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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 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.