"You’re victimising me when you do that. You’re indicating that it’s most likely I need special, extra support. Just because I’m female."
This is exactly how I felt during my Microsoft internship in 1998 when the internal women's organization, HOPPERS, decided to change their successful "intern buddy" program from opt-in to opt-out. (Well, not really opt-out, because until I got upset with them about it they clearly never considered that anyone might want to opt out.) Despite being only one of two women, both interns, on a team of 40 people, I never felt anything other than welcomed by my team and never felt singled out or harassed because of my gender. As such, I felt quite insulted by the assumption that I needed an "intern buddy" just because I'm a woman in a male-dominated field. A long email thread with the head of the organization ensued, and in the end I did not have the intern buddy that I never asked for in the first place.
I wholeheartedly support the self-organization of underrepresented groups to create safe spaces. However, when participation in such efforts is compelled by things like special awards for members of underrepresented groups in tech or being assigned an "intern buddy" without your knowledge or consent just because you are a member of an underrepresented group, that's not a safe space. That's a ghetto.
Thank you for helping me find the right word to describe what most of these diversity, minority outreach programs look like -- ghettoization. It seems that many are more interested in highlighting the presence of minorities in their midst than actually rethinking their conduct. It makes most of the initiatives and discussions here on HN look like a sham.
If I were an affected minority (I am a minority but not in any of the ways that are currently fashionable) I would not want to be highlighted because I am a minority. That is treating people like they are animals in a zoo. What I would want to see is people like me quietly working in their field and really, truly appearing (and being) equal to their peers.
Which is amazing, in a way, that that even needs to be specified. That the majority is so incapable of empathizing with their peers and it seems the only visible response is to highlight "diversity" by pointing to diversity hires. Gag -- WASPs :/
> I would not want to be highlighted because I am a minority.
I feel the exact same way. Unfortunately, my opinion is often dismissed on this issue because I'm half white or my minority representation isn't underrepresented enough.
Meanwhile many people in tech, specifically women and URMs, who have spent so much time focusing on them being a women or URM in tech are now upset that they're being viewed as just that.
I was on a United flight a year or two ago, and before the flight they showed a video that was all female United employees talking about how United cared about women, and how women at United were pilots, and women were maintenance people, and how women made United work!
If I had a daughter I wouldn't want her to see that video. I think I would literally cover her eyes and ears. Sure, it's helpful for a little girl to know that there are female pilots. But I think that a kid seeing that kind of propaganda just helps build a complex for thinking women are less than men and need to make videos like that.
I'm a short guy, within the bottom few percentile of male height in the US. Being this short has been highly correlated with decreased wages and significant decreases in attractiveness. Can you imagine a video with a lot of short people saying "X company values short people. You short people can do whatever you want. Us short people are strong together. See, short people can become executives!" Makes me sick just thinking about it.
How do any women at all support this kind of thing?
Her follow up sentence... "You’re also indicating that “this is a women’s problem, best solved by women” but that deepens the divide, creating an “us” and a “them”. Just based on gender…" I also find just as provocative. She's flipping the narrative very effectively with these short punchy hard to miss articulations. I remember feeling taken for granted with some other special help recruitment Facebook dished out for seemingly unrepresented groups. It was totally not my thing and turned out to sour my impression of the company.
I don't quite understand how a corporate policy like an "intern buddy" can be compared to a ghetto or even how it remotely hurts you in the same way that an unspoken "boys club" office setting would. A corporate policy like that is pretty clearly an impersonal management-type fluff program that does not solve every problem that could possibly arise from sexism, but that serves a resource for a few people desperately in need of it (and pretending that there are not people desperately in need of it is part of the problem). Furthermore, refusing to participate in a program that could give you connections and special insight out of some misguided principle that we must maintain the appearance that everyone is treated equally is very strange to me. While you were refusing assistance out of principle, your colleagues were offered opportunities, encouraged into management, etc. at varying rates based on process that can in no way be described as meritocratic.
Honestly, why take things like that personally? Why liken it to a ghetto? Is your pride really so hurt that someone wanted to help you out around the office that you refuse to believe that you could have learned anything useful from it? You can't even come out of it with another friend, a future business contact, an interpersonal skill, deeper knowledge of a workplace tool? It's great if some people don't think they need help overcoming sexist barriers in the office, some people do. No need to over-complicate it.
> Honestly, why take things like that personally? Why liken it to a ghetto?
Man, it's beyond irritating to see this kind "what's the big deal? just chill" type rhetoric used in this context. Particularly because it's a hard-fought (and ongoing) battle to stop this _same exact logic_ from being used to deflate complaints about what it's like for underrepresented minorities in the workplace.
The argument here was that being offered assistance is personally insulting. In this case, I think the "same exact logic" holds. Yes, the line of questioning is a bit of an abrasive way of putting someone on the defensive, but I wanted to have a clear and direct answer for why the ghetto comparison held.
My point is that all the arguments used to rebut this line of thinking when applied to more conventional complaints from underrepresented people apply just as well here. If "the same exact logic" holds, what exactly makes the same exact rebuttals magically invalid?
Usually it's something like "you can't minimize someone else's experience if they're expressing that it's affecting their work life", "clearly there's a problem since they are underrepresented", etc.
They're usually pretty unfalsifiable, but they're not unreasonable, and the line of acceptable discourse has been firmly drawn to exclude questioning them.
I'm skeptical that you're actually unaware of these rebuttals: if I said to someone something like "what's the big deal, who cares that you're the only Latina in this company, the only one making a big deal out of it is you", I'm sure these rebuttals would readily come to mind. If not because you believe them, then at least because they're so ubiquitous.
Deciding that they're appropriate just because you disagree with the specific policy being criticized is kind of weaselly.
I wish more people were like you. If everyone tried to assume the best of others until proven otherwise instead of assuming the worst we would all be much happier as a group
Sure, but that buddy system sure sounds a lot like pushing someone in a wheelchair, them asking you to stop, and you going on regardless. Unwanted help is unwanted.
"why take things personally?" The same could probably be asked of many of the "sexist barriers" you allude to. Intentions And pragmatism have never been relevant with regards to inclusivity; why should they now be? Because the offender has the right politics?
That's a confusing reaction to what I said and what I'm arguing against.
Edit: For the record, I'm a bisexual Mexican woman. Of course there are times when I perceive people as holding my hand too much and I know it can feel condescending. When I reflect on it, though, no, it's not the same brand of condescension that made my middle school teacher tell me I had no future in math. There's something strange about victimizing yourself out of fear that people are victimizing you.
An internship program for women at Microsoft isn't a ghetto; it can only come from a place of extreme privilege and ignorance to believe so.
Aren't your posts here telling the GP how important and useful a specific group for females is despite them explaining why they didn't want want to be a part of it a form of mansplaining?
Why are you assuming that I'm a man? Either way, these kinds of programs are useful for certain people and there are lots of other articles in defense of them. Just because one person didn't want to participate doesn't mean that other people aren't happy that they exist.
Do you believe decisions like this are randomly made?
> "Why not offer everyone an 'intern buddy'"
Female interns could have complained about sexual harassment, female interns could have had lower rates of accepting return offers, etc.
> "Also, why change from opt-in to opt-out"
The program had been going on for a while. They could have had data that suggested that female interns would be interested in such a program but had fears about bringing it to the attention of their managers or had fears of the repercussions of being one of the few who accepted.
Do you believe that decisions like this exclude men because women are so much more fragile and need more help than men?
Do you think that men may not need similar help. "intern buddy" doesn't imply a gender role, and maybe should choose to be an inclusive concept instead of exclusive.
The also could have just winged it and made the decision without backing data based on the advice of a gender studies professional.
I don't know what reasons Microsoft had for making the program exclusive to women, because I think men would also benefit. Here's my guess: gender affects mentorship. An older man having a close working relationship with a young woman, inviting her out to lunch, and getting drinks after work carries implications that simply do not exist with a young man. Having these interactions take place within a socially sanctioned program helps everyone out because it clarifies the nature of the relationship to both the participants and the onlookers.
Because it implies an opinion of weakness to the party offering said "help". Many people do not need or want help and forcing it on them only serves to enforce hidden power dynamics on behalf of the requestor.
What I really don't understand is how we men can act so innocent about all this. "Oh, I was just asking a question," "I didn't force her to do anything," "she was free to decline," "what, how could you not want help? Think of all the [rationalizations]!" and so on....
Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Intentions are as clear as the sky on a sunny day...
People who see others as equals treat people differently than those who think they see a potential partner, or victim, or lackey...
You are super angry at something. Maybe that something is perfectly valid but it does not seem a reasonable reaction to the situation at hand.
You sound like the kind of person I would avoid interacting with at all costs because anything could result in non productive conflict. Have you considered people might be reacting to your hostility not your gender?
I am. Technology was in such a good place; the internet was a buffet of information free and available perused mostly by nerds, the clueless, and the occasional asshat. Now that all this crap's gone mainstream, the best info was bought up, and positivity-sucking muggles have ruined all that's left.
So am I supposed to feel equally condescended to by the man in upper management who calls me "sweetie" and the woman who has organized some person to show me around the office and introduce me to people? Okay.
Why interpret one charitably and not the other? I survived being called "honey" by a woman in management; I didn't take offense because it would never occur to me to spin a well-intentioned comment for victim points. I fully realize that cute nicknames can be used in condescending tones, but then the issue is being condescending, not the nickname. I also realize that the genders are reversed, and that's supposed to make the nickname more offensive or invalidate my opinion or something; just to head this one off early--it doesn't.
...and as with much of this stuff, much of it depends on context -- body language, situation, phrasing, intonation, and so on. A perfectly routine request or offer can quickly become patronizing depending on the manner in which it is asked, or by who. The vibe that I got from the original article was HOPPERS was one of those things -- help, ostensibly, but unnecessary and patronizing. Not in the same category as Mr. Sweetie Manager but still offensive.
"Paternalistic" is the word that pops into my head. I really like "condescending" too.
Projecting the belief that we know what's best for other people, the arrogance, is why so many hate "liberal elites" like me. Whereas I'm trying to figure out ways to empower others, many of my cohort continue to unwittingly disempower others.
I definitely don't have any useful answers, insights.
(Aside: "liberal elites" are the mirror image of the "fundamentalists", for lack of better terms, who also know what's best for other people. This is not a left vs right issue.)
I'm not sure "corporate policy" is the right way to characterize it. This wasn't a policy adopted by HR or anything like that. An internal employee group took this upon themselves, and in the years before I did my internship it was completely voluntary. They changed that the summer I was there.
As for the word ghetto, that is what came to mind when I read the part in Maria's post about special awards for women in tech.
It would have been fine if I had gotten an email describing the program and inviting me to participate. Instead, I got an email from a stranger, completely unannounced, saying "Hi, I'm your intern buddy!"
It was the assumption that I needed help because I'm a woman that I found condescending. I'm not saying programs like this aren't good, or that nobody needs them, it was the blanket application to an entire group without consulting them first that I took issue with. The difference between a safe space and segregation is whether or not your participation is voluntary. Had it been offered as an invitation I might have even taken them up on it, but nobody bothered to ask first. It was just assumed that because I'm female, I needed help. I disagreed.
Nothing can be described as meritocratic because meritocracy is a myth.
Yeah, I can see how such an e-mail wouldn't exactly feel so welcoming if your participation was assumed and suddenly thrust upon you. But I don't necessarily think that it makes sense to believe that they wrote the e-mail that way because they thought you were helpless. Whoever wrote it could have been excited about the program and assumed everyone else would be too.
Well I'm paraphrasing and omitting details for reasons of brevity and memory (this was almost 20 years ago, after all). I do recall the email was lengthy and made the point more than once that I needed extra support because I was a woman. I was at least halfway through my internship, which had been going very well, when I got it. It wasn't my first intern-like role, either, I'd done an 8-month co-op at another company the year before, which also went very well. The word that Maria used in her post, and that I quoted above, really does match how I felt -- I felt like I was being told I was a victim when that didn't mesh at all with my experience.
I don't have special knowledge of the particulars of the internship, but characterizing the effect as creating a ghetto makes sense to me, and I can try to explain why.
Have you ever heard the argument that donating free clothing to Africa is actually bad for Africans? The idea is that by providing free clothing, you destroy the local industries which allow Africans to create clothing for themselves, eliminating jobs, introducing dependency, and eliminating the possibility of a native African-style clothing industry flourishing and eventually exporting products and enriching the community. [1]
Charity comes with a counterintuitive hazard: any time you do something for someone that they could do for themselves, you make them weaker. You deprive them of the independence and control that doing it themselves would offer them, and you reduce the development of their own infrastructure for doing the task the next time.
Charity must attempt to make people stronger. Reduce the impact of a crisis while people recover. Give otherwise unattainable support while the person develops in ways they couldn't without it. Philosophically, funding startups, not donating products.
I'm not saying donating things is always bad . . . it depends on the effects. Charity is hard, I think more because it's hard to figure out how to help people, than because it's hard to be unselfish. I think there are a lot of cases where it's hard to anticipate what the effects will be, which is why it's so important to study what you're doing and see if you're actually helping. It's very easy to do harm while intending to do good. But the rough criterion I use comes from an old song about charity in Africa, and argues that the right attitude to have is, "I want to see you shine / See your light not mine." In a charitable effort -- is the focus on the generosity of the giver? Or is it about what the recipient can achieve and become, with the giver's help being a footnote?
A formalized mentorship seems like a marginal case, one you could argue worked either way. It's giving the new employee knowledge and extra help about the firm, a running start, if you will. Where's the harm in that?
The harm is that the new employee would normally acquire these things herself by asking coworkers, and in the process would learn who she could ask about what, and would begin establishing peer relationships that she will use throughout her career. The implication that she cannot do this for some reason isolates her, and giving her an artificial source of support weakens her ability to find her own support. This would be a bad thing if that artificial support ever went away, but in a way, it's almost a worse thing if it sticks around, because the result is the new employee relying on an inferior network to the one she would have developed herself.
The term ghetto to me implies that all the capable and competent people moved away, leaving the poorest ones stuck with just each other. A targeted system which isolates and coddles new employees will have just that effect -- they'll have the impression that it's the system and each other they can talk to, leaving them with a much, much poorer network than if they had just been introduced to the veteran coworkers as if that were perfectly normal which it is.
I'm right there with you in that this sort of thing shouldn't be taken personally. People intend it helpfully, and that charitable impulse should be honored (if perhaps gently educated, too). But I myself have always been very suspicious of programs targeting women, because there are a lot of people in the world who want to Help Women and I always suspect those programs are about their glory and pro-womanness or whatever, and more likely to harm me than do me any good, even if I can't see right away why that might be. I think my chances are better on my own, and anyway -- I'd prefer to have a similar experience to others in my field in the ways I can, to help me integrate into the new group.
Helping people develop and become stronger is difficult, even in the most concrete cases. It's not dissimilar to raising a child -- you argue one minute that relieving their frustration by making a task easier will give them the boost they need to do something even greater, and argue the next that letting them fail will make them stronger and they will eventually succeed on their own. It's an art more than it is a science, but I think as long as you are teaching something you understand and guiding someone toward mastery, you are pretty safe. But I definitely think it is much safer to devise solutions to help concrete cases than to help statistics. If I see you need help finding the break room, it is easy to conclude that giving you directions will be helpful. Providing you a buddy preemptively because certain classes of employee are less likely to ask for directions easily . . . seems more dubious in its effect. I understand the impulse, but I really think it is safest to stick to the concrete, and to help the people around you and solve the problems you can clearly identify directly.
The females in tech I know want maternity/paternity leave, respect, good work/life balance, a culture that values intelligent discussion, and fair salaries. You know, the stuff that most men want too.
The one advantage I see beyond the traditional self-organization of various diversity groups is that an ERG can do a lot with a non zero amount of money, and influence within the recruiting department.
Forced participation is never a good thing when it comes to this type of stuff, but to have the money to send those who do wish to participate to events that help those who feel excluded, to feel included is certainly valuable in its own way.
My wife got angry quite a few times in graduate school because the university's Women in Computing group forcibly signed her up to their mailing list at the start of every academic year. She unsubscribed every year and, without fail, they silently added her back. Apparently they thought a woman in computing couldn't manage without being part of this group!
It's one thing to give people the space and support they ask for. It's quite another to shove space and support, unsolicited, upon them.
I can sort of see your point. If you're 2 women out of 40 people chances are you already have enough of a thick skin and drive to find the environment comfortable and not wanting any help.
At the same time I bet that if this was offered to, at least some of, the men I've worked with it would take two weeks until everyone was informed of how important the program was for the organisation. While in reality they would use it to create informal networks within the same to further their own careers. Few of them would ever admit being singled out for any other reason than being an exceptional asset to the people around them. A fact that preferably would be indicated by their salary.
I can definitely see how getting special attention could be annoying. But at some point loudly objecting about something because it's only for women becomes not so flattering for women as a group.
There's sexism in tech, and to address it you have to call it for what it is. I'm glad her experiences are such that she hasn't encountered these barriers, but other people have, and they need these words and spaces.
Take my previous job. Women were objectified on Slack. A woman was groped, though she didn't report it out of concern for the repercussions. In meetings execs, male execs would only address/look at the men, not the women. The company was 91% men, even though 24% of the workforce for those jobs in the area was female.
My friends in another high-profile company in the area were sexually harassed, though they felt like they couldn't report it. They simply left the job.
I've mentored young women in high school interested in STEM in a program specific for them. The content is the same, but there's value in having these to counter the obstacles specific to women that they'll face.
I've never seen men, as a group, encounter the obstacles I've seen many female peers discuss. Not all women encounter these, but as a group, it's undeniable that there's extra obstacles.
> but as a group, it's undeniable that there's extra obstacles
I'm not sure you can really say that. It's true, women as a group encounter problems with being treated as sex objects, and there are cultural reasons for that, blah blah blah. So women have a unique experience. BUT! Men experience a pressure to succeed that we as women can hardly fathom. Consequently, they wind up in jobs they need, in a way we never will, which opens them up for a different kind of abuse in the workplace. Men experience such pressure to succeed that they sacrifice their health and well-being, sometimes their life, in the effort to succeed, and that seems pretty terrible. And there are cultural reasons for that and blah blah blah.
I really don't think it's useful to try to calculate who has it worse. Workplace abuse is bad. Let's oppose it. Sexual harassment is bad. Let's oppose it. Which is worse? Who cares? They're kind of incomparable anyway. Let's not waste time on that. Let's all agree to oppose these things and help those who suffer!
I'm not saying opposing sexual harassment is a waste of time. That's absolutely a good thing to do. And I'm not saying women as a group don't have a specific set of issues and problems it makes sense to address as a set. I think sometimes they do. But I am saying focusing on that and saying, "and therefore WOMEN HAVE PROBLEMS AND MEN DON'T" is a bit myopic, and I don't really think it helps either of us.
We've all got problems, some of our own making, some due to family or history, or . . . sometimes we just randomly walk into someone else's problems. People have genetic diseases. People have deformities. People have nutritional problems and religious obligations and sick relatives. And people overcome these things because they're AMAZING! Let us not bother keeping score. Let us be compassionate and kind and support those we see in trouble. Let us expect, without exception, that everyone will be treated well.
Thanks for saying this--too often people hand-wave away others' problems though, ironically, they may end up inheriting them. Your comment reminded me about an article on how Millennial women are conflicted about being breadwinners. [1] Between chuckling about how I (a Millennial guy) have said many of the quotes nearly verbatim, it dawned on me that as we approach equality in the workplace these women are being now being exposed to what were classically "man problems." I think guys are mostly familiar with those, but I think we also mostly conditioned or compelled endure it in silence, which may lend to the idea that there are "no extra obstacles" for us.
So yes, let's be sympathetic to each others' problems and avoid demonizing each other...you never know, it could end up being your problem.
Haha! On point. I can identify with that article. Man, there's this wonderful quote about this I wish I could find, about how women were somehow sold the idea that the working world, the land of heart attacks and ulcers, was where the real awesomeness in life was happening, and where they wanted to be.
There's this documentary that I just love on this topic. This lady decides she wants to see what the world of men is like, and goes undercover and lives as one for eighteen months. And at the end of it, she emerges with such a tangible sense of compassion for men and their problems. They have all these difficulties that they don't talk about!, she says. It's so sweet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip7kP_dd6LU
We're playing with powerful forces, here, what with women entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers, and encountering unprecedented success. Historical, cultural forces. Biological forces. Psychological forces. I think we're making the world a better place, but this tale that it's a simple struggle between good and evil, and women and men . . . the world is more complicated than that. We don't need to take out our frustrations on each other. We need all our combined strength and wisdom. We should proceed with empathy and understanding and compassion.
For what it's worth, I think you guys are awesome. Hugs from an internet stranger. :)
That's a really fascinating documentary. Interesting to see a woman analyzing male issues from a first-hand perspective, haha! I did think it was a little funny at the end, the guy saying "this will be revolutionary" but today it's mostly the same, though I do believe things are slowly getting better for both sides.
"In Millennial Guy, the highly-anticipated sequel to Bicentennial Man, a blogger living in a world where robots seek humanity seeks to become a robot, but spends his time arguing about it on the internet instead, ultimately never achieving his goal. Instead, he waits for his break as an internet "thought leader" while living with his disappointed parents, then he dies."
Addendum - these ideas are not original to me. If this way of thinking resonates with you, here are a couple of the things I've been watching and listening to that taught me to think this way. They're worth your time.
Sexism hurts men too. Nor am I saying men don't have problems specific to them - they do.
However, I'm saying there's a problem in terms of how women are treated in tech at a group level that create obstacles specific to them. That men, as a group, do not face these obstacles.
When it comes to hard numbers, even when other factors are taken into account, women as a group do indeed have it worse in tech. When it happens at a group level like this, it means there's group-level barriers that can be addressed to make the playing field less biased and closer to a meritocracy. Some of the solutions are simple - like removing names from resumes when initially reviewing them for new employees.
We've all got problems. Being a woman doesn't mean you automatically have it worse than a particular dude. But I'm not talking about individual circumstances, I'm looking at aggregate data, and there's data there that can't be ignored.
I like how you think - let's just keep it simple and oppose all the things that suck then shall we?
I'll add that the best way to oppose something is to promote its opposite. Only because "opposing" has a tendency to backfire. We should therefore promote, for example, sexismlessness. Yes I made up a word.
If you promote reason and common sense, you (are working in order to) get rid off all these problems plus many more. I'm emotionally refreshed to read the post you reply to, and the OP's writing. More sexism doesn't help in trying to remove sexism, and revenge and positive discrimination bring lots of tension among the sides.
> And people overcome these things because they're AMAZING!
Other times they overcome them because someone did research and found out that putting up a curtain between the musician and the judges removed a visual gender bias from the orchestra's hiring process.
The correction for bad gender-equality policy isn't for everyone to take a ride on a sine wave of understanding through equally unsupported opposing viewpoints. It's to do the difficult and probably boring work of researching and implementing a more effective policy.
Edit: changed last word from "system" to "policy" for clarity
Not sure I agree that men have a pressure to succeed that women don't. My wife faced plenty of this pressure in her software career: as a point of professional pride, as a prerequisite to career advancement, and because her family raised her to be financially independent. Stuff you cite was all stuff my wife went through as much as I.
And I question the generalization prima facie, as it does not reflect the experience of me or the women I'm close to. Unless there's data to support it?
EDIT: the issue isn't the Hacker News audience; the issue is that you were wrong in your assumption that Dove was male, and your entire comment depended on that assumption. There is no audience for which you could write that comment where it would have been correct (though some audiences might have cheered it, that would be a fault, not a virtue, of theirs.)
One of the beautiful things about the HN community is that we expect and welcome disagreement -- but we hold it to high standards. We expect people to read whole comments and engage in the actual ideas expressed, not to skim and then rail at straw men. You are welcome here, and you are welcome to disagree with the ideas expressed in Dove's comment -- but we will not demean you by excusing low-quality, low-content, personally-targeted rants as the best you can do.
> "don't think this is really true ... in any online community."
Stick around and give us the opportunity to surprise you ;)
> "My comment would have been the same regardless of gender."
You might have intended the same point, but I suspect you would have articulated it differently. There were a few lines like "We probably are under more pressure than you" or "Everything is about you all the time anyway" that don't make sense directed toward a woman, for example.
> "direct to a blog post"
Thanks. I think that helps me articulate my own disagreement better (and also some agreement, though I won't focus much on that.)
In essence, you're approaching the issue from the perspective that talking about men's issues "silence" women's perspectives, and you believed Dove's comment was an uninvited insertion of men's issues. It wasn't. Instead, it was the same type of meta-commentary as the blog post -- it was about how to have the discussion effectively without silencing the relevant perspectives, specifically, why trying to "keep score" is an ineffective approach (as a direct response to a scorekeeping comment) and why that approach inherently silences key perspectives. The approach that says "group X has it worse than group Y" invites competition and pushback rather than understanding and collaboration. The natural consequence of a comparison is for people to argue the comparison, which takes the focus away from the actually-relevant issues, and thereby silences actually-relevant perspectives in favor of tangential perspectives and pointless noise-making.
In a broader sense: every "civil right" or "human right" happens at the intersection between people, groups, and/or institutions. Whenever we're talking about rights, we're talking about the boundary between what we are entitled to (both "to do" and "to be"), and what we are restricted from because it interferes with another. Whether we're talking women's rights, men's rights, LGBT rights, economic rights, religious rights, immigrant's rights, parental rights, children's rights, or any other type of rights, it's always about how we as a whole interact with each other. There are two conceptually different approaches to how we approach the discussion, and IMO one of them is far more effective than the other.
One approach is to treat rights as group-specific, and to create a hierarchy of rights violations. To say, this is a women's issue and it's worse than what men face, and talking about men experiencing literally the exact same thing is a distraction. This hierarchical approach (which the blog post criticizes in its quoted point #5) invites competition and one-upmanship and tribalism among "insiders" and "outsiders". It invites "patriarchy hurts men too" comments as a way for men to attempt to improve their position on the scoreboard.
The other, IMO better, approach is to treat rights as universal, and then to apply the universal to the specific. For example, all humans have the right to life, and we recognize that right is threatened by domestic violence, particularly for women. So we highlight that issue as a women's rights issue, but not exclusively so -- and we also recognize that solutions are not explicitly women's solutions. This approach invites us to hear women's perspectives and to elevate those perspectives because they represent a large part of the whole (and allows for women-only discussions to particularly highlight those perspectives, but does not treat that as the default expectation.) It also invites the broader community to participate in holistic understanding and unified, compassionate support. It invites us to treat each others' civil rights as participatory, to transform our own actions for the sake of one another, and to treat our underlying humanity as a uniting force that allows us to respect our differences and hold one another in high esteem.
Eventually, those "universal" rights have to be applied to an out-group or they are meaningless. There's no avoiding a conflict. Look at the hundreds of messages on this page which sum to "nothing is wrong, change nothing".
> "those "universal" rights have to be applied to an out-group"
Yes, absolutely! That's why I used the term "universal". They apply to everyone, not just favored groups.
> "hundreds of messages on this page which sum to "nothing is wrong""
A few. Most, you're reading uncharitably. I'd summarize the most common theme as more like "we've misidentified the precise problem, and as a result our solutions are ineffective or worse."
> "There's no avoiding a conflict."
Some types of conflict are essential and inevitable. Others are optional and unnecessary.
When you apply universal rights to a group that has been dehumanized, there is necessary conflict between those who wish to continue dehumanization and those who wish to end it.
But when you treat rights like a contest, you introduce unnecessary conflict, by creating incentives for various groups to try to knock one another down in order to compete for a more favorable spot in the hierarchy.
Focus on resolving necessary conflict, not artificially generating unnecessary conflict.
I don't think it's fair to blame the audience for what happened there. (Not to pick on you; people diss the HN community left and right all the time and say all sorts of things that aren't true, and I sometimes feel like standing up for what's good in it.)
By far the best thing about this thread is how many women have been posting their thoughts. That's excellent for the same reason that a systems programming thread with lots of systems programmers would be.
Dove said she’s a woman pretty clearly. And her comment didn’t make something that was about women all about men. She made it all about shit people deal with in their working life.
I think you're missing the point of the article. It's not that these things don't exist, or didn't exist for her -- of course they do.
The point seems, to me at least, to be that in order to attempt to actually solve these problems you can't actively (or passively) try to exclude yourself from the people causing them.
It's like politics -- if you separate yourself into "us" versus "them", how are you ever supposed to work together to find a solution?
I think you're missing the point of the discussion. When you have women who are excluded and hit on and passed over simply because they are women, they come up with all kinds of solutions, including raising awareness that there are great women who are WOMEN and you should listen to "women in tech".
The stage of creating women-only and women-focused groups ( and buying into the diminutive labeling the original author hates ), is what happens after you have a bunch of really, really, really shitty interactions.
Thus, I think it is likely the author simply hasn't had the kind of really poor interactions & groping & whatnot, and she doesn't mention it in her post.
I am passionate about this because my significant other is a woman, and she's in tech. I know plenty of other women in technology. Most of them aren't deeply involved in "women-in-tech" and prefer a low-key evangelizing of the great women that have been in tech, combined with fleeing from companies that employ ... jerks ... who harass and ignore.
I was very happy that, in my startup under my leadership, we had a 50% male-female ratio. Subsequently, as CTO without much staff, that ratio has steadily decreased, and we are now down to 0% women in engineering. While that can be sampling error ( we don't have a 1000 member engineering staff ), it does give me pause.
The women technologists I know don't specifically slag the "women-in-tech" movement as the author did, I suspect because they do realize the magnitude of the problem is great enough that multiple points of pressure are required. Simply being great isn't enough, and the problem is getting worse not better - but there are likely other reasons.
Depends how you define results. As a "woman in tech," I don't actively participate in these movements that much, but I certainly benefit from the extra visibility they give to women who are succeeding in this industry. I often think one of the biggest hurdles is finding relatable role models that can serve as a template for your own success and career path. When I first started out, there were a couple of obvious examples, but it was hard for me to picture what a female 'leader' should look like, aside from the old stereotype of a ball-busting corporate woman who acts like a man. That has meaningfully changed in the last few years. I now know -- and see -- a lot more examples of women who I can relate to, who are finding lots of success in this field. I realize this is anecdotal but in terms of my own career development, it feels significant. I tend to think it will benefit other women as well, and perhaps serve to normalize the idea of women succeeding in what was traditionally a male-dominated field, thereby attracting more young women to the field.
That said, I definitely recoil at the idea of being selected for any role or being treated differently simply because I'm female, since I would put my own abilities up against my male peers without hesitation. Special treatment feels condescending.
Did you even try looking before asking this? I can think of a bunch in just the couple months, mainly in regards to Uber and other SV companies taking concrete steps to fix their culture.
Doubling down on sexual harassment and other abhorrent behavior is very different from having stuff like women-in-tech awards and women only tech meetups.
Also we have more initiatives than ever trying to get women into tech yet the numbers are at an all time low, shouldn't we admit that we need to change our approach?
Men-only clubs were broadly a problem because (at the time they were prevalent) men and their clubs held a significant portion of the money and power in society. Exclusion was an extreme sanction.
Why do women-only tech events bother you? Do you think women are meeting up to exert power over you?
They don't bother me, it is just that I think they might hurt women more than they help. If they helped we should have seen it in the statistics a long time ago. Instead I think that they just redistribute the women who already are in tech to different schools/companies.
You could say that doing something is better than doing nothing even if it is worthless, but I don't agree. Celebrating tokenism just means that companies will pat themselves on their backs for implement these token measures and then forget about their diversity problem.
> They don't bother me, it is just that I think they might hurt women more than they help.
Perhaps you can see why being told by you (presumably a man) that they shouldn't do the thing that they want to do because you know what's best for them might not go down well? Be my guest :)
You'll find that people make choices for reasons other than industry statistics. Many people feel more comfortable at those events because mainstream events can have conduct issues and bias issues.
Of course exclusive events are far from an ideal, but labelling them as "worthless" misunderstands why people do them.
The gender war has nothing compared to the class war. A rich black girl has more privilege than a white trailer park boy.
Huge difference in network and in knowledge of what is available for education and financial investment.
And guess what part of the working world has given the most opportunities to get out of the gutter the last 3 decades? Tech. So when trust-fund people start complaining on behalf of women, it can feel like class warfare.
They bother me on a fundamental fairness level. It you change the pronouns and suddenly its unacceptable to you, then clearly it is also unacceptable as is.
For example, if mens only clubs and events are wrong, then so too are women only events.
How do other issues bother you on a "fundamental fairness level"? Such as the incidents of workplace harassment in STEM fields that have been coming out in the last year? Or income inequality / options available to people by class they were born in?
I notice a lot of people saying what you're saying, that safe spaces or clubs for certain types of people are the "reverse" of whatever ___ism they're trying to address.
Certainly you realize there are systemic issues that are causing much greater offenses to the idea of "fundamental fairness" yet you seem to concentrate specifically on minor conceptual issues with the methods of the people trying to address it. That's pretty telling.
Fundamental fairness is that we should treat each other equally. I think we should treat each other equally, regardless of skin colour, religion, or gender. I abhor sexual harassment and believe that people should get equal pay for equal work.
I also think like the author of this blog post that splitting people into smaller tribes creates an us vs them environment and makes everyone worse off.
I didn't focus on this 'one aspect' the person above asked how people thought about it and I responded why I didn't like those things.
It kinda makes me thing of the "Millennials Don't Exist" talk by Adam Conover. He talks about how generational terms are just made up by authors who want to get rich and they're almost always condescending (those entitled baby boomers, those lazy millennials, those gen x-ers) and how people don't liked to be talked down to:
Are millennials attached do their cellphones? Yes .. so are mothers, fathers, grandparents and some dogs. It's literally the most compact and powerful communication and computational device we've ever had. When you break down all the labels, all you really have is people. Talk to them like people.
There is utility in being part of an in group be that people from country X, religion Y, or just credential Z. The trade off is worse global performance, but MBA's networking with other MBA's can be good for people with MBA's and eff anyone else.
On top of that their are cognitive biases like I got an CS degree so getting a CS degree must be a good idea. Therefore I will give preference to others with a CS degree.
PS: Men do face discrimination in female dominated fields, and being white can often hurt your chances for various things. But, while dead weight losses exist the incentives often favor discrimination even if it's called networking.
That is something I also see. All sorts of discrimination gets put under the umbrella of networking. It's a lot harder to apply to a CS job through Indeed, Dice, Monster, et cetera, but my current part time job I got through an industry networking event, which I was only able to go to because I have the luxury of free time to search for a job.
I'm curious if anyone has thoughts to what might change this.
Tribalism seems to be encoded in the genes of every primate species on the planet, so it's not that surprising. In our past, every time a line dividing tribes was erased, we drew a different line.
This is just speculation on my part, but the only way we'll achieve cohesion as a species is if/when we encounter intelligent alien life. We'll still be tribal, but at an interplanetary level.
The women who report these issues has no obligation to solve the problems, they're simply pointing out that they exist (since for a long time, people wouldn't believe them).
You're right, there is no obligation to help. Likewise there's no obligation for me as a straight, white man in tech to help either.
But the more people working along side me who I can collaborate with, the better. That only makes both our jobs easier. It doesn't matter what you label yourself as. If labels are getting in the way of our mutual increased success by arbitrarily keeping you from working with me as an equal, why wouldn't I want to help?
> It's like politics -- if you separate yourself into "us" versus "them", how are you ever supposed to work together to find a solution?
It's not like that at all. Ideologies exist on a spectrum. And there are some on the extreme ends that are so reprehensible that there's no good reason to find a way to include them in any reasonable dialog.
I don't care how hurt someone feels if they can't find a safe space to talk about their racist ideas. If you're a little racist on the inside, fine, just be uncomfortable and don't be racist on the outside. We're not here to police how people think but you better watch how you behave. I won't feel sorry for you if someone punches you in the face.
The real problem is that centuries of oppression have made sexism normal. It's part of the institution. It's invisible to most people. There isn't a clear label you can apply to people to sort out whose sexist. It's everywhere. How do you fight something like that?
I want it to be normal as hell to be a woman/person of colour/queer/etc-in-tech (and the rest of the world). I don't look at programs that give people recognition or assistance as a pity-party or somehow makes them less. I see it as evening the playing field... but it's only treating a symptom. The harder battle is curing the disease.
Why do these discussions always devolve into talks about punching people or getting punched? I can't get through a day without somebody suggesting violence is the only response to get somebody to think like them.
If you don't want these "programs" to exist at the professional level, you have to go all the back to college and high school. You can only continue to treat symptoms through affirmative action, because that is the cycle we're stuck in. That is the disease you are identifying. People who are propped up by outside assistance will naturally continue to depend on those props and leech resources at a disproportionate rate.
When these props are removed, the whole thing comes crashing down and we'll be forced to face the reality that these issues can't be fixed from a top down approach. Hiring more women or minorities into tech won't trickle down into incentivizing more women/minorities to major in Computer Science. Accepting more women/minorities into CS programs won't encourage more women/minorities to become interested in nerdy stuff in high school.
The real disease is third party intervention. Thinking all the world's problems can be solved as long as it looks like somebody's doing something for a long enough period of time. All that does is allow under-qualified individuals to shit the pool for the demographic that they represent and reinforce negative perspectives until people who pay for productive work can't turn a blind eye and then get punched in the face I suppose.
No, you're missing the part where women leave tech in droves because of the treatment they experience.
Sure, we need to get more women into the pipeline. But we also need to not be pushing them out of the industry because they don't want to be groped, ignored, or otherwise disrespected.
In my experience, every woman I've worked with in tech has been above average or excellent. It's the men I've worked with who are much more variable in skill.
I heard a woman on this phenomenon in a podcast, saying that we'll know we actually reach gender parity when there are women working in tech who are below average in skill. And we're not there yet; women in tech tend to the exceptional. Women who stay are the ones who couldn't imagine doing something else because they're so good at tech.
> I want it to be normal as hell to be a woman/person of colour/queer/etc-in-tech (and the rest of the world).
it seems like diversity and inclusion are at odds. id like to feel okay with my unfasionable identity, too. highlighting how different i am from others helps to discourage inclusion by them-ing my peers.
The intention of "normal as hell," is not to make us all brothers and sisters. Variety is the spice of life and it takes all kinds to make good software.
The spirit is one where we're not living in a system that encourages to sub-consciously bias ourselves against others.
I'd like it if my friends didn't have to succeed in spite of all the time whereas I get a (pretty much) free ride.
It seems like the brunt of your statement is that we should be fighting human nature itself. No wonder the problems seem so unapproachable. If you don't want to discuss reality, that is fine, but you lose the moral and intellectual high ground that you seem to think you so unquestionably have.
My argument is clear: some ideas carry no weight and deserve no recognition. Debate is for reasonable people with reasonable positions.
We've heard the same arguments from white supremacists in 1991 when Christopher Hitchens graciously hosted John Metzger Jr. (and Sr!) on his show. It was the same line then that these wet alt-right nationalists are using today: pride, freedom of speech, censorship. It didn't work on his show then and I'm not going to be fooled by this petty idea that we need to include every voice in the discussion. That's not the case and we need to maintain an "us versus them" attitude when it comes to defending ourselves against such abhorrent ideology.
The problem is not unapproachable. It takes time to change hundreds of years of oppression and institutionalized behaviour.
It's not a very high ground. It's more like a sunny hill. I think you protest too much.
Who are you to determine which ideas carry weight, especially without debate? The moment you use political leverage to win intellectual battles, you are embracing corruption.
> Who are you to determine which ideas carry weight, especially without debate?
I'm just an average, under-achieving person who tries really hard like most people here.
In a word, the thing that tells me which ideas are worth debating and which to ignore? Ethics.
Immigration policy is already a hot topic for many reasons. There are reasonable positions to take on various questions. Should we increase the number of allowed refugees this year in order to meet our international disaster relief commitments? A reasonable position would be, "No, the recent economic downturn has forced us to cut funding to essential services that are already operating at peak capacity; allowing more refugees in might put them into more harms way as we struggle to find out what we can do with them." What about the question, should we incarcerate and mass-deport people of X ethnic minority because they're taking our jobs and using our under-funded healthcare system? That's not even a debate worth having: the question is based in nationalist protectionism and racist ideology. It is unethical.
How about the "all lives matter" debate? Bunk. The only reason to argue against BLM is to continue stealing the spotlight from a very noble and necessary cause.
Don't even get me started on the anti-feminist rhetoric of MRAs. "Debate," there is just a trollish tactic to harass people.
There isn't a leg to stand on for these ideologies and positions. They're ethically and morally reprehensible and completely unreasonable. There's no debate to be had. The people who insist on debating in favour of them do so without a credible argument or position. They only want to continue the "debate" to keep attention away from the real arguments. It's a waste of time.
The only reason the Metzger interview was interesting to me was as a demonstration of just how weak and pathetic these people are. There's no reason for anyone to take the Metzger's of the world seriously at all. Rather we should take the proliferation of their ideas seriously and should stamp them out everywhere we find them.
I've been in enough of these conversations to know replies like this are just trolling and/or white-noise.
Why NOT separate yourselves into an "us" vs "them"? Why should oppressed people try to "work together" with their oppressors?
If you're so interested the effectiveness of social movements, why haven't you looked at cases like Susan Fowler's to see how little it accomplishes to "work together", or within the system, "to find a solution"?
What rulebook, exactly, should people consult when organizing to stop awful shit from happening? Let us know so we can tell which methods are kosher with you. In the meantime maybe start holding the perpetrators to the same rigorous standard of moral behavior.
This is meandering, meaningless point. I have no idea what you actually mean here.
How exactly do support groups for women in STEM tear at the fabric of society? How does it do so in such a way that actively excluding them doesn't (via harassment and other boundaries), and why aren't you equally critical of those people?
And others say that you can't solve the problem of exclusion by having exclusivity. You can instead lead by example, which is not the same as pretending that the problem don't exist.
Then there are alternatives solutions which don't include either inclusivity nor exclusivity. Instead you address underlying issues that create the unwanted behavior. That too would not be people pretending that the problem don't exist, but rather a indirect way to solve the problem.
Different solutions have different drawbacks and benefits. Criticism of one don't mean the denial of the problem.
Different and opposing groups work together to find a common solution all the time. You can be different and work in a group and it not be antagonistic. This "us v. them" mentality is fostered by people who don't want to contribute with people who are different, they want everyone to assimilate into "their way."
Take the "black lives matter" movement. If we followed the OPs advice, they should just protest that "all lives matter" instead, which is precisely what their opposition is doing (e.g. blue lives matter, all lives matter), to diminish their campaign.
I understand how it can be annoying to be labeled or be associated with a group, even if you don't want to, but this problem is not going to be solved if it's not identified and that is what is going on. I think she's just reading too much into it.
This is something my friends and I were talking about privately for a while now. One of the things that came out of it was something summed up by one of my friends -- stop founding movements, start founding communities.
Modernism (and I'm talking as far back as the early 1900s, and arguably, even earlier than that) has eroded our sense community. Our communication tech has, over the past few centuries, have allowed people to talk to each other at greater physical distance while at the same time, created more emotional distance from each other. While modernism might have produced great advancement in science and technology and challenged traditional dogmas, it also threw out a lot of what we needed from those traditions. Community-building is one of them.
Movements that are trying to raise awareness on problems and change don't always have a clear idea on what happens after the fight is over: can you imagine still living, working, and playing with those people after all is said and done?
Take "Black Lives Matter", or even "All Lives Matter". People voice their deep concerns, the ugly things get aired out. And after all of that, can you see yourself living next door? Your children playing and going to school together? Going to the pub after a town hall meeting? Barbecue at the park on a summer day? Borrow each other's tools? Asking each other for advice? Taking in one of the kids after school because your neighbor is busy that day?
Or do you get a sense of fear, disgust, resentment, contempt, or despair?
I get none of those reactions. BLM are simply asking for equal treatment, not special treatment. Considering the "all lives matter" movement, if you can call it that, is more of a spiteful and petty response to BLM, I'm not sure it's a great example. A movement does not need to devolve into "us v. them" and cause those kind of responses you list. The only reason BLM would be offensive and cause those reactions is if this statement is offensive to your being -- black people having equal rights as white people.
The "black lives matter" movement is a great example of a movement being required because they have been shut out of a "community" that already exists. That community being their actual community they live in. The community is the problem. All those things you have listed -- fear, disgust, resentment, contempt, despair -- are things black people have experienced against them at the hands of our government/police and that is why BLM exists, and that is why a movement is needed to change the community. Just like the civil rights movement, which is not over.
I agree many movements do not have clear goals, but that often speaks to their poor leadership (e.g. occupy wall street), not a problem of movements in general or their grievances. Look at the civil rights movement. I think movements often arrive because the community has failed them.
I would be interesting in hearing more practical examples of how a community would better solve some of these problems (or historical 20th century problems) over a movement, or what that distinction truly is or means. Definitely curious!
> The only reason BLM would be offensive and cause those reactions is if this statement is offensive to your being -- black people having equal rights as white people.
Yes, that's the obvious response. There is also the other responses: that you can live with white people without fear, resentment, anger, disgust, or despair. Like being able to go onto a bus and not have judgements made on you that you're dangerous or seeing fear flicker in white people's faces, and in turn, put on a blank mask because to get angry will confirm all those fears. (Disclaimer: I'm not black; I people-watch a lot). There's a mirroring effect that happens where you don't know whose fear it is, or whose fear "started" it.
> I would be interesting in hearing more practical examples of how a community would better solve some of these problems (or historical 20th century problems) over a movement, or what that distinction truly is or means. Definitely curious!
I would too. This is the first time I am trying out these ideas outside my circle of friends, so I'm still working out concrete examples and brainstorming with others.
That was why my attempt here started with an empathy-visualization exercise to test the waters.
Here's another test: in my yuppie neighborhood I live in within metro Phoenix (which isn't my first choice, but family circumstances ... ) people get very passionate about homeless people on Next Door. There are vocal people who wants to kick them out and a smaller, but just as vocal group that talks about what it is like to be homeless. Some people want to call the cops. Some people reported a soup kitchen as a homeless hangout. (There _are_ people who case homes, or things like use card skimmers to steal credit cards, or try to arrange for a busted tire in order to corner a woman driving alone; it isn't as if this place was crime-free either).
Using this frame about community, we can ask these questions: are homeless and vagrants a part of this local community or not? Can you see yourself living with them? Or do you feel disgust and fear?
It's best to test for emotional reactions where your personal body and your family -- especially your children -- may actually be under threat. (In the esoteric martial arts, we call this "heart living under the sword": can you _really_ maintain loving-kindness even in face of threat, danger, and aggression?)
I don't think movements and communities are mutually exclusive, which you seem to imply (or i'm still misunderstanding). In fact, I would say the movements are often responsible for invigorating and restoring/refurbishing a community. The Lutherans, despite forking from Catholicism, actually also improved Catholicism. The civil rights movement made America better, but it was inherently adversarial because at some point you're going to have to say "hey i'm not being treated as fair as you are!" There is no way to fix a community without identifying its warts. It's like any problem, how do you solve it unless you call it out and identify it and agree mutually that it is a problem?
We definitely need better communities, especially as religion becomes less popular in America and that was the traditional community before. Stable life-long jobs and unions are also leaving which are another form of secular community. So people are definitely more isolated. And if we are isolated from people who are different than us, including black people, it will make these kind of fears more pronounced as we often fear the unknown or give in to the loudest stereotypes.
I also live in a yuppie neighborhood, in Denver, which has one of the highest homeless rates in the country. My view on the homeless is that I really don't mind them as a group, but some of them are trouble, just like some non-homeless people are trouble. Never had a violent interaction with a "homeless person" or felt scared by the existence of homeless people. The homeless are part of my community, they live in my community. They are people...without homes, but they are still humans.
So, you ask whether you can maintain loving kindness in the face of threat/danger/aggression? I'm saying there is no such thing that exists on a daily basis. I don't fear any homeless person unless they approach me in a way that says they mean harm to me personally.
I think it's important for Americans to see the homeless in our neighborhoods, ESPECIALLY us yuppies, so that we can be reminded of what a shameful failure it is that the richest country in the world still has a homeless problem this bad. And we can privatize and segregate ourselves as much as possible in our homes and parks to shield us from it, but we can't eject homeless people from a city that we have to share.
Movements and communities are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but there are often movements which polarizes or radicalizes. Because we lost our sense of community (due to modernism), movements today generally do not try to build communities.
The split between Lutherans and Catholicism is not a good example of community building. That is an example of exchanges of ideologies and dogma, not really about the exchanges of people and community. A slightly better example might be when my friend brought a group of Thai Theraveda Buddhist monks to visit a colony of Trappist monks outside of Atlanta. They got into the sanctuary and were amazed by the acoustics. The Buddhist monks tried out some chants and then Trappist monks performed some of their own chants. They could do that despite differences in philosophy because there was a sense of ultimately belonging to the greatest whole. It is also not a good example because monks are not ordinary people.
Have you read any of the philosophies about modernism? I think you're conflating religions with the traditional modes. Philosopher Ken Wilbur has some great stuff to say about this. One of the characteristics of traditional, pre-modern communities has to do with this idea of the Great Chain of Being. The name is specific to Western ideas, but the generalization of the "Great Chain of Being" covers a lot of ground, even into Eastern philosophies as well as indigenous, tribal cultures.
It is this knowing that you are part of a greater whole (and that greater whole is part of an even larger greater whole, and that greater whole is a part of a larger greater whole). Religions used to provide that sense of knowing where you belong -- but so did tribal cultures without organized religions. This sense of belonging used to be normative and now it is not. Stable, long-term jobs and unions were imperfect substitutes for what modernism broke. Our hyper-connectedness has exacerbated that separation.
On Facebook, for example, people seek out other like-minded people, not to connect (like you were saying in your homeless example), but more to reinforce psychological ego (the beliefs, narratives, and identities a person develops for a false sense of self). Connection requires opening up, of allowing the social masks to be vulnerable, of mutual impact and sharing. That generally does not happen on Facebook (instagram/snapchat/etc).
> So, you ask whether you can maintain loving kindness in the face of threat/danger/aggression? I'm saying there is no such thing that exists on a daily basis. I don't fear any homeless person unless they approach me in a way that says they mean harm to me personally.
Like you, I generally don't fear the homeless. When I lived in Seattle, there were many that lived out in the neighborhood I lived at, more easily found there than in Phoenix. (You have to hide from the sun in Phoenix).
However, I think you live in a very narrow, and sheltered view. There are places in the world where people do live in fear, on a daily basis. My point is exactly that: threats and aggression to someone's life often brings them much closer to ugly parts of themselves. There are not many people in the world who can actually maintain loving-kindness in face of existential threats. While it is possible, generally, ideals tend to get thrown out the window when the pressure is on and shit hits the fan.
> I think it's important for Americans to see the homeless in our neighborhoods, ESPECIALLY us yuppies, so that we can be reminded of what a shameful failure it is that the richest country in the world still has a homeless problem this bad.
Americans living in rural areas also have it bad, but are not exactly "homeless". One of the cherished ideals is this idea of self-reliance. From their perspectives, all those city folks are crazy. And rural folks would not see themselves as being a part of the richest country in the world. Much of that wealth-building had passed them by too. Seeing laws and government policies that favor disadvantaged groups -- who are largely city-dwellers, must rub 'em the wrong way in a bad way.
>Take the "black lives matter" movement. If we followed the OPs advice, they should just protest that "all lives matter" instead,
That might have been more effective, even if it isn't as fair or correct.
Hard to say, but in the lead up to the the latest US presidential election, there were many movements that I absolutely agreed with that I wish had shut up for just 1 year, because I could seem them fueling resentment on 'the other side' much more than energizing their own side. The rural side of my family was in the middle of being completely out of their minds over having a black president and gay marriage made legal when media started pushing for black lives matter and transgenders in bathrooms. They revolted, and now we have a moron as a president. "Deepened the divide" indeed.
This may be an evolution in my own thinking, that there can be more important things than being "right". Think long term.
I think the main problem with this line of thinking is that "if only they could have waited 1 year" ends up translating to 5 years, then 10, or never. MLK went through this with Lyndon Johnson, who also wanted him to wait due to political expediency.
It's also a lot easier to tell someone else to wait when you're not the one that has had their rights violated. If these are truly rights and not privileges, then waiting any time at all really makes no sense.
I do understand what you're saying, thinking about the bigger picture, but I think it's dangerous path. We have to accept some short-term losses for the greater good. It could be argued that Obamacare was the reason Congress was handed over to the GOP. But now look at how the discussion has changed in America about healthcare -- it's less about whether people should be covered and mostly about what it's going to cost in premiums.
Just a hypothetical, but can you imagine any of the gun owners in America going along with a "just wait" strategy if Obama had banned guns?
Now imagine if we could have ended slavery and found a way to resolve things peacefully without escalating into a brutal war that killed 2% of the population, with massive suffering on both sides.
I'm personally convinced we couldn't. The blood was already on our hands when we decided to start counting slaves as 3/5 of a non-voting person.
Of course, those who passed this compromise may have been thinking: well let's not rock the boat or we won't have a Constitution! So maybe let's wait a year or five and revisit...
Hardly[0]. Don't believe the hype. The GOP won using gerrymandering, voter-suppression tactics and clever electoral positioning. Its tools: Voter ID laws and propaganda that deactivated potential voters.
The VAST majority of voters have ID, and it's relatively easy to get one. Most people need one to function in society, and in many states you register to vote in the same place you get an ID anyhow. Perhaps you can point to a few examples where more than one or two people were singled out who wanted to vote but were unable to because of the requirement for ID.
It's been shown that voter fraud in several districts was much higher than previously expected or proposed.
I'm against a lot of the propaganda, and frankly the gerrymandering pisses me off to no end. But saying that requiring an ID to vote is excessive is pretty much out of line with the reality of living in society today.
> In states where the voter identification laws did not change between ’12 and ’16, turnout was up +1.3%. In states where ID laws changed to non-strict (AL, NH, RI) turnout increased less, and was only up by +0.7%. In states where ID laws changed to strict (MS, VA, WI) turnout actually decreased by – 1.7%.
Vastly more people "live in society" then what you apparently see in your bubble. The right to vote is guaranteed to every citizen in this country. EVERY citizen. Even the old, the infirm, the disabled, the slave-descended, and the naturalized.
And travel is also a right, but these same 0.03% of the population would have similar issues getting a driver's license. Also, the guy in the Wisconsin article had to deal with a law that changed over 5 years prior.. you're saying that 5 years isn't enough time to get a state issued ID?
Regarding gun license vs. student id, student ids don't indicate nation of birth, or non-citizenship. Though, I don't think a gun license should either. But I'm not in favor of gun licensing as a general rule.
I'm not trying to belittle anyone's struggle here, but I wouldn't expect to put off getting my ID renewed for however long, then take care of it right before voting. Depending on residence, it might be easier to get an absentee ballot. Beyond this, not every state has enacted voter laws the same, or made it nearly as difficult to get a state issued ID.
It comes down to a question of fundamentally, who are we as a people? Air travel doesn't define who we are as Americans. We believe, fundamentally, that citizens have the unalienable, inviolable right to democratically elect their representatives in government. It's literally [EDIT: We've fought long and hard for it to be] in the contract :)
>It is not hard for me, therefore it is not hard. These people should have just had the foresight, resources and knowledge of their local regulations to prepare all the documentation they needed to vote beforehand.
I hope by stating it this way you see the strategy for what it is: a formula for denying citizens--with the right to vote--the ability to do so.
It's a classic onboarding funnel problem. Ask any Product Engineer worth their salt: if you're trying to get people to do a thing: buy a product, click a button, etc, you minimize the number of barriers to that action. This does the opposite, for no good reason.
>Beyond this, not every state has enacted voter laws the same, or made it nearly as difficult to get a state issued ID.
[Therefore it is not a problem]
Remember Trump only won because certain key states swung by tiny margins. These states resurrected Jim Crow Voting Restriction laws, sold them as a solution to a problem that doesn't statistically occur, and affected the outcome in real, measurable ways. (See zimpenfish's response.)
It matters. And the GOP is gearing up to take the strategy national.
There is zero reason to believe that this piece is suggesting that women who get groped shouldn't call it out. Part of her point is that having awards specifically for women implicitly agrees that women are second rate and can't compete with the guys, so should not bother and should just accept their pink collar ghetto status and stop bothering to try to escape it and actually get taken seriously.
>> I'm glad her experiences are such that she hasn't encountered these barriers,
According to whom? Just because one doesn't address or mention the obstacles faced in their personal life doesn't necessarily mean that none were faced.
>> I've never seen men, as a group, encounter the obstacles I've seen many female peers discuss.
The solution is not to ignore the individual instances of these problems occurring within a group or across other groups that aren't necessarily by gender.
You're not addressing the article at hand. The article is not claiming that sexism doesn't exist.
> I've never seen men, as a group, encounter the obstacles I've seen many female peers discuss
Though since we're on the topic - I can't speak for your specific anecdotes, but I'll say this: men may not face obstacles to the same extent of women, but they definitely face their own obstacles, and sexism against men even in this industry is a thing.
Affirmative action and hiring quotas are reverse discrimination. Being a women in this field gives you a leg up in terms of university admission to competitive CS programs and employment at competitive firms. Recruiters are often female and discriminate in favor of women. (I've experienced this numerous times firsthand). For your friends who were actually sexually harassed, the mere accusation alone is often enough to get co-workers fired and have their reputations ruined (see Adria Richards dongle joke).
So yes, females unfortunately face a huge set of obstacles, but they also face a huge set of advantages that shouldn't be overlooked. This victim mentality needs to stop at some point.
>I'm glad her experiences are such that she hasn't encountered these barriers, but other people have, and they need these words and spaces.
This is what I intended to post; thanks for sharing your experience. I'm a gay Indian male living in Canada. I have never experienced marginalization for being Indian, but at my previous engagement, I experienced quite a bit of harassment and discrimination for being queer. Until that point, I didn't think much of what female colleagues were going through but began to notice a slew of inappropriate remarks (most famously: "Are we sure he's not post-op? I thought only women get migraines." from the CEO) and discriminatory behaviours (boss 'rating' female colleagues with the general response of nervous laughter).
I think that you hit the nail on the head - many people have to either directly experience or observe these issues before they become legitimate. The author has been extremely fortunate.
It's important not to dismiss her experience as being extremely lucky. The thing is, there are lot of women like her, who were not harassed at their work places or have "grown-up" work environments with decent managers and HR policies.
Frankly I'd be surprised if she had never been harassed in some way. I know a grand total of zero women a decade into their careers who have literally never experienced some kind of harassment. Without being able to speak for her, I can surmise that maybe she just doesn't feel it needs to define her.
Of course every survey may be flawed or mistaken, and we need to read carefully how they define harassment, etc. But based on that survey and others, and my own anecdotal experiences, I don't think we should be surprised when a woman says she never experienced sexual harassment.
This is a large industry, with lots of different cultures and experiences.
> Frankly I'd be surprised if she had never been harassed in some way.
1. She grew up in Denmark
2. She works in the UK
From what I've heard, both are far more progressive and egalitarian than the US. If the people you know are based in the US, that could be the distinction.
That was my take on it too. It's also why I think her post missed the mark for me; she simply doesn't have experience with what she's writing about, because she's living a different society that doesn't experience the problem on the same scale, so her proposed solutions don't carry much weight to workers in Silicon Valley.
It is cherry picking to analyze only obstacles faced by women in tech and then conclude that women face extra challenges without even considering that men spend their lifetimes facing predominantly male-unique problems.
The same flawed perspective leads to generalized racism like the now popular opinion that white people should be treated poorly because they all had it easy.
> I've mentored young women in high school interested in STEM in a program specific for them. The content is the same, but there's value in having these to counter the obstacles specific to women that they'll face.
Taking for granted a priori that this group will face obstacles isn't exactly what this post is about?!?
>There's sexism in tech, and to address it you have to call it for what it is. I'm glad her experiences are such that she hasn't encountered these barriers, but other people have, and they need these words and spaces.
Or they just need to learn to speak up for themselves?
You are a woman programmer and somebody treats you like a jerk?
Do the same that a man programmer would do if somebody picked on them.
Why the need for some different behavior, special groups etc? I think they mainly exist so that their leaders have careers, a voice in the media, etc.
I don't really know where to sit on this. It's a bit confusing for me. I understand the need for "X minority group in tech" events, I really do. I think it helps newcomers and people who feel like they're at the fringe find a community.
At the same time, I DO find it a little weird at times to go to "LGBTQ-only", "Asian-only", or "women-only" events. It just kind of reminds me of... this reverse-frat mentality.
Going to events with ONE homogenous group just really skeezes me out for some reason.
I think the "-only" part is the problem. Marketing and naming events for minority groups is fine, but they would ideally be welcoming of all groups not part of the minority. Now it might still seem slightly funny for any old person to take part in an event called "black girls code", but it's better than excluding them entirely and I'd hope that most such events are inclusive of all groups.
> but it's better than excluding them entirely and I'd hope that most such events are inclusive of all groups
"Most"?
No, the point is for ALL events to be inclusive. Instead of combatting exlusion with isolation, it would be far better to strengthen the message that it really doesn't matter what labels other have put on you: if you have a desire in skill X, then come to this event with other people who are further along and learn from them, irrespective of their label. And conversly, if you are skilled in X, come spread the skill to anyone who's got a desire, irrespective of their label.
> I think it helps newcomers and people who feel like they're at the fringe find a community.
Once thing I've noticed is a lot of the diversity events are directed towards college students. Grace Hopper has a large student presence, in addition to conferences like Out for Undergraduate which are for UG students only.
For someone with zero or very little professional experience, to read all these articles about how they will be discriminated against once they start working. Having such resource groups is important, so they know that there are people who do have their back.
Once you're an experienced professional, who has built a network of people who recognize your engineering abilities, this fear is less present on the surface, as it can be easier to avoid toxic people when you have the ability to choose who you work with (in a way a new grad doesn't).
She makes a good point when she says "I’m already here, people. So I’m not the problem you’re trying to solve."
I think what a lot of these kinds of posts miss is that efforts to bring women into tech generally aren't aimed at the kind of women who have always done tech, have always wanted to do tech, and participate in the tech community despite their gender. Those women are the die-hards who largely will ignore gender barriers because of their enthusiasm for the field. But if we want to improve the gender ratio we have to think about how to appeal to the women who don't fall into that category too.
I do consider myself a "woman in tech" but that doesn't mean I want special treatment. I'm lucky enough to be surrounded by smart, passionate people of all genders and don't really suffer much sexism with regards to my work. What I do want is more women colleagues and I support initiatives aiming to achieve that.
Full disclosure: I run a student branch of the Women's Engineering Society here in the UK, although we are far from a women's only group. Most of our events are about 50/50.
I don't consider getting women into tech as the only problem facing our industry. Because once they get in, a lot of them face abuse.
Nobody is saying you should get special treatment. Only that we need to acknowledge and label a problem in order for it to have visibility so we can make the problem better.
She also says:
"I also wish gay rights == human rights. If you throw a parade celebrating women who did awesome shit in STEMM and invite the world to join, I’m in and I’m bringing pom-poms!)"
So, wouldn't you take this as saying that the gay rights movement should change their entire PR to advance "human rights" and not gay rights? How do you solve a problem and market a problem without actually calling it out?
This all feels like she is reading too much into a label.
While true, the more women you get into tech the more than can end up at the top in tech. The more women at the top of a tech company or working in VC, the more diversity we have at the top which (hopefully) leads to the sexist men at the top being held accountable by their peers.
If that can happen, then there will likely be a decrease in abuse towards new comers in the field. Yay!
Trying to hire the same number of men and women is sexist when 4/5 CS graduates and 12% of nursing graduates are men. At 7%, men are underrepresented in nursing against their graduation rates. Imagine if we gave men special treatment in this obviously sexist field!
Is it any surprise that affirmative action of any kind offends high achievers of both genders? Accomplishments are called into question. It brings gender into roles creating 'women developers' hired for their gender rather than capability, leading to lower compensation used to further highlight the sexism in the field.
Preferential treatment based on gender should not exist. This is a simple, equitable principle. Men and women should be equally affected by the time they take to rear children. Hire based on merit, not gender. With EQ and mounting evidence on female managers, this means that we may see men losing out to women.
Let's eliminate the mysoginists and misandrists. It'll create a lot of job openings for the rest of us :)
Thank you. I find myself feeling the exact same way as a black man in this industry, and cringe at "minority only" events and clubs. We don't need token inclusion and separate praise for being "brave" and "fighting against the odds". We need a world where those things are irrelevant.
Watching from the sidelines as a white male, I have to say that I find these kinds of situations so confusing. Some people want these differences to be highlighted, while others like yourself want the complete opposite. I'm left believing that my only choice is to have no opinion. Though I lean towards your stance across the board.
> I'm left believing that my only choice is to have no opinion.
I learned this lesson a long time ago from the role models in my life that ended up getting burned because of having a differing viewpoint from whatever societal winds were blowing. I, and I realize probably cynically, now only elect to share, post, tweet, or whatnot whatever only can positively benefit my "brand". Sometimes I have to act like my own PR person, because if I learned anything, anything you say can and most likely probably will be used against you. Working in foodservice for 8 years before switching to developer taught me if something you say doesn't offend or piss someone off, you just haven't ran into the right person yet.
> because if I learned anything, anything you say can and most likely probably will be used against you.
Even right now, writing on a niche message board using a fake name, I'm hesitant to voice my honest opinions about anything related to race or gender or other topic like that. it's like there's an army of internet people waiting for you to mess up and will punish you with controversy and/or honestly try and get you fired.
But then the discussion began, and it was the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had. I don’t mind when people ask hard or critical questions, but I was surprised that I had misread the audience so thoroughly. My talk had little to do with gender, but the second question was “So you think rape is OK?” [..]
After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male."
Absolutely. 9/10 of the comments that I write on HN never see the light of day. And not just on HN, but pretty much every social media platform I engage with.
I don't feel like I have anything particularly controversial, inflammatory, or offensive to say. But, I so strongly don't want to be perceived that way that I just opt-out most of the time.
Freedom and rights are wonderful things. But as I see them used to justify censorship, I can't help but think that's exactly what's happening: they're being used.
I don't know about you, but I rather resent being used, and I won't have it.
We need our serious dialogue. We are undertaking a revolutionary project, realigning the way the sexes relate. The changes of the last century have been enormous. It is arrogance and folly to think that the monotone wisdom of one political perspective is all we need to guide us through such a storm. We need diversity and respect for opposing opinions. We need to gather wisdom from all experiences and backgrounds, and build something excellent.
seems unclear that being `different in tech` implies that `people [are] waiting for you to mess up and will punish you with controversy and/or honestly try and get you fired`.
I'm with you but I pretty much opted out of social media entirely. If I do participate, it's generally for the purpose of keeping in touch with someone or watching a band's tour schedule. Sharing opinions is just not "safe" anymore.
Not dead - you can speak your mind - just you pay a social price to do so. Free speech, even in the most libertarian concept I have doesn't prevent other people's right to criticize your speech - in fact, I'd say it encourages just that. Speak out against stuff you don't like rather than censoring it.
Ultimately it's an effect of large, diverse communities and deep political divisions.
If you want to have political discussions in such public places without suffering a reputation hit, the only way to do so is under a pseudonym - and you're free to do that on many sites.
Personally, I don't think tribalism / group-think, as well as public / private image spaces are very new things at all. Scandals, blacklisting, even execution for having the "wrong opinion" for the social norm of the time -- that's unfortunately pretty common throughout history.
From my viewpoint, an issue with a lot of today's social media is it doesn't feel as nakedly public as it really is. Personally, I wouldn't go into a large room of often random people that you don't know well, and loudly break traditional rules of etiquette by broadcasting inflammatory viewpoints on potentially pot-stirring topics like politics, religion, etc. Likewise, I feel the same with Facebook: that is not the place to discuss these sorts of topics due to how very public Facebook is. Yet a lot of people do that on Facebook and Twitter every day.
> In the past, you could just vocalise your opinion, and it would not survive many hops in the real-world social network.
In the past, "vocalizing your opinion" meant debating friends over drinks, the difference today is that every person with an opinion deliberately leverages modern technology to broadcast that opinion to as many people as possible, and the more that receive it, the better. Naturally, people who disagree will respond... the system is working as intended.
If only that. Take the well-known case of a woman who overheard a private joke between two men on a programming conference and posted an outraged message to social media, which promptly got one of the men fired.
It's not the person who got hurt that "leveraged modern technology to broadcast that opinion to as many people as possible" - it's the other person, the one who overheard stuff and got offended. This is why many start to feel afraid voicing their opinions - because even if you try to keep it to a small group of your friends, there's no telling when someone decides to rebroadcast it publicly on the Internet, and then all hell breaks loose.
There's a lack of proportionality to the "system" you describe.
Someone with a dozen twitter followers, all friends and family, who has no intent to "broadcast to as many people as possible" but just to comment to acquaintances, can say something juuuust a little bit ignorant and, if they happen to get noticed by an "influencer", suddenly have thousands of angry replies, calls to their employer, death threats, etc. They might not have even been broadcasting on twitter, but might have told a joke to a friend in a public place, perhaps even a joke that was misunderstood or misheard by someone listening in, and then suddenly find themselves in the middle of a storm. And it's not typically a storm of people correcting mistaken ideas or helping them reason through errors, but a storm of people seeking vengeance -- not "hey man, that thing you just said is demeaning and wrong", but "you're a bad person and you should be cast out of society".
That is not "the system working as intended" (well, maybe it is in some peoples' minds, but if so it's a terrible system!) That's not a system that fixes ignorance; that's a system that creates a black market for unpopular opinions and that creates fear and resentment.
That's free-speech. Person A freely makes a statement and anyone else can freely respond to it. That's the ideal that everyone envisions and it's also the reality on the ground.
Creating an environment in which some people are justifiably afraid to speak, for fear not of counterargument but of very substantial punishment merely for dissenting from, or even seeking more clearly to understand, the permissible range of opinion, seems like a pretty clear problem to me. No doubt some feel otherwise.
> Creating an environment in which some people are justifiably afraid to speak
Those who you are appearing to condemn would just as easily use the language of "justifiably afraid to speak" in the context of their own political issues, but I am guessing you would disagree with their particular justifications, yet the implication you seem to be making is that they are "more free" to speak, even though both sides are equally capable.
The particular topic is irrelevant, there is certainly a venue in which any opinion would antagonize a particular crowd of close-minded ideologues, but just because a certain group of people are closed-off to certain types of ideas, doesn't mean you are any less free to speak them.
Imagine Obama giving a speech to a crowd of Trump supporters.
Imagine Trump giving a speech to a crowd of Obama supporters.
Both sides would claim "they screamed our guy down and didn't even give him a chance to speak, the [right/left] are killing free speech"... well, they'd both be wrong because freedom to speak doesn't mean everyone will agree, and if you broadcast an unpopular opinion in the wrong crowd, you get an angry mob; this doesn't mean your freedom is being trampled on, because there are plenty of places you can go to speak your ideas where everyone will clap and cheer and exclaim how enlightened you for sharing the clearly-correct-opinion regarding topic x.
It's a bit of a stretch, I think, to equate an intellectually chilly or even hostile reception, on the one hand, with professional blackballing over mere opinions, and in one case that comes to mind an attempt to incite multiple criminal investigations over a piece of satire, on the other.
I don't imagine that either side in the current political conflict would in general be any more virtuous than the other, given power. The thing about power is that, having it, one is tempted to use it. But it would be foolish to ignore the fact that, in the current political conflict, one side by and large does have power, and is less shy daily in wielding it.
Some believe the proper solution to this is to wrest that power away from those who now hold it, the better to wield it and say, well, they hit us first. I understand the appeal, but disagree with the goal; I would rather see a modus vivendi which enables both sides of the political divide to live more or less in peace with one another, ideally without the sort of constant incitement that goes on today. Such behavior seems probable by trivial extrapolation to take us all to a place where nearly none of us wants to go, and even most of those few who think they think otherwise will drown in horror and regret.
Ignoring reality doesn't seem likely to advance such a goal, but on the other hand, there's little evidence to suggest that is a goal which many are likely to share.
If you express your opinion on a private forum instead of a public one, you're much less likely to be crucified for it. I can make nasty off-handed comments to my friends in private chat all day, with very little fear that it'll see the light.
Ultimately sheer quantity of people is the bigger problem than anything else.
It's possible, but it's far, far less likely than a post on social media with your name tied to it - it's also completely deniable and contains only usernames.
This crosses the Internet boundary too - see e.g. the well-known case of a guy who lost his job because someone overheard his meatspace conversation and decided to post it on-line...
Realistically, being in a blue state, if i were to say anything but the most politically popular thing about this topic on Twitter or Facebook, and a colleague got wind of it, I'd get fired, and be essentially unemployable in any of the big tech hubs. Unless I wanted to work for the next Uber-like company that will inevitably get destroyed online (even if its for good reasons).
The social price is extremely high now. It's very nearly as bad as being tossed in jail.
I agree that it's normal to pay a social price for saying crummy things. I'd argue that the climate of our times is such that even reasonable opinions that conflict with a certain point of view are demonized and punished. We've become ultra sensitive and overbearing as a society.
I'd argue you're still at liberty to do it - you just have to be willing to accept any social prices associated with it. Other people enjoy the same liberties that you do, they have every right to think and say whatever they will about you due to your speech.
Of course, this is really only a significant issue on a public forum, on which you can post pseudonymously and still gain any benefits of discussion without paying any significant toll. Some people view this as a negative and want to ban this kind of commenting - I love it, it means you can experiment with different views, make arguments you might not want to make in real life and see what sticks with you.
I'm talking in terms of moral rights - which not necessarily everyone will agree on - but there are some generally accepted ones. For example, murder would violate your neighbors right to life.
Denying your neighbor the ability to speak out against your opinions violates their right to free speech. If you don't like it, argue back.
Exactly. Free speech goes both ways. The only people I see saying things like 'free speech is dead', are usually the ones who want to say ignorant things and get away with it.
Not at all; that's an argument used against the right of privacy. GP was merely remarking that those who lament free speech being dead seem to be, at least from my point of view, those who say bad things. Maybe they have a right to say them, but you'll find this occuring elsewhere.
Voat for example was set up as a website that's like reddit but free from "censorship". That being its attractive quality, many people who value that quality highly went there, and it quickly turned into a truly vile place. My hypothesis is that this happened because the most of the people who could be described as "censored on Reddit" were actually censored for what I would think is a good reason - for saying vile/Nazi/etc. things. Therefore, even if that group was not entirely made of such people, Voat became a place just for them.
I think that communities which have a major selling point of free speech will tend to attract those who feel censored first, and bound to fall into the sort of site almost nobody wants, driving away "legitimate" censored users and failing to attract more people. Most "good" things aren't censored, remember.
Even when looked at from a progressive perspective I think what you're bringing up is a bigger problem to be honest.
You're taking people who maybe think that say, write shitty things about fat people or want to use that as motivation to lose weight and putting them in a basket with people who were subscribed to /r/niggers.
Pushing people out of major communities over minor offenses only results in the promotion of more offensive views in those people. This kind of exclusion from the mainstream results in extremification of views in those individuals. I've felt it myself, I've found myself agreeing with things that I know mere years ago I would have outright rejected, but now contemplate. People don't back down on views like that, they just clamp down harder. So in my opinion it's a lot better to just argue with them and not to censor them.
Arguing for abolition of slavery in South Carolina in 1838 or so would certainly be ignorant within that context. Times change. Today's normal is tomorrows ignorant and vise versa.
I'm not sure that free speech is dead so much as people's ability to think critically is dead, or at the very least their ability to deal with the idea that sometimes people who are great in every other respect advocate a position they don't.
I think this is more correct, but I'm not sure there's really any point in differentiating between the two. The end result either way is: either keep your mouth shut or parrot what the crowd is saying, even if it's the opposite of what they were saying yesterday.
I don't want to make this a Trump thing ... but I"m gonna. I didn't like that he tweeted the CNN clothesline but I just read their response which was doxing and extorting a bs apology from the creator. It shows that the problem is worse than you've pointed out. Even if you're relatively anonymous, you'll be guilty by association if someone uses your words and amplifies them in a way you never could.
Well, the creator of the CNN clothesline wasn't merely "guilty by association" given he had a clear history of posting hate speech and creating fairly obviously bigoted content.
Here is the thing. You can have private opinions but when you express them publicly, the larger the audience the larger the chance that someone can totally misinterpret / take out of context / take IN context but write a diatribe against / etc. what you say.
It could be someone who is outraged or someone who actually uses your words to further their ideological agenda against those who are outraged.
In short, the more people see what you say, the more chances that it can run away from under you and distract from your brand and its focus.
That is why Coke executives don't just tweet their personal views on topics, etc. and why politicians stay on message.
Anything you say publicly can and may be used against YOUR GOALS. And maybe against your character.
"Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something there to hang him.
As quoted in Champlain's Dream (2008) by David Hackett Fischer"
And with AI you can probably quote mine anyone like Richelou.
Sometimes, like Trump, the controversy helps attract media attention and you can find a core audience who flocks to you. Then you become a polarizing figure. If that's your way of getting famous, then the price you pay is people quote mining what you say later and you having to filter out people who are constantly lining up to debate you and take you down.
Trump has been able to sidestep the parsing of his words by not standing for anything and being so willing to change with the wind and just say so much random stuff, while at the same time saying what enough people want to hear that he totally polarized the country.
My personal view is that Trump is deliberately trolling the media, and they are taking the bait every time. There's also a "they can dish it out but can't take it" element to it.
I've watched him and I think it is just too hard for him to control himself. He's got the political correctness and factual accuracy version of dyslexia.
When I posted this, the upvotes went up to +3 points, and then steadily have been declining to -2 points.
No one has commented as to why they are downvoting or whatever. Fine. But I have noticed this on many of my other posts. And I wonder sometimes whether people actually have downvoting rings / clones on HN for topics/people/opinions! It seems to be free to downvote or upvote, so economically it would make sense that there are no repercussions.
> It seems to be free to downvote or upvote, so economically it would make sense that there are no repercussions.
Since there is no cost to downvoting, it is cheaper in terms of time and effort to--anonymously!--censor opinions than to express them. It's doubly bad because, in order to acquire downvoting privileges, you must first express enough "correct" opinions, which makes the system self-selecting for certain views. It's a fundamentally broken system, because it incentivizes the wrong things, and it's why I stopped commenting here....oops.
> Since there is no cost to downvoting, it is cheaper in terms of time and effort to--anonymously!--censor opinions than to express them.
Sometimes it's cheaper in terms of time and effort to downvote rather than engage because the comment or commentator displays obvious* signs that a discussion will be fruitless.
* To me, of course; I only represent myself and my opinions.
This is why I only use pseudonyms online and don't tie together my "real life" with my "life online".
I think it's foolish to tie the two together if you ever want to express your personal opinions. Just because they're "popular now" or aren't causing harm in the now doesn't mean that will hold true 10 years from now, keeping in mind that "the internet never forgets".
I have a professional life, using my real name, with virtually no public exposure. I have a personal life as well, using social media, but locked down to close family and friends. And I've had numerous "hobby lives", Mirimir being one of the most recent and active, isolated through VPN services and Tor.
> if something you say doesn't offend or piss someone off, you just haven't ran into the right person yet.
Agreed. No matter how calculated you are chances are someone is going to be angry or atleast peeved by you having an opinion. I believe that everyone has a right to voicing their opinion. By this I mean that people should have a chance to be heard, but I believe the backlash that comes from voicing an opinion is sometimes a necessary evil and it too should not be completely silenced. There's a healthy balance in the war of words.
I personally feel despite the backlash if you feel strongly about something that you feel is right then speak out about it, and have a voice. Some words need to be heard and expressed. People do often have strong biases, but your words can hold power to sway someone to either side.
One important thing to note about truly making a debate a learning experience is just because the person is on the other side of the debate doesn't mean you can't learn some principle or truth from them. You can almost always learn or see some shred of truth from any argument no matter how fallacious, wrong, or stupid it may seem. Our job as conversationalists should be to try to separate the fact from the fiction.
As words are expressed and understood people come to know where their misconceptions lie. They start aligning their perceptions with what they truly feel is right.
I love hacker news the community often does not take a single side, and the views on both sides are heard. This helps me decide where I should stand on the issue. So I just have to say thank you to those who give constructive thoughts that help guide the conversation.
That's my favorite quote from one my favorite characters of Red Mars: “It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did.”
As a fresh US immigrant from the middle of Europe yet visually passing as an average white man, I haven't even shared the style of upbringing that people assume I did, and yet I lean closer to the opinion expressed above because I fear that a determined person with an agenda can find a way to use my story or opinions to illustrate their point and paint me and broad classes of people as problematic in the process.
I empathize with those who've also turned to self-censorship for fear of being branded as part of a the problem. I want to have the tough conversations, but not at the expense of being made a public example for holding opinions that are neither hateful nor malicious, just colored by my origins and journey through life: the exact same factors that others advocate taking into account.
The whole thing is really unfortunate: people holding moderate (and in many ways, mainstream) opinions are withdrawing from the public discourse, which I don't believe is conducive to satisfactory progress.
I have kids to take care of. There are certain opinions I might have that I dare not discuss. I don't even dare say I have such opinions even without naming them, that's how deep the impulse to self-censor goes. Let's just say I do, hypothetically.
I would very much fear for the economic consequences of voicing various opinions. Even if they didn't lead to my termination at work, I'm certain they would prevent any kind of career advancement.
I'm reasonably sure I can survive in the world without my opinions being known, or the changes I presumably would like to see not being made. In short, they win, I'll survive somehow, and my kids will eat. They'll also maybe learn that some things I might believe are not acceptable, and will have to think about that when choosing to believe them themselves.
Certain ideas and people have definitively won the day, and it's now just survival mode for many.
The question then is, will the world your children inherit be better or worse for people such as yourself holding their tongues.
These free speech rights we technically have were not acquired without cost--on the contrary, they came at enormous cost in blood. Now we refrain from defending them because doing so might inconvenience us.
Of course, it's easy for me to say this, sitting in front of a computer writing vague comments. Food for thought, especially for Americans the day after Independence Day.
I think most of the founders and revolutionaries didn't believe they were martyring themselves for a hopeless cause. The inconvenience here would be the total ruin of my family in exchange for the satisfaction of having spoke my mind on some issue, which isn't a good trade.
You could create an online persona to have those "tough conversations". And use VPN services and/or Tor to keep it isolated from your real-world identity.
this comment speaks my own views in many ways. thanks for sharing.
i'm still bothered by the active censorship of comments and discussion that occurred earlier in the week, and i hope this discussion is informative for the moderators, who are hopefully having discussions about how best to handle similar situations in the future.
You may be misunderstanding how HN moderation works. The overwhelming majority of 'censorship' of comments (if by that you mean flagging and downvoting) is done by HN users. That includes the recent threads on sexual harassment.
Mods are not trying to optimize HN for opinion but for intellectual curiosity, and that requires substantive discussion. That's pretty much the whole story, though of course there are a thousand details.
This thread is different from the other ones because the OP is different. Mods are doing the same thing here as in any other. That's devilishly hard for people to see because everyone interprets moderation through the filter of their own pre-existing opinions and there's little we can do about it. I wrote about this here if anyone wants more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14693348.
Its almost like a industry upon itself, being busy being insulted and helping to overcome those insults by selling seminars, stickers and absolution.
I almost feel sorry for anyone who is to deal with either side. Harassment is one thing, but if that industry is the only help you can turn too- that is worser. Cause this side has no interest in resolving the core Issue (it literaly lives from it) and doesn't have a interest in a good outcome for the harassed either.
Still, if i think back on the woman i tutored in the freshman C-class - and later in there careers - any creep in power molesting those: Its good that this industry exists, to apply pressure too keep standards. For every woman in tech, should be able to walk, live and write like maria.
I deeply understand this sentiment, especially the "what can/should I do?" aspect, but I think "watching from the sidelines" is a mistake. If we do nothing then the status quo will tend toward more segregation, not less.
Some simple things I do to try to make things better in my workplace:
With others:
* actually listen
* never interrupt
* make sure criticism is constructive
* in a shared codebase, use the lightest possible touch (avoid aesthetic refactoring)
With myself:
* acknowledge my own privileges/biases, and be aware of the fact that simply what I look like/how I speak etc. can affect other people
* be open to the possibility that my own opinions may not be immutable objective truths (this is hard)
My new motto (if I can pull it off), is to never criticize, ever. If I see a project on an obvious downward trajectory, rather than pointing out the blatantly obvious things that could turn it around, I am going to smile and repeat the same nonsense feel good crap my coworkers do as if everything is just fine, and watch it crash and burn. And then in my next interview, I will declare it a smashing success! In my experience, this is literally the recipe for success in modern times.
I should note, these observations are based on working in large enterprises where failure of an individual project can be absorbed, as opposed to a smaller shop where success actually matters.
I'm fine with acknowledging my shortcomings. I think it shows a healthy humility and a kind of leadership that is really lacking these days.
But I find the language of privilege to be a certain kind of virtue signalling. I don't ascribe to the underlying philosophy, so I would be misleading my audience to talk about my "privileges".
> the fact that simply what I look like/how I speak etc. can affect other people
That can describe really bad, really racist outcomes. It's not fair, at least in the Rawlsian sense, to make people responsible for how others react to who they are.
Well, I think that's ok. As fellow white male, our opinion is not really what matters here. It's not really about us. We are involved, we try to help each other out and whatnot, but in the end it's ok to just be there and listen for once.
We're talking about the behavior of others; who cares if Sally wants to order chicken or Fred wants a blue car or Mark and Sarah want to form a club for Pittsburgh-expats? If someone wants to create an award for women/minorities/lefties/gingers/etc, it seems perfectly reasonable to feel neither positively or negatively about it. This isn't a test, you don't get marked down for "no answer".
People will always (and should) have differing opinions, don't let that stop you from forming your own opinion and then working to improve the situation.
I don't see their preferences as necessarily conflicting from your point of view. Some people of various groups want the ability to have events of their own, and others want to be included in non-restrictive coding events. Allow/encourage both. Don't fight back against "Women Who Code" events, and be welcoming and polite to women at non-restrictive coding events. You don't need to have a stance on which is better, and as long as you don't try to have a white or men exclusive event I don't see you having any trouble.
It seemed like a legitimate question. The parent comment said pretty much every selectivity group is okay except for white males and the child post simply asked why is that the case. At least that's how I read it.
[..] I find these kinds of situations so confusing. Some people want these differences to be highlighted, while others like yourself want the complete opposite. I'm left believing that my only choice is to have no opinion.
The post and the parent comment show that this is not a matter of opinion, not a matter to be confused of; we're all human, nothing more, nothing less. Keeping this in mind will clear things up for everyone eventually.
We all do it, but sharing opinions tends not to be all that useful anyway. From someone else's point of view it's just another stranger's opinion on the Internet.
Better to ask questions, share links, and tell stories based on personal experience if you have any.
There's a third choice: Have a supportive opinion. Knowing full-well that you don't understand what it's like to be a woman/African American/non-binary/non-straight person in this situation, express belief in everyone's individual experience, and support them in it. Don't assume you know, just listen and show support. If it's a matter of having to decide between the two opinions, bow out, because you have no say.
I can't agree more - coming from former east-bloc european environment where women had to work same as men and there was no racism (simply because there were only white people for last 2000 years on this place), both of what you mention is distant issue (but clearly some other places are/were riddled with it).
I already treat women as equal (actually more), same goes to my LBGT friends and colleagues, and same for all non-white people. But constant presence in media is making these topics so annoying to me, I wish more focus was dedicated to healthy lifestyle for example (probably being selfish here but that's my view, and view of people close to me too).
Things like company-wide emails encouraging us to go to gay prides over weekend "where you can finally participate and show your hetero support" - god damn I work for banking corp with 130k employees. If I wanted to go there, I would be already going for last 10+ years. I show support to the cause by treating them as equal, because THEY ARE EQUAL, not treating them like disabled kids. Keep work emails about work, and let me do my own stuff in my own time.
"Only white people" doesn't mean "no racism". As an Englishman, let me assure you my ancestors managed racism against white Irish people extremely well, and - somewhat ironically - plenty of the less educated people around me today are extremely racist to eastern Europeans (who are supposedly "takin' er jerbs").
Your point is "I don't do racist things, therefore there isn't a problem", which is just not true - there are still huge problems for tons of people with racism, sexism and other bigotry, and just because you don't see it or notice it doesn't make it not a problem. You got annoyed? I'm sure some non-racists were annoyed when all anyone could talk about was how bad slavery was. If you don't care about the issue, feel free to ignore it - but saying that people are imposing on you by caring is just unreasonable.
I mean racism. It's commonly accepted that race is a fuzzy term when it comes to this kind of thing and encompasses discrimination against people based on background, nationality and ethnic groups. However you want to define racism, the discrimination against Irish people in England fits the same pattern and has largely the same problems as racism in other forms.
In case you weren't aware, yes, Irish is an ethnicity, dating back over 9,000 years, making it older than most existing ethnicities. Wikipedia has more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_people
Being an island, Ireland was quite cut off genetically from the world for quite a long time, allowing a distinct ethnicity to develop. And as you may be aware, "race" isn't a real scientifically valid concept, but the word is used colloquially to refer to ethnicity, which is a scientifically valid concept that can be measured using genetics.
I recently watched an answer on this by Steven Pinker as to why this "re-segregation" is happening. He basically says that legitimate movements don't stop as soon as they've reached their goal and at that point, they start to become regressive. Interestingly he provides an example that hasn't to do with any ism: child protection.
My personal thought on this is that those who devote themselves to these movements internalise them in such a way that the movements define their identity.
Once the goal of the movement is achieved, that part of their identity necessarily needs to disappear and because this is such a difficult thing to do they simply shift the movement's goalposts to keep their internal purpose alive (usually toward a regressive point).
I think this is part of it. I also think that humans are essentially greedy when it comes to progress. I am fortunate to have a nearly limitless supply of clean water, at nearly any temperature I want. Yet I still curse the shower for taking a minute or so to warm up. It just is never good enough, moving the goalposts as you say.
I think it was Joe Rogan who mentioned a similar point where, until a goal is reached those who want equity and those who just want a position of power are pointed in the exact same direction. It is only once the goal is reached that the difference between the two ideals becomes apparent.
That idea has existed since before Joe Rogan was born, and been explored in far more depth. Crediting it to him seems a bit odd, but perhaps it's telling.
excellent video. I wish I could get a point across as eloquently as Pinker...
It seems these movements don't have a defined point where they can say the goal has been achieved and everybody can go home. Instead I think it's the opposite and the movement wins in strength. The more traction the movement gets the more power and influence it gets and the bigger its goals will get.
His example about child protection is great. There is no cutoff point.
I would also argue that shareholder capitalism has reached the same state. In a lot of circles it's not even OK to question the current trend of inequality and it's not OK to think about ways to raise standards for everyone.
Yup, if I recall corectly MADD had a problem with this recently where someone who was on board very early basically said "y'all are crazy, I'm out of here"
Thanks for this link. I have (independently) been thinking the same thing, that movements become regressive after a huge goal is achieved. Steven puts the point across well.
Yes, of course in an ideal world these things would be non-issues, but they aren't. People are discriminated against, and there are barriers from culture that won't change without intentional scruity.
Of course, everyone should be able to just do their job and no more. If you aren't interested in being a role model or trying to push for that equality, that's absolutely fine, no one is obligated to do so. Some people do, however, and they will be trying to find others that do, I don't think that's unreasonable.
If, for example, women are routinely excluded from male-dominated clubs, for example, maybe they never get an interest in programming. While in an ideal world everyone can attend those clubs and it doesn't matter, if that's not the reality because of societal expectation, until that expectation has changed, maybe girl's clubs allow girls to get involved without fear of the societal stigma of doing "boys things" (if they don't happen to be one of the IDGAF people who do it anyway), resulting in more women in tech, which normalises it, eventually removing the need for girl's specific clubs.
This isn't exactly a new idea. It's the same idea behind things like women's-only chess - if the culture has excluded a group for a long time, it can be hard for talented individuals to get started because they get excluded inherently. If you can create a separate culture to get them interested, then merge the cultures over time, you can fix that.
To me, saying "we should just have everyone together" is like proclaiming racism was done the day slavery was abolished. Things don't magically get fixed culturally and socially - that takes an integration.
The problem is that the strategies used to "fix" the original, supposed discrimination are sins by themselves. Affirmative action is plain racism/sexism without the history aspect.
There is no quantification (or even validation really) of the supposed discrimination. People don't look bother trying to figure out what actions would make the scale equal. They are completely concentrated on moving the scale in one direction only and never check the balancing.
People must believe that there is discrimination is always so severe that any necessary evil used to balance it out is justified.
> Things don't magically get fixed culturally and socially - that takes an integration.
Not necessarily, I see 2 opinions on how to fix this :
- An "active integration" like you explain, where the differences are highlighted (what we mostly see in the US). The idea is that by forcing the change we'll get used to it.
- A post-racial/genre approach, where the differences are made as irrelevant as any physical trait, so the change comes naturally but it's a long process (what I've mostly seen in France)
IMHO the first approach may yield faster results, but only the second can solve cultural issues (in part by blurring and mixing the cultures, instead of crystallizing them)
The second isn't a process - it's an end result. That only happens where there is some pressure for that result to come to fruition. That means you need people to get pushed into situations where they interact with others to get that normalisation. That requires some effort to pursue equality and give people chances.
I also think it's morally reprehensible to just sit back and accept generations of people who don't have the chances others do.
> - A post-racial/genre approach, where the differences are made as irrelevant as any physical trait, so the change comes naturally but it's a long process (what I've mostly seen in France)
I grew up (in the US) thinking that my generation (I'm a very early "millennial", apparently—the kind that well remembers a pre-Web world and grew up with a lot of Gen X media) pretty much had this down, and that especially the tech people did. The Internet of the hacker world wasn't supposed to care about this stuff, just results and ability.
Now everyone seems more divided over sex than it did then. Hell, sexual orientations of all sorts and interracial relationships (anyone else remember those "look who's coming to dinner" episodes of daytime talk shows in the 90s?) and such, which were all still very much issues to the adult public when I was growing up, really do seem to be disappearing as Things To Be Upset About (I know, bathroom bills and not counting your chickens and so on, but the progress there seems huge and very real), but the regular ol' divide between men and women? It seems to be way worse than it was.
I'm not sure what happened, but this certainly wasn't something I expected to be a major problem for adults of Gen X/Millennial generations. And I was raised in the Midwest and surrounded by Republicans (including my parents), so it's not like I grew up in a liberal bubble or something. The last decade or so's "culture war"-type battles in online communities, all the reports of significant difficulties for women in technology, and so on, have caught me very much by surprise.
My knowledge of the US is very limited but that's not what I've seen, for the me the "integration" in the US seems not very deep. At least in France in Paris there is a mixed middle class, the diversity in the workplace is huge at every level (well ok except for developers, even if there is a lot of CS grads the majority goes to consulting), there is a common culture and group of friends and colleagues are diverse without even noticing it without conscious thinking.
Sorry for the edits, I'm not a good english speaker and the tone wasn't right.
The US is very big - a lot of the US has extremely good integration.
The reality is that integration follows a similar pattern - bigger cities mean better integration. Find a vote map and you've basically got a map of how good integration is.
Yeah, agreed. I still remember seeing a bunch of college students pushing for 'segregation' at university because it would 'help minorities' and thinking "Wasn't that exactly what we got rid of because it was horribly racist 50 years or so ago?"
It feels like all these 'minority only' events and clubs and what not are going straight back to the bad old days. Just from the opposite 'side' of the political spectrum.
Opinions about <group>-only events aside, there's a difference between a homogeneous group of people choosing to be together, and a group of individuals who were barred from using specific toilets, water fountains, seats, education opportunities, jobs, etc.
Comparing segregation to voluntary <group>-only events is a gross misunderstanding of how things were.
Well it is my understanding that it was a whites-only back in the day. Now it is a not-whites only which really doesn't seem as different to me as you comment indicates it really is. It is just a different group of people telling others what they can and can't do.
If you were white in 60's America, you didn't have to check ahead of time if a given restaurant would serve you food. If you're white now, you still don't have to check.
If you're not white, things are different.
Can you think of some examples of when you were unexpectedly forbidden from participating in an event/group/etc? Did you have access to alternatives?
The 1960s were 50 years ago. You won't experience that today (with very rare exceptions), and that's a good thing. But we can't be forever fixated on things that we've moved past.
1. The purpose was to illustrate the difference between white-only discrimination (the origin of our current discrimination laws) and modern exclusive group events.
2. There are lots of people who lived through the Civil Rights movement alive today, and segregation and the associated attitudes didn't disappear overnight. Do you think 70 year old politicians carry no baggage from their upbringing and early adulthood?
True, but that's not a gender issue per se. Women-only programming groups are based on the theory that women are not being well served by co-ed programming groups, as a combination of socially enforced gender roles plus an understandable discomfort at being the only woman in a room. All male groups are generally frowned upon because there's no reason to think the average male would be prevented from participating in a technically co-ed but heavily male group.
I suspect men-only clubs for traditionally female dominated fields, something like an all male kindergarten teacher group, would be broadly accepted as reasonable.
> I suspect men-only clubs for traditionally female dominated fields, something like an all male kindergarten teacher group, would be broadly accepted as reasonable.
Nursing, home healthcare, child care, veterinary services, social services, and libraries are the other canonical examples besides education of highly women-dominated fields where having male-only employee resource groups might make logical sense.
I'm not sure I agree with you that it would be broadly accepted as reasonable, however, even though I personally would find it reasonable.
Since you can't really eliminate backroom dealing, male only social clubs can have the practical effect of excluding women from equal participation/opportunity, at least as long as groups like "C level exec" are disproportionately male.
You know what, I think people, in general, should be allowed to discriminate. The whole "right to refuse service" shtick - people shouldn't be forced to do things they don't want to do, even if they are following stupid beliefs.
That said, I recognise there are things that have to beat that. Just like free speech doesn't include shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre, we have to curtail people's right to discriminate where other people's lives are made unlivable because of it.
If someone refuses me, the white straight male, the chance to buy something, I go somewhere else. That's not the case for some minorities however. If everyone won't provide wedding services for you, or everyone won't let you attend a class, or everyone won't sell you food, you can't live your life. Commonly discriminated minorities have to be protected because they have a right to do what they want as well. Just as you are free to do what you want, but that doesn't include murdering people. You are free to refuse service, but not based on things that mean that person can't get service anywhere.
It's not perfect, but it's a solution.
Now, of course, that doesn't address another salient question - even if it's legal, why would minorities want restricted events?
Well, culture. Obviously in an ideal world events would be open to all and it'd all just work. The reality is, however, that culture can be a barrier. Let's take chess as an example.
Chess was male-dominated in part due to lack of education for women and it being seen as a male game. Obviously tournaments today are not restricted to men, but we still see less women.
That is, at least in part, because women never get exposed to chess because there is still cultural pressure that it's a "men's game". Women are excluded when they are young and never get a start. The intent of girl's only clubs and tournaments is to encourage women to get into chess, then they integrate into the larger chess scene. As time goes on, the societal stigma lessens and hopefully we end up in that ideal situation.
> If everyone won't provide wedding services for you, or everyone won't let you attend a class, or everyone won't sell you food, you can't live your life.
True, but socially, we've moved past that. There might be the rare individual baker who would not want to bake a cake for a gay wedding, because he's a devout Christian or Muslim or whatever and thinks homosexuality is a sin. But 98% of businesses won't care, as long as you can pay the bill.
We'll never be rid of all discrimination. It's just a flaw in human nature. We should keep educating and working against it. But I think we're largely past the institutionalized (to say nothing of codified) discrimination of the past centuries.
> True, but socially, we've moved past that. There might be the rare individual baker who would not want to bake a cake for a gay wedding, because he's a devout Christian or Muslim or whatever and thinks homosexuality is a sin. But 98% of businesses won't care, as long as you can pay the bill.
Untrue. There are still many communities where you can be totally ostracized for those things. Just because you don't notice it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Furthermore, this misses the point - even if there wasn't active discrimination in that way, it doesn't mean there isn't societal pressure or a need for minority groups to get minorities into a community in order to integrate that culture.
> We'll never be rid of all discrimination. It's just a flaw in human nature. We should keep educating and working against it. But I think we're largely past the institutionalized (to say nothing of codified) discrimination of the past centuries.
I mean, sure, but I'm sure people said the same thing about murder, then rape, etc..., etc... - we should always be working to reduce these things.
We are not at the point where discrimination is some crazily rare thing like murder is in modern societies.
If you had a Kerry sticker on your car in the high school parking lot, there was a squad of kids that would break your windows, slash your tires, and key your car. The school had cameras, but refused to investigate the matter.
I had friend who was gay, and after he got off the bus one day, all of the kids on that side of the bus threw rocks at him. He was in a coma for a few days.
This was in 2004. And define widespread? Like was it sure to happen if you were out? No. If you started a GSA club like he did, more likely. I think the term 'uppity' was thrown around.
> If someone refuses me, the white straight male, the chance to buy something, I go somewhere else. That's not the case for some minorities however. If everyone won't provide wedding services for you, or everyone won't let you attend a class, or everyone won't sell you food, you can't live your life. Commonly discriminated minorities have to be protected because they have a right to do what they want as well. Just as you are free to do what you want, but that doesn't include murdering people. You are free to refuse service, but not based on things that mean that person can't get service anywhere.
An event that had the implicit backing of the school administration sent a widespread message.
Lynching in the wasn't 'widespread', but it's message was. According to this: http://time.com/3703386/jim-crow-lynchings Georgia had 586 total lynchings from 1877 until 1950. That's about 1 per county per generation.
> An event that had the implicit backing of the school administration sent a widespread message.
If you check the thread you'll clearly see my interest wasn't whether discrimination happens at all, it's whether it is to the point of being literally ostracized, as was stated.
>> Could you name a two or three so we have some idea what you're talking about?
> sure..
Perhaps don't impersonate other people if you don't want to be mistaken for someone else.
Then again, I suppose by now I should know better than to expect reasonable discussion in threads such as these.
> If you check the thread you'll clearly see my interest wasn't whether discrimination happens at all, it's whether it is to the point of being literally ostracized, as was stated.
You don't think putting the kid who was being 'uppity' in a coma doesn't cause imply ostracization for the others like him? Particularly when there was no repercussions from perceived authority figures?
> Perhaps don't impersonate other people if you don't want to be mistaken for someone else.
It's hard to 'impersonate' on a forum where every post has my username on it. Are you new to the internet or something?
The point you were trying to make was that these were isolated incidents, that these people could live their lives around them. Reading that list, it's clear that isn't true - people threatening to kill you, beating you up, these aren't signs that you can live you life normally.
Clearly, we aren't in the same place we were when we had state-supported segregation, but there is a reason these minorities are still protected, and there is still significant discrimination.
This all means that there is a big difference between a community coming together in a space exclusively for them to try and push for inclusion, and discrimination.
>> True, but socially, we've moved past that. There might be the rare individual baker who would not want to bake a cake for a gay wedding, because he's a devout Christian or Muslim or whatever and thinks homosexuality is a sin. But 98% of businesses won't care, as long as you can pay the bill.
> Untrue. There are still many communities where you can be totally ostracized for those things.
The point of contention is not whether some (and sometimes very severe) discrimination exists, it is whether as he claims that there are places where it is so common/frequent that you could be considered ostracized. I was looking for proof of the latter (his original assertion), not proof of the former (that which was provided, and now provided by you).
> The point you were trying to make was that these were isolated incidents
I'm not asserting anything, I am simply being skeptical and asking for proof of an extraordinary claim.
If my "stance" pisses you off, I beg that you reconsider. To win over those who are still not "on your side" (and I'm not one of them, by the way), using exaggerations and half-truths is most definitely not the way to go about it, especially in this modern day "everyone's-a-victim" culture we live in. I am not your enemy, I'm just offering some well-intentioned advice on how to talk to your enemies in order to persuade them.
I just don't understand how "some severe discrimination exists" but that doesn't ostracise people? You don't need everyone to hate you to be ostracised - just enough people to stop you living your life. If there are three local venues suitable for a wedding and those three people are anti-gay, good luck getting married locally.
It's not exaggerations or half-truths - being gay, black or of a given religion (or lack thereof) can mean your life is basically unlivable in some communities. If you need more concrete examples, go read the ex-mormon subreddit, for example. People who, because they are atheists, are disowned by their family and lose every friend they ever had, and have to leave the only place they ever lived.
It's easy to not see it outselves and say "it's all stuff of the past", but it isn't. Even if your life isn't completely unlivable, quality of life can be severly reduced. I was talking about the extremes that triggered the laws, not trying to say that's the only thing that's an issue.
More importantly, the point of my first post (the root of the chain) was that minority groups that are designed to provide a path into a field aren't the same as segregation.
verb (used with object), ostracized, ostracizing.
1.
to exclude, by general consent, from society, friendship, conversation, privileges, etc.:
His friends ostracized him after his father's arrest.
2.
to banish (a person) from his or her native country; expatriate.
3.
(in ancient Greece) to banish (a citizen) temporarily by popular vote.
> If there are three local venues suitable for a wedding and those three people are anti-gay, good luck getting married locally.
Ok, now we're getting somewhere. Are there a significant number of such places? (There very well may be, if there is it causes me no mental anguish whatsoever to acknowledge this, it was merely a simple honest question from the very start of this absurd thread.)
> Even if your life isn't completely unlivable, quality of life can be severly reduced.
Now this sounds like a more honest description of objective reality.
Liberals often accuse those who are opposed to their ideas that they are small minded. Well, is it completely false that there is a relatively new movement that has taken hold on college campuses, where a significant number of students suddenly (as in, there was almost no incidences of this 2 to 5 years ago) need "safe spaces", and simply hearing ideas that they philosophically disagree with causes them to "literally shake", and people of color are now self-segregating themselves into their own events because suddenly mainstream society is so racist it is literally unbearable (despite the reality being continued improvement, if anything, in mainstream "acceptance" of people of color)?
It is my belief that the well-intentioned (actually, I'm not even sure) actions of some people on the left is significantly setting back the true progress of their stated intentions, and in many cases are causing genuinely serious mental illness in impressionable teens. I am not joking in the slightest when I say that these people (not you necessarily, but based on your faux incredulity I'm suspicious) are FAR more damaging to society than the "evils" they claim to be fighting.
And if your response to this is the typical smug liberal, deliberate misinterpretation of what I've said, that will be just yet another confirmation that your "movement" is insincere, whose goal is not to genuinely move society to a more accepting-of-diversity place as you claim, but instead that you are in fact an architect of hate, but just with a different target in mind. Some people are indeed just like that, some of my very best friends in fact.
> Ok, now we're getting somewhere. Are there a significant number of such places?
Yes, I'll make the same reference - the ex-mormon subreddit is an example where you will find a ton of stories of people being completely ostracised for their (lack of) belief. It's not just mormon's obviously, that's just a good example. It's really not hard to find that racism, sexism and other bigotry are alive and well today - people talk about it, precisely because it has such a large effect on their lives.
> Well, is it completely false that there is a relatively new movement...
I mean, I'm sure those people exist - I've seen no evidence of it being more than extremely isolated cases though, definitely not "a significant number" - as with any cause, there are people who go to extremes, but they don't reflect on "the left" any more than neo-nazis reflect on "the right" - they are a subsection.
You appear to be implying that this is somehow commonplace, but it's not.
Now, are you equating "girls only computing clubs" and examples like that I've given to "safe spaces" or "self-segregation"? Because they aren't. Again, as I've been making the point - we know it is hard to give opportunities to minorities when there is cultural expectation and barriers to entry. E.g: computing is a "boy" thing. Those kind of targeted groups are used as a force to push back on those barriers and societal expectations, allowing minorities opportunities they might otherwise not get.
I'll be absolute: I am a firm believer in free speech and debate, and universities are places to learn, and you need active debate for that. While people have a right to not be harassed (I've seen the claim that it's free speech to follow someone around a university campus or invade their living space, which is clearly just as dumb), that doesn't require infringing on debate to achieve.
The self-segregation thing I've literally never even heard of. The only examples I've seen were as protests, which is entirely valid.
I hear a lot of claims that there is some plague of "SJW"s destroying freedoms in a quest for safety - I've seen no evidence of this being anything other than a vanishingly small minority. People tend to claim this plague exists, cite one example of someone saying something obviously crazy, and then claim anyone arguing for social change is an crazy SJW who can be ignored. It's roughly equivalent to just claiming that everyone on the right is a nazi. Yes, there are some nutjobs out there, but clearly that isn't a representation of "the right" as it stands. The vast majority of "the left" is strongly in favour of protection of free speech.
Again, you were the one that was arguing my point - so your tone and direction seem off to me - are you really equating minorities working together to try and find routes around obstacles in place because of discrimination against them to segregation, and implying it is bad in the same way? That's the point I was originally making, and I honestly can't tell if you just cherry-picked a part of my point to try and nitpick and then go off on a tangent about how "the others" are worse, or if you believe that my point was invalid.
I also can name a few things that are dominated by woman, or latin, jews, etc...
Is this really a problem?
I think that some of these lines of thought, while are valid points to justify and individual problem, tend to fall into a slippery slop that tends to beleving that a true (ideal) society is all greyed out with everyone in the same mold: genderless, opinionless, etc...
There is nothing inherently wrong with a lack of diversity, but it is almost always a symptom of an issue with society or systems limiting people. For example, I would argue that primary school teachers being almost entirely women is indeed an issue with systemic and social sexism.
You have completely missed my point. The point is that everyone should have opportunity if they want to do something and are capable of it, not some kind of homogenization. Women are currently actively pushed away from the industry. If women don't want to be in tech, that's fine, the issue is that women that do get pushed away, discriminated against, or never get the opportunity to learn they are interested in it.
There is no attempt to make everyone the same - the attempt is to try and allow everyone to embrace their own differences - to give everyone the same opportunities.
The problem encompasses way more than you claim it to. It includes things like quality of service, social networks, and mostly, basic human dignity. If what you said was actually the problem, then the civil rights act wouldn't have outlawed segregation.
I was simplifying to try and make a point relevant to the topic at hand - obviously it's not literally just about complete inability to live your life - we have more rights than that.
Eh, this is just the standard argument against "identity politics".
The obvious counterpoint is that, by working together as an identified sub-group, you have greater power than you would otherwise. Dedicated venues for those sub-groups offer a place to organize, provide communal support, etc.
Frankly, I think it's sadly naive to believe that we can simply "Lose all the labels" and that'll magically fix things.
"Identity politics" is what led to women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, etc. And while I'm not one to claim that "women in tech" is of the same significance as those movements, I think history teaches us that sub-groups, bound together with a common goal, are infinitely more effective at instituting change than a bunch of individuals who choose not to organize.
I remember quite some time ago, before Social networks. Before blogs. Before all of what we think of the WWW.
We were still in Web 1.0 , with email, usenet, IRC, and other then-essential services. Dial-up was the way online. And when people talked with each other, we were told to not release who we are. Be guarded in your real-identity.
And that lead to user1 talks with user2. I didn't know if user2 was white, black, asian, hispanic, native, male, female, transgender, gay, asexual, or what. I only knew from the content of the text we traded in communication. There was enough bandwidth for pictures, but didnt. Webcams were bad and expensive. Scanners were hard to come by. And there was no impetus to link a pic to a person's text.
Now, it's "Real Name Policy". Facebook will encourage friends to rat your lying profile to catch you. Google will do similar, or datamine your real content. Everyone wants a picture for your profile.
What used to be "person talks to person", is now "Person with forced specific identity talks to person with forced specific identity". And it certainly doesn't feel better than before. It feels strictly worse, bringing identity politics in with it.
This really is a problem that cannot be fixed by pretending that it doesn't exist. Are you going to ignore the fact that by "forcing" identities, we are unable to behave in a way that makes identity irrelevant? The only way we can currently achieve the utopia in which gender, race, sexuality, class, attractiveness, etc don't matter is when we purposefully construct an environment where it all magically disappears. While it's great that internet communities give us the promise of a fully integrated society, these communities are built on a fragile and naive premise. That is, when people on IRC begin to link their Facebook profiles, nobody is going to be able to control the way that people begin to react to the ideas coming from the identities of the people on the other side of the screen. Social networks aren't the problem, they simply reveal the insidious nature of the problem.
But it's not forcing identities, or it wasn't back in the day.
Were you black? It didn't matter. White? So what. Male? Female? It didn't matter.
The words on the screen, and the thoughts behind the superficial bodily stuff was what mattered. How did they think? How did they communicate their ideas? How did they collaborate? What were their ethics and values? -- Those were what mattered, not that someone had a blue mohawk and were bisexual. Those things didn't matter.
Better yet, this method also transcended poor and rich... Yes, you had to have a certain amount to access a computer and the internet. Or you hacked the local university's access. Or used it at the library. Or had a cool friend. Except, now it's what you think, not what stylish clothes you wore, or the jewelry you had.
And this blurring of gender, sexual preference, race, weight, height,.. you name it was distilled down to "what's in that skull". And someone whom you might never walk up to and talk with, you could strike conversations with them, and they you. It also was the first steps of breaking down national borders - I could talk with people who say they live in Europe, or Asia, or Africa, or wherever...
At that time, for a small window, "We" were one peoples of this world. As the Hacker's Manifesto put it;
"We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals."
I await this day to come again. Hopefully the next time, we can meet face to face, and celebrate our differences and come together as one peoples of this world.. But a few of us saw it the first time, for a bit.
That only works if you want to bully others for the resources. (That's how unions work). That, however, will re-enfonce negative stereotypes for the group and will not improve anything.
If you want to overcome the stereotype, work with other people. Get to know them. Learn the rules of the game and play by the same rules as everyone in society does.
If you want to identify as that subgroup based on (gender/race/etc) for social and communal support. No one will fault you on that. (That's culture) However, you will be judged on being hostile/exclusive if non-members of that group are harshly penalized for attempting to integrate with the culture.
While there are obviously cases of unions bullying companies, there are many, many more cases of companies bullying employees - unions were originally intended (and still are, in most cases) as a defense against bullying by creating an equivalently powerful entity, not a way to bully.
The rest... it strikes me as incredibly hypocritical - you blame these people for creating groups for support and social which you think stop integration of culture, but these groups are created precisely because that integration isn't happening. If you are a young girl who has an interest in computing, but is dissuaded from joining the computing club at school because "only boys like computers" and the club members make fun of her, how are you meant to get into that general community?
Now, if there is a girl's computing club and she can join that with no stigma, learn about the hobby and then integrate with that interest already there, it helps make that happen. You can't integrate if you never gain that interest or skill because you are rejected at the beginning.
It's like expecting slavery to end by saying black people can be slave owners or own themselves. If you don't recongnise the barrier to entry and integration, then sure, you can paint these groups as negative, but that's just missing the point.
My point is that if you create the alternative computer club. You're never going to solve the root issue. You're just going to create 2 groups, with their own mentality, fights over the same audience, fights over resources, and conflict between both groups.
When they're self-isolating groups, they stop integration.
> "only boys like computers"
That's a self-limiting belief that can only be fixed by the person who believes it. Telling the person who believes it is not going to work. They'll always have doubt.
If it's done by members of that group then the leadership should be made aware of that and fix it.
Not sure how you jumped to this extreme:
> It's like expecting slavery to end by saying black people can be slave owners or own themselves. If you don't recongnise the barrier to entry and integration, then sure, you can paint these groups as negative, but that's just missing the point.
My point was, the individual has to address their own beliefs and figure out how to achieve the goal they want. Do it in a dishonest way, society won't stand for that (In the long term, it's effective in the short term) Do it in an honest way, people will reward you for that. (Eventually)
> That's a self-limiting belief that can only be fixed by the person who believes it. Telling the person who believes it is not going to work. They'll always have doubt.
100% agree. The reality is that person's belief (and in general, the cultural expectation) won't change until that behavior is normalised. People stop being racist when they interact with people of other races and get used to it. The same is true of everything else. If more women are programmers, people stop thinking of it as a male-only thing.
It's a chicken and egg problem - the girl's computing groups are a man-made egg to kick-start that cycle. Those girls will grow up an integrate, and that creates a normality of it which will eventually make those groups redundant.
There are existing barriers to entry from cultural expectation and pressure from peers. If you create an artificially isolated environment so these minorities can pursue their interests without that pressure, it bypasses those barriers, and those people will, in future, tear them down just because they exist.
i (black skin/latino ethnicity) used to cringe at those too, but after thinking about why they exist some more, i finally realized that many people really appreciate having a "safe" space where they can be with other people that look or grew up like them.
my family and i usually get along pretty well, but we have very different ideas about things like money or family "closeness" that were only made evident to me from my white fiancee watching "from the sidelines," as someone else above me put it. It also happens that much of the way my family goes about things is very typical for Latino families.
She's asked some really really good questions that made me think hard about why my family does things the way they have. As you can imagine, this puts me between a rock and a hard place, as I don't want my family to think that I "forgot where I came from," but I also don't want to participate in things that can really set my future self back a number of years for the sake of the family.
Very few of my acquaintances and none of my close friends (i only have a handful) are Black or Latino, so I don't really have anyone that isn't family that I can talk about this stuff with. I also spend almost zero time with other people that "look like me" at work; I've run into very few Black or Latino engineers in my nine year career, though I know that there are plenty out there. I was almost always the only black/latino person on the teams i've been on.
I've tried the minority only clubs, both in college and after I started working, and found that I don't like being fit into homogenous boxes or participating in echo chambers. So I've stopped joining them.
Top performers will not let their accomplishments be belittled through association with a marginalized sub-group. Sub-group leaders, often not masters in their field, find opportunity in leading sub-groups. Everyone in between, that fits the sub-group demographics, quietly takes advantage of the new benefits from the sidelines. The only group that does not have political power is the treat 'everybody' decent group, which has insufficient incentive to push back.
My observation on this is that some people in these demographics don't feel comfortable when they are vastly outnumbered at events and that "minority only" events and clubs exist to provide them with the opportunities provided by such events, but without the dangers or discomforts that may be perceived or existing at more inclusive events. I can certainly respect that viewpoint, but I, too, hope for a time when this is unnecessary and that all events are inclusive and all people treated equal.
On the other hand... I couldn't continue doing what I do without having spaces where I can feel comfortable and maybe vent a little to people who actually understand by way of having shared experiences.
Yes, I'd like stuff not to matter - but unfortunately, right now it does, and pretending it doesn't doesn't help me.
What gets me is that we have a ton of gender, sex, and race neutral user groups, but yet there is forceful attempts at creating a segregated user group. ("Bridge" being one) From what I've seen they're awful, they just reinforce really bad hyperbolic stereotypes about their group.
One of my experiences in this was a talk about imposture syndrome. They made the claim that "Women suffer syndrome the most". Also IIRC I couldn't attend because I didn't identify in their target audience and would have to "have a sponsor to attend."
I'm glad I'm not the only one who wanted to highlight that one. And despite what has been said downthread, I am going to state what I honestly believe.
TL;DR: any company who isn't trying to attract female engineers is actively shooting themselves in the foot. Before you jump to any conclusions about my statement, please read on because the issue is both subtle and complex. It doesn't fit into a soundbite.
From my experience, after nearly 20 years in the industry and a few more in the university before that, the women who stay in technology field tend to be pretty damn good. As far as I am concerned, the very concept of "Women in Tech" being a thing is, in itself, frustrating.
And now comes the subtle part. I don't believe that gender has anything to do with skills or abilities. The statements so far are not contradictory; my experience simply highlights a deep-rooted problem. The question is not "why are the women in our field better?"; it should be "what are we as an industry doing to all the rest? Why are we discouraging and scaring away the non-stellar ones?"
Now... my observations are not isolated. I have heard and read from several other sources that this is a not an uncommon situation. There is clearly a bias in play.
Either it's selection and observation bias, with only the positive samples showing up ... or it's survivor bias. The latter is a scary thought.
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From the research I've read, in the UK the average retention time for female engineers in tech companies is about 1 year. Judging purely by that metric, at Smarkets we are probably doing something right - or at least we are not doing notably worse than the industry overall. Of all our female engineering hires, no-one has left.
I cannot know, but I think that a good part is that we don't treat our female engineers in any special way. They are engineers. Simple as that.
My wife and I have discussed this multiple times before, and feel the exact same way. All she wants is regular inclusion!
I think it is clear her gender has worked against her several times in the past. When she was running her startup, some suppliers would tell her to put them in touch with a decision maker, despite her clearly being one of two founders/execs.
The counter argument I have heard was: "this doesn't help create change in the industry".
> My wife and I have discussed this multiple times before, and feel the exact same way. All she wants is regular inclusion!
Heck, I know people who just want acknowledgement of their existence. The "other" category is not a great place to be. That also ignores when institutions divert resources away that were given to the institution to help the forgotten.
Yeah, it's pretty much an industry on its own now...now we have people who are interested in and focus their energy on "X in Tech" instead of the tech itself...its very odd imho
Sure, @aphextron. I think right-minded people will agree that there shouldn't be separate praise & calling-out @ labeling. As a white male, I cringe too.
Yet - how to we get to inclusion and equality? The path of simply being fair and color/gender blind - which is how I was taught to manage & behave in a work environment - doesn't seem to be working.
The point of exclusivity is creating a safe space for women; for men most spaces are safe spaces - I can assert that as a male.
It doesn't mean, though, that we can deal with toxic masculinity without men being involved. I do remember seeing some serious effort within Thoughtworks (and I haven't even worked there) to discuss gender issues without excluding men, so it's not a impossible thing.
We (the ones that are already here) don't need. The ones out, they need to get in. The way the tech club are pretending they are trying to invite more women and black men to tech doesn't work, because it is done mostly by white men. We should be the ones helping more to come.
It's hard to know what's right on this stuff. For every woman like Maria, there's another woman saying that exclusive events helped her get over her fears and join in. There are women who celebrated their geeky side and then were scared off by men who, for whatever reason, couldn't manage to treat her like one of the boys.
Some areas of tech have reached that terrible threshold where women aren't just a minority, they're ultra-rare. This makes the problem worse as they become a black hole for all the attention, both positive and negative (and that terrible combination of both where a million lonely young men chase the one woman who is Like Them). Even if you subscribe to the idea that the apparent disinterest of women in the field is not a real problem, you can't deny that it's bad when they start facing the effects of being a "fringe group".
I really agree with this. It has always disturbed me when a push for female developers is mentioned; a company should be focused on acquiring the best developers they can, not finding ones of a specific gender. This behaviour is literally an example of the problem it is trying to resolve. To the company I work for, I am a software engineer, not a man or woman.
>It has always disturbed me when a push for female developers is mentioned;
My initial reaction to hearing news like this is that more qualified candidates are going to be passed over in favor of more diverse candidates. This in turn can quickly turn into viewing minority candidates as diversity hires.
There is a lot of sexism, racism, and classism in our society. We need to hit it at the root where it occurs and realize that any other approach to correct it can end up being more costly. For example, many attempts to correct racism don't account for classism. This ends up creating resentment in class minorities who aren't racial minorities, which ends up perpetuating racism and creating groups who are opposed to the notion of social justice in general.
I don't think the fault lies at the employment level.
I think the societal biases are imprinted in people during their social development.
Girls are less likely to be given the equipment and backing to get into software development at an early age, and their peers would rarely understand such an interest.
The field and the associated character traits around it are viewed as nerdy or boring, the people who don't give a stuff about such judgements seem to be the people who do gain an interest in the field and consider working in it.
Biases are not just socially constructed - they're often rooted in biology. It might just be the case that for biological reasons, females (in general) aren't as interested in creating technology.
The gender imbalance in fields like programming and nursing is larger in the most "fair and evolved" societies (e.g. Denmark), because these societies allow biological gender differences to more freely assert themselves.
Equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome is something I very strongly agree with, I would be mortified to be given handouts because of a particular box I fit in.
Affirmative action reeks of plastering over a bug instead of squashing it at the root cause.
> I don't think the fault lies at the employment level.
I think companies can take steps to improve outreach to excluded groups, and set up policies to help reduce exclusionary behaviour in the workplace. I don't really care if it's their fault or not.
Which reflects the existing industry placements + recent graduates, which reflects the university applications, which reflects the high-school graduations, which reflects the typical 50/50 gender split of the general population.
If women are self-excluding, what is causing the hostility in that environment? If they're systemically-excluded, how do we remove it?
> That is, most companies (regardless of conscious choice) are finding the best (young, white) male developers only.
The implication here is that earned (through training) software and programming skills are equally distributed among the entire population. This is simply not true just by looking at StackOverflow/CS major demographics.
They are finding the best female developers. There just aren't that many (for whatever reason)
> They are finding the best female developers. There just aren't that many (for whatever reason)
This sounds like you think companies don't have an obligation to improve their environments so that women feel included. Consider a developer that you would say is among the best: would she accept a position at your company? Why not?
A refinement would be that the company should focus on acquiring the developers who will provide the most marginal benefit. For an organization that values diversity but that currently has a non-diverse team, this could tip the scales toward a competent developer who exists outside that monoculture.
I understand your argument but it's taking a very narrow view of best. Specifically, you're usually making a very small selection from a small sample that responded to a specific job description.
Now the chances are that you haven't selected the best is some global absolute sense as that would be stunningly unlikely. So you've actually selected from a sample that is exceptionally biased in numerous ways. By having a drive for, say, female developers, you're just replacing one very biased sample with another very biased sample.
Now, if you're at a sufficiently small organisation and you're recruiting sufficiently few people, and you're only interested in the immediate needs of your organisation, it is reasonable to assume that a female biased cohort won't necessarily lead to better candidates due to the current heavy gender imbalance.
However, not everyone recruits with such constraints. For example, I work for a large, global organisation that recruits 100's of devs a year into a pool of 1000's of devs. Given the statistical significance, any gender imbalance is not because we recruited the best, it's because we recruited the best of a very badly skewed pool. The corollary is that, if we don't try to address this, we are deliberately ignoring a huge pool of potentially talented devs.
Now, it would be correct to argue that, if we were just to select women from the existing pool, it isn't likely to help things much. If an organisation is doing that then they're mostly doing it to appear diverse. But a drive for female devs that affects the pool absolutely can make a difference. It's not easy, it can mean planning for the long term i.e. going to universities, schools etc. but I strongly believe that it's worth it.
> a company should be focused on acquiring the best developers they can, not finding ones of a specific gender
I respectfully disagree. This position doesn't take into account how existing gender biases affect those who are choosing which field to enter. If a field is primarily composed of men, then young women may not feel welcome in the field and may go elsewhere, meaning there are fewer good developers in the pool to begin with. This leads to lower quality overall in the field than if there were no bias.
It becomes a tragedy of the commons situation: if everyone hires the best regardless of gender, then we continue to repel half of the population. But if one company biases towards hiring women even if they're somewhat less skilled, then they are at a disadvantage to companies that don't do this. This is why things like hiring quotas and other forms of affirmative action exist.
I don't follow. I was explaining why the "hiring only the best" strategy perpetuates a gender imbalance. If there is an 80:20 gender ratio in the industry, and assuming an equal skill distribution, then there will be about 4 times as many men as women in the "hiring only the best" work force. It's not hard to imagine that this could dissuade some young women from choosing this industry, regardless of their aptitude for it. As a result, we have fewer high quality candidates in the industry as a whole.
One way to change this is to correct the imbalance in industry, giving young women a more welcoming environment, role models, etc. However, this actively requires a different hiring strategy than "only the best." As I said, this gets into a "tragedy of the commons" situation, which can only be resolved through collective action, whether voluntarily within the industry like hiring quotas and outreach to women or enforced by the government through affirmative action-style laws.
I feel that any sort of quotas will be worked around by restructuring the employment relationship as a business-to-business contract - and there will be pressure on companies to do that if there's significant competitive advantage.
As a straight white male, this type of thing has never affected me directly.
But as a programmer who's now in his 50s, I'm starting to get a very tiny taste of the same emotions. There was an article on HN just a few days ago about "why you should hire older programmers" which I felt to be deeply, deeply offensive in a way I found hard to articulate. Why are you putting labels on me? Why are you pretending there's something special about this aspect of me that's completely irrelevant to my tech skills? It really bothered me, and I couldn't figure out how to respond to it.
I couldn't imagine being inundated with this stuff on a daily basis. If there were "older programmer" meetups or if HR were reaching out to me to put me in outreach materials or if I had to read articles like this all the time, I honestly don't know well how I'd deal with it. It's easy to deal with the occasional age discrimination in the industry (which is definitely out there), but it's actual this other aspect of it that I find infuriating.
I love that even though it's taken you a while to see from somebody else's point of view you took the time to share this. Especially "I couldn't imagine being inundated with this stuff on a daily basis".
We can't exists without labels. There are no lab-white programmers out there pure as a function. I missed that article, but older probably meant more experienced. You shouldn't be offended, but it's up to you.
I try to avoid labels too, but I can't escape it. In a room full of firmware engineers I would be the "web guy", I'm fine with that.
There are "older programmer" meetups, it's just not called that way. A friend of mine visited a smalltalk meetup in London and he sad it was a couple of guys in their 50-s. He really enjoyed it.
I think it's much better to learn to live with labels (after all you can invent your own) than being constantly pissed off about them.
> smalltalk meetup in London and he sad it was a couple of guys in their 50-s
These examples sound to me like the exact opposite of what was being discussed here. In both cases, these are examples of labeling based on technical skill or interest, the complete polar opposite of what's being discussed here.
> than being constantly pissed off
I don't see how either myself or OP said anything like this. In fact, I tried to emphasize how I had experienced only a tiny taste of this kind of thing.
How is this the complete opposite? Tangent at worst :) Labels are labels, it doesn't really matter to me if it's a tech label or something I can't control. If I can't control it, then I don't care about it.
Well, because the discussion is about labelling people based on non-technical personal attributes. You're discussing the exact opposite type of label.
If you honestly don't see any difference between somebody being called "the web guy" on a daily basis and making assumptions about your skill based on that title, as opposed to somebody being called "the black dev" on a daily basis and having people making assumptions about skills based on that title, then I don't think anything I say here can possibly make a difference.
(1) Which professions have a gender diversity problem? and
(2) Given that the population's gender ratio is ~50/50, which male stone mason (99.5% male) do you want to be a preschool teacher (97% female) and which preschool teacher do you want to make into a stone mason?
I've seen a bizarre thing with a certain portion of women in tech, which this article kind of alludes to. Instead of being interested in new technology or being really interested in tech itself, some number are interested in "women in tech". It's bizarre, and I believe a symptom of this effort to bring women into tech by emphasizing that they're women. Women/Men/Whatever should just be people in tech, stop focusing on gender and get to work.
AFAIR the real statistics work even more in your favour. In many countries many women don't join the work force so the gender ratio is not 50/50 (even ignoring that in multiple populations men outnumber women until around 40 year mark).
One anecdote: throughout my childhood I didn't know men are allowed into education because 100% of my teachers until university were women. On the other hand pretty much until 2000s basically all the police force were men.
Okay, so here is the thing: nobody wants to make the labels explicit, or to think about the minority or female labels.
The reason that has come into style is because people have implicit associations and biases. And the theory is the best way to deal with them is to explicitly think about it.
Example.
You're hiring for a position. It is very technical. You see a bunch of candidates and then you just think some would be better suited to the technical role than the others.
Now, let's say you think: let me notice the gender.
Oh, this is funny. All the ones I rejected from the technical role as being "better suited to marketing" happen to be female. Am I being fair to them?
Now you reread the resume only focusing on the actual skills and you find that some of the people you rejected have stronger technical skills but you unconsciously downplayed it because of the female name.
(Or, vice versa, you rejected a male name for not being "the marketing type" when perhaps their resume suggests otherwise).
It would be better to read the resume without the gender clues. (Names removed, sorority and fraternity info removed, women organization removed etc) But without that I think we make it explicit just so we have a shot at examining the things we don't make explicit.
>Now you reread the resume only focusing on the actual skills and you find that some of the people you rejected have stronger technical skills but you unconsciously downplayed it because of the female name.
Wasn't there a recent study that removing names led to the percentage of men being interviewed increasing?
A recent study of hiring practises by the government in Victoria, Australia, found that there was actually a bias towards hiring females when gender cues were removed. One of the conclusions was that they should stop removing gender cues because removing them decreased diversity.
The example itself is interesting (and truly very revealing) but I kind of wish you hadn't included that reddit thread with it. It was weird seeing some pretty cringey replies get so heavily upvoted. Perhaps it's just the increased anonymity of reddit that's the cause, or the particular demo browsing that subreddit.
Just a thought. What would happen if some big company implemented this practice and it led to number of hired women to be even less? Will they be praised because they did it, or attacked because they now have even less women? It's not a sarcasm/anything, just interested in your opinion.
I had a philosophy teacher who once explained to me how you can only become a master of something only when you explicitly know all of its rules and are aware of all of them.
A few examples:
- a chess master knows all about chess
- a con artist must know all the social rules to exploit them
So when recruiting or making a judgment, you should be aware of all your biases.
> It would be better to read the resume without the gender clues. (Names removed, sorority and fraternity info removed, women organization removed etc) But without that I think we make it explicit just so we have a shot at examining the things we don't make explicit.
It's actually only one study, and both the lead author and the conducting body have their doubts about it:
>Professor Hiscox said he discussed the trial with the ABS and did not consider it a rigorous or randomised control trial, warning against any "magic pill" solution.
The discussion section of the study's report also opines that the voluntary nature of recruiter selection [1] as well as the absence of a control group could skew results, and that particular recruitment processes were not studied for engendered bias before designing the trial.
[1] - ie, recruiters who tended to be more supportive of diversification in the public sector would be more likely to participate
My sister was a software engineer. She wasn't ever a part of those women-only developer groups. She just really liked programming. It wasn't a political statement, and I don't think I've ever heard her talk about 'sexism in the workplace' that everyone else seems to love to talk about.
She left her engineering job to raise her children. My mother was completely against this move though because my mother (also originally a software engineer) thought it was bad form that an educated female engineer would leave the workforce and 'waste her life as a stay at home mom' (paraphrased), and that my sister needed to set a good example as a professional woman or something.
I kind of think it's all silly that my mother would push for this, but I do understand it, because when my mother was a software engineer things were pretty bad. However, I think these days it's pushing the point too far.
Of course your sister should make her own choices, but the pressure on a mom in tech to leave is still absolutely immense. The more of us who tough it out, the better for our daughters.
>The more of us who tough it out, the better for our daughters
How exactly is it better for our daughters?
Anecdote: My wife (software engineer) left the workforce to care for and raise our daughter and she doesn't regret her choice one bit. She says it is far more meaningful work (caring for and shaping the mind of a young child) than making money for some corporate fatcats.
It would be great if there was more part-time work in tech in general. Seems as though this would be something everyone (mothers, single or married men/women) could benefit from.
Not to be too personal, genuinely curious, what do you hope to gain by 'toughing it out'? A better workplace for your daughters? Or to set an example or something? Coming from someone with a mother who 'toughed it out', I rarely saw my mother growing up, and only really saw her when she became a consultant much later.
I enjoy making things with code. I like earning a check. Why do you stay in your job?
It makes me sad to think my kids will think I didn't do enough for them one day, but dads have been working full-time for ages. You're not the first person who has pressured me to go part-time, either.
>It makes me sad to think my kids will think I didn't do enough for them one day
Why do you assume they will look at your decision to stay home (I won't call it "not working" since it is arguably more stressful and difficult than working at an office) and think that you didn't do enough for them?
I agree with what Maria says. One huge problem at this point, is that the "women in tech" problem is completely dominated by activists in this field, that does not happen to be always very balanced in their visions. Normal people try to disappear when there are those kind of discussions, because they escalate easily, and you can get hurt in many ways. So we as a community of programmers, should try to get more involved to avoid that only people with extreme over-reacting thoughts handle it.
This is a story about misaligned incentives and social status.
Having the special programs lowers the social status of the demographic it targets, because it suggests those people are not good enough to climb the ladder through meritocratic means. At the time they do lower the hurdle for the demographic seeking to enter the industry and/or get ahead, fairly or otherwise. In otherwords, there is a tradeoff between social status and initial growth.
Whether this is a favorable trade depends largely on where you sit. If you're high up already, you would likely prefer the programs to go away since they hurt your status by associating you with the low-status newbies while not giving you much. On the other hand if you've just submitted your resume on BigTechCo's website like a thousand others, it's much more likely to get read by a human if they have some kind of affirmative action program (at the cost of somebody else's resume not getting read by a human, of course). Once you get in, extra programs and mentorship would also be valuble.
Finally, from the company's perspective, it just wants the statistics-illiterate social media diversity mob off its back while deviating as little from its current HR formulas as possible (since they obviously worked well enough to get them big enough to have to worry about this). This means it'll optimize for visibility and photo-ops and photogenic suit-clad female interns in its annual reports.
I'm so glad this article made it to HN front page. This is so important!
All kinds of "affirmative action" have two unintended side effects: 1) they emphasize the artificial divides, 2) they make people who are subject to affirmative action the subject of suspicion (did he/she get there on his/her own merit, or because he/she is a woman, black, or otherwise a minority?).
We should strive to stop emphasizing superficial differences between us. What your sexual identity is or what your skin color is should have no more bearing on things than what the color of your t-shirt is. That's what we should be aiming for.
Note that all that I wrote above would likely be received in different ways depending on whether I said I was black or white (or a man or a woman, pick your divide). It's another sign of how we're approaching the problem badly.
I mean, how nice for you? This article seems to be very much about how there isn't a problem for people like the OP, because people who don't feel they benefit from all-women's tech groups are perfectly free not to go to them.
I attend both all-women(/trans/femme) tech meetups and broader meetups. I get different benefits from each. I don't think anyone advocates for a world in which women in tech don't ever have to associate with anyone else, and most of us work in male-dominated spaces to start with, so it seems a little nonsensical to posit some sort of hyper-separation/man-avoidance or victimization in woman-run groups (many of whom run events that are not woman-only as well).
I find it productive to have spaces where the express goal is to uplift women in tech and to center issues in tech specific to women. The support and comfort level in these groups is often fantastic.
When men at other meetups stop asking questions like "oh, a women's python group? Can I come? I'm into that kind of woman" then let's talk about how we are in some sort of a world where tech groups for women are somehow counterproductive.
> "oh, a women's python group? Can I come? I'm into that kind of woman"
But that's funny, depends on who said it and how well you know them. Between friends or close colleagues, VERY crass and 'vulgar' things are said for laughs. Or maybe they were being honest? Or... it's offensive and representative of sexism in tech. The choice is yours.
There is an interesting idea that I like there and that is that it's not ok to talk for people or assume they are victims or part of some victimized class unless they also identify as such, or they make it a part of their identity.
I imagine it would be rather annoying trying to tell someone about a cool algorithm you figured out or implemented and instead they come back and say "Oh but how has your status as a woman played into this algorithm, did you write it because you were oppressed..." and in reality they really just want to talk about the cool algorithm.
It would be like someone imposing their assumption about me being an immigrant and assuming that is the primary part of my identity and somehow that struggle or issues I've had because of it are front and center and color everything I do in life. There is a different issue, if I come out and say "yes, this shapes everything I do, I want to talk about it, and so on". It would feel patronizing, and even more so if they'd somehow used it to push some kind of agenda.
A lot of commentators from the SV world (and more worryingly recently also from Western Europe) completely miss the point and actually create new, worse divides and new, worse discrimination.
I applaud Maria on her strength and bravery to post a piece like this.
Completely agree with what Maria said. I also cringe at the "WomanInTech" tag. I would like to be noticed for my engineering skills rather than because I happen to be female.
I definitely want to see more women in technology.
There are social pressures because of which girls move away from STEM. We need to encourage more 11-12-year-old girls to try out science. Both men and women in tech can help make that happen.
However, being noticed because of your color of skin or gender and not because of your ability is demeaning.
What's your opinion on artificially inflating the perception of women in science in order to attract more women to science? It's not a loaded question, I'm genuinely curious for opinions.
For example if say NASA is 30% women but more women are presented on the NASA online stories, articles, blogs and scientist profiles, along with a dedicated domain women.nasa.gov, and other tactics. (Naturally there's no men.nasa.gov)... all to reinforce the message that "look, women can do this too" (to use the OP's quote).
Are we moving into the zone that the OP was concerned about? Over-inflated labels and reactionary agendas that? Or is that fine, do we use whatever tools and tactics available to bring more women to science, even if it means promoting an unrealistic or inaccurate impression bordering on disingenuous?
I was discussing this today with a woman who works in tech in SF. She's had people try to harass her, but it doesn't bother her much; she's comfortable with pushing back. She's more upset about the startup she worked for tanking because the people running it were in their 40s and 50s and too slow-moving.
Another woman I know works for a large software company that acquired her software startup. She does a lot of public speaking, despite being under 5' tall with a mousy voice. She hasn't had much harassment. But she's mostly in the US northeast, not SF.
Another is a lawyer with a big law firm in Silicon Valley. She's had problems, but not really serious ones. She was originally not too comfortable with confrontation, and was a back-room lawyer drafting contracts. But once she started doing trial work, she became used to dealing with confrontation regularly, which improved her success at work.
All three women are horse owners. That seems to help. Women who own horses are used to dealing with huge, powerful animals with strong personalities. The skills to deal with this seem to transfer. Bullies don't seem to be a major problem for horse people.
(Years ago, when I had a horse at the Stanford barn, one of the high-school girls showed up after school and announced, in frustration, "I just do not understand teenage boys". I told her "watch the rooster for fifteen minutes and you'll figure it out." The barn had a rooster and several chickens. The rooster made a lot of noise, chased the chickens around, and didn't accomplish much. A rooster is testosterone driving a brain the size of a peanut. The girl came back later and said "Now I get teenage boys.")
There's an interesting dichotomy on the "women in tech" question between "SV tech" and non-SV tech.
I briefly worked at a tech company making oil industry software in .NET in a Houston suburb. Not trendy, cubicles, but they paid fine (and unlike my current job the office was quiet). I quickly noticed that half of my coworkers were not only women, but a lot were people of color and older (I actually think I was the only person under 25 there). Many were managers too. The idea of inclusivity and outreach was never brought up.
I think the difference is that these companies are, for lack of a better word, more professional. Startups and SV tech companies seem to focus a lot on culture, people, outings, coworkers being friends, etc. The company I worked on just required you to not be unpleasant and do your work.
Funny, same thing in my office. It's a small, quiet, well-established professional services firm. We focus solely on serving our clients' needs and delivering solutions.
The senior consultant on my team is female. No one makes a thing out of it. It's just universally understood she's an expert in her field and is perfectly competent.
The organization does have occasional minor recognition awards and we occasionally have company-wide meetings to go over quarterly highlights, etc. She receives an appropriate amount of recognition, as does anyone who deserves it.
I can't think of a quicker way to make her feel uncomfortable than to call attention to her gender. We all understand gender doesn't mean jack shit when it comes to ability to deliver. These gender-exclusive things seem so... patronizing, and insulting.
I think you make an excellent point here. The standards of professionalism have shifted to accommodate the "startup culture" ethos which tends to favor a "fun and productive" office environment instead of the traditional "professional and productive" office environment. This is the result of individuals from younger generations building companies with an idealistic vision of what a company can be. They imagine they want to come into a workplace where everyone is friends and everyone is comfortable joking around and we're all just here to have fun and make money, nobody ever takes it too far and there's really no need for HR because we're all friends here... but of course, the reality is often quite different from what is imagined and you end up in a situation where people start brushing inappropriate behavior under the rug because it causes cognitive dissonance for those who are champions of the "fun" culture.
Absolutely. People are rarely willing to talk about class in these discussions, but the reality is that not only have we created an industry with a gender imbalance, we've created an industry with a culture that prioritises the values of one class (middle/upper-class urban men) over everything else. Thus you have 'casual' workplaces with games consoles, beer, lame forced socialising, chill zones etc in which some people feel comfortable and others feel thoroughly excluded from.
My experience is exactly the opposite - "professional" workplaces are all about middle/upper-class values of dress/speech/behaviour and only comfortable for those with a middle/upper-class cultural/educational background, while the SV-casual workplace is a lot more welcoming for those of us from working/lower-middle class.
There are bad professional places and good professional places - law and finance and rife with the things you describe. However, my "enterprise .NET software" experience was not bad. I just wore a button up, pants, and leather shoes and no one cared about my class background.
If anything, SV tech is commonly full of (and targets as consumers) out-of-touch-with-working-class urban upper middle class people.
we've created an industry with a culture that prioritises the values of one class (middle/upper-class urban men) over everything else. Thus you have 'casual' workplaces with games consoles, beer, lame forced socialising, chill zones etc in which some people feel comfortable and others feel thoroughly excluded from.
I disagree. Speaking as someone in that group, I would argue that those things are most valued by freshly minted graduates who've been in the industry for 5 years or less, with few if any commitments outside of work.
i.e., the folks the tech industry exploits by convincing them to work 60-80 hours a week until they burn out. Heck, Google et al even refer to their facilities as "campuses" to appeal to that demographic.
That said, I agree, Silicon Valley has created a culture in that region that values one thing: male youth.
It's why sexual and age discrimination are such a problem in the industry in general, and in that region in particular. It even gave birth to the concept of the "brogrammer", which is the ultimate expression of this ideal.
Yep. I know a lot of women in oil and gas and in engineering roles they tend to do just fine--though the closer you get to the fields the more of a boy's club it becomes (because redneck wildcatters).
As a black man I am going to disagree with some of what she said even if I can relate on some level. You need support when you are hired especially as an "under represented" person. If the company didn't think you needed support they simply wouldn't be offering it. Most of the "not under represented" people have support that helps them become more successful.
Completely lost on your meaning, sorry. I literally have no idea what you mean. Care to elaborate? "Most of the not under represented people"... say what?
Most of the people who claim to be "not underrepresented" - i.e. they are in an underrepresented group but they do not lay claim to the title - still benefit from some of the support that is offered to them from being in that underrepresented group.
I learned long ago that as an Asian(not White, but...) male working in technology, you are not to express your honest thought on issues with a designated "victim" class, unless you're a part of the class. Words have consequences and you can't share your intent with a toneless text. Not only are you easy to be misunderstood, but oftentimes inadvertently insult. No, not everyone is thin-skinned or "snowflake" as a denigrating term, but non-zero are. I think many people learned this when Adria Richards got two engineers fired at the PyCon on an inoffensive(subjective) joke.
Nowadays, I self-censor more than ever. I've seen friends, people in my networks, or people two-degrees-apart getting torn apart by expressing their opinion. I don't want to waste the lessons I've learned in proxy. I find myself either avoid getting in the situation with "dangerous"(i.e., the "marginalized" group) people, or prefer people I trust when working with important/interesting project.(you can read high-profile instead). I may be stymying the junior developer girl's success by not giving her the opportunities she deserves by preferring "the guys" over her.
Am I a part of the problem? Based on the lambastings on sexism in tech, I guess I am. In fact, I know I'm perpetuating the diversity problem, and I should be more inclusive. Of course, I do not harass and work professionally, but the risk is just too high. Despite low likelihood, the risk of being misunderstood just once is too high. The optimal strategy is to protect myself by eliminating any potential situation as much as I can.
My only cowardly push-back is that I don't participate in "Asian-only" event, or the ilk that promotes exclusivity in the name of diversity, lest I perpetuate the issue.
Even in HN where I've been active for half of decade I couldn't comment on my original account.
Kudos to Maria(OP) with her expressions. I just wish I were as brave.
I think that opinion pieces like this make tech seem inaccessible to a lot of women. I understand that she herself does not like being a "Woman in Tech," but I don't think that her proposed solution to the women in tech problem being throwing away the labels is the right way to go about it.
The author seems to imply that what set her on her course to programming was that she was a tomboy, and that she "loved lots of really technical, computery things that only men know about… Teehee…" For some women, that is how they get into tech. And she's right, those aren't the women who need the support groups. They love the software or love being one-of-the-guys so much that they will not notice or deliberately ignore or tolerate or fight back personally against the harassment. They don't need any special support.
The ones that need these support groups are the same ones that are deterred by articles like this. Some women go into tech DESPITE the fact that it is male dominated, not BECAUSE of it. They are the ones who read thinkpieces like this and say "if all women in tech are so against being woman-like, then maybe tech isn't for me."
If the problem is that unconscious bias makes a specific demographic under-represented in an area, industry, award, etc.. then how does making a target-demographic-specific area, quota, award, etc. solve that problem?
It just further exacerbates, or even serves to justify, the original bias-- you can continue to perpetuate the original discrimination on the grounds that there is a specific pool, quota, or designated award for "those people".
These policies strike me as really shitty band-aid solutions that treat the symptoms, not the causes, and-- if anything-- delay the wound from closing.
The policies are better than nothing, because you meet people facing the same biases you do and realize you aren't a lunatic weirdo.
But in my utopia, everyone takes the implicit associations tests, has the courage to take in the parts that make them feel bad about themselves, and starts working on those things.
" Or that twice as many women quit the high tech industry as men?"
....
I’m already here, people. So I’m not the problem you’re trying to solve."
This seems contradictory, women leaving tech is one of the biggest problems, so even if she is already in tech keeping her because she is a woman is still a concern.
Its great that she likes to play Diablo II and be one with the boys, but a lot of women don't but that doesn't make them bad tech workers. That is the crux of the problem. The insidious cultural requirements that no one has on paper, but everyone intangibly enforces.
She's right. We need to find ways to be less implicitly exclusionary. It is vastly more effective than being explicitly inclusionary, which has all the problems she is decrying.
I wasn't sure what to expect from the title but I agree with this post more than almost anything else I've read. Carving people up by gender, race, religion, just divides us more, even if it's to solve a problem just divides us more; even if it's under the premise fixing that very issue.
BTW, I am also not a Woman in Tech, for real though.
A theory: Women-only groups aren’t just “Women-only”, they also exclude women with these beliefs. But this is far from obvious, so women at these group gatherings see only themselves, and it becomes an echo chamber where they believe they represent all women’s views on this subject.
That's how I feel about it, too. There is no war. Women are not oppressed, men are not oppressors. We're all just people with problems who need support and compassion.
Besides being morally wrong, a tribal approach is limiting. If you can't learn from, if you can't make friends and allies with people from all walks of life, if you must sit in your little castle with the few you count as your tribe -- are you not obviously much poorer for it? I think so.
Believing you are an outsider is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just stand up and expect to belong. Judit Polgár eschewed women's chess events because she knew she belonged with the top competitors. And through perseverance and high expectations, this became obvious to everyone. That is how you change the world. Boldly expect acceptance, and my experience has been -- you will receive it. [Source: 20 years on the internet, as a gamer and in tech.]
I think treating someone as disadvantaged, even if they're quadriplegic, does them no favors. It is a kindness to recognize situations in which they need help, but it is an unkindness to make invalid a part of their identity. Let the main story be strength and dignity and independence. And so with those of us whose problems are slighter.
But there is a troubling trend I want to oppose. People seem to have the impression that if a member of class A says the wrong thing around a member of class B, the latter has the right to become vindictively angry. That's . . . really destructive. I think the policy I'm advocating is the best, but if you do something else, I'll take it as you mean it. I think most people are trying to be nice, and understanding and kindness and good old fashioned gettin' along do a whole lot more good than fighting some battle for cosmic justice by being a jerk in the break room.
>Besides being morally wrong, a tribal approach is limiting. If you can't learn from, if you can't make friends and allies with people from all walks of life, if you must sit in your little castle with the few you count as your tribe -- are you not obviously much poorer for it? I think so.
Well put.
I experienced this when moving abroad - Expatriates formed social groups based on their origin country, and their identities became disproportionately based upon that.
For those people, interactions with anyone outside the ex-pat group usually centred around contrasting their home culture with the other party's culture, inevitably favouring the home country culture. The subtle problems this introduced for them were many, but they appeared to entirely lack insight into this or if they had it, admitting so was verboten.
Outsider interactions were constantly tainted with an air of negativity that left the other party feeling less-than-good about the interaction, and so less likely to engage in future. The in-group folks frequently became unfairly disillusioned with their new country because of the distorted negativity field introduced by their group's favouritism towards the home country culture. Often members of the group would pack up and head back home, but after a few years would return having apparently remembered the reasons they left in the first place.
This behaviour seemed not so bad since the countries in question were culturally not so far apart (same language, significant shared history, similar ethnic demographics). I can only imagine how alienating this behaviour is for migrants in countries with larger cultural differences.
>Boldly expect acceptance, and my experience has been -- you will receive it.
Thank you for your 2 anecdotes! Perhaps since Susan Fowler [0] followed your advice and did not achieve results, you will give her anecdote the same argumentative weight you give yours.
But there is a troubling trend I want to oppose. People seem to argue that getting vindictively angry and fighting for your rights is wrong, and that its better to sit back and let others like you be oppressed. Fortunately, someone else has written on the subject far more eloquently than I have. [1]
Susan Fowler's case - and the case of hundreds of thousands of other women, perhaps millions - are definitely valid and valuable.
I think though, that what the OP is getting at is not so much "Well, if your bold expectation didn't work, oh well" but rather, "this is not how we behave, and I have faith in you as a human being that you either a) do not want, or b) can learn not to, treat me this way. Rather than go and make my own tribe, I'm going to insist that you treat me well within this tribe we already share." By all means get angry. Just don't resort to separating yourself.
It's a harder road. It is not as glamorous. But the ends do not justify the means; because the means make the ends. If exclusivity is the tool we use, it is only to be expected that division and exclusion is what we end up with.
If the goal is inclusion, it must also be the tool.
"If you can't learn from, if you can't make friends and allies with people from all walks of life, if you must sit in your little castle with the few you count as your tribe -- are you not obviously much poorer for it"
Exactly, see this article from two days ago about how men and women are afraid to be alone with one another. Considering how often networking comes up in any job related thread, I think we are much poorer for it.
I like having events where women can get together without getting hit on or talked down to and where you've often encountered the same kinds of problems.
However. At my last job, there was just constant pressure from HR to go to these "Women in Tech" things that had nothing to do with writing code. I have three kids and a full-time job -- if I'm missing time with my kids and making my husband do more than his share, I need to be learning something both new and awesome.
One day, I may have time to mentor or help recruit or just mingle for free hummus (it's always goddamn hummus at the women's things). That day is so not now.
Yes, yes, and yes. I'm a woman and a also pretty damn good software engineer. It drives me crazy that nearly every time I tell people what I do they want to ask me about my experiences of sexism at work (I've never experienced that in a significant way). I hate that HR people constantly want to talk to me about how supportive they are.
Thanks for sharing. I've started to avoid these sorts of events/initiatives myself because they are a huge time sink. If I'm already disadvantaged, why am I expected to take on extra volunteer commitments? Especially when my peers don't face the same pressure to participate in these distractions?
IMO, I think companies should focus on fixing their broken interviewing process and becoming more transparent about hiring and compensation.
I think when you're in a minority and you are not rising to the top as fast as you expect, you use your minority as leverage to propel yourself.
I am also in a minority. I've often felt cheated that my career isn't Musk-esque. And sometimes I even ask the question, "Am I being held back because I'm [in my minority]?"
Then I snap back to reality.
It's not the minority that holds you back. It's a class system.
Almost everyone has about a million things holding them back. The problem is that for any specific individual, focussing on the things holding them back is usually counter productive.
For society as a whole, spotting some of those things and trying to remove them can be very beneficial.
Telling yourself that you're a victim of other peoples bigotry even if true tends to lead to paranoid, non-growth mindset attitudes when to actually succeed you'd be better served by an open, growth attitude.
The problem is that for any specific individual, focussing on the things holding them back is usually counter productive.
So what is the alternative? To sit back and hope the problem solves itself?
Yes, obviously using minority status as a mental excuse for under-performing is a bad strategy.
But I'd claim it's no better to simply ignore the issue.
In reality, for a person in a minority group, success is a function of personal achievement and minority status. That's just life. To deny that is, to me, simply unrealistic. To use a somewhat incendiary example, this idea is encapsulated in the concept of "white privilege".
I realise that by starting by saying that everyone is held back by something I probably sound dismissive to the people who have to contend with dramatically more than others who are held back by less. I apologise for that. Almost everyone can find factors outside themselves that make their lives harder but some are much more serious and pervasive than others.
As to the alternative? I think that attempting to achieve in your area and simultaneously trying to fix society are big asks. I've noticed some minority high achievers seem to have deluded themselves into not believing that they have been much discriminated against when they clearly have. I think that that is a strategy that can help some people (although they will sometimes then say unhelpful things in the context of a wider discussion). This self delusion is, I believe, part of their maintaining the non paranoid outlook and the growth mindset that has helped them achieve what they have.
> success is a function of personal achievement and minority status. That's just life. To deny that is, to me, simply unrealistic.
I'm explicitly not denying this, I'm acknowledging it and I want society as a whole and companies and other groups of people to spot this and try to fix it. What I am saying, based on personal observation is that being on the look out for these kinds of discrimination is a strategy that may not be in the interests of specific individuals in terms of maximising their personal achievement.
Your comments are beginning to make a habit of being uncivil. Would you please fix that?
In particular, please edit the gratuitous provocations like "Hate to break it to you" and "Huh?" out of your comments here. Those things are (minor) violations of HN's civility rule in any thread, but when it comes to flamewar-prone topics like this one they're particularly harmful.
I'm glad this was said because I think there's a spotlight on "women in tech" right now and all that's being said is how hard it is to be a woman. Yes there is a glass ceiling in tech for women but consider how easy it is for women to get to that ceiling versus being a man.
Given the previous study that said companies more likely hire men when names are removed from an application - it makes me curious about what it would be like to be a woman in tech. Would I get more interviews? Would my blog posts and tweets get shared more because women get better exposition in the developer communities?
Women have to try hard to break that ceiling, but men have to try harder to get there. Being in a minority puts you in a spotlight - people pay attention to you.
That doesn't make discrimination or sexual harassment okay and I'm not saying women should count their chickens but I can't help but feel numb to some of the noise that surrounds this issue.
That's not what buf said. On HN, please be charitable when interpreting others, in the sense of responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of their meaning. It makes discussions more interesting and flamewars less likely.
Perhaps you can find a more charitable interpretation for my comment? If it's not what he said, then it doesn't apply to him. But if it does, it is my personal opinion that people can free themselves of the mindset that how others see them affects what they can or can not do.
If I were going to discuss the issue with you, I would! (or at least I hope I would). But my comments in threads like this are limited to the very different issue of what builds vs. destroys substantive conversation on HN.
The class system is obviously holding everyone back, that's why you have poor neighbourhoods and poor cities instead of just poor individuals. And every statistic you see tends to show the class system. Elon Musk is just a statistical error and even then wasn't even coming from a poor family in the first place.
It's fair to say he came from a pretty upper class background. Wealthy/famous parents, went to the best schools, started an early web company with his dad's money, became part of paypal mafia.
YES!! 100% agree. I hate these labels and after having moved to the US it is really difficult to stand against them. The environment is so pressing! I am meeting with my HR to talk about this, because we are having a meeting with one of our bosses and women in the org. I find it super discriminating. This article will help me argue my point!
This is the most well thought out, honest, and non-agendized essay I've ever read on this subject matter. Bravo, and I hope readers see the value in a piece such as this!
YES. I’m a software engineer. I’m a woman. I’m not a “female-software-engineer”. I don’t need people in HR randomly telling me that they support me (umm, thanks?). I hate that the typical first question after I tell someone what I do is usually about sexism, not about what I’m working on. I’m not a victim.
Just want to thank the author of the blog post as well as the more level-headed engineers (black, white, female, male, whatever) who commented in this thread.
I feel like i've been slowly losing my mind with the constant oversensitive rhetoric and white-knighting taking over every aspect of life and the workplace. Of all fields, engineering was supposed to be about merit. I would say that in the modern day and age, the vast majority of company cultures integrate employees just fine and don't give a damn about the colour of your skin or your sexual orientation. And you know what? I think that's the way it should be.
Enough with the hand holding and mollycoddling. It only serves to demean the efforts and accomplishments of those who don't need or want it.
Well said! I wish more people would think the same way.
I'm a long-time (10 years+), digital nomad. My younger daughter (currently 6) grew up mostly in Southeast Asia, but also in Europe and to a certain extent, all over the place (we have been traveling a lot (duh)).
It's interesting to observe that she has absolutely no concept of minority labels - for her, a Thai Muslim, a Balinese Hindu, an African-American classmate in Europe or an Arab (presumably Muslim) neighbor from Mauritania living in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, etc. are all just... people. Regardless of their sex, sexual orientation, religion, etc.
You could say 'she is a child, she will be spoiled over time' - I'm doing everything in my power to prevent the latter from happening, and don't agree with the former: she has the concept of sexes, skin colors, and differences in general (it's obvious from her questions that she does realize there ARE differences) - she just does not view them as differences in the sense we do (minority/majority, typical/weird, out-of-place, extreme, etc.).
To her, it just does not make sense to put people into boxes, tell them apart based on whatever criteria, etc.
!! HOWEVER !!
If she is met with the constant emphasis on how certain groups are different from the mainstream, she might develop the notion that there is a need for those boxes after all...
The irony of the situation is that the people that have the biggest power to steer her into this direction the most are coming from those minority groups!!!
It's way easier to shield her from the majority attacks (say, a Nazi remark from a white guy directed toward a black dude, or a guy saying shit like 'all Muslims are terrorists' etc.) by asserting 'never mind; they are assholes.'
However, if a member of a minority group is pouncing on the fact that he/she IS a member of a minority group and how everyone should realize this and do x/y/z then... how I am going to explain that to her in order to forego the creation of a minority label/box?
Humans have become very good at building in/out social groups. We even did it when we lived in small villages of homogenous skin colors. I admire what you're trying to do, but pretending that human nature is different than it has been for thousands of years is likely to leave you disappointed.
It's an uphill battle, I know... but one we have to wage to our best abilities.
I'm also trying to avoid being an asshole, but I somehow manage to fail at it almost every day :) That doesn't mean I will stop trying tomorrow, though.
It would be foolish to believe the segregation/xenophobia etc will ever stop - it would be still nice if at least the people being attacked would stop the self-sabotage by emphasizing, rather than leaving behind, their minority status.
The thing that makes these kinds of discussions so difficult is that people often aren't clear (even in their own minds) about eventual goals vs. immediate actions. Absolutely, inclusion and color/gender/whatever blindness is where most of us would like to be eventually. Unfortunately, pretending we're already there doesn't get us there. It just preserves the status quo. As painful as it is, we have to accentuate and perhaps even exaggerate both the problem and present remedies. If you're not willing to take even the tiniest risk of over-correction, you're practically guaranteeing permanent under-correction.
I'm sure the OP is quite sincere. I find her attitude laudable in its way. Unfortunately, I also find it a bit non-generalizable and counter-productive. We don't yet live in a world good enough for that prescription to work.
Is that approach not entirely just an opinion of yours though? How can you state so firmly (in opposition to many here) that "you're practically guaranteeing permanent under-correction". I think that statement is only true if those in the majority have no desire for true equity - which then is begging the question.
If the hypothetical 'truly equitable' personality exists, is it not of some moral repugnancy to require them to re-engage with a (by definition) racist or sexist system, even if the racism and sexism being engaged in are to the short term advantage of society? Are you suggesting the end justifies that particular means? And is that not precisely a moral failing? And for the sake of the argument, if you presume some people are more sexist/racist than others, then you also must allow that some are less sexist/racist than others - and precisely those hypothetically equitable personalities would be put in a very real moral quandary by your strategy. And does then requiring sexist/racist actions that such people would otherwise not have taken part in, then act to precisely "preserve the status quo" of sexism and racism?
I would just question your confidence that your strategy is the correct one to get where I think we all want to eventuality arrive. It may be a viable strategy, but it's not yet clear that it is the only viable strategy. And though it might be a fast strategy, it too could be a less morally sound strategy. There are tradeoffs all around, and it's uncharitable to make declarative decisions about those moral tradeoffs on behalf of others.
> How can you state so firmly (in opposition to many here) that "you're practically guaranteeing permanent under-correction"
Because "no more than" usually means "less than" in a vast range of contexts, with computer programs being a rare exception. This is particularly evident in matters of justice. "Innocent until proven guilty" and "beyond reasonable doubt" and all of the restrictions on evidence practically guarantee that some guilty will go free. Why do we allow that? Because we know that perfect precision is impossible. We can not simultaneously avoid all false positives and all false negatives. As a society we have made a conscious choice on which side to err, and we preclude methods that tend to take us over that line.
The situation as regards equality is the converse. Not only should it be possible for the ragged edge of real-life outcomes to cross our ideal line sometimes, but it must be allowed to happen. If we insist that no measure we take can cross that line, then we limit ourselves to measures that fall short. We can't solve inequality by continuing to give one group unique protection.
> is it not of some moral repugnancy to require them to re-engage with a (by definition) racist or sexist system
In Philosophy 101, a very long time ago, I was introduced to the concept of a dilemma - a situation in which there are seemingly compelling arguments for two mutually incompatible positions. Yes, it's wrong at an individual level to make people re-engage with such a system. It's also wrong at a social level to let them exempt themselves. There is no answer that satisfies both sets of constraints. Real life is messier than an Ayn Rand novel. As you say, there are tradeoffs all around. Forcing people to confront the uncomfortable truth of their own privilege seems like a small price to pay in return for greater progress toward tangible equality.
I think there is no argument that the ragged edge will bump around the ideal line - and that in a reasonable expectation of how society works.
The question is more of policy and strategy in how to arrive there. And in that it is unclear that a "fast-and-overshoot" is any 'better' than "slow and steady" vs any other strategy. You have not shown that any one strategy is more wrong, nor more right. Nor is there any collective definition of where 'eventual' may lay, preventing the most accurate strategies that might require, 'going fast, then slowing down, then slightly overshooting, then correcting'.
More specifically, exactly, this is a 'dilemma', and to frame it as a solved argument, essentially saying, 'get with the program' is unhelpful. And the author of the article is pointing out exactly that the "small price to pay" in some cases is being borne by exactly the group that one says they are trying to help. And in that, the "small price to pay" may actually not be so small as to overcome the inherent nature of the dilemma. The dilemma is very real.
Can you not see the perspective that you are telling the article's author that she should "confront her own privilege" and pay the [moral] price of intentionally discriminating against someone that she otherwise would not, because it's somehow better for her in the long run, maybe? That is a very perverse action that you are forcing onto her, that she may not wish to take, even if you say it is in her best long-term interest. For how long should she discriminate, and how strongly, and on what basis? It might actually be in her moral interest to not engage in such a program at all. And that is precisely why this dilemma is both difficult and not so easily remedied with broad strategic declarations.
You're totally twisting and appropriating what I say. For example...
> it is unclear that a "fast-and-overshoot" is any 'better' than "slow and steady" vs any other strategy
Nowhere did I say it was unqualifiedly better. I was refuting your absolutist position that "never overshoot" should be a requirement.
> essentially saying, 'get with the program' is unhelpful
Never said that either. The point I was trying to make is that the OP's own "program" is not globally applicable or sufficient, therefore that she (and you) should consider other strategies as well.
> pay the [moral] price of intentionally discriminating against someone
Again, never said. Confronting one's own privilege does not inevitably lead to discriminating against others. All I'm suggesting is that we consider programs and policies that have some risk of creating outcomes that are inequitable in some way other than the inequity we already have. It should be obvious - and I think was to most people - that I'm not saying we should deliberately create inequity in any direction, or fail to address it when it occurs. I'm just saying that "never risk harming this group" is too limiting of the things we might try, and noxiously so when "this group" is the one already enjoying substantial unearned advantages.
Discussion of how best to achieve equity is a 'dilemma', and to frame any answer to the dilemma as 'correct' is not helpful. Starting off a discussion by saying, "As painful as it is, we have to accentuate and perhaps even exaggerate both the problem and present remedies" is a conclusory statement regarding a philosophical dilemma that disregards the author's perspective (as well as many others here).
Discussion quickly then becomes both toxic and treacherous even when you are communicating with those who share your ideals. Be aware of that price.
> Discussion quickly then becomes both toxic and treacherous
...when people rely on misrepresentation and logical fallacies as much as you have.
There's clearly little more to be said here, so I'll just reiterate my main points. There's a difference between future goals and present actions, but people often conflate the two. The OP's "we shouldn't have to do this (in the future), therefore we shouldn't do this (in the present)" falls into that trap. Your "we should never risk the slightest overcorrection" falls into a different trap, of precluding any but the most inadequate of present actions. As such, it merely reinforces the status quo. Maybe that was the goal. I wouldn't presume to read your mind as you presume to have read mine, but you haven't suggested anything positive here. "Pretend we're already equal" doesn't count.
I don’t want your ‘exclusively for women’ support groups
I want inclusivity, not exclusivity.
You’re victimising me when you do that. You’re indicating that it’s most likely I need special, extra support. Just because I’m female.
You’re also indicating that “this is a women’s problem, best solved by women” but that deepens the divide, creating an “us” and a “them”. Just based on gender…
This is the core point for me. Indeed, the problem exists, and it needs to be solved by men, not women. Women generally are already doing the best they can - even the ones that want to not care and just go about their work - they feel obliged to write blog posts like this one.
We men must make the changes that make women feel more welcome at the workplace. One easy to way to start (courtesy of a friend of mine) is to go up to a female colleague and ask for 1 thing that can make the company more inclusive, then do that without judging.
(i suspect the same holds for other minorities in tech, but this thread is about gender)
> We men must make the changes that make women feel more welcome at the workplace. One easy to way to start (courtesy of a friend of mine) is to go up to a female colleague and ask for 1 thing that can make the company more inclusive, then do that without judging.
This is exactly the kind of behavior that the author is speaking out against.
> It’s hurtful when you say “we need to solve the problem of women in tech” and “Maria, you’re a woman in tech” in the same breath…
My take away from this post is that Maria is hired as a software developer and would like to get on with software development. Not be a champion of diversity just because she is a woman.
> Maybe I’m representative, maybe I’m not, but don’t ask me to represent!
> You’re also indicating that “this is a women’s problem, best solved by women” but that deepens the divide, creating an “us” and a “them”.
It's as though the safe space that protects one person is the hostile environment which harasses another person. One's heaven is another's hell, to put it colloquially.
I cannot agree more with you! Besides, if men think they are better in tech, why do I see so much rubbish code produced by them?
Imao it's just men's ego's, sexism and stupidity that creates this discrimination. It's abject and should change, the sooner the better! (I'm not female btw)
It's fascinating that articles like these are kept on Hacker News, but others like tweets by Susan Fowler or the latest Github post by Coraline Ada are flagged for being "divisive" and "politcal".
As in some many things regarding politics (in a broad sense of the word), my favorite take on this is by Yes, Minister, specifically the "Equal Opportunities" episode, which overall goes much in the same line as this article. Of course, the irony being that it was written by a man.
By the way, if you're interested, I beg you not to read the synopsis. Unlike most, this show has actual actors playing the parts, and they provide a much richer experience than just knowing the story.
I'd urge folks in this thread to remember to treat this post as only speaking for Maria, and not as political capital for your personal POV about Women in Tech, because, well, that's the entire point of her post.
Not everyone is going to agree on the best way to foster diversity and inclusiveness, and that's fine.
People have a great ability to put labels indeed. Whenever you do something "untypical", you earn a label. This pisses me off. It's not about women only, it's about judging people by any set of attributes and making conclusions that it's unusual to do thing A because you do thing B.
I know this will never happen but I'd love it if people broke the terms "sexual harassment" or "sexism" into 3 different more specific descriptions of what happened to them:
(1) I got hit on
(2) I was discriminated against
(3) I was sexually assaulted or coerced
(1) is a lot different than (2) and (3) and a lot of the stories coming out lately basically boil down to (1), a dude was sexually attracted to a woman and he let her know he wanted to hook up with her (not including examples where there were threats or leverage was applied which would fall into (3)).
(2) and (3) are clearly 100% unacceptable and should result in immediate firing and criminal investigation for (3). (1) OTOH reflects a normal and healthy human reality: men want to have sex with women. Men and women hook up via work intros all the time. That is ok and even good IMO. If we talk about (1) separately and without inflammatory language maybe we could as a society even come up with a set of appropriate norms and rules for how people should act on their attraction to each other.
I have never heard anyone call (1) sexual harassment as long as it was handled in an appropriate manner, i.e.
a. There was no power relationship involved. Don't try to hook up with your subordinates. That is extremely inappropriate.
b. It was not excessively crass. Asking someone out for a drink is okay; asking them outright for sex is not.
c. It was not done repeatedly in the face of rejection. Hitting on someone once to see if they are interested is okay; continuing to hit on them after you have been rejected is not.
I agree with your definition of inappropriate 100%. Don't agree that failing to be appropriate == sexual harassment. That there is a gap there is exactly what I'm calling out.
Anyway, I never said (1) was always appropriate, I just said it was different than (2) and (3) and lumping them all together is polarizing and inflammatory. If I excused (1) at all the place I'm coming from is that the desire is healthy and normal and demonizing it and suppressing any sexual expression in the workplace is not productive and is simply not going to work in any case. If we talked about (1) separately without the polarizing language yeah there are definitely tons of ways idiots misbehave or nice guys just screw it up that we could probably improve on.
> Studies are showing that more diverse teams have higher collective intelligence...
Yet the evidence provided for this claim regards preliminary findings of a singular study conducted six years ago.
> Is it a problem that of computer science degrees earned, only 28% are earned by women?
Again, the evidence provided for this claim is an article about an article about an infographic stating, "Among all students holding B.S. degrees in Computer Science...28% ARE WOMEN...though we recognize that this has decreased over the last 25 years, we are encouraged by the increases that are occurring." However, the source for these figures seems to emanate from this table:
Which illustrates, "Degrees in computer and information sciences conferred by degree-granting institutions, by level of degree and sex of student: 1970-71 through 2010-11." And shows that between 2010 and 2011 only 17% of bachelors degrees went to women while 28% of masters degrees went to women. So that contradicts the figure reported in the graphic as it seems they used the wrong degree type. Nevertheless, I was at least able to eventually source this figure even though it holds little bearing on discrimination.
> Or that the rate of women in computing has been steadily in decline since 1991?
I cannot even source this statistic and no evidence is provided. Although, it would seem to be contradictory given what's listed in the above report.
> Or that twice as many women quit the high tech industry as men?
Again, no evidence is provided for this conclusion. However, I do feel that I've previously read an article to this effect. Although, it was quite faulty in its conclusions and I believe I left a comment to that effect. So I cannot even speak to the veracity of this claim without doing a bunch more research.
> Assuming we can agree there is a problem...
Given what's above, we cannot.
> I’d say it’s something like this: the problem is, that the tech industry isn’t able to attract and retain enough women.
Well I'd say something like this: attempting to force equality over a volunteer workforce is unnecessary and meaningless. If women want to become a larger portion of the tech industry, they are free to get educated and work their way up just like everyone else. And if they encounter actual discrimination or harassment along the way, there are laws already in effect which can be readily enforced.
I really like how you broke down the sources, statistics and try to put things in perspective. I really tend to agree here.
There is no mention of pay in this article, but there are plenty of other sources that dispel the myth that women get paid less than men (it's more like people of lower confidence simply do not ask for as much money -- both men and women; see The Confidence Gap).
I also think part of the reason we see fewer women in Tech is they don't want shitty jobs. We have everything from Dilbert to Office Space to We The Robots, all showing how terrible life in a cube can be. Women often take jobs that pay less but are more fulfilling (teachers, nurses, non-profits).
If we want more women in tech, I think we'd need to make tech more fulfilling and less miserable for everyone.
On the experimental side, studies show candidates with female names are rated lower and recieve lower starting salaries to male candidates with identical CVs (see Moss-Racusin et al. 2012)
You may have your pet theories as to what explains the statistics, and some of them may partially explain some aspects of a complex phenomenon.... but the fundamental finding that people are treated differently based on who they are is repeated over and over, both in research and in human experience.
Some more studies on the subject:
[1] People in gender-incongruent roles penalised more heavily for mistakes (Brescoll, Dawson, & Uhlmann, 2010).
[2] Voluble women perceived as less competent and less suitable leaders, inverse true for men (Brescoll, 2011).
[3] Women who succeed in male-dominated fields percieved as not likeable (Heilman et al, 2004).
[4] Students question the competence of female teachers who evaluate them negatively, less so than male teachers (Sinclair & Kunda 2000).
A study with Resumes/CVs is a fun thought experiment, but it's not reality. You need to compare actual wages in actual jobs.
> You may have your pet theories as to what explains the statistic
Please avoid this race to the bottom. I could be wrong. You could be wrong. No need to say I have "pet theories." The EPA once told DDT was perfectly safe to spray around humans. We are all wrong about something.
"..under this metric for people with a college degree, there is virtually no pay gap at all."
The Confidence Gap is a great article which talks about how people are more likely to get high wages if they have confidence and ask for it, and how women have trouble with portraying confidence without being perceived as bitchy:
> The Confidence Gap is a great article which talks about how people are more likely to get high wages if they have confidence and ask for it, and how women have trouble with portraying confidence without being perceived as bitchy
> A study with Resumes/CVs is a fun thought experiment, but it's not reality.
Dismissing a single actual experiment with as "a fun thought experiment" is neither factual nor rational. In reality there are many experiments.
You can take as much offence at my use of the term "pet theories" as you like, but until you present a rational argument that's all they remain. Unsubstantiated opinions are reasonably described as "pet theories".
Your own links clearly state a gender pay gap. I'm not sure what argument to make at this point. Maybe you could give me some guidance as to what areas remain in dispute?
> Don’t we all, in theory, have the same possibilities for succeeding in tech?
In theory, with all else being equal, yes. But all else isn't equal and we all don't have the same possibilities (orders of magnitudes of difference, I'd say.)
I agree. The problem isn't 'women in tech', it's more like 'assholes in tech' caused by some perverse glorification of Asperger syndrome (not to disparage those truly suffering from Asperger's.) It wasn't this way when I started my career in the mid 80's but somewhere along the way things have gone haywire.
I hate to break this to ya, but we all have labels; most are not self defined. Most have more than one.
Lose your hearing when addressed by a label. Get tough if you have to.
I remember when we openly said "it's a woman doctor," or "a woman chef"
So its not desired to be addressed by "woman in tech" but it will happen. Just like the "divorced" group or the "wealthy" or the "rehab" or the DINKs or whatever.
It is the personal responsibility of the sayer to avoid labels out loud.
Your post helps those that might slip know it is not desirable
We all have such great contributions we can make because we are individuals: not because we have a label. But don't think they don't exist.
This whole piece strikes me as rambling and misguided.
> “Woman in tech” is just another label I don’t need
The author agrees there is a shortage of women in tech and that it is a problem, yet how can you address a problem of underrepresented groups in tech without talking about those groups and referring to them through the use of labels? Does she really think we don't need these labels?
> I don’t want your ‘exclusively for women’ support groups
Those support groups are an attempt at solving the problem. Is it possible those groups are helpful to some women, even if not for you?
> I don’t want your special award
Same as above. This is an attempt at fixing the problem. Maybe it's not effective and kind of dumb/patronizing in some cases. Is it really where you should directing your frustrations though. No, if you care about the problem you should directing your frustrations at the root causes.
> It’s hurtful when you say “we need to solve the problem of women in tech” and “Maria, you’re a woman in tech” in the same breath…
I really did not understand the author's point here. People look to women in tech as pioneers and sources of solutions for getting more women into tech. It is quite natural to bring up women currently in tech, when thinking of ways to recruit more women into tech.
I get the author's point, that a lot of this stuff doesn't apply to her. She's comfortable in her job and doesn't need support groups or awards. It almost feels like bragging on her part, in the guise of acting annoyed at all this stuff that she doesn't want/need. Good for her, but not every woman can be like her, and shooting down attempts at solutions while offering none of her own is pretty shitty imo.
This reminds me of a special award that some folks that were part of a [special ethnic group] wanted me to compete for. It was "[special ethnic group] Engineer of the Year Award 20xx".
My boss (who was not part of [special ethnic group]) sent me an email saying "Hey, there is this award thing that HR is doing and they say since you are of [special ethnicity] they want you to participate in."
My reply was a Shermanesque statement to my boss, basically saying I was not interested but to tell HR that I would be happy to run for "Engineer of the Year Award 20xx." My boss didn't care much but told me that HR said they did not have that award, and no answer as to why they didn't. At least they did not tell us that the award existed but I was not allowed to participate!
Personally abrasive escalation takes threads into flamewar, so please edit such things out of your comments here. As a bonus, the signal/noise ratio of your comments will get higher.
I'll extend the editing window for you. Always happy to do that to help people fix stuff like this (in fact we may eventually build some software support for it).
Why did my comment get dislodged from being underneath another comment that I was replying to?
It's now showing as a stand-alone comment under the thread.
-------------------------------------------
I'm doing a similar thing. I stopped posting anything personal on Facebook about a year ago and I never post to Twitter. I'll never go back to posting personal thoughts on social media, not under any circumstances. It's a wholly pre-emptive move.
At least in the US, society has become so aggressively censorship-by-threat & political correctness oriented, with severe consequences to going against popular opinion, it's not worth the risk to my business interests to stand out with an opinion that could be unpopular at any point (get caught with an opinion that is in the minute considered hurtful, hateful, whatever).
I don't agree with unfettered illegal immigration for example; I overwhelmingly agree with legal immigration and think the US system needs reformed to facilitate easier immigration. The left now considers that to be racist, xenophobic, hate-thought, insert-control-vector-label-here.
I don't agree with feminism as a concept, I'm in favor of equality (which - in my opinion - nullifies the supposed point of feminism). Many on the left consider that to be attacking women, holding women down, being sexist, being anti-women, etc.
This is the only place I post opinions online now.
Generic ideological tangents lead to flamewars and are so low in information that they're off-topic even when they sound on-topic. For example, you guys have started arguing about "feminism" without the slightest reason to believe you mean the same thing by it. You'd think the triviality of such a disagreement would lower the stakes, but in fact the opposite happens: we each fill in the blank slate with our own demons and everybody's buttons get pushed. The way out of this is to have something more substantive to talk about.
(That's not to say your feelings aren't valid, of course they are, and so are the feelings that flare up in response. The problem is that communication can't take place this way, and we don't want battle here.)
> For example, you guys have started arguing about "feminism" without the slightest reason to believe you mean the same thing by it.
Fair point. Thanks for the clarification. Amusingly, the discussion about feminism was only supposed to be an example of something that tends to get social media discussions heated no matter what direction you go with it (and as something to generally be avoided as a business risk).
It would be helpful for you to phrase your opinions in ways that are not so inflammatory.
For example, instead of saying, "feminism is not about equality" you can say, "some feminists don't want equality." Which will also be more accurate, since there are feminists who do want equality.
I am doing the same thing more and more. The threat of being crucified for sharing or expressing a view not in accordance with the increasingly politically correct society is real.
It is a defensive move for me to avoid talking about politics or anything like that because there is a chance some very politically opinionated person with army of online followers will attack me as insert-type-of bigot.
The safest is to never express my opinion and only talk about business or tech related topics.
So the only place you post opinions is where you're protected by anonymity? That's a rough way to live. Have you considered that if you don't feel open enough to speak your opinions in public, maybe they should be challenged?
I disagree with your position on feminism, as it is a blanket statement which you would not want applied to yourself in an opposite position.
As for the left's beliefs on illegal immigration, again, blanket statement. I'm a pretty far leftist, but I agree that unfettered immigration isn't an ideal state. Where we may diverge is asserting causation to where we are today. We spent decades looking the other way as more and more people were crossing our borders because we had an economic benefit to do so — cheap labor. There were jobs we didn't want to pay citizens to do (farming, manual labor, home labor, etc.), and there were thousands of people willing to do them under the table because it was a better offer than they got at home.
We could have curbed this issue as it happened by removing the incentive. We could have penalized homes and businesses hiring undocumented labor. We could have enforced tax codes on all of the under the table money changing hands. We allowed entire industries to become dependent on unlawful cheap taxed labor. Today, we can't stop. Georgia tried to enforce above the board labor for one season and lost a harvest (https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-...). Cutting undocumented labor today would have disastrous consequences to our economy.
So, after decades of benefitting our economy, keeping food, hotels, restaurants, and numerous other service industries more affordable, we decide to start deporting? Hilarious. For all the talk of the "send them back" crowd, I don't think anyone is really thinking through what it means.
So yeah, I agree, we need to control illegal immigration. We also need to be realistic on the stupid situation we've created for ourselves by wanting cheap stuff.
1) Do you find your trust ("only place I post") in HN to be well-placed given what happened with this subthread?
2) >US, society has become so aggressively censorship-by-threat & political correctness oriented,
I agree, but wouldn't you also agree that withdrawing your opinion "pre-emptively" contributes to observed censorship and tribalism through self-censorship?
It's fairly vague (and I'm ok with that), just as my use of "right" in another post is. I'm going to continue using it even if it generates a silly over-reaction by some people on the left and right.
There's an aggressive coalition on the left that now likes to use labels as a control vector for stopping free speech (any speech they disagree with in fact). The major social media platforms for example have all taken up the cause and are beginning to shut down free speech (it'll get far worse yet, it'll become hyper restrictive), and nations such as Germany are doing the same.
The reason I ask is that it seems like you might be using a circular definition here. You say "the left likes to use labels to stop free speech", but have you just defined "the left" in your head to mean "anyone who uses labels to stop free speech"?
I do think using such vague terms in general is at best useless, but it's especially pointless when you redefine labels to fit whatever you're trying to argue against.
> People ask me sometimes, when — when do you think it will it be enough? When will there be enough women on the court? And my answer is when there are nine.
This is from Justice Ginsburg, and a widely shared quote by a lot of feminist articles. This claim feels pretty vindictive to me and definitely not about equality. In the other words, it is not about REDUCE the inequality, it is about REVERSE the inequality.
You are misunderstanding the quote. She's not saying that she wants there to always be nine female members of the SC like it had been with men for so long - rather, the proof of true equality would be when that happened by chance at some point (not sustained), and it wasn't a big deal. That's true equality when it comes to randomness - occasionally it'll be all one gender. If the answer is "half", then that could just be some level of intentional selection of women to reach a quota, which isn't equality.
Of course, as with anything, there are a very small number of people who call themselves feminists who are extremists who believe in sexism against men. That is a vanishingly small group, however, and mainstream feminism, even the more fringe wings, want equality, not revenge.
So it's fine if there are nine men in court but not nine women? I don't get your point. Shouldn't it not matter? You are also arguing that one persons opinion represents an entire group.
First of all, they are currently 3 women at the supreme court.
But ideally, if equal, shouldn't the court, if we assume both gender are equal, split 50:50?
If you are advocating for opportunity equality, that is fine with me. But in reality, a lot of companies, as inspected by the media, seems like to hail a 50:50 gender split goal. Those are not compatible with each other.
I never said it was simple and I fully recognize there are countless gradients of all sorts in feminism. I believe it's unnecessary as a concept. Pursuing and agreeing with the concept of equality nullifies feminism - that is my opinion. It's a very unpopular opinion with the left today. I've been having discussions about feminism for two decades online, there is hardly any conversational ground I haven't covered in the process.
The definition of feminism is "the advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes" - that is fundamentally compatible with equality. You can claim that's not what feminism today is working towards, but that's simply untrue. Feminism hasn't changed to some kind of anti-male conspiracy, despite the ability for people on the internet to find stupid troll posts or the odd extremist saying "all men should be slaves"!
> You can claim that's not what feminism today is working towards, but that's simply untrue.
You can claim that's the definition of feminism, I believe what you're saying is untrue. I don't believe what you quoted is the definition of feminism - there are more likely almost as many definitions of feminism as there are feminists. I think it's absurd to claim that there is one definition given the rather elaborate diversity of belief on the matter just among feminists.
I take it you mean "I think what most feminist advocate isn't equality, but sexism against men" - that is not what the predominant message of feminism is today. As I see it, you are taking a vanishingly small minority of comments from extremists/trolls and extrapolating that all feminists believe it.
This kind of comment violates the site guidelines no matter how wrong the other person is. Moreover the entire subthread is off-topic as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14703722. Please stop.
Your response is conceptually exactly why I no longer post opinions as myself on social media now. If this were a personal discussion on Facebook or Twitter, the left's censorship/control attack wave would be rolling in right now, calling me countless labels (instead, here you'll just get downvotes, your life won't be ruined and your business won't be threatened with boycott for not being in favor of eg illegal immigration).
> Your response is conceptually exactly why I no longer post opinions as myself on social media now.
That's not a free-speech problem. In a discussion about free-speech, you broadcasted your particular personal opinions regarding notoriously controversial topics and castigate "the left" as anti-freespeech, and then when someone responds to you with a civil disagreement, you exclaim that is what's killing free speech. This is how free-speech works, it means that people can respond freely to the statements you made freely, where is the problem?
Adventured is right, about both feminism and censorship. I think the ERA would actually help men more than women. Right now it is much better to be a woman in america.
Feminism has more than accomplished its goals of equality. Women can do anything they want, yet they also get these benefits:
If accused of a crime less likely to be convicted
If they hit a man far less likely to be charged with harsh domestic violence laws
If convicted, men get 60% longer sentences
If another Vietnam happens, women will stay home while men are forced to get killed, get their arms and legs blown off in war.
If they have a child out of wedlock they get free money from the government
If there is a divorce, they get custody 80% of the time.
The reason men make more money is because on average, they have a higher iq than women (this is scientifically proven), because they have more natural drive than women, and because they have fewer emotional insecurities that prevent them from succeeding in the workplace.
Feminism has achieved equality of opportunity in every regard. Today it is no longer about equality of opportunity, but equality of results. If feminists are going to fight for equal pay, regardless of merit, they should also fight for mandatory longer prison times, and mandatory higher conviction rates just for being women in order to match men. Or if they think things should be decided on relative merit of the individual, then they should quit whining about being women. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses. Find your niche, instead of trying to win at someone else's and then cheating because you came in second and wanted first.
Edit:
As for the dogmatic downvoters, why don't you at least present some sort of rebuttal against these facts, instead of a media-ingrained fear downvote?
This is the sort of generic ideological rant that we're trying to avoid here, and we ban accounts that use HN primarily for this purpose. So would you please stop posting like this to HN? Nothing good or new can come of it; these discussions are always the same and always become nasty. Boring and uncivil are the two sins on HN.
Dang, please help me understand. I was responding to the thread in the comments. How would have been a better way to express my thoughts in a HN appropriate way?
No, it's because I'll get attacked for not agreeing with x y z position.
It's no longer acceptable to have discussions about such topics. It's no longer acceptable to just not stand in the way of such topics (I'm not against people being feminists for example, I don't care) - you must agree, or you're regarded as being against.
Unless you specifically agree with illegal immigration and feminism, then you are against them. That is the present approach taken by the left in the US (the right does it with various topics as well, such as gun control). We now live in an us-vs-them society, you have to choose a side or else.
> Maybe I'm missing part of the thread, but who is attacking you?
I'm not being attacked on HN / in this thread. HN tends to be about 10x more civil than public social media.
I can't post any of what I said on here - none of which was very inflammatory - without practically enraging dozens of my Democrat/liberal/left-oriented (is there a PC term for that?) friends on eg Facebook. These are good people I'm talking about, and they now lose their minds at the drop of a hat on discussing these topics (post Trump, it has all gone into another gear). And if this conversation were being held on Twitter, I'd be getting death threats (or something close to it; maybe I'd just get called horrible names and proclaimed as being a racist Trump supporter etc) by now for not specifically being in favor of feminism / illegal immigration (as two examples).
It's not agreement I seek, I don't need it. I can't voice opinions about these subjects on public social media, as myself, without people being enraged about the discussion (and or possibly worse, people taking what I say out of context, or failing to understand what I'm arguing (either of their own fault or mine) etc), that response is a business risk that I can't tolerate.
> I can't post any of what I said on here - none of which was very inflammatory - without practically enraging dozens of my Democrat/liberal/left-oriented (is there a PC term for that?) friends on eg Facebook.
Do you not see the irony in this complaint? You're bemoaning the end of free-speech because people who disagree with you engage with the commentary that you broadcast on a platform for sharing speech. If you don't want to invite public commentary on your political opinions, don't broadcast them to the public. It doesn't matter what the opinion is, who is responding to it, or (short of threats) what they are saying in response, even if they are demonstrably and objectively incorrect; free-speech means other people are free to speak in response to your speech; period. And as an aside, if you want to limit the visibility of particular posts to a subset of individuals who respond within what you consider to be the acceptable range of discourse, Facebook does allow you to do this.
> These are good people I'm talking about, and they now lose their minds at the drop of a hat on discussing these topics (post Trump, it has all gone into another gear)
So what? Do you wish they would just stop expressing their opinions? Do you wish they'd just stop expressing their opinions on your posts? Do you wish they'd just be "more reasonable" in their opinions? Or is it more that you'd prefer they expressed their opinions in a way that makes you feel comfortable? What about their speech do you wish would change so that they would meet your standard for acceptable expression of their opinions?
> And if this conversation were being held on Twitter, I'd be getting death threats
This is a universal truth of the twitter cesspool regardless of the topic and has nothing to do with "PC" or "the left". I've seen plenty of rape and death threats directed towards feminists on twitter and I've seen my own kid addressed with death threats because of his opinion on PlayStation vs Xbox.
> I can't voice opinions about these subjects on public social media, as myself, without people being enraged about the discussion
Free-speech means you get to express your opinion, it doesn't mean you get to control how other people feel about the opinion you express.
That's definitely not always true and probably not in the majority case either. Please don't escalate a discussion like this straight into political battle—we want interesting, thoughtful conversation here and the two aren't compatible.
I think the decision to detach the comment was overzealous. A reply to that comment on that thread would have been a great opportunity to provide an informed opposing view, and now it'll be stuck down in the cheap seats where people involved in the original discussion won't benefit.
The idea of a political activist isn't divisive, it's a core feature of all politics. Every single person engaged in politics does so to bring attention to their issue. Of course, not everyone who highlights a difference in some political sphere is an activist per-se, and marking the distinction may be useful to help understand a potential bias over a politically divisive issue.
I understand that you're trying to serve the will of your HN overlords, but can you please ask them to not require you to micro-moderate sociopolitical posts? Downvotes and replies from peers with power provide more positive guidance for group behavior than sending "spicy" comments to the back of the bus.
Maybe it was a notch too much. Moderation is guesswork. Fortunately there's plenty of opportunity for people to substantively discuss that aspect and many others.
Re your last paragraph: neither HN, nor HN moderation, nor the organization that runs HN, work the way you describe. Just to pick a couple examples, the threads are sensitive to initial conditions, and no one at YC has told me how to moderate. HN users more than make up for it though!
You can and should have an opinion, its a part of being a discerning human being trying to navigate this world. It doesn't mean you should never listen to others opinions, but having your own informed opinion is a good thing. If others tell you that you can't because you're a white male, tell them to piss off.
EDIT: Downvotes for saying that a white male should have an opinion??
It wasn't a great HN comment before that either, because of the combination of gratuitous resentment and category invocation in the last sentence. It probably seemed innocuous when you posted it, but this is the equivalent of dropping a lit match or a cigarette butt in a dry forest: the sort of thing that sparks other resentments and then a huge flamewar. People downvote such comments as a way of trying to protect the thread from the danger. No doubt we'd all prefer a robust discussion in which a comment like yours wasn't a problem but that, unfortunately, is not the fragile container we're working with.
I haven't downvoted you but... "informed" is a tricky beast. Many people, but especially white men, especially engineers, think that they're qualified to comment on fields where they are a novice.
(see Dunning-Kruger and others)
In the field of discrimination, women and minorities are statistically more experienced; so on the whole you'd expect them to hold more informed opinions than white men.
At the best of times telling anyone to "piss off" would be poorly advised, but especially so when the people so dismissed are likely better informed.
In the field of discrimination, women and minorities are statistically more experienced; so on the whole you'd expect them to hold more informed opinions than white men.
Maybe so, but I think it would be a mistake to understate the extent to which white men can experience discrimination. That is, there are far more parameters on which one can discriminate than just gender and ethnicity. For example, you could be a white man who is short. Or fat. Or short and fat. Or an atheist. Or who speaks with a Southern accent. Or a short, fat, atheist who speaks with a Southern accent.
The point is, everybody experiences at least some discrimination. As such, Caveman_Coder's position is understandable, even if his language could have been a little less inflammatory.
I'm not "comparing" anything. Simply pointing out that non-white / non-male individuals don't have a monopoly on experiencing discrimination. Nothing you said above contradicts that in any way. I'm not saying that certain group don't experience more or even more severe discrimination. But this narrative that seems so prevalent today, the whole "you can't know anything about discrimination if you're a white male, and by the way, you white males are the root of all evil" is not supported.
And FWIW, I did not down-vote you. In fact, have a corrective up-vote on me.
You're defending white men against a point that I did not make. I was careful to make my original comment in a precise and defensible way.
You admit that women and minorities experience more frequent and severe discrimination. From that follows that a sample of those people are statistically more likely to have greater experience with discrimination than an otherwise-similar sample of white men. That's the point I made that prompted you to reply; I haven't yet seen a criticism of that point but we can discuss it if you like.
Instead you chose to argue the point "everybody experiences at least some discrimination". You're probably right, but in doing so you choose a definition of the word "discrimination" so broad that it becomes much less meaningful.
The net effect of this type of comment is to minimise the more severe discrimination experienced by women and minorities. To diminish the power of their experience.
So, to sum up; you replied to me to argue against a straw man, with the effect (conscious or not) of minimising the discrimination suffered by women and minorities.
My best guess is that you feel guilt by association, possibly insecurity. You're fed up of feeling that and are pushing back in order to feel better. It's understandable, it's natural.
I've got two points to make here that might help:
(1) There are other ways to make yourself feel better. Listening to people & helping is a good one. Reframe yourself as someone helping solve the problem, rather than someone trying to diminish the problem.
(2) Society is not a zero sum game. Raising up women and minorities does not mean knocking down men, even though sometimes it might feel that way.
Hope that helps. Thanks for the up-vote, right back at you.
>Instead you chose to argue the point "everybody experiences at least some discrimination". You're probably right, but in doing so you choose a definition of the word "discrimination" so broad that it becomes much less meaningful.
I grew up in a poor, primarily black/latino urban community. Not to anyone's surprise, the minority groups of the area (whites/asians) received far more discrimination than the majority groups. That's going to happen basically anywhere. Classic in/out group dynamics that humans display in every society across the world that I can think of.
This idea that white people only suffer "small amounts of discrimination, under a broad definition" is a joke. Ever been beaten up just because you were white and walking through a black neighborhood? Is that "small discrimination" or am I spreading the definition too broadly? Because to me it sounds like you grew up in a primarily white suburb and assumed because white people don't experience much/any discrimination in an area where they are the majority that they simply can't experience any meaningful amounts of discrimination anywhere.
>You admit that women and minorities experience more frequent and severe discrimination.
And the point that was trying to be made is that white people can be a minority. So nothing is contradicting this statement or the experience of white men who have faced discrimination. The problem is that in modern dialogue, white people are assumed to be the majority always and as such have no say in discrimination because they can't "possibly have faced any meaningful amount".
Which is why mindcrime feels you two are talking past one another; because you were. You're arguing statistics and the three of us (Caveman_Coder, mindcrime, and myself) are arguing that using that statistic to be dismissive is not acceptable. Which may not be what you're trying to argue, but is something it seems you are defending.
It is used to dismiss any experiences of discrimination faced by white men because "statistically they're more likely to be better off and experience less discrimination as a whole" which is not always true on an individual level or anywhere where being white puts them in the minority.
Let's go all the way back to a great, great grandparent that started this whole thread [0]. The argument is that white men can experience discrimination, and to tell people to piss off if they say otherwise. Then you specifically brought up that white men, statistically, experience less discrimination as a whole [1]. Which is not the argument put forward. The argument put forward was: "white men can experience discrimination, piss off if you say otherwise". Which is why mindcrime responds [2] that it is a mistake to understate the discrimination that white men can face.
You then follow up in [3] continuing to argue the statistic argument, when nobody is arguing the statistic. They're saying that being dismissive of white men's experiences of discrimination because of that statistic is bullshit which is the argument made in [0].
It may not have been what you meant - but it is how both myself and mindcrime interpreted your argument. If you still feel I've completely misread the discussion that is fine, I only wanted to explain how I came to my position.
The point that failed to land was first thing I said, i.e. that we are poor judges of our own informed-ness.
Assuming discrimination were uniformly distributed it might be a reasonable position to suggest to people that they hold firmly to their own opinion (i.e. telling others to "piss off").
However discrimination is not evenly distributed, which means white men as a population will be disproportionately affected by overconfidence effects like Dunning-Kruger and fail to correctly assess their own informed-ness.
I can agree insofar as that. Although I don't think Dunning-Kruger applies, I do understand what you're trying to convey. But I don't feel it is a strong argument.
You would have to show that the individual is not "well informed" about discrimination in order to make that argument. Which is not an easy task and is also not what is commonly done. The common thing to do is to claim that they can't possibly be informed, because, for example "they are a cis, white male". It's just stereotyping using a statistic and is no less wrong than other forms of stereotyping based on statistics.
I'm not saying you do that, just that it's common and is where the "Oh, piss off" mentality comes into play.
> Although I don't think Dunning-Kruger applies...
Based on your extensive qualifications in behavioural science I assume? ;)
Sorry, that was a cheap laugh... but you don't get to brush it off without reasoning though, and Dunning-Kruger isn't the only confidence bias on the table. For example; system justification bias, state and national-scale in-group bias, and the ubiguitous availability of white male role models in almost any profession.
Confidence comes from many places. For example many police forces have trouble recruiting minority officers, even in areas where those minorities are majorities. This is usually not for want of trying, and neither is it because of qualifications. A complex web of motivating and demotivating factors affects conversion rates throughout the recruitment process that often results in unintentional systematic bias.
> You would have to show that the individual is not "well informed" about discrimination...
Not at all.
Caveman_Coder took it upon himself to issue advice to an entire demographic. I argued that demographic will be affected by disproportionate confidence bias. Caveman_Coder's advice specifically hinged on a self-assessment of informed-ness, which will be strongly influenced by confidence bias... making this advice likely to persist ignorance in a proportion of those people.
There's no reasonable obligation for me to look at individual cases of informed-ness.
Happy to discuss yours though.
I'm sympathetic to your story about your own experiences growing up, but I'm skeptical about your claims that you suffered equivalent discrimination to a minority in a white neighbourhood.
On a national level all of the following indicators show bias against minorities. To argue that discrimination against whites in your area is equivalent (in an informed way) you ought to be able to show that a good portion of these indicators are reversed in your neighbourhood... with data, or anecdotally if you that's all you have.
- What proportion of white men are shot by the police in your childhood neighbourhood, vs black or latino men? What are the stop-and-search statistics, and for death in police custody? What do the comparative conviction rates, sentencing, or parole rates look like?
- What's the data on employment by race? What do callback rates for black/white/latino résumés look like? Salaries, promotion, etc.
- What's the data on punishments issued to white/black/latino kids in school for comparable offences? Suspection & expulsion rates? Data on amount of help offered when kids struggle?
- To what comparative extent are white/latino/black votes devalued by gerrymandering in the area? What voter registration laws are in force, and what voter de-registration policies are in place?
What data/analysis do you have? Or if you tell me the name of the neighbourhood I'm happy to have a poke around.
Sorry for the late reply, but it seems you misunderstood what I meant about Dunning-Kruger in that it has to do with ability or perhaps knowledge in a defined field but not in something like a subjective experience.
It'd be confirmation bias or some other thing but not Dunning-Kruger.
So you're drawing a distinction between expertise and experience and saying Dunning-Kruger applies to one not the other. Huh. Perhaps we could dig into that at some point, but you can't ignore the parts of my comment that you don't like.
Can you demonstrate that a good portion of the indicators I listed in my previous comment are reversed to favour minorities over whites in white-minority areas?
If you can't, then your claim to have experienced equivalent discrimination is incorrect, and uninformed. Perhaps you have a deeper understanding of discrimination (personal or institutional) than being "beaten up" but so far you've not shown or hinted at it.
Without that evidence, your argument falls apart, and you come across as an uninformed white man arguing that uninformed white men should be encouraged to ignore others. It's an argument with no credibility.
Do you see the problem?
(I'm not being unreasonable, I know getting evidence is work and my offer to help with some legwork stands, although I suspect it'd be an eye-opening experience for you)
[Update - by all means reply and address these questions, but in the absence of that I'm going to interpret your silence as an admission that actually you're not as informed on the subject of discrimination as you initially argued. Which would kinda prove my point about overconfidence in your own opinion when you don't know very much. Wouldn't it.]
>but in the absence of that I'm going to interpret your silence as an admission that actually you're not as informed on the subject of discrimination as you initially argued.
HN just ate my post I spent the last hour on. So in lieu of that, here's the TL;DR
I only post on weekdays, and usually during work hours while I mull over some problem or another at work. If you look at my post history there is almost always a 2-day gap for the weekend. I rarely, if ever, post after PMT work hours, on Saturdays, or on Sundays. I simply don't go on HN at those times and as such wouldn't have seen your post to respond to. While HN doesn't timestamp posts with the hours - you can at least check and verify the days and then choose to trust me on the hours.
I try to limit the PII I put on the internet, but I grew up in a town that is part of Los Angeles County. Statistics for the town are not so readily available as they are for the county as a whole. The town I lived in is meth head central with lots of gangs. Mostly MS13 and Blood offshoots, so Hispanic and Black gangs - there's a few skinhead/lowrider groups.
I'll try to find actual statistics - but do know that statistics won't tell you of the white kid growing up in MS13/Bloods territory anymore than they'd tell you the story of a black kid growing up in Aryan Brotherhood territory. Do you agree that "growing up in the wrong neighborhood" where gangs are divided among racial lines means that you're far more likely to be discriminated against on the basis of your race?
I don't want to research these statistics at work - and am in the middle of moving countries (I depart on the 28th of this month) so don't exactly have the free time to provide you with any research. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or via email as I am interested in defending myself, but I'm not certain if I actually have the time to do so this month.
> ...but do know that statistics won't tell you...
I don't dispute that some or all of your childhood sucked. I understand and sympathise. You've landed that point.
> Do you agree that "growing up in the wrong neighborhood" where gangs are divided among racial lines means that you're far more likely to be discriminated against on the basis of your race?
The question is ambiguous. I'll break it out.
More likely to experience racially-aggrevated violence than a white kid in a white neighbourhood? Yes, I'd agree.
More likely to experience racially-aggrevated violence than a black kid in a black/latino neighbourhood? Not sure; you probably know better than I do. I'd need to see data. If I was forced to guess I'd expect it to depend on severity; higher chance of assault than a black kid, lower chance of fatality... but that's a total guess.
More likely to "be discriminated against" generally than a black kid in a black/latino neighbourhood? No, but it'd vary across the type of interaction so maybe some types of interaction might be equivalent... maybe.
More likely to "be discriminated against" generally than a black kid in a white neighbourhood? No way. Not even close.
Physical danger is one dimension, amongst MANY (and there's a significant difference between being afraid of criminals and being afraid of the state; you'd be comparatively less likely to be shot by the police, even assuming equivalent circumstances).
The USA is a country that only ended racial segregation within living memory. Evidence of significant bias against minorities at a federal and state level is still very strong. The specific demographic breakdown of an individual neighbourhood is a small part of a very big picture.
Even the existence of a black neighbourhood in Los Angeles is because of the black exodus from the South during the segregation era, when young boys such as Emmett Till were lynched for crimes like whistling at white women (turns out he was innocent even of that). Yes, that's somewhat historical, but it's still within living memory and you don't undo that kind of societal damage easily.
> I think we're just talking around each other here.
No, we aren't talking around each other at all, but I can understand why you might feel uncomfortable discussing your motivations so by all means let's stop.
So to try and make your next discussion productive, maybe try using evidence, try not creating straw-man arguments, try not deflecting or changing the subject in response to points made by other people.
SV tech companies are infested with young white brogrammers who only want to work with people who look like them and share their hobbies/interests. They call it "cultural fit"
Would you please stop posting flamebait to HN? You've done this repeatedly and we ban such accounts. If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
Single purpose accounts, and/or accounts that use HN primarily for ideological battle, aren't allowed here because they violate the mandate of the site (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). We've banned this account.
> I think when you're in a minority and you are not rising to the top as fast as you expect, you use your minority as leverage to propel yourself.
> I am also in a minority. I've often felt cheated that my career isn't Musk-esque. And sometimes I even ask the question, "Am I being held back because I'm [in my minority]?"
Then I snap back to reality.
> It's not the minority that holds you back. It's a class system.
Here's something that you might not have considered – maybe you're just not that good?
> Studies are showing that more diverse teams have higher collective intelligence
Absolutely! Discrimination is self-defeating. Why intentionally deprive yourself or your team of resources?
Or, to take a larger perspective, why deprive _humanity_ of resources? Imagine how many more Einsteins we'd have if everyone had the same opportunities.
This is exactly how I felt during my Microsoft internship in 1998 when the internal women's organization, HOPPERS, decided to change their successful "intern buddy" program from opt-in to opt-out. (Well, not really opt-out, because until I got upset with them about it they clearly never considered that anyone might want to opt out.) Despite being only one of two women, both interns, on a team of 40 people, I never felt anything other than welcomed by my team and never felt singled out or harassed because of my gender. As such, I felt quite insulted by the assumption that I needed an "intern buddy" just because I'm a woman in a male-dominated field. A long email thread with the head of the organization ensued, and in the end I did not have the intern buddy that I never asked for in the first place.
I wholeheartedly support the self-organization of underrepresented groups to create safe spaces. However, when participation in such efforts is compelled by things like special awards for members of underrepresented groups in tech or being assigned an "intern buddy" without your knowledge or consent just because you are a member of an underrepresented group, that's not a safe space. That's a ghetto.