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posted by LaminatorX on Monday April 07 2014, @08:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the Don't-be-a-jerk! dept.

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?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 07 2014, @01:17PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 07 2014, @01:17PM (#27448)

    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.

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  • (Score: 1) by NaN on Monday April 07 2014, @01:37PM

    by NaN (3118) on Monday April 07 2014, @01:37PM (#27457)

    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

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 07 2014, @02:23PM (#27495)

      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

        by NaN (3118) on Monday April 07 2014, @02:56PM (#27533)

        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

          by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 07 2014, @04:00PM (#27584)

          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.