12 ms·

The Gray Zone

178 points by stanleydrew 13y ago

stanleydrew 13y ago
The "gray zone" problem as stated here is that it is easy for two people who are unlikely to develop a romantic relationship (say, two heterosexual men) to form a close working relationship. But in order to tear down the glass ceiling heterosexual men and women will need to form close working relationships, and sometimes those are misinterpreted as more romantic than they actually are. This is the most important paragraph: "I think the path forward is finding a way to tolerate this gray zone and accommodate it without simply shutting women out professionally. So I really do not think these shit shows help women break into business. I think they just reinforce the current paradigm where the people in power -- mostly men -- have reason to err on the side of shutting women out in order to protect themselves from potential scandal or accusations or similar." This is a very complicated issue, but I don't think we are well-served by slandering one another on social media rather than having a reasoned discussion. Unfortunately the claims made in the current debacle are not permitting a reasoned discussion, either by mistake or design, which is incredibly frustrating.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- auggierose 13y ago
  Yep. 100% right. I like your generalisation of the original statement in that the gray zone is defined by obvious mutual romantic incompatibility. For example, a heterosexual man also can help a heterosexual woman in a total professional non-romantic way if he doesn't find her attractive.
- thatthatis 13y ago
  Romantic and/or sexual.
- Loic 13y ago
  Where I am really surprised is that you have a lot of issues like that in the computer/programming world (see related issues in conferences) where, we do not have these problems in other engineering areas. I am is bio/chemical engineering, working with women in basically all the fields from very men dominated domains (oil and gas, auto industry) to mixed (pharma/food industry), the only case I know of issues was in the army provider area. This is where I am surprised, please note that my contacts are mainly in Europe. Maybe another question could be why these issues are endemic to the computer/programming world? Is it because all the other industries are pretty conservative? We have families and kids when we go home and we are not supposed to kill our social life by working insane hours to "ship". I have no answers, but I am happy to be in a field where I can work with men and women without these sexism issues.
  - facepalm 13y ago
    I'd say it's not even that common in the programming world either. But the internet collects cases from all over the world, and the programming sites blow them out of proportion (is there a Hacker News for bio chemical engineering?). There are sites that try to list all such incidents. If you compare them to the number of people and companies in the field, you realize not that much is actually happening... I think feminists have also set a special sight on programming. I suspect it is because it is one of the few engineering jobs that seem compatible with women. Sorry for the stereotypes - I don't speak for all women, but consider that with programming you don't get oil on your clothes, you don't have to walk through mud all day, etc. That's why feminists think women should have more part in programming (at least it's a theory...).
Ryel 13y ago
If I reply to this with constructive criticism, would that be sexist?
- MartinCron 13y ago
  Why don't you try?
- lilsunnybee 13y ago
  Loaded question much? Sounds like you already have your mind made up.
munin 13y ago
okay I don't really know how to say this, but in my limited and man-centric experience the sexism that I've seen has nothing to do with an ambiguous relationship or sexual tension and everything to do with toxic attitudes towards women. The guy who says "you should be making babies" to a woman engineer is not trying to avoid some kind of "gray zone" caused by getting too close to this woman and deciding between a professional or romantic relationship, he's just an asshole. The guy who says "I don't hire women" isn't doing this because he's afraid of falling in love with them, he's just an asshole. I think that this idea gets dangerously close to an idea that men and women cannot be friends without romantic feelings spontaneously forming. I think that's crap. It might be true when you're a teenager, but when you grow up I don't think it's an excuse any more. I think that people use "women and men can't be friends" as a lead-in to "and that's why women should stay at home", and that's why it's super confusing to read about it from this perspective.
- MartinCron 13y ago
  It seems like there are two distinct problems, and the one Michelle is writing about involves all of the self-proclaimed "good guys" (myself included).
- stanleydrew 13y ago
  The kind of sexism you describe in your first paragraph is incredibly easy to see. It's the kind of sexism you'd see in a movie, and it does happen. But I think we have come far enough to know that if someone said "you should be making babies" seriously to someone else, it wouldn't be tolerated. In short, I think your experience is definitely "limited and man-centric". Talk to your female friends more and see if they agree with your experience. I'm not a woman, but intuitively I would bet that the awkward gray zone stuff is a much larger part of what makes women uncomfortable in an office setting. In fact, I have seen the gray zone affect my girlfriends and close friends who are women. It's a much bigger problem than the few true misogynists out there.
  - munin 13y ago
    I'm not sure I agree totally with you. I've talked about this a lot with my women friends and in 2014 consistent complaints I hear are people using diminutive or sexist language towards women in professional contexts. It's just that blatant and it's totally tolerated, across government, academia and industry. It takes a lot of effort to stick your head up and say "I'm sorry, I don't want that to happen" and some friends of mine have just stopped trying and go with it because fighting it and working professionally is just too hard. I'd be interested in seeing if the gray zone exists in an office that's absent toxic attitudes towards women but in ten years of working I haven't seen such an office. The women are uncomfortable because John leers at them when they walk past his office, or everyone keeps asking Mary to take notes at the meeting and fetch coffee, or Joe keeps talking about porn on his lunch break. You should read Nancy Hauge's "Consulting Adult" series about life working at Sun - it was depressing how little had changed in a corporate setting with regards to the treatment of women! In my experience at least...
jellicle 13y ago
While I agree with the writer that sometimes mating behavior can be observed in office settings, that's not actually the main problem in the tech industry. The problem in the tech industry is that there are a lot of misogynist assholes who are put into positions of power and encourage that behavior in their businesses. The average techie is a male who has spent a lot more time interacting with his computer than he has interacting with women. He does not understand women, he fears women, and what he fears, he hates.
- balozi 13y ago
  "The average techie is a male who has spent a lot more time interacting with his computer than he has interacting with women. He does not understand women, he fears women, and what he fears, he hates" I think this is unhelpful pop-psychology babble. The average techie is no different than the average human. Average humans with spouses/partners, siblings, friends and bills to pay, just like you. They have hangups, insecurities and personalities no different than your own. These myths about how they interact with computers, fear or hate women is nothing more than often repeated nonsense from people that haven't spent much time in the real world meeting and interacting with real people.
- __pThrow 13y ago
  In the future, you can reduce your diatribe to what you actually believe "patriarchal misogynist assholes" and that will help everyone out. Your supporters as well as those who would disagree with you.
- selmnoo 13y ago
  > The problem in the tech industry is that there are a lot of misogynist assholes who are put into positions of power and encourage that behavior in their businesses. It's really, really weird that I keep reading this. Are you sure you want to single out tech industry as having a lot of assholes? Because, I'm a person who's come to the tech industry after being in various different industries over the years -- particularly, I've worked alongside a lot of mechanical engineering folk, sales folk, and construction folk. And let me tell you, far and away the tech industry folk have been the least misogynistic I have ever had to deal with. I can't even tell you the kind of things my fellow engineers used to tell me, how they depicted their relationships with women (invariably viewing them as just sex objects, etc.). I'm not really sure why there isn't much public and vocal outrage about problems in those industries. I totally don't understand it.
yummyfajitas 13y ago
Michele raises a very good point. This is a problem. The only successful way I've found to deal with it is rude honesty. "Sorry, I wasn't interested in writing a paper with you, I wanted to touch your boobies." "We can totally work together, but lets be realistic - under other circumstances we'd totally be doing it." Now it's all out in the open, and can continue in the relationship under whatever circumstances are desired. Or perhaps not continue, in the case that I want to make out and she wants me to prove theorems. Everyone's feelings might be a little hurt ("she doesn't think I'm hot?", "he doesn't think I'm smart?") but that can be solved by growing a pair. Unfortunately, in the hypersensitive PC world that feminists are pushing on the bigger players in the tech world, you simply can't do that. Too much of a power imbalance - the woman can ruin your reputation with a few tweets. Since there are so few women, the marginal cost to avoiding close relationships with women is also fairly low. No amount of moral posturing will change the incentives.
- cbhl 13y ago
  > The only successful way I've found to deal with it is rude honesty. This is entirely hearsay, but the way that people around Waterloo talk about pg, I feel like he does operate this way. But he does so with everyone, not just women. > Unfortunately, in the hypersensitive PC world that feminists are pushing on the bigger players in the tech world, you simply can't do that. IIRC there was a study that said people would let you cut in line if you had a reason, even if that reason was nonsense (say, "Please let me cut in line because I need to make copies"). I usually explain my rude honesty as a side-effect of having Asperger Syndrome, although it's actually deliberate coping strategy as opposed to my default behaviour. On the other hand, if everyone dealt with this through rude honesty, it would still result in inequity, because women would have to deal with all the guys saying they were hot, whereas few guys would have to deal with this. (If you look at the behaviour on dating websites -- the OKCupid blog was good for this before they got bought out by Match.com -- or in an undergraduate Engineering classroom, you'll readily see this.)
  - _pmf_ 13y ago
    > This is entirely hearsay, but the way that people around Waterloo talk about pg, I feel like he does operate this way. Being a millionaire helps a bit in getting through with this behavior. If a simple wage slave tries anything in the direction of "rude honesty", he'll be out of the door within 2 minutes.
calinet6 13y ago
I'll just say the only thing that occurs to me... This is remarkably mature, and astute, and human. It touches at the reality of the situation when you assume most of the players have good intentions. It avoids sinking to the platitudes and trivialities that cloud this discussion. It's enormously complex, beyond this. But this is a truth I haven't heard yet, and it's part of the kernel of the problem.
- stanleydrew 13y ago
  I agree, which is why I submitted it to HN. I don't know her personally, but I think Michelle should be commended for bringing something actually interesting and useful to this discussion.
- secstate 13y ago
  Perhaps the most unsettling part of Michele's observation is that it is not clear how to get around it. Calls for gender neutrality in the work place are a bit like asking for world peace. There is no neutral, so long as sex and instinct are involved. When I am tasked to work one-on-one with an attractive female co-worker, shit gets cloudy really quickly. I'm a happily married man. I telecommute. There is no reason for these situations to be awkward. But yet, here we are. The gray zone certainly exists and it will be a very tough nut to crack. Basically, kudos to Michele for calling out the uselessness of public shame sessions, and advocating a new tack. Because the old one sure as hell wasn't going to get us across the finish line.
Difwif 13y ago
I'm sure most people are as tired of this issue as it sounds the author is. I finished the article and couldn't help feeling some sense of dread. Knowing full well what should be the most controversial and opinionated comment will likely become the most upvoted. Again the author will have to re-evaluate if she wants to continue reading HN and if she decides to leave, our community bias will continue to grow. This is one of the toughest issues that our industry faces. Their doesn't seem to be a clear answer and because of that it seems to be shunned. There's just so much momentum to overcome behind the culture of our species, add on to the fact that we can really only agree that it's "broken" with lots of opinions on how to improve it. I don't have an answer and I'm not even going to try to offer one because I honestly feel like I'm still far too entrenched in my own biases to really offer something viable. My only wish is that more people would realize the same and be less prone to slandering someone because they tried to help.
- Mz 13y ago
  I am sorry it fills you with dread. I am actually extremely encouraged by my recent experiences on HN and pleasantly surprised to see this piece discussed in earnest. I hope that, over time, I will be able to blog about some things that have been helpful to me personally in hopes of getting some solutions in place. Since some people here are taking my premise seriously, that looks a great deal more do-able to me than it ever has before.
__pThrow 13y ago
I have found I often agree with Michele, but I think she makes some basic errors in this piece. 1) That most power is in the hands of a few people, who at this moment are primarily men, does not generalize to mean that most men have any power over most women. Most men, most women, at work are powerless. Bosses, leads, vps from other departments -- they have power and they are frequently women. 2) She frames the problem as one of active male behavior and passive female behavior. Women are acted upon. Men at work want sex or romance -- I guess women at work do not want sex or romance. It may very well be that at work she does not want sex or romance. And my guess is that at work most men do not want sex or romance. But there are some men, and there are some women that do. That's not to say that her path out may not have some virtues. I do think it would be good for everyone to turn the knob back down to 10, or 9, or perhaps even 3, and talk about the issues of sex and romance and sexism at work, while recognizing this isn't a problem of "Men" and isn't a problem of "Women" but is perhaps a problem of "homo sapiens in the 21st century".
eruditely 13y ago
Is she really, a "prominent" engineer? But yes, this grey zone is valid, but people cannot pretend that these black-swan type gender scandals do not make men err on the side of caution when employing women; so they do not awaken the unconscious twitter opinion cartels one day unintentionally. The fact that this unconcious opinion farming cartel will pick on the good guys(PG)[1], and not only the bad-guys show that they are indiscriminate in their wake, and these people don't give a shit before publishing on valley-wag or going to twitter. [1]no scare-quotes, because they are good guys, IE Paul Graham)
bittercynic 13y ago
This is the most thoughtful thing I've ever read on the topic, and it gives me some new insight into my own thoughts and feelings. I'm a straight, happily married man, and count myself lucky to work with many gay and straight men and gay and straight women who I enjoy being around. Of those four groups, I have noticed that I'm the least at ease around straight women, and I think this article does a good job of explaining the reason for that. With the other three groups there is far less risk of friendliness being mistaken as flirtatiousness.
zobzu 13y ago
This article is much more reasonable that the previous one i've read from you. Yeah, women will be women and men will be men. There is always some kind of sexual attraction between the two, and there are always physical and even mental differences between the 2 genders. It's how we're made. There will always be a divide - its about how we behave about it: This seems to be much more of an issue in the US than anywhere else tho. The US default expectation seems to be to always over-exaggerate stuff, and always takes the over-defensive position. It's seen as "good person". It's seen as OK for the minority to attack the majority and is considered legitimate regardless of the attack or argument being made (in this case, women using their gender as a weapon, so it's really just a minority within the minority). Sometimes the same happens with black vs white, and so on, too. In fact "think of the children" attacks are based on the exact same concept. (remove internet neutrality, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!) If anything, it deserves the ones who really get harassed IMO, because eventually those might not be defended when they really should be.
tunesmith 13y ago
I don't know, if the author's only experience of male coworkers is that they either don't want to work with her, or they want to get busy, then it basically sounds to me like she is surrounded by a bunch of arrested-development coworkers with poor boundaries. Restricting this to heterosexual dynamics, a bonding platonic interaction with the opposite gender very well might feel different than a bonding interaction with the same gender. But that doesn't by definition mean that it has to be distracting, with the participants wondering whether they're about to shag. That's what having boundaries is all about. It's what professionalism is about. It's erring towards the professional interpretation rather than the suggestive interpretation. If some other coworker sees you laughing together and gets all gossipy about if something is going on, then that is simply an immature reaction, and it is not professional. I just can't quite fathom simply "tolerating" a gray zone when it really sounds like people need to do a better job of shutting it down and being professional. I see snippets of this conversation and it's hard to wrap my hands around it because it just seems like the entire conversation is stuck in a paradigm from a few decades ago. It sounds like people in this industry just need some more experiences with having positive, bonding professional experiences with compatibly-gendered coworkers, without it getting all weird and dramatic, before they'll start to accept that it is actually normal and expected, and that there's no reason to get all distracted by whether or not there's any subtext there. Maybe that's all it is, just something where the community needs more experience and socialization...
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  > * it basically sounds to me like she is surrounded by a bunch of arrested-development coworkers with poor boundaries.* That's extraordinarily common in the industry, especially in startups.
err4nt 13y ago
To be clear: I may be in the minority I'm a young male. Maybe too young to matter, but I do not, and I can't stress enough, I literally give no merit to the gender of my coworkers. I was I raised to treat everybody equal. In my family as well as in general society today, women are MORE highly educated on average than men. And that's a great thing! Men can act weird toward women at times, and men will never understand what that feels like. But I AM a man. Trust me when I say that women will never understand what it feels like when a man talks to a man in the absence of women. I know people can be dicks, they can be terrible, and that's across both genders, but there IS a 'straight man to straight man' dynamic that women will always be protected from that isn't terribly pleasant. TL;DR: The old boys club isn't fun for all boys, it's still only fun for the ones on top and that doesn't represent most of us.
- SolarNet 13y ago
  Which is why you shouldn't participate in it? I realize there are serious societal pressures to conform and be part of that 'old boys club'. But that is exactly the problem, your support of it (even if mostly implicit by merely being present, is made explicit when you laugh along with the sexist jokes or nod in agreement) is what perpetuates your male privilege. I have a lot of privilege too, so I'm not talking from some theoretical moral high ground of being less privileged than you. But I try not to participate. It's one of the hardest things to stand up to society and your peers. But next time, try walking away. It isn't as good as telling the others why they are being bigoted, but it's better than contributing. And I realize that isn't always possible. But the next time you get a job, or promotion, and you get that 'old boys club' vibe. Realize that someone else might have gotten that if they had been male (or white, or straight, or Christian, or American, or ...).
  - tomp 13y ago
    > But that is exactly the problem, your support of it (even if mostly implicit by merely being present, is made explicit when you laugh along with the sexist jokes or nod in agreement) is what perpetuates your male privilege. The choice, for me and him and maybe other people (men included) is very simple: we can either accept reality, conform to the "old boy's club" (you call that "supporting it"), and progress in our careers, or fight moral battles we cannot win and stagnate professionally or even be fired. It's easy to take the moral high ground from a position of power, but from a position of a young male, it's not very wise. Personally, I find that all great employees I've worked with have also been great people, so I haven't had this problem myself. But I think that your position is not the most reasonable.
aragot 13y ago
> So I really do not think these shit shows help women break into business. I think they just reinforce the current paradigm where the people in power -- mostly men -- have reason to err on the side of shutting women out in order to protect themselves from potential scandal or accusations or similar. As a male, I approve. I'd like to talk more about my needs regarding this topic, but it's hard to do in a perfectly politically correct way.
_pctq 13y ago
My comment may appear incredibly naive, I'm sorry about that. But I wonder if this gray zone is not simply the symptom of massive loneliness. I often say to friends that I'm surprised how much, when I'm in a relationship, I see all (other) women as men. Even when other women try to engage me into seduction play, it just makes me laugh or mocking them, just like I would with men (providing they know I'm with someone, of course, or else I try to be less rude). This gray zone seems to me like people are incredibly lonely and craving for sexual activity, and I think we can spot that in our societies way beyond those "sexism at work" problems (the "dating" thing where you meet people you hardly know, "social" activities like facebook, etc). It could be also a thing for people that are prone to cheat, but I can't think it's a majority of people.
- NoodleIncident 13y ago
  Fair enough assessment. This problem applies mostly to people not in a relationship. Is that helpful? Lots of people are not in a relationship. Most of them would like that not to be the case. Also, you can't tell just when meeting people whether or not they're in a relationship, so it's a problem regardless.
  - eric_h 13y ago
    > Also, you can't tell just when meeting people whether or not they're in a relationship, so it's a problem regardless. Well, you can if they're wearing a wedding ring.
    - gfodor 13y ago
      Uh, that's not the same thing. Many (the majority?) of twenty something's who are in a relationship are not married.
      - eric_h 13y ago
        Agreed, I was merely pointing out an edge case in the GP's generalization.
michaelochurch 13y ago
The problem isn't sexism. It's corruption, and it's all throughout business. Most of "business" has nothing to do with discounted cash flows or customer needs or building new products, but about leveraging the emotional vulnerabilities and drives of corrupt humans with more power than they deserve. That's 95% of it. That's why more is learned in MBA school at the bar than in the courses. Aside: the above also explains why being a non-drinker (like me, for health reasons) impedes your career. When you get sloshed, you see a much wider range of human behavior (some people hitting their worst) and you learn things that are otherwise impossible to learn about guarded, intelligent, 25+ year-old people with a lot to lose. You can read about that stuff (how to negotiate enormous deals with irrational humans) in books; or you can get hammered with 10 other people and interact with it, on a smaller scale where the points (unless you get severely fucked up in a bar fight) mostly don't matter. The problem is that most of the work isn't hard, and doesn't require talented people. If the work is legitimately hard (i.e. someone might fail) that's viewed as a management failure. This means that anyone can be "groomed" to appear as a leader and as a success, which means that the whole process is already (justifiably) under suspicion. Ergo, the promotion of a woman (even if she's the most talented, because it's impossible to tell in most cases) raises doubts. People assume she was mentored because she was female and pretty, and not because she had the most potential. It's wrong, but you can expect those kinds of attacks in a system where everyone already knows that corruption is the norm. People will use whatever they have to discredit someone who rose faster than they did: female and pretty, boss's son, "had something" (i.e. extorted his way into the sun). It doesn't have to be true. The sexism battle here is a minor one, really, in the much grander theater of corporate dysfunction. What's more obvious is that the corporate world is not a meritocracy. Most people are forced to work 3 levels below their ability and become deeply resentful, and anyone who gets promoted on potential is immediately thrown into suspicion. The sad thing is that the companies that were coming closest to fixing this are the ones prominently using open allocation: Valve and Github, the latter now under attack. (To make it clear, I'm not taking sides because it's pretty clear that almost none of us have any real information at this point.) With managerial power being a major source of corruption in the past, it seems wise to get rid of it. But it's also clear that getting rid of all management functions is a non-starter. Even if you do everything right in a no-management company, people will distrust you (was HR asleep on this? you mean there was no HR?) as soon anything goes wrong.
hrktb 13y ago
Somehow I'd hope puting homosexuality more in the spotlight, with more realistic depiction in fiction would indirectly aleviate this problem. Even if it would still be statisticly low, making it that two men closely working together face the same gray zoning problem would move the problem from a gender problem to a generic human relation problem involving the majority of workers, and we could see effective solutions to it.
ryanpardieck 13y ago
I think a lot of the problems regarding the gray zone come from not being clear, not understanding boundaries, and not knowing when to move on. These, of course, are things I've learnt the hard way ... And anyway, is the gray zone itself really such a problem? Being close to someone and sometimes wondering whether there's something "else" there seems pretty normal. Maybe we should just be OK with a bit of ambiguity in some of our friendships. It won't kill you ... I think a few principles, once applied, make navigating the gray zone almost trivial: -First, if you think you might be interested, engage in light harmless flirting and gauge the response. If there is no/negative response, then move on. The flirting should truly be harmless. If you friend feels uncomfortable, unsafe, or demeaned, then you have flirted wrongly. Apologize and move on. -If you've determined you're interested, decide whether it is worth acting on. Sometimes it isn't - for instance, if you're married, or you're just too busy or whatever. Just move on. -If you're interested and it's worth acting on, promptly express interest in a way that is clear and firm, but not embarrassing or intimidating to your friend. Do not express interest if you are not ready to take "no" for an answer. If you can't take "no" for an answer, just move on and try to figure out why. Where a lot of people go wrong here is instead of actually asking, they half-ask and half-demand. That is going to frighten your friend, and you probably won't be friends any longer. -If you're rejected, accept it and don't lash out. If you goofed and made things super-awkward and uncomfortable, then lighten the air with a silly joke or something (ie make it clear that you're not going to flip, and that you're cool). Lashing out is going to create a toxic environment for everyone, and it's going to suck. Instead, deal with your feelings on your own, and continue to treat your friend with respect. And, of course, move on. It's maybe a little awkward to continue working next to stop who rejected you--or who you rejected--but in my experience, it really isn't that bad at all, and it goes away quickly. What's much worse is to ignore one of these steps, and then have things end in a massive immature blow-out. Just take responsibility and be clear, and don't have undue expectations. And it's often not too late to save yourself. In one case I was a massive douche, but I owned up to my behavior, apologized, and said I hoped we could eventually put this behind us. We did eventually, and it was fun. Basically, you just have to be considerate and know when to move the hell on.

178 points by stanleydrew 13y ago

The "gray zone" problem as stated here is that it is easy for two people who are unlikely to develop a romantic relationship (say, two heterosexual men) to form a close working relationship. But in order to tear down the glass ceiling heterosexual men and women will need to form close working relationships, and sometimes those are misinterpreted as more romantic than they actually are. This is the most important paragraph: "I think the path forward is finding a way to tolerate this gray zone and accommodate it without simply shutting women out professionally. So I really do not think these shit shows help women break into business. I think they just reinforce the current paradigm where the people in power -- mostly men -- have reason to err on the side of shutting women out in order to protect themselves from potential scandal or accusations or similar." This is a very complicated issue, but I don't think we are well-served by slandering one another on social media rather than having a reasoned discussion. Unfortunately the claims made in the current debacle are not permitting a reasoned discussion, either by mistake or design, which is incredibly frustrating.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
auggierose 13y ago
Yep. 100% right. I like your generalisation of the original statement in that the gray zone is defined by obvious mutual romantic incompatibility. For example, a heterosexual man also can help a heterosexual woman in a total professional non-romantic way if he doesn't find her attractive.
thatthatis 13y ago
Romantic and/or sexual.
Loic 13y ago
Where I am really surprised is that you have a lot of issues like that in the computer/programming world (see related issues in conferences) where, we do not have these problems in other engineering areas. I am is bio/chemical engineering, working with women in basically all the fields from very men dominated domains (oil and gas, auto industry) to mixed (pharma/food industry), the only case I know of issues was in the army provider area. This is where I am surprised, please note that my contacts are mainly in Europe. Maybe another question could be why these issues are endemic to the computer/programming world? Is it because all the other industries are pretty conservative? We have families and kids when we go home and we are not supposed to kill our social life by working insane hours to "ship". I have no answers, but I am happy to be in a field where I can work with men and women without these sexism issues.
- facepalm 13y ago
  I'd say it's not even that common in the programming world either. But the internet collects cases from all over the world, and the programming sites blow them out of proportion (is there a Hacker News for bio chemical engineering?). There are sites that try to list all such incidents. If you compare them to the number of people and companies in the field, you realize not that much is actually happening... I think feminists have also set a special sight on programming. I suspect it is because it is one of the few engineering jobs that seem compatible with women. Sorry for the stereotypes - I don't speak for all women, but consider that with programming you don't get oil on your clothes, you don't have to walk through mud all day, etc. That's why feminists think women should have more part in programming (at least it's a theory...).

Ryel 13y ago

If I reply to this with constructive criticism, would that be sexist?

MartinCron 13y ago
Why don't you try?
lilsunnybee 13y ago
Loaded question much? Sounds like you already have your mind made up.

munin 13y ago

okay I don't really know how to say this, but in my limited and man-centric experience the sexism that I've seen has nothing to do with an ambiguous relationship or sexual tension and everything to do with toxic attitudes towards women. The guy who says "you should be making babies" to a woman engineer is not trying to avoid some kind of "gray zone" caused by getting too close to this woman and deciding between a professional or romantic relationship, he's just an asshole. The guy who says "I don't hire women" isn't doing this because he's afraid of falling in love with them, he's just an asshole. I think that this idea gets dangerously close to an idea that men and women cannot be friends without romantic feelings spontaneously forming. I think that's crap. It might be true when you're a teenager, but when you grow up I don't think it's an excuse any more. I think that people use "women and men can't be friends" as a lead-in to "and that's why women should stay at home", and that's why it's super confusing to read about it from this perspective.

MartinCron 13y ago
It seems like there are two distinct problems, and the one Michelle is writing about involves all of the self-proclaimed "good guys" (myself included).
stanleydrew 13y ago
The kind of sexism you describe in your first paragraph is incredibly easy to see. It's the kind of sexism you'd see in a movie, and it does happen. But I think we have come far enough to know that if someone said "you should be making babies" seriously to someone else, it wouldn't be tolerated. In short, I think your experience is definitely "limited and man-centric". Talk to your female friends more and see if they agree with your experience. I'm not a woman, but intuitively I would bet that the awkward gray zone stuff is a much larger part of what makes women uncomfortable in an office setting. In fact, I have seen the gray zone affect my girlfriends and close friends who are women. It's a much bigger problem than the few true misogynists out there.
- munin 13y ago
  I'm not sure I agree totally with you. I've talked about this a lot with my women friends and in 2014 consistent complaints I hear are people using diminutive or sexist language towards women in professional contexts. It's just that blatant and it's totally tolerated, across government, academia and industry. It takes a lot of effort to stick your head up and say "I'm sorry, I don't want that to happen" and some friends of mine have just stopped trying and go with it because fighting it and working professionally is just too hard. I'd be interested in seeing if the gray zone exists in an office that's absent toxic attitudes towards women but in ten years of working I haven't seen such an office. The women are uncomfortable because John leers at them when they walk past his office, or everyone keeps asking Mary to take notes at the meeting and fetch coffee, or Joe keeps talking about porn on his lunch break. You should read Nancy Hauge's "Consulting Adult" series about life working at Sun - it was depressing how little had changed in a corporate setting with regards to the treatment of women! In my experience at least...

jellicle 13y ago

While I agree with the writer that sometimes mating behavior can be observed in office settings, that's not actually the main problem in the tech industry. The problem in the tech industry is that there are a lot of misogynist assholes who are put into positions of power and encourage that behavior in their businesses. The average techie is a male who has spent a lot more time interacting with his computer than he has interacting with women. He does not understand women, he fears women, and what he fears, he hates.

balozi 13y ago
"The average techie is a male who has spent a lot more time interacting with his computer than he has interacting with women. He does not understand women, he fears women, and what he fears, he hates" I think this is unhelpful pop-psychology babble. The average techie is no different than the average human. Average humans with spouses/partners, siblings, friends and bills to pay, just like you. They have hangups, insecurities and personalities no different than your own. These myths about how they interact with computers, fear or hate women is nothing more than often repeated nonsense from people that haven't spent much time in the real world meeting and interacting with real people.
__pThrow 13y ago
In the future, you can reduce your diatribe to what you actually believe "patriarchal misogynist assholes" and that will help everyone out. Your supporters as well as those who would disagree with you.
selmnoo 13y ago
> The problem in the tech industry is that there are a lot of misogynist assholes who are put into positions of power and encourage that behavior in their businesses. It's really, really weird that I keep reading this. Are you sure you want to single out tech industry as having a lot of assholes? Because, I'm a person who's come to the tech industry after being in various different industries over the years -- particularly, I've worked alongside a lot of mechanical engineering folk, sales folk, and construction folk. And let me tell you, far and away the tech industry folk have been the least misogynistic I have ever had to deal with. I can't even tell you the kind of things my fellow engineers used to tell me, how they depicted their relationships with women (invariably viewing them as just sex objects, etc.). I'm not really sure why there isn't much public and vocal outrage about problems in those industries. I totally don't understand it.

yummyfajitas 13y ago

Michele raises a very good point. This is a problem. The only successful way I've found to deal with it is rude honesty. "Sorry, I wasn't interested in writing a paper with you, I wanted to touch your boobies." "We can totally work together, but lets be realistic - under other circumstances we'd totally be doing it." Now it's all out in the open, and can continue in the relationship under whatever circumstances are desired. Or perhaps not continue, in the case that I want to make out and she wants me to prove theorems. Everyone's feelings might be a little hurt ("she doesn't think I'm hot?", "he doesn't think I'm smart?") but that can be solved by growing a pair. Unfortunately, in the hypersensitive PC world that feminists are pushing on the bigger players in the tech world, you simply can't do that. Too much of a power imbalance - the woman can ruin your reputation with a few tweets. Since there are so few women, the marginal cost to avoiding close relationships with women is also fairly low. No amount of moral posturing will change the incentives.

cbhl 13y ago
> The only successful way I've found to deal with it is rude honesty. This is entirely hearsay, but the way that people around Waterloo talk about pg, I feel like he does operate this way. But he does so with everyone, not just women. > Unfortunately, in the hypersensitive PC world that feminists are pushing on the bigger players in the tech world, you simply can't do that. IIRC there was a study that said people would let you cut in line if you had a reason, even if that reason was nonsense (say, "Please let me cut in line because I need to make copies"). I usually explain my rude honesty as a side-effect of having Asperger Syndrome, although it's actually deliberate coping strategy as opposed to my default behaviour. On the other hand, if everyone dealt with this through rude honesty, it would still result in inequity, because women would have to deal with all the guys saying they were hot, whereas few guys would have to deal with this. (If you look at the behaviour on dating websites -- the OKCupid blog was good for this before they got bought out by Match.com -- or in an undergraduate Engineering classroom, you'll readily see this.)
- _pmf_ 13y ago
  > This is entirely hearsay, but the way that people around Waterloo talk about pg, I feel like he does operate this way. Being a millionaire helps a bit in getting through with this behavior. If a simple wage slave tries anything in the direction of "rude honesty", he'll be out of the door within 2 minutes.

calinet6 13y ago

I'll just say the only thing that occurs to me... This is remarkably mature, and astute, and human. It touches at the reality of the situation when you assume most of the players have good intentions. It avoids sinking to the platitudes and trivialities that cloud this discussion. It's enormously complex, beyond this. But this is a truth I haven't heard yet, and it's part of the kernel of the problem.

stanleydrew 13y ago
I agree, which is why I submitted it to HN. I don't know her personally, but I think Michelle should be commended for bringing something actually interesting and useful to this discussion.
secstate 13y ago
Perhaps the most unsettling part of Michele's observation is that it is not clear how to get around it. Calls for gender neutrality in the work place are a bit like asking for world peace. There is no neutral, so long as sex and instinct are involved. When I am tasked to work one-on-one with an attractive female co-worker, shit gets cloudy really quickly. I'm a happily married man. I telecommute. There is no reason for these situations to be awkward. But yet, here we are. The gray zone certainly exists and it will be a very tough nut to crack. Basically, kudos to Michele for calling out the uselessness of public shame sessions, and advocating a new tack. Because the old one sure as hell wasn't going to get us across the finish line.

Difwif 13y ago

I'm sure most people are as tired of this issue as it sounds the author is. I finished the article and couldn't help feeling some sense of dread. Knowing full well what should be the most controversial and opinionated comment will likely become the most upvoted. Again the author will have to re-evaluate if she wants to continue reading HN and if she decides to leave, our community bias will continue to grow. This is one of the toughest issues that our industry faces. Their doesn't seem to be a clear answer and because of that it seems to be shunned. There's just so much momentum to overcome behind the culture of our species, add on to the fact that we can really only agree that it's "broken" with lots of opinions on how to improve it. I don't have an answer and I'm not even going to try to offer one because I honestly feel like I'm still far too entrenched in my own biases to really offer something viable. My only wish is that more people would realize the same and be less prone to slandering someone because they tried to help.

Mz 13y ago
I am sorry it fills you with dread. I am actually extremely encouraged by my recent experiences on HN and pleasantly surprised to see this piece discussed in earnest. I hope that, over time, I will be able to blog about some things that have been helpful to me personally in hopes of getting some solutions in place. Since some people here are taking my premise seriously, that looks a great deal more do-able to me than it ever has before.

__pThrow 13y ago

I have found I often agree with Michele, but I think she makes some basic errors in this piece. 1) That most power is in the hands of a few people, who at this moment are primarily men, does not generalize to mean that most men have any power over most women. Most men, most women, at work are powerless. Bosses, leads, vps from other departments -- they have power and they are frequently women. 2) She frames the problem as one of active male behavior and passive female behavior. Women are acted upon. Men at work want sex or romance -- I guess women at work do not want sex or romance. It may very well be that at work she does not want sex or romance. And my guess is that at work most men do not want sex or romance. But there are some men, and there are some women that do. That's not to say that her path out may not have some virtues. I do think it would be good for everyone to turn the knob back down to 10, or 9, or perhaps even 3, and talk about the issues of sex and romance and sexism at work, while recognizing this isn't a problem of "Men" and isn't a problem of "Women" but is perhaps a problem of "homo sapiens in the 21st century".

eruditely 13y ago

Is she really, a "prominent" engineer? But yes, this grey zone is valid, but people cannot pretend that these black-swan type gender scandals do not make men err on the side of caution when employing women; so they do not awaken the unconscious twitter opinion cartels one day unintentionally. The fact that this unconcious opinion farming cartel will pick on the good guys(PG)[1], and not only the bad-guys show that they are indiscriminate in their wake, and these people don't give a shit before publishing on valley-wag or going to twitter. [1]no scare-quotes, because they are good guys, IE Paul Graham)

bittercynic 13y ago

This is the most thoughtful thing I've ever read on the topic, and it gives me some new insight into my own thoughts and feelings. I'm a straight, happily married man, and count myself lucky to work with many gay and straight men and gay and straight women who I enjoy being around. Of those four groups, I have noticed that I'm the least at ease around straight women, and I think this article does a good job of explaining the reason for that. With the other three groups there is far less risk of friendliness being mistaken as flirtatiousness.

zobzu 13y ago

This article is much more reasonable that the previous one i've read from you. Yeah, women will be women and men will be men. There is always some kind of sexual attraction between the two, and there are always physical and even mental differences between the 2 genders. It's how we're made. There will always be a divide - its about how we behave about it: This seems to be much more of an issue in the US than anywhere else tho. The US default expectation seems to be to always over-exaggerate stuff, and always takes the over-defensive position. It's seen as "good person". It's seen as OK for the minority to attack the majority and is considered legitimate regardless of the attack or argument being made (in this case, women using their gender as a weapon, so it's really just a minority within the minority). Sometimes the same happens with black vs white, and so on, too. In fact "think of the children" attacks are based on the exact same concept. (remove internet neutrality, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!) If anything, it deserves the ones who really get harassed IMO, because eventually those might not be defended when they really should be.

tunesmith 13y ago

I don't know, if the author's only experience of male coworkers is that they either don't want to work with her, or they want to get busy, then it basically sounds to me like she is surrounded by a bunch of arrested-development coworkers with poor boundaries. Restricting this to heterosexual dynamics, a bonding platonic interaction with the opposite gender very well might feel different than a bonding interaction with the same gender. But that doesn't by definition mean that it has to be distracting, with the participants wondering whether they're about to shag. That's what having boundaries is all about. It's what professionalism is about. It's erring towards the professional interpretation rather than the suggestive interpretation. If some other coworker sees you laughing together and gets all gossipy about if something is going on, then that is simply an immature reaction, and it is not professional. I just can't quite fathom simply "tolerating" a gray zone when it really sounds like people need to do a better job of shutting it down and being professional. I see snippets of this conversation and it's hard to wrap my hands around it because it just seems like the entire conversation is stuck in a paradigm from a few decades ago. It sounds like people in this industry just need some more experiences with having positive, bonding professional experiences with compatibly-gendered coworkers, without it getting all weird and dramatic, before they'll start to accept that it is actually normal and expected, and that there's no reason to get all distracted by whether or not there's any subtext there. Maybe that's all it is, just something where the community needs more experience and socialization...

InclinedPlane 13y ago
> * it basically sounds to me like she is surrounded by a bunch of arrested-development coworkers with poor boundaries.* That's extraordinarily common in the industry, especially in startups.

err4nt 13y ago

To be clear: I may be in the minority I'm a young male. Maybe too young to matter, but I do not, and I can't stress enough, I literally give no merit to the gender of my coworkers. I was I raised to treat everybody equal. In my family as well as in general society today, women are MORE highly educated on average than men. And that's a great thing! Men can act weird toward women at times, and men will never understand what that feels like. But I AM a man. Trust me when I say that women will never understand what it feels like when a man talks to a man in the absence of women. I know people can be dicks, they can be terrible, and that's across both genders, but there IS a 'straight man to straight man' dynamic that women will always be protected from that isn't terribly pleasant. TL;DR: The old boys club isn't fun for all boys, it's still only fun for the ones on top and that doesn't represent most of us.

SolarNet 13y ago
Which is why you shouldn't participate in it? I realize there are serious societal pressures to conform and be part of that 'old boys club'. But that is exactly the problem, your support of it (even if mostly implicit by merely being present, is made explicit when you laugh along with the sexist jokes or nod in agreement) is what perpetuates your male privilege. I have a lot of privilege too, so I'm not talking from some theoretical moral high ground of being less privileged than you. But I try not to participate. It's one of the hardest things to stand up to society and your peers. But next time, try walking away. It isn't as good as telling the others why they are being bigoted, but it's better than contributing. And I realize that isn't always possible. But the next time you get a job, or promotion, and you get that 'old boys club' vibe. Realize that someone else might have gotten that if they had been male (or white, or straight, or Christian, or American, or ...).
- tomp 13y ago
  > But that is exactly the problem, your support of it (even if mostly implicit by merely being present, is made explicit when you laugh along with the sexist jokes or nod in agreement) is what perpetuates your male privilege. The choice, for me and him and maybe other people (men included) is very simple: we can either accept reality, conform to the "old boy's club" (you call that "supporting it"), and progress in our careers, or fight moral battles we cannot win and stagnate professionally or even be fired. It's easy to take the moral high ground from a position of power, but from a position of a young male, it's not very wise. Personally, I find that all great employees I've worked with have also been great people, so I haven't had this problem myself. But I think that your position is not the most reasonable.

aragot 13y ago

> So I really do not think these shit shows help women break into business. I think they just reinforce the current paradigm where the people in power -- mostly men -- have reason to err on the side of shutting women out in order to protect themselves from potential scandal or accusations or similar. As a male, I approve. I'd like to talk more about my needs regarding this topic, but it's hard to do in a perfectly politically correct way.

_pctq 13y ago

My comment may appear incredibly naive, I'm sorry about that. But I wonder if this gray zone is not simply the symptom of massive loneliness. I often say to friends that I'm surprised how much, when I'm in a relationship, I see all (other) women as men. Even when other women try to engage me into seduction play, it just makes me laugh or mocking them, just like I would with men (providing they know I'm with someone, of course, or else I try to be less rude). This gray zone seems to me like people are incredibly lonely and craving for sexual activity, and I think we can spot that in our societies way beyond those "sexism at work" problems (the "dating" thing where you meet people you hardly know, "social" activities like facebook, etc). It could be also a thing for people that are prone to cheat, but I can't think it's a majority of people.

NoodleIncident 13y ago
Fair enough assessment. This problem applies mostly to people not in a relationship. Is that helpful? Lots of people are not in a relationship. Most of them would like that not to be the case. Also, you can't tell just when meeting people whether or not they're in a relationship, so it's a problem regardless.
- eric_h 13y ago
  > Also, you can't tell just when meeting people whether or not they're in a relationship, so it's a problem regardless. Well, you can if they're wearing a wedding ring.
  - gfodor 13y ago
    Uh, that's not the same thing. Many (the majority?) of twenty something's who are in a relationship are not married.
    - eric_h 13y ago
      Agreed, I was merely pointing out an edge case in the GP's generalization.

michaelochurch 13y ago

The problem isn't sexism. It's corruption, and it's all throughout business. Most of "business" has nothing to do with discounted cash flows or customer needs or building new products, but about leveraging the emotional vulnerabilities and drives of corrupt humans with more power than they deserve. That's 95% of it. That's why more is learned in MBA school at the bar than in the courses. Aside: the above also explains why being a non-drinker (like me, for health reasons) impedes your career. When you get sloshed, you see a much wider range of human behavior (some people hitting their worst) and you learn things that are otherwise impossible to learn about guarded, intelligent, 25+ year-old people with a lot to lose. You can read about that stuff (how to negotiate enormous deals with irrational humans) in books; or you can get hammered with 10 other people and interact with it, on a smaller scale where the points (unless you get severely fucked up in a bar fight) mostly don't matter. The problem is that most of the work isn't hard, and doesn't require talented people. If the work is legitimately hard (i.e. someone might fail) that's viewed as a management failure. This means that anyone can be "groomed" to appear as a leader and as a success, which means that the whole process is already (justifiably) under suspicion. Ergo, the promotion of a woman (even if she's the most talented, because it's impossible to tell in most cases) raises doubts. People assume she was mentored because she was female and pretty, and not because she had the most potential. It's wrong, but you can expect those kinds of attacks in a system where everyone already knows that corruption is the norm. People will use whatever they have to discredit someone who rose faster than they did: female and pretty, boss's son, "had something" (i.e. extorted his way into the sun). It doesn't have to be true. The sexism battle here is a minor one, really, in the much grander theater of corporate dysfunction. What's more obvious is that the corporate world is not a meritocracy. Most people are forced to work 3 levels below their ability and become deeply resentful, and anyone who gets promoted on potential is immediately thrown into suspicion. The sad thing is that the companies that were coming closest to fixing this are the ones prominently using open allocation: Valve and Github, the latter now under attack. (To make it clear, I'm not taking sides because it's pretty clear that almost none of us have any real information at this point.) With managerial power being a major source of corruption in the past, it seems wise to get rid of it. But it's also clear that getting rid of all management functions is a non-starter. Even if you do everything right in a no-management company, people will distrust you (was HR asleep on this? you mean there was no HR?) as soon anything goes wrong.

hrktb 13y ago

Somehow I'd hope puting homosexuality more in the spotlight, with more realistic depiction in fiction would indirectly aleviate this problem. Even if it would still be statisticly low, making it that two men closely working together face the same gray zoning problem would move the problem from a gender problem to a generic human relation problem involving the majority of workers, and we could see effective solutions to it.

ryanpardieck 13y ago

I think a lot of the problems regarding the gray zone come from not being clear, not understanding boundaries, and not knowing when to move on. These, of course, are things I've learnt the hard way ... And anyway, is the gray zone itself really such a problem? Being close to someone and sometimes wondering whether there's something "else" there seems pretty normal. Maybe we should just be OK with a bit of ambiguity in some of our friendships. It won't kill you ... I think a few principles, once applied, make navigating the gray zone almost trivial: -First, if you think you might be interested, engage in light harmless flirting and gauge the response. If there is no/negative response, then move on. The flirting should truly be harmless. If you friend feels uncomfortable, unsafe, or demeaned, then you have flirted wrongly. Apologize and move on. -If you've determined you're interested, decide whether it is worth acting on. Sometimes it isn't - for instance, if you're married, or you're just too busy or whatever. Just move on. -If you're interested and it's worth acting on, promptly express interest in a way that is clear and firm, but not embarrassing or intimidating to your friend. Do not express interest if you are not ready to take "no" for an answer. If you can't take "no" for an answer, just move on and try to figure out why. Where a lot of people go wrong here is instead of actually asking, they half-ask and half-demand. That is going to frighten your friend, and you probably won't be friends any longer. -If you're rejected, accept it and don't lash out. If you goofed and made things super-awkward and uncomfortable, then lighten the air with a silly joke or something (ie make it clear that you're not going to flip, and that you're cool). Lashing out is going to create a toxic environment for everyone, and it's going to suck. Instead, deal with your feelings on your own, and continue to treat your friend with respect. And, of course, move on. It's maybe a little awkward to continue working next to stop who rejected you--or who you rejected--but in my experience, it really isn't that bad at all, and it goes away quickly. What's much worse is to ignore one of these steps, and then have things end in a massive immature blow-out. Just take responsibility and be clear, and don't have undue expectations. And it's often not too late to save yourself. In one case I was a massive douche, but I owned up to my behavior, apologized, and said I hoped we could eventually put this behind us. We did eventually, and it was fun. Basically, you just have to be considerate and know when to move the hell on.