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Speaking While Female
- o0-0o 12y agoSpeaking as a man, I would prefer that we use the term woman. As in, "Speaking as a Woman". The term female is without species. Female giraffe? Female water buffalo? Female human!
- cookiecaper 12y agoThis type of specienormativism is an example of the pure bigotry that is holding all of us back! Who are you to say that the speaker is not a female giraffe? Why do you assume she wouldn't be? We all have the right to self-define, and then brutally ostracize people who reject our self-definitions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin
- mralvar 12y agoYeah I agree the term female has this almost creepy de-humanizing sound to it.
- frandroid 12y agoIn other languages such as French, female is applied exclusively to non-human animals.
- hvs 12y agoI think the "speaking" part clarifies the species.
- longlivegnu 12y agoI don't think so, apes speak to each other and you cannot understand them. Dolphins speak to each other and you cannot understand them. Speaking is not a human only action.
- wxs 12y agoThey're referencing the structure of the phrase "Driving While Black". It gets the feeling of oppression across in 3 words in a way that "Speaking as a Woman" would not.
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- Jun8 12y agoI guess they wanted to mirror the "Driving While Black" phrase (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_While_Black http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_While_Black).
- VLM 12y agoNote that you changed it from "while" implying temporary, to "as" implying permanence. The temporary-ness of the title has a very strange angle having nothing to do with the story. Given the title I expected a story about the experiences of MtoF trans- people speaking out. Which would have probably been more interesting than the actual story.
- ipsin 12y agoI think the title was meant to make the reader feel uncomfortable, and to echo the concept of "Driving While Black".
- Torgo 12y agoSpeaking as a male, I would prefer we use the terms male and female. Because they don't carry all the anglo cultural connotations that come along with "man" and "woman".
- dragonwriter 12y ago> The term female is without species. Since the issue being discussed was gender, not species, that's appropriate.
- vacri 12y agoWhile yes, they were going for a poetic comparison to 'Driving whilst black', I'd prefer we use 'woman' as the noun and 'female' as the adjective. 'Woman driver' and 'woman CEO' are phrases we see that don't have the counterparts 'man driver' or 'man CEO', for example.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> While yes, they were going for a poetic comparison to 'Driving whilst black', I'd prefer we use 'woman' as the noun and 'female' as the adjective. It was using "female" as the adjective. If it was being used as a noun, it would have to be "Driving while a female".
- vacri 12y agoSorry, I meant to make that more as a broader point, not about that phrase specifically.
- hueving 12y agoUnfortunately this seems like a bootstrapping issue now. If women are viewed differently for speaking up, it's because people aren't used to women speaking up. :(
- sosuke 12y ago"When female executives spoke more than their peers, both men and women punished them with 14 percent lower ratings." I've seen similar comments before and even going as far as saying women were harder on women than men when moving up in a career. It's deeper and more complex than men versus women. I've heard my share of anecdotal stories from women who say the same thing, women are their harshest critique and most difficult challenge. It seems daunting, how do you even begin to change that. "He announced to the writers that he was instituting a no-interruption rule while anyone — male or female — was pitching." That is excellent, and sad, that we have to go back to grade school etiquette to let people find a voice. It's true though, if a team member isn't trusted to have a voice they shouldn't be a part of the conversation. If they are a part of the conversation they should have the respect of the rest of the team enough for them to shut up and listen, then respond. Spirit sticks!
- frandroid 12y agoIndeed. Patriarchy is enforced by both men and women.
- frandroid 12y agoOh yeah I forgot. Make a feminist point on HN, get downvoted to hell and beneath.
- teamhappy 12y ago> Make a feminist point on HN, get downvoted to hell and beneath. That's not true at all. I think you got down-voted because you missed the point of the comment you replied to. (I think) the point was that even if you get rid of patriarchy, you'd still have to deal with women putting each other down. I guess that's noteworthy because it's easy to forget when you read an article like this one. I am constantly amazed by how poorly we treat each other. All of us, really.
- rmc 12y agoBut how much of women putting other women down is due to patriarchy? What if it's all due to patriarchy? What if getting rid of patriarchy solves it all?
- jug5 12y agoHave you heard women talk?
- Jimmy 12y agoThis really doesn't match my experience. Women at my workplace aren't afraid to speak up at all. It helps that about half of our middle management roles are occupied by women.
- bbaumgar 12y agoIt seems your experience actually does matches up with the author's thesis. As in the credit union with 74% female supervisors, companies with higher female makeup purportedly had less difference in the way female and males were perceived when they spoke up.
- Jimmy 12y agoI suppose that will teach me to read articles before I comment, then. :)
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- jmagoon 12y agoFrom the article: >>The long-term solution to the double bind of speaking while female is to increase the number of women in leadership roles.
- nmeofthestate 12y agoThis is interesting - I've noticed that sometimes when I'm with some women colleagues in a social setting, I'll be completely ignored when making a comment (and of course, I get slightly butthurt by the experience). I wonder if this is on some way related to the problem outlined in the article - I'm being a pushy interrupting man, but because I'm in the minority, I can get frozen out for a change. Then again, maybe† it's a 'person' thing rather than a 'gender' thing. †probably
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- brador 12y agoWait. Why did the women allow the male to run with their idea? Why didn't they continue and run with it themselves? Are we supposed to sit patiently watching the gears turn until person A thinks of the idea themselves? It's a meeting. Speak up, run with ideas, contribute. If you're gonna be mousey you're gonna get run over. Male or female.
- frandroid 12y agoBut you do understand that men face this hurdle much less in the first place?
- ebiester 12y agoAh, but the woman will be negatively perceived for that action. If even powerful women speak less consciously because of negative reactions, there might just be more than smoke. What if we started believing women when they tell us their experiences?
- brador 12y ago> What if we started believing women when they tell us their experiences? I have a ratio of around 1:10 female:male from my tech staff. I have not seen this "powerful women speak less consciously because of negative reactions" from women any more or less than I see in men. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I am saying it's natural for variation to exist and it's not exclusive to women. But whatever, keep pushing that narrative. It hasn't worked in 12 months, but maybe today eh.
- ebiester 12y agoHave you asked them, and listened rather than dismiss what they say? I have. I am not just pushing narrative here.
- emsy 12y agoI think it's not so easy, unfortunately. A while ago I read an article that woman who are eager to argue in business are perceived as bitchy, while men with the same eagerness were perceived as ambitious (by both men and women). In my experience, there are many such subtle discriminations that makes it hard for women to speak up.
- nostromo 12y agoI worry that we're now viewing all of society's interactions through a prism of demographics and privilege. The prevailing cultural narrative is now that your demographic is your destiny. Too much success is granted to privilege and too much failure is blamed on society. In my formative years, the rule for proper behavior seemed very simple: treat everyone the same, no matter their demographics or background. Now it seems there is a different ruleset for every demographic group. It all seems very retrograde and divisive.
- codyb 12y agoHmm really? From the solutions that worked in the article I came to the exact opposite conclusion. No interruptions rule no matter who is talking worked and the team became stronger. The other was anonymously submitted ideas which were ranked prior to the meetings and the best ones adopted.
- nostromo 12y agoI actually liked the article's prescription. Not because of gender issues alone, but because I've worked in offices where the smartest people in the room were also the quietest (both men and women).
- imissmyjuno 12y agoAlso, how much was the rule actually observed back in your formative years? I feel like mysoginy and inequality are issues that are only slowly and recently becoming tthought about and reconsidered by the North American societies.
- afterburner 12y agoThe world is already divided, in terms of class now more than in recent times (in the Western world), people are simply realizing it. Of course your ideal would be nice and a good goal to strive for/recapture. But whether that happens depends more on government policy than politeness. In the past people were probably more divided on racial, sexual orientation, or other lines.
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- forrestthewoods 12y agoI'd love to see these discussions recorded and more objectively graded. I can not fathom a room full of people in a story meeting that isn't over flowing with interruptions and shot down ideas. Now I'm not saying that these issues aren't real. Or that women don't run into issues that men don't have or have with less frequency. What I am saying is that these tales are anecdotal and we need more objective assessments if we have any hope of making any improvements.
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- JulianMorrison 12y agoThis is why it's important to have things like affirmative action - and in fact to scale that right down to informal conversations. Your experience of simple obvious facts is lying to you. You'll think a woman is taking more than her fare share of time when a numeric time measurement would show her being sidelined (as well as interrupted, ignored, and poached from). So you need to swallow your feelings of indignation and your naive realism, and measure.
- ANTSANTS 12y agoOk, you can break the stopwatches, I'm sure that will make people more comfortable talking to each other. EDIT, because HN isn't letting me submit new replies: It was hyperbole. I don't care if it's an actual stopwatch, if you record everything on cassette and tally up the minutes later, or if you use some hip new cloud SaaS bespoke locally-grown web-scale meeting management software. When you implement patronizing means of policing human interaction like this, you stifle conversation and make people feel like children. I'm especially aware of this at the moment, because HN is patronizingly preventing me from making any new posts because I happened to submit some replies too quickly. A dumb algorithm intended to police flamewars is making discussions ITT needlessly difficult to read, and preventing me from posting suggestions for the HN Algolia Search people in another thread. It is just as annoying and counter-productive to "rate limit" people in real life for the crime of impassioned discussion. Another suggestion mentioned in the article is that of anonymously submitting and "ranking" ideas prior to the meeting. This is literally an "upvote" mechanism with all the familiar flaws of groupthink and trying to assign quantitative value to ideas. This works poorly enough on the internet, let alone in person.
- proveanegative 12y agoI'm playing the devil's advocate here for the most part but surely today it does not need to be anything as intrusive as a stopwatch. You could conceivably track who gets to speak for how long and any interruptions that happen in live meetings with software running on your smartphone, and you could certainly do so in voice chat meetings. There may be a marketable product in this somewhere.
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- rmc 12y agoThere are anecdotes of trans men (female to male transsexuals) noticing this. They are the same person mostly and do the same thing, yet they get treated much better. There was one trans man who is a scientist and has published under female and male names. Someone, who didn't know, remarked that he was much better than his sister.
- entee 12y agoI believe the scientist you're talking about is Ben Barres at Stanford. I know people who have worked for him and he's a truly exceptional scientist and mentor. He's been pretty outspoken about his personal experience on how women are perceived in high-power science, I'd encourage a google for "Ben Barres Feminism" to see a few articles.
- mercer 12y agoThis article tells that anecdote: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119239/transgender-people-can-explain-why-women-dont-advance-work http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119239/transgender-people...
- jrells 12y agoThat's a great example, reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Barres http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Barres
- kemayo 12y agoIt'd be interesting to see a blind comparison of his pre/post-transition articles. I say this because I could _totally_ see making that transition to male representing a removal of a big chunk of subconscious stress about how he was "lying to the world" about his gender by presenting as female. This could translate into an improvement in the quality of his post-transition work. Or it could be entirely gender-bias at play.
- gizmo686 12y agoI would want to see this experiment repeated trans females who (assuming the presented hypothesis) should see the inverse relationship. I suspect a better (and likely cheaper/easier) test is to take the same papers and present them under a male and female author name.
- evo_9 12y agoMaybe we need to create conference rooms where everyone is in closed off little rooms and everyone speaks anonymously? Otherwise, I don't know how we easily combat this seemingly deep-rooted bias.
- dominotw 12y agoWhenever I read anything like this I always wonder where does the society end and individual begin? Is such a distinction necessary or even valid?
- sighsigh 12y agoThere was this one time I was watched a whole bunch of old media agitprop reciting various tropes on how things should be and when I did what TV told me to do, people responded negatively! It doesn't matter if those people were also exposed to the same trope and became skeptical of it based on their own experience... or if my imitation of the trope was ham fisted... I'M THE SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE HERE. How dare others have opinions of how my favorite trope should work! TV would never lie to me :^(
- strickjb9 12y agoMy theory is that gender inequality (less women than men, or vice versa) will cause the minority gender to have less of a say. It seems supported by the article's last example: "Professor Burris and his colleagues studied a credit union where women made up 74 percent of supervisors and 84 percent of front-line employees. Sure enough, when women spoke up there, they were more likely to be heard THAN men."
- 300bps 12y agoOn its face, it is obvious that there are differences between males and females at all age groups. I think a core issue is when we try to pretend like males and females are the same. In male dominated workplaces, women find it difficult to adapt to how men do things. In female dominated schools, boys find it difficult to adapt to how girls do things. When 98.1% of pre-school and kindergarten teachers are female it's no surprise that boys are disciplined more often, disciplined more harshly and test poorer on reading and other academic achievement measures than girls. Elementary school as a whole isn't much better with 90% of teachers being female. The first 6 years of each boy's academic life is spent trying to adapt him to how girls behave and how girls learn. Failing to adapt in such a manner leads to punishment and recommendations of holding him back until he is as mature as his younger female peers despite his academic ability.
- pervycreeper 12y agoA little meta-observation: across HN discussions of topics like these, I notice over and over, the same commenters posting abundantly, vociferously, and stridently in support of what I might loosely term the pro-social-engineering side of the debate. I worry that this might falsely create an impression of consensus when there is in fact none, especially considering the potential social penalties for voicing dissent. There also seems to be, for males, a certain prestige to espousing this type of ideology, and it seems to increasingly be being used as a form of social signalling (not in the least because it is oppressive to males not occupying the very highest social strata, incurring a real cost for them, hence being a somewhat honest signal). Not sure how these two phenomena interact.
- exstudent 12y agoVery good observation. It's unfortunate that this topic seems to allow for zero debate. There are quite a few reasons that someone wouldn't want genders treated different, but even stating that is an invitation to massive down voting. I'm still sad we lost meritocracy. I come from a poor background and am a minority but today I'm a successful developer. I fought my way up the chain with hard work, self-study and being good at what I do. It's sad that now a lot of the same people who didn't like that I was advancing are now espousing the urgent need to eliminate meritocracy (which is really the only thing I can call the ladder I climbed up) in favor of identity politics.
- exstudent2 12y agoI tried to comment on this (see my original comment below), but it turns out I've been shadow banned. You can view my comment history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=exstudent https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=exstudent I think that I was banned for what I said backs up your statement and my original comment. -- Very good observation. It's unfortunate that this topic seems to allow for zero debate. There are quite a few reasons that someone wouldn't want genders treated different, but even stating that is an invitation to massive down voting. I'm still sad we lost meritocracy. I come from a poor background and am a minority but today I'm a successful developer. I fought my way up the chain with hard work, self-study and being good at what I do. It's sad that now a lot of the same people who didn't like that I was advancing are now espousing the urgent need to eliminate meritocracy (which is really the only thing I can call the ladder I climbed up) in favor of identity politics.
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- jwmerrill 12y agoIt's pretty common that in any given group, the subset of people who have good ideas and the subset of people who are comfortable dominating a group conversation are not entirely the same. One strategy that I've found is sometimes helpful that recognizes this fact is to start group decision making by having everyone write ideas down independently on sticky notes for, say, 5 minutes. This means every person present ends up with a physical representation of the fact that they have ideas, sitting in front of them on the table. Then, in a second phase, you can put them on a board and organize them, evaluate them, vote on them, etc. Since the ideas are now sticky notes on a board, they can be evaluated (more) independently of the person who articulated them. The first time I participated in something like this, it felt like Kindergarten, and I didn't really appreciate it. But after some practice, I've come to appreciate that it gives every member of a group the chance to contribute ideas, without having to simultaneously finesse the holding-the-floor game.
- lists 12y agoI've seen this go down in a critical theory graduate seminar where all three of the women in the seminar would routinely be opposed/interrupted by their male peers to the point that they just had to call it out.
- Shorel 12y agoI think this 'please hold the baton in order to speak' thing will benefit nerds and other quiet people, not only women.