stay in such an environment for long.
I'm not sure I understand you here, in what ways could they be uncomfortable?
I know many more-introverted people who wouldn't be comfortable in that environment. I know several talented engineers that wouldn't contribute ideas in that sort of environment. And I, myself, would probably leave a company if that sort of meeting was in the company's culture.
I agree. But if the employees want to thrive in a workplace that has such environments then they need to compete or leave for a more suitable environment. Complaining that it's because of X and Y with anecdotal evidence and proposing solutions that slow down idea flow doesn't help anyone.
You call it 'being mousey', but it's not about being timid - there are social effects in play here, and it's often not worth the social cost to 'power through'.
Edit: thinking further, I think a part of it is upbringing. I was raised to believe that interrupting people while they're speaking is rude. The people who talk over others are generally the same people; they seem to have had upbringings where conversations were more free-for-all, fight to make yourself heard. I'm not sure, just seems to fit.