
Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments? - teklaperry
http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/are-women-being-pushed-out-of-engineering-because-men-have-all-the-fun
======
kogepathic
My company has desperately tried to hire female candidates into our
engineering team, which is currently all male.

From the dozens of applications that we got for the position, only about 5%
were female. After interviewing them, they either declined the position, or
weren't able to complete our take home challenge (nothing against these women,
we have lots of guys fail it too!)

So, yeah, I'd love to have some females on our engineering team. Unfortunately
it's really rare for us to have a female applicant, and those we have talked
to thus far haven't made it onto the team.

Please, tech, do something to fix this. I would very much like to have women
on our team, because I went to university with a lot of smart women in
Engineering, and it kills me that now in industry we can't hire any!

~~~
geebee
You may want to consider these posts by Gayle Laakman McDowell (who write
"Cracking the Coding Interview") on possible problems with take-home exams:

[http://www.gayle.com/blog/2013/09/18/companies-who-give-
cand...](http://www.gayle.com/blog/2013/09/18/companies-who-give-candidates-
homework-assignments-knock-it-off)

From her blog post on general interviews and take-homes:

[http://www.gayle.com/blog/2015/6/10/developer-interviews-
are...](http://www.gayle.com/blog/2015/6/10/developer-interviews-are-broken-
and-you-cant-fix-it)

"Be fair to candidates. Balance the demand on their time with the utility you
get from it. If you're giving a longer project, these should largely replace
your interviews. Be aware that this means losing candidates who have other
responsibilities."

(in the context of github and other outside contributions, but applicable in
my opinion to take home exams as well): "You may really struggle with female
developers here. They're more likely to have substantial family
responsibilities (and thus can't do as much out of work)."

~~~
ltorresv
Same experience as OP here both on number of applicants and number of
qualified female applicants.

Take home test results were considerably worse for females too and they had
over five days to complete a simple thirty minute exercise.

There might be responsibilities that get in the way but IMO if you can't find
a slice of time to work on something that came up then I'll be really careful
in considering you for a job.

Shit happens w/o planning and I'd rather have people I can count on.

~~~
thescribe
I agree, the inability to do homework would itself be a little bit of a red
flag for me, beyond the quality of the homework.

~~~
geebee
It may be that the candidate doesn't want to waste time. There's a big
difference between putting in some time on weekends and evenings for an
important work issue that arises, vs doing some homework assignment that might
not even get looked at.

I think this is one of the reasons Ms McDowell suggest doing the take home
project later in the process, only once a candidate is promising, with a
higher pass rate.

If you're using it simply to screen (i.e., if your pass rates are low), and
the take home demands are substantial, you are likely wasting a huge amount of
candidates time, in aggregate. This can legitimately harm a company's
reputation among developers.

------
zeteo
This is a very interesting article because it avoids the usual pitfalls of
demography-based arguments. ("Group G is underrepresented in activity A.
Therefore we should completely overhaul A with policy P, which appears to be
pro-G. If you have any concerns about P it can only mean you're an anti-G
bigot.")

The article instead asks a novel question and leaves solutions open. How do
tasks get divided among peer groups? It seems like people who are vulnerable
to peer pressure (girls in engineering, in the examples here) are likely to
get booted out of tasks they enjoy and relegated to routine chores instead.
It's a testable hypothesis, it opens a new perspective, and if proven true it
lends itself to very reasonable remedies for both employers (e.g. formalize
the task assignment process) and the affected engineers (watch out and prepare
to stand up to it if needed).

------
cbanek
I'm not sure this is actually a gender problem. I'm a woman, who has worked in
big tech. Having done 12+ years, I've seen that you need to work on the right
projects to get noticed and promoted.

On the other side, usually when a manager wants to get rid of someone, they
just give them the crap work. It doesn't matter if they are a man or woman.
It's part of the process of showing "we don't like you, so start looking for a
job."

~~~
zzalpha
_I 'm a woman, who has worked in big tech. Having done 12+ years, I've seen
that you need to work on the right projects to get noticed and promoted._

Have you found you've needed to work harder to get noticed and promoted as
compared to your male counterparts?

As a man, I've certainly observed that among my female co-workers, but that's
as an outsider looking in.

~~~
cbanek
For sure. Although I think again, it's mostly about people in the big
companies fighting over each other for what management has allocated for
raises and promotions. I've seen men duke it out as well.

Overall I would agree it's a higher up-hill climb for women, but I think
getting the crap work means you're generally a less valued employee (most
likely some strong correlation there between being a woman, but not causation
IMHO).

------
utternerd
I question the method of this "study". I don't think it's a leap to say 40
undergrads writing in their journals is anecdote.

~~~
sp332
Not every study is a double-blind random sample with statistical modeling and
error bars.

~~~
buchanaf
Which also means not every study should be used to project its results over an
entire population.

~~~
rquantz
You're maybe non familiar with qualitative research methods? A study like this
can be used to discover the kinds of challenges that women face in engineering
work environments. It would be a mistake to try to make quantitative claims
about these results, but no one is doing that here.

~~~
sp332
I agree with the first part of your comment, but the authors are making
specific suggestions about changes to college programs.

~~~
rquantz
Yes, specific suggestion about qualitative changes to college curricula, based
on qualitative results of a study. That seems reasonable to me. Once these
changes are enacted, of course, they can be subject to quantitative study.

------
mandeepj
I am sharing this experience from my job during 2008. We tried to hire our
first female engineer. She cleared all the interviews. We gave her a tour of
our company and showed her future work location. At the end, she listed down
few reasons and declined to join. I don't remember all the reasons she
mentioned. Would you like to know what I remember? As I cannot forget this
one. She said one of the reasons she can't join is - there is no other female.
I wish someone told her - "you start from somewhere".

~~~
guantanamo_bob
That's a fair point, but in an interview she's also assessing you. If she sees
no other women working there, then it could be a red flag.

From her perspective no other women could signal that all the other women
left, or all other women interviewing noticed something bad that she missed.

~~~
mandeepj
May be I missed mentioning this. For whatever reason, we never had a female
engineer in that company. Either too few applied or whoever applied did not
made it to job offer.

------
hristov
You want to know why women are trying to exit tech? -- read today's dilbert
cartoon (Jun 17). In it Dilbert proudly proclaims that he does not take
vacations and anyone that takes vacations is a loser with a bad career. This
kind of shit is being constantly pushed on engineering employees.

The only people that would willingly go for that are those with autism
spectrum disorders and we all know that autism hits men more often. There some
people that would go for that unwillingly (i.e., grudgingly) in a calculated
bet to sacrifice their health for the sake of better career and better life
later on, but those are also more likely to be men. Most women want to have
children and they know that sacrificing your health affects the health of the
children regardless of how good your career has gotten.

------
Redoubts
> Twenty percent of engineering graduates are women—but only 13 percent of the
> engineering workforce is female.

>It’s not a pipeline issue

Aren't women half the population? That still sounds like a pipeline issue.

~~~
eevilspock
Not necessarily. It could be the experience of the 20% that leads to a
whittling to 13% influences women to never enter the pipeline in the first
place, which means the root problem isn't the pipeline but what lies at the
end of it.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
The problem is it's self-reinforcing. When you have a gender imbalance of
something like 10:1, everything bad that happens in the 1:1 case now happens
ten times as often even if all the men behave exactly the same. A bad
experience that would have occurred to 3.5% of women then occurs to 35%,
assuming exactly identical behavior. And worse than that if the bad actors
become more aggressive for lack of prospects.

Which means you can't solve it there. You're not going to reduce the number of
bad acts to 10% of the general-population level because the good methods of
inhibiting bad acts are going to be widely deployed. You can't use them to get
a relative advantage.

Probably the only way to fix it is over-representation at the start of the
pipeline. Make it so that 75% of high school seniors applying to CS programs
are female so that by the time a third of them drop out the gender balance is
right, and in ten or fifteen years that will no longer be necessary because
then the gender balance at the end of the pipeline is fixed and the female
dropout rate goes down.

~~~
eevilspock
In your first paragraph you're essentially describing the Matthew Effect. It's
one of the strongest arguments against laissez-faire libertarian approaches to
unfair/unnatural inequalities.

Your approach is a more aggressive form of affirmative action.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Affirmative action can't work. It isn't that kind of problem. There is no
percentage of qualified female applicants you can accept that will put 10
women in 50 seats.

You have to change the culture in middle and high schools so that lots more
little girls _want_ to be hackers.

------
MattGrommes
I think using the word 'fun' in this title is demeaning and misleading. Women
aren't looking for fun, they're looking for meaningful, interesting work and
are being denied it. (Obviously not all women, etc. etc.)

I know a very talented woman with more experience and talent than her
teammates who constantly deals with the interesting work being given to men
instead of her. In meetings men look to the other men for opinions instead of
her, even when she's leading the meeting. Partly it's because corporate
environments prefer bluster to quieter expertise but the answer shouldn't be
to tell women to be bigger blowhards than the men in order to get to do
interesting stuff.

~~~
theseatoms
> Partly it's because corporate environments prefer bluster to quieter
> expertise but the answer shouldn't be to tell women to be bigger blowhards
> than the men in order to get to do interesting stuff.

This often seems like a better dimension on which to analyze these "gender in
the workplace" issues. That is, these issues arise more often due to the
typical characteristics and behaviors that members of each gender display and
engage in, rather than something essential about gender in and of itself.

Blowhards versus... well.. what's the opposite of a blowhard? "Introvert"
doesn't seem quite right.

My point is that gender issues are often actually personality type issues.

~~~
pasbesoin
It also affects quieter, sometimes more effective men.

"Speak up!"

It not infrequently reduces to physical posturing. And volume escalation. I
kid you not.

(Not to mention, that these loud and aggressive types often make particularly
open-space workplaces much greater challenges to the concentration of... this
quiet, effective type (me), for one.)

Why does engineering increasingly suck in the U.S. (excluding some of the
Silicon Valley et al. "gifted" enclaves)? Because type-A assholes have taken
over U.S. management. And they shit all over anyone who isn't like them and
isn't the bully they are.

Next up: Do they succeed on the international scene? Or do different cultures
shut them down? Does e.g. a Shenzhen -- where I just got my latest and
greatest fitness tracker for $23 -- manage to give them a big "fuck you" while
combining extant tech into new and compelling products?

~~~
theseatoms
> Next up: Do they succeed on the international scene?

Ha... is there yet a "Godwin/Poe/Betteridge/etc's Law" equivalent for how
quickly HN threads converge towards Trump?

------
balls187
My wife, PhD in engineering, finds interesting and challenging work fun.

Lucky for her, I guess, that she is usually the only one of her level of
expertise at a company because no one else can typically do the work she is
capable of.

------
kmiroslav
I've long thought that the best way to get more women into engineering is for
parents of young girls to realize that they need to buy their daughters more
engineering labs and electronic kits and fewer dolls.

------
snovv_crash
Couldn't this come down more to men being conditioned to be more assertive and
women being conditioned to de-escalate?

~~~
sp332
That wouldn't explain why men were assigned different jobs than women.
_...sexist infrastructure was in place that kept female interns shuffling
papers while their oftentimes less experienced male counterparts had
legitimate “engineering” assignments._

~~~
loco5niner
Actually, it would. Example: "Hey boss, why wasn't I assigned to X project?"
is something someone more assertive would say.

~~~
eevilspock
When women do that they get labeled "bitch".

~~~
loco5niner
Foul language aside, I believe it's possible to make my previously mentioned
assertion in either an offensive, or a non-offensive manner.

------
franciscop
So maybe the difference is in the behavior (learned). As the example suggests,
men try to do what they do aggressively while women are not so aggressive.

For men: understand that others should have fun, understand that women are
more likely to be more passive and overcompensate for it.

For women: let others know that brushing you off is not okay. Many do it
without realizing it and most do it for both other men and women.

------
tdfischer
Women are leaving engineering because men don't want women to have fun. Who
honestly thinks men having fun means women don't want it?

------
scythe
Everybody's criticizing the study but nobody has actually linked to it and the
link isn't in the article. What's up with that (and airline food)?

[http://m.wox.sagepub.com/content/43/2/178](http://m.wox.sagepub.com/content/43/2/178)

The thing that really bugs me isn't that they read undergrad students'
diaries, it's that they didn't quantify their findings in a way which could be
represented in the abstract, which probably means they weren't quantified well
at all. As such we're left with scare quotes (like the diary bits in the
article) and the researchers' impression of their findings.

This isn't an unfixable limitation -- one wonders, how much room is there for
algorithmic natural language processing in the data analysis here?

------
fatdog
Before reaching for explanations to reinforce hackneyed oppression tropes,
there might be a more economic reason women leave engineering and STEM fields
in general.

Engineering is about developing skills, and all technical skills have a
relatively early inflection point of diminishing marginal returns on effort.

Engineering has a high barrier to entry, and women who are in engineering are
necessarily in the 80th percentile of intelligence, so let's say they are
smart. Smart people have a different apprehension of risk than less smart
people.

Roles that involve management, finance, and relationships, have infinite
upside, where the benefits of roles that involve skills tend to have a fairly
well defined peak.

A woman who is ambitious enough to pass the high bar for engineering is
probably smart enough to recognize that for an equal investment of time and
effort, if she switches to management or a non-technical role, she can achieve
a management role with greater perceived stability, a multiple of salary,
bonuses and eventually equity.

Depending on her motivation in regard to having children, a job that requires
skill maintenance requires much more effort if she is caring for a child, but
_with the same limited upside_. The divided commitment means she has to work
some coefficient of effort harder toward the same result. Can she? Of course,
but why would she?

Some women are content with this, but I think women avoid STEM work because,
decades as a code monkey is not the most productive use of their time. If
boring aspies and loud talkers chased women out of jobs, they wouldn't have
stuck with "traditional" jobs that include handling rooms full of 40 screaming
children, caring for violent drug addicts, serving drunks, etc. Outside
academia, women aren't delicate flower petal snowflakes.

The more plausible explanation is that if it were worth it to them, they would
do it. For some reason, engineering is still not worth it, and the answer is
likely more uncomfortable for men than it would be for women.

~~~
dpark
I've seen this argument before and it makes no sense. You're basically arguing
that smart women recognize that engineering is a bad deal. Why do smart men
not recognize the same?

You mention kids, but that's basically a concern in _any_ field in the US,
because FMLA requirements are a joke. Plus many men in engineering (where
parental leave is often much longer than FMLA requirements) take long
paternity leave, and many women choose not to have children anyway.

So what exactly is it about engineering that makes it the smart move for women
to leave the field but not men? Or what is it about women that makes them
recognize that it's the smart move when men don't see it?

I'm not saying that your assertion is strictly wrong, but I am saying it's not
interesting. If women are leaving engineering because of entrenched sexism,
that might well be the "smart move" for them. But this isn't a useful insight
because the underlying problem remains the entrenched sexism.

~~~
fatdog
If engineering were lower status work than a lot of people think it is, it
would provide a more viable explanation than the effect of a conspiracy.

Men in engineering on average aren't as smart as they think they are, and
given the perceived barriers, mostly it is exceptionally smart women go into
engineering.

The underlying problem is that engineering is lower status work than its
participants believe it is. Women in it recognize this and switch to roles
that provide the benefits of equivalent or greater status for an equivalent or
lesser amount of effort.

Sexism does sound more interesting, but reality tends to be less dramatic.

~~~
dpark
I'm pretty sure it's sexist (but maybe in the other direction?) to claim that
men are in general too stupid to realize that they should leave engineering.
"Perceived barriers" also indicate some sort of sexism is at play here. (The
alternative that women are just imagining these barriers seems far-fetched and
equally sexist.)

Perhaps more to the point, this argument only holds up if women who leave
engineering go into more prestigious/higher status fields. Is there any
evidence of that?

------
rarec
Is it also possible that the men are usually being more aggressive towards
getting more interesting work? After all, in their example the girls could've
just told the guys no and came to an agreement instead of just accepting their
lot.

~~~
cowpewter
The problem with that is that once you do it a few times, you get a reputation
as a "bitch". Assertive men are seen as a "leaders", assertive women are seen
as "bitches".

~~~
SeanMGonzalez
As a leader you get criticized. When we're assertive, men are called assholes
and women bitches. I think the difference is men tend not to care what they
think and believe they're right, regardless. This is useful in that it lets
you press on despite the adversity, but detrimental if there really is an
issue. It's good that women listen better and are more aware than men of
peoples' feedback, it makes them a different kind of leader. Perhaps we need
corporate cultures that value listening more. We all have our strengths.

------
punyearthling
I might be over-simplifying, but isn't this the crux of the whole "lean-in"
approach? Being more assertive in the workplace definitely helps you get more
interesting and meaningful work.

------
ColinDabritz
I appreciate insights and research like this. It seems clear to me that these
issues are complex, multi-faceted, and often subtle. If they were obvious
single issues they would be much easier to address.

Figuring out hard to see sources of bias and discrimination make them easier
to address. For my part, I'll try to consider fair distribution of both boring
and fun tasks in groups when breaking down work.

------
LogicFailsMe
My question: Are they exiting engineering because of brogrammers or are they
becoming leaders because of their higher empathy?

------
rambos
Sounds like a problem with leadership.

Failure should result out of poor leadership in the end. On my team I don't
care for your gender, your race, your culture or your social image. I only
care that you can get the job done. If I know you can, then I'll give it to
you. If I think it allows for time to learn, then I'll give it to the ones who
need to grow. If you think you aren't given a chance, then speak up and I'll
give you a shot at something. Poor leaders will deny those opportunities.

But I believe that there is more good leadership as opposed to poor leadership
in our industry, and that articles like this create misguided issues.

Also, it is too easy for anyone to go and find another job; especially if they
have talent. A full on exit means something else, something these articles
haven't shown yet. For example, my last experience with this type of issue was
with a coworker, a gay black male, who decided to quit in the middle of a
project he was leading. He was falling way behind and presenting demos with
bugs & poor functionality. All would've been fine and understandable if it
weren't for the developer misleading the boss and stating that the project was
on track and doing well. After continuous failure our boss eventually gave him
extensions but was obviously was not happy about it. The boss began to put
pressure on and keep a watchful eye over new commits. The senior ultimately
chose not to continue and quit. On his way out he complained of bullying and
not being appreciated. He declared that he was a senoir and should've been
included in more decision making and that other senior developers were treated
with higher favoritism because they got "cooler projects" and he did not. He
was partly right, but only because he had not shown that he could get the work
done, and rather shown quite the opposite. He had never proven his skills when
given the chance. He faltered at all chances and yet still had some type of
delusional self-entitlement. He left and his project was delivered 2 months
late even after his poor code-base was heavily refactored by the next lead. I
recently chatted him to ask how he was doing and he stated that his experience
on our team and with our boss was so negative that he hasn't looked for a new
job yet, and is even considering a career change. I agreed that he should do
what is good for him, but only because I consciously knew he is in no place to
be a senior developer in this industry (but he will never tell you that, and
neither will any journalist trying to make a story out of it).

------
thescribe
As someone who has had the statistically rare opportunity to be the only man
on a software engineering team I can see this explanation reflects my
experience.

I took so many fewer days off than the team average that I tended to get
assigned the most vital work.

------
socrates1998
I think whenever you are a "minority" in anything you run the risk of being
felt left out.

If your group comprises only 20% of something, then it is always going to be
an issue.

The problem with the gender gap is that it will never go away. Prejudice
against a race, ethic group, or religion is a mistake. People are generally
people and we have more in common than we don't.

And as time goes on, I think you will see this type of prejudice disappear.

However, men and women and their differences will be around forever. There are
clearly differences in how we think, act, behave and look. It's up for debate
how much of this is cultural and how much is biological.

So, I don't see this going away, maybe ever.

Is there only 13% female engineers because men are sexist and treat them
poorly? Or is it because men like math, science and engineering more than
women?

I was a high school math teacher. I did everything I could do encourage my
strong female students to go into a STEM field. They were some of my strongest
students, they worked hard, they were ambitious, but they just didn't want to
do it. I have no idea why, but they didn't want to study any more math than
they had to.

On the opposite end, I had a few male students who weren't great (not even as
good as a lot of the female students), yet they went on to study in a STEM
field. Why? Because they really wanted to do it. They were drawn to it.

This is all anecdotal, but there is something there when I saw the same issue
play out in several of my classes. I even brought it up with my female math
teachers and they saw the same problem. Girls just aren't interested in
studying math and science in college at the same rate as boys.

~~~
sp332
[http://i.imgur.com/reUNxYu.png](http://i.imgur.com/reUNxYu.png) Other
engineering fields are not having this much trouble with it.

~~~
bduerst
I think you meant this one -
[http://i.imgur.com/nzEulzf.png](http://i.imgur.com/nzEulzf.png)

It shows the growth trend as typically being positive for all fields, while
computer science is the negative outlier.

~~~
qbrass
Is there a graph that shows absolute numbers instead of percentages?

------
paulus_magnus2
Aren't women just _not entering_ engineering because management is more fun
and pays more??

------
ffn
Or it could be that tons of girls get sold into taking up the tech field at a
young and impressionable age by presidential speeches, books telling them to
"lean in", and articles like this that hint there is some conspiracy of men
out there actively working to damage women and they are needed to right the
wrong.

Then, after spending 4+ years in college studying surface friction losses or
CRDT applications without tombstones, and n+ years in industry trying to debug
someone else's too-clever binary-flag-in-ruby code, a large number of them
(the ones who dreamed of sexist careers like fashion designer, models,
teachers, or most sexist of them all mothers) realize they really don't enjoy
this work, there was never any "painful injustice" that needed their
"sacrifice" to right, and that they've just been tricked by the popular
political agenda. And, after effectively wasting a decade of their lives
chasing careers that means nothing to them, they quit and actually go follow
their dreams (instead of someone else's).

~~~
dbcurtis
Ummm.... no.

At least not with the data points that I have. 1) Former boss, who is now
managing over 100 people at Intel. Smart engineer and totally into the
technology. I loved working for her. 2) Former female employees and coworkers
that are every bit as much into the technology and every bit as capable as
male engineers. 3) Friend and female no-nonsense CEO of startup who has had to
fight jack-asses like you for her entire career and would very quickly plant
her boot up your ass for talking that way. 4) My own daughter, headed off to
MIT this fall, who is very capable of doing the bench work and has been
instructed in no uncertain terms that if some lab partner displays your
attitude and says something like: "Let me do the measurements and you can just
write them down for me, sweetheart." that she is to grab the multi-meter
probes and poke the bastard's eyes out.

Wake up and grow up, dude. The world has changed.

~~~
loco5niner
> The world has changed.

The nature of people has not.

------
sp332
Oh no, they were tricked into a high-paying, in-demand career! What a
disaster!

~~~
dang
We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11923855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11923855)
and marked it off-topic.

------
seany
No. (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)
)

------
eevilspock
Wow, the comments so far are so disappointing. (When I wrote this they are all
completely dismissive of this study.)

~~~
jdp23
The comments on any HN thread about barriers to gender equity in software
engineering illustrate the barriers to gender equity in software engineering.

~~~
jarvic
Comments that take legitimate concerns with the merits of a particular study
and dismiss them as misogyny don't add anything to the discussion either.

~~~
jdp23
Thanks for illustrating my point so nicely :)

For one thing, rather than engaging with what I actually said, you
inaccurately framed it as an accusation of misogyny.

What other ways do you see your comment as a good example of what I was
saying?

How do you see the other comments in the thread as examples?

------
sixhobbits
I just heard another first hand account of a female computer science masters
candidate dropping out shortly before completion due to sexual harassment from
her supervisor and no support on the matter from the University. Interesting
that the study focuses on the "fun" aspect while the journals themselves
highlight unwanted advances and "creepiness" from males. There are many
factors keeping women out of computer science, but rape culture seems to me to
be the most serious and under-addressed one.

~~~
DisposableMike
Unless your first hand account involves an actual rape, please leave the term
'rape culture' to situations involving actual rape. The linked story certainly
didn't invoke any mentions of rapes occurring - why dilute a real problem with
unrelated 'creepiness'?

Secondly, females complaining about 'creepiness' is a difficult problem to
quantify or solve, as females find attention from unattractive males 'creepy'
regardless of their actual intentions.

~~~
dpark
I agree that the term "rape culture" is unhelpful. It's an extreme term that
alienates people. When you equate undesired behavior to rape, you both
trivialize rape and cause people engaging in the undesired behavior to
disregard anything of substance you might say. When you call someone a rapist,
they aren't going to listen to you when you try to explain why hitting on a
21-year-old coworker is inappropriate.

I do not agree with your dismissiveness of female complaints about
"creepiness". Solving "creepiness" is a hard problem, but not because women
are bad at distinguishing between creepy guys and normal guys who happen to be
unattractive. If you repeatedly hit on someone and fail to pick up on the
social cues that say your advances are unwanted, you are a creepy person,
regardless of whether you are unattractive or not. It is not reasonable to
disregard the discomfort this causes the recipient of the unwanted attention.
It is also not reasonable that the recipient should have to be blunt,
abrasive, or combative to make the unwanted attention stop.

~~~
DisposableMike
I completely agree that repeated attempts to ask out a woman who is clearly
not interested in you can come across as creepy, and I'm not really
insinuating that it's not a problem. People that do that will earn their
association with that term.

I can only comment from personal experience, but many of my female friends
will call ANY interaction with an unattractive male 'creepy', regardless of
how polite or nonthreatening that person has been. An ugly male will warn them
that their car tires are low, or that they dropped something, or ask them
about their volunteer organization (that they are promoting via a t-shirt),
and these women will either give a quick response and leave, or give no
response and actually physically flee the scene. Afterwards, they will ALWAYS
say "some creepy guy tried to tell me that my tires were flat", or "some
creeper was trying to find out where I worked. Is he going to be stalking me
in my parking lot?" And I will have been there, observed the same individual,
and say "what's wrong with you? He was just trying to help you out", etc.

I realize that the above is just anecdotal evidence, and that the
normal/typical behavior of women could be completely different in most/all
other situations, but can I really help that my observations shape my
worldview?

~~~
dpark
Well, there are two things to consider here. First, as you called out, your
friends' behavior is anecdotal and may not be representative. Second, there is
a big difference between work colleagues and strangers. If someone at work
does something like complement my shoes, I'm much less likely to see that as
weird/creepy than if a stranger does it.

Certainly, there are interactions that get labelled as "creepy" when they
really shouldn't. But there are also plenty of legitimately creepy people
making others uncomfortable at work.

