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I'm really glad to see this here. I don't have a better word readily available than sexism for trying to talk about patterns like this but when I use the word s

I'm really glad to see this here. I don't have a better word readily available than sexism for trying to talk about patterns like this but when I use the word sexism, I think people think I mean "Men are intentionally exclusionary assholes just to be assholes because they simply hate women." and that's never what I'm trying to say. I find my gender is a barrier to getting traction and my experience is that it's due to patterns of this sort and not because most men intentionally want me to fail. But the cumulative effect of most men erring on the side of protecting themselves and not wanting to take risks to engage with me meaningfully really adds up over time and I think that tremendously holds women back generally. I think gendered patterns of social engagement also contributed to the Theranos debacle. I've said that before and I feel like it tends to get misunderstood as well. (Though in the case of Theranos it runs a lot deeper in that she was actually sleeping with an investor.)

dageshi 6y ago
Genuine question, if you were a man in that situation, what would you do?
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  In what situation?
  - dageshi 6y ago
    Well the situation in the article seems like a good example, you think the female ceo should swap with the male co founder. You're invested but not massively and you've not really known either for years.
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      The odds are good I would err on the side of not risking it Which is why this needs to be discussed: So a path forward can be found. Our current default patterns aren't working well.
      - worker767424 6y ago
        The only path forward is for enough high-profile, hyper-woke behavior examples to get negative public exposure. As long as men are afraid of accidentally becoming the target of the next donglegate, it's safer to just not engage.
        DoreenMichele 6y ago
        I agree with what I think you are going for: That this super blamey "hyper woke" bullshit needs to stop if we are going to make any real forward progress on issues like this one. In my experience, one good example of how to do it right is vastly more powerful in solving social ills than any number of people being hung high and scapegoated for getting it wrong. In fact, I generally feel that scapegoating people in a system where there are no good answers is actively counterproductive and helps keep things stuck. Hanging someone high for not knowing "the right answer" in a system that gives zero good options for how to handle X implicitly suggests that good answers exist and implicitly denies the reality that "We don't know how to do this dance. We don't have an answer for that." It implicitly suggests there is a means to get this right when the reality is there isn't. So it actively distracts from real problem solving. I would like to see more real problem solving in this space. As a dirt poor woman, I have a vested interest in seeing a world where there are answers for how to do this dance. So far, I am mostly coming up empty under circumstances that suggest to me that my behavior is not the problem. The problem is the lack of good answers for how to do this dance.
        dkersten 6y ago
        Completely agree. Scapegoating can't have positive effects. At best, it causes what we see here: people staying silent in fear. At worst, it just alienates people and causes them to dig their heels in, doubling down on whatever bad behavior they're scapegoated for because they've got nothing left to lose. It rarely, if ever, actually improves behavior. I recently had a conversation where the lady I was talking to basically said (paraphrasing for brevity) "all men bad, always" and I'm really not sure what she even wanted to achieve. Some kind of perceived revenge maybe? I ended up disengaging and it left me feeling rather deflated. If I'm bad by default and there's nothing I can do to change that, why care at all? Luckily I know that most women are much more reasonable so I will continue to strive to treat everybody equally and how I want to be treated. But I do worry sometimes that even that can backfire, because I've witnessed another situation (on Twitter) where a lady complained that men who didn't get her joke tweet were mansplaining about how what she wrote was wrong, that they were explaining her (purposeful) error to her because she was a woman. Except others replied with their own versions of the joke and they too were getting "mainsplained" too, even though many were themselves men. That is, some people were misunderstanding the joke and commenting, it wasn't anything to do with her being a woman. But she turned it into a gender issue. So if I want to treat everyone equal, but that equal treatment can be seen as mansplaining or other negative gendered thing, that makes me more likely to disengage out of fear and then I'm not treating people equally, but not out of malice or feeling of superiority, just out of fear... Its a big problem and I don't know the answer either.
    - cwhiz 6y ago
      It’s easy. Investment is a math game. What is the upside and downside of either action? First choice, I remain silent. Best case, the female CEO kills it and I make some money. Worst case she flops and I lose my investment. Potentially great upside, relatively minor downside. Second choice, I suggest a change. Best case the company does well and I make money. Worst case I’m labeled a sexist and I’m effectively ejected from the startup world. Potentially great upside, but unlimited losses. Easy choice. I stay silent.
      - themolecularman 6y ago
        > Easy choice. I stay silent. Agreed same here. Unfortunately I think the reality will be that male founders may get even more funding than before, which will then lead to a potentially wider gap. And then the cycle will continue, a misread of the situation as sexism or more accusations of sexism than before will lead to more people staying with the easy choice of being silent. I'm reminded of that quote, "better to be silent and be thought of as an idiot than to open your mouth and remove any doubt people have." The same thing is true for investors but with idiot replaced by sexist.
      - darkerside 6y ago
        Actually, biggest upside is, you make a change, the business succeeds because of your change, and you not only make huge profits on the business but also continue to cement your reputation as a top tier advisor. But yes, doing it safely requires skill.
      - pm90 6y ago
        Third choice: you invest in creating a better relationship with the female founders so that you’re capable of expressing your concern without appearing sexist. I’m not sure why female founders are being portrayed as a different species? They’re humans. They know about sexism. They know when what they’re seeing is sexism vs critical feedback. And they will understand if you express your concerns with that.
        threwawasy1228 6y ago
        The path of least resistance requires less work? I don't disagree with your view on this but it seems like the incentives simply aren't aligned to learn how to dodge an ever evolving anti-sexist culture that is interpreted as having different communication rules by different people. If it was as easy as like "don't misgender people" or something sure, fine everyone can learn the rules of the protocol in under 15 minutes. There is no reason why anyone can't do that. The rules for interacting aren't this simple though, and they are often differently interpreted by different people. Learning how to communicate in a way that makes every person feel comfortable often just isn't worth the time investment. If we want people to take this other option it has to have significant and demonstrable positive incentives that make people want to invest the time.
    - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
      I am male, and I would say so. I do not live in the Anglo Saxon world; know this well. I would say so, and the thought that anyone would level some of these weird gender arguments I've primarily seen from Anglo-Saxon news sources wouldn't cross my mind, for it has never happened to me in my life. — and I am not entirely sure as to how much I should believe such stories I read on the internet that speak of how seemingly every single issue in Anglo-Saxon culture is phrased in terms of an imaginary gender war. I have never in such professional disputes in my life felt as though gender were used as an excuse, or reason, I have never in my life been accused of sexism when I criticized female staffmembers, and I have never seen it happen to anyone else either, I have never seen anyone go that route as a matter of defence. Perhaps, a difference is that Dutch professional analyses ten to be more numerical, and that the Anglo-Saxon more often wings it based on feeling rather than numbers. It is o course far harder to argue with numbers.
      - sidlls 6y ago
        The Dutch aren't any more analytical or rational than any other nation or nationality.
        Blikkentrekker 6y ago
        Of course there is a cultural difference between how much numbers speak in different cultures. What you want the world to be isn't what the world is, and in this case it's true, as by law in the Netherlands, various promotional and termination choices are required to be justified by numbers, which is not the case in Anglo-Saxon countries, where employers are more so at liberty to subjectively assess whom they wish to promote, and whom not.
        sidlls 6y ago
        Yes, and I'm sure the Dutch robotically compute such numbers, and there is rarely or never any subjectivity in their decision making that is justified ex post facto by clever accounting.
- awb 6y ago
  You give the honest feedback. We won’t progress as a society by being afraid.
  - oblio 6y ago
    What's good for society might not be good for the individual.
    - awb 6y ago
      True, but a broken society isn’t good for the individual either.
      - dkarras 6y ago
        But a broken society might maybe affect you somewhat vaguely in decades, but putting your neck out now can demolish your career today.
        awb 6y ago
        Yes, it’s a question we all need to ask ourselves. If you have kids though or plan to live more than a decade or more, the choice is hopefully one of bending towards the greater good for society rather than the individual.
        refenestrator 6y ago
        I have kids. Providing for them is number one, becoming a meaningless casualty of culture wars doesn't help their future at all.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Also, in the spirit of guilt by association, kids may become collateral damage too.
        awb 6y ago
- quicklime 6y ago
  For that particular situation, I'd stay silent. I agree there's a risk, and that this is a problem. Longer term though, I'd make sure we hire female investors into my VC fund. I'd take them along the journey of investing with this startup, and if I felt a female CEO needed to be replaced with a man, I'd discuss this with my investment partners. Any harsh feedback, if given, would be coming from all of us, and a mixed panel would be harder to accuse of sexism.
  - protomyth 6y ago
    Any harsh feedback, if given, would be coming from all of us, and a mixed panel would be harder to accuse of sexism. Nope, a hostile founder/CEO will pick the men out of the panel and sick the mob on them. The women on the panel are either oppressed or anti-feminism. The mob doesn't care and won't hear the whole story.
    - viro 6y ago
      > The women on the panel are either oppressed or anti-feminism. "internalized misogyny" is the term you are looking for.
    - quicklime 6y ago
      Yep, that's why I used the word "harder" instead of "impossible". At that point, the situation would be within my threshold of acceptable risk.
  - yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
    > a mixed panel would be harder to accuse of sexism That's not how this works. People eager to engage in this kind of ideological battle always have Internalised Misogyny as an argument to fall back on in this situation.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Use another woman as a shield? Damned if you do, damned if you don't...
- skc 6y ago
  If SV is run on candor as the author believes, then surely the solution is to state empirically why you think the roles should be swapped?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cistercianic 6y ago
>men erring on the side of protecting themselves and not wanting to take risks to engage with me meaningfully Do you believe that people should take potentially career-ending risks to benefit you?
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  No. But I believe I shouldn't have to literally starve and be homeless for years for the crime of being born with girl bits between my legs, which is more or less part of my back story here.
  - cistercianic 6y ago
    edit: removing my comment as this probably isn't a fruitful avenue of conversation.
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      I did freelance work to accommodate my health situation. I was also the apparently highest ranked woman on HN and failing to turn that into professional connections and professional development and adequate income. I believe my gender is a factor in that failing to become what I desired. Every single time I comment on that, without fail, someone acts like I am utterly full of shit and I get really awful and dismissive replies that completely fail to acknowledge that maybe I have a point and maybe my gender actually was a factor in my low income. (And still is.)
      - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
        Online relationships have a shred of value of what a personal one does. I don't know you but to me it sounds more like you didn't want to work for peanuts at a company and instead risked being an entrepreneur or something.
      - saberdancer 6y ago
        "I'm a freelancer. I polish resumes, I do a little website work and I do some writing." Polishing resumes and website work don't sound like highly paid jobs, regardless of your ranking on HN. This is probably bigger issue then your gender in your income.
go13 6y ago
As usually, in western gynocentric social order, men are evil and the problem and women are like kids: should have all privileges and carry no responsibility.
- dijit 6y ago
  This is not a constructive or helpful comment.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into gender flamewar hell. This sort of generic tangent is exactly what the site guidelines ask you not to post here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules, we'd be grateful. Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what ideology they're battling for or against, because it's destructive of what this site is supposed to be for. Curious conversation and ideological battle can't coexist any more than frisbee in a park can coexist with tank warfare. We're trying to optimize for curiosity here. Please use HN in the intended spirit from now on.
  - go13 6y ago
    okay, noted
    - dang 6y ago
      Appreciated!
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - go13 6y ago
        Can an intelligent conversation really happen like playing frisbee? Even court trials, where people want to get to the bottom of the truth, happen on the adversarial dialogue principle. Also, most of the comments under this topic were ideological. The post itself is ideological. Ideological - where two competing ideas fight. Often ideological means moral in it's root. You don't like this? What is wrong with ideological conversations then? I am the person who can analyse, think and articulate my conclusions, but, apparently, some positions and thoughts are not welcome here. Apparently, everybody, you, corporations, government, society, my employer want me to be an empty headed craftsman who can talk only on technical topics and avoids social and political topics because it can be discussed by big boys only.
nullsense 6y ago
It's more like reverse sexism here. I totally get the behaviour here. You simply don't want to be on the receiving end of potential backlash when you're just trying to help someone. The calculus being you feel as if you might make a genuine remark only to receive a response interpreting said remark as the product of sexism e.g "out of persons A and B, I think B should run the company" where A is a woman and B is a man is simply far too likely to be met with "well of course a man would pick another man" than "it seems they carefully evaluated the attributes and qualities of A and B and B is likely better suited". The former response is itself sexist as it's basing assumptions about the decision on attributes of gender first and foremost, hence it's a sort of reverse sexism if you will. And the man's move here is sexist also in the regard that his calculus of the reverse sexism response is also based on the assumption that this dynamic exists and presents a real danger and it's all based primarily on gender too. Sexism all the way down on both sides. I've come to understand in life through experience there are a very thorny class of problems that I don't know of a proper name for, but have formulated my own concept of the "non-native speakers dilemma". It goes as follows: You're on a bus and while listening to two strangers conversing you realise you can't quite understand what they're talking about. As a native speaker you feel perfectly confident that you know the language and you are simply missing context shared only by the individuals talking and hence it isn't possible for you to understand the conversation, and not because you don't know the language. If you are a non-native speaker, and depending on your level, you often start to doubt your abilities, and can never be fully sure if you simply don't understand because you're missing context that's not possible for you to obtain or there are gaps in your language skills that still need to be filled. I had this realisation on the bus about a decade ago when learning Japanese. But I've often thought back to it in certain situations and these kind in particular seem to crop up a lot. One example I overheard was a female engineer talking to another female non-engineer outside their workplace just about their experiences in their jobs. I heard the female engineer remark something along the lines of "the Architect often shoots down my ideas because I'm female". I sat thinking to myself... That's interesting because the architect shoots down my ideas too (different workplace, so I don't _know_ her situation) but it's certainly not because I'm female, because I'm not female, but it's probably because I'm an intermediate level Dev with lots to learn and the idea has some flaws in it that he can see that I can't. In this case I'm a "native speaker" so to speak, so I can be perfectly confident my thinking is accurate with respect to the reason why it's getting rejected. The female engineer is the so called "non-native speaker" where this pernicious dynamic exists making it nigh on impossible to confident that your assessment is accurate. Curious if that metaphor makes sense to others, or if others ever noticed the same thing?
ridethebike 6y ago
Wasn't Theranos debacle because the tech was never going to work due to it being borderline snake oil and whishful thinking hyped by con(wom)man?
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Yes, but it was called a "decacorn" because it was valued at $10 billion dollars and its valuation dropped overnight to zero when it was outed as a fraud. I posit that it wouldn't have gotten so crazy overvalued if it hadn't been headed by a pretty young woman. But trying to explain that is probably "off topic" and just thinking about trying to explain it makes me tired. I'd rather not.
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    > crazy overvalued I didn't pay too close attention to the story. If they had managed to produce the tech they claimed for the price they claimed, would $10 billion be crazy overvalued?
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      I have no idea. Possibly not. The issue is this: Would a man have gotten a $10 billion valuation based on hot air and zero results for years and years? Or would someone have called him on his shit a lot earlier? She was literally sleeping with and living with a much older male investor* while publicly claiming to be celibate in her twenties due to her extreme devotion to her career and business. I always figured that was bullshit and she was probably sleeping with someone and "I'm celibate" was probably a cover story. And no one went looking for that because of fear of being called sexist, I guess. I hesitated to give that opinion on HN for fear of back lash. But as a woman with six year of college and yadda, when I meet accomplished men in positions to open doors for me, a lot of them find me attractive and this actively closes doors in my face. I'm not willing to sleep with a man to open doors, not because I have some kind of moral objection to that but because I don't believe it actually works. It didn't actually work for Elizabeth Holmes. Sleeping with an investor did not, in fact, help her succeed in the world of business. It merely helped her cover up fraud while her problems grew larger until it resulted in both criminal and civil suits and her name is mud. She will never really recover from this debacle. So I don't think sleeping with men to open doors works. I think sleeping with rich and powerful men would get me sex and maybe would let me be a "kept woman" but it wouldn't get me taken seriously as a business woman and it wouldn't teach me how business is done and it wouldn't have some men giving me meaty, constructive feedback. * Edit: To be crystal clear here, I mean someone who invested in Theranos, I don't mean "Someone whose job title was investor." This was a clear conflict of interest.
Thorentis 6y ago
What is described in the article isn't sexism - it's fear. Fear of being labeled as a sexist.
- rocqua 6y ago
  Its treating people different based on gender. It depends very much on semantics whether you call that sexism. It is certainly not the form of sexism that people these days are most worried about.
  - tolbish 6y ago
    That would be discrimination based on sex, but no it would not be sexist in this case. Now if, for example, he treated people based on gender because he felt women belong in the kitchen, then that would be both sexist and discriminatory. The words sexism/racism often get confused with discrimination.
    - awb 6y ago
      > The words sexism/racism often get confused with discrimination. Oxford definition of “sexism” via Google: > prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex The definition of sexism seems to include discrimination. What definition are you using?
      - Closi 6y ago
        The problem is how politically charged the word 'sexist' is. I'm aware that the boring unemotional dictionary definition is treating someone differently on the basis of gender, but in reality if a guy is hanging out in a women's toilet its not generally seen as sexist/sexism to ask him to leave (even though this is discrimination on the basis of sex). So labelling anything where two genders are treated differently as 'sexism' or 'sexist' I don't think actually matches the modern usage of the word. I think the difference is it's usually used in a negative connotation and the type of discrimination is seen as non-acceptable - for instance most people wouldn't call a girl-band or boy-band sexist because they select their members based on gender, while most would call an employer sexist if they had a generic business and tried to segregate their teams into single-gender teams. Most people still don't have a problem with boy bands (i.e. a male-only-team in a music workplace), thus not sexist, but do have a problem with male-only-teams in other workplaces, thus sexist.
internetslave 6y ago
Basically the me too movement and the way in which men cannot defend themselves from sexual accusations back fired. Very predictable that this happened, there’s no easy solution.
- ookdatnog 6y ago
  It's perhaps a bit much to conclude from some anecdotes in this thread that the me too movement backfired (i.e., was a net negative for women in the workplace) as a whole.
  - sepin4 6y ago
    Your conclusion is as subjective as his is. There is no real objective criteria by which the "net negative" could be measured. Even history will not be objective, because it will be written by those in power. However I'm of the same mind as him, that this has been more negative than positive for three reasons: 1) This was a precedent for public shaming without evidence or due process 2) This generally changed the working dynamic between male and female to something extremely formal and sometimes borderline hostile 3) It was a bandwagon for actresses(and eventually other careers) to make money because of 1)
    - ookdatnog 6y ago
      You misread. I did not make any conclusions in my post. I do lean towards the opposite opinion. But I'm in no position to judge definitively whether the net effect has been positive or negative so far, I'd need to interview a sizeable and representative sample of women for that. Responding to your points: 1) What's missing from this argument is how we get to this point. IMO, the reason public shaming was used by the movement as a way to achieve justice, is because from their point of view, there was no other way to achieve justice. It's a classic example of "taking matters into their own hands" because the system failed them. Public shaming isn't the end goal, it should be a wake-up call to restore faith in the system. 2) I don't feel like anything meaningful changed in how I interact with female coworkers since metoo. But I only have my own experience to go on, so I won't make any big claims here. 3) Even if this is true (citation needed), it seems irrelevant.
xbar 6y ago
I sad that I cannot respond. It's too dangerous. Good luck.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
burlesona 6y ago
I think a lot of what is going on in society right now comes down to people buying into a worldview about victims and villains. When we talk about any ism, most people understand that to be a dynamic where one side of the ism is the oppressor - a villain, and the other side the oppressed - a victim. And as this article points out, the zeitgeist of the moment is the presumption of guilt, so any accusation of being an *ist comes with tremendous consequences, and people are understandably fearful of that. What you're observing that this creates an unfortunate vicious cycle: the fear of persecution for an accidental offense leads to disengagement which disadvantages the very people who the disengagement is meant "not to hurt." This isn't a new observation. MLK said: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction ... The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation." [1] I think this is where the extremes of "wokeism" and "social justice" miss the mark. When the mob is rallied to punish and seek vengeance against those who have done wrong, it can become a witch hunt. To Dr. King the path to victory over oppression was through forgiveness[2]. "Here then is the Christian weapon against social evil. We are to go out with the spirt of forgiveness, heal the hurts, right the wrongs and change society with forgiveness. Of course we don't think this is practical. This is the solution of the race problem." In the hypermedia era I honestly don't know if calm, civil discourse is possible. It certainly isn't profitable compared to the level of engagement driven by outrage. But I think if we wanted to take the next major step forward it would be wise to look back at how much progress happened during the Civil Rights era, and specifically to understand how and why the progress was made. Can we imagine applying Dr. King's words today, to seek to understand each other, to identify wrongs done intentionally or unintentionally, and then to forgive each other for past mistakes so we can do better going forward? [1]: https://mlk.wsu.edu/about-dr-king/famous-quotes/ https://mlk.wsu.edu/about-dr-king/famous-quotes/ [2]: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/meaning-forgiveness https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/mea...
nswindows 6y ago
On the contrary, it shows a clear imbalance of power towards repetitional destruction, something that was always in a women's arsenal but much less so in a man's (which would favour, let's say, settling things in a fight). So, considering you are the potential carrier of a nuclear power it makes sense to thread carefully. The problem isn't sexism. The problem is that being wrongly labeled as a sexist is a socio-economical death blow while the accusers gets scot free. This imbalance in power has to be settled somehow and I think this is a pretty good solution. Posting this anonymously since I'm not insane.
etripe 6y ago
What's sexist is the lack of agency ascribed to women, as in: success/failure is something that happens to women and something men work for/through. That is the textbook definition of objectification, very much the norm even today and in my mind perpetuated by modern woke feminism framing everything as "we're being oppressed", singling out men's contributions to the situation and ignoring women's own. I have the deepest sympathy for any hardship you have experienced. From the conversations I've had with my sister and colleagues, it's obvious sexism and its effects are real. That said, your post frames it as if your career is not in your own hands. Please afford yourself some more agency. I have overcome a narcissist parent, academic failure, classism and depression, working my way up to programming and a college degree on my own dime. I find it's fundamentally unproductive to see yourself as a car vendor mascot, being dragged whichever the wind blows. Engage with the people holding you back to get what you need and change your environment if there's no other way. I found "Nice girls [still] don't get the corner office" (the second edition added the "still") by Lois P. Frankel educational. The book's about her practice as a career coach for women and lists the mistakes her clients make to subconsciously sabotage their own careers. Of the 101 errors in the first print, I recognised a good 30% in myself. All this to say: it's not because there's sexism and perceived sexism that there's nothing else going on.

dageshi 6y ago

Genuine question, if you were a man in that situation, what would you do?

DoreenMichele 6y ago
In what situation?
- dageshi 6y ago
  Well the situation in the article seems like a good example, you think the female ceo should swap with the male co founder. You're invested but not massively and you've not really known either for years.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    The odds are good I would err on the side of not risking it Which is why this needs to be discussed: So a path forward can be found. Our current default patterns aren't working well.
    - worker767424 6y ago
      The only path forward is for enough high-profile, hyper-woke behavior examples to get negative public exposure. As long as men are afraid of accidentally becoming the target of the next donglegate, it's safer to just not engage.
      - DoreenMichele 6y ago
        I agree with what I think you are going for: That this super blamey "hyper woke" bullshit needs to stop if we are going to make any real forward progress on issues like this one. In my experience, one good example of how to do it right is vastly more powerful in solving social ills than any number of people being hung high and scapegoated for getting it wrong. In fact, I generally feel that scapegoating people in a system where there are no good answers is actively counterproductive and helps keep things stuck. Hanging someone high for not knowing "the right answer" in a system that gives zero good options for how to handle X implicitly suggests that good answers exist and implicitly denies the reality that "We don't know how to do this dance. We don't have an answer for that." It implicitly suggests there is a means to get this right when the reality is there isn't. So it actively distracts from real problem solving. I would like to see more real problem solving in this space. As a dirt poor woman, I have a vested interest in seeing a world where there are answers for how to do this dance. So far, I am mostly coming up empty under circumstances that suggest to me that my behavior is not the problem. The problem is the lack of good answers for how to do this dance.
        dkersten 6y ago
        Completely agree. Scapegoating can't have positive effects. At best, it causes what we see here: people staying silent in fear. At worst, it just alienates people and causes them to dig their heels in, doubling down on whatever bad behavior they're scapegoated for because they've got nothing left to lose. It rarely, if ever, actually improves behavior. I recently had a conversation where the lady I was talking to basically said (paraphrasing for brevity) "all men bad, always" and I'm really not sure what she even wanted to achieve. Some kind of perceived revenge maybe? I ended up disengaging and it left me feeling rather deflated. If I'm bad by default and there's nothing I can do to change that, why care at all? Luckily I know that most women are much more reasonable so I will continue to strive to treat everybody equally and how I want to be treated. But I do worry sometimes that even that can backfire, because I've witnessed another situation (on Twitter) where a lady complained that men who didn't get her joke tweet were mansplaining about how what she wrote was wrong, that they were explaining her (purposeful) error to her because she was a woman. Except others replied with their own versions of the joke and they too were getting "mainsplained" too, even though many were themselves men. That is, some people were misunderstanding the joke and commenting, it wasn't anything to do with her being a woman. But she turned it into a gender issue. So if I want to treat everyone equal, but that equal treatment can be seen as mansplaining or other negative gendered thing, that makes me more likely to disengage out of fear and then I'm not treating people equally, but not out of malice or feeling of superiority, just out of fear... Its a big problem and I don't know the answer either.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    It’s easy. Investment is a math game. What is the upside and downside of either action? First choice, I remain silent. Best case, the female CEO kills it and I make some money. Worst case she flops and I lose my investment. Potentially great upside, relatively minor downside. Second choice, I suggest a change. Best case the company does well and I make money. Worst case I’m labeled a sexist and I’m effectively ejected from the startup world. Potentially great upside, but unlimited losses. Easy choice. I stay silent.
    - themolecularman 6y ago
      > Easy choice. I stay silent. Agreed same here. Unfortunately I think the reality will be that male founders may get even more funding than before, which will then lead to a potentially wider gap. And then the cycle will continue, a misread of the situation as sexism or more accusations of sexism than before will lead to more people staying with the easy choice of being silent. I'm reminded of that quote, "better to be silent and be thought of as an idiot than to open your mouth and remove any doubt people have." The same thing is true for investors but with idiot replaced by sexist.
    - darkerside 6y ago
      Actually, biggest upside is, you make a change, the business succeeds because of your change, and you not only make huge profits on the business but also continue to cement your reputation as a top tier advisor. But yes, doing it safely requires skill.
    - pm90 6y ago
      Third choice: you invest in creating a better relationship with the female founders so that you’re capable of expressing your concern without appearing sexist. I’m not sure why female founders are being portrayed as a different species? They’re humans. They know about sexism. They know when what they’re seeing is sexism vs critical feedback. And they will understand if you express your concerns with that.
      - threwawasy1228 6y ago
        The path of least resistance requires less work? I don't disagree with your view on this but it seems like the incentives simply aren't aligned to learn how to dodge an ever evolving anti-sexist culture that is interpreted as having different communication rules by different people. If it was as easy as like "don't misgender people" or something sure, fine everyone can learn the rules of the protocol in under 15 minutes. There is no reason why anyone can't do that. The rules for interacting aren't this simple though, and they are often differently interpreted by different people. Learning how to communicate in a way that makes every person feel comfortable often just isn't worth the time investment. If we want people to take this other option it has to have significant and demonstrable positive incentives that make people want to invest the time.
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    I am male, and I would say so. I do not live in the Anglo Saxon world; know this well. I would say so, and the thought that anyone would level some of these weird gender arguments I've primarily seen from Anglo-Saxon news sources wouldn't cross my mind, for it has never happened to me in my life. — and I am not entirely sure as to how much I should believe such stories I read on the internet that speak of how seemingly every single issue in Anglo-Saxon culture is phrased in terms of an imaginary gender war. I have never in such professional disputes in my life felt as though gender were used as an excuse, or reason, I have never in my life been accused of sexism when I criticized female staffmembers, and I have never seen it happen to anyone else either, I have never seen anyone go that route as a matter of defence. Perhaps, a difference is that Dutch professional analyses ten to be more numerical, and that the Anglo-Saxon more often wings it based on feeling rather than numbers. It is o course far harder to argue with numbers.
    - sidlls 6y ago
      The Dutch aren't any more analytical or rational than any other nation or nationality.
      - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
        Of course there is a cultural difference between how much numbers speak in different cultures. What you want the world to be isn't what the world is, and in this case it's true, as by law in the Netherlands, various promotional and termination choices are required to be justified by numbers, which is not the case in Anglo-Saxon countries, where employers are more so at liberty to subjectively assess whom they wish to promote, and whom not.
        sidlls 6y ago
        Yes, and I'm sure the Dutch robotically compute such numbers, and there is rarely or never any subjectivity in their decision making that is justified ex post facto by clever accounting.
awb 6y ago
You give the honest feedback. We won’t progress as a society by being afraid.
- oblio 6y ago
  What's good for society might not be good for the individual.
  - awb 6y ago
    True, but a broken society isn’t good for the individual either.
    - dkarras 6y ago
      But a broken society might maybe affect you somewhat vaguely in decades, but putting your neck out now can demolish your career today.
      - awb 6y ago
        Yes, it’s a question we all need to ask ourselves. If you have kids though or plan to live more than a decade or more, the choice is hopefully one of bending towards the greater good for society rather than the individual.
        refenestrator 6y ago
        I have kids. Providing for them is number one, becoming a meaningless casualty of culture wars doesn't help their future at all.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Also, in the spirit of guilt by association, kids may become collateral damage too.
        awb 6y ago
quicklime 6y ago
For that particular situation, I'd stay silent. I agree there's a risk, and that this is a problem. Longer term though, I'd make sure we hire female investors into my VC fund. I'd take them along the journey of investing with this startup, and if I felt a female CEO needed to be replaced with a man, I'd discuss this with my investment partners. Any harsh feedback, if given, would be coming from all of us, and a mixed panel would be harder to accuse of sexism.
- protomyth 6y ago
  Any harsh feedback, if given, would be coming from all of us, and a mixed panel would be harder to accuse of sexism. Nope, a hostile founder/CEO will pick the men out of the panel and sick the mob on them. The women on the panel are either oppressed or anti-feminism. The mob doesn't care and won't hear the whole story.
  - viro 6y ago
    > The women on the panel are either oppressed or anti-feminism. "internalized misogyny" is the term you are looking for.
  - quicklime 6y ago
    Yep, that's why I used the word "harder" instead of "impossible". At that point, the situation would be within my threshold of acceptable risk.
- yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
  > a mixed panel would be harder to accuse of sexism That's not how this works. People eager to engage in this kind of ideological battle always have Internalised Misogyny as an argument to fall back on in this situation.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Use another woman as a shield? Damned if you do, damned if you don't...
skc 6y ago
If SV is run on candor as the author believes, then surely the solution is to state empirically why you think the roles should be swapped?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cistercianic 6y ago

>men erring on the side of protecting themselves and not wanting to take risks to engage with me meaningfully Do you believe that people should take potentially career-ending risks to benefit you?

DoreenMichele 6y ago
No. But I believe I shouldn't have to literally starve and be homeless for years for the crime of being born with girl bits between my legs, which is more or less part of my back story here.
- cistercianic 6y ago
  edit: removing my comment as this probably isn't a fruitful avenue of conversation.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    I did freelance work to accommodate my health situation. I was also the apparently highest ranked woman on HN and failing to turn that into professional connections and professional development and adequate income. I believe my gender is a factor in that failing to become what I desired. Every single time I comment on that, without fail, someone acts like I am utterly full of shit and I get really awful and dismissive replies that completely fail to acknowledge that maybe I have a point and maybe my gender actually was a factor in my low income. (And still is.)
    - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
      Online relationships have a shred of value of what a personal one does. I don't know you but to me it sounds more like you didn't want to work for peanuts at a company and instead risked being an entrepreneur or something.
    - saberdancer 6y ago
      "I'm a freelancer. I polish resumes, I do a little website work and I do some writing." Polishing resumes and website work don't sound like highly paid jobs, regardless of your ranking on HN. This is probably bigger issue then your gender in your income.

go13 6y ago

As usually, in western gynocentric social order, men are evil and the problem and women are like kids: should have all privileges and carry no responsibility.

dijit 6y ago
This is not a constructive or helpful comment.
dang 6y ago
Please don't take HN threads into gender flamewar hell. This sort of generic tangent is exactly what the site guidelines ask you not to post here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules, we'd be grateful. Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what ideology they're battling for or against, because it's destructive of what this site is supposed to be for. Curious conversation and ideological battle can't coexist any more than frisbee in a park can coexist with tank warfare. We're trying to optimize for curiosity here. Please use HN in the intended spirit from now on.
- go13 6y ago
  okay, noted
  - dang 6y ago
    Appreciated!
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - go13 6y ago
      Can an intelligent conversation really happen like playing frisbee? Even court trials, where people want to get to the bottom of the truth, happen on the adversarial dialogue principle. Also, most of the comments under this topic were ideological. The post itself is ideological. Ideological - where two competing ideas fight. Often ideological means moral in it's root. You don't like this? What is wrong with ideological conversations then? I am the person who can analyse, think and articulate my conclusions, but, apparently, some positions and thoughts are not welcome here. Apparently, everybody, you, corporations, government, society, my employer want me to be an empty headed craftsman who can talk only on technical topics and avoids social and political topics because it can be discussed by big boys only.

nullsense 6y ago

It's more like reverse sexism here. I totally get the behaviour here. You simply don't want to be on the receiving end of potential backlash when you're just trying to help someone. The calculus being you feel as if you might make a genuine remark only to receive a response interpreting said remark as the product of sexism e.g "out of persons A and B, I think B should run the company" where A is a woman and B is a man is simply far too likely to be met with "well of course a man would pick another man" than "it seems they carefully evaluated the attributes and qualities of A and B and B is likely better suited". The former response is itself sexist as it's basing assumptions about the decision on attributes of gender first and foremost, hence it's a sort of reverse sexism if you will. And the man's move here is sexist also in the regard that his calculus of the reverse sexism response is also based on the assumption that this dynamic exists and presents a real danger and it's all based primarily on gender too. Sexism all the way down on both sides. I've come to understand in life through experience there are a very thorny class of problems that I don't know of a proper name for, but have formulated my own concept of the "non-native speakers dilemma". It goes as follows: You're on a bus and while listening to two strangers conversing you realise you can't quite understand what they're talking about. As a native speaker you feel perfectly confident that you know the language and you are simply missing context shared only by the individuals talking and hence it isn't possible for you to understand the conversation, and not because you don't know the language. If you are a non-native speaker, and depending on your level, you often start to doubt your abilities, and can never be fully sure if you simply don't understand because you're missing context that's not possible for you to obtain or there are gaps in your language skills that still need to be filled. I had this realisation on the bus about a decade ago when learning Japanese. But I've often thought back to it in certain situations and these kind in particular seem to crop up a lot. One example I overheard was a female engineer talking to another female non-engineer outside their workplace just about their experiences in their jobs. I heard the female engineer remark something along the lines of "the Architect often shoots down my ideas because I'm female". I sat thinking to myself... That's interesting because the architect shoots down my ideas too (different workplace, so I don't _know_ her situation) but it's certainly not because I'm female, because I'm not female, but it's probably because I'm an intermediate level Dev with lots to learn and the idea has some flaws in it that he can see that I can't. In this case I'm a "native speaker" so to speak, so I can be perfectly confident my thinking is accurate with respect to the reason why it's getting rejected. The female engineer is the so called "non-native speaker" where this pernicious dynamic exists making it nigh on impossible to confident that your assessment is accurate. Curious if that metaphor makes sense to others, or if others ever noticed the same thing?

ridethebike 6y ago

Wasn't Theranos debacle because the tech was never going to work due to it being borderline snake oil and whishful thinking hyped by con(wom)man?

DoreenMichele 6y ago
Yes, but it was called a "decacorn" because it was valued at $10 billion dollars and its valuation dropped overnight to zero when it was outed as a fraud. I posit that it wouldn't have gotten so crazy overvalued if it hadn't been headed by a pretty young woman. But trying to explain that is probably "off topic" and just thinking about trying to explain it makes me tired. I'd rather not.
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  > crazy overvalued I didn't pay too close attention to the story. If they had managed to produce the tech they claimed for the price they claimed, would $10 billion be crazy overvalued?
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    I have no idea. Possibly not. The issue is this: Would a man have gotten a $10 billion valuation based on hot air and zero results for years and years? Or would someone have called him on his shit a lot earlier? She was literally sleeping with and living with a much older male investor* while publicly claiming to be celibate in her twenties due to her extreme devotion to her career and business. I always figured that was bullshit and she was probably sleeping with someone and "I'm celibate" was probably a cover story. And no one went looking for that because of fear of being called sexist, I guess. I hesitated to give that opinion on HN for fear of back lash. But as a woman with six year of college and yadda, when I meet accomplished men in positions to open doors for me, a lot of them find me attractive and this actively closes doors in my face. I'm not willing to sleep with a man to open doors, not because I have some kind of moral objection to that but because I don't believe it actually works. It didn't actually work for Elizabeth Holmes. Sleeping with an investor did not, in fact, help her succeed in the world of business. It merely helped her cover up fraud while her problems grew larger until it resulted in both criminal and civil suits and her name is mud. She will never really recover from this debacle. So I don't think sleeping with men to open doors works. I think sleeping with rich and powerful men would get me sex and maybe would let me be a "kept woman" but it wouldn't get me taken seriously as a business woman and it wouldn't teach me how business is done and it wouldn't have some men giving me meaty, constructive feedback. * Edit: To be crystal clear here, I mean someone who invested in Theranos, I don't mean "Someone whose job title was investor." This was a clear conflict of interest.

Thorentis 6y ago

What is described in the article isn't sexism - it's fear. Fear of being labeled as a sexist.

rocqua 6y ago
Its treating people different based on gender. It depends very much on semantics whether you call that sexism. It is certainly not the form of sexism that people these days are most worried about.
- tolbish 6y ago
  That would be discrimination based on sex, but no it would not be sexist in this case. Now if, for example, he treated people based on gender because he felt women belong in the kitchen, then that would be both sexist and discriminatory. The words sexism/racism often get confused with discrimination.
  - awb 6y ago
    > The words sexism/racism often get confused with discrimination. Oxford definition of “sexism” via Google: > prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex The definition of sexism seems to include discrimination. What definition are you using?
    - Closi 6y ago
      The problem is how politically charged the word 'sexist' is. I'm aware that the boring unemotional dictionary definition is treating someone differently on the basis of gender, but in reality if a guy is hanging out in a women's toilet its not generally seen as sexist/sexism to ask him to leave (even though this is discrimination on the basis of sex). So labelling anything where two genders are treated differently as 'sexism' or 'sexist' I don't think actually matches the modern usage of the word. I think the difference is it's usually used in a negative connotation and the type of discrimination is seen as non-acceptable - for instance most people wouldn't call a girl-band or boy-band sexist because they select their members based on gender, while most would call an employer sexist if they had a generic business and tried to segregate their teams into single-gender teams. Most people still don't have a problem with boy bands (i.e. a male-only-team in a music workplace), thus not sexist, but do have a problem with male-only-teams in other workplaces, thus sexist.

internetslave 6y ago

Basically the me too movement and the way in which men cannot defend themselves from sexual accusations back fired. Very predictable that this happened, there’s no easy solution.

ookdatnog 6y ago
It's perhaps a bit much to conclude from some anecdotes in this thread that the me too movement backfired (i.e., was a net negative for women in the workplace) as a whole.
- sepin4 6y ago
  Your conclusion is as subjective as his is. There is no real objective criteria by which the "net negative" could be measured. Even history will not be objective, because it will be written by those in power. However I'm of the same mind as him, that this has been more negative than positive for three reasons: 1) This was a precedent for public shaming without evidence or due process 2) This generally changed the working dynamic between male and female to something extremely formal and sometimes borderline hostile 3) It was a bandwagon for actresses(and eventually other careers) to make money because of 1)
  - ookdatnog 6y ago
    You misread. I did not make any conclusions in my post. I do lean towards the opposite opinion. But I'm in no position to judge definitively whether the net effect has been positive or negative so far, I'd need to interview a sizeable and representative sample of women for that. Responding to your points: 1) What's missing from this argument is how we get to this point. IMO, the reason public shaming was used by the movement as a way to achieve justice, is because from their point of view, there was no other way to achieve justice. It's a classic example of "taking matters into their own hands" because the system failed them. Public shaming isn't the end goal, it should be a wake-up call to restore faith in the system. 2) I don't feel like anything meaningful changed in how I interact with female coworkers since metoo. But I only have my own experience to go on, so I won't make any big claims here. 3) Even if this is true (citation needed), it seems irrelevant.

xbar 6y ago

I sad that I cannot respond. It's too dangerous. Good luck.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

burlesona 6y ago

I think a lot of what is going on in society right now comes down to people buying into a worldview about victims and villains. When we talk about any ism, most people understand that to be a dynamic where one side of the ism is the oppressor - a villain, and the other side the oppressed - a victim. And as this article points out, the zeitgeist of the moment is the presumption of guilt, so any accusation of being an *ist comes with tremendous consequences, and people are understandably fearful of that. What you're observing that this creates an unfortunate vicious cycle: the fear of persecution for an accidental offense leads to disengagement which disadvantages the very people who the disengagement is meant "not to hurt." This isn't a new observation. MLK said: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction ... The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation." [1] I think this is where the extremes of "wokeism" and "social justice" miss the mark. When the mob is rallied to punish and seek vengeance against those who have done wrong, it can become a witch hunt. To Dr. King the path to victory over oppression was through forgiveness[2]. "Here then is the Christian weapon against social evil. We are to go out with the spirt of forgiveness, heal the hurts, right the wrongs and change society with forgiveness. Of course we don't think this is practical. This is the solution of the race problem." In the hypermedia era I honestly don't know if calm, civil discourse is possible. It certainly isn't profitable compared to the level of engagement driven by outrage. But I think if we wanted to take the next major step forward it would be wise to look back at how much progress happened during the Civil Rights era, and specifically to understand how and why the progress was made. Can we imagine applying Dr. King's words today, to seek to understand each other, to identify wrongs done intentionally or unintentionally, and then to forgive each other for past mistakes so we can do better going forward? [1]: https://mlk.wsu.edu/about-dr-king/famous-quotes/ https://mlk.wsu.edu/about-dr-king/famous-quotes/ [2]: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/meaning-forgiveness https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/mea...

nswindows 6y ago

On the contrary, it shows a clear imbalance of power towards repetitional destruction, something that was always in a women's arsenal but much less so in a man's (which would favour, let's say, settling things in a fight). So, considering you are the potential carrier of a nuclear power it makes sense to thread carefully. The problem isn't sexism. The problem is that being wrongly labeled as a sexist is a socio-economical death blow while the accusers gets scot free. This imbalance in power has to be settled somehow and I think this is a pretty good solution. Posting this anonymously since I'm not insane.

etripe 6y ago

What's sexist is the lack of agency ascribed to women, as in: success/failure is something that happens to women and something men work for/through. That is the textbook definition of objectification, very much the norm even today and in my mind perpetuated by modern woke feminism framing everything as "we're being oppressed", singling out men's contributions to the situation and ignoring women's own. I have the deepest sympathy for any hardship you have experienced. From the conversations I've had with my sister and colleagues, it's obvious sexism and its effects are real. That said, your post frames it as if your career is not in your own hands. Please afford yourself some more agency. I have overcome a narcissist parent, academic failure, classism and depression, working my way up to programming and a college degree on my own dime. I find it's fundamentally unproductive to see yourself as a car vendor mascot, being dragged whichever the wind blows. Engage with the people holding you back to get what you need and change your environment if there's no other way. I found "Nice girls [still] don't get the corner office" (the second edition added the "still") by Lois P. Frankel educational. The book's about her practice as a career coach for women and lists the mistakes her clients make to subconsciously sabotage their own careers. Of the 101 errors in the first print, I recognised a good 30% in myself. All this to say: it's not because there's sexism and perceived sexism that there's nothing else going on.