8 ms·

I'm a bit torn on this whole issue, I wonder if somebody could give me some perspective. There are two conflicting things I don't like here. In the first place,

I'm a bit torn on this whole issue, I wonder if somebody could give me some perspective. There are two conflicting things I don't like here. In the first place, I don't like when people are so sensitive that there's no room for a harmless joke. In most cases I really would say "oh come on lighten up." On the other hand, among us computer programmers, there's so much social ineptness (and perhaps outright disrespect for women, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt because I really don't understand why it would be particularly prevalent here, other than perhaps a result of ineptness) on the part of the males that a lot of it really isn't so harmless. Not necessarily because it sets out to make women uncomfortable, it's just not funny. And if it's not genuinely funny, the only conclusion women (having better taste than men, I hope I'm not sexist for saying so) can draw is that they're being disrespected. I feel like this joke is somewhere on the line. In a world where people aren't putting pornography in their slide presentations for no apparent reason, maybe we could take this joke at face value (ha ha, we're all sex deprived computer nerds who would do anything to interact with women for a second). On the other hand it's not particularly funny (and I didn't really get the joke before they explained it), and in this world I can have some sympathy for the women. I guess my ultimate point is, and I'd like to hear what others here think, I hope it's not too late to turn this around, such the solution is more genuine respect and tact so we can safely go back to actual harmless jokes, rather than this turning into another "PC police" scenario that's going to start making us uncomfortable for different reasons.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago
I can't and won't defend these guys, but I remember my teenage years, and I remember being pretty shallow when it came to women. Looking around, I suspect many other males were the same way. I got over this by slowly growing up, not by having a crowd tell me I was an ass. I think if the crowd had pressured me back then, I'd tell them to go jump in a lake. These guys were wrong, no two ways about it. My concern is that we've created a system where kids can't go out and get drunk, make racy comments about girls -- basically act like kids -- without the entire world coming down on their head. Everything you do online lasts forever. That doesn't sound like a good thing at all.
- kaens 15y ago
  That doesn't sound like a good thing at all. Sounds to me like we can perhaps finally just admit that kids go out and get drunk, and haven't quite expanded their reality bubbles past their own nose, and have all us "grown-ups" stop pretending we didn't (except for where we didn't). And we can perhaps finally admit it because it's punching you in the face all the time with minimal research. The stigma against having "inappropriate" behavior in youth known about that turned out to be part of a growing up process for a pretty alright person is ridiculous. All I know is that if someone ever brings up to me that they can find an angsty Xanga from my teen years, I won't deny it, but it'll be a huge red flag for me if they judge me, now, on its contents. I'll agree strongly that it probably won't be the most pleasant transitory phase.
- carlcoryell 15y ago
  There are many places in our society where kids can do stupid and immature things but I don't think the adults in our engineering profession need to support or sponsor them. I respect Heroku etc for pulling their sponsorship dollars. I'm a huge fan of supporting adult standards of behavior to participate in adult society and I have no patience for sexism in our field.
  - DanielBMarkham 15y ago
    Perhaps I should have been clearer. You are correct. We can and should encourage adult behavior. Heroku and the rest did the right thing -- from an adult, socially-responsible position. There is nothing new about this, it's the way professional groups have conducted themselves since forever. From a longer-term view, this incident will still be around 50 years from now when these guys are grandfathers. This is completely new and has never existed before in the history of humanity. I don't think it's an either-or situation. The immediate response could be exactly correct and the long-term impact could be entirely out-of-whack.
    - anthuswilliams 15y ago
      This story won't be around in 50 years. We think it will because when we grew up, our social flubs simply disappeared. Now they're around forever, but the important thing is they don't exist in isolation. This story, like all the embarrassing comments I have personally published in forums across the internet, can for all intents and purposes be just as lost to time in a deluge of data as it can in a drought. A year from now, when one searches the names of one of these founders, or the name of their company, this episode will not even appear in the first few pages of Google search results. Perhaps for a person with a sufficiently strong memory that he/she was specifically searching for this exact story, the incident could be dredged up. But for the vast majority of humanity, probably even those looking for some vague form of dirt on sqoot, the episode will have vanished.
perokreco 15y ago
See, both their joke and the statement: "maybe we could take this joke at face value (ha ha, we're all sex deprived computer nerds who would do anything to interact with women for a second)" assumes women are not programmers and thus makes them feel less welcome. That is the main reason why it is bad.
- orblivion 15y ago
  And I guess what I'm saying is, if there weren't the disrespectful atmosphere to begin with, I think women could let it slide, with the understanding that this joke is based on the fact that "women are not programmers" is enough of an approximation of the truth that you can base a joke off of it. (again, not that it's that great a joke)
- cgoddard 15y ago
  Exactly. It marginalizes women in the profession. It also supports sexual objectification as being okay in a workplace / professional environment.
jacobian 15y ago
Sadly, we don't live in "a world where people aren't putting pornography on their slide presentations" — we live in a world where it happens pretty regularly. Sexism is deeply embedded in the culture of the software industry; in that context, there isn't really any such thing as a "harmless joke". These "jokes" continually reinforce the thought that women aren't welcome in our community.
- orblivion 15y ago
  Maybe the women need to come back and make fun of these people for being shitty at humor. EDIT: I dunno, I'd just hate to have to resort to being uptight as a solution. Plus it could backfire.
  - theorique 15y ago
    Thing is, it's not as easy when you already feel a bit marginal. Women are definitely the minority at tech events so 'fighting back' in this way takes a lot of guts. I try to put myself in the mindset as follows: I'm a white guy. If I were in a club that had 90% black patrons and some people were making jokes about 'whitey', I don't know if I'd want to speak up in that environment. Even if the jokes are not intentionally intimidating, and I'm technically 'in the right', it's still going to feel intimidating pushing back and standing out. I imagine it feels similar for a woman in a 90+% male environment pushing back against jokes like this. There's the uncertainty of 'am I overreacting?' and 'how will I be perceived if I push back?' weighed against wanting to speak your piece.
    - orblivion 15y ago
      Great point. I think it might help if we backed them up in doing this.
- theorique 15y ago
  And thank are due to you and the other organizers for emphasizing that message at PyCon. The recent conference was a great example of treating inclusiveness as the norm.
chernevik 15y ago
I think you're saying that these guys didn't mean to push anyone's buttons, they're just clueless guys trying to be funny, and does clueless really deserve such a beatdown? To the guys who wrote this, this faux pas may well feel no more significant than forgetting to match your belt to your shoes. But the latter is -- wait they're supposed to match? is that why people look at me funny? And the former got them ridden out of town on a rail. The answer is, yes and no. I'm certainly not politically correct -- I think I'm leading for Most Downvoted 2012 -- but there are some flavors of clueless that create problems beyond their immediate vicinity. This particular form is so predictable that it can easily cause a lot of women to just avoid settings where it appears, which pushes them away from activities they might otherwise enjoy and at which they might excel. If we want to provide those people avenues to what they might be good at, we have to make something more of such idiocy than we would of other idiocies. But I think it is very useful to object to the important idiocies in a measured, thoughtful tone. Because this conveys This Is Serious, and encourages the knuckleheads to _think_ about what they've mistaken. I don't want them to learn to camouflage their boneheadedness from predictable outrage, I want them to be less boneheaded. When you're yelling at someone really the only thing they can do is make apology noises and retreat, which isn't exactly what you want here. I get that some people were genuinely irritated, I think some expressions of that help show the community's feeling, but if that's all there is to the community reaction I don't think it's going to teach all it could.
- orblivion 15y ago
  I'm not sure if you meant to disagree with something I said, but I think I agree with you here. It's not a harmless faux pas, it's making qualified people uncomfortable. I'm just afraid that dealing with this a certain way will lead to people being uptight. Trying to communicate with the people about what was wrong, as you suggest, sounds like a good idea. Assuming instilling good taste is a viable option for such people, perhaps if someone helps them distinguish disrespectful from edgy-but-respectful, they can safely stay on the other side of it.
ttt_ 15y ago
Two points: 1) I don't like when people are so sensitive that there's no room for a harmless joke. The joke might seem harmless to you (because your are privileged[1] to think so), but it doesn't mean it is for everyone. Also, if the joke is based on any kind of prejudice (the teller being aware of it or not), it is in fact harmfull as it only helps the status quo, while a number a groups are putting tremendous effort to disrupt said status quo in order to do something about prejudice that is affecting them. 2) there's so much social ineptness Social ineptness might explain it but it doesn't justify or excuse it. [1]: http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-is-male-privilege/ http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-...
- orblivion 15y ago
  Though I'm generally turned off by the use of the word "privilege", I actually don't disagree with you on either point. 1) I'm not saying this is a harmless joke. I'm saying that I'm afraid that actual harmless jokes will fall prey to the backlash against ones like this. I anticipate that there will be another story at some point where an actual funny, but edgy, joke will be told and I will have to find myself on the other side of the argument. EDIT: I guess I've been sortof inconsistent on this one. I forgot I said that this one was on the line. It's a stupid joke. I suppose it's harmful in the current atmosphere, I could see it just being stupid in a different atmosphere. 2) I'm actually sortof holding their ineptness against them. I think it's their responsibility to try to learn to understand people a bit better, or leave the jokes to someone else. I'm just trying to get to the root of the problem, rather than assuming it's rooted in actual sexism (and again it very well may be, it just seems weird to me).
  - cgoddard 15y ago
    Behavior and humor in professional, work environments need to be held to a different standard than what might fly just between a group of friends or in a bar. In such an environment even usually harmless jokes contribute to a subtle if not overt sexist atmosphere which discourages female participation. Sure, there are always going to be some aggressive, driven women who will enter the field anyways and excel, but there are lots of other women who will end up being turned away, believe it or not.
Duff 15y ago
I'm a guy who in more of an IT role with alot of women (probably a little less than half the people here) -- so I guess I come from a weird perspective. My sister is an engineer/designer, so I've heard her perspective on this as well. The issue with this kind of behavior is that it intimidates and/or repels professional women. It doesn't set an appropriate tone. If you were a woman with a degree in CS who was potentially interested in seriously participating in this event, would you want to to hang out with a bunch of beer-swilling jerks making passes at barmaids? Do you want to be one of a small number of women serious about hacking, feeling inadequate around the girls with tight tops with the beers? Probably not -- but that is the picture that the event organizers were painting. It's not a matter of bringing in the "PC police". It's about respect.
- orblivion 15y ago
  > It's not a matter of bringing in the "PC police". It's about respect. The distinction between these points is important to me, I'm glad you bring it up. I know I've been somewhat contradictory on this, but I'll say I agree that the given joke, as it stands, is not respectful. If it were a guy's gathering, I think it would be ok, but it's an open invitation. Since I've been saying that the problem is about bad taste in humor, I've been trying to come up with a better way of making the same joke (if we are to take them on their word that this joke was really about being a male dominated field). What do you think of this variation (not to say it's that much more funny): "Women: Yes, we aim to make a welcoming atmosphere for women who want to participate in our hackathon. (And for those men still afraid of getting out-programmed by a girl, we've hired an all-female event staff to serve you cold beer.)" Granted it maybe sends a bit of a double-message still, I think something more along these lines could make it clear that we mean no real disrespect, but still keep it from getting too uptight.
  - cgoddard 15y ago
    What's most offensive about the incident wasn't the wording in the ad, but the fact that they were going to hire exclusively women as sex objects (eye candy) for a professional event. The ad simply provided advance notice and an opportunity to call them out on it before the event actually happened.
rsynnott 15y ago
> In the first place, I don't like when people are so sensitive that there's no room for a harmless joke. But there was no joke. None. It wasn't even an offensive joke (not that they're all that rare in the community, sadly), it was just offensive. I think their characterisation of it as a joke is just an attempt to get themselves out of hot water.
Tichy 15y ago
I don't live in the US, and the city I live in is plastered with posters advertising parties. They all advertise with attractive women on the cover. Not that different from a Hackathon advertising with attractive female waiters, if you think about it. I think it was poor style, but I also don't like the mobbing aspect of the "apologize or die" movement.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

I can't and won't defend these guys, but I remember my teenage years, and I remember being pretty shallow when it came to women. Looking around, I suspect many other males were the same way. I got over this by slowly growing up, not by having a crowd tell me I was an ass. I think if the crowd had pressured me back then, I'd tell them to go jump in a lake. These guys were wrong, no two ways about it. My concern is that we've created a system where kids can't go out and get drunk, make racy comments about girls -- basically act like kids -- without the entire world coming down on their head. Everything you do online lasts forever. That doesn't sound like a good thing at all.

kaens 15y ago
That doesn't sound like a good thing at all. Sounds to me like we can perhaps finally just admit that kids go out and get drunk, and haven't quite expanded their reality bubbles past their own nose, and have all us "grown-ups" stop pretending we didn't (except for where we didn't). And we can perhaps finally admit it because it's punching you in the face all the time with minimal research. The stigma against having "inappropriate" behavior in youth known about that turned out to be part of a growing up process for a pretty alright person is ridiculous. All I know is that if someone ever brings up to me that they can find an angsty Xanga from my teen years, I won't deny it, but it'll be a huge red flag for me if they judge me, now, on its contents. I'll agree strongly that it probably won't be the most pleasant transitory phase.
carlcoryell 15y ago
There are many places in our society where kids can do stupid and immature things but I don't think the adults in our engineering profession need to support or sponsor them. I respect Heroku etc for pulling their sponsorship dollars. I'm a huge fan of supporting adult standards of behavior to participate in adult society and I have no patience for sexism in our field.
- DanielBMarkham 15y ago
  Perhaps I should have been clearer. You are correct. We can and should encourage adult behavior. Heroku and the rest did the right thing -- from an adult, socially-responsible position. There is nothing new about this, it's the way professional groups have conducted themselves since forever. From a longer-term view, this incident will still be around 50 years from now when these guys are grandfathers. This is completely new and has never existed before in the history of humanity. I don't think it's an either-or situation. The immediate response could be exactly correct and the long-term impact could be entirely out-of-whack.
  - anthuswilliams 15y ago
    This story won't be around in 50 years. We think it will because when we grew up, our social flubs simply disappeared. Now they're around forever, but the important thing is they don't exist in isolation. This story, like all the embarrassing comments I have personally published in forums across the internet, can for all intents and purposes be just as lost to time in a deluge of data as it can in a drought. A year from now, when one searches the names of one of these founders, or the name of their company, this episode will not even appear in the first few pages of Google search results. Perhaps for a person with a sufficiently strong memory that he/she was specifically searching for this exact story, the incident could be dredged up. But for the vast majority of humanity, probably even those looking for some vague form of dirt on sqoot, the episode will have vanished.

perokreco 15y ago

See, both their joke and the statement: "maybe we could take this joke at face value (ha ha, we're all sex deprived computer nerds who would do anything to interact with women for a second)" assumes women are not programmers and thus makes them feel less welcome. That is the main reason why it is bad.

orblivion 15y ago
And I guess what I'm saying is, if there weren't the disrespectful atmosphere to begin with, I think women could let it slide, with the understanding that this joke is based on the fact that "women are not programmers" is enough of an approximation of the truth that you can base a joke off of it. (again, not that it's that great a joke)
cgoddard 15y ago
Exactly. It marginalizes women in the profession. It also supports sexual objectification as being okay in a workplace / professional environment.

jacobian 15y ago

Sadly, we don't live in "a world where people aren't putting pornography on their slide presentations" — we live in a world where it happens pretty regularly. Sexism is deeply embedded in the culture of the software industry; in that context, there isn't really any such thing as a "harmless joke". These "jokes" continually reinforce the thought that women aren't welcome in our community.

orblivion 15y ago
Maybe the women need to come back and make fun of these people for being shitty at humor. EDIT: I dunno, I'd just hate to have to resort to being uptight as a solution. Plus it could backfire.
- theorique 15y ago
  Thing is, it's not as easy when you already feel a bit marginal. Women are definitely the minority at tech events so 'fighting back' in this way takes a lot of guts. I try to put myself in the mindset as follows: I'm a white guy. If I were in a club that had 90% black patrons and some people were making jokes about 'whitey', I don't know if I'd want to speak up in that environment. Even if the jokes are not intentionally intimidating, and I'm technically 'in the right', it's still going to feel intimidating pushing back and standing out. I imagine it feels similar for a woman in a 90+% male environment pushing back against jokes like this. There's the uncertainty of 'am I overreacting?' and 'how will I be perceived if I push back?' weighed against wanting to speak your piece.
  - orblivion 15y ago
    Great point. I think it might help if we backed them up in doing this.
theorique 15y ago
And thank are due to you and the other organizers for emphasizing that message at PyCon. The recent conference was a great example of treating inclusiveness as the norm.

chernevik 15y ago

I think you're saying that these guys didn't mean to push anyone's buttons, they're just clueless guys trying to be funny, and does clueless really deserve such a beatdown? To the guys who wrote this, this faux pas may well feel no more significant than forgetting to match your belt to your shoes. But the latter is -- wait they're supposed to match? is that why people look at me funny? And the former got them ridden out of town on a rail. The answer is, yes and no. I'm certainly not politically correct -- I think I'm leading for Most Downvoted 2012 -- but there are some flavors of clueless that create problems beyond their immediate vicinity. This particular form is so predictable that it can easily cause a lot of women to just avoid settings where it appears, which pushes them away from activities they might otherwise enjoy and at which they might excel. If we want to provide those people avenues to what they might be good at, we have to make something more of such idiocy than we would of other idiocies. But I think it is very useful to object to the important idiocies in a measured, thoughtful tone. Because this conveys This Is Serious, and encourages the knuckleheads to _think_ about what they've mistaken. I don't want them to learn to camouflage their boneheadedness from predictable outrage, I want them to be less boneheaded. When you're yelling at someone really the only thing they can do is make apology noises and retreat, which isn't exactly what you want here. I get that some people were genuinely irritated, I think some expressions of that help show the community's feeling, but if that's all there is to the community reaction I don't think it's going to teach all it could.

orblivion 15y ago
I'm not sure if you meant to disagree with something I said, but I think I agree with you here. It's not a harmless faux pas, it's making qualified people uncomfortable. I'm just afraid that dealing with this a certain way will lead to people being uptight. Trying to communicate with the people about what was wrong, as you suggest, sounds like a good idea. Assuming instilling good taste is a viable option for such people, perhaps if someone helps them distinguish disrespectful from edgy-but-respectful, they can safely stay on the other side of it.

ttt_ 15y ago

Two points: 1) I don't like when people are so sensitive that there's no room for a harmless joke. The joke might seem harmless to you (because your are privileged[1] to think so), but it doesn't mean it is for everyone. Also, if the joke is based on any kind of prejudice (the teller being aware of it or not), it is in fact harmfull as it only helps the status quo, while a number a groups are putting tremendous effort to disrupt said status quo in order to do something about prejudice that is affecting them. 2) there's so much social ineptness Social ineptness might explain it but it doesn't justify or excuse it. [1]: http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-is-male-privilege/ http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-...

orblivion 15y ago
Though I'm generally turned off by the use of the word "privilege", I actually don't disagree with you on either point. 1) I'm not saying this is a harmless joke. I'm saying that I'm afraid that actual harmless jokes will fall prey to the backlash against ones like this. I anticipate that there will be another story at some point where an actual funny, but edgy, joke will be told and I will have to find myself on the other side of the argument. EDIT: I guess I've been sortof inconsistent on this one. I forgot I said that this one was on the line. It's a stupid joke. I suppose it's harmful in the current atmosphere, I could see it just being stupid in a different atmosphere. 2) I'm actually sortof holding their ineptness against them. I think it's their responsibility to try to learn to understand people a bit better, or leave the jokes to someone else. I'm just trying to get to the root of the problem, rather than assuming it's rooted in actual sexism (and again it very well may be, it just seems weird to me).
- cgoddard 15y ago
  Behavior and humor in professional, work environments need to be held to a different standard than what might fly just between a group of friends or in a bar. In such an environment even usually harmless jokes contribute to a subtle if not overt sexist atmosphere which discourages female participation. Sure, there are always going to be some aggressive, driven women who will enter the field anyways and excel, but there are lots of other women who will end up being turned away, believe it or not.

Duff 15y ago

I'm a guy who in more of an IT role with alot of women (probably a little less than half the people here) -- so I guess I come from a weird perspective. My sister is an engineer/designer, so I've heard her perspective on this as well. The issue with this kind of behavior is that it intimidates and/or repels professional women. It doesn't set an appropriate tone. If you were a woman with a degree in CS who was potentially interested in seriously participating in this event, would you want to to hang out with a bunch of beer-swilling jerks making passes at barmaids? Do you want to be one of a small number of women serious about hacking, feeling inadequate around the girls with tight tops with the beers? Probably not -- but that is the picture that the event organizers were painting. It's not a matter of bringing in the "PC police". It's about respect.

orblivion 15y ago
> It's not a matter of bringing in the "PC police". It's about respect. The distinction between these points is important to me, I'm glad you bring it up. I know I've been somewhat contradictory on this, but I'll say I agree that the given joke, as it stands, is not respectful. If it were a guy's gathering, I think it would be ok, but it's an open invitation. Since I've been saying that the problem is about bad taste in humor, I've been trying to come up with a better way of making the same joke (if we are to take them on their word that this joke was really about being a male dominated field). What do you think of this variation (not to say it's that much more funny): "Women: Yes, we aim to make a welcoming atmosphere for women who want to participate in our hackathon. (And for those men still afraid of getting out-programmed by a girl, we've hired an all-female event staff to serve you cold beer.)" Granted it maybe sends a bit of a double-message still, I think something more along these lines could make it clear that we mean no real disrespect, but still keep it from getting too uptight.
- cgoddard 15y ago
  What's most offensive about the incident wasn't the wording in the ad, but the fact that they were going to hire exclusively women as sex objects (eye candy) for a professional event. The ad simply provided advance notice and an opportunity to call them out on it before the event actually happened.

rsynnott 15y ago

> In the first place, I don't like when people are so sensitive that there's no room for a harmless joke. But there was no joke. None. It wasn't even an offensive joke (not that they're all that rare in the community, sadly), it was just offensive. I think their characterisation of it as a joke is just an attempt to get themselves out of hot water.

Tichy 15y ago

I don't live in the US, and the city I live in is plastered with posters advertising parties. They all advertise with attractive women on the cover. Not that different from a Hackathon advertising with attractive female waiters, if you think about it. I think it was poor style, but I also don't like the mobbing aspect of the "apologize or die" movement.