5 ms·

>anecdotally I happen to be an extreme introvert, and the excessive socializing and advice or notion that if we have an environment where we can all be super gi

by mklim 10y ago

>anecdotally I happen to be an extreme introvert, and the excessive socializing and advice or notion that if we have an environment where we can all be super girly like omg together is the vibe I get from alot of female focused events in tech. It's actually overwhelming and makes me feel more out of place than not. I'm just one more anecdote and a bit of a living edge case, but this has been painfully true for me as well. I deliberately avoid women in tech events/blogs/etc now because of how uncomfortable they tend to make me. Hearing "tech" talks about how it's important for women to get hired because we're just like, so in touch with our feelings and therefore we make great UX--incredibly demoralizing and othering for me.

ci5er 10y ago
I'm assuming based on your use of pronouns that you are a "woman in tech" (if that is incorrect, please correct me). IF that is wrong, then my eventual stated question later is pointless, but I am forging ahead on that assumption... I am an old white straight male. When I started out in my employed career - semiconductor design - Motorola - Tokyo Japan in the late 80s, I had to spend a year in the US for "training", but in both the US and Tokyo it was about 70%~80% males and 20%~30% females. Systems. Circuits. Layout. Fab. Prequal. I guess more females in layout, but ... in general that was about how it was. We all worked together, raised barns together, drank together, went to funerals together. We were mates. Co-workers. It wasn't until recently that I was told that this was wrong. That I needed to show more concern about female issues in a male dominated world. And maybe this is right - I don't know. I wasn't educated enough to know that treating a talented female engineering co-worker as a talented co-workers wasn't enough. I guess my question is this: Is ignoring gender when interacting with co-workers wrong? Should I be doing something different when I interact with female co-workers?
- mklim 10y ago
  >I guess my question is this: Is ignoring gender when interacting with co-workers wrong? Should I be doing something different when I interact with female co-workers? Me being sexed female doesn't really qualify me to answer this question--I'm just some random person and have no formal power to speak as the official representative for Women Everywhere (I'd be a very bad choice for that, too--I am so masculine that I tend to be perceived as male, that's part of what I meant when I called myself a "living edge case" in my earlier comment). That disclaimer out of the way, two points to your question: 1. It's highly unlikely that you are treating women identically to men, even though you genuinely believe you do. I'd bet hard money that you don't, actually, because a) almost nobody does, myself included despite my best efforts b) I can already name an instance where you didn't--you specifically asked me this question based on my sex and only my sex, by your own admission. I don't know how much you've read about unconscious bias, but it's a very well-studied and documented phenomenon and I recommend looking into some of the research on it that's been done. Hiring managers are more likely to extend offers to identical resumes that have male names, and the offers they extend to the male-named resumes tend to be higher. Startup pitches given by male actors are rated as more convincing and more likely to earn investment by VCs than the exact same pitches given by female actresses. Women are interrupted much more frequently than men in group discussions, and a group will perceive that women have talked "most of the time" if they talk for >=30% of the time. Men are perceived as more technically competent than women. Women are perceived negatively (too aggressive, "not a team player") for negotiating their salary, in general, whereas men are not. Even if you specifically are 100% egalitarian and have no mental shortcuts that you apply towards women whatsoever, the vast majority of the people they're interacting with are not truly gender blind. This is from people who really believe that they are unbiased, in a lot of cases, and aren't aware of the subconscious stereotyping that's driving their behavior--that's the unconscious part, and it's insidious. So, consciously saying "well I believe the genders are equal and I treat everyone the same and that's what we should do in the workplace, not take sex into account at all and just be buds" can just leave subtle sexism totally unchecked and rampant, instead of truly promoting equal behavior. Harvard hosts a couple free online tests to check your implicit bias, if you're curious to check yourself: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html (I come off as biased on gender, for the record, most people do, regardless of their sex.) 2. I think this question, like affirmative action, comes down to whether you think it's more ethical to prioritize equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. Women in general are socialized to defer to the people around them, be more caring, be less assertive, be less confident. That has already happened by the time you're hiring them. If you and everyone in your workplace somehow do overcome your socialization and years of mental heuristics and manage to treat women in the field exactly the same as you do men in the field, the women will still have lower salaries (don't want to be confrontational and negotiate aggressively), apply to your job openings less (women do not apply to a job unless they meet the majority of the listed qualifications, unlike men), be less likely to voice their opinions in meetings, etc. Note here: I'm not saying all women act like this or every individual woman is more likely to than every individual man, I don't as far as I'm aware, but I'm saying that a random sampling of women are in general more likely to than a random sampling of men are. I'm sure you've seen that internet argument half a dozen times already, but in general the argument for treating everyone the exact same way is that you're treating everyone equally and that's the best you can do, even if there's disparate outcomes we shouldn't treat people differently, we should just control our behavior and make sure that's egalitarian. The argument against is along the lines of: we don't tell people confined to wheelchairs "the stairs are open to you too, stop fussing", we build ramps for them--the starting points for the two groups are not equal, therefore treating them the same isn't really egalitarian in the first place, it's just keeping the (unequal) status quo. I can tell you that I personally would be extremely unhappy if my coworkers decided to behave in specific ways towards me because of my sex, but I'm, like I said, an edge case. And, on the contrary, I've had coworkers (correctly) guess that I am attracted to women and make awkward non-sequitor statements about their lesbian relative/friend and how happy they are for her--I actually am really pleased when this happens, even though it's always extremely awkward and we both know why they're bringing this up out of the blue. It lets me relax about it and just act normally without it affecting my career. (An aside: my first internship, my boss was big on listening to Rush Limbaugh in his cubicle, I wasn't working in a state where sexual orientation was a protected class, and I wasted a huge amount of mental energy agonizing over him potentially firing me over it, 0/10 internal conflict would not recommend.) So even an individual can have conflicting feelings about their minority status being explicitly accounted for by their coworkers, you can't really generalize.
  - ci5er 10y ago
    Wow. Thank you for such a detailed response. I may come back and have questions about this later (but I don't want to presume...) I think Re #1 - that I did treat them differently is probably right. I almost went back and edited my original question a few seconds after I posted it. I noticed that I blushed (a lot) when women would say risque things vs. guys. They noticed too - and ganged up on me a little about it. There were probably more instances of this. I need to think about it some more. Thank you.
  - ci5er 10y ago
    I've never worked in a protected-anything state, but why would someone fire a valuable contributor because of orientation after they've gone to the expense of hiring and training them? Was your fear irrational because you were young - or was your fear rational because humans are jerks?
    - mklim 10y ago
      If you're in the US, there are already several universally protected classes (race, gender). Why would a parent knowingly disown and put their gay child out on the street, risking criminal charges and effectively wasting however many years of effort they put into raising their child? I don't know, but ~40% of the homeless American youth population identifies as LGBT. (Source: http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/americas-shame-40-of-homeless-youth-are-lgbt-kids/ http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/americas-shame-4...) Happened to a friend of mine as a teenager. People are not always rational actors. Firing someone over their sexual orientation is extremely rare, but not unheard of. (A handful of anecdotes: http://www.advocate.com/year-review/2013/12/18/meet-people-fired-being-lgbt-2013 http://www.advocate.com/year-review/2013/12/18/meet-people-f...) Luckily though, my former boss had similar opinions to you and I was completely fine. I've since moved to California and established myself as a solid developer, so it's not even a serious issue on my radar anymore. I would just switch to a better workplace now if I was concerned.
      - ci5er 10y ago
        So, in this case, you were young and irrational and didn't understand the cost of replacing a good developer? I'm still processing your upstream comments, but anecdotally, when I got to spend about a year on the street, Imma gonna to say that in central Texas, there were a lot of people with mental challenges (which is sad) and a whole lot more with drug issues (which is a different problem, and separately sad), and either of them would have swung any way you asked for their next hit. I am not going to claim that this experience is representative in any way.
- usmeteora 10y ago
  Hello, in my case (I wrote the original comment) most men I work with are totally chill and just like you. Unfortunately, I'd say 1/20-30 guys I work with are going to make a pass at me, or make me feel uncomfortable. Alot of this is encouraged r discouraged based on the culture of the workplace. In general, I get along with my male coworkers, and I loathe getting special treatment or being given breaks because I'm a girl so I agree with you, you don't need to do anything extra beyond what you normally do. Unfortunately, not everyone is as awesome as you. It's more just that statistically if females are a minority, and the culture of the workplace allows it, it's likely you might get hit on, and it's possible the female coworkers you hung out with may have gotten hit on inappropriately at work and just never talked to you about it. For sure, none of the guys I worked with who were cool with me knew what I went through. Same as you, I started in semiconductor. 95% of the guys were totally chill and we worked and ate together etc etc. I did however, get asked out on dinner and dates by four married men in my two years working then, who then avoided me and refused to even do necessary job place coordination with me on daily tasks after I turned them down, making my job harder for me. The team was 114 people, 6 women, all of us 20 yrs younger than the average age of the men. SO that means 108 of the men were totally awesome, and 4 of them sucked. This is not all that I went through, just a PG version but in general, I'm making the point on average and most men are not like that, instead of trying to hone in on the few bad outlier scenarios I had to encounter. I definitely don't want these conversations to make men like you feel you are not doing enough. On the contrary, need more men like you that DON"T feel the need to treat us any differently, because thats what we want, atleast for me.
  - ci5er 10y ago
    I'm not awesome and chill -- I'm just old. And I am very very afraid that the rules are changing under my feet and I don't have a handbook. I don't even know how to count teams that large -- I suspect the way I process "team" and you do are different. I was getting my sea legs back when I was in semi-conductor, and (I don't recall, to tell the truth, but I think I'd never had a girl friend), I asked a lady for a date. She was very cool and said "no", and that she had a boy friend. I was a little mortified that I didn't already know this, but she was a (the?) sales engineer on on of my two accounts (Canon and Sony were "mine"), and I don't think it would have occurred to me to NOT work with her. I guess I'm saying that I was embarrassed as hell, but it was my fault for asking for a date in the first place. I am so sorry you had people (probably people like me) get their own ass embarrassed and treat you like that.

by mklim 10y ago

ci5er 10y ago

I'm assuming based on your use of pronouns that you are a "woman in tech" (if that is incorrect, please correct me). IF that is wrong, then my eventual stated question later is pointless, but I am forging ahead on that assumption... I am an old white straight male. When I started out in my employed career - semiconductor design - Motorola - Tokyo Japan in the late 80s, I had to spend a year in the US for "training", but in both the US and Tokyo it was about 70%~80% males and 20%~30% females. Systems. Circuits. Layout. Fab. Prequal. I guess more females in layout, but ... in general that was about how it was. We all worked together, raised barns together, drank together, went to funerals together. We were mates. Co-workers. It wasn't until recently that I was told that this was wrong. That I needed to show more concern about female issues in a male dominated world. And maybe this is right - I don't know. I wasn't educated enough to know that treating a talented female engineering co-worker as a talented co-workers wasn't enough. I guess my question is this: Is ignoring gender when interacting with co-workers wrong? Should I be doing something different when I interact with female co-workers?

mklim 10y ago
>I guess my question is this: Is ignoring gender when interacting with co-workers wrong? Should I be doing something different when I interact with female co-workers? Me being sexed female doesn't really qualify me to answer this question--I'm just some random person and have no formal power to speak as the official representative for Women Everywhere (I'd be a very bad choice for that, too--I am so masculine that I tend to be perceived as male, that's part of what I meant when I called myself a "living edge case" in my earlier comment). That disclaimer out of the way, two points to your question: 1. It's highly unlikely that you are treating women identically to men, even though you genuinely believe you do. I'd bet hard money that you don't, actually, because a) almost nobody does, myself included despite my best efforts b) I can already name an instance where you didn't--you specifically asked me this question based on my sex and only my sex, by your own admission. I don't know how much you've read about unconscious bias, but it's a very well-studied and documented phenomenon and I recommend looking into some of the research on it that's been done. Hiring managers are more likely to extend offers to identical resumes that have male names, and the offers they extend to the male-named resumes tend to be higher. Startup pitches given by male actors are rated as more convincing and more likely to earn investment by VCs than the exact same pitches given by female actresses. Women are interrupted much more frequently than men in group discussions, and a group will perceive that women have talked "most of the time" if they talk for >=30% of the time. Men are perceived as more technically competent than women. Women are perceived negatively (too aggressive, "not a team player") for negotiating their salary, in general, whereas men are not. Even if you specifically are 100% egalitarian and have no mental shortcuts that you apply towards women whatsoever, the vast majority of the people they're interacting with are not truly gender blind. This is from people who really believe that they are unbiased, in a lot of cases, and aren't aware of the subconscious stereotyping that's driving their behavior--that's the unconscious part, and it's insidious. So, consciously saying "well I believe the genders are equal and I treat everyone the same and that's what we should do in the workplace, not take sex into account at all and just be buds" can just leave subtle sexism totally unchecked and rampant, instead of truly promoting equal behavior. Harvard hosts a couple free online tests to check your implicit bias, if you're curious to check yourself: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html (I come off as biased on gender, for the record, most people do, regardless of their sex.) 2. I think this question, like affirmative action, comes down to whether you think it's more ethical to prioritize equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. Women in general are socialized to defer to the people around them, be more caring, be less assertive, be less confident. That has already happened by the time you're hiring them. If you and everyone in your workplace somehow do overcome your socialization and years of mental heuristics and manage to treat women in the field exactly the same as you do men in the field, the women will still have lower salaries (don't want to be confrontational and negotiate aggressively), apply to your job openings less (women do not apply to a job unless they meet the majority of the listed qualifications, unlike men), be less likely to voice their opinions in meetings, etc. Note here: I'm not saying all women act like this or every individual woman is more likely to than every individual man, I don't as far as I'm aware, but I'm saying that a random sampling of women are in general more likely to than a random sampling of men are. I'm sure you've seen that internet argument half a dozen times already, but in general the argument for treating everyone the exact same way is that you're treating everyone equally and that's the best you can do, even if there's disparate outcomes we shouldn't treat people differently, we should just control our behavior and make sure that's egalitarian. The argument against is along the lines of: we don't tell people confined to wheelchairs "the stairs are open to you too, stop fussing", we build ramps for them--the starting points for the two groups are not equal, therefore treating them the same isn't really egalitarian in the first place, it's just keeping the (unequal) status quo. I can tell you that I personally would be extremely unhappy if my coworkers decided to behave in specific ways towards me because of my sex, but I'm, like I said, an edge case. And, on the contrary, I've had coworkers (correctly) guess that I am attracted to women and make awkward non-sequitor statements about their lesbian relative/friend and how happy they are for her--I actually am really pleased when this happens, even though it's always extremely awkward and we both know why they're bringing this up out of the blue. It lets me relax about it and just act normally without it affecting my career. (An aside: my first internship, my boss was big on listening to Rush Limbaugh in his cubicle, I wasn't working in a state where sexual orientation was a protected class, and I wasted a huge amount of mental energy agonizing over him potentially firing me over it, 0/10 internal conflict would not recommend.) So even an individual can have conflicting feelings about their minority status being explicitly accounted for by their coworkers, you can't really generalize.
- ci5er 10y ago
  Wow. Thank you for such a detailed response. I may come back and have questions about this later (but I don't want to presume...) I think Re #1 - that I did treat them differently is probably right. I almost went back and edited my original question a few seconds after I posted it. I noticed that I blushed (a lot) when women would say risque things vs. guys. They noticed too - and ganged up on me a little about it. There were probably more instances of this. I need to think about it some more. Thank you.
- ci5er 10y ago
  I've never worked in a protected-anything state, but why would someone fire a valuable contributor because of orientation after they've gone to the expense of hiring and training them? Was your fear irrational because you were young - or was your fear rational because humans are jerks?
  - mklim 10y ago
    If you're in the US, there are already several universally protected classes (race, gender). Why would a parent knowingly disown and put their gay child out on the street, risking criminal charges and effectively wasting however many years of effort they put into raising their child? I don't know, but ~40% of the homeless American youth population identifies as LGBT. (Source: http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/americas-shame-40-of-homeless-youth-are-lgbt-kids/ http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/americas-shame-4...) Happened to a friend of mine as a teenager. People are not always rational actors. Firing someone over their sexual orientation is extremely rare, but not unheard of. (A handful of anecdotes: http://www.advocate.com/year-review/2013/12/18/meet-people-fired-being-lgbt-2013 http://www.advocate.com/year-review/2013/12/18/meet-people-f...) Luckily though, my former boss had similar opinions to you and I was completely fine. I've since moved to California and established myself as a solid developer, so it's not even a serious issue on my radar anymore. I would just switch to a better workplace now if I was concerned.
    - ci5er 10y ago
      So, in this case, you were young and irrational and didn't understand the cost of replacing a good developer? I'm still processing your upstream comments, but anecdotally, when I got to spend about a year on the street, Imma gonna to say that in central Texas, there were a lot of people with mental challenges (which is sad) and a whole lot more with drug issues (which is a different problem, and separately sad), and either of them would have swung any way you asked for their next hit. I am not going to claim that this experience is representative in any way.
usmeteora 10y ago
Hello, in my case (I wrote the original comment) most men I work with are totally chill and just like you. Unfortunately, I'd say 1/20-30 guys I work with are going to make a pass at me, or make me feel uncomfortable. Alot of this is encouraged r discouraged based on the culture of the workplace. In general, I get along with my male coworkers, and I loathe getting special treatment or being given breaks because I'm a girl so I agree with you, you don't need to do anything extra beyond what you normally do. Unfortunately, not everyone is as awesome as you. It's more just that statistically if females are a minority, and the culture of the workplace allows it, it's likely you might get hit on, and it's possible the female coworkers you hung out with may have gotten hit on inappropriately at work and just never talked to you about it. For sure, none of the guys I worked with who were cool with me knew what I went through. Same as you, I started in semiconductor. 95% of the guys were totally chill and we worked and ate together etc etc. I did however, get asked out on dinner and dates by four married men in my two years working then, who then avoided me and refused to even do necessary job place coordination with me on daily tasks after I turned them down, making my job harder for me. The team was 114 people, 6 women, all of us 20 yrs younger than the average age of the men. SO that means 108 of the men were totally awesome, and 4 of them sucked. This is not all that I went through, just a PG version but in general, I'm making the point on average and most men are not like that, instead of trying to hone in on the few bad outlier scenarios I had to encounter. I definitely don't want these conversations to make men like you feel you are not doing enough. On the contrary, need more men like you that DON"T feel the need to treat us any differently, because thats what we want, atleast for me.
- ci5er 10y ago
  I'm not awesome and chill -- I'm just old. And I am very very afraid that the rules are changing under my feet and I don't have a handbook. I don't even know how to count teams that large -- I suspect the way I process "team" and you do are different. I was getting my sea legs back when I was in semi-conductor, and (I don't recall, to tell the truth, but I think I'd never had a girl friend), I asked a lady for a date. She was very cool and said "no", and that she had a boy friend. I was a little mortified that I didn't already know this, but she was a (the?) sales engineer on on of my two accounts (Canon and Sony were "mine"), and I don't think it would have occurred to me to NOT work with her. I guess I'm saying that I was embarrassed as hell, but it was my fault for asking for a date in the first place. I am so sorry you had people (probably people like me) get their own ass embarrassed and treat you like that.