8 ms·

Skimming over the comments here, once again I find myself distressed at the large number of men in the tech community who just don't get it. Whether it's sexis

Skimming over the comments here, once again I find myself distressed at the large number of men in the tech community who just don't get it. Whether it's sexist jokes, inappropriate language or illustrations, or plain old stereotypes, it sometimes feels like the tech community's firmly stuck in the 70s. The worst thing is that none of this is difficult to solve, it just involves growing up, frankly.

sp332 15y ago
It's because they don't intend to be offensive. For example: in the US, holding up two fingers is cool. In the UK, it's offensive. So one group of people can have a set of behaviors that another group finds offensive, but the first group has no idea why the second group is offended because they don't intend offense. I know there are a lot of actually misogynistic people in tech. I'm only talking about the guys who "don't get it."
- itg 15y ago
  If you hold up two fingers in the UK and someone tells you it is offensive, you stop doing it. Despite the numerous people who try to educate the guys who "don't get it", they continue their immature ways. I'm not going to give them a free pass.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
    - itg 15y ago
      I don't think or have the mindset that women are living in some sort of separate culture from us or there are stark differences between us. It's the trolls, misogynists, etc that treat them differently only because they are women.
  - getsat 15y ago
    > If you hold up two fingers in the UK and someone tells you it is offensive, you stop doing it. Wouldn't this be more analogous to people from the UK coming into a typically US-centric area and complaining about US people holding up two fingers? I agree that it's wrong, but change will probably be slow...
    - sp332 15y ago
      It's like the US trying to attract more UK people by telling them not to be offended by rude gestures, instead of stopping.
- antihero 15y ago
  Well perhaps there's some social responsibility and generally being an adult involved in not offending people? For instance, I'm no huge fan of Islam (or any religion), however, my beef is with the doctrine and the leaders, not the average day to day Muslim, so I'll actively speak out against Islamophobia and try not to offend the average Muslim. It's called actively not being a jerk.
  - sp332 15y ago
    If I'm in the US, and I see that some Arab guy got offended by someone trying to congratulate him by giving him a thumbs-up, I might be completely at a loss as to what exactly he was offended by, or how to avoid it in future.
  - gizmo 15y ago
    Conflict avoidance isn't always the adult thing to do. If people are strongly opposed to some views, or some aspects of some culture then why shouldn't they speak out about it? If that means they're jerks, so what? Ridicule or rudeness is just a tool in the toolbox and it can be more effective than reason. The society we've built is by no means adult or responsible. Millions starve, get killed in genocides. Slavery is still rampant. Atrocities happen all across the world. Animals are treated inhumanely. The 1st world doesn't make much of an effort at addressing these problems. Why? Because people rather not talk about it or know the details about the truly horrendous things going on in this world. Ignorance really is bliss. This status quo is only possible because we, responsible adults, choose to stick our collective heads in the sand. We need to get confronted with many things we disagree with and we have to stop passively supporting the status quo (unless we really think this is the best we can do as a species). In the big scheme of things hurt feelings don't matter. If a vegan tells me with a smirk "If you knew where that steak came from you wouldn't be eating it" it's easy for me to get upset at the vegan for being a jerk, for ruining my appetite. But I wouldn't get offended if the vegan were simply wrong. I get upset because I know, deep down, that I would never set foot in a beef processing plant. Sure, the vegan is a jerk, but is he wrong? Going with your example; substitute characters if necessary: You may not have a beef with the average day to day Muslim, but you do have a beef with people who have a beef with the average day to day Muslim. Even though your adult tolerance may just be based the comforting belief that the average Muslim is not the problem and that a few religious leaders are. The jerk probably believes that the average day to day Muslim is part of the problem. Who is right? That's a factual question about the world. And if it turns out, for whatever reason, that the jerk is right and you are wrong would you then change your mind? Would being a jerk then be justified? Or would you still choose the non-confrontational route and avoid giving offense? Is your true objection that only the Muslims leaders are the problem or is it a mere rationalization for politeness and civility? (Questions are rhetorical. I'm not defending the sexism in the FOSS world, nor do I judge you for being tolerant.)
ubercore 15y ago
Have there been any articles/studies about what gender relations are like in other equally "divided" industries? I'm wondering if it's related to a certain type of person naturally attracted to software/tech, or if it can develop naturally in any industry split pretty starkly along gender lines.
- mtoddh 15y ago
  It would be interesting- whether it's job ads comparing programmers to ninjas and rock stars, to using sexual images in slides at conferences, the tech industry seems sort of unique with regards to behavior that might be seen as juvenile in other industries.
- propater 15y ago
  It seems to develop naturally in any industry/community with a strong gender imbalance (cf. the "elevatorgate" in the skeptic community.) The situation seems to improve as populations approach parity.
  - bermanoid 15y ago
    The situation seems to improve as populations approach parity. This can appear to be true even if men don't, on average, change their behavior at all. Think about it: if 10% of the people in a field are female, that means that 90% of a woman's interactions in the field are with men. If the field becomes more balanced, that will come down towards 50%. Even if men in the field individually keep acting the same, that's almost a 50% reduction in the amount of sexism a woman will experience, because she's interacting with fewer men and more women. We tend to notice offensive things by counting them, not by figuring out expected values based on sample sizes, so things would appear to improve, even though the men will not have changed their behavior at all. The real WTF odd fact is that as the field tips towards 50/50 women, the amount of sexism that (non-sexist) men will observe will actually go up, because a higher proportion of the interactions they observe will be male/female (whereas with a highly tilted sex ratio, they usually mainly see male/male conversations taking place). IMO the real problem with the lopsided male/female ratio in tech is that women experience almost double the harassment they would if it was 50/50, so they think things are much worse than "average", and meanwhile men witness a much smaller amount (almost 3:1), so they think things are better. Then both sides clash, and argue about whether there's a problem or not, relative to other industries. Based on their observations, both men an women could probably be forgiven for jumping to the conclusions that they do; unfortunately, I haven't seen any sort of actual numbers that might help pin down whether men in tech are actually worse, better, or the same as men in other fields. That women experience more harassment does not necessarily mean individual men are more likely to harass.
airlocksoftware 15y ago
I can barely believe the things I'm reading on this page. Lots of comments similar to "It's just trolling, get over it." And "she's just reinforcing negative stereotypes of women by not being strong enough to handle the internet." And "men deal with negative comments all the time and don't whine about it." These are the exact attitudes that are the problem! Why can they not see this?
- sp332 15y ago
  When she complains about the trolling, there is nothing we can do about that. It's a completely different mindset to just try to empathize without trying to solve the problem.
- mcantor 15y ago
  By definition, privilege is a lack of perspective--that includes [straight] [white] male privilege. That's why it's so hard for many guys (not just programmers) to understand.
  - fleitz 15y ago
    I'm pretty sure the definition of privilege is not lack of perspective. Maybe Zed Shaw should quit too, he seems to get a lot of online harassment, too bad his white straight male privilege isn't stopping it. There are a lot of shitty things in any community, lets focus on fixing the community and not trying to figure out which genders / sexual orientations / races are to blame. Maybe people should stop trolling everyone and not just women. Have you considered that the troll is anonymous because the community would never put up with this kind of behavior? This isn't an issue of community standards, it's an issue of someone being an asshole who possibly happens to share a gender / race with myself.
    - icosa 15y ago
      Women get a whole other dimension of online harrasment that men don't. For a gaming-centered sample, look at http://fatuglyorslutty.com/ http://fatuglyorslutty.com/ .
tptacek 15y ago
This is mostly nerds wanting to have something to argue about. For reasons I can't put my fingers on, nothing seems to irritate nerds more than the idea that they're oppressing people; it probably has something to do with the fact that so many of them were picked on growing up. The reality is that the stuff we're talking about here would, for the most part, be a firing offense at most companies.
- ezy 15y ago
  From personal experience, my impression is that this kind of defensiveness comes from a lack of perspective. Especially when you realize you're hurting someone (and perhaps yourself). I don't know whether it's confined to nerds -- there are a lot of regressive, defensive people out there. :-) For people who pride themselves on being analytical and meritocratic, it can be a difficult thing to realize that no amount of detailed analysis is going to help because you've been living in a bubble for most of your life -- you have only a small amount real data to work with. It can be even more startling when your meritocracy not ends up not only not really being one, but possibly impossible to achieve given the constraints of human nature.
- bitops 15y ago
  From "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson: they think they're too smart to be sexist.
- VladRussian 15y ago
  >it probably has something to do with the fact that so many of them were picked on growing up. and here we're talking about how perpetrating of stereotypes is a bad thing edit: found a word for it in English - hypocrisy.
- bermanoid 15y ago
  [tl;dr: With a lopsided sex ratio in a field, women are more likely to experience sexism, and men are less likely to witness it, than if the ratio was closer to equal, regardless of the actual frequency of sexist behavior. The fact that you (male) don't see much of it doesn't necessarily mean that it's not happening, and the fact that you (female) experience a lot of it doesn't necessarily mean that the men in the field are worse than elsewhere.] I'd like to just add a bit (edit: okay, a rather long-ish bit...) about how a reasonable, non-sexist guy could end up assuming that things are not that bad in the industry, whereas a reasonable women can have experienced more sexism than in other industries, and both can be "right". All without the typical (and IMO, rather cynical) assumption that guys are just playing along, encouraging it, or putting on blinders. And also (more importantly) without the assumption that men in the industry are any better or worse than in any other. This should make both sides pause a bit before they scream about how unreasonable people on the other side are being... For a lot of men, the skepticism is not over whether actions are sexist or not, but over how often they actually happen. My argument is that this difference in perception is almost exclusively due to the extremely lopsided sex ratio in tech, not due to people in tech being any better or worse: I don't know exact numbers, but let's say somewhere around 10% of tech workers are female (in my experience it's even worse than that, but I don't know for sure, industry-wide). Going with that number, that means that out of a random sample of interactions between other people that you (let's assume "you" are a non-sexist guy that can accurately recognize sexism when you see it) personally witness over the course of a career, only 18% will be between a man and a woman. As for the percentage of sexist guys (I'm making the simplifying assumption that a guy is either sexist or not-sexist - I could easily remove this restriction and replace it with a probability distribution, but it would needlessly complicate things)...I'm not sure about that, but let's aim high and say it's 20% (I don't think more than 20% of us would, for instance, show pantless pictures of ourselves, send harassing e-mails, proposition an intern, ask about kids at an interview, etc.). Even when a sexist guy interacts with a woman, we should probably assume that it's a reasonably small percentage of those interactions, maybe 10%, where he'd actually say or do something offensive, especially with someone else present. [Again, all these numbers are pure fiction, placeholders for the purpose of demonstrating the extreme effect that the sex-ratio has, rather than figuring out anything in detail] Put that all together, and let's say that you, a not-sexist guy, witness 1000 interactions between other people at work during some time period. By these estimates, only 3 of those interactions would be "sexist interactions." The problem seems rather small when you look at it that way, and in fact, it's small enough that statistical variation could mean that you never end up witnessing such interactions at all, even if they are happening at your place of work. Now, the meat of the argument: consider, instead, the point of view of a woman. 18% of all of her interactions are with sexist men, and 1.8% of her interactions involve a guy acting sexist towards her. By the percentages, that's a sixfold increase over what you would notice as a man, even though the actual frequency of sexist behavior is the same. I think that's where this sort of discussion breaks down: those of us that are not sexist, but are not women, see an apparent level of sexism that is six times lower than what women observe in their own work interactions, and that's arguably the difference between the perception that sexism is pervasive and oppressive, versus barely worth considering. And it's all due to the sex ratio - if it was 50/50, then the percent of interactions that are sexist that men observe (holding the other numbers the same) would be 50% * 20% * 10% = 1%, and what women observe in their own interactions would be 50% * 20% * 10% = 1%, so there would be an equal perception of sexism. We all need to keep this in mind to bring some sanity these sorts of discussions: girls, it's not that the men that doubt this are assholes or privilege-denying-misogynists, it's that they truly, honestly witness sexism less often than they would if they worked in a field with a more balanced gender ratio, and it's not necessarily that they're complicit or ignoring it. And guys, the women aren't being whiny or weak, they truly, honestly experience a higher percentage of sexist interactions than they would in a field with more women. FWIW, all of this applies to any minority situation, and is (IMO) one of the biggest unrealized factors that leads to disagreement whenever these arguments come up.

sp332 15y ago

It's because they don't intend to be offensive. For example: in the US, holding up two fingers is cool. In the UK, it's offensive. So one group of people can have a set of behaviors that another group finds offensive, but the first group has no idea why the second group is offended because they don't intend offense. I know there are a lot of actually misogynistic people in tech. I'm only talking about the guys who "don't get it."

itg 15y ago
If you hold up two fingers in the UK and someone tells you it is offensive, you stop doing it. Despite the numerous people who try to educate the guys who "don't get it", they continue their immature ways. I'm not going to give them a free pass.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - itg 15y ago
    I don't think or have the mindset that women are living in some sort of separate culture from us or there are stark differences between us. It's the trolls, misogynists, etc that treat them differently only because they are women.
- getsat 15y ago
  > If you hold up two fingers in the UK and someone tells you it is offensive, you stop doing it. Wouldn't this be more analogous to people from the UK coming into a typically US-centric area and complaining about US people holding up two fingers? I agree that it's wrong, but change will probably be slow...
  - sp332 15y ago
    It's like the US trying to attract more UK people by telling them not to be offended by rude gestures, instead of stopping.
antihero 15y ago
Well perhaps there's some social responsibility and generally being an adult involved in not offending people? For instance, I'm no huge fan of Islam (or any religion), however, my beef is with the doctrine and the leaders, not the average day to day Muslim, so I'll actively speak out against Islamophobia and try not to offend the average Muslim. It's called actively not being a jerk.
- sp332 15y ago
  If I'm in the US, and I see that some Arab guy got offended by someone trying to congratulate him by giving him a thumbs-up, I might be completely at a loss as to what exactly he was offended by, or how to avoid it in future.
- gizmo 15y ago
  Conflict avoidance isn't always the adult thing to do. If people are strongly opposed to some views, or some aspects of some culture then why shouldn't they speak out about it? If that means they're jerks, so what? Ridicule or rudeness is just a tool in the toolbox and it can be more effective than reason. The society we've built is by no means adult or responsible. Millions starve, get killed in genocides. Slavery is still rampant. Atrocities happen all across the world. Animals are treated inhumanely. The 1st world doesn't make much of an effort at addressing these problems. Why? Because people rather not talk about it or know the details about the truly horrendous things going on in this world. Ignorance really is bliss. This status quo is only possible because we, responsible adults, choose to stick our collective heads in the sand. We need to get confronted with many things we disagree with and we have to stop passively supporting the status quo (unless we really think this is the best we can do as a species). In the big scheme of things hurt feelings don't matter. If a vegan tells me with a smirk "If you knew where that steak came from you wouldn't be eating it" it's easy for me to get upset at the vegan for being a jerk, for ruining my appetite. But I wouldn't get offended if the vegan were simply wrong. I get upset because I know, deep down, that I would never set foot in a beef processing plant. Sure, the vegan is a jerk, but is he wrong? Going with your example; substitute characters if necessary: You may not have a beef with the average day to day Muslim, but you do have a beef with people who have a beef with the average day to day Muslim. Even though your adult tolerance may just be based the comforting belief that the average Muslim is not the problem and that a few religious leaders are. The jerk probably believes that the average day to day Muslim is part of the problem. Who is right? That's a factual question about the world. And if it turns out, for whatever reason, that the jerk is right and you are wrong would you then change your mind? Would being a jerk then be justified? Or would you still choose the non-confrontational route and avoid giving offense? Is your true objection that only the Muslims leaders are the problem or is it a mere rationalization for politeness and civility? (Questions are rhetorical. I'm not defending the sexism in the FOSS world, nor do I judge you for being tolerant.)

ubercore 15y ago

Have there been any articles/studies about what gender relations are like in other equally "divided" industries? I'm wondering if it's related to a certain type of person naturally attracted to software/tech, or if it can develop naturally in any industry split pretty starkly along gender lines.

mtoddh 15y ago
It would be interesting- whether it's job ads comparing programmers to ninjas and rock stars, to using sexual images in slides at conferences, the tech industry seems sort of unique with regards to behavior that might be seen as juvenile in other industries.
propater 15y ago
It seems to develop naturally in any industry/community with a strong gender imbalance (cf. the "elevatorgate" in the skeptic community.) The situation seems to improve as populations approach parity.
- bermanoid 15y ago
  The situation seems to improve as populations approach parity. This can appear to be true even if men don't, on average, change their behavior at all. Think about it: if 10% of the people in a field are female, that means that 90% of a woman's interactions in the field are with men. If the field becomes more balanced, that will come down towards 50%. Even if men in the field individually keep acting the same, that's almost a 50% reduction in the amount of sexism a woman will experience, because she's interacting with fewer men and more women. We tend to notice offensive things by counting them, not by figuring out expected values based on sample sizes, so things would appear to improve, even though the men will not have changed their behavior at all. The real WTF odd fact is that as the field tips towards 50/50 women, the amount of sexism that (non-sexist) men will observe will actually go up, because a higher proportion of the interactions they observe will be male/female (whereas with a highly tilted sex ratio, they usually mainly see male/male conversations taking place). IMO the real problem with the lopsided male/female ratio in tech is that women experience almost double the harassment they would if it was 50/50, so they think things are much worse than "average", and meanwhile men witness a much smaller amount (almost 3:1), so they think things are better. Then both sides clash, and argue about whether there's a problem or not, relative to other industries. Based on their observations, both men an women could probably be forgiven for jumping to the conclusions that they do; unfortunately, I haven't seen any sort of actual numbers that might help pin down whether men in tech are actually worse, better, or the same as men in other fields. That women experience more harassment does not necessarily mean individual men are more likely to harass.

airlocksoftware 15y ago

I can barely believe the things I'm reading on this page. Lots of comments similar to "It's just trolling, get over it." And "she's just reinforcing negative stereotypes of women by not being strong enough to handle the internet." And "men deal with negative comments all the time and don't whine about it." These are the exact attitudes that are the problem! Why can they not see this?

sp332 15y ago
When she complains about the trolling, there is nothing we can do about that. It's a completely different mindset to just try to empathize without trying to solve the problem.
mcantor 15y ago
By definition, privilege is a lack of perspective--that includes [straight] [white] male privilege. That's why it's so hard for many guys (not just programmers) to understand.
- fleitz 15y ago
  I'm pretty sure the definition of privilege is not lack of perspective. Maybe Zed Shaw should quit too, he seems to get a lot of online harassment, too bad his white straight male privilege isn't stopping it. There are a lot of shitty things in any community, lets focus on fixing the community and not trying to figure out which genders / sexual orientations / races are to blame. Maybe people should stop trolling everyone and not just women. Have you considered that the troll is anonymous because the community would never put up with this kind of behavior? This isn't an issue of community standards, it's an issue of someone being an asshole who possibly happens to share a gender / race with myself.
  - icosa 15y ago
    Women get a whole other dimension of online harrasment that men don't. For a gaming-centered sample, look at http://fatuglyorslutty.com/ http://fatuglyorslutty.com/ .

tptacek 15y ago

This is mostly nerds wanting to have something to argue about. For reasons I can't put my fingers on, nothing seems to irritate nerds more than the idea that they're oppressing people; it probably has something to do with the fact that so many of them were picked on growing up. The reality is that the stuff we're talking about here would, for the most part, be a firing offense at most companies.

ezy 15y ago
From personal experience, my impression is that this kind of defensiveness comes from a lack of perspective. Especially when you realize you're hurting someone (and perhaps yourself). I don't know whether it's confined to nerds -- there are a lot of regressive, defensive people out there. :-) For people who pride themselves on being analytical and meritocratic, it can be a difficult thing to realize that no amount of detailed analysis is going to help because you've been living in a bubble for most of your life -- you have only a small amount real data to work with. It can be even more startling when your meritocracy not ends up not only not really being one, but possibly impossible to achieve given the constraints of human nature.
bitops 15y ago
From "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson: they think they're too smart to be sexist.
VladRussian 15y ago
>it probably has something to do with the fact that so many of them were picked on growing up. and here we're talking about how perpetrating of stereotypes is a bad thing edit: found a word for it in English - hypocrisy.
bermanoid 15y ago
[tl;dr: With a lopsided sex ratio in a field, women are more likely to experience sexism, and men are less likely to witness it, than if the ratio was closer to equal, regardless of the actual frequency of sexist behavior. The fact that you (male) don't see much of it doesn't necessarily mean that it's not happening, and the fact that you (female) experience a lot of it doesn't necessarily mean that the men in the field are worse than elsewhere.] I'd like to just add a bit (edit: okay, a rather long-ish bit...) about how a reasonable, non-sexist guy could end up assuming that things are not that bad in the industry, whereas a reasonable women can have experienced more sexism than in other industries, and both can be "right". All without the typical (and IMO, rather cynical) assumption that guys are just playing along, encouraging it, or putting on blinders. And also (more importantly) without the assumption that men in the industry are any better or worse than in any other. This should make both sides pause a bit before they scream about how unreasonable people on the other side are being... For a lot of men, the skepticism is not over whether actions are sexist or not, but over how often they actually happen. My argument is that this difference in perception is almost exclusively due to the extremely lopsided sex ratio in tech, not due to people in tech being any better or worse: I don't know exact numbers, but let's say somewhere around 10% of tech workers are female (in my experience it's even worse than that, but I don't know for sure, industry-wide). Going with that number, that means that out of a random sample of interactions between other people that you (let's assume "you" are a non-sexist guy that can accurately recognize sexism when you see it) personally witness over the course of a career, only 18% will be between a man and a woman. As for the percentage of sexist guys (I'm making the simplifying assumption that a guy is either sexist or not-sexist - I could easily remove this restriction and replace it with a probability distribution, but it would needlessly complicate things)...I'm not sure about that, but let's aim high and say it's 20% (I don't think more than 20% of us would, for instance, show pantless pictures of ourselves, send harassing e-mails, proposition an intern, ask about kids at an interview, etc.). Even when a sexist guy interacts with a woman, we should probably assume that it's a reasonably small percentage of those interactions, maybe 10%, where he'd actually say or do something offensive, especially with someone else present. [Again, all these numbers are pure fiction, placeholders for the purpose of demonstrating the extreme effect that the sex-ratio has, rather than figuring out anything in detail] Put that all together, and let's say that you, a not-sexist guy, witness 1000 interactions between other people at work during some time period. By these estimates, only 3 of those interactions would be "sexist interactions." The problem seems rather small when you look at it that way, and in fact, it's small enough that statistical variation could mean that you never end up witnessing such interactions at all, even if they are happening at your place of work. Now, the meat of the argument: consider, instead, the point of view of a woman. 18% of all of her interactions are with sexist men, and 1.8% of her interactions involve a guy acting sexist towards her. By the percentages, that's a sixfold increase over what you would notice as a man, even though the actual frequency of sexist behavior is the same. I think that's where this sort of discussion breaks down: those of us that are not sexist, but are not women, see an apparent level of sexism that is six times lower than what women observe in their own work interactions, and that's arguably the difference between the perception that sexism is pervasive and oppressive, versus barely worth considering. And it's all due to the sex ratio - if it was 50/50, then the percent of interactions that are sexist that men observe (holding the other numbers the same) would be 50% * 20% * 10% = 1%, and what women observe in their own interactions would be 50% * 20% * 10% = 1%, so there would be an equal perception of sexism. We all need to keep this in mind to bring some sanity these sorts of discussions: girls, it's not that the men that doubt this are assholes or privilege-denying-misogynists, it's that they truly, honestly witness sexism less often than they would if they worked in a field with a more balanced gender ratio, and it's not necessarily that they're complicit or ignoring it. And guys, the women aren't being whiny or weak, they truly, honestly experience a higher percentage of sexist interactions than they would in a field with more women. FWIW, all of this applies to any minority situation, and is (IMO) one of the biggest unrealized factors that leads to disagreement whenever these arguments come up.