Without trivializing institutionalized sexism, the author's highly submissive (almost grovelling) attitude makes me feel uncomfortable, not because of the genders of those involved but because he seems to let the workplace hierarchy completely define both himself and the boss. I am not familiar with the author, but is it unfathomable that he has accomplished something that some donor would like to speak to him about privately? Is that necessarily disrespectful towards his boss? Unless the author and his boss (in her tweet) withheld some information, they are being very assuming about the donor's motives and beliefs.
The other anecdotes mentioned in this piece appear to be stronger examples of sexism, such as the journalist who wrote an article about the charity without mentioning anything about the female executive director, and the comments made in that closed-door meeting with industry leaders. But I wish that the author hadn't diluted the message in the final paragraph by using sexist terms like "mansplaining."
I got zero sense of a 'highly submissive (almost grovelling) attitude'.
I got a strong sense of irritation and annoyance that people still, after many years, have not understood the organizational structure. He's using repetition to make it clear, in no uncertain terms, that his boss really is his boss.
Kuhn writes "I can't think of a single reason this donor could want to speak to me that would not be more productive if he instead spoke with Karen."
Since you don't know what he's done, why do you second-guess his explicit statement by positing "is it unfathomable that he has accomplished something that some donor would like to speak to him about privately."
Apparently yes, it is unfathomable to Kuhn and Sandler.
True, it's possible that the donor is (say) hoping for a private meeting with Kuhn to proposition him for a one-night stand - we can imagine many such scenarios which are broader than the simple context of a donor relationship to a non-profit. But these then become much more improbable than the stated view that the donor used a gender biased viewpoint to misjudge the dynamics involved.
You write "they are being very assuming about the donor's motives and beliefs" - but compare that with Kuhn's phrase "repeatedly insisted that the donation was gated on a conversation with me". If there were a reasonable explanation, perhaps based on Kuhn's past accomplishments, why didn't the donor say so explicitly?
Or are you proposing that the donor did say so, and that Kuhn is hiding the response, in order to misdirect us? You know little of him, so what is the basis of your doubt?
I cannot easily reconcile what you wrote, when I compare it to the original text, as something other than trivializing institutionalized sexism.
>Since you don't know what he's done, why do you second-guess his explicit statement by positing "is it unfathomable that he has accomplished something that some donor would like to speak to him about privately."
>Apparently yes, it is unfathomable to Kuhn and Sandler.
I am second-guessing it because it obviously not unfathomable that the author, who has many years of experience in his field, has accomplished something that someone finds worthy of a private conversation. When there is any doubt of people's motives, you should not go around and assume the worst, let alone make angry, public accusations.
>I cannot easily reconcile what you wrote, when I compare it to the original text, as something other than trivializing institutionalized sexism.
It is regrettable that you had to add an inappropriate accusation like this to your comment. I hope you are more respectful in your daily life when you encounter people with opposite viewpoints to your own.
Please explain your use of the term "unfathomable."
I interpret it to mean that there is no possible, conceivable reason other than the one given.
I believe this term is inappropriate, as it implies that "unfathomable" is somehow an appropriate guideline.
The guideline should be "reasonable". Otherwise, I pointed out a 'fathomable' but unreasonable scenario. I can easily create more 'fathomable' but unreasonable scenarios.
I believe the use of an extremist term like "unfathomable" serves to trivialize the topic made by making the goal posts too high.
What is a reasonable scenario where a potential donor to the Conservancy, when told several times they should be dealing with Sandler, still insists on a private meeting with Kuhn (and not Sandler) as condition of the donation?
I can fully understand why someone might want a private conversation with Kuhn, because of his background and experience.
The question at hand, however, is why a private conversation with Kuhn is a gating condition for the donation. I strongly doubt that the only way to have a private conversation with Kuhn is by contributing to the Conservancy.
So, what scenario do you propose which is more reasonable than institutional sexism?
> I got a strong sense of irritation and annoyance that people still, after many years, have not understood the organizational structure. He's using repetition to make it clear, in no uncertain terms, that his boss really is his boss
People aren’t as rigid as the organizational structure wants them to be. My boss is also my boss, but when his boss wants to cut through the bs and get stuff done, he comes right to me. Humans are fluid like that.
You can read about Bradley, he’s been around the open source community for decades. The reputation alone is the reason why the donor wants to speak with him, how is that not immediately obvious? Why be disingenuous and think that it is something more insidious (why would you even suggest something sexual? There was no indication of that....)?
What you describe is your boss's boss exercising power within his job position. That is not the case Kuhn describes.
When someone comes to you to have handle something which should be handled by your boss's boss, do you go ahead and do it? Even if you don't want to, and it's outside of your job description?
I have read about Kuhn and Sandler. I have also listened to most of their oggcasts.
You write "The reputation alone is the reason why the donor wants to speak with him"
Do you have evidence that that is the case? Because as presented, we don't know the specific reasons, and Kuhn states that "I can't think of a single reason this donor could want to speak to me that would not be more productive if he instead spoke with Karen". I presume Kuhn doesn't think his reputation is relevant.
Nor do I see a reason to think that Bradley's reputation is relevant. If the donor wants to speak to Bradley, why gate the donation on the private meeting? Why not donate the money without that thread attached, and independently arrange a private meeting with Kuhn?
Also, Sandler also has a reputation. She has been in the free software community for 13 years, has a legal background in defending free software, is the Executive Director, and (according to Kuhn), "better than [him] at the key jobs of a successful Executive Director."
The question isn't "why would someone want to have a private conversation with Kuhn?" but "why would a donor gate a donation on having a private conversation with Kuhn?"
It is certainly not "immediately obvious" that Sandler shouldn't also be at that conversation. Can you explain why it's obvious to you?
The "disingenuous" comment I made you mentioned is because the OP wrote "unfathomable", which is an extremist viewpoint which sidesteps the topic. I can make up fathomable reasons - and indeed I did - but they are all much more improbable than the stated reason of institutional sexism.
>You write "The reputation alone is the reason why the donor wants to speak with him"
>Do you have evidence that that is the case?
OP does not have the burden to prove something about the donor's motives. The burden is on the author who wrote this inflammatory article, because he is the person who is making a claim that the donor is sexist.
Why can we not accept what the author writes? What motive does he have to tell something other than his best interpretation of the evidence?
I have read and listened to far more from Kuhn than I have of you or the other commenters here on HN. That has lead me to conclude that this is not something he makes lightly or for ulterior motives.
"intimacy"? What a delightful word. I am intimate with my partner. I have intimate friends.
This is the first time I've ever been told I'm intimate with someone who I've never met, who I only know about through public writings and talks, and to whom I've never communicated.
My circle of intimacy instantly expanded as it now includes Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson, Eugene Garfield, and Donald Knuth. Though to be fair, I have communicated with the latter two.
And all those people who write critical biographies of dead people - surely we can't trust them now as they are too intimate to the person in question, and thus more likely to be biased.
Indeed, the only people we can trust are those who know nothing at all.
First, I am an ESL speaker. If you have nothing left to contribute except to nitpick my choice of words ('unfathomable' and 'pereived intimacy'), then you have obviously lost this debate.
Second, I don't believe that you have never met those people. Based on your activity here and emotional investment, I find it more likely that you are affiliated with the charity or maybe even the author himself. Notice that there isn't a single other person in this comment section who is defending the author, but you are responding to everything.
It’s also worth pointing out that role changes take time for people to realize. This guy used to be the executive director and people knew him as that guy. All of a sudden Karen replaces him and everybody is instantly supposed to treat her as in charge and totally disregard their previous relationship with him? Come on.
The exec holding back the donation wasn’t holding it back to speak to a man, he was holding it back to speak to Bradley. The whole peice feels contrived and I feel like it diminishes real sexism that women face. It’s not sexism to want to skip the hierarchy and talk to the person who has been a heavyweight in the organization and wider community for decades.
You wrote: "and everybody is instantly supposed to treat her as in charge and totally disregard their previous relationship with him? Come on."
As described, that is not the case for this situation. Kuhn wrote:
> Yet, the executive, who was previously well briefed on the role changes at Conservancy, repeatedly insisted that the donation was gated on a conversation with me.
How do you turn that into "instantly supposed to treat her as in charge"?
I find your activity for this article highly suspect. You are picking apart some lay comments as if this is a doctoral dissertation. This is not the place for nuanced debate, especially around trite personal problems someone on the other side of the continent is having.
To me the situation is explained too vaguely to tell: exec tells current charity director that he wants to talk with previous charity director before making a donation. If we weren't talking about donations, I would say that's definitely impolite, but in this case I'm not sure. And we don't have info about whether they previously knew each other or not, so I wouldn't dare to judge yet in this case without more info.
To me, this other fragment is more interesting:
>> I consistently say [...] that Karen is my boss. [...] But instead of taking that as the fact that it is, many people make comments like well, Karen's not really your boss, right; that's just a thing you say?.
Not just "tells current charity director" but "repeatedly insisted".
In what situations would it be reasonable to gate a donation on having a private conversation with an employee, instead of having a join conversation with both the employee and the executive director?
The only ones I can think of involve fraud or other form of distrust. But in that case, why is the exec considering a donation, when the person the exec wants to talk to doesn't have the power to control the donation?
Can somebody explain me why the situation described in the tweet is an example of sexism? The person wants to donate, and wants to speak with some other person about it with which he is comfortable dealing. That person happens to be male and his boss (the author of the tweet) happens to be female. Why does it make the situation sexist? Is there an obligation that if I contact somebody in the organization to make a donation, I must speak to a person of an opposite gender or I will appear sexist? Is there something else in the situation that did not fit in a tweet? How this situation is a no-win for Karen Sandler - isn't she getting the donation her organization needs, and having her employee do the work that is his job? Maybe she wanted to speak with that person instead, so maybe that is not all-win, but it doesn't seem to be no-win. What am I missing here?
Let's start with "which he is comfortable dealing".
There can be many reasons why a person could be uncomfortable. One could be that he does not believe women are not authority figures, and that Sandler's role as director is a figurehead.
So, if he is "comfortable" dealing with Kuhn, but not with Sandler, simply because Sandler is a women, then actions which make him more comfortable is supporting a form of sexual discrimination.
You ask "Is there an obligation that ..."
The obligation is to speak with the person who is most appropriate for what you want to do. In the case of making a donation to the Conservancy, it seems the most appropriate thing is to talk with the current Executive Director. Who happens to be a woman.
I see no need to posit there is an implied obligation to "speak to a person of an opposite gender or I will appear sexist".
You write "isn't she getting the donation her organization needs, and having her employee do the work that is his job?"
An organization depends on a long-term continuity of structure. If that structure is undermined by doing whatever is necessary for the short-term gain of a single donation, then it risks the organization as whole.
As an example of a no-win situation, suppose I were to offer $10M to the Conservancy, but gate it on having a date with Kuhn, then one view is that Sandler should pressure Kuhn to go on a date with me, because it will result in a donation. On the other hand, Kuhn and others might decided they don't want to work in that sort of environment, and leave.
Thus, it's not always the case that "getting a donation" is something that an organization needs.
Also, regarding "that is his job" - how do you know that private meeting with a potential donor is part of Kuhn's job?
> The obligation is to speak with the person who is most appropriate for what you want to do
What is the objective criteria of who is the most appropriate? I.e. if I think person A is the most appropriate and somebody thinks it's person B, is my opinion sexist if A is male and B is female? I.e., is there a place for reasonable disagreement which is not sexist? I mean, if the sole reason he prefers Kuhn to Sandler is because of her gender, this is obviously sexist, by definition, but why the assumption is it's the sole reason? Is there anything indicating it is so?
> An organization depends on a long-term continuity of structure. If that structure is undermined by doing whatever is necessary for the short-term gain of a single donation, then it risks the organization as whole.
How donating after speaking with her employee undermines the organization? From my experience, that's how a lot of donations happen - people speak to the employees of the NGO, understand that the mission of the org is the one they want to support and donate. Many times it's not the CEO - the CEO can't possibly meet with all donors. And sometimes donors meet with specific people doing things, just to understand that things that are being done are those they indeed want to support.
> suppose I were to offer $10M to the Conservancy, but gate it on having a date with Kuhn, then one view is that Sandler should pressure Kuhn to go on a date with me, because it will result in a donation.
"Pressuring" anyone might be a wrong move, no doubt, but even if it happened - which I don't see any indication it did - how it is sexist?
> Also, regarding "that is his job" - how do you know that private meeting with a potential donor is part of Kuhn's job?
I didn't know. I assumed it is since otherwise it'd be very weird from the side of the donor to request it and I prefer not to assume bad behavior without evidence. And since he has the CEO job before, which means he met with a lot of people and had established old relationships. In case it is not his job, it's indeed weird, but still doesn't answer why it is sexist.
"What is the objective criteria of who is the most appropriate?"
The people who are receiving the funding usually get to decide what they consider to be the appropriate mechanism.
That's pretty objective, yes?
"how it is sexist?"
Unwelcome sexual advances are covered under EEOC guidelines regarding hostile workplaces, under US civil rights laws. In this case, the pressure to go on a date would be described as an implicit term or condition of an individual's employment.
I enjoyed reading the EEOC guidelines on sexual harassment, some years back. It was a real eye-opener to have relatively objective descriptions of what sexual harassment in the workplace means, and to read case stories of what was judged to be sexual harassment.
Also, the way this article describes the situation made me think there's probably other things at play too. So I searched youtube for the two people in question speaking. Karen is a really, really bad public speaker. I found her speaking style to be cringingly bad. So that's probably also a variable at play.
Karen made a mistake by writing the tweet, and Bradley made a mistake by writing this article. It became clear to me while reading it that Bradley is either not that socially aware or doesn’t really have Karen’s best interests at heart. He should have found a way to phase himself out of the organization, or at least refrain from writing an article that could be summarized as “I’m disappointed that nobody really respects Karen as Executive Director”
Indeed, looking at the tweet, it seems that the senior tech director wanted go have hand-on information about how things are going, not marketing speech from someone at the top.
I've had to do the same with suppliers and software vendors.
A quick one-on-one with the "tech person" has often been far more informative & accurate than anything I've heard from the execs or senior managers.
Concluding sexism here seems overzealous. If Sandler were a man, I could still see all the same confusion due to Kuhn's history at the organization. Expecting hierarchical nomenclature to change external perceptions is a bit naive. I agree with others here that Kuhn should have stepped down completely if he really wanted pass on the organization, otherwise it's not exactly clear what role he plays. It's like expecting people not to associate GvR with Python.
Sexism and institutionalized sexism obviously exist. However, it's not very clear from the article whether the alleged discrimination was due to sexism or just experience-ism. If the BDFL of a project is replaced by a newer leader, people would obviously still trust the previous leader more, irrespective of the gender. I can easily see this story happening but with the genders reversed.
From their homepages:
Karen M. Sandler is the executive director of Conservancy.
Bradley M. Kuhn is the President and Distinguished Technologist at Software Freedom Conservancy, on the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and editor-in-chief of copyleft.org.
Sexism exists. This article is a great example of it in the way it implies it's only a problem for women.
Asking sexually reproducing mammals to treat each other as equals just isn't going to work. There are many other animal instincts which people have tried to suppress over the years, like greed. It doesn't usually work. Instead you have to learn how to live with it. But first you have to accept it. We'll start to see more acceptance in the coming decades.
Of course it is, which disregards a good deal of research in cultural studies accumulating over the past half of a century. But you know that, as you clearly have studied the field.
The implication being that the only reason I could disagree with the idea that there is no human nature is that I have never encountered critical theory, structuralism, or postmodernism. Actually, one can acknowledge that we are all immersed in social structures that shape our thought in ways that we can't objectively understand, that communication is fraught with signs asserting cultural preconceptions, that there is a close connection between knowledge and power, etc., while repudiating the idea that external reality is illusory or unknowable, or that human behaviour is purely a function of context.
Human beings are animals, and thus the product of evolution. We are not blank slates, but highly specialised machines with innate tendencies and potentials. Almost anyone could, with minimal difficulty, list any number of phenomena universal to any human society: pain (and aversion thereto), communication, laughter, anger, etc. It is avowedly extremely difficult to separate ourselves from our inculcated norms when reasoning about human nature, but that does not refute its existence.
Of course, suggesting that human beings have no natural tendencies evolved for their survival ignores an overwhelming preponderance of evidence accumulated by biologists over the past century. But you know that, having clearly studied the field.
The other anecdotes mentioned in this piece appear to be stronger examples of sexism, such as the journalist who wrote an article about the charity without mentioning anything about the female executive director, and the comments made in that closed-door meeting with industry leaders. But I wish that the author hadn't diluted the message in the final paragraph by using sexist terms like "mansplaining."