Hacker News Reader

Comment by spiffyman | Hacker News Reader

I posted this on FB last night and had quite a discussion ensue. I really like what the author has to say about assumptions. As a user group and conference organizer, time and time again I have seen men approach feminine people in the crowd with these just terribly naïve prejudices. "Oh, you must be a junior dev." Or "Who are you here with?" We men should absolutely try to set these poor assumptions aside -- if not for better equality (although why not?), then because of the awkwardness that ensues when someone says "No, actually I'm giving the keynote" or "Yeah, I co-wrote that book." If you don't want to look like an idiot on the regular, don't go around the world thinking every competent person looks/acts/dresses/talks the way you do.

View on HN

That's really the core issue: too many people believe that they can evaluate a person's technical knowledge based on physical appearance, which ends up including gender, race/ethnicity, sometimes even religion (if the person is wearing religious attire).

It's just easier to get to know people instead of assuming.

Also: environments that are unpleasant/hostile/uncomfortable for "people outside the norm" make it difficult for such people to distinguish between sexism/racism/discrimination and legitimate feedback.

For example, playing with one's hair during a presentation is often a sign of nervousness, but it is also a signal that conveys that nervousness to the audience. Is it distracting to some degree? Maybe, but more importantly, it detracts from her authority. Still, I can see why she responded as she did--if you are constantly undermined, under fire or criticized for no good reason, it becomes difficult to filter out which criticism/feedback is actually useful.

Edited to add: Loved the artwork in that article.

> It's just easier to get to know people instead of assuming.

I hate to be the one to say it, but no, it's not easier. It's much more accurate, but it's not easier.

Getting to know someone involves overcoming biases, stereotypes, first impressions, and a lot of time. The payout from expending this effort is a much richer experience, but it comes at the cost of having fewer experiences.

I personally don't have the time or energy evaluate every person I meet with such scrutiny, and so I take shortcuts and evaluate them based on my experience with people superficially similar to them.

I'm not ashamed of that, it's part of being a human with a finite amount of time to devote to interpersonal relationships.

Not really my point. I'm hardly suggesting that it's necessary to establish in-depth relationships with every person you meet. For me it's easier not to think about who a person might be and instead just ask them who they are.

Reminds me of how when a female singer produces her own music and has limited assistance from a man, reviewers attribute the entire thing to the man:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/01/21/bjork_pitchfo...

It's not even some malicious, deliberate assumption. People have been raised to expect that it is men who do the "real work", and pass over women without thinking about it.

Can someone explain to me why this is so horrific? When 95+% of music producers are male, of course men are going to assume that you're not a producer if you're female. When 90+% of developers are men, of course men are going to assume you're not a developer if you're a female. If I saw an extremely tall, handsome, well-dressed, and sociable man at a tech conference, I wouldn't take him to be a developer either. If you're a short white guy at an NBA event, people are going to assume you're not a pro basketball player. I'd imagine that the same thing holds true for men in female-dominated fields.

Whenever there's a tiny minority, people will make assumptions. As long as you're not overly zealous about your assumptions and willing to admit that you're wrong when told so, I don't see the problem. Realistically, there's nothing that will ever prevent people from making assumptions until the tiny minority stops being such a minority.

I don't think this is about whether it's natural to have assumptions. It's that the "tiny minority" (although I think your numbers are wrong) are consistently saying that those assumptions are offensive, exclusionary, off-putting, etc. So, natural or not, it behooves us to try to set them aside.

Forget the connotation 'horrific'.

Are you asking why we should work to stop this behavior?

Pardon me for assuming but here are my thoughts -

Because it's literally systematically oppressive. This behavior makes an entire gender less likely to participate in our field. That's bad for the gender and it's bad for the field.

Isn't that enough reason to work to fix it?

So what if there are non-malicious explanations for an individual to behave this way....that doesn't mean we shouldn't stop it.

I'm saying that it's impossible to fix. If you're a short white guy, people will always initially assume that you're not a pro basketball player.

Again, as long as you're not overly zealous about your assumptions and willing to accept when they're wrong, it's not discrimination or "systematic oppression". Feminists try to turn this into a gender war, but it's really not. It's the circumstance of any minority in any heavily majority-dominated field.

Being short is a natural impediment to playing professional basketball.

Being female is not a natural impediment to programming. So, even if you're correct that gender assumptions are valid (and apparently OK) because of the prevailing gender makeup, it is not impossible to fix - you fix it by changing the prevailing gender makeup. (I don't agree with that assumption, but let's grant it for the sake of exploring the other point.)

If part of the reason for the prevailing gender split is the attitudes that are caused by the prevailing gender split, then sure, you have a chicken-and-egg problem. But it's far from impossible. You can, for example, change one half of the equation by social expectation manipulation. Or change the other half by affirmative action measures. You may think the cost is greater than the benefit, but it's not impossible.

> Being short is a natural impediment to playing professional basketball.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muggsy_Bogues

Impediment doesn't mean you can't work around it, it just means it's more difficult.

> you fix it by changing the prevailing gender makeup

Yes. This is the only way to stop men from making assumptions. That's what I said in my original post ("there's nothing that will ever prevent people from making assumptions until the tiny minority stops being such a minority"). To get more women in tech, more women have to pursue tech. Unlike what this article touts, telling men to assume feminine women are developers isn't going do much if anything until more feminine women become developers (which would be awesome!).

Women already get affirmative action and special groups/scholarships, yet they're still not choosing to pursue tech from an early age. I think this means two possible things: (1) girls naturally are less interested in tech, (2) parents, teachers, and the environment steer girls away from tech. Maybe (2) causes (1), or maybe it's biology.

I'd like to see more articles discussing (2) rather than seeing yet another article lamenting the fact that women commonly get mistaken for designers/recruiters at tech conferences. That's not the reason women aren't studying CS in high school (just like I'd imagine that's not the reason why men don't pursue nursing), the issue is much deeper than that.

Saying it is "impossible to fix" is a bad attitude - difficult may be accurate, but declaring impossibility is a display of laziness/lack of creativity or knowledge of history. It denigrates the efforts of those who believe it possible to change the course of history.

When I said it's impossible to fix, I was referring to the majority making assumptions about someone who doesn't fit their mold. Telling people to be politically correct about it isn't going to fix it.

You say politically correct and I say treating people with respect.

I'm sorry that you think it's impossible to fix. I think it is possible to fix by getting some balance in our numbers. Getting more women around, basically. If we see more women in software then we'll start to get rid of our stereotypes.

When I say systematically oppressive I mean that there are few women programmers and because of that we have stereotypes that women don't program and when we express those stereotypes it drives women out of programming in many ways. Thus the system reinforces itself.

Again, this sucks for both women and our field.

Let's work together to fix it.

How do we do that? By making fewer assumptions about people. And asking each other to do the same.

I do not believe this is a big ask but I do believe the potential benefit is huge.

I sincerely hope that you're wrong about it being impossible to fix. I would hope that you'd at least think it's worth trying given the stakes.

> Realistically, there's nothing that will ever prevent people from making assumptions until the tiny minority stops being such a minority.

These kinds of assumptions create an environment in the field that can make it uncomfortable for these "tiny minorities" to enter and become less of a minority. It serves to perpetuate the imbalance. You are 100% correct that it is natural human behavior to make these kinds of assumptions, but that's why we must try to make a conscious effort not to do so if we want to try to balance the demographics.

>When 90+% of developers are men, of course men are going to assume you're not a developer if you're a female

For one, that's a crime against statistics and formal logic itself. "90% of RAM is not fault tolerant, of course men are going to assume it's not RAM if it's fault tolerant" would be a ridiculous thing to say, because you just can't reason that way.

The kind of reasoning you want to do works like this: 90% of developers are male. Given that there are about as many men as there are woman, a randomly chosen woman has a 10% chance of being a developer. That's valid statistics. The problem is that this works relatively good while speaking to people in a subway, but at a tech conference you don't have a fair sample of either males or females. You aren't choosing at random but from an extremely skewed sample.

Of course there's instances where these kind of assumptions are valid, but most often (and with most stereotypes) it's just people applying statistics wrong.

>"90% of RAM is not fault tolerant, of course men are going to assume it's not RAM if it's fault tolerant" would be a ridiculous thing to say, because you just can't reason that way.

If you had to make an assumption, and all you knew about an item was that it was fault tolerant, ruling out RAM is not a terrible strategy if 90% of all RAM is not fault tolerant.

Likewise, if all you know about someone is they are a developer, assuming they are male is not a terrible strategy since you are correct 90% of the time! I'll take those odds of being right without having to gather facts in most circumstances.

Obviously in a social setting (especially a tech conference) being wrong even once can be painful to the other party, so we should avoid making our assumptions known until we've verified them when trying to be civil.

But in most matters it's not unreasonable to prejudge and then verify, otherwise we'd spend too much time being uncertain. And in some cases, choosing to act on certain assumptions leads to a higher payoff than waiting to act on facts (which can be expensive to procure).

Until passing over women for developers costs more than assuming they're not developers, this will continue. The strategy being used by disgruntled female developers seems to be to inflate the social cost of not assuming all women are equally likely to be developers. In some circles that will matter, in others it won't. I don't blame women for using guilt to gain leverage. I'd do the same thing in their place.

>Likewise, if all you know about someone is they are a developer, assuming they are male is not a terrible strategy since you are correct 90% of the time!

Yes, and I'm not questioning that. The problem is that that same statistic says nothing about the likelihood that a given female is a developer.

But if about half the people in the world are female and there are more male than female developers, then isn't it safe to assume that the likelihood of a random male being a developer is going to be higher than that of a random female?

When picking a random person from a phone book, yes. But that's not what this whole discussion is about. In virtually any real situation you don't have a completely random female. In most relevant situations you don't even have even close to equal amounts of men and woman in your sample.

This was surprising and saddening…these are the sort of artists that I thought people sought out because they do so much interesting stuff largely on their own.

I’ll admit I’m guilty of assuming Taylor Swift was merely a front for a pop machine, but that’s because I’d prefer to believe she’s a better person in real life than some of her songs would indicate.

Or if one is going to make an assumption, err on the side of unoffensive ones. If there is a chance that it is offensive, don't verbalize it.

I very much like this simple, civilized rule.

Some people may call that political correctness or something, but I call it manners.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com