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One thing I don't agree with, how is the following feedback gender-specific?: “Why are your slides so pink? It’s very distracting.” “Stop pushing your hair be

One thing I don't agree with, how is the following feedback gender-specific?: “Why are your slides so pink? It’s very distracting.” “Stop pushing your hair behind your ear when you present. It’s very distracting.” “Your voice goes up after every sentence you say.” I feel like this is all valid feedback. Back in university we would also get feedback on our behaviour during our presentations or the look of our slides.

skj 12y ago
Especially with the vocal comment, many people get annoyed with female voices when they're in a supposedly serious context. But the thing is that it's not actually some fundamentally annoying or distracting quality of the voice- it's that it's different from what they expect: a male voice. "This American Life" had a great segment about this, targeting "vocal fry" in particular: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-say-it-in-all-caps?act=2#play http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/i...
- mgkimsal 12y ago
  Voices going up - as in, asking a question(?) - is annoying whether it's a female voice or male voice.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    It's a feature heavily associated with female voices. So it is discrimination against female voices. It's also not something people do consciously, it is a feature of dialect. And studies show that why people dislike a dialect has nothing to do with its actual aural qualities, and everything to do with its social status.
    - rjbwork 12y ago
      You can say what you want, and studies can say what they do, but but vocal fry is annoying. It literally makes me cringe and it grates my ears to hear it.
      - skj 12y ago
        The telling thing from the "This American Life" episode is that despite both men and women having noticeable vocal fry, 100% of the complaints mentioning it were about the women. This may be an unconscious bias at play.
        rjbwork 12y ago
        Nah, I've noticed it in men. The stereotype is this like, laid back hipster douche. It's even more noticeable and annoying when coming from men!
    - JDiculous 12y ago
      Are you serious? Just because it's more common with females doesn't make it discrimination. Just because poor black people are more likely to commit crimes doesn't mean that criticizing criminals makes you racist and classist. Come on now, this is basic logic.
      - foldr 12y ago
        I think the point is that it's something which tends to be more common with females for various non-accidental reasons. E.g. because they need to lower their voices to be perceived as less feminine and more masculine and authoritative. So it would be a bit like criticizing black guys for keeping their hair very short, when the reason for this might be that longer hair styles on black guys are usually perceived negatively. (That may not be a particularly realistic example; it's only intended hypothetically.)
    - Mithaldu 12y ago
      > its social status. Link? I've found dislike for dialects spoken by poorer people (chavs for example), richer people (valley talk) and completely normal average people of a wide range (bavarian) in myself. In my experience how much i dislike a dialect has always been about how difficult it makes it for me to understand it, in both english and german, and there's literally no pattern to the social status in it.
      - foldr 12y ago
        This kind of proves the point. There isn't any single dialect of English spoken by "chavs", so it must be that you dislike the various dialects that those people speak because they're spoken by those people. Of course the claim is not that people's dislike will always be targeted at groups with a low socio-economic status. E.g. as a British person, I quite dislike "posh" dialects. And that is entirely my problem -- not the problem of people who happen to speak that way.
        Mithaldu 12y ago
        There's a certain specific londonish dialect i'm thinking of, but don't know the name for, so i abbreviated it to chavs, but feel free to extrapolate my thoughts. My problem also isn't the people, my problem is that i cannot fucking make out the words they are trying to form, but i guess you can ignore that too despite me literally saying that in my previous post.
        foldr 12y ago
        I'm not ignoring it, but the whole point is that the reasons that people give for liking/disliking a particular dialect are often not the real reasons. I think it's pretty telling that you chose to identify one of your example dialects using "chav", which is basically a term of abuse directed at a certain social group which isn't dialectically all that homogenous.
        Mithaldu 12y ago
        So i didn't want to leave you hanging, and i figured out thanks to the help of gaius below that i wasn't talking about chavs, but cockney, as exampled in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o It's an accent i hate not because it sounds different, but because i literally cannot understand what they are saying for over 2/3 of the words (using the term words loosely here, i have trouble distinguishing their words in the first place).
  - partisan 12y ago
    Completely agreed. A hundred years ago, this would have been some sort of local affect, but thanks to the internet, nationwide TV, radio, etc, today it's a plague.
  - rjbwork 12y ago
    That's when you're SUPPOSED to end your sentence by going up. That is the natural pattern. Doing it at the end of everything else is the annoying part.
    - mgkimsal 12y ago
      I didn't write that comment very well. I mean, when the voice goes up at the end of a sentence making it sound like a question when the sentence is not a question.
- Mithaldu 12y ago
  High Rising Terminal is a thing and it has nothing to do with gender: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal Edit: Heck, in the segment you link they even comment on the fact that the guy does it too, and it was one of the first things i noticed. Those are just valley people, that's it.
  - skj 12y ago
    It's not gender-based, but the complaints about it are gender-based.
    - Mithaldu 12y ago
      I can assure you i'll hate the fuck out of you for triggering my question recognition flag without asking a thing, regardless of what's hanging between your legs or what clothes you're wearing, and i know quite a few people who share my sentiments.
    - brandonmenc 12y ago
      It's just as annoying when a guy does it. If anything, it's an ageist thing, since only young people seem to do it. It makes people sound young, inexperienced, and unsure.
  - aupajo 12y ago
    It's worth reading this piece for context. Reactions to uptalk can belie underlying prejudices. http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/12/16/uptalk_is_okay_young_women_shouldn_t_have_to_talk_like_men_to_be_taken_seriously.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/12/16/uptalk_...
    - Mithaldu 12y ago
      I read it and got this far: > But even if women did uptalk more than men, we've all > heard enough uptalk to know that its rising intonation > doesn't indicate a question. No one's actually confused. And as well-meaning as Marybeth Seitz-Brown might be, i do not appreciate the insinuation that i am lying when i, as a foreigner, state that i hate HRT* in men, women, americans, australians, anyone because it fucks with my parsing of spoken english, which is already one of hardest-to-parse languages on this planet. Should i read further? Does she at any point acknowledge that i might be saying the truth? * It's the only thing too, i don't mind excessive "like" usage, high-pitched voices, gravely voices, rednecks.
- kelukelugames 12y ago
  I think vocal fry is pretty annoying period, but let's assume it is gender specific. That doesn't mean having poor inflection is a female only problem. Read any public speaking guide or speak to a speech coach, fixing rising inflection is one of the first recommended fixes. If anyone is interested, I found this book very useful: http://www.amazon.com/Its-Way-You-Say-Well-spoken/dp/1609947436/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425745988&sr=8-1&keywords=carol+speech http://www.amazon.com/Its-Way-You-Say-Well-spoken/dp/1609947...
  - skj 12y ago
    That's the whole point: it's not gender specific. But when people complain about it, the targets are almost always women.
- partisan 12y ago
  I remember hearing this episode on the radio some time back. I am blessed to have worked in places where I haven't been exposed to many people who speak this way. I am surrounded by women, to be sure, but they are worried more about doing a good job than by trying to sound like it by deepening their voices. It's funny, my mom is a non-native english speaker, having been in the US for 30 years. She heard a few women talking the other day using a well practiced combination of up-talk and vocal fry. She later turned to my wife and asked "Why are they talking like that?". I do think that you will find that different demographics are more likely to speak this way. It's not the blanket category of "WOMEN". It's likely, from my experience, to be white, younger, professional women, and then, as knock-on effect, women from other backgrounds who work with them. They are probably plugged into the monoculture, have a common vocabulary, and use their vocal affects and vocabulary to filter out people who are not of a similar mind. It's like when the newscasters all started speaking the same way, emphasizing certain words, movements of the head, a unique cadence that would, in conversation, be considered bizarre. Nowadays, you are likely to dismiss any newscaster who doesn't speak that way as an amateur or charlatan who is not to be trusted. Just my two cents. Feel free to give back change.
- belorn 12y ago
  The claim that female voices has an effect on speaker quality should seem to be extremely silly for anyone who regularly goes to international conferences. I personally just happy if I can understand the words the speaker is trying to pronounce, and if the concept they are translating from their own native language matches the English words.
spcoll 12y ago
This feedback makes it clear that acting feminine is considered a weakness, instead of a strength. You shouldn't be ashamed to look beautiful, wear dresses and make-up, and present cute slides with a pink theme and occasional kitty picture. This is what the whole "like a girl" is about: if you express your femininity in the things you do and the way you look, people associate that with incompetence.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Exactly. If you were to make a stereotypically "masculine" presentation, you wouldn't get negative comments on it.
  - thomasmarcelis 12y ago
    Pink just is a bright colour. Bright colours can distract if used plenty. I've had the same comment on using too many yellow.
    - sgift 12y ago
      Black and yellow, beloved combination of many Star Wars fans, also known as "death of readable presentations" (yes, I got that comment and I've learned to never do this again)
  - Alphasite_ 12y ago
    What, blue with tanks all over it? I think you'd get more than a couple of comments.
  - hderms 12y ago
    what would be a stereotypically masculine presentation? not trying to bait or anything, I'm just curious what that would be? Some kind of bro-ish stuff included?
  - nightski 12y ago
    This is so not true. Suits are heavily discriminated against in our industry. If you wear a suit to a conference you probably won't get much attention. EDIT: I must go to the wrong programming conferences, never see suits. Wish the down voters would just share their experiences!
PuffinBlue 12y ago
There are a lot of valid points in the article and I enjoyed it. These 'gender-specific' points are of course not gender specific at all though. I've done a huge amount of presenting and briefing and so has my wife. We have both received feedback like this. Personal appearance, bearing, manner, speech patterns, intonation, inflection and even breathing noise let alone a million other things have come up in feedback for both of us. The underlying point is it's possible to be an annoying presenter as a male AND as a female. Thinking about it, I suppose much of what this article says also applies simply to 'those who don't look like they fit', regardless of their gender, such that if the article was about 'age' it would still be entirely valid. I'll sign off by saying that if you really want prejudice, try raising kids as a full time Dad. If you think men can be bad with 'those that don't fit' then you are in for a shock compared to what women can be like!
pornel 12y ago
I think the objection was that it was feedback about how it was presented, not about what has been presented. It may be valid feedback, but not necessarily the most relevant one. And I think she finds it problematic because women are more often openly judged by how they look rather than what they do, and this fits the pattern.
- falcolas 12y ago
  Doing presentations in school is as much about learning to present as it is the topic of presentation. For many topics and audiences, how a presentation is made can be as important, or more important, than what is being presented.
  - andrewaylett 12y ago
    True. But if all the men get one kind of feedback and all the women the other, that's (a) sexist and (b) not actually maximally helpful to anyone.
pfooti 12y ago
The story I got from the article is (a) feminine presenters are more likely to get that kind of feedback, and (b) masculine presenters are more likely to get feedback on the content of the presentation.

skj 12y ago

Especially with the vocal comment, many people get annoyed with female voices when they're in a supposedly serious context. But the thing is that it's not actually some fundamentally annoying or distracting quality of the voice- it's that it's different from what they expect: a male voice. "This American Life" had a great segment about this, targeting "vocal fry" in particular: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-say-it-in-all-caps?act=2#play http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/i...

mgkimsal 12y ago
Voices going up - as in, asking a question(?) - is annoying whether it's a female voice or male voice.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  It's a feature heavily associated with female voices. So it is discrimination against female voices. It's also not something people do consciously, it is a feature of dialect. And studies show that why people dislike a dialect has nothing to do with its actual aural qualities, and everything to do with its social status.
  - rjbwork 12y ago
    You can say what you want, and studies can say what they do, but but vocal fry is annoying. It literally makes me cringe and it grates my ears to hear it.
    - skj 12y ago
      The telling thing from the "This American Life" episode is that despite both men and women having noticeable vocal fry, 100% of the complaints mentioning it were about the women. This may be an unconscious bias at play.
      - rjbwork 12y ago
        Nah, I've noticed it in men. The stereotype is this like, laid back hipster douche. It's even more noticeable and annoying when coming from men!
  - JDiculous 12y ago
    Are you serious? Just because it's more common with females doesn't make it discrimination. Just because poor black people are more likely to commit crimes doesn't mean that criticizing criminals makes you racist and classist. Come on now, this is basic logic.
    - foldr 12y ago
      I think the point is that it's something which tends to be more common with females for various non-accidental reasons. E.g. because they need to lower their voices to be perceived as less feminine and more masculine and authoritative. So it would be a bit like criticizing black guys for keeping their hair very short, when the reason for this might be that longer hair styles on black guys are usually perceived negatively. (That may not be a particularly realistic example; it's only intended hypothetically.)
  - Mithaldu 12y ago
    > its social status. Link? I've found dislike for dialects spoken by poorer people (chavs for example), richer people (valley talk) and completely normal average people of a wide range (bavarian) in myself. In my experience how much i dislike a dialect has always been about how difficult it makes it for me to understand it, in both english and german, and there's literally no pattern to the social status in it.
    - foldr 12y ago
      This kind of proves the point. There isn't any single dialect of English spoken by "chavs", so it must be that you dislike the various dialects that those people speak because they're spoken by those people. Of course the claim is not that people's dislike will always be targeted at groups with a low socio-economic status. E.g. as a British person, I quite dislike "posh" dialects. And that is entirely my problem -- not the problem of people who happen to speak that way.
      - Mithaldu 12y ago
        There's a certain specific londonish dialect i'm thinking of, but don't know the name for, so i abbreviated it to chavs, but feel free to extrapolate my thoughts. My problem also isn't the people, my problem is that i cannot fucking make out the words they are trying to form, but i guess you can ignore that too despite me literally saying that in my previous post.
        foldr 12y ago
        I'm not ignoring it, but the whole point is that the reasons that people give for liking/disliking a particular dialect are often not the real reasons. I think it's pretty telling that you chose to identify one of your example dialects using "chav", which is basically a term of abuse directed at a certain social group which isn't dialectically all that homogenous.
        Mithaldu 12y ago
        So i didn't want to leave you hanging, and i figured out thanks to the help of gaius below that i wasn't talking about chavs, but cockney, as exampled in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o It's an accent i hate not because it sounds different, but because i literally cannot understand what they are saying for over 2/3 of the words (using the term words loosely here, i have trouble distinguishing their words in the first place).
- partisan 12y ago
  Completely agreed. A hundred years ago, this would have been some sort of local affect, but thanks to the internet, nationwide TV, radio, etc, today it's a plague.
- rjbwork 12y ago
  That's when you're SUPPOSED to end your sentence by going up. That is the natural pattern. Doing it at the end of everything else is the annoying part.
  - mgkimsal 12y ago
    I didn't write that comment very well. I mean, when the voice goes up at the end of a sentence making it sound like a question when the sentence is not a question.
Mithaldu 12y ago
High Rising Terminal is a thing and it has nothing to do with gender: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal Edit: Heck, in the segment you link they even comment on the fact that the guy does it too, and it was one of the first things i noticed. Those are just valley people, that's it.
- skj 12y ago
  It's not gender-based, but the complaints about it are gender-based.
  - Mithaldu 12y ago
    I can assure you i'll hate the fuck out of you for triggering my question recognition flag without asking a thing, regardless of what's hanging between your legs or what clothes you're wearing, and i know quite a few people who share my sentiments.
  - brandonmenc 12y ago
    It's just as annoying when a guy does it. If anything, it's an ageist thing, since only young people seem to do it. It makes people sound young, inexperienced, and unsure.
- aupajo 12y ago
  It's worth reading this piece for context. Reactions to uptalk can belie underlying prejudices. http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/12/16/uptalk_is_okay_young_women_shouldn_t_have_to_talk_like_men_to_be_taken_seriously.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/12/16/uptalk_...
  - Mithaldu 12y ago
    I read it and got this far: > But even if women did uptalk more than men, we've all > heard enough uptalk to know that its rising intonation > doesn't indicate a question. No one's actually confused. And as well-meaning as Marybeth Seitz-Brown might be, i do not appreciate the insinuation that i am lying when i, as a foreigner, state that i hate HRT* in men, women, americans, australians, anyone because it fucks with my parsing of spoken english, which is already one of hardest-to-parse languages on this planet. Should i read further? Does she at any point acknowledge that i might be saying the truth? * It's the only thing too, i don't mind excessive "like" usage, high-pitched voices, gravely voices, rednecks.
kelukelugames 12y ago
I think vocal fry is pretty annoying period, but let's assume it is gender specific. That doesn't mean having poor inflection is a female only problem. Read any public speaking guide or speak to a speech coach, fixing rising inflection is one of the first recommended fixes. If anyone is interested, I found this book very useful: http://www.amazon.com/Its-Way-You-Say-Well-spoken/dp/1609947436/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425745988&sr=8-1&keywords=carol+speech http://www.amazon.com/Its-Way-You-Say-Well-spoken/dp/1609947...
- skj 12y ago
  That's the whole point: it's not gender specific. But when people complain about it, the targets are almost always women.
partisan 12y ago
I remember hearing this episode on the radio some time back. I am blessed to have worked in places where I haven't been exposed to many people who speak this way. I am surrounded by women, to be sure, but they are worried more about doing a good job than by trying to sound like it by deepening their voices. It's funny, my mom is a non-native english speaker, having been in the US for 30 years. She heard a few women talking the other day using a well practiced combination of up-talk and vocal fry. She later turned to my wife and asked "Why are they talking like that?". I do think that you will find that different demographics are more likely to speak this way. It's not the blanket category of "WOMEN". It's likely, from my experience, to be white, younger, professional women, and then, as knock-on effect, women from other backgrounds who work with them. They are probably plugged into the monoculture, have a common vocabulary, and use their vocal affects and vocabulary to filter out people who are not of a similar mind. It's like when the newscasters all started speaking the same way, emphasizing certain words, movements of the head, a unique cadence that would, in conversation, be considered bizarre. Nowadays, you are likely to dismiss any newscaster who doesn't speak that way as an amateur or charlatan who is not to be trusted. Just my two cents. Feel free to give back change.
belorn 12y ago
The claim that female voices has an effect on speaker quality should seem to be extremely silly for anyone who regularly goes to international conferences. I personally just happy if I can understand the words the speaker is trying to pronounce, and if the concept they are translating from their own native language matches the English words.

spcoll 12y ago

This feedback makes it clear that acting feminine is considered a weakness, instead of a strength. You shouldn't be ashamed to look beautiful, wear dresses and make-up, and present cute slides with a pink theme and occasional kitty picture. This is what the whole "like a girl" is about: if you express your femininity in the things you do and the way you look, people associate that with incompetence.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Exactly. If you were to make a stereotypically "masculine" presentation, you wouldn't get negative comments on it.
- thomasmarcelis 12y ago
  Pink just is a bright colour. Bright colours can distract if used plenty. I've had the same comment on using too many yellow.
  - sgift 12y ago
    Black and yellow, beloved combination of many Star Wars fans, also known as "death of readable presentations" (yes, I got that comment and I've learned to never do this again)
- Alphasite_ 12y ago
  What, blue with tanks all over it? I think you'd get more than a couple of comments.
- hderms 12y ago
  what would be a stereotypically masculine presentation? not trying to bait or anything, I'm just curious what that would be? Some kind of bro-ish stuff included?
- nightski 12y ago
  This is so not true. Suits are heavily discriminated against in our industry. If you wear a suit to a conference you probably won't get much attention. EDIT: I must go to the wrong programming conferences, never see suits. Wish the down voters would just share their experiences!

PuffinBlue 12y ago

There are a lot of valid points in the article and I enjoyed it. These 'gender-specific' points are of course not gender specific at all though. I've done a huge amount of presenting and briefing and so has my wife. We have both received feedback like this. Personal appearance, bearing, manner, speech patterns, intonation, inflection and even breathing noise let alone a million other things have come up in feedback for both of us. The underlying point is it's possible to be an annoying presenter as a male AND as a female. Thinking about it, I suppose much of what this article says also applies simply to 'those who don't look like they fit', regardless of their gender, such that if the article was about 'age' it would still be entirely valid. I'll sign off by saying that if you really want prejudice, try raising kids as a full time Dad. If you think men can be bad with 'those that don't fit' then you are in for a shock compared to what women can be like!

pornel 12y ago

I think the objection was that it was feedback about how it was presented, not about what has been presented. It may be valid feedback, but not necessarily the most relevant one. And I think she finds it problematic because women are more often openly judged by how they look rather than what they do, and this fits the pattern.

falcolas 12y ago
Doing presentations in school is as much about learning to present as it is the topic of presentation. For many topics and audiences, how a presentation is made can be as important, or more important, than what is being presented.
- andrewaylett 12y ago
  True. But if all the men get one kind of feedback and all the women the other, that's (a) sexist and (b) not actually maximally helpful to anyone.

pfooti 12y ago

The story I got from the article is (a) feminine presenters are more likely to get that kind of feedback, and (b) masculine presenters are more likely to get feedback on the content of the presentation.