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Amazing. The author spends a lot of time to tell us a very convincing story how sexism affects people in our industry, and the Hacker News thread is full of peo

Amazing. The author spends a lot of time to tell us a very convincing story how sexism affects people in our industry, and the Hacker News thread is full of people rationalizing it. - it's only because people think you're a bot - it's because of your target audience - it's because chat widgets are annoying - you don't really have enough data to make any conclusions How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere?

verroq 9y ago
"Rude people are sexist" or "Sexist people are rude" is about the only conclusion you can draw here (maybe not even that, correlation != causation etc etc) It doesn't even come close to showing how "sexism is everywhere". For all we know the sample could be entirely edgy 12 year olds. Tell me again how this self-admittedly "non-rigorous scientific study" proves "sexism is everywhere"? It could easily be that more attractive profiles result in more interactions and receive the same proportion of sexist responses. Their data measures sexist messages not the proportion of sexist messages over all of their interactions.
- jakobegger 9y ago
  You're probably new to HN, so you might not have seen all the other stories about sexism posted in the last year or so. A single story like this doesn't prove anything, but the flood of stories just like that paint a pretty clear picture. At some point you can no longer say: "This is an isolated incident".
  - verroq 9y ago
    I'm not new to HN, I've been here for far longer than you have. And yes some of those stories have merit, but this is not one of them.
    - aepiepaey 9y ago
      (account age is not a good proxy for "time on HN")
      - always_good 9y ago
        But "you're probably new to HN [lil fella, but here's how it's been]" is a tacky, low-effort quip especially towards an account over 8 years old.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    A flood of stories on the internet doesn't necessarily prove much either. When there are billions of people on the internet, there could easily be a vocal minority that doesn't represent the majority.
  - geezerjay 9y ago
    > A single story like this doesn't prove anything, but the flood of stories just like that paint a pretty clear picture. A flood of biased anecdotes doesn't become truth or facts after a given count. Oponionated militants don't define reality. Your comment indicates a profound lack of ratinal and objective thinking.
  - hueving 9y ago
    The plural of anecdote is not data. We need real stats about this because individuals complaining vastly outweighs the silent remaining ones. There are enough murders every day to cover the front page of hacker news with a story about each one. It doesn't mean murder is a rampant problem in our society.
    - UncleMeat 9y ago
      We have real stats. Hundreds, if not thousands of studies. But those get this identical reaction.
      - Chris2048 9y ago
        > Hundreds, if not thousands of studies That you personally know of, despite citing even one?
    - dahart 9y ago
      > The plural of anecdote is not data. We need real stats about this There are mountains of real stats. Have you tried to look? All you have to do is google "sexism statistics". The first hit for me has a link to a real study about online interactions: http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ > There are enough murders every day to cover the front page of hacker news with a story about each one. It doesn't mean murder is a rampant problem in our society. What a strange statement. Since there are enough murders every day to cover the front page of HN, doesn't that prove it's a problem? If sexism covered the front page of HN every day, would that mean it's less of a problem than it is now? Murder is a rampant problem in our society. There are entire countries with less than one tenth the murder rate of the U.S. Are you suggesting that because the problem is everywhere, it's not a problem?
  - Sir_Substance 9y ago
    >At some point you can no longer say: "This is an isolated incident". The problem with this is there's really no such thing as an "anti-sexism" story. No one posts news about how they worked at a company and everyone was just a normal person. That's not news, that's just life. It happens all the time, and in fact it's probably happening right now within a few hundred meters of almost everyone reading the post, yet it will never make the news. Moreover, the vast majority of news articles on this site are analyzable as containing an absence of sexism, but that's not an "anti-sexism" story either. What I'm trying to get here is that the signal you are listening to is unidirectional. If you're incrementing a mental counter of "how many sexism-related articles have I seen" without any way of decrementing it then yeah, eventually you'll hit a number you dislike. That's not because there's any meaning behind your metric though, it's just because you've structured your metric in a way that means given infinite time, you'll hit /all/ the positive integers. Anyway, that doesn't mean that sexism isn't a major problem. But it does mean that you, jakobegger, don't know if it's a major problem or not.
  - skookumchuck 9y ago
    The daily newspaper has stories that are interesting because they aren't happening to nearly everyone. They give people a very skewed impression of how likely they are to happen to them. The newspaper rarely bothers to write stories about things that are likely to happen to you, like dying from a hospital mistake, car crash or a drowning. The risk of dying in a terrorist incident in the US is essentially zero, but you'd never know that from the flood of newspaper stories about it.
  - Pica_soO 9y ago
    The flood of stories only tells me "We want the power these organizations wield" to have everyone walking on eggshells and start a rioting mob towards anyone not paying respect to the social priest caste.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    Believing things based on quantity of internet articles on the topic is how fake news works. If a proper study of incidents like this is done, with good stats relating to the totality of incidents in context - i.e that takes into account the full picture, we could then conclude something.
- GreaterFool 9y ago
  Also, rude comments aside, which avatar received the most useful comments?
  - beobab 9y ago
    I would be interested to find this out.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  This one thing is obviously not the smoking gun. But in context of the thousands of other similar things it becomes impossible not to see a pattern.
  - wruza 9y ago
    Even I, being not good at statistics, got your parent’s point. We do see patterns easily when there is/maybe none due to how our pattern-detection works. It is evolutionally false-positive, because it is easier to label and avoid than explain and manage (and take damage on mistake). In this light, the “context of thousands of similar things” is one great generalizing bs.
  - spiraldancing 9y ago
    Well, apparently not impossible, if one denies hard enough.
    - wruza 9y ago
      Or is uncertain.
  - jerf 9y ago
    Thousands of similar events, in a ratio with millions upon millions of respectful interactions. It really shouldn't be surprising when the proposed solution to the former is to endlessly harass those doing the latter and accuse them of sexism day in, day out using the largest megaphones our species has ever constructed that the latter get touchy. For which the secondary solution is then to berate them for getting touchy, which as anyone with a basic understanding of human nature could tell you, doesn't do much to endear your arguments to them. The perception that it is being done so that those doing the berating can feel good about how virtuous they are doesn't help either. It's the streetlight effect [1] in social problems; yell at the people whom it is safe and convenient to yell at, who are not (in general) the problem. It does not help anybody to come on to a place like HN and broadcast how deplorable you think everybody else is. Even the possible benefits it could bring, like setting the tone for making it clear this isn't acceptable, is handily defeated by the amount of anger you create by accusing people willy-nilly of sexism (which, by the way, people are supposed to be angry about, remember; if sexism is one of the True Evils of the world you should not be surprised when people react to accusations of it) and the way it makes those who are behaving well start to wonder "Why, exactly, am I bothering reigning in these impulses if I'm going to be bathed in accusations of sexism anyhow?" Whatever the solution is, it isn't going to be found in abusing broadcast media like internet discussions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
- rocqua 9y ago
  "Rude people are sexist" still means we have a 'systemic' problem of sexism. In fact, one might argue that rude people being sexist are worse than polite people being sexist. Because the rude people are more disruptive over all. The statement 'sexism is everywhere' does not mean 'almost all people are sexist'. Instead, it means 'almost all women suffer from sexist attitudes in most areas of their lives. If 10% of people are sexist, that is easily enough for all women to notice it. I'd guess the real threshold is more like 3% of people being sexist.
  - mdpopescu 9y ago
    So, you're saying <grin> that the problem is actually very small?
    - MereInterest 9y ago
      No. The brake line on your car is a very small part of it. If it is cut, the problem is anything but small. That a small percentage of men can have a disproportionately large effect in no way implies that the problem is small.
    - kirillseva 9y ago
      that's what she said
      - dang 9y ago
        Please don't do this here.
  - DarkWiiPlayer 9y ago
    I think the term "sexist" is being used very lightly here. Sexism implies some sort of discrimination based on sex. Same goes for "sexual harassment"; harassment implies some degree of persistence, not just a single action. I think "indecent" behaviour is the most fitting word for this kind of problem.
    - 9y ago
- acranox 9y ago
  Ok, but do you think those 12 year olds are going to all grow up to be well behaving adults? Or maybe the problems with this kind of sexism are starting very young. If you are right then the solutions still need to be addressed, but we need to start earlier.
  - geezerjay 9y ago
    Marginal levels of immature and/or antisocial elements don't mean that society is sexist, no matter how vocal those trolls may be.
    - dsr_ 9y ago
      No, society tolerating those vocal trolls does mean that society is sexist. "The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept" - Lt. Gen. David Morrison
      - dlss 9y ago
        > No, society tolerating those vocal trolls does mean that society is sexist. What change in society would count as not tolerating these trolls?
        notriddle 9y ago
        To start with, commenters on HN could acknowledge that this is actually a problem.
      - geezerjay 9y ago
        > No, society tolerating those vocal trolls does mean that society is sexist. Actually that just means society tolerates trolls. You're showing your bias by jumping to the conclusion that everything is sexism or that somehow antisocial and immature people only target women. Furthermore, western society actually holds in high regard concepts such as frer speech, which covers idiots being able to say idiotic things.
- eloisant 9y ago
  The conclusion we can draw is pretty much what the author says: it's better to present yourself as an anonymous avatar than a real person. Despite what marketing people tell you about "creating a connection" or "showing that your company is made of real people", often a bit of distance and professionalism is best for your relationship with customers.
  - mikulas_florek 9y ago
    > it's better to present yourself as an anonymous avatar than a real person. Only if you want to avoid rude/sexist messages. You can get more normal messages with good looking girl, and that's what matters for business.
    - notriddle 9y ago
      > Only if you want to avoid rude/sexist messages. Who wouldn't?!
      - mikulas_florek 9y ago
        It's not just black and white. You will get less rude messages, but you will also get less normal messages. It means you will have smaller conversion ratio and earn less money. So to answer your question, I would not want to avoid sexist message if it means less money for my business. It's extremely simple to ignore bad people on the Internet. It's hard to earn money.
    - azernik 9y ago
      Do you have a source for that claim?
      - mikulas_florek 9y ago
        You are right, I should have written "you probably can" instead of "you can". But my original point is that that > it's better to present yourself as an anonymous avatar than a real person is not what's implied from the article. Rather it should be: "it's better to present yourself as an anonymous avatar than a real person if you want to receive less crap" Note: there's a user in this discussion saying in their case image of good looking woman worked the best.
- thaumaturgy 9y ago
  I am so glad someone on HN is here to enforce rigorous standards when it comes to this topic, in particular. Because there have been multiple accounts of bad behavior, both subtle and not-subtle, at tech conferences (https://shift.newco.co/what-its-like-to-be-a-woman-at-a-tech-conference-8a1a299ac82b https://shift.newco.co/what-its-like-to-be-a-woman-at-a-tech..., https://blog.juliaferraioli.com/2014/08/do-you-even.html https://blog.juliaferraioli.com/2014/08/do-you-even.html), but those aren't studies, they're just isolated experiences, so we can ignore those. And there have been multiple accounts from women who won't use a feminine identity online due to harassment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3411627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3411627), and really talented women who have to endure sexist work environments (http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/12/04/meeting/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/12/04/meeting/), and, occasionally, even much more lively discussions from women on what it's like to work in tech (https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4ioxw9/as_i_sit_in_a_massive_sausagefest_conference_it/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4ioxw9/as_i_sit_i...). But, again, these aren't studies, so we can ignore them. Of course, there have been studies, including one that found feminine names in chats got 25 times more malicious messages (http://www.ece.umd.edu/News/news_story.php?id=1788 http://www.ece.umd.edu/News/news_story.php?id=1788), which would seem to support this woman's experience too ... but, surely, we can find some way to dismiss that, too, right? The important part is that, every time a submission like this comes along, we rush to the comments section to try to shout it down. There are surely some medium.com posts about experiences that other developers have had that we could upvote instead. Preferably, ones from developers who don't happen to be too feminine.
  - verroq 9y ago
    >I am so glad someone on HN is here to enforce rigorous standards when it comes to this topic, in particular. I am so glad someone on HN is here to tell us exactly why we aren't allowed to have a rigorous discussion when it comes to this topic, in particular. It is interesting how you immediately reframe women getting harassed as misogyny. Nevermind women likely get more attention online as well. Let's have a look at the study [0] you mention. Which measures private messages received from an IRC channel by a bot. Do you honestly not think a female username will receive more attention given the typical gender composition of an online IRC channel? (Who still uses IRC apart from unwashed CS nerds?) 25 times messages likely means there were 25 times more males than females in that particular room. [0] Meyer, R., & Cukier, M. 2006 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.89.3613&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.89.... This point is, without properly establishing a base rate of attention VS harassment, all you can do appeal to emotion. Yes women are being harassed in tech, are they being harassed in at a higher rate than other industries? Is it a specifically a tech problem? Is your solution to the problem to accuse men in the tech industry as misogynists/sexists further alienate both sides from each other when you don't even have proper evidence?
- throwaway-hn123 9y ago
  Post your contact details, mate. I'll come visit you and give you a personal explanation, ok?
- JabavuAdams 9y ago
  Why was no one rude to the dude, dude? You're engaging in cargo-cult statistics.
- rkangel 9y ago
  The conclusion you can draw here is that being female will makes you the target of abuse that you wouldn't receive as another gender (or species in the case of this article). Other people have provided data that supports the case that this is a widespread problem that faces female tech-people (and even that is a subset of a larger problem). To take it to extremes, that abuse could entirely be the fault of one single person who frequents every forum on the internet (you suggested it was "just 12 year old boys"). That the cause of the problem is only a small subset of men in no way affects the fact that there is a problem that makes being a female tech-person a less pleasant experience than being a male tech person.
  - buhris 9y ago
    I'm not sure that accounts on sexual harassment alone can be used to argue that being a female tech-person is a less pleasant experience than being a male tech-person. Women do experience more sexual harassment in tech industry than men but they do not experience more harassment or workplace bullying overall. The harassment that is not of sexual nature is not necessarily less upsetting than sexual harassment. In fact the opposite might be the case: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bullies-work/workplace-bullying-worse-than-sexual-harassment-study-idUSN0622290520080310 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bullies-work/workplace-bu...
  - bozniv 9y ago
    I'm not sure you can conclude from accounts on sexual harassment alone that being a female tech-person is a less pleasant experience than being a male tech-person. Women do experience more sexual harassment in tech industry than men but they do not experience more harassment or workplace bullying overall. The harassment that is not of sexual nature is not necessarily less upsetting than sexual harassment. In fact the opposite might be the case: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bullies-work/workplace-bullying-worse-than-sexual-harassment-study-idUSN0622290520080310 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bullies-work/workplace-bu...
    - rkangel 9y ago
      Accounts on sexual harassment give one way in which being a woman is worse than a man. I am aware of no study or plausible anecdotal evidence of a significant issue that men are exposed to that women aren't. Lacking something to 'balance it out' I find it reasonable to conclude that women have a less pleasant experience.
- dahart 9y ago
  > Tell me again how this self-admittedly "non-rigorous scientific study" proves "sexism is everywhere"? By itself, this article doesn't prove that, it's only one more data point in the vast unending ocean of data points that prove it. > It could easily by that more attractive profiles results in more interactions and receive the same proportion of sexist responses. You're imagining something fairly contrary to what the article said, and to what many other examples and studies have shown. The primary factor is the gender of the recipient, and while the article is not rigorous, it demonstrated a greater percentage of sexist comments for the more attractive female photo, and demonstrated a near zero percentage for the male photo. > For all we know the sample could be entirely edgy 12 year olds. That, um, doesn't count as sexism? If it's all 12 year olds, we still have a problem. Maybe a worse problem. Out of curiosity, you seem to be arguing that sexism online might not exist, yet it's a huge problem, easily demonstrable and widely known. What's preventing you from acknowledging the issue?
- scott_s 9y ago
  > It could easily be that more attractive profiles result in more interactions and receive the same proportion of sexist responses. The male co-founder is an attractive man. He did not receive nearly the same amount of sexual harassment. It's reasonable to suspect that the reason is gender. Your objection is true, it could be that way. But given all of the priors we has in this area, it's quite reasonable to lean towards a gender-bias in receiving sexual harassment.
- stordoff 9y ago
  > For all we know the sample could be entirely edgy 12 year olds. If 12-year-olds are being sexist to be edgy, that's a problem in itself. Also, if it was people deliberately trying to be edgy, I'd expect way generic, or possibly racist, to be directed at Eric Lu, which does not seem to be the case.
around_here 9y ago
Probably quite a bit because this is "private". Most people don't witness these kinds of things off the internet, or run with groups who never do this outside of one-to-ones with mostly disconnected people. I don't dispute her results at all, but I can basically guarantee you that I haven't been around where a woman has said "hi" to someone and they're all "Yea, eff your mom". Only confounding factor I think comes in to play is the assumption that it's a bot, so you can say taboo/antisocial things without repute.
- donkeyd 9y ago
  > I haven't been around where a woman has said "hi" to someone and they're all "Yea, eff your mom" Lucky you, I recently saw this 'interaction' between a guy and a girl on the street: Guy: Hey cutie! Guy: Hey sexy! Guy: Hey girl, come over! Guy: Hey bitch, come over here. Guy: Go away you ugly bitch! The girl just kept walking and the guy turned to more profanities. This wasn't in some shitty part of town, it was at the main station of one of the nicest cities in the Netherlands. It's not just the internet where stuff like this happens.
  - TaylorAlexander 9y ago
    I’ve heard that before. Guys will get aggressive if a woman ignores them. I don’t get it and it’s sketchy as hell. It shows how superficial so many guys can be - they want to sound sweet until it’s clear they’re not getting anything, and then they become aggressive. It’s always about their satisfaction - they reveal that they were not being nice in order for the woman to feel better, or they wouldn’t have turned aggressive. Obviously it should be clear that I’m not talking about all men, but I have seen this behavior on occasion before and it’s super unnerving.
    - guy98238710 9y ago
      Actually anger is a normal reaction to frustration, not to mention to the rude rejection. It shows how the society is broken. Wolves prey on the streets for trusting victims. They won't listen to polite no. People learn to just walk away quietly without saying anything polite. Wolves don't mind it, but ordinary people find such silent treatment infuriating. They respond with more rudeness back.
AlexTTT 9y ago
"Sexism is actually everywhere" is an extremely strong statement. Such a strong statement requires an extraordinary amount of work (going far beyond mere observations) to be proven. I personally would be very interested to know why "Julia" is being insulted much more than "Eric", but saying "this is because of sexism" is no better than saying that "the sun is bright because it shines".
- loup-vaillant 9y ago
  "Julia" isn't being insulted more than "Eric" because of sexism. "Julia" being insulted more than "Eric" is sexism. The causes of sexism is another subject. But the first step is to acknowledge sexism is going on in the first place.
  - taneq 9y ago
    What? No. "A man and a woman are treated differently" is not sexism unless there's a causal link between their sex and their treatment.
    - cimmanom 9y ago
      How else would you explain the difference in this case?
      - taneq 9y ago
        I dunno, maybe with some actual analysis of the events rather than an assumption that "if something bad happens to a woman then it's sexist"?
        cimmanom 9y ago
        TFA does that.
    - Chris2048 9y ago
      I'd add - it also usually has to be unjustified and harmful per common usage.
guy98238710 9y ago
Sexism might be everywhere (going both ways), but this particular case likely isn't sexism. Even if it is, it's not clear whether this is sexism against women or against men (programmers in particular) assumed to be hiding behind pretty woman's photo.
- jjeaff 9y ago
  Since the female photos get a significantly higher level of harrassed, how does this not indicate sexism?
  - Double_a_92 9y ago
    Female photos, especially the second model photo, look incredibly fake. I guess people use that unwanted box to vent to frustations with what seems to be a bot?
    - aninhumer 9y ago
      The perception that female photos look fake is still sexism. It suggests people believe it less likely that a woman would be on the other end of the conversation. And you suggesting that perception as an explanation without challenging it kind of demonstrates how this is a pervasive problem. Now I agree that the model photo looks a little more artificial for reasons beyond gender, and they should probably have compared with a male model photo as well. Though personally I suspect people would still think it more likely that an attractive man was a real person than an attractive woman.
      - mikulas_florek 9y ago
        >The perception that female photos look fake is still sexism Except it's not. Stock photos of good looking women are routinely used in marketing to attract users. It's proven by stats from A/B testing.
        aninhumer 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
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Double_a_92 9y ago
What's wrong with rationalizing things? Should we just take it for pure truth because a woman said it?
- Double_a_92 9y ago
  Judging by the downvotes I guess we really shouldn't think rationally about things. Ok, lesson learned. Thank you very much :) Actually NOT. I will not yield to those virtue signaling pricks!
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    "Rationalize" != "think rationally", despite the similarity in the words.
- orthecreedence 9y ago
  I think rationalizing is fine. But people tend to rationalize selectively, and only when it benefits their worldview. The parent comment made that clear, but you sidestepped that point. I don't think the downvotes are necessarily virtue signaling. I was temped to downvote you, though. I live with a woman, and know many more, and I've been party to the sexism and harassment they deal with on a day to day basis. I've been party to people not believing what they say because of what's between their legs (eg "...take it for pure truth because a woman said it?"). I've been party to my wife being groped on a crowd, and seeing young teenage girls being catcalled by grown men. I've had female friends who have been raped. At this point, the evidence is more than anecdotal to me. I find myself wondering, when I read comments like yours, if the people who make them have absolutely no connection with any women at all.
chappi42 9y ago
I'm strongly convinced that the 'average HN reader' is well aware of this (sexism) problem. I don't rationalizing it, but I believe, the points you mention are important. And in addition, yes there are idiots on the internet. And not all problems have a easy wrong solution... The blog post is (for me) shallow and the 'tests' would need to be expanded to be really interesting: what happens if you put on pictures from women from different cultures, ditto men from different cultures? Where are these insulting comments coming from? Does it also happen if you use 'less-into-your-face chat widgets'? etc...
vegardx 9y ago
Anecdotal and not really a big problem, but it took me having to put my coke in a coffee cup to be taken seriously in meetings to really "get it".
- madez 9y ago
  Thanks for the tip about the cup in meetings. Often these implicit rules are not obvious, so making them explicit is very helpful to work around and maybe even fix them. Humans are guided by stereotypes and superstition and not scepticism and scientific reason. And if there is an individual that is sceptical and demands scientific reason, they are punished socially for it. This makes homo sapiens look a bit bad in my eyes.
  - DarkWiiPlayer 9y ago
    ^ nailed it
  - 7952 9y ago
    Good scientific analysis does require a level of domain knowledge though. Otherwise you will be susceptible to those exact issues of sterotyping and superstition. Especially when we are talking about issues that are so complex and have such a long legacy.
- newman8r 9y ago
  You also have to sip it slower than you normally would with a coke, taking small sips and exhaling slowly after each sip. But I'm sure you already know that.
- nuffsaid 9y ago
  I had to put my coke in a small bag in my key pocket to be taken seriously.
  - nasredin 9y ago
    I too was confused when she wrote "coke". Don't think putting a can of Coke in a cup was the problem there. And "coke" and "Coke". Different things.
fsloth 9y ago
"How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere?" I presume those that think this way either have no female friends or have not asked them about it. Men generally don't get catcalls or get their body fondled by strangers.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  That assumes they’re honestly representing their views, rather than marketing their prejudices as something more acceptable to the HN crowd.
- Helmet 9y ago
  I've been both sexually harassed at work and groped by strangers when out on the town (by a woman) - but yeah, I agree with your larger point. I think it's certainly more prevalent the other way around.
  - nasredin 9y ago
    How did you feel? Yeah... I still got it! or Something negative?
    - therealdrag0 9y ago
      I got groped by some passing female tailgaters when I was just walking down the street minding my own business listening to a podcast. It was very startling.
- lokopodium 9y ago
  Men generally don't catcall or fondle strangers' bodies either. It's a general projection, "why would anyone do that?".
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > Men generally don't catcall or fondle strangers' bodies either. But vastly more men catcall or grope women than the other way around. That's the issue. > It's a general projection, "why would anyone do that?". To assert power and dominance (both attributes that are part of the common definition of "masculinity" in western societies).
Void_ 9y ago
That’s not sexism, just being disrespectful. But why are you surprised about this if the next article on HN may be about technology in PornHub? It’s okay to treat women as a piece of meat in porn, but suddenly it’s a big deal if people are making sexual comments?
- Chris2048 9y ago
  > It’s okay to treat women as a piece of meat in porn, but suddenly it’s a big deal if people are making sexual comments? No more or less than it's ok to treat people as units of work in corporations. I rarely see sex-tech on HN anyway, plus not every feminist has a problem with porn.
- scott_s 9y ago
  When "being disrespectful" tends to happen more often to women than men, that is sexism.
JepZ 9y ago
> The author spends a lot of time to tell us a very convincing story how sexism affects people in our industry, and the Hacker News thread is full of people rationalizing it. I wonder what you expected. Actually, for most of us its not shocking, as that is exactly the internet we know for some time now. Have you ever been around when some 15ish boys are in a small group? They keep saying such crap the whole day. Some of us eventually grow up some day, but some seem to be stuck in their puberty forever. I don't like it either, but I haven't found a cure for that disease yet. I mean in some online gaming communities its daily business and when you hear those guys grunting into their microphone you are very happy to have mute buttons and kick/ban vote systems (telling them to stop doesn't seem to have a positive effect on the situation). The difference here seems to be that, you don't have to play online games, but when you work in our industry you have to cope with such crap. Btw. whats wrong about 'rationalizing' things? I mean your list just shows quotes of people missing the point.
jaemison 9y ago
I’m not sure if the problem is that the average HN reader doesn’t believe that sexism is everywhere or if the problem is that the average HN reader doesn’t believe that sexism as it exists today is a large, interesting problem that needs to be solved. I would love to see this experiment done as a function of time of day in the user’s IP location. There have already been studies showing higher rates of abusive behavior towards women from low-status males[1] and if internet activity follows general population entertainment consumption trends from television we can infer that there is a higher likelihood of someone being low-status active on the internet during daytime working hours. 1. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0131613 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourna...
NietTim 9y ago
And then you get here And this shit is up top Sigh
ashelmire 9y ago
You can believe sexual harassment is everywhere and also believe chat widgets are annoying. Sadly, women getting harassed on the internet by anonymous strangers, while unfortunate, is not a novel revelation. Anyone who says it isn’t common has their head in the sand. You can’t help people like that.
- DarkWiiPlayer 9y ago
  A single message is not harassment though.
  - rectang 9y ago
    You can't make that blanket statement. A single punch is battery. A single genital grab is sexual assault. A single demand for quid pro quo sexual favors in exchange for professional rewards is sexual harassment. A single message asserting that an individual is not right for their job because of their gender creates a hostile work environment, and that's also sexual harassment. Just because there can be cases where a single message does not constitute sexual harassment doesn't mean that a single message can never amount to sexual harassment.
    - naikrovek 9y ago
      A single event can be illegal, immoral, wrong, or any one of a bunch of other words, and a single event is never harassment because harassment requires multiple events. A single demand for quid pro quo sexual favors in exchange for professional rewards is a sexual offence, a bad one, and alone it is not harassment. IANAL, though the dictionary definition sticks with me, especially the key words: "multiple", "unwanted", and "intentional". That's why "harassment" as a word exists, it is to indicate that multiple unwanted events have happened intentionally. Maybe the legal definition of "harassment" differs from the dictionary definition. If so, a new word for single event harassment needs to be chosen.
      - rectang 9y ago
        > A single demand for quid pro quo sexual favors in exchange for professional rewards is a sexual offence, a bad one, and alone it is not harassment. That's simply wrong -- a single egregious instance can certainly constitute harassment, both in terms of common sense and in terms of legal consequences. What matters is severity -- and though repeating the behavior makes it more likely to be judged as severe, one bad incident can easily exceed the threshold. A quid-pro-quo proposal of sex-for-promotion is a perfect example.
mozumder 9y ago
Quit your bullshit. I'm in the fashion industry. After 10 years and dealing with tens of thousands of people, this type of anonymous behavior doesn't happen. I'm looking at todays emails in the middle of fashion month, and 95% of the names are female. It would be a good way to lose any kind of status you have in the industry if you acted this way. This is specifically a male-driven tech industry problem, and more specifically, an edge-lord meme-maker audience problem. Don't be the self-absorbed douche that thinks everyone shares your same problems. That's only an excuse to pass the buck to someone else by blaming society in general instead of your specific group. Own up to it. Other industries have solved this problem by incorporating more women into.
randomsearch 9y ago
Also, HN story about general experience that isn’t about sexism: “Oh, that’s interesting, I wonder if that’s because of X or Y?”, “gee that most have been awful”, “hey that makes me re-examine a way I behaved once”, “I’ve seen similar behaviour here at Q and Z” When about sexism: “unless this is a triple-blind study that has been repeated across every continent, let’s not jump to the conclusion that there is a lot of online sexism”. We should all up our game here. It’s depressing how oblivious a lot of the posts are on these comments. Clearly, the female avatars received the worst abuse. And the effect was so strong, so immediate, and based on a solid hypothesis. Something has gone very badly wrong with the internet and we should be working out what we can do about it, rather than sticking our fingers in our ears saying “boys will be boys” or “this isn’t scientific!”. Are we all too defensive to admit there is a problem?
- GVIrish 9y ago
  > Something has gone very badly wrong with the internet and we should be working out what we can do about it, rather than sticking our fingers in our ears saying “boys will be boys” or “this isn’t scientific!”. I think the internet has just served to exposed something heinous that has been in our society for eternity. Plenty of men have held these attitudes from time immortal, it's just that the internet gives them an easier means to express those attitudes without consequence.
- piracykills 9y ago
  I don't think people are doing that so much as there's just not much to discuss there - sure, you can yell at people to parent better til the cows come home or talk about how our society is somehow collapsing because of this but no one will care. There's no proven fix, so not much to say on the matter. Instead, people here are looking for realistic fixes - like making the chat box not automatically open so only those who need support will go out of their way to get it. I think the author would have been much less likely to receive abuse if people were actually there to ask her questions about her service than because they had just searched for a way to to generate a shitty meme. I could be wrong about that, but it'd be an interesting thing to do an A/B test with I think. Perhaps it makes more sense to put it into security terms - In the same way that it doesn't make sense to don't go around talking about how we could live in a dream world where bots don't scan the internet for weak SSH credentials all day, it doesn't make sense for us to go around talking about a dream world where sexism simply doesn't exist. The author found a good compromise to defend herself against that threat - many people on HN are just suggesting other possible defenses.
mikeash 9y ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair The average HN reader is a huge beneficiary of sexism. Most people do not have the mental fortitude to accept that a decent chunk of their good fortune is due to something like this.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  > The average HN reader is a huge beneficiary of sexism. I dispute that statement. (I will admit that you can find some possible benefit to the majority from sexism. "Huge" is a much larger claim, though.)
sctb 9y ago
> How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere? Many comments in this thread are lamenting these dismissals, which happen to be languishing at the bottom while this comment as well as the original article are massively upvoted. If I were to draw a conclusion about how the community generally feels about this issue, it would be opposite to yours.
- Orangeair 9y ago
  I generally agree with your appraisal here, but it is worth it to note that although those sorts of comments are usually pushed to the bottom of the discussion, they are almost always there on every thread where these sorts of issues are raised. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that a significant portion of the tech worlds holds those sorts of beliefs; there are probably even more people who would post things like that, but don't because they know they'll just get downvoted.
  - dang 9y ago
    Sure: the community is divided, as is society in general. That's the accurate way to frame this. What's not so accurate are grand claims about HN being massively one way or the other, which people make all the time as a rhetorical device.
wazoox 9y ago
Exactly. These "kids" don't randomly harass anyone; they harass very specifically women, and the more attractive the woman is, the more harassment. This is sickening. I can't help but think that as the symptom of a profoundly heinous society towards women. And frankly, I find the sort of lame excuses in this thread quite hard to swallow.
throwaway_66587 9y ago
First things first: we do need some solution to the problem that she faced, and it is a real problem, that relates to gender. That said. > How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere? In a sense, it obviously is. But I want to reflect a bit on what that might entail. You will note (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16390786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16390786) that the amount of sexist threads was 14 per week, which, in the period of 3 months with 2100 messages, gives about 1% of messages. For reference, the DSM gives the prevalence of psychopathy at 3% for males and 1% for females (https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-people-are-psychopaths-sociopaths https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-people-are-psychopa...). So, even though this sexism is a societal problem (in the sense that it exists in our society and is hard to extricate from comunities) it is not clear that sexism (or at least the sexism displayed in the article) is a problem with a social solution: teaching children (or people in general, as it may be) that this is not OK probably would not reduce the problem much further. I predict, therefore, that no amount of society-wide measures against sexism can reduce this (very marginal!) behaviour (if the chat itself remains consequence-free for the users). That is: that fighting sexism is not gonna help this at all, and we'd need other, technical and local-to-the-website solutions. > How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere? That it is everywhere, in the sense that some (few) people bring it everywhere, not much. That it is everywhere, in the sense that all of society is guilty of it and each person should try to fix it in themselves, evidence of an entirely different sort.
stordoff 9y ago
> it's only because people think you're a bot I wonder if people are more likely to assume it's a bot when a female image is used - I've noticed that a lot of sites that are automated (or at least aren't so directly connected to a real person) use stock photos of female staff. Certainly not a justification, but could be a factor. I wonder if there's any way you could control for that to get truer data (I'm not doubting the overall conclusion that sexism is rampant) - maybe explicitly say "This is/is not a bot" or trial photos that look like very stereotypical/generic stock photos?
tomxor 9y ago
> How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere? When you use the word "sexism", notice how it was not necessary to say "against women". This little example highlights the strong societal view that there exists sexism against women far more than any against men to require that clarification. The reasons I find it necessary to highlight this fact is: from the perspective of someone trying to intentionally provoke offence in others, this view is an obvious candidate for exploitation when the target is a women. I'm talking about trolls of course, but it seems to be so hard to get that point across here... there is a clear bias in the offensive messages, but if they are all trolls (and they certainly look that way), then surely the bias reflects the simple fact that sexism against women is a reaction provoking topic, rather than "wow we have a sexism problem look at all these legitimate sincere comments", I mean isn't the later exactly what the trolls wanted.

verroq 9y ago

"Rude people are sexist" or "Sexist people are rude" is about the only conclusion you can draw here (maybe not even that, correlation != causation etc etc) It doesn't even come close to showing how "sexism is everywhere". For all we know the sample could be entirely edgy 12 year olds. Tell me again how this self-admittedly "non-rigorous scientific study" proves "sexism is everywhere"? It could easily be that more attractive profiles result in more interactions and receive the same proportion of sexist responses. Their data measures sexist messages not the proportion of sexist messages over all of their interactions.

jakobegger 9y ago
You're probably new to HN, so you might not have seen all the other stories about sexism posted in the last year or so. A single story like this doesn't prove anything, but the flood of stories just like that paint a pretty clear picture. At some point you can no longer say: "This is an isolated incident".
- verroq 9y ago
  I'm not new to HN, I've been here for far longer than you have. And yes some of those stories have merit, but this is not one of them.
  - aepiepaey 9y ago
    (account age is not a good proxy for "time on HN")
    - always_good 9y ago
      But "you're probably new to HN [lil fella, but here's how it's been]" is a tacky, low-effort quip especially towards an account over 8 years old.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  A flood of stories on the internet doesn't necessarily prove much either. When there are billions of people on the internet, there could easily be a vocal minority that doesn't represent the majority.
- geezerjay 9y ago
  > A single story like this doesn't prove anything, but the flood of stories just like that paint a pretty clear picture. A flood of biased anecdotes doesn't become truth or facts after a given count. Oponionated militants don't define reality. Your comment indicates a profound lack of ratinal and objective thinking.
- hueving 9y ago
  The plural of anecdote is not data. We need real stats about this because individuals complaining vastly outweighs the silent remaining ones. There are enough murders every day to cover the front page of hacker news with a story about each one. It doesn't mean murder is a rampant problem in our society.
  - UncleMeat 9y ago
    We have real stats. Hundreds, if not thousands of studies. But those get this identical reaction.
    - Chris2048 9y ago
      > Hundreds, if not thousands of studies That you personally know of, despite citing even one?
  - dahart 9y ago
    > The plural of anecdote is not data. We need real stats about this There are mountains of real stats. Have you tried to look? All you have to do is google "sexism statistics". The first hit for me has a link to a real study about online interactions: http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ > There are enough murders every day to cover the front page of hacker news with a story about each one. It doesn't mean murder is a rampant problem in our society. What a strange statement. Since there are enough murders every day to cover the front page of HN, doesn't that prove it's a problem? If sexism covered the front page of HN every day, would that mean it's less of a problem than it is now? Murder is a rampant problem in our society. There are entire countries with less than one tenth the murder rate of the U.S. Are you suggesting that because the problem is everywhere, it's not a problem?
- Sir_Substance 9y ago
  >At some point you can no longer say: "This is an isolated incident". The problem with this is there's really no such thing as an "anti-sexism" story. No one posts news about how they worked at a company and everyone was just a normal person. That's not news, that's just life. It happens all the time, and in fact it's probably happening right now within a few hundred meters of almost everyone reading the post, yet it will never make the news. Moreover, the vast majority of news articles on this site are analyzable as containing an absence of sexism, but that's not an "anti-sexism" story either. What I'm trying to get here is that the signal you are listening to is unidirectional. If you're incrementing a mental counter of "how many sexism-related articles have I seen" without any way of decrementing it then yeah, eventually you'll hit a number you dislike. That's not because there's any meaning behind your metric though, it's just because you've structured your metric in a way that means given infinite time, you'll hit /all/ the positive integers. Anyway, that doesn't mean that sexism isn't a major problem. But it does mean that you, jakobegger, don't know if it's a major problem or not.
- skookumchuck 9y ago
  The daily newspaper has stories that are interesting because they aren't happening to nearly everyone. They give people a very skewed impression of how likely they are to happen to them. The newspaper rarely bothers to write stories about things that are likely to happen to you, like dying from a hospital mistake, car crash or a drowning. The risk of dying in a terrorist incident in the US is essentially zero, but you'd never know that from the flood of newspaper stories about it.
- Pica_soO 9y ago
  The flood of stories only tells me "We want the power these organizations wield" to have everyone walking on eggshells and start a rioting mob towards anyone not paying respect to the social priest caste.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  Believing things based on quantity of internet articles on the topic is how fake news works. If a proper study of incidents like this is done, with good stats relating to the totality of incidents in context - i.e that takes into account the full picture, we could then conclude something.
GreaterFool 9y ago
Also, rude comments aside, which avatar received the most useful comments?
- beobab 9y ago
  I would be interested to find this out.
UncleMeat 9y ago
This one thing is obviously not the smoking gun. But in context of the thousands of other similar things it becomes impossible not to see a pattern.
- wruza 9y ago
  Even I, being not good at statistics, got your parent’s point. We do see patterns easily when there is/maybe none due to how our pattern-detection works. It is evolutionally false-positive, because it is easier to label and avoid than explain and manage (and take damage on mistake). In this light, the “context of thousands of similar things” is one great generalizing bs.
- spiraldancing 9y ago
  Well, apparently not impossible, if one denies hard enough.
  - wruza 9y ago
    Or is uncertain.
- jerf 9y ago
  Thousands of similar events, in a ratio with millions upon millions of respectful interactions. It really shouldn't be surprising when the proposed solution to the former is to endlessly harass those doing the latter and accuse them of sexism day in, day out using the largest megaphones our species has ever constructed that the latter get touchy. For which the secondary solution is then to berate them for getting touchy, which as anyone with a basic understanding of human nature could tell you, doesn't do much to endear your arguments to them. The perception that it is being done so that those doing the berating can feel good about how virtuous they are doesn't help either. It's the streetlight effect [1] in social problems; yell at the people whom it is safe and convenient to yell at, who are not (in general) the problem. It does not help anybody to come on to a place like HN and broadcast how deplorable you think everybody else is. Even the possible benefits it could bring, like setting the tone for making it clear this isn't acceptable, is handily defeated by the amount of anger you create by accusing people willy-nilly of sexism (which, by the way, people are supposed to be angry about, remember; if sexism is one of the True Evils of the world you should not be surprised when people react to accusations of it) and the way it makes those who are behaving well start to wonder "Why, exactly, am I bothering reigning in these impulses if I'm going to be bathed in accusations of sexism anyhow?" Whatever the solution is, it isn't going to be found in abusing broadcast media like internet discussions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
rocqua 9y ago
"Rude people are sexist" still means we have a 'systemic' problem of sexism. In fact, one might argue that rude people being sexist are worse than polite people being sexist. Because the rude people are more disruptive over all. The statement 'sexism is everywhere' does not mean 'almost all people are sexist'. Instead, it means 'almost all women suffer from sexist attitudes in most areas of their lives. If 10% of people are sexist, that is easily enough for all women to notice it. I'd guess the real threshold is more like 3% of people being sexist.
- mdpopescu 9y ago
  So, you're saying <grin> that the problem is actually very small?
  - MereInterest 9y ago
    No. The brake line on your car is a very small part of it. If it is cut, the problem is anything but small. That a small percentage of men can have a disproportionately large effect in no way implies that the problem is small.
  - kirillseva 9y ago
    that's what she said
    - dang 9y ago
      Please don't do this here.
- DarkWiiPlayer 9y ago
  I think the term "sexist" is being used very lightly here. Sexism implies some sort of discrimination based on sex. Same goes for "sexual harassment"; harassment implies some degree of persistence, not just a single action. I think "indecent" behaviour is the most fitting word for this kind of problem.
  - 9y ago
acranox 9y ago
Ok, but do you think those 12 year olds are going to all grow up to be well behaving adults? Or maybe the problems with this kind of sexism are starting very young. If you are right then the solutions still need to be addressed, but we need to start earlier.
- geezerjay 9y ago
  Marginal levels of immature and/or antisocial elements don't mean that society is sexist, no matter how vocal those trolls may be.
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    No, society tolerating those vocal trolls does mean that society is sexist. "The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept" - Lt. Gen. David Morrison
    - dlss 9y ago
      > No, society tolerating those vocal trolls does mean that society is sexist. What change in society would count as not tolerating these trolls?
      - notriddle 9y ago
        To start with, commenters on HN could acknowledge that this is actually a problem.
    - geezerjay 9y ago
      > No, society tolerating those vocal trolls does mean that society is sexist. Actually that just means society tolerates trolls. You're showing your bias by jumping to the conclusion that everything is sexism or that somehow antisocial and immature people only target women. Furthermore, western society actually holds in high regard concepts such as frer speech, which covers idiots being able to say idiotic things.
eloisant 9y ago
The conclusion we can draw is pretty much what the author says: it's better to present yourself as an anonymous avatar than a real person. Despite what marketing people tell you about "creating a connection" or "showing that your company is made of real people", often a bit of distance and professionalism is best for your relationship with customers.
- mikulas_florek 9y ago
  > it's better to present yourself as an anonymous avatar than a real person. Only if you want to avoid rude/sexist messages. You can get more normal messages with good looking girl, and that's what matters for business.
  - notriddle 9y ago
    > Only if you want to avoid rude/sexist messages. Who wouldn't?!
    - mikulas_florek 9y ago
      It's not just black and white. You will get less rude messages, but you will also get less normal messages. It means you will have smaller conversion ratio and earn less money. So to answer your question, I would not want to avoid sexist message if it means less money for my business. It's extremely simple to ignore bad people on the Internet. It's hard to earn money.
  - azernik 9y ago
    Do you have a source for that claim?
    - mikulas_florek 9y ago
      You are right, I should have written "you probably can" instead of "you can". But my original point is that that > it's better to present yourself as an anonymous avatar than a real person is not what's implied from the article. Rather it should be: "it's better to present yourself as an anonymous avatar than a real person if you want to receive less crap" Note: there's a user in this discussion saying in their case image of good looking woman worked the best.
thaumaturgy 9y ago
I am so glad someone on HN is here to enforce rigorous standards when it comes to this topic, in particular. Because there have been multiple accounts of bad behavior, both subtle and not-subtle, at tech conferences (https://shift.newco.co/what-its-like-to-be-a-woman-at-a-tech-conference-8a1a299ac82b https://shift.newco.co/what-its-like-to-be-a-woman-at-a-tech..., https://blog.juliaferraioli.com/2014/08/do-you-even.html https://blog.juliaferraioli.com/2014/08/do-you-even.html), but those aren't studies, they're just isolated experiences, so we can ignore those. And there have been multiple accounts from women who won't use a feminine identity online due to harassment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3411627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3411627), and really talented women who have to endure sexist work environments (http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/12/04/meeting/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/12/04/meeting/), and, occasionally, even much more lively discussions from women on what it's like to work in tech (https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4ioxw9/as_i_sit_in_a_massive_sausagefest_conference_it/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4ioxw9/as_i_sit_i...). But, again, these aren't studies, so we can ignore them. Of course, there have been studies, including one that found feminine names in chats got 25 times more malicious messages (http://www.ece.umd.edu/News/news_story.php?id=1788 http://www.ece.umd.edu/News/news_story.php?id=1788), which would seem to support this woman's experience too ... but, surely, we can find some way to dismiss that, too, right? The important part is that, every time a submission like this comes along, we rush to the comments section to try to shout it down. There are surely some medium.com posts about experiences that other developers have had that we could upvote instead. Preferably, ones from developers who don't happen to be too feminine.
- verroq 9y ago
  >I am so glad someone on HN is here to enforce rigorous standards when it comes to this topic, in particular. I am so glad someone on HN is here to tell us exactly why we aren't allowed to have a rigorous discussion when it comes to this topic, in particular. It is interesting how you immediately reframe women getting harassed as misogyny. Nevermind women likely get more attention online as well. Let's have a look at the study [0] you mention. Which measures private messages received from an IRC channel by a bot. Do you honestly not think a female username will receive more attention given the typical gender composition of an online IRC channel? (Who still uses IRC apart from unwashed CS nerds?) 25 times messages likely means there were 25 times more males than females in that particular room. [0] Meyer, R., & Cukier, M. 2006 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.89.3613&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.89.... This point is, without properly establishing a base rate of attention VS harassment, all you can do appeal to emotion. Yes women are being harassed in tech, are they being harassed in at a higher rate than other industries? Is it a specifically a tech problem? Is your solution to the problem to accuse men in the tech industry as misogynists/sexists further alienate both sides from each other when you don't even have proper evidence?
throwaway-hn123 9y ago
Post your contact details, mate. I'll come visit you and give you a personal explanation, ok?
JabavuAdams 9y ago
Why was no one rude to the dude, dude? You're engaging in cargo-cult statistics.
rkangel 9y ago
The conclusion you can draw here is that being female will makes you the target of abuse that you wouldn't receive as another gender (or species in the case of this article). Other people have provided data that supports the case that this is a widespread problem that faces female tech-people (and even that is a subset of a larger problem). To take it to extremes, that abuse could entirely be the fault of one single person who frequents every forum on the internet (you suggested it was "just 12 year old boys"). That the cause of the problem is only a small subset of men in no way affects the fact that there is a problem that makes being a female tech-person a less pleasant experience than being a male tech person.
- buhris 9y ago
  I'm not sure that accounts on sexual harassment alone can be used to argue that being a female tech-person is a less pleasant experience than being a male tech-person. Women do experience more sexual harassment in tech industry than men but they do not experience more harassment or workplace bullying overall. The harassment that is not of sexual nature is not necessarily less upsetting than sexual harassment. In fact the opposite might be the case: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bullies-work/workplace-bullying-worse-than-sexual-harassment-study-idUSN0622290520080310 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bullies-work/workplace-bu...
- bozniv 9y ago
  I'm not sure you can conclude from accounts on sexual harassment alone that being a female tech-person is a less pleasant experience than being a male tech-person. Women do experience more sexual harassment in tech industry than men but they do not experience more harassment or workplace bullying overall. The harassment that is not of sexual nature is not necessarily less upsetting than sexual harassment. In fact the opposite might be the case: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bullies-work/workplace-bullying-worse-than-sexual-harassment-study-idUSN0622290520080310 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bullies-work/workplace-bu...
  - rkangel 9y ago
    Accounts on sexual harassment give one way in which being a woman is worse than a man. I am aware of no study or plausible anecdotal evidence of a significant issue that men are exposed to that women aren't. Lacking something to 'balance it out' I find it reasonable to conclude that women have a less pleasant experience.
dahart 9y ago
> Tell me again how this self-admittedly "non-rigorous scientific study" proves "sexism is everywhere"? By itself, this article doesn't prove that, it's only one more data point in the vast unending ocean of data points that prove it. > It could easily by that more attractive profiles results in more interactions and receive the same proportion of sexist responses. You're imagining something fairly contrary to what the article said, and to what many other examples and studies have shown. The primary factor is the gender of the recipient, and while the article is not rigorous, it demonstrated a greater percentage of sexist comments for the more attractive female photo, and demonstrated a near zero percentage for the male photo. > For all we know the sample could be entirely edgy 12 year olds. That, um, doesn't count as sexism? If it's all 12 year olds, we still have a problem. Maybe a worse problem. Out of curiosity, you seem to be arguing that sexism online might not exist, yet it's a huge problem, easily demonstrable and widely known. What's preventing you from acknowledging the issue?
scott_s 9y ago
> It could easily be that more attractive profiles result in more interactions and receive the same proportion of sexist responses. The male co-founder is an attractive man. He did not receive nearly the same amount of sexual harassment. It's reasonable to suspect that the reason is gender. Your objection is true, it could be that way. But given all of the priors we has in this area, it's quite reasonable to lean towards a gender-bias in receiving sexual harassment.
stordoff 9y ago
> For all we know the sample could be entirely edgy 12 year olds. If 12-year-olds are being sexist to be edgy, that's a problem in itself. Also, if it was people deliberately trying to be edgy, I'd expect way generic, or possibly racist, to be directed at Eric Lu, which does not seem to be the case.

around_here 9y ago

Probably quite a bit because this is "private". Most people don't witness these kinds of things off the internet, or run with groups who never do this outside of one-to-ones with mostly disconnected people. I don't dispute her results at all, but I can basically guarantee you that I haven't been around where a woman has said "hi" to someone and they're all "Yea, eff your mom". Only confounding factor I think comes in to play is the assumption that it's a bot, so you can say taboo/antisocial things without repute.

donkeyd 9y ago
> I haven't been around where a woman has said "hi" to someone and they're all "Yea, eff your mom" Lucky you, I recently saw this 'interaction' between a guy and a girl on the street: Guy: Hey cutie! Guy: Hey sexy! Guy: Hey girl, come over! Guy: Hey bitch, come over here. Guy: Go away you ugly bitch! The girl just kept walking and the guy turned to more profanities. This wasn't in some shitty part of town, it was at the main station of one of the nicest cities in the Netherlands. It's not just the internet where stuff like this happens.
- TaylorAlexander 9y ago
  I’ve heard that before. Guys will get aggressive if a woman ignores them. I don’t get it and it’s sketchy as hell. It shows how superficial so many guys can be - they want to sound sweet until it’s clear they’re not getting anything, and then they become aggressive. It’s always about their satisfaction - they reveal that they were not being nice in order for the woman to feel better, or they wouldn’t have turned aggressive. Obviously it should be clear that I’m not talking about all men, but I have seen this behavior on occasion before and it’s super unnerving.
  - guy98238710 9y ago
    Actually anger is a normal reaction to frustration, not to mention to the rude rejection. It shows how the society is broken. Wolves prey on the streets for trusting victims. They won't listen to polite no. People learn to just walk away quietly without saying anything polite. Wolves don't mind it, but ordinary people find such silent treatment infuriating. They respond with more rudeness back.

AlexTTT 9y ago

"Sexism is actually everywhere" is an extremely strong statement. Such a strong statement requires an extraordinary amount of work (going far beyond mere observations) to be proven. I personally would be very interested to know why "Julia" is being insulted much more than "Eric", but saying "this is because of sexism" is no better than saying that "the sun is bright because it shines".

loup-vaillant 9y ago
"Julia" isn't being insulted more than "Eric" because of sexism. "Julia" being insulted more than "Eric" is sexism. The causes of sexism is another subject. But the first step is to acknowledge sexism is going on in the first place.
- taneq 9y ago
  What? No. "A man and a woman are treated differently" is not sexism unless there's a causal link between their sex and their treatment.
  - cimmanom 9y ago
    How else would you explain the difference in this case?
    - taneq 9y ago
      I dunno, maybe with some actual analysis of the events rather than an assumption that "if something bad happens to a woman then it's sexist"?
      - cimmanom 9y ago
        TFA does that.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    I'd add - it also usually has to be unjustified and harmful per common usage.

guy98238710 9y ago

Sexism might be everywhere (going both ways), but this particular case likely isn't sexism. Even if it is, it's not clear whether this is sexism against women or against men (programmers in particular) assumed to be hiding behind pretty woman's photo.

jjeaff 9y ago
Since the female photos get a significantly higher level of harrassed, how does this not indicate sexism?
- Double_a_92 9y ago
  Female photos, especially the second model photo, look incredibly fake. I guess people use that unwanted box to vent to frustations with what seems to be a bot?
  - aninhumer 9y ago
    The perception that female photos look fake is still sexism. It suggests people believe it less likely that a woman would be on the other end of the conversation. And you suggesting that perception as an explanation without challenging it kind of demonstrates how this is a pervasive problem. Now I agree that the model photo looks a little more artificial for reasons beyond gender, and they should probably have compared with a male model photo as well. Though personally I suspect people would still think it more likely that an attractive man was a real person than an attractive woman.
    - mikulas_florek 9y ago
      >The perception that female photos look fake is still sexism Except it's not. Stock photos of good looking women are routinely used in marketing to attract users. It's proven by stats from A/B testing.
      - aninhumer 9y ago

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Double_a_92 9y ago

What's wrong with rationalizing things? Should we just take it for pure truth because a woman said it?

Double_a_92 9y ago
Judging by the downvotes I guess we really shouldn't think rationally about things. Ok, lesson learned. Thank you very much :) Actually NOT. I will not yield to those virtue signaling pricks!
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  "Rationalize" != "think rationally", despite the similarity in the words.
orthecreedence 9y ago
I think rationalizing is fine. But people tend to rationalize selectively, and only when it benefits their worldview. The parent comment made that clear, but you sidestepped that point. I don't think the downvotes are necessarily virtue signaling. I was temped to downvote you, though. I live with a woman, and know many more, and I've been party to the sexism and harassment they deal with on a day to day basis. I've been party to people not believing what they say because of what's between their legs (eg "...take it for pure truth because a woman said it?"). I've been party to my wife being groped on a crowd, and seeing young teenage girls being catcalled by grown men. I've had female friends who have been raped. At this point, the evidence is more than anecdotal to me. I find myself wondering, when I read comments like yours, if the people who make them have absolutely no connection with any women at all.

chappi42 9y ago

I'm strongly convinced that the 'average HN reader' is well aware of this (sexism) problem. I don't rationalizing it, but I believe, the points you mention are important. And in addition, yes there are idiots on the internet. And not all problems have a easy wrong solution... The blog post is (for me) shallow and the 'tests' would need to be expanded to be really interesting: what happens if you put on pictures from women from different cultures, ditto men from different cultures? Where are these insulting comments coming from? Does it also happen if you use 'less-into-your-face chat widgets'? etc...

vegardx 9y ago

Anecdotal and not really a big problem, but it took me having to put my coke in a coffee cup to be taken seriously in meetings to really "get it".

madez 9y ago
Thanks for the tip about the cup in meetings. Often these implicit rules are not obvious, so making them explicit is very helpful to work around and maybe even fix them. Humans are guided by stereotypes and superstition and not scepticism and scientific reason. And if there is an individual that is sceptical and demands scientific reason, they are punished socially for it. This makes homo sapiens look a bit bad in my eyes.
- DarkWiiPlayer 9y ago
  ^ nailed it
- 7952 9y ago
  Good scientific analysis does require a level of domain knowledge though. Otherwise you will be susceptible to those exact issues of sterotyping and superstition. Especially when we are talking about issues that are so complex and have such a long legacy.
newman8r 9y ago
You also have to sip it slower than you normally would with a coke, taking small sips and exhaling slowly after each sip. But I'm sure you already know that.
nuffsaid 9y ago
I had to put my coke in a small bag in my key pocket to be taken seriously.
- nasredin 9y ago
  I too was confused when she wrote "coke". Don't think putting a can of Coke in a cup was the problem there. And "coke" and "Coke". Different things.

fsloth 9y ago

"How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere?" I presume those that think this way either have no female friends or have not asked them about it. Men generally don't get catcalls or get their body fondled by strangers.

IntronExon 9y ago
That assumes they’re honestly representing their views, rather than marketing their prejudices as something more acceptable to the HN crowd.
Helmet 9y ago
I've been both sexually harassed at work and groped by strangers when out on the town (by a woman) - but yeah, I agree with your larger point. I think it's certainly more prevalent the other way around.
- nasredin 9y ago
  How did you feel? Yeah... I still got it! or Something negative?
  - therealdrag0 9y ago
    I got groped by some passing female tailgaters when I was just walking down the street minding my own business listening to a podcast. It was very startling.
lokopodium 9y ago
Men generally don't catcall or fondle strangers' bodies either. It's a general projection, "why would anyone do that?".
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > Men generally don't catcall or fondle strangers' bodies either. But vastly more men catcall or grope women than the other way around. That's the issue. > It's a general projection, "why would anyone do that?". To assert power and dominance (both attributes that are part of the common definition of "masculinity" in western societies).

Void_ 9y ago

That’s not sexism, just being disrespectful. But why are you surprised about this if the next article on HN may be about technology in PornHub? It’s okay to treat women as a piece of meat in porn, but suddenly it’s a big deal if people are making sexual comments?

Chris2048 9y ago
> It’s okay to treat women as a piece of meat in porn, but suddenly it’s a big deal if people are making sexual comments? No more or less than it's ok to treat people as units of work in corporations. I rarely see sex-tech on HN anyway, plus not every feminist has a problem with porn.
scott_s 9y ago
When "being disrespectful" tends to happen more often to women than men, that is sexism.

JepZ 9y ago

> The author spends a lot of time to tell us a very convincing story how sexism affects people in our industry, and the Hacker News thread is full of people rationalizing it. I wonder what you expected. Actually, for most of us its not shocking, as that is exactly the internet we know for some time now. Have you ever been around when some 15ish boys are in a small group? They keep saying such crap the whole day. Some of us eventually grow up some day, but some seem to be stuck in their puberty forever. I don't like it either, but I haven't found a cure for that disease yet. I mean in some online gaming communities its daily business and when you hear those guys grunting into their microphone you are very happy to have mute buttons and kick/ban vote systems (telling them to stop doesn't seem to have a positive effect on the situation). The difference here seems to be that, you don't have to play online games, but when you work in our industry you have to cope with such crap. Btw. whats wrong about 'rationalizing' things? I mean your list just shows quotes of people missing the point.

jaemison 9y ago

I’m not sure if the problem is that the average HN reader doesn’t believe that sexism is everywhere or if the problem is that the average HN reader doesn’t believe that sexism as it exists today is a large, interesting problem that needs to be solved. I would love to see this experiment done as a function of time of day in the user’s IP location. There have already been studies showing higher rates of abusive behavior towards women from low-status males[1] and if internet activity follows general population entertainment consumption trends from television we can infer that there is a higher likelihood of someone being low-status active on the internet during daytime working hours. 1. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0131613 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourna...

NietTim 9y ago

And then you get here And this shit is up top Sigh

ashelmire 9y ago

You can believe sexual harassment is everywhere and also believe chat widgets are annoying. Sadly, women getting harassed on the internet by anonymous strangers, while unfortunate, is not a novel revelation. Anyone who says it isn’t common has their head in the sand. You can’t help people like that.

DarkWiiPlayer 9y ago
A single message is not harassment though.
- rectang 9y ago
  You can't make that blanket statement. A single punch is battery. A single genital grab is sexual assault. A single demand for quid pro quo sexual favors in exchange for professional rewards is sexual harassment. A single message asserting that an individual is not right for their job because of their gender creates a hostile work environment, and that's also sexual harassment. Just because there can be cases where a single message does not constitute sexual harassment doesn't mean that a single message can never amount to sexual harassment.
  - naikrovek 9y ago
    A single event can be illegal, immoral, wrong, or any one of a bunch of other words, and a single event is never harassment because harassment requires multiple events. A single demand for quid pro quo sexual favors in exchange for professional rewards is a sexual offence, a bad one, and alone it is not harassment. IANAL, though the dictionary definition sticks with me, especially the key words: "multiple", "unwanted", and "intentional". That's why "harassment" as a word exists, it is to indicate that multiple unwanted events have happened intentionally. Maybe the legal definition of "harassment" differs from the dictionary definition. If so, a new word for single event harassment needs to be chosen.
    - rectang 9y ago
      > A single demand for quid pro quo sexual favors in exchange for professional rewards is a sexual offence, a bad one, and alone it is not harassment. That's simply wrong -- a single egregious instance can certainly constitute harassment, both in terms of common sense and in terms of legal consequences. What matters is severity -- and though repeating the behavior makes it more likely to be judged as severe, one bad incident can easily exceed the threshold. A quid-pro-quo proposal of sex-for-promotion is a perfect example.

mozumder 9y ago

Quit your bullshit. I'm in the fashion industry. After 10 years and dealing with tens of thousands of people, this type of anonymous behavior doesn't happen. I'm looking at todays emails in the middle of fashion month, and 95% of the names are female. It would be a good way to lose any kind of status you have in the industry if you acted this way. This is specifically a male-driven tech industry problem, and more specifically, an edge-lord meme-maker audience problem. Don't be the self-absorbed douche that thinks everyone shares your same problems. That's only an excuse to pass the buck to someone else by blaming society in general instead of your specific group. Own up to it. Other industries have solved this problem by incorporating more women into.

randomsearch 9y ago

Also, HN story about general experience that isn’t about sexism: “Oh, that’s interesting, I wonder if that’s because of X or Y?”, “gee that most have been awful”, “hey that makes me re-examine a way I behaved once”, “I’ve seen similar behaviour here at Q and Z” When about sexism: “unless this is a triple-blind study that has been repeated across every continent, let’s not jump to the conclusion that there is a lot of online sexism”. We should all up our game here. It’s depressing how oblivious a lot of the posts are on these comments. Clearly, the female avatars received the worst abuse. And the effect was so strong, so immediate, and based on a solid hypothesis. Something has gone very badly wrong with the internet and we should be working out what we can do about it, rather than sticking our fingers in our ears saying “boys will be boys” or “this isn’t scientific!”. Are we all too defensive to admit there is a problem?

GVIrish 9y ago
> Something has gone very badly wrong with the internet and we should be working out what we can do about it, rather than sticking our fingers in our ears saying “boys will be boys” or “this isn’t scientific!”. I think the internet has just served to exposed something heinous that has been in our society for eternity. Plenty of men have held these attitudes from time immortal, it's just that the internet gives them an easier means to express those attitudes without consequence.
piracykills 9y ago
I don't think people are doing that so much as there's just not much to discuss there - sure, you can yell at people to parent better til the cows come home or talk about how our society is somehow collapsing because of this but no one will care. There's no proven fix, so not much to say on the matter. Instead, people here are looking for realistic fixes - like making the chat box not automatically open so only those who need support will go out of their way to get it. I think the author would have been much less likely to receive abuse if people were actually there to ask her questions about her service than because they had just searched for a way to to generate a shitty meme. I could be wrong about that, but it'd be an interesting thing to do an A/B test with I think. Perhaps it makes more sense to put it into security terms - In the same way that it doesn't make sense to don't go around talking about how we could live in a dream world where bots don't scan the internet for weak SSH credentials all day, it doesn't make sense for us to go around talking about a dream world where sexism simply doesn't exist. The author found a good compromise to defend herself against that threat - many people on HN are just suggesting other possible defenses.

mikeash 9y ago

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair The average HN reader is a huge beneficiary of sexism. Most people do not have the mental fortitude to accept that a decent chunk of their good fortune is due to something like this.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
> The average HN reader is a huge beneficiary of sexism. I dispute that statement. (I will admit that you can find some possible benefit to the majority from sexism. "Huge" is a much larger claim, though.)

sctb 9y ago

> How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere? Many comments in this thread are lamenting these dismissals, which happen to be languishing at the bottom while this comment as well as the original article are massively upvoted. If I were to draw a conclusion about how the community generally feels about this issue, it would be opposite to yours.

Orangeair 9y ago
I generally agree with your appraisal here, but it is worth it to note that although those sorts of comments are usually pushed to the bottom of the discussion, they are almost always there on every thread where these sorts of issues are raised. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that a significant portion of the tech worlds holds those sorts of beliefs; there are probably even more people who would post things like that, but don't because they know they'll just get downvoted.
- dang 9y ago
  Sure: the community is divided, as is society in general. That's the accurate way to frame this. What's not so accurate are grand claims about HN being massively one way or the other, which people make all the time as a rhetorical device.

wazoox 9y ago

Exactly. These "kids" don't randomly harass anyone; they harass very specifically women, and the more attractive the woman is, the more harassment. This is sickening. I can't help but think that as the symptom of a profoundly heinous society towards women. And frankly, I find the sort of lame excuses in this thread quite hard to swallow.

throwaway_66587 9y ago

First things first: we do need some solution to the problem that she faced, and it is a real problem, that relates to gender. That said. > How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere? In a sense, it obviously is. But I want to reflect a bit on what that might entail. You will note (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16390786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16390786) that the amount of sexist threads was 14 per week, which, in the period of 3 months with 2100 messages, gives about 1% of messages. For reference, the DSM gives the prevalence of psychopathy at 3% for males and 1% for females (https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-people-are-psychopaths-sociopaths https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-people-are-psychopa...). So, even though this sexism is a societal problem (in the sense that it exists in our society and is hard to extricate from comunities) it is not clear that sexism (or at least the sexism displayed in the article) is a problem with a social solution: teaching children (or people in general, as it may be) that this is not OK probably would not reduce the problem much further. I predict, therefore, that no amount of society-wide measures against sexism can reduce this (very marginal!) behaviour (if the chat itself remains consequence-free for the users). That is: that fighting sexism is not gonna help this at all, and we'd need other, technical and local-to-the-website solutions. > How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere? That it is everywhere, in the sense that some (few) people bring it everywhere, not much. That it is everywhere, in the sense that all of society is guilty of it and each person should try to fix it in themselves, evidence of an entirely different sort.

stordoff 9y ago

> it's only because people think you're a bot I wonder if people are more likely to assume it's a bot when a female image is used - I've noticed that a lot of sites that are automated (or at least aren't so directly connected to a real person) use stock photos of female staff. Certainly not a justification, but could be a factor. I wonder if there's any way you could control for that to get truer data (I'm not doubting the overall conclusion that sexism is rampant) - maybe explicitly say "This is/is not a bot" or trial photos that look like very stereotypical/generic stock photos?

tomxor 9y ago

> How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere? When you use the word "sexism", notice how it was not necessary to say "against women". This little example highlights the strong societal view that there exists sexism against women far more than any against men to require that clarification. The reasons I find it necessary to highlight this fact is: from the perspective of someone trying to intentionally provoke offence in others, this view is an obvious candidate for exploitation when the target is a women. I'm talking about trolls of course, but it seems to be so hard to get that point across here... there is a clear bias in the offensive messages, but if they are all trolls (and they certainly look that way), then surely the bias reflects the simple fact that sexism against women is a reaction provoking topic, rather than "wow we have a sexism problem look at all these legitimate sincere comments", I mean isn't the later exactly what the trolls wanted.