6 ms·

> The author, without any evidence, concludes that the manager said this because she is a woman, and is hellbent on "pushing [her] out" of the team. Well, with

> The author, without any evidence, concludes that the manager said this because she is a woman, and is hellbent on "pushing [her] out" of the team. Well, without any evidence that she presented. She's been working with this particular group, and we haven't. It's not unbelievable that there have been numerous other minor instances of some form of preferential treatment or sexism. She did, after all, consult with friends, with some foresight of what was coming. While some amount of skepticism on our part might be prudent, there's also no reason to outright disbelieve her, either. > The reality is that thin-skinned managers and managers overly sensitive to maintaining office decorum exist everywhere, and they don't do this based on your sex. Woah. That's a lot of certainty right there. How are you able to be so assertively positive that managers -- indeed, in this context, no managers anywhere -- do this based on gender? Even subconsciously? Even without meaning to maintain a tight-knit good ol' boys drinking group? This is what never fails to amaze me, that enough people are so certain that there's no such thing as sexism in the technology industry. Meanwhile, someone else on Reddit or elsewhere posts a picture of a co-worker and the majority of the comments are, "she's hot, you bang her yet?"

philwelch 15y ago
The whole point of the blog post was to illustrate an incidence of sexism at work. The blog post failed to do so. It seems willfully perverse to turn around and push the burden of proof on those of us who are simply pointing that out.
- lusr 15y ago
  Indeed. I really don't understand the purpose of the post. What seems to be annoying most people here is that the comments could apply equally to men or women, yet the author assumes the issue is sexism without explaining why. By doing so, the author effectively dismisses the experience and opinions of men who have been in similar situations (based on the description) and believe the issue to have a different root cause. She's making the claim that this would never happen to a guy which is clearly directly contrary to the experience of many male readers, and it's unsurprising this is going to piss people off. Note that I'm not disputing that the post MIGHT have represented a case of sexism, just that since the post doesn't explain how the author determined their position it's useless to myself and other readers. Let's flip the question around: how do you know when your manager is being sexist and when they're just presenting their opinion, which is fair criticism? The post appears to imply the answer is: "If the recipient of criticism is a woman, then it's sexism; men never receive this kind of criticism." This is a bold claim, and if accepted, it's impossible to disprove because any attempt to disagree will see you labelled as sexist - which is the second source of frustration among people with a different opinion on this thread.
- jtheory 15y ago
  Burden of proof, what? This is not a court proceeding; it's a discussion thread about a blog post. The whole point was to illustrate how sexism at work can come in far more subtle forms than "my boss keeps pinching my ass" or "I can't stay late because that's when the guys all gather around the biggest monitor and watch porn" or even "too many fsck jokes". I read the post; that's the point I came away with, and I came back to the HN discussion to see if anyone else in the community had similar experiences to share, suggestions about how to wrestle with this kind of subtle sexism, etc.. Why in the world would I need to be convinced that her particular example could be proven to be part of a pattern of sexism? Why, in a blog post, would she take the time to document all of the other experiences that created the context that convinced her this was sexism at work? Maybe some of you know the company & are even working there? I didn't feel there was any accusation against me. I don't know anyone involved (the author included), so even if somehow she was some weirdo who invented the whole story, or drastically misintepreted the situation/context, that's completely beside the point. The point was to start a conversation; that this experience could be part of a subtle version of sexism is perfectly plausible; and yet somehow so many commenters here are completely avoiding that conversation, and instead reverting to this overly-formal stilted legal language and demanding incontrovertible proof that this specific incident can be validly ascribed to sexism. Who cares? She sounds like she has a reasonable grasp of the situation; why shouldn't she have the benefit of the doubt? (What's the horrible cost to avoid?) And the few people who seem aware of what's happening here are too busy pointing this out to have the conversation.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    > The whole point was to illustrate how sexism at work can come in far more subtle forms than "my boss keeps pinching my ass" or "I can't stay late because that's when the guys all gather around the biggest monitor and watch porn" or even "too many fsck jokes". That's fine, but it didn't illustrate sexism at work at all. That's the criticism.
    - jtheory 15y ago
      She was not illustrating aggressive sexism where it's blatantly obvious; that's my point. She was covering a more subtle variety, wherein (in this example) the "too emotional" card was played, with her, all the time simply because (it was clear to her) she was a woman. She ran a simple experiment, and in this interaction didn't even volunteer information that might seem critical, just answered questions simply and without elaborating or making any additional comment (like, "yeah, that was kind of frustrating that I had to be woken up to fix this, even though it was X's shift"). The card was played anyway. Are you in the club of people saying she needs to document all of the times that card was played against her in the past (and not played against male coworkers), or "it wasn't sexism"? She explained the context. The card is played all the time. She tried this little experiment, and did everything she could think of to avoid it short of speaking in a robot voice. No dice. Is this some kind of "proof" that it was sexism and couldn't be anything else? Of course not; but she was convinced enough (from her total experience) that she left the job. "The straw that broke the camel's back" is just a tiny straw. The expression assumes there is already a massive bale already on board. Hell, even if further investigation (video footage, I guess?) somehow showed that this case was most likely not related to her gender at all, the problem is still there: the environment felt unpleasantly sexist to the woman working in it. Is this not worth talking about? It's a deep subject, and many companies are affected in non-trivial ways; main point #2 of the blog post was that because she was forced out by this discomfort, the company is suffering real losses. Good IT workers are not interchangeable, and you might lose a cornerstone of your business due to seemingly-trivial mistakes repeated many times.
nimblegorilla 15y ago
The claim was "How do you piss off a technical woman so she will leave your team? It's easy. Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would never apply to a guy." I'm a man and I've also been in the situation of overly sensitive office managers. Maybe this problem does happen to women more often than men, but to say that it never happens to men is completely untrue. Playing the sexism card every time you run into a bad manager with a dysfunctional team seems like wasted effort to me. In the case above it's really hard for me to get past this developer's sour grapes to know if there was real sexism or just inability to recognize her (or anyone's) competence. I'd rather see some thoughts on how a reasonably competent team loses a solid female developer.
- Duff 15y ago
  The issue isn't sensitive managers, it is that sensitive managers call men jerks, lazy or assholes, but they'll say that women are "shrill" or "too emotional". There's a difference there -- with the woman, the manager is attacking her as a person. With the guy, he is directing the commentary towards the man's behavior.
  - jmmcd 15y ago
    Your examples could just as easily be read the other way -- that "jerk", "lazy" and "asshole" are directed at the person whereas "shrill" or "emotional" are towards behaviour. I don't see what criteria you're using to put these examples in one category or the other.
  - quanticle 15y ago
    ... it is that managers call men jerks, lazy or assholes, but they'll say that women are shrill or "too emotional". I don't really see a distinction. To me calling someone an asshole is equally a personal to calling someone shrill.
    - daxelrod 15y ago
      The distinction is that, in many peoples' eyes, "shrill" as a personal insult is almost always directed at women. There is a stereotype of a shrill woman.
bermanoid 15y ago
Whether or not this incident was motivated by sexism, there's absolutely no indication, based on the facts presented, that it was. All that's there is a bare assertion that "wow, you were really hard on S" is somehow equivalent to "you're being too emotional" in terms of sexism, and that we should be offended. Here's the relevant part, from the post: It's a very bizarre and stunted conversation. The woman is clearly going to great lengths to not elaborate. She's answering things as succinctly as possible so as not to give you any way to claim that she's being emotional. It doesn't matter! You can still play that card! Here's what you do. After the meeting, you get her on chat and you say "wow, you were really hard on S". It doesn't matter that she was answering direct questions posed by the boss and had to answer them. The more you accuse, the more it becomes true, so stay at it! I don't see any hint of missing context, I plainly see the claim that "wow, you were really hard on S" is an accusation of "being emotional." Which is bollocks, plain and simple. If there was more to the story, then it should have been presented if the author wanted to rack up page views by blogging about sexism in the field. If there's not, then she is overreacting. Not because she's a woman, mind you. Because she really is too touchy about this. Quite frankly, the fact that she's raging over and reading so much into a statement that is, by normal standards, extremely neutral, leads me to believe that even if she has been directly accused of being too emotional in the past, then maybe there's something to the accusations. Some people really are overly sensitive to perceived slights, and the fact that they're women doesn't necessarily mean the criticism is unfair...
- thaumaturgy 15y ago
  Granted that as an example of sexism in the industry, the post could have been written more thoroughly. In defense of anyone in a situation like this, I often find myself frustrated at a particular thing, and tempted to write about, except that I realize I don't have good enough notes (or often any notes at all) and I don't have a precise enough memory to get enough of the background right to be able to present it well. > Quite frankly, the fact that she's raging over... "Raging" seems loaded to me. Tone-wise, her post struck me as more sardonic than anything -- detached. > ...leads me to believe that even if she has been directly accused of being too emotional in the past, then maybe there's something to the accusations. Some people really are overly sensitive to perceived slights... We really should try harder to not psychoanalyze people we don't know based on their blog posts. Clearly she was in a frustrating situation, and that situation culminated in this particular event, which she felt was unfair. I'd be inclined to leave it at that at this point -- sort of an Occam's Razor Of Psychology.
Legion 15y ago
> Well, without any evidence that she presented. Which makes for an ineffectual argument. It doesn't mean her point is wrong, but it means she failed to adequately support it.
- jtheory 15y ago
  It's a blog post. She's not "presenting evidence" or even making an accusation; she's telling a story. Who "adequately supports" an anecdote in a blog post? You just tell your story as you saw it, and if the topic is interesting, it can be a base for good conversation. Here's another viewpoint no one seems to be discussing: the fact that she was seeing a pattern of sexism that was serious enough for her to leave the company is not disputed. WTF happened there, eh? I venture to suggest that it wasn't all in her head, and that it's a problem worth a better discussion than "is her evidence adequate". I suppose because of the "sensitive" topic, she should be proving that this particular story is 100% factually true, and pack those few paragraphs with footnotes to the dozens of other events that would show that her interpretation is sufficiently supported? This is all so silly. The stilted legal-defense language exploding everywhere isn't helping anyone. (Side note: no intention to rail on your comment in particular; this started as a one-liner).

philwelch 15y ago

The whole point of the blog post was to illustrate an incidence of sexism at work. The blog post failed to do so. It seems willfully perverse to turn around and push the burden of proof on those of us who are simply pointing that out.

lusr 15y ago
Indeed. I really don't understand the purpose of the post. What seems to be annoying most people here is that the comments could apply equally to men or women, yet the author assumes the issue is sexism without explaining why. By doing so, the author effectively dismisses the experience and opinions of men who have been in similar situations (based on the description) and believe the issue to have a different root cause. She's making the claim that this would never happen to a guy which is clearly directly contrary to the experience of many male readers, and it's unsurprising this is going to piss people off. Note that I'm not disputing that the post MIGHT have represented a case of sexism, just that since the post doesn't explain how the author determined their position it's useless to myself and other readers. Let's flip the question around: how do you know when your manager is being sexist and when they're just presenting their opinion, which is fair criticism? The post appears to imply the answer is: "If the recipient of criticism is a woman, then it's sexism; men never receive this kind of criticism." This is a bold claim, and if accepted, it's impossible to disprove because any attempt to disagree will see you labelled as sexist - which is the second source of frustration among people with a different opinion on this thread.
jtheory 15y ago
Burden of proof, what? This is not a court proceeding; it's a discussion thread about a blog post. The whole point was to illustrate how sexism at work can come in far more subtle forms than "my boss keeps pinching my ass" or "I can't stay late because that's when the guys all gather around the biggest monitor and watch porn" or even "too many fsck jokes". I read the post; that's the point I came away with, and I came back to the HN discussion to see if anyone else in the community had similar experiences to share, suggestions about how to wrestle with this kind of subtle sexism, etc.. Why in the world would I need to be convinced that her particular example could be proven to be part of a pattern of sexism? Why, in a blog post, would she take the time to document all of the other experiences that created the context that convinced her this was sexism at work? Maybe some of you know the company & are even working there? I didn't feel there was any accusation against me. I don't know anyone involved (the author included), so even if somehow she was some weirdo who invented the whole story, or drastically misintepreted the situation/context, that's completely beside the point. The point was to start a conversation; that this experience could be part of a subtle version of sexism is perfectly plausible; and yet somehow so many commenters here are completely avoiding that conversation, and instead reverting to this overly-formal stilted legal language and demanding incontrovertible proof that this specific incident can be validly ascribed to sexism. Who cares? She sounds like she has a reasonable grasp of the situation; why shouldn't she have the benefit of the doubt? (What's the horrible cost to avoid?) And the few people who seem aware of what's happening here are too busy pointing this out to have the conversation.
- philwelch 15y ago
  > The whole point was to illustrate how sexism at work can come in far more subtle forms than "my boss keeps pinching my ass" or "I can't stay late because that's when the guys all gather around the biggest monitor and watch porn" or even "too many fsck jokes". That's fine, but it didn't illustrate sexism at work at all. That's the criticism.
  - jtheory 15y ago
    She was not illustrating aggressive sexism where it's blatantly obvious; that's my point. She was covering a more subtle variety, wherein (in this example) the "too emotional" card was played, with her, all the time simply because (it was clear to her) she was a woman. She ran a simple experiment, and in this interaction didn't even volunteer information that might seem critical, just answered questions simply and without elaborating or making any additional comment (like, "yeah, that was kind of frustrating that I had to be woken up to fix this, even though it was X's shift"). The card was played anyway. Are you in the club of people saying she needs to document all of the times that card was played against her in the past (and not played against male coworkers), or "it wasn't sexism"? She explained the context. The card is played all the time. She tried this little experiment, and did everything she could think of to avoid it short of speaking in a robot voice. No dice. Is this some kind of "proof" that it was sexism and couldn't be anything else? Of course not; but she was convinced enough (from her total experience) that she left the job. "The straw that broke the camel's back" is just a tiny straw. The expression assumes there is already a massive bale already on board. Hell, even if further investigation (video footage, I guess?) somehow showed that this case was most likely not related to her gender at all, the problem is still there: the environment felt unpleasantly sexist to the woman working in it. Is this not worth talking about? It's a deep subject, and many companies are affected in non-trivial ways; main point #2 of the blog post was that because she was forced out by this discomfort, the company is suffering real losses. Good IT workers are not interchangeable, and you might lose a cornerstone of your business due to seemingly-trivial mistakes repeated many times.

nimblegorilla 15y ago

The claim was "How do you piss off a technical woman so she will leave your team? It's easy. Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would never apply to a guy." I'm a man and I've also been in the situation of overly sensitive office managers. Maybe this problem does happen to women more often than men, but to say that it never happens to men is completely untrue. Playing the sexism card every time you run into a bad manager with a dysfunctional team seems like wasted effort to me. In the case above it's really hard for me to get past this developer's sour grapes to know if there was real sexism or just inability to recognize her (or anyone's) competence. I'd rather see some thoughts on how a reasonably competent team loses a solid female developer.

Duff 15y ago
The issue isn't sensitive managers, it is that sensitive managers call men jerks, lazy or assholes, but they'll say that women are "shrill" or "too emotional". There's a difference there -- with the woman, the manager is attacking her as a person. With the guy, he is directing the commentary towards the man's behavior.
- jmmcd 15y ago
  Your examples could just as easily be read the other way -- that "jerk", "lazy" and "asshole" are directed at the person whereas "shrill" or "emotional" are towards behaviour. I don't see what criteria you're using to put these examples in one category or the other.
- quanticle 15y ago
  ... it is that managers call men jerks, lazy or assholes, but they'll say that women are shrill or "too emotional". I don't really see a distinction. To me calling someone an asshole is equally a personal to calling someone shrill.
  - daxelrod 15y ago
    The distinction is that, in many peoples' eyes, "shrill" as a personal insult is almost always directed at women. There is a stereotype of a shrill woman.

bermanoid 15y ago

Whether or not this incident was motivated by sexism, there's absolutely no indication, based on the facts presented, that it was. All that's there is a bare assertion that "wow, you were really hard on S" is somehow equivalent to "you're being too emotional" in terms of sexism, and that we should be offended. Here's the relevant part, from the post: It's a very bizarre and stunted conversation. The woman is clearly going to great lengths to not elaborate. She's answering things as succinctly as possible so as not to give you any way to claim that she's being emotional. It doesn't matter! You can still play that card! Here's what you do. After the meeting, you get her on chat and you say "wow, you were really hard on S". It doesn't matter that she was answering direct questions posed by the boss and had to answer them. The more you accuse, the more it becomes true, so stay at it! I don't see any hint of missing context, I plainly see the claim that "wow, you were really hard on S" is an accusation of "being emotional." Which is bollocks, plain and simple. If there was more to the story, then it should have been presented if the author wanted to rack up page views by blogging about sexism in the field. If there's not, then she is overreacting. Not because she's a woman, mind you. Because she really is too touchy about this. Quite frankly, the fact that she's raging over and reading so much into a statement that is, by normal standards, extremely neutral, leads me to believe that even if she has been directly accused of being too emotional in the past, then maybe there's something to the accusations. Some people really are overly sensitive to perceived slights, and the fact that they're women doesn't necessarily mean the criticism is unfair...

thaumaturgy 15y ago
Granted that as an example of sexism in the industry, the post could have been written more thoroughly. In defense of anyone in a situation like this, I often find myself frustrated at a particular thing, and tempted to write about, except that I realize I don't have good enough notes (or often any notes at all) and I don't have a precise enough memory to get enough of the background right to be able to present it well. > Quite frankly, the fact that she's raging over... "Raging" seems loaded to me. Tone-wise, her post struck me as more sardonic than anything -- detached. > ...leads me to believe that even if she has been directly accused of being too emotional in the past, then maybe there's something to the accusations. Some people really are overly sensitive to perceived slights... We really should try harder to not psychoanalyze people we don't know based on their blog posts. Clearly she was in a frustrating situation, and that situation culminated in this particular event, which she felt was unfair. I'd be inclined to leave it at that at this point -- sort of an Occam's Razor Of Psychology.

Legion 15y ago

> Well, without any evidence that she presented. Which makes for an ineffectual argument. It doesn't mean her point is wrong, but it means she failed to adequately support it.

jtheory 15y ago
It's a blog post. She's not "presenting evidence" or even making an accusation; she's telling a story. Who "adequately supports" an anecdote in a blog post? You just tell your story as you saw it, and if the topic is interesting, it can be a base for good conversation. Here's another viewpoint no one seems to be discussing: the fact that she was seeing a pattern of sexism that was serious enough for her to leave the company is not disputed. WTF happened there, eh? I venture to suggest that it wasn't all in her head, and that it's a problem worth a better discussion than "is her evidence adequate". I suppose because of the "sensitive" topic, she should be proving that this particular story is 100% factually true, and pack those few paragraphs with footnotes to the dozens of other events that would show that her interpretation is sufficiently supported? This is all so silly. The stilted legal-defense language exploding everywhere isn't helping anyone. (Side note: no intention to rail on your comment in particular; this started as a one-liner).