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Written in a New York Times article and summarily paraphrased here,
Elissa Shevinsky can pinpoint the moment when she felt that she no longer belonged. She was at a friend's house watching the live stream of the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon, when she saw that it opened with two men who developed an app called Titstare. After some banter, one of Titstare's developers proudly proclaimed, "This is the breast hack ever."
Ms. Shevinsky felt pushed to the edge. Women who enter fields dominated by men often feel this way. "It's a thousand tiny paper cuts," is how Ashe Dryden, a programmer who now consults on increasing diversity in technology, described working in tech. Women in tech like Shevinsky and Dryden advocate working to change the tech culture from inside-out, but other women like Lea Verou write that,
' women-only conferences and hackathons cultivate the notion that women are these weak beings who find their male colleagues too intimidating...As a woman, I find it insulting and patronizing to be viewed that way.'
This all being hot on the heels of engineer Julie Ann Horvath's departure from Github as a result of similar concern.
Any of you care to address your own personal experiences or opinions regarding the subject matter; as well as the accuracy of the articles' stories compared to the industry-at-large?
(Score: 1) by Bartman12345 on Monday April 07 2014, @10:51AM
I would like to hear a woman's point of view about this story.
Hello...
Hello...?
*crickets chirping*
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Monday April 07 2014, @11:21AM
Nerd #1: Hello? Are there any girls in this room at all?
Nerd #2: Yeah, bring on the hot chicks 'cause I'm a hot stud.
Nerd #3: Yeah! So are we!
[Leela pushes her way to the centre of the crowd.]
Leela: I'm a woman, if that's what you mean. [The nerds gasp.] I don't like to play games, so I'll just say I'm a cyclops, I'm a spaceship captain, I'm the only one of my species and I'm interested in meeting a man.
Nerd #4: A woman! I'm scared.
A Bicyclops Built for Two [theinfosphere.org]
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NaN on Monday April 07 2014, @11:37AM
You could start by not calling adults "girls". ;-)
If you really want to know, I generally avoid commenting at all in these threads because I don't particularly care for the flaming that it's so easy to anticipate following... But hey, this is a new site, and despite the comments so far suggesting otherwise, maybe there's reason to hope things might be different here.
I've personally rarely encountered a situation where gender was a source of discomfort, but that could be because I've had the good fortune to run my own businesses for a while, and to choose partners and employees who act with professionalism and treat me with respect. I've never been on the wrong side of that power imbalance. But yes, I'm constantly aware that I've had to break gender stereotypes to get to where I am.
Reading these stories, and even more so, reading the now-predictable knee-jerk backlash in the comments, all the evidence is on the side of the tech world at large being hostile to women. Or at the very least, the vocal minority. Why would I want to put up with that if any alternatives existed where I wouldn't have to fight against a tsunami of resentment just to be treated with a bit or respect and occasionally be given the benefit of the doubt?
Where did all this defensiveness come from? Why such a need to defend unprofessional behavior that would be totally unacceptable in nearly any other field? I read men accusing any woman who's been subjected to this inappropriate hostility, stereotyping, and "humor" of being "thin-skinned". Maybe they should consider growing a thicker skin about the fact that our industry is imperfect and has room for improvement. And that that's something we *all* need to take responsibility for. Why is that so hard to admit?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 07 2014, @01:17PM
Thanks for the input and stories.
"I read men accusing any woman who's been subjected to this inappropriate hostility, stereotyping, and "humor" of being "thin-skinned"."
Its complicated, and individually each reason is pretty stupid in isolation from the whole. I'll present it math proof style with one concept per numbered paragraph.
1) We shame people who report being an individual victim of bullying way more than we shame people who report being a victim of generic society wide sexism. Probably related to the personal failing of lack of assertiveness or lack of personal courage. But I'll claim it as fact. Also letting the bastards win means the bullies are going to make it even worse for everyone else remaining.
2) Some workplaces not only tolerate bullying but encourage it. Why? Maybe the mgmt is stupid or damaged goods or bullies themselves, donno for certain. Very weak / incompetent / inexperienced managers like to hire non-assertive people to make their job much easier, which become food for the bullies, making them worse than normal and worse over time.
3) Any new person to the old group is likely to be hazed / harassed, at least a bit. Also cultural impedance mismatch means the odd man out (ha ha bad pun) is likely to be a victim of bullying, in this case a rare woman dev. So its extremely likely the local bully will bully a new woman. Aside from pure evil I know from personal experience that some folks like to "test" new people to see how strong or weak they are, maybe in coding, maybe in "social warfare that could be considered bullying" and once the pecking order is defined, they become friends, crazy as it might sound. I had a friend in high school who said something along the lines of someone is not worth having as a friend unless he would tell him to F off if he was doing something wrong. I passed by telling him to F off when he was harassing me and he was a truly great guy once I passed his test. A glance at physique can determine the pecking order at a construction job; how does that work in IT other than what boils down to hazing/bullying? Very few guys test new people for their "ability to run off to HR and tattle" or "ability to cry in the bathroom" although "brave enough to tell me to F off" comes up surprisingly often when defining pecking orders. This long paragraph boils down to "women employees can be victims of bullying" which isn't exactly Nobel prize winning observation, but...
So combining it all, #2 is the reason some workplace cultures are toxic, unprofessional, and childish, #3 is why this one individual woman was bullied as per #2 above, and #1 is why she gets virtually no respect WRT #3 above. In combination it kind of makes sense although individual each reason is fairly stupid in isolation.
So this is why some guys give bullying victims (who sometimes happen to be of a female persuasion), a hard time. You knew you volunteered to enter a vipers nest, you knew you volunteered to be in the first wave on D-Day, now stop crying in the bathroom and get out there and (hopefully non-violently) fight, or someone else (maybe one of us?) is going to have to fight even harder in even worse conditions because someone chickened out. I don't want to get stuck with her crappy coworkers and crappy boss because she's a chicken. They made fun of her because of her genitals and they'll make fun of me because of my pathfinder RPG books. Maybe fighting is wrong. Probably it is. But if you must fight, fight to win, or we all go to our doom.
There is a side issue of making fun of how she fights. Hmm. Lets think of a strategy that's been tried a million times before against bullies and failed every time, and try it again? Hmm how about tattling and crying. Maybe it'll work this time, for the first time ever. Oh, it didn't? Well, it can't be that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, it must just be because "men suck" or some generic whine about culture. Hmm. Let's just try it again, surely next time it'll work.
Side issue 2 is seriously, if you have no idea how to fight, you ask someone friendly to train you up. That's the plot of about eight billion teen movies from karate kid to star wars and beyond. Unless you feel too superior to lower yourself to asking for advice from a mere plebe. Eh, forget her, she could have been a mighty warrior, maybe better than her trainer, but she's too snooty to ask, so let her suffer until she learns humility. You need a coach but don't want one, well, good luck with that.
(Score: 1) by NaN on Monday April 07 2014, @01:37PM
I'm not sure I understand -- are you presenting this as descriptive or normative?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 07 2014, @02:23PM
Those are loaded terms.
In the sociology sense, normative as in cultural norms, yeah thats kind of the point of #2 the management thinks their toxic workplace is supposed to be exactly how it is, those crazy guys, and the bullies obviously like having free reign, so, yeah, exactly, its an impact of their weird norms vs some random womans pop culture norms, and different strategies for handling that impact have widely varying levels of success, some almost comically bad.
In the standards doc sense where normative is like a command and descriptive is why the normative stuff exists, then its descriptive because its at least a pitiful attempt at explaining the "logic" behind it. May not like it, or determine it to be logical, but its descriptive in the attempt at explaining, rather than commanding how it shall be which would be normative.
In the "reddit" / pop culture sense where normative means its normal and therefore by definition good (LOL) because we're all conformists here, and descriptive means I don't like it but thats how it is, then I guess its descriptive to me although I hope it stands on its own as a set of observations without relevance to personal feelings or showing the need to appear politically correct in public.
So at least one answer is probably what you were looking for.
(And keep being a good role model... serious no sarcasm intended based solely on your self description of achievements above)
(Score: 1) by NaN on Monday April 07 2014, @02:56PM
Haha. Thanks for the clarification. It wasn't clear to me whether you were saying simply that this is the way things are, or whether you were also saying you agreed that it's how they should be.
I think there's a lot of value simply to understanding why the situation is the way it is -- but mostly in the hope that understanding will give us better insight into how to change it. I'd be interested if you see any way forward: since women who complain about the dysfunction are so often dismissed as "shrill" or "whiny", how do we build recognition of the problem and momentum for change among the men who make up the majority?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 07 2014, @04:00PM
The way forward is
CALM ASSERTIVE PERSISTENT POLITE PROFESSIONAL DOCUMENT.
Sorry for the all caps shouting. Not 1 of 6, not 5 of 6, all 6. Its what I'd tell my own daughter. Or my son, for that matter. Also I say don't take it personally. My experience is women don't much like being told they're shrill, take a wild guess what adjective a bully might attack a woman with... If its weaponized it'll be used as a weapon, accurate or not, so don't sweat it, don't mean nothin anymore once its been weaponized.
If you're familiar with bad "soft" sci fi, a complaint about it is its just another genre of story after a bad search and replace job. In a similar search and replace manner, you can take stories about women being bullied in the workplace and create the exact same story, often in the same workplace, with religion, orientation, ethnicity, nationality... the bad behavior will read exactly the same. Just need bullying prevention training, not special training for gender vs special training for race vs special training for orientation. Bully's gotta bully, this week it was the one woman on the team, next week it'll be the one gay guy on the team, or the one jew. Its just a bad scene all around and band aid-ing the symptom won't cure the cause.
As far as recognition, look at the level of diversity in historical (recent?) war time atrocities. There won't be much. Just saying. You can't have 19 identical young white boy clones gang up on the one woman on a 20 person team if you don't have 19 identical young white boy clones on the same team. If you hire to mold what amounts to a gang, and they start acting like gang members, don't act surprised. Groupthink doesn't apply just to bad business decisions, but also to bad interpersonal behaviors. So business that encourage groupthink turn into failed ratholes. There's a financial metric benefit to avoiding that outcome, aside from the obvious lawsuits, so it should be an easy sell?
In many years of reading stories about anti-female workplace "sexism", if you cross out all the bullying, there usually isn't anything left. In the linked story of the github woman, cross out all her claims of bullying, and all that's left is one dude asked her out on a date, she goes drinking with her bosses wife, and she's in a neopuritan rage she observed her coworkers goofing off consensually, perhaps stupidly, but consensually, with some hula hoops. Suddenly the story does not sound all that bad.
TLDR is the first six all caps words, plus some anti-workplace bullying training will take care of the cause of a whole slew of of problems.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Sir Garlon on Monday April 07 2014, @01:19PM
I am frequently taken aback by the defensiveness of my male colleagues when gender equity issues are raised. Men I respect and admire can sound quite bitter.
After thinking about it for years, I have come to believe the problem is really lack of understanding of the issue. There are at least three factors at play in gender equity:
In my experience, the males I talk to get defensive because they aren't misogynist, don't see themselves as misogynist, and don't perceive other males to be misogynist. This is all true. Score victory for first-wave feminism here. The idea that women are inferior to men is marginalized to the point where decent people won't accept it being mentioned in public. Sometimes men still feel they are being accused of it, or that it's still the emphasis of the dialogue on gender equity. So it takes some effort to move past the objections, "I'm not part of that problem" or "why are we still talking about this?"
Which brings us to the uncomfortable territory of item #2, unconscious bias. Everybody has this and no one wants to admit it. It doesn't help matters when people throw around words like "bigot." The sense of outrage over overt misogyny has quite a chilling effect on confronting unconscious bias, because no one wants to consider the label "sexist" as potentially applying to himself. Yet one can point to studies (I am not a scholar in these matters so I don't have references ready to hand) showing how gender-blind interviewing practices result in hiring more women, etc. So I think to address this problem, we need to get past accusations and *the perception of accusations* and get men and women to examine their biases. I happen to have received training in what I'll call bias awareness when I was in college and it was great, world-changing stuff. Yet most companies don't have any workplace equity training at all, and those that do seem to focus on legal compliance, which is more in the territory of item #1. I have searched the Web on several occasions, not a quick Google query but an hour-long, methodical search, and not even found anything that counts as a decent article or PowerPoint presentation that addresses unconscious biases. Maybe some of the fine folks at Soylent will have more success than I have. I think it is critical to drive the point home with men that unconscious biases are pervasive but can be corrected with effort, because once you have done that you recruit legions of allies in the cause of gender equity.
Then there is the point that men and women are different. The differences are mostly the result of socialization and societal expectations in my humble opinion, but they are real and they are not going away in one generation or maybe not in ten generations. In fact, I reject the very idea that men and women should ever be the same or *want* to be the same. I am happy to accept my hetero-normative gender role and I think women should be free to enjoy the lifestyle they want. One of the last women I dated before I met my wife described herself as a "girly girl." What I think is demanded of us here is to create conditions where people can fit into traditional gender stereotype if they want, or slip out of them if they don't. That means being able to work effectively and productively with people who fit either stereotype, or neither. Right now, in male-dominated fields, men can get by only knowing how to communicate with other men. Communicating across that stereotype gap takes effort, as any married heterosexual can tell you, and a lot of men don't want to be bothered. I think it is possible to change their minds, but it is a hard sell partly because it seems like women are demanding "special treatment." Well, it's only special because they're so excluded from the current workplace. If half my peers were women then being able to form strong professional relationships with them would be an enabler of success. Since it's not the case, men don't feel the need to learn anything or change their communication styles in the slightest. That leaves us with a bootstrapping problem. I think it is possible to overcome that by appealing to a sense of fairness, but it takes a lot of tact and a sensitivity to males' sense of vulnerability, not wanting to be portrayed as the bad guys.
I have come to regard the "women in engineering" sorts of groups as a necessary work-around to the real problem. They enable women to succeed in spite of the climate by networking with other women. That helps the ones who are in the workplace now but does little to affect the underlying problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07 2014, @02:13PM
If it is like you say a matter of one sex learning how to interact with the other, why is it more reasonable to demand that men should "learn how to talk to women" than the opposite, that women should learn how to talk to men and be accepting of them and their ways?
This is something I'd genuinely like a good answer to.
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Monday April 07 2014, @02:31PM
According to my wife, "Men need to lean how to talk to women, because women are already adapt at put up with men on a daily basis. Unfortunately it'll never happen; the telepathy gene is in the other X chromosomes you didn't get."
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07 2014, @02:54PM
Women can be very dismissive of male interests and passions, labeling them childish, immature and subjecting them to all sorts of ridicule, but the moment a woman has a feeling about something it's to be taken serious.
If we are to move forward to true equality being especially accomodating to the rabid feminists foaming at the mouth while spewing their hatred of the male gender, while the men have to walk on eggshells around them to not offend them or be percieved as insensitive is not a way forward.
If we take a hypothetical example, one that will for sure get me rated as a troll, if there were only two different opinions in the world, one being the nazis and the other being that all white people should die and I happened to be a caucasian I'd sure as hell side with the nazis.
The only way forward is compromise, as long as feminists demand special consideration there will be a huge opposition. Come back with reasonable suggestions for compromise and we can finally move past the sexist mindsets on both sides of the argument.
(Score: 2) by LaminatorX on Monday April 07 2014, @02:36PM
Everyone should learn to communicate with one another. Women in man-dominated fields are forced to accommodate mens's ways as a matter of survival. Men need to accommodate women better in order to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. The gender that is (mostly inadvertently) enforcing a glass ceiling (less impermeable than it once was, but very much still there) and pay and hiring disparities bears the weight of needing to be more accommodating. Business as usual will only perpetuate the inequality.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Sir Garlon on Monday April 07 2014, @02:42PM
You raise a good point. I don't think all the responsibility should fall on either side of the fence.
Generally, males are in the critical path to women's career success. The converse is more rarely true. At my company, managers (male and female) get a "bonus round" of diversity training and I support that as a cost-effective approach. What I really advocate is the more power an employee has over others, the more diversity training he or she receive. The fact the most managers are male is incidental to that priority, but it remains true.
Males right now set the climate of the workplace and if you want to make that climate more inclusive, males are in a position to effect the change.
Really, everyone needs diversity training. Saying that "men need to do X" should not imply that women need to do nothing, or vice versa. Insofar as the training needs of men and women are different, I think you can make a bigger impact by starting with men.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by NaN on Monday April 07 2014, @02:54PM
Perhaps part of the trouble is that the overt misogyny is unfortunately still often on display in the tech world -- whether it's a high-profile startup personality like Pax Dickinson making over-the-top remarks or /. trolls exhorting women to go back to the kitchen. They may be more vocal than their actual representation in the population, and the media may enjoy blowing up the situation in exchange for clicks, but that's no excuse for the people who go on to defend these assholes.
So let's assume that the majority of the trouble is with people who do suffer from unconscious bias -- and furthermore that both men and women are subject to those biases. (Possibly relevant: http://www.catalyst.org/system/files/The_Double_Bi nd_Dilemma_for_Women_in_Leadership_Damned_if_You_D o_Doomed_if_You_Dont.pdf [catalyst.org] ) The trouble with the defensiveness around the unconscious bias is that the defensive reactions are easy to interpret as hostile. Less hostile than the overt misogyny, but the fact that at least half of the commenters on a typical post about women-in-tech defend the existence of the boys' club and the "right" to act unprofessionally (and with hostility) suggests to both the women and the men reading along at home that this is the norm in technology and women aren't fully welcome.
Yes, in general, to some degree, men and women act and react in different manners (not the qualifiers). I, too, happen to believe that this is primarily a result of social/cultural pressures, but whether it's learned or innate is largely irrelevant in the end -- particularly given that it's not likely to change any time soon. (On the flip side, my co-founder wanted at least one woman on the founding team to ensure that we take into account the perspective of the female half of our audience -- only to discover that, ironically, our other male co-founder is far more likely than me to take a stereotypically female perspective on any given issue. There's a huge overlap between the gaussian distributions for males and females.)
The important thing is that neither way of dealing with the world (cooperative vs. assertive) is inherently better than the other. Having both modes of interaction makes for a stronger organization (as thought diversity generally does), and -- regardless -- an adult needs to learn to get along with more than just the half of the population that shares the same genital structure.
In most fields, this has largely been accomplished by accepting that *in a professional setting* there are certain types of interactions, certain types of jokes, that are considered disrespectful and thus inappropriate.
How is it less reasonable to ask men to self-censor in the workplace the things they wouldn't say to their proverbial grandmother or 14y/o sister, than to expect all women to be sufficiently thick-skinned to not be made at all uncomfortable by objectifying "humor" and other subtle "you're not welcome" cues? Isn't the goal of the workplace to *get work done*? Do you really expect people to do their best work in an environment with an undercurrent of hostility? Shouldn't we be creating an environment where all members of the workforce have a chance to feel welcome and respected?
These not-particularly-onerous behavioral standards have largely been accepted in most other professions. Why do so many people in the computing world continue to defend the notion that it's OK -- or even "right" -- for our field to have an immature "boys' club" culture that marginalizes women?
This is not a demand for "special treatment". It's a request for 1) a minimum level of professionalism; 2) restraint from pre-judging people based on their external attributes; and 3) a culture of consideration and respect for *all* team members.
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Monday April 07 2014, @03:59PM
It also requires at least as much effort as lifting a finger, and when it comes right down to it, a lot of people are not willing to do that. Far easier to deny there's a problem than to become part of the solution.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 1) by Jiro on Monday April 07 2014, @04:25PM
Here, I'll toss in another word for you.
Unfalsifiability.
Accusing people of unconscious bias is a handy way to make an accusation that they can't possibly rebut because regardless of whether it's true, you've defined away everything that might disprove it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Sir Garlon on Monday April 07 2014, @05:04PM
Such a claim is only unfalsifiable on an individual level. Actually, even there is it testable but I would advocate against trying. You can absolutely conduct experiments to determine whether institutional bias exists. The one that comes to mind is the study on blind orchestra auditions [theguardian.com]. Orchestras who tried gender-blind auditions, where the application plays music behind a screen so the hiring panel did not know the applicant's gender (or age or race, presumably) saw a statistically significant increase in the number of women who passed the first round of auditions.
I have seen a handful of studies like this, sufficient to convince me the *possibility* of gender bias is widespread.
I do take exception to your adversarial language. I am not advocating "accusing" anybody of anything. You can no more condemn someone for unconscious bias than you can condemn him for spelling mistakes. OK, some people still do it but they're jerks. :-) A better approach is to try to identify where it exists and introduce mechanisms to remove it. One of those mechanisms, in my opinion, is just to prove it exists so people are aware and make an effort to minimize it in themselves.
Part of the problem is that the word "bias" has been used as a gentler euphemism for bigotry. This is what you often see in the press. That's not what I mean when I use the word; what I mean is cognitive bias [wikipedia.org] in the technical sense. It's no wonder people get defensive as soon as some uses the word, though.
Cognitive bias is scientifically detectable, measurable, and falsifiable.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 1) by AdamHaun on Tuesday April 08 2014, @05:09AM
I have a hypothesis that a lot of the dysfunction in (computer) geek culture is a leftover reaction to the bullying that many older geeks experienced when they were kids. There's a sort of cultural superiority complex that developed around being better and smarter than "normal" people as a defense mechanism. This was really obvious back in the 90s in the early days of Slashdot et al. The stuff about Morlocks and Eloi in "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" was a great example, along with smaller things like talk about computer geeks "hacking politics". A couple years ago Slashdotters were saying that exposure to the Pirate Bay would be a key factor in bringing down dictatorships. And of course there's the ever-present crowd of libertarian ideologues, convinced that the rest of humanity just can't wait to steal everything they have.
Basically, a lot of geeks think of themselves as put-upon Atlases, heroically defending against the stupidity and shallowness of the common masses. Then someone suggests that they might be contributing to sexism or racism or some other social problem, and they just can't handle it. It's sad.
Adam Haun
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 08 2014, @03:48PM
Or it could be as simple as reading the article, you know...
This is an article about a woman who watched a live stream which featured a pardody of an app regarding boobs, this parody makes this woman fly into an uncontrollable rage on twitter claiming that these guys must hate women. Her businesspartner is then like "uh, I don't think these guys hate women", also on twitter, this makes her so hateful and mad towards him, despite the fact that he has never mistreated her or any other woman at work, that she ragequits the company. This simple disagreement also makes this poor dude lose his other job - something that is completely glossed over in the article, indicating that this was normal or good. He then tries to reason with her to get her to come back to work, but this is a no go... finally she bullies him into making an apology for having the nerve to disagree with her that these guys must really be women haters and forces him into an agreement that in the future she gets to censor his tweets.
Now, this is somehow supposed to be an article about how women are mistreated in IT?
WTF?