
I Didn’t Want To Lean Out - ISL
http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-didn-t-want-to-lean-out
======
jorleif
My own experience from academia tells me that a big part of the problem is the
fact that everyone is competing for a small pool of faculty positions and
those positions are filled based on individual performance. This means you can
never win as a team, only as an individual, and everyone needs to get their
share. Only a professor can build a team, but even those teams are temporary.
Add to this the fact that only new things count as science, which means that
good work can easily turn out worthless if the desired results are not
achieved. For this reason, science then is naturally elitist, and has big
differences in the status of participants (tenured vs not), and heavy
competition. Might it be that this environment breeds nasty behavior such as
misogyny and bullying?

If a professor treats a student badly (I don't mean harassment, I mean
overwork and bad guidance) then that is rarely punished in any way, it is
probably beneficial for his career.

~~~
Fede_V
A very famous Harvard Nobel prize winning scientist had a phd student commit
suicide while in his lab:

[http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/29/magazine/lethal-
chemistry-...](http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/29/magazine/lethal-chemistry-at-
harvard.html)

Still there, still incredibly famous, still untouched.

Oh, and speaking specifically of chemistry, who can forget this brilliant gem?

[http://www.chemistry-blog.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/06/a40...](http://www.chemistry-blog.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/06/a40kI.png)

That's real by the way.

~~~
bigd
here's one right out of my mailbox (edit added subject):

Subject: CORE HOURS -- effective NOW

Group,

It seems my efforts to communicate to you the importance of putting in the
time and focusing on * your * research -- again, your, not mine -- are being
ignored. I just saw a group of three graduate students going merrily to gym at
4 PM. At the same time, the lab is empty -- most of the day, not to mention
evenings.

Here is what is going to happen, effective immediately:

The CORE HOURS for EVERYONE in the lab are from 10 AM to 6 PM. If you prefer
to come early I can -- on an individual basis -- allow 9 AM -- 5 PM.

During core hours, I want to see EVERYONE WORKING, if you are not at your
desk, you must leave a note where you can be found.

Saturday is the SAME core hours as the rest of the week.

The minumum number of WORK hours I expect -- not schmoozing around, going to
gym etc -- is 60 per week, This means that in addition to 6 * 8 core hours, I
expect to see you in the lab for at least additional 12 hrs a week.

Vacation in the group is TWO weeks a year -- in line with the Grad School
policy. In special circumstances, I might consider an extra week.

There are NO exceptions to the policy outlined above.

If you have any questions s to the "legality" of these requirements, I suggest
you talk to ____ or to the Graduate School officials.

I am sorry it had to come to that but it appears other means of persuation
simply fail.

~~~
jkimmel
I'm currently considering graduate school, and have unfortunately read too
many stories quite like this.

Do you have an idea of how prevalent this kind of micromanagement is for peers
in your cohort? Do you just have a particularly unreasonable PI?

~~~
bigd
Our PI is renewed for being one of the worst in the planet, but he's also a
really famous one. (average is 1 science + 1 nature / year)

Is hard to find someone this bad, but the worst part was not the
micromanagement. That is pretty common. It was the constant lack of
appreciation, being blackmailed over the visas, his holding papers hostage for
years until your loyalty was proven. A colleague has been there for 4 years of
post-doc, and has 0 papers published, 6 ready to go on his desk. And the first
one is from 3 years ago.

I can go on all day over this.

I resigned yesterday at the second post-doc.

~~~
coldtea
His name? It would be fair enough to warn people about the guy.

~~~
bigd
I hope you will understand if I don't tell his name.

My wife is still in the lab. And she's already facing enough shit, + the
retaliations because I've betrayed the PI by leaving. We don't need any legal
crap added to the mix.

However, I can tell you that there are many investigations ongoing, ranging
from sexual to misconduct to stealing research money, and that he's in hiring
freeze since few months.

There's a chance he will be fired. The university seems, for once, on our
side. Then, it will be my pleasure to tell the world all the details.

~~~
angersock
Sunlight is the best antiseptic.

Good luck to you and your wife!

------
Geekette
Wow. This stuck out so much: "My mother, who'd earned degrees in physics and
electrical engineering in the 70's, cried when I told her that I was leaving
and why but she never blamed me. She'd hoped that my generation’s experiences
would be better than hers."

~~~
DaveWalk
A great point you brought up. I know someone whose mother, by all intents, was
cleared to get accepted to a PhD program in the sciences...but unfortunately,
they didn't allow women into the program at the time. It was "simply not
done." And this was a decade after the Civil Rights Movement!

~~~
HillRat
Back in the 70s, my father ran a state government agency staffed primarily by
economists, statisticians and modelers. One economist was a woman who was very
highly credentialed -- multiple Ivy Leagues, quant-heavy background, extremely
knowledgeable in her particular field. He tendered her an offer, expecting her
to take over a fairly critical position within a week.

He immediately got a memo from the governor's office tersely informing him
that he would need to submit to them _her husband 's notarized approval in
writing_ before they would allow him to hire a woman.

To contextualize, this was a few years after a flurry of state ratifications
of the Equal Rights Amendment. A kind of proto-"Mens' Rights Movement" had, by
the mid-1970s, coalesced against the ERA and legal protections for women in
the workplace.

In this state, a fairly prominent state politician had publicly taken the lead
in trying to roll back protections for women (in part by arguing that the ERA
would require public swimming pools to be topless!), and the liberal(ish)
governor was fighting a conservative cultural backlash from constituents. As a
result, political agencies were deluged with a series of _ad hoc_ restrictions
that basically made it impossible to hire or promote women unless they were in
"traditional" roles such as the typing pool. (To his credit, my father fought
through the strictures, using the same kind of cussedness that led him to take
long road trips with African-American fellow military officers through the
Deep South of the 1960s, in which they found out that, black or white, a
military uniform didn't protect you from redneck sheriffs.)

If you think about the sweep of history, four or five decades ago is a _very_
short time, and even though gains for women and minorities have been very real
and tangible, it's all too easy to see how fragile they are. Today, racism and
sexism are generally more tacit than explicit (and often supported by decent
people who simply aren't aware of, but _can_ be educated about, the
superstructural biases of their organizations), but the results are just as
pernicious for those operating on life's higher difficulty settings.

------
seanccox
It's interesting that the author describes an alienation from work that sounds
exceedingly Marxist and appears to be the result of failed bargaining power.
This isn't an article about the pressures of academia, but about how those
pressures mount when universities wield disproportionate power over graduate
students' unions, which reflects the overall defeat of unions in the US. It
will be interesting to see how long and how inhumanely elite, highly qualified
professionals will allow themselves to be treated before there is a collective
response.

~~~
001sky
This is a bizarre comment given that the problem with science is that the
funding model is coming from the government (NIH, NSF) and non-profits (ie,
501c3s).

~~~
seanccox
Bizarre how?

Work is work, regardless of whom the work is done for or their income (taxes
vs. sales). A worker can be as easily exploited by a state entity as by a
corporate one, which is why teachers, firefighters, and police tend to have
unions.

Can you elaborate on the 'bizarreness' of my previous comment?

~~~
humanrebar
I can't speak for 001sky, but I believe you misunderstand the origin of the
problem here.

The means of production in academia is overwhelmingly socialized right now.
This top-down decision making is both what causes funding to stagnate (since
it's up to bureaucratic and political whims) and causes labor issues to fester
(since the number of alternate employers is so low).

With that in mind, a call to unionization seems rather futile. There is no
body to bargain with, just bureaucrats and budgets. What leverage would a
union have against that?

Fixing loopholes in labor laws is overdue, but why unionize and create yet
another special interest group? Workers in all sorts of industries, including
tech, are exempted from labor laws. Why not start a broader movement to fix
those loopholes?

------
thebooktocome
It's getting harder and harder for me to rationalize staying in STEM.

I'm currently ABD, hoping to graduate next spring. My boyfriend of two years
has an amazing job, and I have trouble finding it fair to force him to move
around with me should I bounce from postdoc to postdoc for the next three to
five years, especially when we currently live close to both of our families.

When I started my Ph.D., I was out to my peers because I figured anyone who
was this high up in academia wouldn't care. I chose my adviser carefully, and
we have a good working relationship, but I still haven't come out to him, or
my coauthors. It just seems like too big of a risk when the rest of my career
is on the line.

At the same time I have no idea what I'd do if I left. It's not like my
programming knowledge is solid enough to pass a technical interview. Blerg.

~~~
jowiar
The past few years' trend of "data science" positions make for an awesome
landing ground for people who are trained in science but don't want to do
science anymore. The programming/statistics/analysis/visualization skill set
is broad enough that nobody starts as a star in everything, and the value is
in being able to create value with the skills you bring, and get better
elsewhere.

~~~
HillRat
Oh my God, yes. It is ridiculously hard to find good data analysts, because
companies have recently come to realize just how much data they have, and how
much can be done with it. And professional statisticians aren't always the
right people to throw at the problem! Add machine learning -- where a solid
math foundation is more useful than straight coding knowledge -- into the mix
and you've got a pressing need for mathematicians. Or you can hit the
financial market, where a graduate math background and some F# will land you a
quant position in any major market you care to name.

~~~
rprospero
Where are you looking for data analysts? Coming out of academia, it always
seems strange to me that people can't find data scientists. I could throw a
baseball and hit someone who has a masters in physics, hates their job, has
written production code in at least three languages, and thinks $60k a year is
an ungodly huge sum of money. I would guess that, if you sent a recruiter to
the graduate lounge in any physics building on any campus and mentioned that
you're hiring, you'd get at least three resumes from disillusioned students
who'd love a change of pace. Hell, my resume would have been on that pile if
you'd done it before this month.

------
bovermyer
This is horrible. It's also far from the first time I've heard of things like
this happening.

My dad is a professor. I'm intimately familiar with the politics,
backstabbing, and petty bickering that permeates academia. My dad survives by
being positive, supportive, and staying out of the fray as much as possible.

I made a conscious choice to not enter academia. My degree is a B.A. in
History; the only obvious career choice for that degree is to go through the
hell that is history academia. I opted to fall back on my web development
interests rather than use my degree or the network I'd built up.

Academia is abusive. The current state of things, as evidenced by the linked
article and my own experiences, is holding back the real purpose of academia:
a quest for knowledge.

I will reiterate: academia is abusive.

The problem is so systemic that I don't think there's any way to fix it. We
need a new model, a new community.

------
Theodores
Margaret Thatcher studied chemistry at Oxford and became a proper scientist
working for a proper company before starting her political career. This was
during a time when equal opportunities for women was a controversial idea
rather than a right.

One of Thatcher's more notorious beliefs was that there is no such thing as
society and everyone had to be out for themselves. After reading this article
I can see that she might have got this belief from academia where the culture
is competition rather than collaboration.

~~~
iMark
"And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men
and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except
through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to
look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have
got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no
such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation."

~~~
humanrebar
In other words, entitlements come from somebody else (or many somebodies), not
a magical cornucopia called "society".

That quote is an attempt to humanize the source of government resources.

~~~
pessimizer
>There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an
obligation.

In other words, people who don't work don't eat, except through the charity of
people who have decided that they've earned enough to take care of themselves
and their families.

~~~
humanrebar
More like, if you didn't pay for it, somebody else did.

That is, you can't honestly say you're entitled to anything from "society"
because "society" doesn't own anything. Only living, breathing people own
things. When someone feels entitled to something (note the passive voice),
they are saying that someone else owes them something.

Maybe that's fair, but personifying the argument makes it much more honest,
which I believe is the point of the quote.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Yeah, but Thatcher's capitalist-conservatism is open to the same Marxist
critique as the American version: these whole "private property" and "owned
capital" things are themselves social constructions in the first place, so
claiming that you don't owe other people basic human welfare while society
owes you a property system that benefits you at everyone else's expense _is
itself_ an unfair, uneven entitlement being made by a parasitical minority on
the decent, hardworking majority.

------
al2o3cr
They also don't tell you we're currently significantly overproducing PhDs:

[http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou...](http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2012_07_06/caredit.a1200075)

~~~
1stop
How do you 'over-produce' phds... Society is getting 'too intelligent'? wtf?

~~~
watwut
Of course, when you are dumb as a brick, you will not finish PhD. However,
finishing PhD will not make you "more intelligent". It will make you more
knowledgeable in whatever you finished PhD in and it will make you prepared
for doing science.

And if society needs 5 new highly knowledgeable scientists a year, then
producing 100 new PhD holders a year is over-producing them.

~~~
1stop
you miss my point to argue semantics.

What if the PhD is the ends (in and of itself), not just the means to some
other end?

~~~
mattlutze
It's an academic credential to show an ability to do research, and to present
that research, in an academically sound and rigorous method.

I would be quite surprised if the overflow of PhD holders in science spent
that extra decade of double hours and crappy compensation just to say they did
it, and expect that percentage is in reality negligible.

If more people are granted PhDs per year that want to do research than are
needed, then there are too many produced. It's really that simple.

------
not_paul_graham
This comment is a bit off topic, but one of the ways to keep underrepresented
minorities and women engaged with _computing_ at the undergraduate level is
through constant encouragement. Research [0] from some computing professors
suggests that:

 _" Without encouragement even high ability women and under-represented
minorities were unlikely to persist in computing."_

And this really sucks because one of the professors from this referenced
research has said that CS access in High School is limited to affluent
students (who are mostly white and asian) and the only place in the education
pipeline where the playing field is even is in college, but without
encouragement a lot of women and members of the minority community _lean out_.

The second issue is the fact that these fields are dominated by men and you
can't control everyone's behaviour. Sure we can figure out clever ways to
encourage and engage when this group is most at risk of leaning out, but once
they are already in the field, I'm not sure what can be done on a larger
scale?

[0]
[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2361276.2361304&coll=DL&dl...](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2361276.2361304&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE)

------
DaveWalk
I'm shocked by the sexism evidence in this article, and I respect the author
for removing herself from such a place. I often wonder how this hostility
compares to other institutions, and other labs in the same institution
(forgive the scientist in me). I think it speaks volumes about the unevenness
of higher education across universities, and where each PI can rule his
fiefdom with whatever mercy he chooses to provide.

I believe the pyramid-like structure of academic research combined with the
winner-take-all nature of publishing results is a toxic mix for exploitation,
and sexism would make it all the more unberable. For women in the biosciences,
I strongly suggest tapping into a network of support from other successful
women such as Women in Bio ([http://womeninbio.org/](http://womeninbio.org/))
and AWIS ([http://www.awis.org/](http://www.awis.org/)).

------
jpeg_hero
>and whom I heard joke about “finishing up some chromatography”
(chromatography is a purification technique that usually involves flushing a
quantity of liquid through a long, narrow column) when we paused our
consulting session for a bathroom break.

Is it offensive to make a chemistry joke about taking a piss?

~~~
jforman
That's the one thing you decide to make a comment about?

~~~
rjknight
We were only given two facts about the person in question, and that was one of
them. It stood out to me in the original post, because it highlighted the fact
that what _actually_ upsets people and what a disinterested observer _thinks_
should upset people are different things.

------
Fuxy
Is it just me who doesn't see the sexism? This is the typical experience of
every student regardless of gender, it is messed up but working harder doesn't
defeat the system it validates it you should never let yourself be manipulated
into working more than you wish or can without endangering your health or
passion for the field.

Even if you choose to leave you don't have to give up on your passions.

I for one would never give up chemistry if i really loved it, sure it would be
a lot harder without getting a PHD but who the hell cares I'm doing it for
myself and will do whatever it takes to get what i want without endangering my
health or love for the field.

If it takes me building my own lab and my own company to support my financial
needs then so be it.

~~~
hpriebe
There are two types of sexism at play here:

One is blatant - i.e. sexual harassment, prejudice, and discrimination.

The second is latent - i.e. the "typical experience of every student," as you
put it, impacts people differently depending on a number of things including
their gender. By not taking those individual differences into consideration,
the culture of STEM forces women to work harder to fit in and balance their
gender-specific circumstances.

------
Malarkey73
OK this is a shame... but a quick look at the authors CV (on her webpage)
shows that she graduated in 2007 and has two scientific publications, neither
first author... which is OK for someone who appears to be 2 years into a PhD.

But reading her story I got the impression that she had been ground down or
had been unfairly stepped over for years and was leaving in despair. I got the
impression she chose to do an MS and PhD because she was being unfairly
ignored despite a shining academic record ... but she started them in 2010
just 3 years after graduation.

So it reads like she has made a possibly sensible choice that academia is not
for her. But it also seems graceless given here lack of experience to smear
everyone around her.

~~~
insuffi
Found the academic! Your post comes off as highly judgmental, right from the
start.

Her lack of experience does not mean she cannot have an opinion, and cannot
point out that she's being abused.

If such a line of reasoning is common place in academia, then I'm extremely
happy I didn't pursue further study.

~~~
HillRat
Parenthetically, but recently it seems that academics have formed some kind of
collective Stockholm Syndrome regarding their careers, where a tenure-seeking
goonswarm piles on anyone who points out how toxic academia has become.

Not that the academy ever needed an excuse for its viciousness(to paraphrase
Sayre's law, the politics are so ugly because the stakes are so small), but
these days it seems like many academics compete to prove that they _deserve_
abuse. Philosophy professor? You deserve nothing more than to eat dogfood in
an unheated flat! Grad student? Be _grateful_ for the chance to be sexually
harassed and/or emotionally abused by a credit-grabbing tenured sadist! PhD
candidate? You're a worthless drain on productive society, just like the rest
of us! How _dare_ you try to negotiate a job offer! How _dare_ you point out
that grad programs are human-destroying slaughterhouses of hope!

I've never felt better about my decision not to go back to grad studies. And
I've never felt worse about never feeling better.

------
allendoerfer
I see how being one of the first, who succeeds leading the others is to hard
to do for most people.

What i do not get is, why she does not use her flexibility as a weapon against
the unfair system. She obviously planned to change it, why not attack from
another angle? Why not consider switching to another university or even take
the chance and visit another country. There must be a competent professor in
organic chemistry with more divers graduates somewhere in the world, where she
could have an unfair advantage.

Get a Phd there, gain superpowers, come back and defeat the evil villains.

~~~
wisty
If you work 3 years in IT, and switch jobs, you get a raise. I don't think a
PhD works the same way.

------
fleitz
Academia for the most part sounds horrible, when I found out what string
theorists get paid I was astounded, it was only slightly better than a tech
support job I had 12 years ago.

~~~
jorleif
Ideally you get to work on "what you are interested in", which is the key
appeal. Money-wise it is often a game for suckers.

------
duochrome
I witnessed a lot similar stories in software companies.

~~~
rwallace
The story in software companies is utterly different. The software industry is
a healthy market where if your boss is an asshole, you can say "bugger you,
your loss," and go get a job someplace where the standards are better.
Academia is a deformed industry where funding is inadequate, too many people
are encouraged to try to crowd into the field, and the setup puts all the
bargaining power into the hands of employers at the expense of employees, so
if your boss is an asshole, there's very little you can do about it.

------
watwut
"Diversity is good. This woman is adding to diversity in STEM. Her leaving
decreases diversity. Therefore, she is bad to leave."

That sounds ridiculous.

~~~
jey
Not to me; I parsed it as "she shouldn't leave so that she sets a good example
for other women" or "by leaving, she's not doing enough to support the cause".

~~~
watwut
Staying in job that treats you badly and pay less when you can get better one
is not "setting a good example for other women".

Your second parsing is what I find ridiculous. What is the cause here? Why
should she sacrifice her career and personal happiness to your goal of
diversity?

~~~
makomk
It is ridiculous - and yet you still see arguments like this, or like that
article in the NYT which spun exposing a pyramid scheme as racist because most
of their low-level distributors (read: scam victims) were poor ethnic minority
individuals. Basically, using the facade of fighting for equality to screw
over the very people who're supposedly being helped.

------
rdl
I thought the "you need a PhD to do anything real in chemistry/bio/etc.
research" was well understood. I guess SM + MD would be fine too.

(Chem Eng and industrial chemistry seem fine with an SB, and maybe an
employer-provided SM, but that's not research.)

~~~
doctorcroc
I agree, there are a lot of options in industry with a BS in ChE, but not so
much in Chemistry. You're pretty much expected to get at least a Masters...

~~~
jey
I wonder why this is so different in CS, where it's much more feasible to get
a senior highly-technical job without formal credentials. What's the source of
this cultural difference?

~~~
ksk
(Note: I have assumed you mean CS as in programming)

Because programming is not science. In fact its not even an engineering
discipline from what I can see.

The process is not rigorous enough and few programmers can even hope to
attempt something like formally proving that their code works. We need less
people writing code, not more. And those fewer people should be held to a much
higher standard than 'Bob's cousin once read a book on sharepoint so go ask
him if he can create a cake ordering website for you'

~~~
ggreer
I think the exact opposite is true: Programming is more scientific than most
science. A biologist often spends months experimenting before invalidating a
hypothesis. A programmer's hypotheses are proven wrong dozens of times a day.
By failing so quickly and often, we build mental models of code that closely
correspond to reality.[1]

Also, our experimental apparati are more powerful than anything in the analog
world. We have debuggers that can _stop time_ and examine every aspect of a
running process. No other field gets such tools. In fact, I'm not sure I'd
feel safe if other fields had debuggers. The chemistry-equivalent of a
debugger is molecular nanotech. The physics-equivalent is omnipotence.

1\. A side note: I have a hunch that this perpetual feedback loop of failure
messes with our heads. There's a certain _je ne sais quois_ about many who
write code. It's not just programmers who notice it. A few months ago, I
overheard two finance people talking about me. One said, "Geoff's kind of a
weird guy, don't you think?" To which the other replied, "You haven't met many
programmers, have you?"

Douglas Crockford seems to agree. From
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taaEzHI9xyY#t=26m50s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taaEzHI9xyY#t=26m50s):

 _I think there has to be something seriously wrong with you in order to do
this work. A normal person, once they’ve looked into the abyss, will say, “I’m
done. This is stupid. I’m going to do something else.” But not us, ‘cause
there’s something really wrong with us._

~~~
ksk
>By failing so quickly and often, we build mental models of code that
correspond closely to reality.

Okay, but those mental models are not close to reality since in 'reality' all
those models consistently break in production use. We write code to work on
platforms which run on top of other platforms, etc and each of those platforms
breaks in weird inconsistent ways. The cargo-cult mantras like 'ship often' ,
'move fast, break things' that people love to blog about are all useless here.
(Note that I don't care much for the business aspect. For me, shipping
reliable software is infinitely more valuable than making money shipping junk)
I propose we don't ship _at all_ unless the software can be 'certified' to run
for atleast a year.

>We have debuggers that can stop time and examine every aspect of a running
process.

Its okay if you find that impressive. As someone who ships multithreaded
embedded/systems code which has to run for months/years without crashing I
find most tools to be rubbish for helping me catch the really hard to find
bugs. It does not matter (from my customers POV) that the bug was in the OS or
hardware or whatever.

Maybe that is an 'impossible' standard to hold someone to, but that is exactly
what I'm proposing.

~~~
ForHackernews
There are specific sub-fields of programming (embedded systems, real-time
operating systems, etc.) that focus more on provably-correct programs and
shipping non broken code.

[http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-
stuff](http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff)

> What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never
> crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is
> perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats :
> the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just
> one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17
> errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000
> errors.

~~~
ksk
I've read it before. It is a great article. Those guys are far more smart and
rigorous than what I can hope to be with my own work.

------
untilHellbanned
cue the downvoting of anyone critical of the OP....

------
collyw
She complains a bit about supervisors /PI's /consultants not graduating female
students, without actually specifying how many females had the potential to
graduate with the supervisor. To me this just comes off as some feminist
whining, until you have actually shown that there is some sort of bias. If no
females ever applied to work there, how could he / she graduate any females? I
am guessing that (like CS) chemistry is a fairly male dominated subject.

I am not saying that the sexism doesn't exist, but please demonstrate it
exists properly before complaining about it.

~~~
EC1
Do you realize how silly you sound?

~~~
collyw
I suggest you have a look at this if you think my comment sound silly:

[http://vudlab.com/simpsons/](http://vudlab.com/simpsons/)

