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Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

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Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Complaining about identity politics is how white men practice identity politics. " Are you sure that I'm a guy? Or even white? Your comment is simply bigoted.

>Are you sure that I'm a guy? Or even white? Yes. Yes. Next question, boy?

These comments contribute absolutely nothing to the discussion. Are you trying to be inflammatory?

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#353
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no quote because it was him being nicer to me than to the other men thought he should have been - it was actually him not treating me like a second class citizen. It was this "equal" status that made the others feel that I got better treatment. I made no remark about anything else because I do not wish to speculate about anyone else's intentions or motivations - and that is not relevant to the point of this…

>it was him being nicer to me than to the other men thought he should have been - it was actually him not treating me like a second class citizen That sounds like you're saying the supervisor didn't do anything wrong, but rather that your coworkers took a reasonable gesture the wrong way? If so, that doesn't really jive with "One day, one of my supervisors jumped to my defense at a team event, in an awkward display o…

tyingq, your line of inquiry reads as a rather aggressive litigation of someone who is a self-identified victim of harassment. I can't speak to your soul, so I don't know if it's intentional or not, but in so doing, you're actually contributing to the harassment in some small way. Other women who read this story and these comments could see the way you're doubting and questioning the author on her experiences, and easily take that as stay silent on her own negative experiences. Think about the effects of your words; defer to empathy over suspicion :)

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#354

I really doubt guys who are scared to say girls get laid. But that's just my opinion.

Trust me, guys who listen to what women say, respect their opinions, and make some form of effort to show that respect, get laid. Regularly. Male feminists are hard to find, and people like dating people who share their political beliefs.

Not what I have seen. Men who are confident, powerful, happy, and successful get laid. In certain places, those in power are left-leaning, and so the confident, powerful, happy, and successful men are espousing left-leaning ideologies to signal their worthiness and virtue. However, if you conduct an experiment and have a hetero identifying but poor, weak, and uncertain man claim that he's a feminist, you'll find that such men are called to question and attacked. You can reverse the polarity on the above and come up with an analogous situation for right-leaning contexts.

Ideology is used more often as a bludgeon in our ape-like dominance struggles far more often than it's used as a tool of thought. The way most people use it, most of the time, it might as well be an arm-band or a flag.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#355
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what scoreponok is trying to say is at the end of the day, it's just a job. There is a lot of suffering and trauma in the world. Even though I don't want to try and quantify either of those for different events, there's probably a difference between say being affected by a natural disaster and issues at work. After all, work != life. Note that this obviously don't mean the issue is to be trivialised. After al…

Issues at work can become serious. Even before there was attention on sexism/racism related issues, burnout was a well recognized mental illness. And the thing with stress is that it doesn't need to build up overnight. Even a constant low level source of stress can build up to something big over time. Since we spend a major portion of our waking lives at work, it shouldn't be surprising that our jobs can cause mental…

> it shouldn't be surprising that our jobs can cause mental illnesses

No, it absolutely should. I work in Europe - saying that shouldn't matter, but maybe it does:

> so that we don't have to worry what will happen if we don't have a source of income

As long as you don't have a family to support, not having a job in the EU is not a big deal. I mean it isn't nice, but for a skilled worker, finding a new job isn't too hard. Especially if you have "Apple" on your resume.

So, we conclude that I am in fact not in a position to provide any useful input. Only a different perspective.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#357

"there was no harassment according to legal definition. " He's extremely lucky. In Canada, and in a growing number of jurisdictions - there is 'harassment' so long as the victim feels as if there was. If a girl feels harassed - then that's it. Guilty. It's a deep breach of our fundamental rights, in that crimes should be determined objectively, and not subject to the whims and feelings of a victim. Obviously, this is…

Wow, the quality of Apple hires have gone down.

The user experience of Clef is abysmal. Maybe she is doing something other than UX?

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is an indicator of the bubble you're living in. It may be common vernacular amongst all or nearly all of the people you interact with, but it is simultaneously highly disrespectful. It might be worth taking a step back and asking yourself what other things you consider normal might actually be disrespect" You might want to consider that you live in a bubble - and that your finger wagging is condescending. 'Girl…

There are plenty of examples of OK usage, like calling your daughters 'the girls' or your buddies 'the guys'. but calling a grown woman a girl if you're in a position of power (as a man you may always be perceived as such) can be problematic. In your case, since addressing someone you don't like as a girl (julie horvath) comes off in more a negative light than say your sympathetic tone toward the article's subject ('…

Son and boy also have racial implications in the US, particularly the South. It'd be bad form for me to speak to a male, black colleague (given an age difference with me being older) and call him "son". If he were white (as I'm also white) it might be seen as slightly dismissive, but it would hardly be offensive.

In the same sense that we have to be aware of the implications of language and race, we have to do the same with language and gender. Without this, you're not treating other people as peers or equals or legitimate agents (referring to a woman as girl has the implication that she's a child, either needing correction or protection, from you, the big, strong man).

This is, as I noted in another comment, also very regional. I live in the South. I could probably call many women girl here and they'd have no problem with it, without familiarity they call me honey and doll. But I also lived in Raleigh (still the South, but culturally very different thanks to the universities and IBM and others). Girl there would have been seen as offensive or dismissive by many women I knew if the man wasn't someone they knew in a familiar sense.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#359
in this era of exaggerated claims to gain victimhood points and outright hoaxes to prove whatever "-ism" causes the most damage, the author's unsubstantiated claims make her come off as a narcissistic liar more than anything

why did she stay there? why didn't she contact an outside attorney? it takes all of 15 seconds of googling to figure out what to do in this situation -- document & lawyer up. no, this comes across as someone who wants sympathy points for claims that have no evidence behind them

sorry, not buying it

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#360

If I was back at the start of my career, I would of dismissed this article and told the author to "toughen up". After all, what's a bit of ribbing among co-workers? Surely she's just being overly-sensitive. Until I had the (mis)pleasure of working with a truly toxic co-worker did my mindset completely change on the issue of bullying, intimidation, and hostility in the workplace. He was a senior guy, decent at his job…

Honestly, I think many of the dismissive reactions to these things have a similar basis. It can look like people excusing this behavior, but I think in many cases they've just never seen this behavior. If the worst you've seen at work is friendly teasing and maybe some racy language, it's easy to assume that's what happened and someone is overreacting. If you've seen someone truly corrosive, that assumption changes.…

Except its almost never teasing, its bullying.

I learned the difference between teasing someone and bullying in elementary school, directly via the education system (ie. the teacher).

Repeated 'joke' on/about the same subject? Bullying.

Is it mutual fun between/with different subjects, and can the subject themselves laugh about the joke? Teasing.

Telling someone to 'shape up' after they heard a joke regarding their race, sex, or something else the umptieth time is nigh annoying, and they will explode internally if they're introvert. People do notice this, and it gives bullies (ie. narcissists) fuel. The extroverts will more clearly defend their boundaries, so bullies tend to stick away from those. I don't know if the subject in this story is introvert, but I do know -and this is a generalisation- Indian women are rather courteous.

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