Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

>I guess my question is this: Is ignoring gender when interacting with co-workers wrong? Should I be doing something different when I interact with female co-workers?

Me being sexed female doesn't really qualify me to answer this question--I'm just some random person and have no formal power to speak as the official representative for Women Everywhere (I'd be a very bad choice for that, too--I am so masculine that I tend to be perceived as male, that's part of what I meant when I called myself a "living edge case" in my earlier comment).

That disclaimer out of the way, two points to your question:

1. It's highly unlikely that you are treating women identically to men, even though you genuinely believe you do. I'd bet hard money that you don't, actually, because a) almost nobody does, myself included despite my best efforts b) I can already name an instance where you didn't--you specifically asked me this question based on my sex and only my sex, by your own admission. I don't know how much you've read about unconscious bias, but it's a very well-studied and documented phenomenon and I recommend looking into some of the research on it that's been done. Hiring managers are more likely to extend offers to identical resumes that have male names, and the offers they extend to the male-named resumes tend to be higher. Startup pitches given by male actors are rated as more convincing and more likely to earn investment by VCs than the exact same pitches given by female actresses. Women are interrupted much more frequently than men in group discussions, and a group will perceive that women have talked "most of the time" if they talk for >=30% of the time. Men are perceived as more technically competent than women. Women are perceived negatively (too aggressive, "not a team player") for negotiating their salary, in general, whereas men are not. Even if you specifically are 100% egalitarian and have no mental shortcuts that you apply towards women whatsoever, the vast majority of the people they're interacting with are not truly gender blind. This is from people who really believe that they are unbiased, in a lot of cases, and aren't aware of the subconscious stereotyping that's driving their behavior--that's the unconscious part, and it's insidious. So, consciously saying "well I believe the genders are equal and I treat everyone the same and that's what we should do in the workplace, not take sex into account at all and just be buds" can just leave subtle sexism totally unchecked and rampant, instead of truly promoting equal behavior. Harvard hosts a couple free online tests to check your implicit bias, if you're curious to check yourself: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html (I come off as biased on gender, for the record, most people do, regardless of their sex.)

2. I think this question, like affirmative action, comes down to whether you think it's more ethical to prioritize equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. Women in general are socialized to defer to the people around them, be more caring, be less assertive, be less confident. That has already happened by the time you're hiring them. If you and everyone in your workplace somehow do overcome your socialization and years of mental heuristics and manage to treat women in the field exactly the same as you do men in the field, the women will still have lower salaries (don't want to be confrontational and negotiate aggressively), apply to your job openings less (women do not apply to a job unless they meet the majority of the listed qualifications, unlike men), be less likely to voice their opinions in meetings, etc. Note here: I'm not saying all women act like this or every individual woman is more likely to than every individual man, I don't as far as I'm aware, but I'm saying that a random sampling of women are in general more likely to than a random sampling of men are. I'm sure you've seen that internet argument half a dozen times already, but in general the argument for treating everyone the exact same way is that you're treating everyone equally and that's the best you can do, even if there's disparate outcomes we shouldn't treat people differently, we should just control our behavior and make sure that's egalitarian. The argument against is along the lines of: we don't tell people confined to wheelchairs "the stairs are open to you too, stop fussing", we build ramps for them--the starting points for the two groups are not equal, therefore treating them the same isn't really egalitarian in the first place, it's just keeping the (unequal) status quo.

I can tell you that I personally would be extremely unhappy if my coworkers decided to behave in specific ways towards me because of my sex, but I'm, like I said, an edge case. And, on the contrary, I've had coworkers (correctly) guess that I am attracted to women and make awkward non-sequitor statements about their lesbian relative/friend and how happy they are for her--I actually am really pleased when this happens, even though it's always extremely awkward and we both know why they're bringing this up out of the blue. It lets me relax about it and just act normally without it affecting my career. (An aside: my first internship, my boss was big on listening to Rush Limbaugh in his cubicle, I wasn't working in a state where sexual orientation was a protected class, and I wasted a huge amount of mental energy agonizing over him potentially firing me over it, 0/10 internal conflict would not recommend.) So even an individual can have conflicting feelings about their minority status being explicitly accounted for by their coworkers, you can't really generalize.

Yes, it was tautological on purpose. Maybe I failed to communicate what I wanted, but basically I was trying to say that I've seen most people equate luck to something akin to a deity's intervention, i.e. luck is something that an external force thrusts upon you because destiny or whatever.

You say that "luck is when the variables that you cannot control for work out in your favor", and I kind of agree with that, except that I have doubts if they are really variables you can't control that are part of this "good luck" term.

e.g. Let's say I do great in my career because of "good luck". What amount of that luck is actually because I grew up in a family that gave me support, self-esteem, social skills, study skill, etc, even though many of those variable can't be controlled by you?

My point is (not really disagreeing much with you) that luck can be actually just a way of describing all those variables that we don't know even exist or that we don't know how to model/explain, even though they are actually stuff that CAN be influenced by you or your family, friends, etc. Kind of how we describe dark matter or dark energy, where it's actually just a placeholder term for saying "we don't really know".

So again, I do agree with you in that you could describe good luck as the set of those factors that helped you out and I guess also bad luck as those that work against you, and in that sense I also think that it's not really paiting the full picture, but unless you try to model these hidden variables, I guess it's as best a prediction as you can make to say that you need to avoid those 4 mistakes + "good luck".

You actually got me thinking a lot on this...it's an interesting topic for me I guess.

You need to make the decision makers life easier. At the moment it sounds like you have made something that makes their life harder right now in exchange for some future benefit that might not help them personally. Until someone loses their job because they are not able to show compliance then you are going to have a hard time getting people to use your product.

How do your competitors sell their products?

If you're in the US, there are already several universally protected classes (race, gender).

Why would a parent knowingly disown and put their gay child out on the street, risking criminal charges and effectively wasting however many years of effort they put into raising their child? I don't know, but ~40% of the homeless American youth population identifies as LGBT. (Source: http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/americas-shame-4...) Happened to a friend of mine as a teenager. People are not always rational actors. Firing someone over their sexual orientation is extremely rare, but not unheard of. (A handful of anecdotes: http://www.advocate.com/year-review/2013/12/18/meet-people-f...)

Luckily though, my former boss had similar opinions to you and I was completely fine. I've since moved to California and established myself as a solid developer, so it's not even a serious issue on my radar anymore. I would just switch to a better workplace now if I was concerned.

So, in this case, you were young and irrational and didn't understand the cost of replacing a good developer?

I'm still processing your upstream comments, but anecdotally, when I got to spend about a year on the street, Imma gonna to say that in central Texas, there were a lot of people with mental challenges (which is sad) and a whole lot more with drug issues (which is a different problem, and separately sad), and either of them would have swung any way you asked for their next hit. I am not going to claim that this experience is representative in any way.