
Speaking While Female - mattybrennan
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/opinion/sunday/speaking-while-female.html
======
sosuke
"When female executives spoke more than their peers, both men and women
punished them with 14 percent lower ratings."

I've seen similar comments before and even going as far as saying women were
harder on women than men when moving up in a career. It's deeper and more
complex than men versus women. I've heard my share of anecdotal stories from
women who say the same thing, women are their harshest critique and most
difficult challenge. It seems daunting, how do you even begin to change that.

"He announced to the writers that he was instituting a no-interruption rule
while anyone — male or female — was pitching."

That is excellent, and sad, that we have to go back to grade school etiquette
to let people find a voice. It's true though, if a team member isn't trusted
to have a voice they shouldn't be a part of the conversation. If they are a
part of the conversation they should have the respect of the rest of the team
enough for them to shut up and listen, then respond. Spirit sticks!

~~~
drzaiusapelord
This also opens the door to having one or two self-promoting types control the
conversation by commenting early on and to never stop talking. I find its
helpful to interrupt people sometimes as it helps cut the BS in meetings.

I doubt there's an easy fix here. My take is that there's a larger aspect not
addressed in the article: women simply aren't socialized to be socially
aggressive. The same way women often won't negotiate salary and then we wring
our hands over women's salaries. How about of instead changing everything to
suite these women, we encourage them to be more socially aggressive? Its not
like these things are pleasant or easy for men either. I feel like if I didn't
learn how to act this way, I wouldn't be competitive at my job. The same way I
see loads of shy male techies who never speak up and don't contribute much and
don't end up promoted or appreciated. I think its a skill that can be learned
and things like "oh I'm INTJ, oh I'm a woman, etc" are excuses. Why aren't
some people motivated to learn the proper social skills? As a previous shy
person, I know that this is just a learn-able skill.

I don't think we need to make meetings longer and "nicer" and if we did, it
would just lead to resentment and fleeing of talent to company B where that
talent can thrive without a lot of politically correct baggage holding them
back. Now company A is a bunch of quiet milquetoast types unable to engage in
argumentation and eventually not be competitive against a more aggressive
company.

Lastly, a lot of the more quiet people I've worked with are so because they
just don't have a lot of good ideas. They're bureaucrats and desk jockeys or
are ultrafocused on their little niche of the world and add the same things
over and over regardless of context. Yeah, the TPS reports might be slow to
load, but this isn't the time or place for it, yet the TPS manager has
literally nothing else to add. Maybe those without much to add should be
quiet.

The Harrison Bergeron-ing of all things really isn't the way to go. I really
wish more people understood that.

~~~
DanBC
> Its not like these things are pleasant or easy for men either.

So the system doesn't work for women, nor for minority groups, nor for many
men. Doesn't that suggest that we should be trying to fix the system?

~~~
msandford
Yeah sure, but how? It's not like you can pass a law one day and the next the
values of every person in the country will have changed.

In my experience values drive law more than law drives values. Marijuana has
been illegal for some 40 years (or more!) in the US but that didn't make
everyone think it was bad. And now the fact that so many people are
unconvinced that marijuana is bad is changing the laws and it's being
legalized all across the US.

Critical theory is fine but "trying to fix the system" implies that there is
some method by which the system can be fixed other than "everyone has to just
grow up" since I don't foresee an "everyone must grow up" law being terribly
successful.

EDIT: Let me state that I don't necessarily think the current state of affairs
is OK, just that it's a fairly intractable problem that won't get solved
quickly. I can figure out what's wrong with my car and install replacement
parts. I can figure out what's wrong with society but there aren't any
replacement parts.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Not to mention, the only system I can think of where competition, which is
what we're really talking about, was systematically eliminated was the USSR
and other implementations of communism, which were both economically and
socially a disaster. There's a lot of feel good stuff when we talk about
fixing things, but the "thing" that needs to be fixed is sometimes a feature
and not a bug.

The USSR is also a good example, especially with women's rights. There was a
top-down equality decree without any sort of legitimate social movement. In
practice, women in the USSR, outside of propaganda, were treated poorly and
once the USSR fell, Russians just naturally fell into their deep patriarchal
views which are mainstream there. If anything, women have it worse in modern
Russia because of the USSR's heavy handed idealistic decrees.

------
nostromo
I worry that we're now viewing all of society's interactions through a prism
of demographics and privilege. The prevailing cultural narrative is now that
your demographic is your destiny. Too much success is granted to privilege and
too much failure is blamed on society.

In my formative years, the rule for proper behavior seemed very simple: treat
everyone the same, no matter their demographics or background. Now it seems
there is a different ruleset for every demographic group. It all seems very
retrograde and divisive.

~~~
JulianMorrison
You are articulating the zeitgeist of the culture: equal treatment is enough.

You are failing to accept the _measured fact_ that people who think they are
giving out equal treatment, are _mistaken_.

Privilege blinds you. There are problems you never see, that if you knew about
you'd be all like "Shit, seriously? that really happens? That's awful". But
because you never know, you fill in the blanks with your own privileged
experience and so erase them. There are problems, like this one, where your
eyes believe they have seen equality, but a camera and stopwatch measures
unfair treatment.

You need to stop being so trusting of your own inputs.

Those "different rules for every demographic" are there to (crudely) rebalance
the scales. They aren't really different rules. They are compensating for the
fact that supposed neutrality is skewed hard. Think of them as komi in go.

And the concept of privilege is there to teach you how the real world works,
because unaided, you'll never see it.

~~~
jrells
A nice explanation of privilege. I'm not super fond of the term, since I hear
too many people use it as an attack instead of a conversation starter. Its
hard to convince someone they're wrong, that has to be a delicate
conversation.

Maybe: Do your best to treat everyone equally, and be aware of just how
insanely hard this is for ANY human being to do.

~~~
thirdtruck
I would go with "Try to 'overcompensate' when it comes to repressed groups;
only then will you trick your brain into more genuinely equitable behavior."

It's similar to how, as a rule of thumb, we would do well to "over-document"
our code. We're so close to the source that things that we consider "obvious"
(due to constant exposure) are absolute headscratchers for people reading the
code for the first time.

~~~
smokeyj
Your use of "overcompensate" seems to suggest unequal treatment is necessary
for equality. That's a head scratcher.

For your example to be relevant, shouldn't the programmer reserve her superb
documentation skills for members of repressed groups?

~~~
thirdtruck
jrells made my point for me.

I put "overcompensate" in quotes because our brains are poorly equipped to
judge equity objectively. We have to use hacks like "You cut the cake, and
I'll choose which half is mine" for that reason.

~~~
smokeyj
It seems the topic of privilege often arises to promote empathy in some
roundabout way. I just think empathy is a good concept that stands without the
help of privilege. It's possible that pointing out the disparity in privilege
can guilt empathetic emotions into some -- but this message then becomes
unfairly reserved for those deemed as "privileged". Empathy is good for
everyone. Privileged or not.

~~~
thirdtruck
Nobody's arguing against empathy. And simply saying that privilege is
"unfairly reserved" (without any qualifiers) begs the question.

We're saying that privileged people are often blind to their own privilege and
others' disadvantages. To them (and I'm in this group), and thanks to things
like hedonic adaption, a position of privilege feels like their "natural"
state. To have some of that privilege taken away feels like a loss, even
though it was nothing they earned on their own in the first place. To
illustrate: How often do people hear _heterosexuality_ applied as a pejorative
label?

~~~
smokeyj
> And simply saying that privilege is "unfairly reserved"

I meant the promotion of empathy is being unfairly reserved. Empathy is a
universally virtuous principle. To preach it at cis white males excludes
others from the joys of this enlightenment.

> To them (and I'm in this group)

This is what confuses me. Why is privilege seen as a membership of a group
rather than a behavioral fact about human existence? If you took someone you
considered "under privileged" and gave them "excess privilege", surely they
too would employ "hedonic adaption". Point being, it seems privilege can be
reasoned about in principle without employing group mentality.

> To illustrate: How often do people hear heterosexuality applied as a
> pejorative label?

On the surface we can reason that pejoratives are bad. Beneath that we can
reason that some people are victimized for being different. And beneath that
we can reason that empathizing with others helps us act in more caring ways.

I think the promotion of kind language is valid and good, but I feel like it's
less useful than the promotion of empathy, because the result of empathizing
most likely encompasses the benefits of kind language and much more.

------
pervycreeper
A little meta-observation: across HN discussions of topics like these, I
notice over and over, the same commenters posting abundantly, vociferously,
and stridently in support of what I might loosely term the pro-social-
engineering side of the debate. I worry that this might falsely create an
impression of consensus when there is in fact none, especially considering the
potential social penalties for voicing dissent.

There also seems to be, for males, a certain prestige to espousing this type
of ideology, and it seems to increasingly be being used as a form of social
signalling (not in the least because it is oppressive to males not occupying
the very highest social strata, incurring a real cost for them, hence being a
somewhat honest signal).

Not sure how these two phenomena interact.

~~~
exstudent2
I tried to comment on this (see my original comment below), but it turns out
I've been shadow banned. You can view my comment history here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=exstudent](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=exstudent)

I think that I was banned for what I said backs up your statement and my
original comment.

\--

Very good observation. It's unfortunate that this topic seems to allow for
zero debate. There are quite a few reasons that someone wouldn't want genders
treated different, but even stating that is an invitation to massive down
voting.

I'm still sad we lost meritocracy. I come from a poor background and am a
minority but today I'm a successful developer. I fought my way up the chain
with hard work, self-study and being good at what I do. It's sad that now a
lot of the same people who didn't like that I was advancing are now espousing
the urgent need to eliminate meritocracy (which is really the only thing I can
call the ladder I climbed up) in favor of identity politics.

~~~
vacri
Possibly the reason why you get downvoted is because you say silly things like
"we lost 'meritocracy'", like it's some sort of team sport, or it's a war and
ground was lost to the enemy.

If you want to be treated better, then perhaps not tar everyone who disagrees
with you (or even all feminists) with that brush you're using. You say you're
talented, so perhaps use that talent to focus your commentary appropriately,
rather than engage in silly us vs them 'sides'.

~~~
exstudent2
We (myself and others) did "lose" meritocracy. It was a valid philosophy and
important part of business culture until recently when it's become banned by
hr/pr.

> If you want to be treated better, then perhaps not tar everyone who
> disagrees with you (or even all feminists) with that brush you're using.

I'm just disagreeing. I'm also not complaining about down voting. I was
BANNED; that's the type of reaction I was talking about. I'm not saying we
should ban feminists from discussion. I don't have to agree with people to
allow them to speak their mind. Apparently that doesn't work for non-feminists
though. That's precisely my point.

------
300bps
On its face, it is obvious that there are differences between males and
females at all age groups. I think a core issue is when we try to pretend like
males and females are the same.

In male dominated workplaces, women find it difficult to adapt to how men do
things.

In female dominated schools, boys find it difficult to adapt to how girls do
things. When 98.1% of pre-school and kindergarten teachers are female it's no
surprise that boys are disciplined more often, disciplined more harshly and
test poorer on reading and other academic achievement measures than girls.
Elementary school as a whole isn't much better with 90% of teachers being
female. The first 6 years of each boy's academic life is spent trying to adapt
him to how girls behave and how girls learn.

Failing to adapt in such a manner leads to punishment and recommendations of
holding him back until he is as mature as his younger female peers despite his
academic ability.

------
nmeofthestate
This is interesting - I've noticed that sometimes when I'm with some women
colleagues in a social setting, I'll be completely ignored when making a
comment (and of course, I get slightly butthurt by the experience). I wonder
if this is on some way related to the problem outlined in the article - I'm
being a pushy interrupting man, but because I'm in the minority, I can get
frozen out for a change. Then again, maybe† it's a 'person' thing rather than
a 'gender' thing.

†probably

------
jwmerrill
It's pretty common that in any given group, the subset of people who have good
ideas and the subset of people who are comfortable dominating a group
conversation are not entirely the same.

One strategy that I've found is sometimes helpful that recognizes this fact is
to start group decision making by having everyone write ideas down
independently on sticky notes for, say, 5 minutes. This means every person
present ends up with a physical representation of the fact that they have
ideas, sitting in front of them on the table.

Then, in a second phase, you can put them on a board and organize them,
evaluate them, vote on them, etc. Since the ideas are now sticky notes on a
board, they can be evaluated (more) independently of the person who
articulated them.

The first time I participated in something like this, it felt like
Kindergarten, and I didn't really appreciate it. But after some practice, I've
come to appreciate that it gives every member of a group the chance to
contribute ideas, without having to simultaneously finesse the holding-the-
floor game.

------
rmc
There are anecdotes of trans men (female to male transsexuals) noticing this.
They are the same person mostly and do the same thing, yet they get treated
much better.

There was one trans man who is a scientist and has published under female and
male names. Someone, who didn't know, remarked that he was much better than
his sister.

~~~
kemayo
It'd be interesting to see a blind comparison of his pre/post-transition
articles.

I say this because I could _totally_ see making that transition to male
representing a removal of a big chunk of subconscious stress about how he was
"lying to the world" about his gender by presenting as female. This could
translate into an improvement in the quality of his post-transition work.

Or it could be entirely gender-bias at play.

~~~
gizmo686
I would want to see this experiment repeated trans females who (assuming the
presented hypothesis) should see the inverse relationship.

I suspect a better (and likely cheaper/easier) test is to take the same papers
and present them under a male and female author name.

~~~
rmc
> I would want to see this experiment repeated trans females who (assuming the
> presented hypothesis) should see the inverse relationship.

Yep, there are ancedotes about trans women just as you predict:

> _Joan Roughgarden is a biologist at Stanford who lived and worked as
> Jonathan Roughgarden until her early fifties, and her experience was almost
> the mirror image of Barres’s. In her words, “men are assumed to be competent
> until proven otherwise, whereas a woman is assumed to be incompetent until
> she proves otherwise.” In an interview, Roughgarden also noted that if she
> questioned a mathematical idea, people assumed it was because she didn’t
> understand it._

[http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119239/transgender-
people...](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119239/transgender-people-can-
explain-why-women-dont-advance-work)

> I suspect a better (and likely cheaper/easier) test is to take the same
> papers and present them under a male and female author name.

There have been published scientific papers looking at (sort of) this. Send
out job applications for a lab manager, and randomly assign a male or female
name. Same job application otherwise. Male applications get more job offers
and more money.

[http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-
prognosis/201...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-
prognosis/2012/09/23/study-shows-gender-bias-in-science-is-real-heres-why-it-
matters/)
[http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474](http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474)

We might give out to Creationists who don't want to accept reality about
evolution, but well...

------
hueving
Unfortunately this seems like a bootstrapping issue now. If women are viewed
differently for speaking up, it's because people aren't used to women speaking
up. :(

------
forrestthewoods
I'd love to see these discussions recorded and more objectively graded. I can
not fathom a room full of people in a story meeting that isn't over flowing
with interruptions and shot down ideas.

Now I'm not saying that these issues aren't real. Or that women don't run into
issues that men don't have or have with less frequency. What I am saying is
that these tales are anecdotal and we need more objective assessments if we
have any hope of making any improvements.

------
JulianMorrison
This is why it's important to have things like affirmative action - and in
fact to scale that right down to informal conversations. Your experience of
simple obvious facts is _lying to you_. You'll think a woman is taking more
than her fare share of time when a numeric time measurement would show her
being sidelined (as well as interrupted, ignored, and poached from). So you
need to swallow your feelings of indignation and your naive realism, and
measure.

~~~
ANTSANTS
Ok, you can break the stopwatches, I'm sure that will make people more
comfortable talking to each other.

EDIT, because HN isn't letting me submit new replies: It was hyperbole. I
don't care if it's an actual stopwatch, if you record everything on cassette
and tally up the minutes later, or if you use some hip new cloud SaaS bespoke
locally-grown web-scale meeting management software. When you implement
patronizing means of policing human interaction like this, you stifle
conversation and make people feel like children.

I'm especially aware of this at the moment, because HN is patronizingly
preventing me from making any new posts because I happened to submit some
replies too quickly. A dumb algorithm intended to police flamewars is making
discussions ITT needlessly difficult to read, and preventing me from posting
suggestions for the HN Algolia Search people in another thread. It is just as
annoying and counter-productive to "rate limit" people in real life for the
crime of impassioned discussion.

Another suggestion mentioned in the article is that of anonymously submitting
and "ranking" ideas prior to the meeting. This is literally an "upvote"
mechanism with all the familiar flaws of groupthink and trying to assign
quantitative value to ideas. This works poorly enough on the internet, let
alone in person.

~~~
pdabbadabba
The point is that we need stopwatches (etc.) to make visible social dynamics
that we would not otherwise observe, and then try to make social rules (not
necessarily laws) accordingly. It's folly to simply feel our way along based
on anecdotal experiences which are themselves infected with the biased sought
to be measured (as well as suffering from limited data).

Nobody is proposing that the remedial social rule _itself_ rely on a
stopwatch.

------
strickjb9
My theory is that gender inequality (less women than men, or vice versa) will
cause the minority gender to have less of a say.

It seems supported by the article's last example:

"Professor Burris and his colleagues studied a credit union where women made
up 74 percent of supervisors and 84 percent of front-line employees. Sure
enough, when women spoke up there, they were more likely to be heard THAN
men."

------
o0-0o
Speaking as a man, I would prefer that we use the term woman. As in, "Speaking
as a Woman". The term female is without species. Female giraffe? Female water
buffalo? Female human!

~~~
wxs
They're referencing the structure of the phrase "Driving While Black". It gets
the feeling of oppression across in 3 words in a way that "Speaking as a
Woman" would not.

------
Jimmy
This really doesn't match my experience. Women at my workplace aren't afraid
to speak up at all. It helps that about half of our middle management roles
are occupied by women.

~~~
bbaumgar
It seems your experience actually does matches up with the author's thesis. As
in the credit union with 74% female supervisors, companies with higher female
makeup purportedly had less difference in the way female and males were
perceived when they spoke up.

~~~
Jimmy
I suppose that will teach me to read articles before I comment, then. :)

------
lists
I've seen this go down in a critical theory graduate seminar where all three
of the women in the seminar would routinely be opposed/interrupted by their
male peers to the point that they just had to call it out.

------
evo_9
Maybe we need to create conference rooms where everyone is in closed off
little rooms and everyone speaks anonymously? Otherwise, I don't know how we
easily combat this seemingly deep-rooted bias.

------
dominotw
Whenever I read anything like this I always wonder where does the society end
and individual begin? Is such a distinction necessary or even valid?

------
Shorel
I think this 'please hold the baton in order to speak' thing will benefit
nerds and other quiet people, not only women.

------
sighsigh
There was this one time I was watched a whole bunch of old media agitprop
reciting various tropes on how things should be and when I did what TV told me
to do, people responded negatively! It doesn't matter if those people were
also exposed to the same trope and became skeptical of it based on their own
experience... or if my imitation of the trope was ham fisted... I'M THE
SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE HERE. How dare others have opinions of how my favorite trope
should work!

TV would never lie to me :^(

------
brador
Wait. Why did the women allow the male to run with their idea? Why didn't they
continue and run with it themselves? Are we supposed to sit patiently watching
the gears turn until person A thinks of the idea themselves?

It's a meeting. Speak up, run with ideas, contribute. If you're gonna be
mousey you're gonna get run over. Male or female.

~~~
jmagoon
The women didn't "allow" anything. They began to speak and their ideas were
finished by men, with the rest of the meeting nodding along with them. When
there's a female minority and an implicit cultural approval for this type of
behavior, it's more than just 'pull yourself up by your ideological
bootstraps'. It's easy to say "just do it" when you've never been in an
environment that subtly discounts your contributions, no matter how good they
are.

It's so irritating that not being gregarious is called mousey, because it's
definitely being stated as a knock. As if people can't make excellent
contributions without yelling the loudest.

I'm not a woman, and I'm not a minority, but being around my wife (an
extremely intelligent, introverted engineer), it's easy to watch the implicit
privilege that men use when relating to her. It's easy for them to steal her
ideas. She is constantly, constantly challenged by every young man with
something to prove, no matter how right she is, no matter how much experience
she has in the matter ("Are you sure? Why don't we do it _this_ way?"). It's
downright exhausting. If she calls someone out on it, men think of her as "a
bitch". If I point it out to them, they often say things like, "Oh wow, I
didn't realize I was doing that". Or, they say something defensive like, "Why
can't she stand up for herself?"

Sorry for the rant, but this logic is so defeating for actually creating a
positive workplace that encourages contributions from everyone, not just 24
year old Messiah-in-training.

~~~
brador
In a meeting time is limited. Are you suggesting everyone wait around while
she finishes her thought when another person could say it quicker?

What your wife needs is not someone white knighting for her (you or this
article). She needs to take lessons in assertiveness to build her confidence
so she can get her views across and not be ignored from basics like a weak
voice or poor posture. It's not rocket science and it's not a huge male
conspiracy against women.

What is true is women are less likely to be assertive, in life and in the
workplace. And that can be fixed. It just won't be easy.

~~~
rgbrenner
_Are you suggesting everyone wait around while she finishes her thought when
another person could say it quicker? ... She needs to take lessons in
assertiveness to build her confidence so she can get her views across and not
be ignored from basics like a weak voice or poor posture_

How could you possibly know that from what he posted? You're introducing your
own conception of her, and attributing things to her that were no where in his
post. Her lack of assertiveness, confidence, weak voice, poor posture, etc
were created purely in your mind.

~~~
brador
She's not speaking up for herself. That's pretty much the definition of lack
of assertiveness.

Lack of confidence, weak voice, poor posture are highly likely based on my
experiences with people who lack assertiveness.

I'm not saying I'm right, but it's highly unlikely I'm wrong.

