“Why are your slides so pink? It’s very distracting.”
“Stop pushing your hair behind your ear when you present. It’s very distracting.”
“Your voice goes up after every sentence you say.”
I feel like this is all valid feedback. Back in university we would also get feedback on our behaviour during our presentations or the look of our slides.
I've done a huge amount of presenting and briefing and so has my wife. We have both received feedback like this. Personal appearance, bearing, manner, speech patterns, intonation, inflection and even breathing noise let alone a million other things have come up in feedback for both of us.
The underlying point is it's possible to be an annoying presenter as a male AND as a female.
Thinking about it, I suppose much of what this article says also applies simply to 'those who don't look like they fit', regardless of their gender, such that if the article was about 'age' it would still be entirely valid.
I'll sign off by saying that if you really want prejudice, try raising kids as a full time Dad. If you think men can be bad with 'those that don't fit' then you are in for a shock compared to what women can be like!
"This American Life" had a great segment about this, targeting "vocal fry" in particular: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/i...
It's also not something people do consciously, it is a feature of dialect. And studies show that why people dislike a dialect has nothing to do with its actual aural qualities, and everything to do with its social status.
This may be an unconscious bias at play.
Link?
I've found dislike for dialects spoken by poorer people (chavs for example), richer people (valley talk) and completely normal average people of a wide range (bavarian) in myself. In my experience how much i dislike a dialect has always been about how difficult it makes it for me to understand it, in both english and german, and there's literally no pattern to the social status in it.
Of course the claim is not that people's dislike will always be targeted at groups with a low socio-economic status. E.g. as a British person, I quite dislike "posh" dialects. And that is entirely my problem -- not the problem of people who happen to speak that way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o
It's an accent i hate not because it sounds different, but because i literally cannot understand what they are saying for over 2/3 of the words (using the term words loosely here, i have trouble distinguishing their words in the first place).
People speak in their native dialects, and there are a lot of different dialects in Britain. I'm sure it's frustrating a as a second language speaker sometimes. However, the idea that cockneys are simply refusing to speak in Received Pronunciation is just laughable to any British person. You might as well ask a Belgian to speak French with a Parisian accent, or an Australian to speak like an American news reader. People can modulate their dialect to an extent, but beyond a certain limit, people would feel as if they were doing a silly impression rather than speaking naturally.
Your attitude is shitty. If you are learning a second language, dealing with dialectal variation is part of that. I am learning Spanish and I find Mexicans, for example, easier to understand than Cubans. I don't blame that on Cubans.
Also, you are comparing apples and oranges. I am talking about people in their own country with dialects, you're talking about people in other countries speaking differently from the country where their language originated in.
Frankly, i would appreciate it if you wouldn't constantly assume that i am lying for the sake of my "internet cred".
>I am talking about people in their own country with dialects, you're talking about people in other countries speaking differently from the country where their language originated in.
I don't see why national boundaries are particularly significant here. Intranational dialectal variation can be as large as international variation. If your point is that it's not reasonable to expect a Cuban to put on a Mexican accent, then I'd point out that it's equally unreasonable to expect someone from the East End to speak like the Queen. In both cases, even if the person happened to be able to do a good impression of the accent in question, they'd feel as though they were doing an impression rather than having a normal conversation.
In general, there is no conspiracy here. If people want to communicate with you, and feel able to speak in a more standard dialect to help with this, then they will. If they don't, it's because they can't.
Edit: Heck, in the segment you link they even comment on the fact that the guy does it too, and it was one of the first things i noticed. Those are just valley people, that's it.
If anything, it's an ageist thing, since only young people seem to do it. It makes people sound young, inexperienced, and unsure.
> But even if women did uptalk more than men, we've all
> heard enough uptalk to know that its rising intonation
> doesn't indicate a question. No one's actually confused.
Should i read further? Does she at any point acknowledge that i might be saying the truth?
* It's the only thing too, i don't mind excessive "like" usage, high-pitched voices, gravely voices, rednecks.
If anyone is interested, I found this book very useful: http://www.amazon.com/Its-Way-You-Say-Well-spoken/dp/1609947...
I am blessed to have worked in places where I haven't been exposed to many people who speak this way. I am surrounded by women, to be sure, but they are worried more about doing a good job than by trying to sound like it by deepening their voices.
It's funny, my mom is a non-native english speaker, having been in the US for 30 years. She heard a few women talking the other day using a well practiced combination of up-talk and vocal fry. She later turned to my wife and asked "Why are they talking like that?".
I do think that you will find that different demographics are more likely to speak this way. It's not the blanket category of "WOMEN". It's likely, from my experience, to be white, younger, professional women, and then, as knock-on effect, women from other backgrounds who work with them. They are probably plugged into the monoculture, have a common vocabulary, and use their vocal affects and vocabulary to filter out people who are not of a similar mind.
It's like when the newscasters all started speaking the same way, emphasizing certain words, movements of the head, a unique cadence that would, in conversation, be considered bizarre.
Nowadays, you are likely to dismiss any newscaster who doesn't speak that way as an amateur or charlatan who is not to be trusted.
Just my two cents. Feel free to give back change.
This is what the whole "like a girl" is about: if you express your femininity in the things you do and the way you look, people associate that with incompetence.
EDIT: I must go to the wrong programming conferences, never see suits. Wish the down voters would just share their experiences!
I also do not penalize for dress during interviews either. It's a distraction from the important things, and irrelevant to the answers to the questions of coding ability and culture fit.
Aside: Atlassian is more interesting. H/P has better food.
Visual ticks - wringing your hands, messing with your hair, licking your lips - make you appear less confident, and has nothing to do with gender.
The vocal tick - making every sentence sound like a question - is distracting no matter who presents it.
These aren't gender specific criticisms in any way. Regardless, unless you're addressing a gender specific topic, why bring your gender into it in the first place? I'm interested not in the person presenting about algorithms, but the algorithms themselves.
A man would be rightly chastised for presenting a de-duplicaton talk with bright pastel blue slides, pictures of beer, and rubbing his forehead while presenting, why shouldn't a woman?
And I think she finds it problematic because women are more often openly judged by how they look rather than what they do, and this fits the pattern.