I have a slight resentment towards the complainant in this article who accused her boss of sexism for giving her feedback on her speaking mannerisms during presentations (voice "going up an octave at the end of statements").
I managed a junior, female engineer who did exactly that --her voice turned up at the end of sentences, making statements always sound like questions-- and I noticed this only happened during stressful presentations, not in regular conversation or team meetings. It destroyed any authority in her voice and made her sound rather childlike. I worked on it with her without mentioning the pitch shift itself (to not make her self-conscious and possibly worsen the problem) but instead I worked to increase her overall confidence when speaking and when running meetings. And I was so happy when I saw her run a multi-team meeting with a strong, steady voice.
I resent the notion that if I had mentioned the pitch shift, I could be labeled sexist.
A male who gives advice to their female co worker or a female they're managing clearly doesn't understand the current cultural situation when any advice can be taken as sexism. Best to keep quiet and work around it rather than trying to give advice or better them. Why get cancelled for the rest of your career for someone else's benefit?
It is a weird time. A buddy of mine, who worked with me some time ago landed a position at another place along with a classmate of her at the same time. Long story short, he landed a senior position and she did not. Her initial reaction was to go HR and claim discrimination.
Since I do consider myself her friend, I tried to take her off the ledge. You are just starting there. You do not want to brand yourself from get-go. You do not know what kind of backing the guy had. HR is not your friend.
I did not hear from her for a while so I hope she took the advice. I would not dare to offer this advice to someone I don't trust.
> I have never been accused of “sexism” despite the “risk” of working with women and men including giving advice to all genders.
Glad to hear it :). It's nice to know that things aren't that bad after all.
> Maybe you should think about the “advice” you give and why you are so worried about getting “cancelled”.
Fair enough. The advice given to the OP was "when closing sentences in presentations, you finish the sentence in a way that sounds like you're asking a question. Something to pay attention to going forward". [1]
The boss than later provided feedback when she improved that in her presentations by saying "you did great. I didn't hear you going up an octave at the end of your statements, came across as much more authoritative, it's super refreshing to provide feedback and then see you attempt to act upon it."
In general, I don't really see that as sexist at all. However, the person getting that advice said "This #tonepolicing is totally okay feedback to get from my #bigtech #male leaders and not #sexist".
At this point, considering that anything seems to be able to be taken as "sexist". Maybe it's better to keep your mouth shut when giving feedback to females. Again, Why risk your entire career for one person? That's my logic at least. I hope that doesn't mean I am sexist.
I've read enough of ashley's stories to know at this point she's not operating in good faith or within normal american standards of behavior. Currently the press is more than willng to go along with stories like hers because it helps their anti big tech narrative.
>>Maybe it's better to keep your mouth shut when giving feedback to females. Again, Why risk your entire career for one person? That's my logic at least. I hope that doesn't mean I am sexist.
Here's your simple test: Do you feel the same way about working with men? If not...I think you get your answer. But you already knew that didn't you?
> Do you feel the same way about working with men? If not...I think you get your answer. But you already knew that didn't you?
Not working, but giving feedback. You can work with someone without giving them feedback or trying to improve them.
However, touche.
I am not sure how that improves anything at all though. The entire point is that it seems like, in today's culture, it is better for men to not give feedback to women ala the case mentioned here (Ashley) and I've personally heard many other anecdotes as well. You can also see the case that the other person who replied to my comment talked about where a female coworker decided to file for discrimination just because the male was promoted.
I guess it is sexist (1). Although, isn't that what women want? After all, "#tonepolicing is totally okay from my #bigtech #male leaders" clearly indicates that males giving advice is not appreciated at least to one female. Mentioning their gender clearly indicates that being "men" is what is also an important factor in why the feedback was bad.
The addition of anecdotes, and the fact that anything taken even remotely badly is going to result in massive repercussions for the male who was giving advice only to benefit the female. Is providing benefit to another person really so important that one should take a risk? I am not sure.
It is sexist to give feedback, and it is sexist to not give feedback.
----
1. I guess this means I am a terrible human being, I mean I don't really consider myself as sexist or not liking/hating women. I am perfectly happy to work with women, and in general would like more women in tech since the testosterone gets way too high in rooms at times. In general, I never have thought of myself as a person who's sexist.
However, I clearly did indicate a view where based on gender, I would likely choose to make a different decision in certain situations i.e. if I was giving feedback to a female, I would likely be a lot more cautious of my words and frame things so that there was no way for it to be taken badly, or more often, likely not say it because I am socially awkward enough anyway. :P
The advice doesn't matter . Anything can be labelled as "sexist" nowadays, and you can find yourself on the "cancelled" end just by interacting with the wrong type of person. Case in point, the very story we're discussing - raising the pitch at the end of a statement. There's nothing sexist about giving advice to correct that, because men do it too. However, the wrong type of person will project their sexist views onto the situation by claiming that it's something only women do. With enough pushing-the-right-buttons from that person (these types do seem to be relentless), you are now branded a sexist and cancelled. The patients are truly running the asylum these days.
I think you need better examples, because my first association with this one is how her behavior is evidently not authentic. We were already at risk of unreasonable people making our lives difficult anyway, so your broad claim about 'these types' feels more like shadow boxing (without broader context punctuated with specific examples).
Lets be real here though, the answer to the person you're talking to is effectively "get over it, what kind of person do you want to be?" when talking about this instead of suggesting there is no risk. Or concrete actions to take about managing it - like talking to your own mentor or person you trust as a sanity check if you'd otherwise be concerned.
Cause there is risk for people. There is a risk they are going to make a mistake, and/or find out that they are ignorant and that society has rapidly moved on from social mores they may be accustomed to.
There's definitely some sexism in how we in tech treat women as more junior if they talk like that.
But I'm a woman and I'd love that kind of candid feedback from my manager. If I'm doing something that limits my career I want to know, regardless of what it is or if it's "fair".
I absolutely think we should be having discussions about how women are treated and calling out bad behavior from companies, but from a selfish, personal perspective I worry that news reports like this are going to make managers less likely to give me useful feedback.
If there was, say, a correlation between women speaking that way and people interpreting it as less professional/authoritative I think that would be an interesting conversation and one worth having, and it would be about sexism/oppression. Thats kind of a zoomed out view though, zoomed in on this situation (living in the world as we find it) I largely agree with the chain of replies.
But the phenomenon, "unnecessary querying tone", is not a dialect and it is not exclusive to female English speakers.
It is not as widespread as the habit of injecting the phrase "Oh my god" or the word "like" into sentences in English. But consider these habits. They too are something that many English-speakers do, regardless of gender or orientation or social status.
If we were to tell a speaker that injecting "Oh my god" and "like" into sentences is distracting and reduces the effectiveness of a presentation, we would be right.
Presenting is an important skill. The healthy response to constructive criticism is to reflect and improve.
There is definitely sexism in tech. No doubt. I've seen it, and I push back when I do.
With that disclaimer out of the way, I would have serious concerns about a male employee with 'valley girl' rising terminals in meetings. According to Wikipedia [1] while there are differences between the way men and women 'valleyspeak' it does in fact apply to both. I would address both the same way, seeking to understand - in open dialogue - whether there was a basis in (lack of) confidence and trying to find ways to support them further in their career development. Maybe suggest public speaking classes, especially if available through work.
[edit] further to [2] I found the way the feedback was communicated around the rising intonation friendly, positive and when addressed, the progress was kindly affirmed and remarked on. I saw no negativity in this. I did see someone who was indignant about receiving criticism, however, and took it to a level rarely seen in a professional setting. To call this the 'nuclear option' would be a bit of an understatement.
Reading the back and forth documented in [2] is an absolute train wreck. Once I got a few pages in, I started to empathize deeply with Apple ER. That's not an easy job some days.
One tweet the author posted said:
> "... when #Apple just tried I said 'No thx, Mr Suicide Nets.' If you're going to create a nervous breakdown you get to watch it unfold in real time & now I'm on Twitter again."
Referring to Tim Cook as 'Mr Suicide Nets' on Twitter seems like an insta-fire.
... am I misreading [2] or did Ashley file an office Nerf war under an "Assault and Battery" complaint to HR?
I'm not saying there aren't some legitimate potential instances of concern documented here, or at least grey areas (director inviting Ashley to drinks alone, 'looking sad' when she brought a friend and talking about his ex-wife) - but they are glossed over, and instead the focus is on sensationalizing some things I would consider trivial. The things I would consider particularly concerning are deemphasized in Ashley's narrative [2].
I suspect some of her 2015 concerns amounted to her manager and team really just not liking her very much. I suspect the behavior Ashley is pointing to wasn't sexism (from her female manager) but rather that she went over her manager's head to the director and shit-talked her. Naturally this was filed under a "Quid-pro-quo" complaint to HR.
It appears she had an open conversation with HR for almost six years complaining about many of the folks she'd ever worked with.
If seen this pattern happen where people get into little gossip circles where they ruminate on slights and offenses so much that they become magnified in their minds. Looking at it from outside that circle things seem pretty mild or not like anything to be concerned about, but when you dwell on them constantly and surround yourself with people consistently reinforcing the validity of dwelling on them, it takes on a life of its own.
Then when the seed is planted everything the gossip target says it does gets put under a microscope to confirm the suspicion that they hate you or are discriminatory or are retaliating over something or other.
I don’t really know what the fix is. I think the basecamp furore recently might be the way. Just discourage this sort of clique formation around airing grievances. But then that has the effect of not giving space for valid grievances.
Honestly when her own story ([2]) makes her seem unhinged, it really damages her credibility. It's hard to read some of this and not see an entitled, selfish person.
Update: from reading through some of this, as well as her "I thought I was dying" article (https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart...) I honestly think she's having some kind of mental health crisis. Some of the logical leaps she makes are bizarre and she seems extremely paranoid.
>With that disclaimer out of the way, I would have serious concerns about a male employee with 'valley girl' rising terminals in meetings. According to Wikipedia [1] while there are differences between the way men and women 'valleyspeak' it does in fact apply to both. I would address both the same way, seeking to understand - in open dialogue - whether there was a basis in (lack of) confidence and trying to find ways to support them further in their career development. Maybe suggest public speaking classes, especially if available through work.
I don't particularly think that the original complaint has much merit, (ie, being coached is not sexist) but that said I also find this sort of attitude wholly unhealthy. Is room full of paid professionals unable to distinguish the content of someone's speech from the quality of their delivery? Particularly in a case where we're just talking about tone of voice, and not difficulty with word choice or articulation? I believe it says more about the audience if they are unable to analyze an idea on its merits rather than using body language to evaluate the value of an idea.
Communication involves much more than the words said. Body language and tone are equally important to effective communication. That's human and transcends paid professionalism.
I think if you ran a business, and cared about the health of your business you'd be incentivized to hear the best quality idea, not necessarily the one you liked hearing the most. There are plenty of things we do that aren't "human" or "natural," but benefit us quite a bit all the same.
Sure, but why not then have the dialog just all text to speech? Businesses are made of people. The right thing to do for the business and the employee is to coach and train the employee to communicate effectively. This removes an unnecessary barrier between the idea trying to be communicated and the audience.
Despite my rhetoric, I'd bet I agree with you more than I've made it sound. ie, I know the difference between professional and unprofessional communication, and agree that professional communication inherently sounds better, and it's what people would strive for. A less extreme version of my argument might be that although it's important to help coach people to communicate effectively, but it's also important for managers and executives to understand the value of an idea even if someone is less able to speak professionally.
Also, plenty of communication works better via text. For example, a book has a very different format than a speech, precisely because of the strengths of the two formats. The same is true of something like a small talk vs. a technical document. And people, with their reliance on body language of course benefit from books and technical papers quite often.
Anyhow, this is a sore point of mine, and I seldom see much agreement on my position. So, thank you very much for your polite discourse on the topic.
Your views on this matter seem, to me, to be virtuous and empathetic.
I suspect that being influenced by presentation is ineluctable however, which might be part of why you don't see much agreement.
> you'd be incentivized to hear the best quality idea
It's not humanly possible to do this, which is why it's such a false narrative. No one ever really knows what the "best quality idea" is, and expecting regular people to have mystical powers isn't helpful.
It’s only spicy if you are ignorant of the actual suicide rates at Foxconn versus other employers in China. The reality is you were significantly less likely to attempt or commit suicide working at Foxconn than other companies in the industry. Foxconn is a Taiwanese company so I would expect Chinese disinformation campaigns about their environmental health and safety.
> With that disclaimer out of the way, I would have serious concerns about a male employee with 'valley girl' rising terminals in meetings.
If you had two employees, one man and one woman, and they both spoke like a “Valley Girl” which would you judge more harshly? I suspect the man, for fairly to conform to expected gender norms/stereotypes.
after reading about high terminal in the NY Times a long time ago I started using it myself, specifically when I was not sure of something, as a way to indicate lack of confidence.
After a while I noticed people never picked up on it so I stopped.
Yeah, regardless of it being fair or not, or the bias being wrong or not, everyone still deserves to know if their career is being limited by those things.
Even if the person who got the feedback doesn't want to change, at least take the opportunity to educate the person that gave you the feedback, rather than reporting them.
Reporting it to HR doesn't address anything, and only sets things back.
> There's definitely some sexism in how we in tech treat women as more junior if they talk like that.
I used to receive the same feedback, though I don't have what commenters or the person in the complaint describes.
My voice deviates in tone a lot, sometimes for no reason at all. The deviations sound like inflections. Additionally, I also have body language that is quite off from what people might expect. On top of that, I have a perma-scowl. I attribute it to time in the military. I've had someone in authority (two levels above me) give me this feedback fairly bluntly. I don't know if there's ever a good way to give this feedback but I would not describe that meeting as pleasant much less positive. I subsequently was not awarded a raise I was promised despite delivering on numerous advancements technologically (and monetarily), the program I was involved with was dissolved, and there was talk of reassigning me. I quit within the month and did not regret it.
A couple notes I have, some dissonance included:
- Critiquing tone and body language is straight up junk. Society has an expectation of what various things look or sound like, however, in a neuro-divergent field you should expect deviation from these things. Maybe even celebrate it.
- I did follow that directors advice. I wear thick frame glasses to cover up my scowl instead of wearing contacts. I don't cross my arms. I don't look up at the ceiling when I'm drawing on information. When I'm excited or engaged I don't let the pitch of my voice change. Does it work? Sure, but work also gets a very shallow clone of me in front of people I won't have a beer with.
> Critiquing tone and body language is straight up junk. Society has an expectation of what various things look or sound like, however, in a neuro-divergent field you should expect deviation from these things. Maybe even celebrate it.
This is all fine and good, until you have to communicate with people who are not engineers. Not being able to communicate effectively with non-tech people, whatever the reason is, is certainly going to be a career-limiting factor. You can celebrate it all you want, but you also need to acknowledge the reality of the situation.
Personally speaking, I think people nannying each other on communication is a real drag. Whether it's language, tone, or body language policing it's highly subjective, rarely constructive, and fairly useless outside of filling some imaginary mold society would like us to fill at a given moment in time.
It is a real drag. It also feels.. important? I guess I know what kind of feedback you are talking about because you call it nannying, but I know I've gotten feedback on how I come across, and it was unpleasant to hear, but after acting on it I noticed I got better results from social interactions. To be genuine, when I was younger there were people that I thought were cool that would do or fall into accents at times, so I tried doing it too. I was bluntly informed that it was 'not cute', which hurt, but frankly I'm grateful.
Conversely I've also been told stuff that boiled down to fitting a mold, working customer service or delivery and being told that tattoos weren't professional while consistently seeing doctors or other 'real' professionals with tattoos.
I feel like the dividing line kind of comes down to the difference between "this is how I personally interpret and feel about your actions/communication" and "this is what I suspect an imaginary other desires".
If it helps, this type of nannying conduct stopped when I went to engineering focused firms instead of product and traditional businesses. Why it happened at Apple eludes me, but I suspect that once an engineering firm grows to a certain size it's culture cannot be sustained homogeneously.
Sure, and I totally get that. If my manager came to me and said I had a perma-scowl and my voice fluctuated too much in pitch, my first question would be "well, okay, but what exactly am I supposed to do about that?" (Edit: I noticed, too, that I definitely scowled when I was thinking about that!) Granted, I don't think I'd be posing that question to my manager, but to my therapist instead.
At the same time, though, it looks like you've already experienced some consequences because of these things:
> I subsequently was not awarded a raise I was promised despite delivering on numerous advancements technologically (and monetarily), the program I was involved with was dissolved, and there was talk of reassigning me.
This is what I was talking about regarding it being a career-limiting factor, and acknowledging the situation. You can say it's bullshit all you want (and, for the record, I agree with you on that), but, in this case, you've seen first hand what can happen when you don't fit that imaginary mold. And, I would claim that, at least in this instance, it was constructively communicated to you, since you mentioned making changes and subsequently getting better results.
Whether we like it or not, people pick up on things like body language and vocal intonations. If you're lucky, not conforming to peoples' expectations there will make you seem "odd," or maybe "eccentric." If you're not, then, further down the scale of reactions you may receive could include thinking your manner of personal interaction is "weird," "unsettling," or, even "creepy." And, these are all serious problems if you ever want to hope to communicate with and be taken seriously by the majority of people.
Again, I want to reiterate that I agree with you, and this is all basically bullshit. But, like it or not, that's the game you have to play if you want to get your ideas across to people.
My point in sharing that story at all was that I perceive that as an unfair societal expectation problem, not one born out of sexism, but I'm a case study of one.
While the things this director rattled off were taken of note, "consequences" would've been good to stop at a conversation. They became non-constructive when they went too far, especially for something far out of my control. The biggest change I made was not interviewing at product or traditional businesses. Engineering firms tend to not have these problems. I once regarded Apple as an engineering firm, but it could be argued they've grown to such a size that they lost homogeneity that would otherwise benefit them in these scenarios.
My understanding this is a recent spoken language innovation. I’m not sure if it’s gendered, but it’s very common. I would never correct it, I think it’s fairly engrained
> Because HRT has been popularized as "Valley Girl Speak", it has acquired an almost exclusively feminine gender connotation. Studies confirm that more women use HRT than men.[18] Linguist Thomas J. Linneman contends, "The more successful a man is, the less likely he is to use HRT; the more successful a woman is, the more likely she is to use uptalk".
I hope that the uncertainty, lack of authority, and amateurism that I ascribe to up-speaking is rightly placed. I hope that it's just a matter of cultural norms that young women are the most likely to speak this way.
But what if there's nothing intrinsically grating about up-speaking, and instead it only reminds us of young women?
I've convinced myself that it's the former, but it wouldn't blow my mind if I were wrong.
Upspeaking is subconsciously used as a defense mechanism. It is advertising a lack of confidence, which is intended to draw a cooperative rather than combative response. It is signalling that "I am unsure of what I am saying". It is based off of the vocal intention of inquisition. It is a subconscious defense mechanism. The bias you speak of is omnipresent. It is also within the speaker. Think about that. The speaker chooses to deploy a style that will bias the listener to view the speaker in a certain way. The bias being present in the speaker is the key factor to understanding this phenomenon. The experiment that I propose is: if the bias was gone, would the speaker still use this speaking technique?
I'm surprised an assertion this strong with zero attestation and the hint of pseudoscientificism is still alive on HN. Anyone living through the 00s (and perhaps even still today) will recognise rising intonation as a social affectation, much the same as vocal fry. Use of it was regular in friendship groups I was in; including when dunking on each other, which is rather the opposite of wanting a cooperative response.
I feel as though your appeal to censorship is emboldened by your sense that I have enfringed on some social code regarding sexism.
I appreciate your counter anecdata, and I recognize that it offers a counter argument to my assertions.
I don't think that means we should take my post down. Do you truly believe that? Do you believe in such limiting of speech? Have I committed a thought crime by thinking that using up speak during a presentation is a defense mechanism? Is it possible I am sometimes right?
I hold that it's possible that I am sometimes wrong. Do you allow that perhaps I am sometimes right?
Do you think this post should be taken down too?
Are you able to introspect on your social groups usage of upspeak and ponder a reason as to it's origin? Perhaps it's advertising a set of values?
Apologies if my earlier post came off as peevish. I would not want your comment to be removed, and to my mind there is nothing sexist about it. I am just constantly surprised that, in a community that seems to pride itself on putative rationality, we often end up swimming in reductive "just-so" stories that co-incidentally agree with the cynical take du jour. I did pick on yours, which is partially bad luck, but also the idea that the voodoo you mention is so comprehensive and airtight that it can diagnose me and everyone I know over the internet with approval-seeking seems particularly ludicrous.
I don't want to dump on your idea too much. It's very possible there's a kernel of truth to it—I know I have noticed sometimes that people use higher voices (as a whole, rather than a cadence) when they don't want to offend. But I think we would all be better served if we learned to start with questions and calls for discussion, than trying to claim universal truth and quickly being refuted.
You know, the speaker is quite often NOT choosing this "technique". The speaker simply speaks focusing on content and that is what voice does, whether innately or because brain mimics other people speaking.
No beginner speaker is in complete conscious control over every detail. Nor are they expected to be, really.
> The speaker chooses to deploy a style [...] The bias being present in the speaker is the key factor to understanding this phenomenon. The experiment that I propose is: if the bias was gone, would the speaker still use this speaking technique?
Both of our ideas are speculative at best, and to attempt to discredit the GP's point via speculative refutes does nothing but polarize the conversation further.
> But what if there's nothing intrinsically grating about up-speaking, and instead it only reminds us of young women?
One of my autistic-traits is that some vocal sounds, tics, and things like that are incredibly irritating to me - it's nothing to do with any mental-associations like that, it's just something my brain/body does.
...but if I were in the same position I'd probably just grin-and-bear it: it's not something worth raising a (potential) fuss over, especially the optics of being seen as being sexist or "man-splaining" to a woman how they should speak (a huge obvious no-no right there).
My and other's regional accents have been the source of consternation at work. Speakers with regional accents have been encouraged to modify them for the benefit of non native English speakers by the DEI group. I find that ironic.
Whyso? At work you're expected to function as a team, and part of being a team necessarily means needing to make personal compromises for the team's sake.
In this situation, non-native English speakers are going through the monumental effort of both learning English and having to put their skills to the test every day instead of them working and communicating in their fluent language. While people with accents such that they're harder for non-native speakers to understand are being asked to have clearer enunciation - for the sake of the team.
You're not being asked to change your accent, just to have clearer enunciation (if your org's DEI team said "accent" instead of "enunciation" then their wording is unhelpfully vague or demonstrably open to misinterpretation) - and not for the benefit of people who aren't themselves doing anything for their own situation (it's not like the non-native English speakers in your workplace are insisting everyone speak their language, after all). Everyone is making a compromise for everyone's sake. There's nothing ironic about it at all - just unfortunate messaging from the DEI people.
Did you get that request on paper? Share it with wider groups, it should be interesting if people learn DEI groups are asking americans with regional accents to change them.
I am more inclined to charitably view it as a minor inconsiderate overstep, an internal matter not for public consumption. Perhaps if it was phrased as 'enunciation' it would not have garnered any reaction.
There is no way to do what you suggest without risking a mob.
I mean, you can make a hardcopy with the DEI team's name attached to the statement?
You should risk the mob. It's not ok for a DEI team to ask people to tailor their regional accents for foreigners who don't speak english well. You can also release this anonymously (it's hard for people to deny written exchanges because the results are in many inboxes).
"Hey khazhoux, maybe you /are/ sexist for thinking that a vocal trait sometimes associated with young women is a sign of amateurism."
The tricky thing about unconscious bias is of course that it's hard to know when you're carrying it. Nonetheless, I'm fairly confident that that speaking style would be considered un-authoritative by most people, and as a manager I see my job as how to help the individual whose career could be impacted by cultural norms both fair and unfair.
I hear a lot of bullshit from people who focus on how they sound. Can't authority be established through work history? TBH, the more polished and confident a presenter sounds, the more likely they are to be actively bullshitting, and it's really annoying to see people fall for it "because he sounded so confident."
If you are ignoring someone's point because of the sound of voice, rather than quality of content... Yikes. I guess certain silicon valley-isms (e.g. Theranos) start to make sense if people really do that in a corporate setting.
I'm not talking about bullshitty Power Speaker polish.
The vocal uptilt --at least in common native-English dialects-- turns statements into questions, and/or indicates that the speaker seeks agreement or approval from the listener. Do it here and there and it's no problem. Do it for every sentence and it's very off-putting, and distracts from the content itself.
It's not radically different advice from not saying Umm every two words, not mumbling/eating half your sentence, not talking to a room in a whisper, etc.
It's even more obvious/annoying if you speak one of the many languages where the only way to ask a question is to raise pitch at the end of a statement.
> Can't authority be established through work history?
No. We're still (relatively primitive) animals: we have plenty of well-documented "vulns" and internal biases that affect our decision-making and opinion-forming abilities - and these come from both actual-instinctive habits (like how we're generally predisposed to be biased towards selecting tall people as leaders or for promotion) and learned biases from our cultural upbringing (e.g. racism in the southern US).
Humans are not machines. Communication is a complex skill that takes years to develop. There's many elements of communication that cannot be represented through text alone. (For example try determining if someone is being sarcastic in online posts, it's entirely communicated through vocal tones.) It's got nothing to do with corporate anything. It's just how communication works.
It’s totally the latter. Men are allowed whatever speech patterns they like, but women have to have perfect pitch throughout an entire sentence? Is that reasonable?
I get your concern but is it possible that your idea of confidence is shaped by a male perspective on how that trait manifests?
Encouraging a junior team member to have more self-assurance in their presentation style is one thing but routinely asking women to behave more like men is another. This same scenario could be seen either way depending on your perspective.
To address sexism in the industry we need to be able to have a reasonable conversation about these kinds of subtle and subjective differences. There are grey areas and we won't all agree but resenting the challenge to think this through is probably not a response that's going to affect change.
It's nothing to do with gender, there's plenty of men who suck at presentation and plenty who do the upwards inflection thing which is a sure fire way to destroy anyone's confidence in you.
Our idea of confidence is shaped by what successful men have found to work with other men. This isn't a social bias, this is economic survival of the fittest.
Blizzard and Rockstar for example. Men interact with women on a way different basis. Men might be gross at the place but I'd like to see if any of them attempted to assimilate as opposed to thinking they could be an individual and participate.
I'm a little confused, I thought you were talking about normal male interaction, but then your examples are two of the most recent incredibly dysfunctional corporate environments.
What does the second half of your statement mean? If who assimilated, and into what? Sorry, I feel like I'm missing some context you're relying on here.
If you walk into a lions den, you pretend to be a lion. You don't complain that it's not a birds nest.
Meaning women do not know what it is they're getting into. The ones that are successful rarely if at all cite sexism until well after their career has been established.
Before you take this as me being some moron that thinks all women are stupid, they're not. I've had plenty of women managers that knew their shit and ran their part of the company really well. It's the naive women (who aren't driven by money) that tend to fall into the trap of anything remotely corrective of their action by a man is interpreted as sexism or an affront.
I would rather change company than being part of the PR processes of today's corporations, I've worked at some big company in the past but for the last 2-3 years I've found my happiness in companies who don't treat political matter as public relations, also because they're so small to cause any noticeable noise
Am not talking about places with an approach like Coinbase, I'm talking about favouring exchange of ideas within people but not as a way to PR the company itself
Alternatively, what might be a display of a certain bias it's associating that vocal trait with young women in the first place. Isn't it akin to associating pink with gender? It's just a colour.
I've no idea if the the vocal trait being discussed is cultural or biological, but there is a difference at least between the two areas: the two sexes do grow physically different vocal systems, which can be heard in voicecs and seen on physical scans, whereas afaik nobody has discovered any biological differences that would account for colour preferences.
the two sexes do grow physically different vocal systems,
Do note, the trait being discussed has absolutely nothing to do with women having a higher voice.
Instead, it has to do with any person raising the pitch of their voice at the very end of a sentence.
In English, this 100% means "a question".
So instead of saying:
* meeting over.
upspeak means
* meeting over?
When employed with every sentence, it sounds as if one is always asking for input, or unsure of their last statement, for they are perpetually asking questions.
This is not sexist, as for at least hundreds of years, English spoken by virtually every English speaker has been this way.
This upspeak phenomenon started about 20 years ago, generally agreed upon as starting in California.
When it first started, many people discussed this in newspapers, journals, etc.
It isn't a new thing, men have also erroneously learned to do it too, and it is simply the same as many other things "one tries not to do when speaking".
The sad part is, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, male managers now feel threatened trying to help female colleagues, due to incidents like this.
They will still try to help male colleagues, which has the horrible side effect of leaving women out. Of putting women on inequal footing, when male managers who want to help, fear for their careers and safety if they try to mentor.
If I was female, I'd literally blast another woman which used something such as this, as a false sexism flag.
Women have it tough enough as it is. The growing perception, thanks to twitter and isolated events like this is, don't get involved with helping women, misery will be the outcome.
Please note that I wasn't addressing the end of sentence up-speak itself, as I'm none of a) a woman, b) someone who speaks like that or c) someone who's read any research into the subject.
I was just pointing out that "how vocal sounds are made" has some known physical differences, unlike "what colour do you prefer".
The OP didn't state anywhere in his post that this was specific to women, just one particular individual who happened to be female. Generally when you label someone you require a justification for it rather than just a projection of your own world view
Genuinely curious how this was your takeaway from khazhoux’s comment. OP recognized a vocal trait they thought was holding someone back, helped them to remedy it in a non-confrontational or aggressive way, and the person grew from it professionally. The person was female and OP noted
this in the context of the Apple case to highlight how they would have felt had they been accused of sexism for specifying the vocal trait in feedback to their employee. Where is the sexism (prejudice or discrimination) in OP’s words or actions?
It seems like this could have been an opportunity for you to learn how to take people seriously and to accept them as having authority regardless of how they speak--a useful thing to learn if, for instance, you ever manage someone with a speech impediment, who might never be able to talk in a way that you prefer.
From the post it seems they did take that person seriously, and so worked to build confidence which is certainly a good thing to have. What do you propose to make this person more effective in meetings, rather than build confidence?
Not everyone in the meetings will be so understanding, either consciously or subconsciously.
Her story about having to turn over nude photos of herself, stored on her personally-owned (edit: apparently a work phone) phone, to Apple lawyers sounded very awful.
The photos were on a company phone, owned and supplied by Apple, for company use.
According to the story, the contents of her work phone were legally required to be turned over under as part of the civil discovery process in a trial.
Apple does not require you to use company devices for personal, sensitive data, and in fact, is quite clear about the risks inherent in doing so.
Nevertheless, she chose to store nude photos on a company device, mixing her company communications with personal communications.
How are the consequences of her inappropriate use of company resources Apple's fault?
Apple’s toilets are also company properties, I expect the Apple employees would find it strange for their intimate parts to be made public only because said intimate parts had direct and unmitigated contact with Apple’s property (like the seats from those toilets).
Point is there should be a limit to the amount of snooping in a company is expected to do/carry out, in this case Apple the company has clearly exceeded that limit.
Even if you skip the legalese when you configure the device...
If your company hands you a device, don't then aim the camera at your genitals.
If your device has Caffe Macs and Radar apps installed, don't point it at your junk.
If you used a device to go over OKR status in the morning, don't point it down your pants at night.
If your Photos app alternates between pictures of the whiteboard from your system architecture meeting, and snapshots of your tickly parts, take a moment to think if maybe there's a problem there.
I mean... should we cater so much to people that can't figure this out themselves?
Working at companies that issued laptops and phones, people looked at me sideways when I told them that I in fact carried two laptops and two phones.
It's not just for photographs taken south of the border, so to speak.
If you do anything on company property or time (including laptops and phones) that isn't 100% company work, it can get caught up in subpoenas, discovery and other miscellaneous legal proceedings that your employer may be a party to. This can land you in legal hot water even if these activities had nothing to do with your employer. Once the DA's got your files, they can charge you with anything you may have dug up even if it's not related to their primary inquiries. Your drug-fueled trips to burning man may not look so entertaining to the DA.
Further the California blanket IP ownership exemptions only apply to things you do on your own time and your own property. If you come up with a fun startup idea, and you write some notes down on your work laptop or text your buddy on your work phone, you should just assume it belongs to the company.
Anyways, for anyone who needs to hear it again, for the love of all that's good and holy do not take photos of your genitals with company property.
And if you work somewhere you're assigned a laptop and a phone, you can probably afford your own of each. If that's the case I highly recommend it. As an Apple employee, the corporate discounts are worth taking advantage of.
However I have the same problem with the Photos app on my personal phone. Apple lacks a proper way to store the private-private stash of late-night consumption vs daytime photos. I never show photos on my iPhone to friends, I never lend it to children, despite carefully triaging photos into albums of my holidays vs memes vs photos of administrative papers vs… porn. They shouldn’t have been in the same app to start with.
In a twist of irony, if Apple employees dogfooded their porn stash a little more with their work iPhone, maybe they would have actually come up with a “Photovault” feature, which doesn’t mix the photos in the photostream, nor uploads them to the cloud, which lead the photo scanning scandal of last week.
Do not use a company phone or laptop to do personal things no matter what they are. I have a phone that’s paid for by my job and I have never taken a photo with it, browsed safari, or use any map app. The apps that are on it are default Apple apps or company apps pushed by MDM.
I see odd google searches in Chrome regularly when someone is screen sharing and typing a URL.
> I see odd google searches in Chrome regularly when someone is screen sharing and typing a URL.
A programmer who does that is incompetent. More than using Incognito, I specifically require my employees on the first day to create several Chrome profiles, to deal with personal stuff. Not only does it avoid Facebook cookie mangling with work, it also helps avoid unrelated advertising during work, improves search relevance, autosuggest becomes actually useful… and you can use your personal profile for your house hunt and bar searches, keeping the bookmarks and all.
This comment makes me regret to allow employees to open private websites at work. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Some people just are cunts about the freedoms they’re given, and because of employees like you, we end up with antiviruses on laptops and corporate firewalls that block Facebook.
Just because employees feel “micromanaged by a terrible supervisor” who asks to use a separate Chrome profile to not mix cookies with work.
Dude if you think not mixing cookies is in the same category as antivirus software you are greatly mistaken.
And your response illustrates my point. You think the poor souls you manage are ungrateful "cunts" who should thank you for the "freedoms" given by their benevolent dictator.
Again, what company is this? If you're this proud of your leadership, go on record.
Coming to her webpage without any further context, I'm having real trouble understanding her "Apple Story". It starts with her publishing an article[0] about her apartment complex being built on a former toxic waste site. And Apple immediately gets mad and starts retaliating against her? Why? What do they care about this article that, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with them whatsoever? What's Apple's motivation here?
No comment on the Apple aspect, but I found that apartment story well-written and detailed. I don't even live in the same hemisphere and have no real reason care yet I still read to the end. Normally that sort of scenario is inevitably a hypochondriac conflating drama.
This entire article seems like speculation. There was an early focus on the idea that the VOC contamination in the unit must be a result of the previous use of the land in agriculture. However, there never was any evidence from study that there were VOCs in the unit (except a handheld tester of unknown provenance) or if there were, that the VOCs came from contamination/land use.
More importantly, the DTSC representative even suggested that if there were VOCs, they most likely came from construction.
There's a lot of accusations without anything more than circumstantial evidence - but the path forward here seems clear. The first air quality assessment came back inconclusive. So do another.
> I argued back and forth with DTSC for months about next steps. At several points, she told me if I could give them proof of chemicals in my body and apartment that could cause my symptoms and be linked to the chemicals on site, then they “can continue to investigate further.”
> I kept pushing back that they were asking a normal resident to pay for and perform seemingly industrial testing. I was also very concerned that a government agency seemed to be asking for my medical records. At one point they said they were happy to talk directly with one of my doctors. WTF.
Holy moly. Do the test. If it's that important, do the test. Seek compensation after.
This seems like a new building, new construction and if there were VOCs the most likely source sounds like adhesives from the construction. It's possible Ashley is particularly sensitive to them. I've met people like that before.
Sometimes I just hate the internet and its extreme bouts of populism. Everyone wants to air their dirty laundry in public and the Twitter masses celebrate it. We love the clicks, we love the drama, we love hating on Apple, or Google, or this guy or that girl. "Did you hear what he said?" or "Did you hear the rumor that..."—it's a high school cafeteria for adults. We get so caught up in other people's lives, we forget to pay attention to our own.
Some of the stuff they did to her was so creepy, like trying to get her to eat at this restaurant, then when she got there, paying for her $300 dinner, and then pressuring her to date the sous-chef.
Then, in another incident, attacked her with a "surprise" nerf gun ambush, recorded her screams and then turned them into a remix and shared it with everyone. Even after she told them she has PTSD from past physical violence. Were those people ever reprimanded? It seems like they haven't.
The nerf gun email exchange was a bit odd though, it read as though she is joking and playing along. If I had read just that email chain, without the rest of the context, her saying stuff like "I need to out mischief them - hide or boobytrap their toys maybe", might be interpreted as something more benign. But, it's worth acknowledging that it would be hard to go against the grain, even though saying something like "what they are doing is disruptive, ask them to stop" might have had a better effect.
Well that's why I highlighted the odd tone in the email.
The other odd thing was the "Make Ashley's Life a Living Hell" ticket screenshot. It looks incredibly bad, but then she replies on the ticket which can be perceived as playing along. I understand that victims sometimes cope that way, by pretending to go along, hoping the abuse would stop, but at the same time, it makes it harder to convince others later how bad things were.
I don’t want to reduce the rest of her message, which is sobering, but the photos were on a work device that she was encouraged to use as a personal one.
That's among the worst, but not the only, direct evidence she presents of harassment at Apple; deeper context is at the other link (where she has screenshotted her extensive Twitter presence on this subject for the last month or so).
Strangely, her timeline about Apple begins in March with an article she published about her health problems. I remember the story was #1 on Hacker News that day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688965 She was having health problems and believed they were the result of toxic waste somewhere on the site of her apartment complex property.
I remember that the details of the story didn’t really support her claims as significantly as she suggested. I detailed my concerns in the HN thread about her other toxic waste battle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26689837 The summary is that she was living in an upper floor apartment but she assumed something in the ground was causing her medical symptoms. She found evidence that an old toxic waste container might be buried somewhere on the 100 acre property surrounding her apartments. She used some questionable measurements (heart rate change of 10bpm and spurious readings from a generic indoor VOC monitor) to try to bolster her story, but it didn’t make sense that the thousands of other people on this site weren’t experiencing severe medical issues even though her apartment wasn’t close to the supposedly toxic ground.
She is apparently also waging a significant battle against her apartment complex and the city for the issues she believes were caused by a toxic waste container that was supposedly buried somewhere near her old apartment.
I bring this up because she highlights this story as the start of her Apple timeline on her site I linked above and brings it up many times throughout her Apple writings. She seems to imply this was somehow related to her harassment claims at Apple, though I’m not sure what she’s exactly implying with that claim.
your inferences are correct: she is not operating in a way that is rational or consistent, and is lashing out. It happens that her complaints are consistent with what the media wants to publish about the bay area and tech industry.
Many people are sensitive to VOCs at levels most people aren't. I know several people that cannot be around strong synthetic fragrance (aka, unregulated VOCs) or it makes them feel ill.
Whether it's a barrel of waste, or just chemical laden construction materials, most likely she was very much experiencing real health problems.
Her blog is kind of hard to follow, and she seems a little nutty, but if her boss indeed tried to 'hook her up' with somebody, that seems like it could be considered harassment in some form.
> Many people are sensitive to VOCs at levels most people aren't.
Yes, but she’s making huge leaps to claim that her 3rd-floor apartment is being filled with VOCs from an old toxic waste container that may or may not still be buried somewhere on the 100 acre property where her apartments were built. If VOCs were truly the cause, and we don’t know that, it would be far more likely to be coming from construction materials or the furniture in her apartment.
I’m not doubting that she’s experiencing distressing symptoms. I am very skeptical of her conclusion that it’s due to buried toxic waste somewhere nearby and her ongoing battles against the city and apartment builders.
This same person has been in the headlines for 3 different victimization stories in the past 6 months: The toxic waste story and her ensuing battle with the city, the time her work phone was subpoenaed for a legal case and lawyers wouldn’t let her selectively delete files from evidence, and now her harassment lawsuit against Apple.
The harassment claims should be investigated like any others. However, before we grab our pitchforks in the court of public opinion it’s important to know the context of her actions. When someone is becoming an extreme outlier victim in multiple situations and promoting her case vigorously on social media, skepticism is warranted.
> she’s making huge leaps to claim that her 3rd-floor apartment is being filled with VOCs from an old toxic waste container
I think part of her original argument in the case was that the cleanup was never actually performed, the city rubber-stamped the job, and that the entire site might actually be contaminated. She was getting the run around trying to investigate, everyone involved refused to look into any facet of the grounds. I don't recall if she provided any specific evidence of this causing a measurable affect in here apartment or not.
what you're basically saying is that her "claim that the cleanup wasn't really done is consistent with the visible evidence", but the reality is there are many more other more believable ways to explain the visible evidence than hers, which are more likely from a scientific perspective.
Superfund sites like this are pretty well understood and characterized at this point, which ongoing monitoring and sampling done by multiple parties. The only way to see into this, however, is to get involved in local politics or hire lawyers to do some investigation. ashley instead appears to have done a terrible job at "investigation" and then threw a bunch of unrelated "facts and opinions" together to make it sound more legitimate.
That's a legal case where actual legal people did actual real investigation and uncovered strong evidence of corruption.
By the way the more you learn about what happened in the bay area in the 1940s-70s, the less surprised you should be by any of this, or why we exported semiconductor manufacturing.
> That's a legal case where actual legal people did actual real investigation and uncovered strong evidence of corruption.
I think if there's evidence of corruption in one, that's evidence of corruption in all. The entire area needs an independent investigation IMO. Unfortunately, California is still struggling with basic things like electricity, so that's unlikely to happen any time soon.
But what does that mean? It just sounds so general it could mean many things.
Also demanding that employees be allowed to spend time on a slack channel discussing pay seems unreasonable. Do it on your own time and not on company infrastructure. The term "equity" in this instance is not clearly defined, does it mean we all earn the same, or all people with same title earn the same, or maybe there's variation in productivity and that causes inequity?
all of the best advice I've received, in terms of having a positive impact on my career, has been tone policing. I've learned (as a mildly autistic person) that only a small number of people have the confidence to tell me what I'm saying wrong, and how I'm saying it wrong, and what to say to have more impact. I would love to understand the psychology of taking people helping you and turning it into oppression.
Some of the best tone policing I've received has been from women.
The idea that people are getting tone policed and instead consider it being sexist is interesting to me.
The investigations aren't why it's newsworthy. The fact that Apple employees are being bold enough to file complaints is. They're quite unusual, especially in tech.
I'll let you make up your own mind about the likely merits of their specific complaints.
As far as the article and it's headline, "U.S. labor agency investigating..." is clearly intended to imply that existence of such an investigation is notable, when in fact:
"The NLRB receives about 20,000 to 30,000 charges per year from employees, unions and employers covering a range of unfair labor practices described in Section 8 of the Act."
Not sure about the claimant's voice actually "going up an octave at the end of statements", but such speech patterns are common. I noticed this everywhere in Australia, especially among younger people, and regardless of sex/gender.
There's plenty of material written about it, such as Speech Patterns: Uptalking [1] (which has a section about its prevalence in Australia), and there's an interesting if navel-gazing BBC article [2] from 2014, The unstoppable march of the upward inflection? - note the question mark in the headline there. (The article mentions how bosses/older people tend to frown on this tic; quite a good read, IMO.)
And re the written word, I've increasingly noticed question marks in non-interrogative text (including on HN), which to me is the same thing as the uplift terminator in speech. Matt Levine [3], the Bloomberg finance writer, tends to do this a lot in his Money Stuff column/newsletter, in fact his writing is littered with this device.
I really don't understand why some people react so negatively to what I'd describe as quite a nuanced form of expression, unless it's along the lines of grammar pedants who don't appreciate that language always evolves; who imagine that the evolution ended when they learnt to speak and write.
I'd appreciate feedback on my thoughts/observations here, from other HN folk?
As I mentioned in the other thread [1] the Sept 1 charge (shutting down pay discussion channel in slack) is right on a current battleground for labour rights in the US. With new pro-labour NLRB chair and general council its highly likely they are going to push hard on this charge to try and reinforce rights to organize in company spaces.
Not to mention the Slack platform is meant for team discussions on work time. Apple is well within their rights to be shutting down pay discussions on company time and on a company platform. Now if they were to do so in the break room or cafeteria then that is a different story.
> Apple is well within their rights to be shutting down pay discussions on company time and on a company platform.
No, they aren't, selectively; they can comprehensively ban non-work discussions of all kinds, but if they don't, since discussions are covered as employee organizing/mutual aid, they cannot selectively be banned (in the US) without violating the National Labor Relations Act and (often) state labor relations law, as well.
> Apple is well within their rights to be shutting down pay discussions on company time and on a company platform
That's simply not what the legal precedent says. It is an "unfair labour practice" to forbid workers doing collective action like discussing pay in a venue where you let them have other kinds of general discussion.
I managed a junior, female engineer who did exactly that --her voice turned up at the end of sentences, making statements always sound like questions-- and I noticed this only happened during stressful presentations, not in regular conversation or team meetings. It destroyed any authority in her voice and made her sound rather childlike. I worked on it with her without mentioning the pitch shift itself (to not make her self-conscious and possibly worsen the problem) but instead I worked to increase her overall confidence when speaking and when running meetings. And I was so happy when I saw her run a multi-team meeting with a strong, steady voice.
I resent the notion that if I had mentioned the pitch shift, I could be labeled sexist.