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From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. Men don

From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. Men don't have to do it, why should women. I think it'd be helpful to identify why this problem exists in the tech field. Is there a chicken and egg situation where more women in tech would solve these problems, but something about tech prevents more women getting involved?

agpen 14y ago
THIS is what prevents more women from going into tech fields. From academia to the workplace, IT/CS has been built into a self-reinforcing boys club. Until on a large scale it is no longer socially acceptable for geeks to treat women like shit, there won't be many women in technical fields.
- s_baby 14y ago
  Proof? Some research suggests women are turned off from the "hard" sciences before they reach high school. It's likely a factor but you're putting the cart before the horse.
  - illuminate 14y ago
    "Some research suggests women are turned off from the "hard" sciences before they reach high school" This is not unrelated to how they're turned off further after and into their careers.
  - demewmew 14y ago
    I think what agpen is trying to say is, "Statements like this are offputting to some people [women] who want to participate in tech." That's going to vary by the individual, but acknowledging that these statements have an offputting effect is proof in itself. Most people reading those statements aren't going to step in and say "this makes me not want to participate," because they know they won't be taken seriously. So instead they just leave.
    - bethly 14y ago
      Citations provided: http://blog.bethcodes.com/is-the-internet-convincing-women-not-to-study http://blog.bethcodes.com/is-the-internet-convincing-women-n... The includes links to studies (like Sapna Cheryan, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Saenam Kim, Classrooms matter: The design of virtual classrooms influences gender disparities in computer science classes, Computers & Education, Volume 57, Issue 2, September 2011, Pages 1825-1835, ISSN 0360-1315,) that show a "lack of ambient belonging", that is being alienated by other group members, was the primary cause, and another that interacting with sexist male engineers lowered women's performance ( http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~billvh/LWSIvHB.JPSP.09.pdf http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~billvh/LWSIvHB.JPSP.09.pdf) Few people seem willing to accept that the lack of women in tech has something to do with men, but it does. Included the "high school girls" who aren't interested: the Girl Scout's study found that the biggest thing keeping them out was expecting to face sexism if they chose those professions.
    - s_baby 14y ago
      Your statement is more sensible and on the fence. She's implying men are the root of women's problems in tech. That there is a conspiracy to marginalize. Women have broken into countless so-called "boys clubs". Doctors, lawyers, marketing, etc... How is tech an exceptionally hostile environment towards women?
      - demewmew 14y ago
        You're making a lot of assumptions that may not be correct in your reading, because they certainly weren't explicitly stated: in particular, that agpen is a woman (not a given from the comment in question), and two, that "men are the root of women's problems in tech." agpen is criticizing boys' clubs, a term that encapsulates a certain culture, behaviors, and set of beliefs. The gender of those participating in that culture is typically male, but women can and do perpetuate boys' club cultures on their own, often because that's the only way they can gain admission. It's fairer to see criticism of boys' clubs as a criticism of that culture and set of behaviors, and the idea that one must participate in those behaviors in order to be accepted, not of men in particular. How is tech an exceptionally hostile environment towards women? http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents - Schneier links to this in the OP. If your response to that is "sexism happens everywhere," well, I'd like it to stop happening everywhere, and I'll start with my home turf.
- deleted 14y ago
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colmvp 14y ago
"From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. Men don't have to do it, why should women." I agree that the props idea is stupid, but men do have things differently. Men don't have to resort to using crazy schemes largely because women overwhelmingly don't approach men. And men who are sexually or physically assaulted by women have a significant fear of being ridiculed by society for not fighting back (or in the case of sexual assault, enjoying it).
karinqe 14y ago
If a woman acts inappropriately towards a man, he rarely has any option to make her fuck off. "Men don't have to do it"? They can't. It's only that it happens less often (I guess). Seems to me that women have a lot more power in this regard.
- agpen 14y ago
  When 1 in 4 men get sexually assaulted during their lives, I will start giving one iota of care about poor poor dis-empowered men.
  - cbs 14y ago
    edit: I give up. Who was I to think that the fact 1-in6 men are sexually abused while underage was a quick and easy response to a remark that men are not sexually assaulted in any real numbers. I should have looked up the statistics on all demographics, because apparently that sexual abuse isn't good enough sexual abuse to refute the weight the parent poster was giving to the 1-in-4 women statistic. Thanks sethg, I see clearly now.
    - sethg 14y ago
      Right, but that’s during childhood, not as an adult going to work and attending technical conferences. I can think of only one person I’ve met since turning 18 who was, umm, skeevy to me in a sexual way, and that person was male. (He didn’t actually assault me, but I later learned that one MIT fraternity had nicknamed him “the NAMBLA man”, and a while after that there was an article in the school paper reporting that he had just done time for rape.)
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
    - reinhardt 14y ago
      Yeap, judging from the downvotes in all sibling posts, the "think of the women" PC brigade is on witchhunt tonight. God forbid someone brings up an area where men are less pampered. Oh well.
illuminate 14y ago
"From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. Men don't have to do it, why should women." Like Hollaback, this is a very imperfect, but apparently effective solution. I appreciate your appeals to straw Feminism, but "women should react the same as men to every situation to 'prove' they are strong" is not it, it's a mess of privileged assumptions.
- FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
  It's not that they "should react the same", it's that - ideally - they shouldn't have to act differently to be treated equally. I'll concede that imperfect but effective solutions are probably necessary to help foster this sort of equality in the long run, though, and the more people who step up and take responsibility for pushing the change (regardless of gender), the better.
  - illuminate 14y ago
    "It's not that they "should react the same", it's that - ideally - they shouldn't have to act differently to be treated equally." Totally. Putting your hands over your ears and eyes isn't going to get us to that point.
sethg 14y ago
From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. People who already have power do not need props and schemes, because, well, they have power. I know that if I grab my boss’s crotch during a meeting and he says ”you have thirty seconds to convince me not to fire your sorry ass right now”, every witness to the event and everybody above him in the corporate hierarchy will back him up. A man tempted to do the same thing to a woman less powerful than himself does not have the same assurance that he will suffer consequences for his bad behavior, and you can’t just create that sense of assurance by fiat. (As the Readercon debacle indicated, even written policies are no guarantee.) So people of good will are still trying to figure out how to hack the social environment to achieve a better culture, and until the rules of that culture become second nature to us all, then those social hacks will seem like, well, hacks.
- demewmew 14y ago
  So well said. When people don't take you seriously, clever hacks are the next best solution. The "What She Really Said" IRC bot story reminds me of this as well.
  - blhack 14y ago
    No they're not. The cards thing establishes the premise that women are incapable of holding social status. They're not. The cards enforce the very thing they're trying to prevent.
    - illuminate 14y ago
      The cards are a reflection of reality, not an endorsement of the current state of things. Your tactic of putting your hands over your eyes and ears has been tried, at length in the past. It hasn't ever worked wherever it's been tried.
efa 14y ago
I'm curious if this is a unique problem for tech workers. I'm sure if you look at conferences from any field there will be incidents of sexual harassment. Is this a problem unique to tech or a general problem of idiot men working with women? I've worked mostly in corporate environments. If I had to characterize a type that was in need of sensitivity training, it usually wasn't the tech guys, it was the "business" type (marketing, finance). Of course that's just my experience.

agpen 14y ago

THIS is what prevents more women from going into tech fields. From academia to the workplace, IT/CS has been built into a self-reinforcing boys club. Until on a large scale it is no longer socially acceptable for geeks to treat women like shit, there won't be many women in technical fields.

s_baby 14y ago
Proof? Some research suggests women are turned off from the "hard" sciences before they reach high school. It's likely a factor but you're putting the cart before the horse.
- illuminate 14y ago
  "Some research suggests women are turned off from the "hard" sciences before they reach high school" This is not unrelated to how they're turned off further after and into their careers.
- demewmew 14y ago
  I think what agpen is trying to say is, "Statements like this are offputting to some people [women] who want to participate in tech." That's going to vary by the individual, but acknowledging that these statements have an offputting effect is proof in itself. Most people reading those statements aren't going to step in and say "this makes me not want to participate," because they know they won't be taken seriously. So instead they just leave.
  - bethly 14y ago
    Citations provided: http://blog.bethcodes.com/is-the-internet-convincing-women-not-to-study http://blog.bethcodes.com/is-the-internet-convincing-women-n... The includes links to studies (like Sapna Cheryan, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Saenam Kim, Classrooms matter: The design of virtual classrooms influences gender disparities in computer science classes, Computers & Education, Volume 57, Issue 2, September 2011, Pages 1825-1835, ISSN 0360-1315,) that show a "lack of ambient belonging", that is being alienated by other group members, was the primary cause, and another that interacting with sexist male engineers lowered women's performance ( http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~billvh/LWSIvHB.JPSP.09.pdf http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~billvh/LWSIvHB.JPSP.09.pdf) Few people seem willing to accept that the lack of women in tech has something to do with men, but it does. Included the "high school girls" who aren't interested: the Girl Scout's study found that the biggest thing keeping them out was expecting to face sexism if they chose those professions.
  - s_baby 14y ago
    Your statement is more sensible and on the fence. She's implying men are the root of women's problems in tech. That there is a conspiracy to marginalize. Women have broken into countless so-called "boys clubs". Doctors, lawyers, marketing, etc... How is tech an exceptionally hostile environment towards women?
    - demewmew 14y ago
      You're making a lot of assumptions that may not be correct in your reading, because they certainly weren't explicitly stated: in particular, that agpen is a woman (not a given from the comment in question), and two, that "men are the root of women's problems in tech." agpen is criticizing boys' clubs, a term that encapsulates a certain culture, behaviors, and set of beliefs. The gender of those participating in that culture is typically male, but women can and do perpetuate boys' club cultures on their own, often because that's the only way they can gain admission. It's fairer to see criticism of boys' clubs as a criticism of that culture and set of behaviors, and the idea that one must participate in those behaviors in order to be accepted, not of men in particular. How is tech an exceptionally hostile environment towards women? http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents - Schneier links to this in the OP. If your response to that is "sexism happens everywhere," well, I'd like it to stop happening everywhere, and I'll start with my home turf.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

colmvp 14y ago

"From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. Men don't have to do it, why should women." I agree that the props idea is stupid, but men do have things differently. Men don't have to resort to using crazy schemes largely because women overwhelmingly don't approach men. And men who are sexually or physically assaulted by women have a significant fear of being ridiculed by society for not fighting back (or in the case of sexual assault, enjoying it).

karinqe 14y ago

If a woman acts inappropriately towards a man, he rarely has any option to make her fuck off. "Men don't have to do it"? They can't. It's only that it happens less often (I guess). Seems to me that women have a lot more power in this regard.

agpen 14y ago
When 1 in 4 men get sexually assaulted during their lives, I will start giving one iota of care about poor poor dis-empowered men.
- cbs 14y ago
  edit: I give up. Who was I to think that the fact 1-in6 men are sexually abused while underage was a quick and easy response to a remark that men are not sexually assaulted in any real numbers. I should have looked up the statistics on all demographics, because apparently that sexual abuse isn't good enough sexual abuse to refute the weight the parent poster was giving to the 1-in-4 women statistic. Thanks sethg, I see clearly now.
  - sethg 14y ago
    Right, but that’s during childhood, not as an adult going to work and attending technical conferences. I can think of only one person I’ve met since turning 18 who was, umm, skeevy to me in a sexual way, and that person was male. (He didn’t actually assault me, but I later learned that one MIT fraternity had nicknamed him “the NAMBLA man”, and a while after that there was an article in the school paper reporting that he had just done time for rape.)
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - reinhardt 14y ago
    Yeap, judging from the downvotes in all sibling posts, the "think of the women" PC brigade is on witchhunt tonight. God forbid someone brings up an area where men are less pampered. Oh well.

illuminate 14y ago

"From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. Men don't have to do it, why should women." Like Hollaback, this is a very imperfect, but apparently effective solution. I appreciate your appeals to straw Feminism, but "women should react the same as men to every situation to 'prove' they are strong" is not it, it's a mess of privileged assumptions.

FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
It's not that they "should react the same", it's that - ideally - they shouldn't have to act differently to be treated equally. I'll concede that imperfect but effective solutions are probably necessary to help foster this sort of equality in the long run, though, and the more people who step up and take responsibility for pushing the change (regardless of gender), the better.
- illuminate 14y ago
  "It's not that they "should react the same", it's that - ideally - they shouldn't have to act differently to be treated equally." Totally. Putting your hands over your ears and eyes isn't going to get us to that point.

sethg 14y ago

From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. People who already have power do not need props and schemes, because, well, they have power. I know that if I grab my boss’s crotch during a meeting and he says ”you have thirty seconds to convince me not to fire your sorry ass right now”, every witness to the event and everybody above him in the corporate hierarchy will back him up. A man tempted to do the same thing to a woman less powerful than himself does not have the same assurance that he will suffer consequences for his bad behavior, and you can’t just create that sense of assurance by fiat. (As the Readercon debacle indicated, even written policies are no guarantee.) So people of good will are still trying to figure out how to hack the social environment to achieve a better culture, and until the rules of that culture become second nature to us all, then those social hacks will seem like, well, hacks.

demewmew 14y ago
So well said. When people don't take you seriously, clever hacks are the next best solution. The "What She Really Said" IRC bot story reminds me of this as well.
- blhack 14y ago
  No they're not. The cards thing establishes the premise that women are incapable of holding social status. They're not. The cards enforce the very thing they're trying to prevent.
  - illuminate 14y ago
    The cards are a reflection of reality, not an endorsement of the current state of things. Your tactic of putting your hands over your eyes and ears has been tried, at length in the past. It hasn't ever worked wherever it's been tried.

efa 14y ago

I'm curious if this is a unique problem for tech workers. I'm sure if you look at conferences from any field there will be incidents of sexual harassment. Is this a problem unique to tech or a general problem of idiot men working with women? I've worked mostly in corporate environments. If I had to characterize a type that was in need of sensitivity training, it usually wasn't the tech guys, it was the "business" type (marketing, finance). Of course that's just my experience.