8 ms·

Going Viral as a Woman in Tech

86 points by DLay 6y ago

xenihn 6y ago
Stuff like this is why I haven't uploaded any new media of myself to the internet since 2010.
- drewmate 6y ago
  I agree, and have tended to keep a low profile online. Unfortunately, much like the unspoken rule to code in your spare time (the subject of Emily's video), it seems like there's always pressure to have an online non-coding presence including blogs, twitter, etc... That's why I briefly wrote about side projects at ${myname.tld} when I was on the job market a few years back, and why I suspect I'll be back at it at some point in the future. In many cases, it's all just a way to stand out in a pile of resumes, which is disheartening in and of itself. That for many women it turns into outright harassment is disgusting and a reflection of the worst that internet anonymity has to offer.
  - xenihn 6y ago
    I think a LinkedIn and a Github are enough for SWE. You don't even really need a Github once you've got experience.
phendrenad2 6y ago
I feel like the men in tech are more brazen misogynists than the men in other fields.
- nickff 6y ago
  I think you should try working a job in the construction industry... any job.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    not OP but I've worked construction for a while as well and while blue collar workers tend to be a lot more vulgar, you know not a lot of high society filters and so on, actually I think genuine misogyny and abuse of women is way worse in white collar work. First off there's simply way fewer women in blue collar work, and if they are there's no real hierarchy. Blue collar workers don't have secretaries. The stories I've heard from women who were harassed over years at startups or law firms, in particular secretaries or women in other jobs that had lower status is something else.
  - shrimp_emoji 6y ago
    Reports of sexism in the software field seem pretty common, but that's tough to square with what also seems like a uniquely high tolerance for trans people (moreso than in other field, as far as it seems).
- xenihn 6y ago
  I'd like to direct you towards AutoAdmit/Xoxohth
base698 6y ago
Social media posts for the vast majority are all risk and no reward. Risk comes in all forms. Creepy internet denizens, job loss, and misinterpretation.
malodyets 6y ago
Here here
mt3ck 6y ago
Not to make small of her points, as i am sure women may get it more but the point 'Why should a woman have to expect to be harassed every time she puts herself out there online?'. I agree this is bullshit, but its the same for anyone, if you put yourself out there expect to be harassed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nicbou 6y ago
  It's the intensity of it that's problematic. I know the internet is full of mean jerks, but they are nowhere near as toxic to me as they are to women.
xmprt 6y ago
As a man, I've never experienced something like this (also never went viral) but I think it's at least somewhat comforting that most of those disgusting comments were downvoted and the moderators had an apologetic response. I wonder how much of the hate was because she was a female programmer vs just because shitty human beings are going to be shitty on the internet regardless of her gender and unfortunately, being a woman in tech is an easy target for them.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- klyrs 6y ago
  > I wonder how much of the hate was because she was a female programmer vs just because shitty human beings... Your inquiry here is kinda the very basis of intersectionality. No matter where you go, there are shitty people who will harrass you for being different. Only it's not just "different" when there's predominantly violence in a single direction across an axis; some people get way more shit than others, and it's not "just because", it's not just.
ravenstine 6y ago
You have to remember, we're talking about Reddit, here. Anyone with eyes knows that Reddit is a cesspool and anyone can create an anonymous account with no verification at all. I'm a nobody, and I regularly have people fight with me on there and sometimes get death threats. Never happens anywhere near to that degree on other social media sites.
- meowface 6y ago
  I think it happens on every large social media website, unfortunately. You can find it all the time on YouTube, for example.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    If you enable showdead, you'll even see it on HN. Thankfully, mods here do better than Reddit can
- fulafel 6y ago
  HN is similarly anonymous, let's not bash privacy support. Cultures breeding bad behavior are born of complex sets of reasons and otoh you get the same kind of thing on FB.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    HN has strict moderation, and it maintains a certain standard of discourse. There are many reddit comments that wouldn't fly here.
- collyw 6y ago
  > I regularly have people fight with me on there and sometimes get death threats. Good effort. I haven't managed to receive a death threat yet.
vmception 6y ago
That was a really funny video and so spot on! I think there is a chronic plague amongst programmers to act differently around women, it is very unnecessary and that was a very relatable and humorous video that was posted. It is good to see more people being able to relate to the problem of tech recruiting as its closer to changing that way, and that isn't going to come from the maladjusted edge-lords prevalent in this industry.
dleslie 6y ago
> And I’m sure most of these kids would have NEVER said any of those things in person, but being anonymous gives you a strange power and a weird desire to say harmful things. Not to your face, no... That's where I falter with the lamentations about the toxicity of online forums; to me, it's not that the language or vulgarity is novel or new, because it's not. At least, not in my personal experience. What is new, and what makes the vulgar abuse more dangerous online, is that it has far greater reach. Many more people will read the forum comments than would have heard the spoken comments. So, ie, where previously conspiracy theorists were a small community that relied on printed zines, limited run books, and (sometimes) radio; the "scene" took a nosedive when the internet took off. Where listening to Art Bell and reading the Whole Earth Catalog was humorously enjoyable and rarely offensive, the online forums and facebook groups have given rise to QAnon. There's something about the medium that's altering the message.
bdcravens 6y ago
I've felt for some time that comments are probably the worst part of the web (and yes, the irony that I'm posting this is a comment isn't lost on me)
- lwansbrough 6y ago
  How do you separate "comments" from... speech? These are just people saying what's on their minds, after all.
- collyw 6y ago
  I prefer to see how real people are thinking rather than someone who has an amplified mouthpiece via some big name publication.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
SamReidHughes 6y ago
This kind of behavior -- I mean degenerate, human filth online behavior, not specifically the sexist kind -- happens a lot more lately now that it can spread by example over the internet, get learned by teenagers, and mimicked. This didn't generate out of, say, people that spent some teenage years posting on Usenet, or even people playing certain video games at certain times in the past, in my experience. And you don't imagine 40-year-olds suddenly picking up and enacting this sort of conduct. Maybe it's also absent in other languages' online behavior. I think it's the sort of conduct that could be socially engineered out of existence -- or lowered by an order of magnitude -- in one teenage generation, if we figured out a way to do it.
- seabird 6y ago
  I can't speak for Usenet, but the internet already had more than its fair share of influential shitholes by the early 2000s. 4chan, ebaumsworld, TOTSE, LiveLeak, etc. existed at their very worst at that time, and even websites that are widely considered toxic/unruly today (namely Twitter and Reddit) are quite tame compared to what was going on then. You are definitely better off for having missed them, but that doesn't mean the behavior didn't exist.
  - SamReidHughes 6y ago
    Maybe. Nowadays I’ve been invited to a discord in some mainstream topic of interest to me, and in its #off-topic channel, well, my monocle dropped to the floor from the hard n-word dropping casual racism, not some attempt to land a joke or be ironic, and that was not an anonymous message board. I think in the early 2000’s 4chan didn’t exist yet, the internet hadn’t really penetrated into life as much, console games were still not networked, and getting kids exposed to such behavior was not the default situation.
    - newen 6y ago
      It was pretty common by mid 2000s when Xbox Live came out. And it was pretty common IRL in early 2000s too. I’ve seen plenty of n-word dropping and casual racism IRL as a kid in the early 2000s.
universick 6y ago
The internet abuse in response to this is disgusting and absolutely predictable. The video -- spot on. I have a good job today because I was accepted to an internship for students with minimal CS experience, received a return offer, and accepted it. I work hard but have never done a side project in my life, and am terrified of having to apply for a new job.
OfficerLayHe 6y ago
Who would've thought? If you sort by 'Controversial' and trawl through the downvoted comments, apparently you can find some things that most people consider distasteful. This lady looked hard enough, and she found exactly what she was searching for. Ironically, her comments about feeling 'unsafe' and in 'fear' are exactly the type of irrational emotional appeals that damage the perception of women in STEM fields as being unable or unwilling to take criticism, even if unfair. It's the internet. You'll get nasty comments about your race, gender, orientation, and anything else people can latch on to. This is not unique to your gender and certainly not this industry. Indeed, you only need to look as far as this lady's own post to find sexist comments against men - "incels". The cynic in me is tempted to believe that this is little more than an attempted viral post capitalising on the previous.
donatj 6y ago
I, a man, posted a picture of myself on a hardware subreddit with an AWS Snowball and received replies criticising my smile "You're gonna catch flies if you keep your mouth open like that." (+28 Karma right now) as well as a bunch telling me I was fat (really? I had no idea), a couple calling me a "beta" and questioning my testosterone levels (why is that a thing?) and one that declared I was obviously a lizard person. All of them had positive karma but we're removed by mods, days later, so I can't quote them directly. The internet is just mean, to everyone. I feel like with the negative karma on all this ladies unpleasant comments she really didn't get it that bad.
- bem94 6y ago
  > The internet is just mean, to everyone. I feel like with the negative karma on all this ladies unpleasant comments she really didn't get it that bad. I don't think gatekeeping bad experiences on the internet is really helpful here.
  - Kednicma 6y ago
    I think that ignoring abuse oriented towards men is a common blind spot in our society. My first upload to Youtube received a comment, "You're nothing but a big fat Jew!" I think that this is quite representative of the hate of the Internet at large. This sort of blindness towards abuse towards men is not just here on the Internets. In real life, progress made against ritual genital mutilation is happening for women but not for men.
    - bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
      So is using any semi-plausible claim to victimhood as a means of acquiring clout / wealth / power in a moral system with a bias toward unquestioningly exalting victimhood.
    - rainonmoon 6y ago
      Men get called names. Women get people finding their addresses and visiting their houses, their online accounts enumerated, their profiles stalked etc. It wasn't that long ago that there was a Reddit bot which searched posters' submissions for GoneWild posts, which was invoked whenever a commenter revealed themselves as a woman. I'm sorry people were rude to you, but the degree and kind of abuse women face online is so disproportionate that these examples (particularly in a thread full of similar) only serve to diminish and distract from that fact.
lwansbrough 6y ago
Can someone chart the volume of misogynistic speech online vs. amount of sex people are having over time?
s9w 6y ago
I've seen nothing but praise for that video. Also if you sort by new or controversial, you'd be surprised what nasty comments humans get.
echo419 6y ago
Ouch, that's rough and I absolutely feel for her. I'm also curious as to why this post is currently flagged.
- tomaszs 6y ago
  I have exactly the same question. Curious why it was flagged...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- tupputuppu 6y ago
  Based on the comments above, it seems many people think that everyone who goes viral gets a lot of creepy and unwanted attention, but when it happens to women it gets more sympathy than when it happens to men. Thus giving special attention to women's plight is at odds with our norms of equality. I concur and feel like this is an example of female privilege, where women in general are given more sympathy than men for similar hardships.
  - echo419 6y ago
    Ok, but that in no way directly answers the question of "why was this story flagged?".
tomaszs 6y ago
Why this is flagged?
koonsolo 6y ago
Why is this about "a woman in tech"? It seems it's just a story that happens to anyone who gets 15 min fame by some post. But now all of a sudden it's again women in tech that are victims... Come on... please... But I guess "person gets harassed online" wouldn't make the front page.
- server_bot 6y ago
  Did you read the same post I read? One of the harassers asserted that she must have traded sexual favors for a CS degree. Do you seriously believe that a male engineer would be sexualized and discredited that aggressively? Please take some time to reflect. Look up statistics on sexual assault and violence against women. This is not an attempt to bait clicks, its an attempt to stand up against systemic attack.
  - newen 6y ago
    Men get called cucks and betas and incels instead. It’s the same thing, just the male version of sexual attacks since men and women are different.
  - koonsolo 6y ago
    > Look up statistics on sexual assault and violence against women Why do I need to limit myself to women? You are claiming that men cannot be victims? Here is what I found: As of 1998, 2.78 million men in the U.S. had been victims of attempted or completed rape. About 3% of American men—or 1 in 33—have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. 1 out of every 10 rape victims are male. So yes, please stop your sexist arguments: both women and men can be victims. Maybe you should be the one who needs to take some time to reflect. I'm one of those people who really doesn't give a shit about gender, race, religion, sexual preferences, etc. But it seems nowadays you have take all of these attributes and divide them into "victims" and "predators". I'm really sick of that, and I'm really sick of media playing out that part. So yeah, there is my reflection on this whole narrative.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Krollifi 6y ago
I saw the video and it was funny and intelligent. It’s disappointing to see the apathy in this thread. I agree with the blogger that we should expect more from mods and commenters.
mister_hn 6y ago
You know what basically flawed everything, inducing these toxic behaviours? Just try to open any social network and navigate to Profiles of women related to coding. As an example, Instagram is full of women in tech writing delightful content but have you seen their pictures? Most of them are in sexy poses, or with full-body perspective, where more sexual recalls are involved, rather than focussing on programming/tech in general. The same happens for TikTok or Facebook. I think all of this free sexism could have been stopped if someone started focussing really on technical aspects, independently from sexual orientation/gender/race/whatever, rather than exacerbating the narcissism. Internet, as long as you don't expose your face, allows you to build a powerful identity, which hasn't nothing to do with personal aspect, but with competence, or at least, it was supposed to work so, until someone went out and started posted those pics. As a reference (just a few selection): - https://www.instagram.com/coding_unicorn/ https://www.instagram.com/coding_unicorn/ - https://www.instagram.com/ioana.codes/ https://www.instagram.com/ioana.codes/ - https://www.instagram.com/tech.unicorn/ https://www.instagram.com/tech.unicorn/
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Although I am mightily confused about their use of Instagram as a blogging and resume-hosting platform, I have to say there is absolutely nothing "sexy" about any of the photos of these three women I could see, at all. Other than the fact that they happen to be conventionally attractive women, I don't see where you're getting this whole "sexy pics are undermining women in tech's credibility" angle.
- nicbou 6y ago
  If you stalk the writer and scroll on their Instagram, you will find personal pictures that are very common among Instagram users. It's therefore their fault if you can't control yourself and act professionally? Because they're asking for it?
  - mister_hn 6y ago
    sure, but differently from common IG users, they write technical comments linked to those pictures. Am I acting unprofessionally or are they, just to catch likes, followers?
chrshawkes 6y ago
People are simply creeps. The cesspools that allow them to be creeps are the biggest social networks out there. I know there is a difference between a video of me (male) vs featuring my daughter. The disgusting pigs come out at that time. I think every woman who gets views on social media will be subjected to this. I've personally had 20+ million views on YouTube, these types of comments rarely show up.

86 points by DLay 6y ago

xenihn 6y ago

Stuff like this is why I haven't uploaded any new media of myself to the internet since 2010.

drewmate 6y ago
I agree, and have tended to keep a low profile online. Unfortunately, much like the unspoken rule to code in your spare time (the subject of Emily's video), it seems like there's always pressure to have an online non-coding presence including blogs, twitter, etc... That's why I briefly wrote about side projects at ${myname.tld} when I was on the job market a few years back, and why I suspect I'll be back at it at some point in the future. In many cases, it's all just a way to stand out in a pile of resumes, which is disheartening in and of itself. That for many women it turns into outright harassment is disgusting and a reflection of the worst that internet anonymity has to offer.
- xenihn 6y ago
  I think a LinkedIn and a Github are enough for SWE. You don't even really need a Github once you've got experience.

phendrenad2 6y ago

I feel like the men in tech are more brazen misogynists than the men in other fields.

nickff 6y ago
I think you should try working a job in the construction industry... any job.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  not OP but I've worked construction for a while as well and while blue collar workers tend to be a lot more vulgar, you know not a lot of high society filters and so on, actually I think genuine misogyny and abuse of women is way worse in white collar work. First off there's simply way fewer women in blue collar work, and if they are there's no real hierarchy. Blue collar workers don't have secretaries. The stories I've heard from women who were harassed over years at startups or law firms, in particular secretaries or women in other jobs that had lower status is something else.
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  Reports of sexism in the software field seem pretty common, but that's tough to square with what also seems like a uniquely high tolerance for trans people (moreso than in other field, as far as it seems).
xenihn 6y ago
I'd like to direct you towards AutoAdmit/Xoxohth

base698 6y ago

Social media posts for the vast majority are all risk and no reward. Risk comes in all forms. Creepy internet denizens, job loss, and misinterpretation.

malodyets 6y ago

Here here

mt3ck 6y ago

Not to make small of her points, as i am sure women may get it more but the point 'Why should a woman have to expect to be harassed every time she puts herself out there online?'. I agree this is bullshit, but its the same for anyone, if you put yourself out there expect to be harassed.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nicbou 6y ago
It's the intensity of it that's problematic. I know the internet is full of mean jerks, but they are nowhere near as toxic to me as they are to women.

xmprt 6y ago

As a man, I've never experienced something like this (also never went viral) but I think it's at least somewhat comforting that most of those disgusting comments were downvoted and the moderators had an apologetic response. I wonder how much of the hate was because she was a female programmer vs just because shitty human beings are going to be shitty on the internet regardless of her gender and unfortunately, being a woman in tech is an easy target for them.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
klyrs 6y ago
> I wonder how much of the hate was because she was a female programmer vs just because shitty human beings... Your inquiry here is kinda the very basis of intersectionality. No matter where you go, there are shitty people who will harrass you for being different. Only it's not just "different" when there's predominantly violence in a single direction across an axis; some people get way more shit than others, and it's not "just because", it's not just.

ravenstine 6y ago

You have to remember, we're talking about Reddit, here. Anyone with eyes knows that Reddit is a cesspool and anyone can create an anonymous account with no verification at all. I'm a nobody, and I regularly have people fight with me on there and sometimes get death threats. Never happens anywhere near to that degree on other social media sites.

meowface 6y ago
I think it happens on every large social media website, unfortunately. You can find it all the time on YouTube, for example.
- klyrs 6y ago
  If you enable showdead, you'll even see it on HN. Thankfully, mods here do better than Reddit can
fulafel 6y ago
HN is similarly anonymous, let's not bash privacy support. Cultures breeding bad behavior are born of complex sets of reasons and otoh you get the same kind of thing on FB.
- nicbou 6y ago
  HN has strict moderation, and it maintains a certain standard of discourse. There are many reddit comments that wouldn't fly here.
collyw 6y ago
> I regularly have people fight with me on there and sometimes get death threats. Good effort. I haven't managed to receive a death threat yet.

vmception 6y ago

That was a really funny video and so spot on! I think there is a chronic plague amongst programmers to act differently around women, it is very unnecessary and that was a very relatable and humorous video that was posted. It is good to see more people being able to relate to the problem of tech recruiting as its closer to changing that way, and that isn't going to come from the maladjusted edge-lords prevalent in this industry.

dleslie 6y ago

> And I’m sure most of these kids would have NEVER said any of those things in person, but being anonymous gives you a strange power and a weird desire to say harmful things. Not to your face, no... That's where I falter with the lamentations about the toxicity of online forums; to me, it's not that the language or vulgarity is novel or new, because it's not. At least, not in my personal experience. What is new, and what makes the vulgar abuse more dangerous online, is that it has far greater reach. Many more people will read the forum comments than would have heard the spoken comments. So, ie, where previously conspiracy theorists were a small community that relied on printed zines, limited run books, and (sometimes) radio; the "scene" took a nosedive when the internet took off. Where listening to Art Bell and reading the Whole Earth Catalog was humorously enjoyable and rarely offensive, the online forums and facebook groups have given rise to QAnon. There's something about the medium that's altering the message.

bdcravens 6y ago

I've felt for some time that comments are probably the worst part of the web (and yes, the irony that I'm posting this is a comment isn't lost on me)

lwansbrough 6y ago
How do you separate "comments" from... speech? These are just people saying what's on their minds, after all.
collyw 6y ago
I prefer to see how real people are thinking rather than someone who has an amplified mouthpiece via some big name publication.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

SamReidHughes 6y ago

This kind of behavior -- I mean degenerate, human filth online behavior, not specifically the sexist kind -- happens a lot more lately now that it can spread by example over the internet, get learned by teenagers, and mimicked. This didn't generate out of, say, people that spent some teenage years posting on Usenet, or even people playing certain video games at certain times in the past, in my experience. And you don't imagine 40-year-olds suddenly picking up and enacting this sort of conduct. Maybe it's also absent in other languages' online behavior. I think it's the sort of conduct that could be socially engineered out of existence -- or lowered by an order of magnitude -- in one teenage generation, if we figured out a way to do it.

seabird 6y ago
I can't speak for Usenet, but the internet already had more than its fair share of influential shitholes by the early 2000s. 4chan, ebaumsworld, TOTSE, LiveLeak, etc. existed at their very worst at that time, and even websites that are widely considered toxic/unruly today (namely Twitter and Reddit) are quite tame compared to what was going on then. You are definitely better off for having missed them, but that doesn't mean the behavior didn't exist.
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  Maybe. Nowadays I’ve been invited to a discord in some mainstream topic of interest to me, and in its #off-topic channel, well, my monocle dropped to the floor from the hard n-word dropping casual racism, not some attempt to land a joke or be ironic, and that was not an anonymous message board. I think in the early 2000’s 4chan didn’t exist yet, the internet hadn’t really penetrated into life as much, console games were still not networked, and getting kids exposed to such behavior was not the default situation.
  - newen 6y ago
    It was pretty common by mid 2000s when Xbox Live came out. And it was pretty common IRL in early 2000s too. I’ve seen plenty of n-word dropping and casual racism IRL as a kid in the early 2000s.

universick 6y ago

The internet abuse in response to this is disgusting and absolutely predictable. The video -- spot on. I have a good job today because I was accepted to an internship for students with minimal CS experience, received a return offer, and accepted it. I work hard but have never done a side project in my life, and am terrified of having to apply for a new job.

OfficerLayHe 6y ago

Who would've thought? If you sort by 'Controversial' and trawl through the downvoted comments, apparently you can find some things that most people consider distasteful. This lady looked hard enough, and she found exactly what she was searching for. Ironically, her comments about feeling 'unsafe' and in 'fear' are exactly the type of irrational emotional appeals that damage the perception of women in STEM fields as being unable or unwilling to take criticism, even if unfair. It's the internet. You'll get nasty comments about your race, gender, orientation, and anything else people can latch on to. This is not unique to your gender and certainly not this industry. Indeed, you only need to look as far as this lady's own post to find sexist comments against men - "incels". The cynic in me is tempted to believe that this is little more than an attempted viral post capitalising on the previous.

donatj 6y ago

I, a man, posted a picture of myself on a hardware subreddit with an AWS Snowball and received replies criticising my smile "You're gonna catch flies if you keep your mouth open like that." (+28 Karma right now) as well as a bunch telling me I was fat (really? I had no idea), a couple calling me a "beta" and questioning my testosterone levels (why is that a thing?) and one that declared I was obviously a lizard person. All of them had positive karma but we're removed by mods, days later, so I can't quote them directly. The internet is just mean, to everyone. I feel like with the negative karma on all this ladies unpleasant comments she really didn't get it that bad.

bem94 6y ago
> The internet is just mean, to everyone. I feel like with the negative karma on all this ladies unpleasant comments she really didn't get it that bad. I don't think gatekeeping bad experiences on the internet is really helpful here.
- Kednicma 6y ago
  I think that ignoring abuse oriented towards men is a common blind spot in our society. My first upload to Youtube received a comment, "You're nothing but a big fat Jew!" I think that this is quite representative of the hate of the Internet at large. This sort of blindness towards abuse towards men is not just here on the Internets. In real life, progress made against ritual genital mutilation is happening for women but not for men.
  - bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
    So is using any semi-plausible claim to victimhood as a means of acquiring clout / wealth / power in a moral system with a bias toward unquestioningly exalting victimhood.
  - rainonmoon 6y ago
    Men get called names. Women get people finding their addresses and visiting their houses, their online accounts enumerated, their profiles stalked etc. It wasn't that long ago that there was a Reddit bot which searched posters' submissions for GoneWild posts, which was invoked whenever a commenter revealed themselves as a woman. I'm sorry people were rude to you, but the degree and kind of abuse women face online is so disproportionate that these examples (particularly in a thread full of similar) only serve to diminish and distract from that fact.

lwansbrough 6y ago

Can someone chart the volume of misogynistic speech online vs. amount of sex people are having over time?

s9w 6y ago

I've seen nothing but praise for that video. Also if you sort by new or controversial, you'd be surprised what nasty comments humans get.

echo419 6y ago

Ouch, that's rough and I absolutely feel for her. I'm also curious as to why this post is currently flagged.

tomaszs 6y ago
I have exactly the same question. Curious why it was flagged...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tupputuppu 6y ago
Based on the comments above, it seems many people think that everyone who goes viral gets a lot of creepy and unwanted attention, but when it happens to women it gets more sympathy than when it happens to men. Thus giving special attention to women's plight is at odds with our norms of equality. I concur and feel like this is an example of female privilege, where women in general are given more sympathy than men for similar hardships.
- echo419 6y ago
  Ok, but that in no way directly answers the question of "why was this story flagged?".

tomaszs 6y ago

Why this is flagged?

koonsolo 6y ago

Why is this about "a woman in tech"? It seems it's just a story that happens to anyone who gets 15 min fame by some post. But now all of a sudden it's again women in tech that are victims... Come on... please... But I guess "person gets harassed online" wouldn't make the front page.

server_bot 6y ago
Did you read the same post I read? One of the harassers asserted that she must have traded sexual favors for a CS degree. Do you seriously believe that a male engineer would be sexualized and discredited that aggressively? Please take some time to reflect. Look up statistics on sexual assault and violence against women. This is not an attempt to bait clicks, its an attempt to stand up against systemic attack.
- newen 6y ago
  Men get called cucks and betas and incels instead. It’s the same thing, just the male version of sexual attacks since men and women are different.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  > Look up statistics on sexual assault and violence against women Why do I need to limit myself to women? You are claiming that men cannot be victims? Here is what I found: As of 1998, 2.78 million men in the U.S. had been victims of attempted or completed rape. About 3% of American men—or 1 in 33—have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. 1 out of every 10 rape victims are male. So yes, please stop your sexist arguments: both women and men can be victims. Maybe you should be the one who needs to take some time to reflect. I'm one of those people who really doesn't give a shit about gender, race, religion, sexual preferences, etc. But it seems nowadays you have take all of these attributes and divide them into "victims" and "predators". I'm really sick of that, and I'm really sick of media playing out that part. So yeah, there is my reflection on this whole narrative.
deleted 6y ago
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Krollifi 6y ago

I saw the video and it was funny and intelligent. It’s disappointing to see the apathy in this thread. I agree with the blogger that we should expect more from mods and commenters.

mister_hn 6y ago

You know what basically flawed everything, inducing these toxic behaviours? Just try to open any social network and navigate to Profiles of women related to coding. As an example, Instagram is full of women in tech writing delightful content but have you seen their pictures? Most of them are in sexy poses, or with full-body perspective, where more sexual recalls are involved, rather than focussing on programming/tech in general. The same happens for TikTok or Facebook. I think all of this free sexism could have been stopped if someone started focussing really on technical aspects, independently from sexual orientation/gender/race/whatever, rather than exacerbating the narcissism. Internet, as long as you don't expose your face, allows you to build a powerful identity, which hasn't nothing to do with personal aspect, but with competence, or at least, it was supposed to work so, until someone went out and started posted those pics. As a reference (just a few selection): - https://www.instagram.com/coding_unicorn/ https://www.instagram.com/coding_unicorn/ - https://www.instagram.com/ioana.codes/ https://www.instagram.com/ioana.codes/ - https://www.instagram.com/tech.unicorn/ https://www.instagram.com/tech.unicorn/

pmiller2 6y ago
Although I am mightily confused about their use of Instagram as a blogging and resume-hosting platform, I have to say there is absolutely nothing "sexy" about any of the photos of these three women I could see, at all. Other than the fact that they happen to be conventionally attractive women, I don't see where you're getting this whole "sexy pics are undermining women in tech's credibility" angle.
nicbou 6y ago
If you stalk the writer and scroll on their Instagram, you will find personal pictures that are very common among Instagram users. It's therefore their fault if you can't control yourself and act professionally? Because they're asking for it?
- mister_hn 6y ago
  sure, but differently from common IG users, they write technical comments linked to those pictures. Am I acting unprofessionally or are they, just to catch likes, followers?

chrshawkes 6y ago

People are simply creeps. The cesspools that allow them to be creeps are the biggest social networks out there. I know there is a difference between a video of me (male) vs featuring my daughter. The disgusting pigs come out at that time. I think every woman who gets views on social media will be subjected to this. I've personally had 20+ million views on YouTube, these types of comments rarely show up.