7 ms·

> "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?" People who are having trouble understanding why this kind of thing is harassment s

by api 8y ago

> "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?" People who are having trouble understanding why this kind of thing is harassment should try changing gender to something else. For example, imagine if you heard: "Whoa, listen to that Southern accent! Surprised to hear that here." "You're a Christian? Didn't know anyone who believed in that stuff would be in engineering..." "Sure you want to start a startup? You look like you need to lose some weight and sitting in a chair all day coding's not going to help..." ... and so on. I actually heard a version of the Southern accent example once. Classism and place-ism are things too. It wasn't long ago that students in some universities were advised to lose their Southern accent if they wanted to get work as engineers.

XCabbage 8y ago
I'm not sure what point you expect these examples to make. The second two are straightforward insults - which describing someone as "hot" is not - and the first one would be seen as completely harmless by many (perhaps most) people.
- munchbunny 8y ago
  > The second two are straightforward insults That's exactly the point: if you can switch some group labels around and make an insult, then don't use the version involving gender.
  - XCabbage 8y ago
    The difference between the "hot" example and the "fat" example is not just switching some group labels around! The "hot" example is complimenting the recipient's appearance and expressing (presumably pleasant) surprise at their presence. The "fat" example is insulting the recipient and explicitly advising them against being there. We can imagine examples of weird and uncomfortable compliments that are in some way related to the demographics of the recipient - like someone attempting to flirt by telling a French man "Your voice is way too sexy for you to be a founder" or a well-built black man "You look way too athletic to be a founder". These seem about as socially inept as the "way too hot" example and strike me as reasonable analogues. But the examples in the post I replied to higher in this chain are nothing like this.
    - munchbunny 8y ago
      You're missing some important context then. "Hot" is not a compliment when an investor says this about you, because that's not a trait that matters as a startup founder, and because of the boys club atmosphere that pervades some parts of the VC world, it carries the strong implication that an irrelevant trait is getting in the way of your purpose for being there. If you look at the example the parent poster gave, that's exactly the implication. "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?"
    - toomanybeersies 8y ago
      It's not actually a complement though. They're basically saying "I value your presence here because of your appearance, not because of your ideas". Let's give another example of a complement that really isn't: "Wow, it's nice to see some black people at this event for once". It's a positive statement, sure, but it's not an appropriate comment to make. Can you understand how this belittles people?
    - itronitron 8y ago
      If you consider the difference between your two examples, the French man and the black man, I think you may see how one would be more put off than the other by the uncomfortable compliment. Specifically, within the United States (and other countries as well) the black man has been historically disenfrachised and therefore any comment/compliment that they do not belong there will not be well received. The 'too xyz to be here' comment is typically made by people that aren't in a position to judge, possibly for a number of reasons.
- Scalestein 8y ago
  Describing someone as 'hot' or generally commenting on their appearance when it isn't relevant is a form of objectification. A woman (or man) is at an event to discuss ideas or their company and the first thing someone says to them is about their physical appearance. This is very discouraging to people who have it happen to them very frequently. Assuming you are a man, imagine being at an event and someone coming up and saying something like, "Woah get a load of Fabio over here". Being compared to Fabio might be a compliment in an objective physical sense, but I'm sure that isn't what you want to talk about when you are trying to get funding or make connections.
  - Chris_Chambers 8y ago
    >Describing someone as 'hot' or generally commenting on their appearance when it isn't relevant is a form of objectification. No, it isn’t. It’s a form of flirting. >This is very discouraging to people who have it happen to them very frequently. No, it isn’t. The opposite is true. The more often something happens to you, the better you get at dealing with it, and before long you’re an expert at pulling the punch and twisting the scenario in your favor.
  - XCabbage 8y ago
    I'm not sure what any of this has to do with my comment that you're replying to. Nothing in it defends commenting on people's appearance or implies that I disagree with anything you've said here.
Chris_Chambers 8y ago
> "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?" That’s called flirting.
apocalypstyx 8y ago
In regards to southern accents, there's a reason that southerners make-up the largest percentage (can't remember where I saw this, though) of students in accent reduction classes. And there's some studies on this form of discrimination. http://sites.middlebury.edu/lngt101fall2015/files/2015/11/article-on-dialect-influence-among-college-students.pdf http://sites.middlebury.edu/lngt101fall2015/files/2015/11/ar... https://web.stanford.edu/group/journal/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Phillips_SocSci_2010.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/group/journal/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-...
monocasa 8y ago
I specifically lost my southern accent to work in tech. Started work in 2010.
sudosteph 8y ago
It takes a lot of effort to unlearn an accent, but it's not terribly hard to learn a fake one to speak in different contexts. My mom does this. Her work accent is usually not very southern, unless she's exclusively around other southerners with accents, but even then her "public southern" accent is nothing like her accent with our family in appalachia. I'm glad my resting accent is relatively neutral. Even in the south, having a thick accent can make you a bully magnet.
706f6f70 8y ago
> "You're a Christian? Didn't know anyone who believed in that stuff would be in engineering..." Religion is a funny one in Silicon Valley because it's outright religious discrimination of Judeo-Christian traditions, while embracing Islam. It makes no rational sense at all for anyone with even the most superficial understanding of religion or history. With race I can see the logic of "well, people that looked like your ancestors were really good at empire-building a while ago, so we're going to favour everyone else instead of you to try to make up for that" and gender "well, women in the workplace is a relatively new phenomena and they're 50% of the population, so we're going to favour them in order to hasten their representation in the workplace and make up for recent transgressions". But the religious one is truly baffling.
- Falling3 8y ago
  >Religion is a funny one in Silicon Valley because it's outright religious discrimination of Judeo-Christian traditions, while embracing Islam. It makes no rational sense at all for anyone with even the most superficial understanding of religion or history. This is absolute nonsense. What you characterize as a wholesale embracing of a religion is actually the recognition that there is systematic discrimination against a religious minority in this country and an attempt to fix it. Islamic traditions are rejected just as much as Judeo-Christian ones.
  - LifeLiverTransp 8y ago
    And you know what- religion is worth of rejection - any kind of in the public plaza. You shall keep thy relgion tho thy self. That minority stones people to death if it has the majority. Female people. So what does the PC-Catalog suggest, when one minority wants to end tolerance and other minoritys, once it is the majority?
    - Falling3 8y ago
      >So what does the PC-Catalog suggest, when one minority wants to end tolerance and other minoritys, once it is the majority? Is that an honest question? Because it sounds like trolling. In what way does protecting a minority promote them to a majority? In what way does it condone their belief systems? Why do people have such a ridiculously hard time not conflating the adherents of t religion with the religion itself?
dragonwriter 8y ago
> "You're a Christian? Didn't know anyone who believed in that stuff would be in engineering..." My wife works in biotech (has been in both ag and pharma, with the same experience) and seems to get exactly this (often verbatim except that “engineering” is replaced with “science”) almost as much as gender-based harassment and microaggressions.
spiralx 8y ago
I'm not sure Christians are unusual amongst engineers - graduates of engineering degrees (other than chemical engineering) are more likely to hold creationist beliefs than graduates of any other degree programme. Engineers and priests both like a well-designed system after all.

by api 8y ago

XCabbage 8y ago

I'm not sure what point you expect these examples to make. The second two are straightforward insults - which describing someone as "hot" is not - and the first one would be seen as completely harmless by many (perhaps most) people.

munchbunny 8y ago
> The second two are straightforward insults That's exactly the point: if you can switch some group labels around and make an insult, then don't use the version involving gender.
- XCabbage 8y ago
  The difference between the "hot" example and the "fat" example is not just switching some group labels around! The "hot" example is complimenting the recipient's appearance and expressing (presumably pleasant) surprise at their presence. The "fat" example is insulting the recipient and explicitly advising them against being there. We can imagine examples of weird and uncomfortable compliments that are in some way related to the demographics of the recipient - like someone attempting to flirt by telling a French man "Your voice is way too sexy for you to be a founder" or a well-built black man "You look way too athletic to be a founder". These seem about as socially inept as the "way too hot" example and strike me as reasonable analogues. But the examples in the post I replied to higher in this chain are nothing like this.
  - munchbunny 8y ago
    You're missing some important context then. "Hot" is not a compliment when an investor says this about you, because that's not a trait that matters as a startup founder, and because of the boys club atmosphere that pervades some parts of the VC world, it carries the strong implication that an irrelevant trait is getting in the way of your purpose for being there. If you look at the example the parent poster gave, that's exactly the implication. "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?"
  - toomanybeersies 8y ago
    It's not actually a complement though. They're basically saying "I value your presence here because of your appearance, not because of your ideas". Let's give another example of a complement that really isn't: "Wow, it's nice to see some black people at this event for once". It's a positive statement, sure, but it's not an appropriate comment to make. Can you understand how this belittles people?
  - itronitron 8y ago
    If you consider the difference between your two examples, the French man and the black man, I think you may see how one would be more put off than the other by the uncomfortable compliment. Specifically, within the United States (and other countries as well) the black man has been historically disenfrachised and therefore any comment/compliment that they do not belong there will not be well received. The 'too xyz to be here' comment is typically made by people that aren't in a position to judge, possibly for a number of reasons.
Scalestein 8y ago
Describing someone as 'hot' or generally commenting on their appearance when it isn't relevant is a form of objectification. A woman (or man) is at an event to discuss ideas or their company and the first thing someone says to them is about their physical appearance. This is very discouraging to people who have it happen to them very frequently. Assuming you are a man, imagine being at an event and someone coming up and saying something like, "Woah get a load of Fabio over here". Being compared to Fabio might be a compliment in an objective physical sense, but I'm sure that isn't what you want to talk about when you are trying to get funding or make connections.
- Chris_Chambers 8y ago
  >Describing someone as 'hot' or generally commenting on their appearance when it isn't relevant is a form of objectification. No, it isn’t. It’s a form of flirting. >This is very discouraging to people who have it happen to them very frequently. No, it isn’t. The opposite is true. The more often something happens to you, the better you get at dealing with it, and before long you’re an expert at pulling the punch and twisting the scenario in your favor.
- XCabbage 8y ago
  I'm not sure what any of this has to do with my comment that you're replying to. Nothing in it defends commenting on people's appearance or implies that I disagree with anything you've said here.

Chris_Chambers 8y ago

> "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?" That’s called flirting.

apocalypstyx 8y ago

In regards to southern accents, there's a reason that southerners make-up the largest percentage (can't remember where I saw this, though) of students in accent reduction classes. And there's some studies on this form of discrimination. http://sites.middlebury.edu/lngt101fall2015/files/2015/11/article-on-dialect-influence-among-college-students.pdf http://sites.middlebury.edu/lngt101fall2015/files/2015/11/ar... https://web.stanford.edu/group/journal/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Phillips_SocSci_2010.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/group/journal/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-...

monocasa 8y ago

I specifically lost my southern accent to work in tech. Started work in 2010.

sudosteph 8y ago

It takes a lot of effort to unlearn an accent, but it's not terribly hard to learn a fake one to speak in different contexts. My mom does this. Her work accent is usually not very southern, unless she's exclusively around other southerners with accents, but even then her "public southern" accent is nothing like her accent with our family in appalachia. I'm glad my resting accent is relatively neutral. Even in the south, having a thick accent can make you a bully magnet.

706f6f70 8y ago

> "You're a Christian? Didn't know anyone who believed in that stuff would be in engineering..." Religion is a funny one in Silicon Valley because it's outright religious discrimination of Judeo-Christian traditions, while embracing Islam. It makes no rational sense at all for anyone with even the most superficial understanding of religion or history. With race I can see the logic of "well, people that looked like your ancestors were really good at empire-building a while ago, so we're going to favour everyone else instead of you to try to make up for that" and gender "well, women in the workplace is a relatively new phenomena and they're 50% of the population, so we're going to favour them in order to hasten their representation in the workplace and make up for recent transgressions". But the religious one is truly baffling.

Falling3 8y ago
>Religion is a funny one in Silicon Valley because it's outright religious discrimination of Judeo-Christian traditions, while embracing Islam. It makes no rational sense at all for anyone with even the most superficial understanding of religion or history. This is absolute nonsense. What you characterize as a wholesale embracing of a religion is actually the recognition that there is systematic discrimination against a religious minority in this country and an attempt to fix it. Islamic traditions are rejected just as much as Judeo-Christian ones.
- LifeLiverTransp 8y ago
  And you know what- religion is worth of rejection - any kind of in the public plaza. You shall keep thy relgion tho thy self. That minority stones people to death if it has the majority. Female people. So what does the PC-Catalog suggest, when one minority wants to end tolerance and other minoritys, once it is the majority?
  - Falling3 8y ago
    >So what does the PC-Catalog suggest, when one minority wants to end tolerance and other minoritys, once it is the majority? Is that an honest question? Because it sounds like trolling. In what way does protecting a minority promote them to a majority? In what way does it condone their belief systems? Why do people have such a ridiculously hard time not conflating the adherents of t religion with the religion itself?

dragonwriter 8y ago

> "You're a Christian? Didn't know anyone who believed in that stuff would be in engineering..." My wife works in biotech (has been in both ag and pharma, with the same experience) and seems to get exactly this (often verbatim except that “engineering” is replaced with “science”) almost as much as gender-based harassment and microaggressions.

spiralx 8y ago

I'm not sure Christians are unusual amongst engineers - graduates of engineering degrees (other than chemical engineering) are more likely to hold creationist beliefs than graduates of any other degree programme. Engineers and priests both like a well-designed system after all.