
The most alienating thing that happened to me as a female engineer - warrenmar
http://niniane.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-most-alienating-thing-that-ever.html
======
King-Aaron
I really don't want to make this sound like I'm diminishing OP's experience,
because from the sounds of that the experience sounded awful. However I've
experienced pretty much identical treatment over a very similar thing (music)
and I'm a male software dev. Wanting to listen to something quiet because the
loud commercial radio/adverts that always run are pretty distracting. I can
completely relate to her experience as I get similar comments.

The all-male t-shirts, the work mentor being creepy, things like that are
shocking to hear and ruffles my feathers as someone who was raised with very
strong morals by my parents. However I tend to feel that bullying (on a more
basic level) will happen to anyone if you give a group of people (in an
stablished social clique) the chance.

I'd like to say though (if the blog OP is on here), massive effort sticking
with the industry and not letting it get the better of you, good job.

~~~
ap3
Do they play the radio soneveryone can hear?

That is annoying and distracting - I used to do that myself at my previous
work and never thought it was annoying and distracting until someone pointed
it out to me.

------
dimgl
This happens to both females and males. I've worked in toxic environments
where normal things I do and like are ridiculed. I've had the COO of a company
tell me that "my girlfriend sounds like my hand".

I've also worked in environments where everyone respects each other and their
differences. This may have been happening simply because you were working with
toxic people who simply didn't like you, and less because you were a female.

------
soft_dev_person
As a male who hates sports, I can relate. However, it has nothing to do with
gender.

The inappropriate touching in car event was more worrying, I think.

~~~
riffraff
I thought the same on first reading.

But now I think the author felt the first more strongly because it made her
feel "not even worth consideration" rather than "merely" objectified, which
presumably is something she might have more familiarity/ability to cope with.

~~~
anc84
Still nothing to do with gender.

~~~
patall
That is not the point. She is complaining that they were 5 to 10 person
watching a TV show, another guy comes in and wants to change the channel, not
even considering asking the other people why they watched something different
that day. Not about gender, not about sports, just shows total social
incompetence.

~~~
anc84
It is the main point, see the title: _The most alienating thing that ever
happened to me, as a female engineer_

------
ZeroGravitas
You know it's bad when that creepy story about the car is just thrown in as an
extra, with no fanfare whatsoever.

~~~
King-Aaron
I feel that this part of the story might not be exclusive to work situations
for a lot of women. But that was particularly creepy sounding compared to the
TV.

------
nikki-9696
I'm a girl, and let me just say that if someone wanted to watch Friends, I'd
laugh at them too. Have we considered that the show is just stupid and
everyone there knew it except OP? Look, there's no accounting for taste, but
if I watch something that no one else on my team watches, but they all watch
something else, I would not consider that to be alienating. I also wouldn't
make them change the channel. I would, however, make fun of baseball the
entire time I was sitting there watching it, because I hate it, and all my co-
workers will tell you how much I enjoy making fun of sports. They are never
offended by this. They find it amusing. And we all get along just fine.

------
marvel_boy
"If I had walked in, and baseball was showing on the television, it would be
completely unthinkable for me to grab the remote and change it to Friends. If
I had done that, the outcry would've been thundering. People would question my
social skills."

Good point. By the way, what a bunch of asholes!

~~~
emsy
I'm not sure whether you're serious or ironic. This is a social dynamic I've
witnessed several times in my life, in male-only and mixed-gender groups. When
someone acts against the groups collective will, he or she faces an "outcry".
I don't condone this, but to call this out as a gender or diversity issue
seems to be a bit of a stretch.

~~~
asQuirreL
I feel like it _is_ a diversity issue, albeit not of the usual kind, and it is
not exclusive to groups whose identity is strongly linked to gender.

All groups will try and preserve their own identity, because if they don't,
they stop existing. I'm merely making an observation here, not condoning the
actions of groups. This kind of behaviour may seem harmless in some
situations, but then also fuels some of the worst instances of discrimination
humanity has seen.

~~~
emsy
I see where you're coming from but I disagree with the argument, because it
only holds up under the assumption that they acted this way mainly to preserve
the group identity. The simpler explanation is that the group made a
democratic choice and she was unhappy with thre result.

~~~
asQuirreL
You are right, it is just democracy at work, but I'm not sure that that is
different from a group trying preserve its identity.

The interesting thing is that most people assume that democracy is inclusive,
because everybody has a voice, but in this case, the inclusive thing to do
would have been to watch something that only one person wanted to watch, to
make them as a minority, comfortable, whereas the democratic thing to do is to
ignore the opinion of the minority as not relevant to the views of the group.

Where the discussion becomes difficult, I guess, is when the dividing line
between majority and minority coincides with that of privileged (PS. I hate
what this word has come to mean) and unprivileged.

~~~
emsy
I agree with you on this. My point was that we should be charitable in our
judgement of the group, especially if we lack other perspectives. Someone from
the group might say she always wanted to get her will and alienated herself.
We can't know. That's the problem with anecdotes.

Regardless, a small group of people has more room for compromise than a
democratic state, and as I said, I don't condone the way these kind of
situations are usually handled.

------
greenleafjacob
What does the TV story have to do with gender? I don't think gender adds
anything. It would be no less rude if they were all die hard Firefly fans and
watched re-runs every night, and author changed it to baseball.

I won't defend the other anecdotes though.

------
zer0defex
How does she know gender actually had anything to do with the difficulties she
was/is experiencing? Sounds like the author may be what the book "Leadership &
Self-Deception" terms as "being in the box", which is to say her own
behavior/attitude is doing way more to manifest these scenarios, much more
than anything her co-workers probably have done. Something about this article
just seems off... 90% of it complaining about not getting to watch a certain
TV show at work (could she not go to her own desk and watch whatever struck
her fancy?), while the much clearer example of sexual harassment in the car is
tacked on the end as little more than an afterthought...

Then again, she comes across as rather passive, so I wouldn't be surprised if
she's also uncomfortable with confrontation, so maybe this is her way of
passive aggressively sticking it to the person in the car story? Who knows..

My advice: find a female power executive to serve as a mentor / career coach
for a few months. Ideally a real hard-ass that pulls no punches when it comes
to getting shit done, knows her shit and gives zero fucks whether an employee
is male, female, penguin, or alien provided the work is done right, done well,
and delivered on-schedule and most importantly, has no qualms about laying
down the wrath of god on any employees slacking off and/or delivering shit
quality work.

Seeing someone like that in action up-close and personal, while also
benefiting from their input and guidance on her own situations encountered
would I think pay huge dividends toward future career growth and happiness.

------
nicolas_t
Well, I'm male and I've been in the same exact situation multiple times. I do
not like sports. I find watching sports on tv to be an absolute boring waste
of time.

Try suggesting in Europe, that you don't want to watch a soccer match and
instead would like to watch Friends (which I like incidentally). It'll be met
with ridicule.

If there's something on the tv and soccer match is coming, you can be 100%
sure that people will change it to the soccer game without even asking.

I don't think that's a question of sexism, it's just a question of shared
culture and the fact that most people cannot imagine that there are people
that do not like soccer. For some people, someone not liking soccer is as
shocking as someone declaring himself an atheist during the times of the
inquisition.

There are a lot of problems for women in tech but I think that in the case of
sports, it's a behavior that touches equally men and women who do not like
sports.

~~~
namaemuta
Specially now with the Eurocup. Try to get into a bar an propose to change the
channel to something else.

------
x0
Christ there's some ugly comments down the bottom of this thread. I always
thought Hacker News was a bit more professional than reddit, now it seems the
only difference is the comments calling her a "feminist", "c--t", "retard" are
downvoted below threshold here.

~~~
Kristine1975
That is a big difference though: It shows that these comments are not welcome
on HN.

------
crimsonalucard
She's just being treated as a bro. Dudes are just immature like that. The
touching is different though but I won't address that. Anyway to give my
explanation more color, let me tell you about one of my "bro" friends.

We go to college together and we always make fun of each other for our
differing tastes in TV shows. He likes pokemon, which I think is for little
kids or adults with developmental problems while I like game of thrones, which
he thinks is a show only liked by people who enjoy watching penises on
television as the show periodically flashes one into your face for no reason.
We make fun of each other about this all the time because we're bros, in
manspeak this means we're just close friends.

I've had worse pranks played on me by said bro. One day I left my computer
unattended and unlocked. He took control of my computer, changed the
background to a giant wet penis; Took a screenshot of the page; made that
screenshot the background then proceeded to hide all the icons and menu bars
on my desktop. The end result was essentially what appeared to be a frozen
computer screen with the background replaced by a huge penis. I thought it was
some crazy virus as even restarting my computer didn't work. I spent the next
ten minutes trying to debug the situation all the while staring at a giant
penis. Funniest thing ever, we both got a good laugh out of it.

I mean this prank could be interpreted as inappropriate depending on the
situation and person, but the point is neither me nor my friend would be
willing to treat each other so "inappropriately" if we didn't feel close.

So in short, both sides have made social errors. Their actions were immature
and they failed take into regard your discomfort as a woman, while the OP
misinterpreted their intentions as sexist.

The resolution to this situation is easy. Ask him to stop... or join in on the
fun. Openly declare their tastes in baseball as stupid and mindless. How could
any sport be more boring? Everyone would've definitely got a good laugh if you
were the one who pulled off that remote control prank.

You must also keep in mind that you are still in a situation where majority
rules and you must honor that situation as you're the only person who wants to
watch friends, it would be disproportionately unfair if they catered to your
tastes instead of the majority.

Whatever the OP chooses to do I honestly believe that her coworkers actions
were not intentionally discriminatory.

------
sandisk5
If they all arrived at the same time each night (dinner) then new entrants may
simply think that the others just got there and simply haven't changed the
channel to the normal channel yet, perhaps they didn't see the remote or were
in a conversation when they entered, so by grabbing the remote and changing
the channel to the normal program people aren't disrespecting the other people
who really aren't watching the program but are simply laughing at the most
recent entrants.

Also some seat belts are non-obvious, especially in a fancy sports car, and
people help other people with seat belts all the time. Perhaps the driver has
given a lot of people rides in his fancy car and has seen many people struggle
with it. Perhaps x seconds didn't seem long to her but to him, who knows how
it works, it seemed like she was having a problem.

------
nabla9
Imagine the same situation in UK, you are foreigner and everybody is watching
cricket.

Cultural alienation is not somebody's fault. It happens when you are minority
in a group that has different culture. In these kind of situations basic
politeness and hospitality would lessen the effect. The solution is not to
watch Friends sometimes to distribute boredom more equally.

People who have been born in monoculture are not usually aware of the work
needed to have fun and inclusive social event. Outside the work those who are
alienated leave. The "mandatory fun" in workplace may need work from the host
to be inclusive.

------
greybox
I think the way the community has reacted to this post is pretty disgusting
and I think says way more than the actual post does about sexism in
engineering

~~~
DanBC
Yes, these kinds of threads are almost always predictably terrible.

------
joe563323
Might be it hurt her genuinely.

------
namaemuta
So... has she even considered that her question was silly because everybody
assumed that everybody can change the channel without asking it? like when an
adult in a meeting of adults ask for permission to go to the toilet. That
usually makes people laugh because it's a child thing.

And about Mike, the one that changed the channel for the joke, has she thought
that he was well known for doing that kind of jokes and because of it he was
confident doing them and people didn't mind at all?

Maybe OP got personal because of her own insecurities and didn't even bother
to consider that her interpretation was wrong.

------
beemboy
Lots of males here providing shameful confirmation of the same thoughtless
behavior the OP is calling out (finally after all these years). By focusing on
specifics most commenters here seen to be missing the point that subtle
marginalizing behaviors cause harm in unseen ways.

~~~
adwn
> _Lots of males here providing shameful confirmation of the same thoughtless
> behavior the OP is calling out (finally after all these years)._

How do you know they are males? Do you think that the main anecdote in the
linked article is about sexism, and if so, why?

------
adwn
To summarize: Most of the team wants to watch progam A; watching program A
during dinner is an established team ritual; author wants to change channel to
program B, which is "met with incredulity and laughter". Some time later,
program B is running; team members come in and want to change the channel to
program A. And that latter event is the most alienating during her time at
Microsoft.

Wat.

It gets better: Because program A is baseball, and program B is Friends, and
since we all know that baseball is a man's program, and Friends is a woman's
program, this is really about gender discrimination and sexism.

> _People would question my social skills._

I really do.

~~~
zasz
The implication is that the rest of the team felt comfortable enough in that
environment that they could change the channel without even having to ask,
while OP was loudly ridiculed for wanting to change the channel in a more
polite way. The rest of the team felt comfortable with the team dynamic in a
way that OP did not, and by ridiculing her, they made it clear that her
desires were less important than theirs, thus proving that her sense of
discomfort was justified.

To put it as clearly and simply as possible, as if we were examining the
results of a double-blind clinical trial:

OP attempts to change the channel. OP is loudly ridiculed in an unpleasant
way.

Rando teammate changes the channel. Everyone thinks it's a really funny joke.

What changed? Just the OP. It's pretty obvious the team doesn't like her the
way it likes the rest of its members. Is this necessarily an example of
sexism, like the seat-belt incident that OP also references? Not necessarily,
but it's certainly quite alienating.

Also, while I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that there is a hierarchy of
things that are better and things that are worse, how impactful an event is,
is ultimately subjective and often not under any conscious control. The time I
was mugged in San Francisco honestly made much less of an impression than the
time my coworker said he hated all of us and refused to go out for lunch.

~~~
Jommi
Yep, it has more to do with team dynamics and authority levels than anything
related to sexism.

It's a simple fact that usually in groups the majority rules. The majority
wanted to watch baseball, not Friends.

~~~
zasz
Sure, but you can be a majority that's a tyranny, or a majority that
occasionally is more accommodating.

~~~
Jommi
Yup, and it sucks and I would personally not be part of that kind of circle.
Ofcourse in a work environment this is hard to avoid. That's why "Culture fit"
is stressed so much in recruiting.

~~~
marvin
This is unrelated, but I don't really get why one would want to watch TV with
colleagues. It's not like you're productive when doing it. The requirement for
the infamous "culture fit" is lower if you don't require that all coworkers
are 100% socially compatible with each other. Then again, I'm from Europe.

------
mgraczyk
Wow, if that's the most alienating experience she has had, I am envious. As a
male engineer who does not like sports, I've had far worse experiences
involving outright ridicule when I asked to watch something besides a game.

I didn't blog about it though, because I have real problems far more vexing
than not having 100% compatibility with my coworkers.

~~~
fleitz
That's because we don't tolerate dissent in the ranks, you either conform, or
you get tough enough to stop taking other people's shit.

Like the downvotes I will take for this post, I'd rather speak my mind than
have more 1 bits on some server somewhere.

~~~
scrollaway
With 2649 days on HN, how do you not realize that the only reason someone
would downvote your post is because you're pre-empting downvotes?

That one addition to your post turned it into a passive-aggressive rant. Well
done speaking your mind, I guess?

~~~
spacemanmatt
That's not true. People dv here for pretty petty reasons all the time.

~~~
Jommi
and how do you know that..?

------
sklogic
Does it matter at all if she's a female? She is just a minority in terms of
preferences. If a male wanted to watch, say, football while the rest of the
crowd settled on a baseball, things would not have been any different.

In the aircon control wars majority always wins, so why would it be different
with a TV?

------
goldenkey
What else is to be expected when working with people who have next to no
social skills in organizations that have next to no soul?

------
sedlich
Why is it so difficult to have the empathy to say: ok every n'th day we switch
to program B for her? Because too many mens clubs lack empathy and respect.
It's that dead simple. (I am male).

~~~
elevenfist
nothing to do with "mens clubs," if you were a guy who didn't like baseball I
wouldn't be surprised if these guys treated you the same way.

Source: That was me.

~~~
sedlich
You might be right. But I argue that this is often highly more significant in
n _men-1women then n_ men-1men. Havn't there been studies here in hackernews
or cited by Cherly Sandbergs book to prove this?!

------
Swizec
> If I had walked in, and baseball was showing on the television, it would be
> completely unthinkable for me to grab the remote and change it to Friends.

Why?

I wonder if she ever tried, or just assumed it was unthinkable. I suspect it
was less unthinkable than she thinks it was. From the rest of the story, it
sounds like not only was it thinkable for people to try to change the channel,
it was expected even. Otherwise the joke wouldn't work.

As people on imgur like to say: Do Thing. Maintain eye contact. Assert
dominance.

You have to establish boundaries. If people are doing shit you don't want them
to, stop them. As a general rule, people will treat you the way you let them
treat you.

edit: I wonder how many people downvoting me are assuming I write this as a
member of The In-Group. Okay I _am_ a guy, but that's where the ingroupness
stops for various reasons that would take a while to list.

~~~
patates
> Assert dominance

IMO this is discrimination. You may get away with suggesting a specific role,
maybe a negotiator, would need to have/develop this ability. As a very
accepting and peaceful guy, I really feel bad (insecure, even) when people
assert that I need to be dominant to be successful.

BTW, I'm not trying to explain why you are being down-voted as I didn't,
wouldn't (and also can't) down-vote you.

~~~
Swizec
It's tongue-in-cheek.

You don't have to be dominant to be successful. But you can't be a pushover.

If something bothers you, you _have to_ speak up. Immediately and decisively.
The first time it happens. Not when it becomes the established social norm.

If you speak up, normal mature people will say something like "Oh, sorry. I
didn't realize that bothered you. I'll be more careful.". They might push
back, if they think you're pushing too far or too hard because of whatever
pre-existing beliefs.

But it's a dynamic balance. Both sides have to push and pull. Without active
participation from everyone, teams become imbalanced and less effective.

~~~
patates
This makes much more sense, thank you for your explanation.

