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"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
by 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 agoYou'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 agoI'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 agoBut "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 agoA 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 agoThe 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 agoWe 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 agoThe 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 agoThe 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 agoBelieving 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 agoAlso, rude comments aside, which avatar received the most useful comments?
- beobab 9y agoI would be interested to find this out.
- UncleMeat 9y agoThis 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 agoEven 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 agoWell, apparently not impossible, if one denies hard enough.
- wruza 9y agoOr is uncertain.
- jerf 9y agoThousands 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 agoSo, you're saying <grin> that the problem is actually very small?
- MereInterest 9y agoNo. 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 agothat's what she said
- dang 9y agoPlease don't do this here.
- DarkWiiPlayer 9y agoI 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 agoOk, 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 agoMarginal levels of immature and/or antisocial elements don't mean that society is sexist, no matter how vocal those trolls may be.
- dsr_ 9y agoNo, 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 agoTo 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 agoThe 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 agoIt'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 agoDo you have a source for that claim?
- mikulas_florek 9y agoYou 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 agoI 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 agoPost your contact details, mate. I'll come visit you and give you a personal explanation, ok?
- JabavuAdams 9y agoWhy was no one rude to the dude, dude? You're engaging in cargo-cult statistics.
- rkangel 9y agoThe 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 agoI'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 agoI'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 agoAccounts 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.