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I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

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Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#121

Post by DoreenMichele »

austinjp wrote: post #117
DoreenMichele wrote: post #63

On the one hand, I agree. And on the other hand, I wonder how helpful it is to be writing this and posting it to HN instead of writing about some engineering subject and posting that instead. I think we need more women in tech talking about tech and less women in tech talking about the problems with being women in tech and only getting attention of the wrong kind -- for being women in tech. I mean, it's kind of recur…

I feel it's true that we should set our course for a (near) future wherein women in tech writing about tech is the norm. Unfortunately this is likely to take some time. That means, between now and then, we're going to hear from plenty of die-hards with opposing views. En route it will be necessary to remind ourselves of the course we should be plotting, and to continue to respond to opposition. Articles such as this…

En route it will be necessary to remind ourselves of the course we should be plotting

That is exactly what I am trying to do.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#122

Post by austinjp »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #121
austinjp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel it's true that we should set our course for a (near) future wherein women in tech writing about tech is the norm. Unfortunately this is likely to take some time. That means, between now and then, we're going to hear from plenty of die-hards with opposing views. En route it will be necessary to remind ourselves of the course we should be plotting, and to continue to respond to opposition. Articles such as this…

En route it will be necessary to remind ourselves of the course we should be plotting That is exactly what I am trying to do.

Great :)

In case it came across as such, I didn't intend my comment to be negative or contradictory, but to add to yours.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#123

Post by pixl97 »

mirimir wrote: post #50
belorn wrote: post #16

I often see people arguing against the idea of sexless-ness based on the idea that its been tried and failed, but I honestly the only time I truly seen evidence of this is in movies making fun of the 70th's. It seems that when the feminist movement moved away from equality feminism it cultural had to disavow the concept of sexless-ness. The idea of sexless-ness, which can also be describe as women/men as equal and un…

Maybe sexlessness overstates the case. It was more like sex blindness. Or sex irrelevance. I mean, she writes: > I come from a country and a back ground where intelligence and the ability to work extremely hard is valued highly, with beauty, money and popularity ranked far, far below. In contrast, modern American culture (which is globally pervasive) is just so incredibly sexualized. And incredibly polarized. Many wo…

> strategy by the kleptocrats. But maybe it's just chaos.

Maybe it's just advertizing?

Someone want's to make you buy a product that makes you more "more". More manly, more womanly, more better looking, more money. News and TV wants to make you more engaged, if that is by telling you more lies, or making you more angry they will do it, so you watch more ads.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#124

Post by north_east_dev »

21 wrote: post #5
programmarchy wrote: post #3

This seems like a good illustration of the soft bigotry of low expectations. Yes, we should make an effort to be inclusive of all individuals, but when that's done by putting people on a pedestal simply because they're a minority, it's superficial, cringy and embarrassing for everyone involved.

In my team, where we have a 50-50 target goal, we were told that if we know a potential woman hire we should refer her not to the regular hiring track, but to a special "woman friendly" hiring track.

I've encountered something similar. Basically two roles were open and I was on the interviewing team. We were told at the start that one of the roles would be for a woman. We got two CVs from women, and about 45 or so from guys. Not fair really but what can you do. It'd be insanity to challenge that, so just keep your head down and nod along.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#125

Post by Grue3 »

rdtsc wrote: post #19
dang wrote: post #2

This article was flagged unfairly. It's substantive and grounded in personal experience. Those are good qualities for an HN piece whether one agrees or disagrees, so I've turned off flags and rolled back the clock on this submission to give it a second shot. If you want to comment here, please (re-)familiarize yourself with the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html , including this one:…

Wonder if the flagging system can be enhanced by having the flagger provide a reason. Maybe having to explain would reduce the incidence of drive-by flagging.

I would like this. Often I want to flag an article because I feel it's of poor quality, but refrain from it because the mods might think I flagged it because of some partisan reason and my flagging rights will be taken away.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#126

Post by dominotw »

21 wrote: post #5
programmarchy wrote: post #3

This seems like a good illustration of the soft bigotry of low expectations. Yes, we should make an effort to be inclusive of all individuals, but when that's done by putting people on a pedestal simply because they're a minority, it's superficial, cringy and embarrassing for everyone involved.

In my team, where we have a 50-50 target goal, we were told that if we know a potential woman hire we should refer her not to the regular hiring track, but to a special "woman friendly" hiring track.

Is this legal in your country?

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#127

Post by LyndsySimon »

fatbird wrote: post #44
belorn wrote: post #16

I often see people arguing against the idea of sexless-ness based on the idea that its been tried and failed, but I honestly the only time I truly seen evidence of this is in movies making fun of the 70th's. It seems that when the feminist movement moved away from equality feminism it cultural had to disavow the concept of sexless-ness. The idea of sexless-ness, which can also be describe as women/men as equal and un…

The problem with sexless-ness is that it only addresses what we're conscious of, when we know that there's lots of unconscious or systemic biases that still exist. One famous example was a study that involved submitting resumes to various jobs with names removed and then randomly reassigned (to avoid any actual correlation between the name's perceived gender and the quality of the resume). Resumes with female names r…

> Resumes with female names received half the callbacks than if they had male names.

I'm a man named Lyndsy. I've experienced the opposite bias - companies that were initially very enthusiastic about my interviewing with them, right up to the moment where they realized I was male.

Obviously, I have no way of knowing whether I received fewer callbacks as a result of my name - but I do know with a very high degree of confidence that I have landed at least one interview based on my name.

It seems to me that actively "working against" this unconscious bias merely replaces it with another.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#128

Post by calvinbhai »

greglindahl wrote: post #102
calvinbhai wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[you were not very enthusiastic about conferences with a "No Asshole Rule"] Not sure where I mentioned that?

I would be pleasantly surprised if you were also very enthusiastic about conferences with a "No Asshole Rule", but that would make your previous comment a bit strange.

Not sure where the miscommunication is, but it looks like one of us is really bad at understanding English :)

Either way, I’m not a fan of the bro-mentality places(jobs/conferences) and I absolutely love conferences which make it nice for people (of any gender, orientation, race, culture, language) to attend.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#129

Post by fatbird »

LyndsySimon wrote: post #127
fatbird wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with sexless-ness is that it only addresses what we're conscious of, when we know that there's lots of unconscious or systemic biases that still exist. One famous example was a study that involved submitting resumes to various jobs with names removed and then randomly reassigned (to avoid any actual correlation between the name's perceived gender and the quality of the resume). Resumes with female names r…

> Resumes with female names received half the callbacks than if they had male names. I'm a man named Lyndsy. I've experienced the opposite bias - companies that were initially very enthusiastic about my interviewing with them, right up to the moment where they realized I was male. Obviously, I have no way of knowing whether I received fewer callbacks as a result of my name - but I do know with a very high degree of c…

It's probably true that a person trying to self-correct for bias will tend to over-correct, to no one's benefit. But the sort of things you do to correct for widespread unconscious bias are different. For instance, the New York Symphony Orchestra found that female applicants were making it through the tape screening round more often when their tapes were blinded, replacing identifying information with a serial number. Women were still being rejected at the audition stage in higher numbers than men, so they started having the applicants play from behind a screen so the judges couldn't see the gender of the audition, and once again, the number of women making it through that round increased[1]. This was all at a time when the NYSO was consciously trying to practice sexless-ness, if not actively increase the number of women in the orchestra.

Several years ago, GoGaRuCo brought in blind judging of their talk applicants pool after ensuring the pool was seeded with half women. Suddenly their roster was half women too, on judging the talks purely on the merits of the proposal.

We constantly see that when we successfully block stimuli to unconscious bias, the bias is disarmed.

[1] Interestingly, they didn't significantly increase until they made auditions walk on stage in their socks, because the sound of their formal-wear shoes were obviously different.

Re: I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

#130

Post by fatbird »

belorn wrote: post #119
fatbird wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with sexless-ness is that it only addresses what we're conscious of, when we know that there's lots of unconscious or systemic biases that still exist. One famous example was a study that involved submitting resumes to various jobs with names removed and then randomly reassigned (to avoid any actual correlation between the name's perceived gender and the quality of the resume). Resumes with female names r…

Thats not studies on sexless-ness, but rather plain discrimination. There are many such studies, some which favor men and some which favor women, but all falls within typical gender roles and expectations. Sexless-ness and gender roles are opposites. Lets bring in other similar studies. Physiologist that work for the juridical system and makes decisions about the mental status of accused criminals. Identical submitte…

There are many, many studies of the justice system in the U.S. showing very biased outcomes depending on factors like gender or race. Practicing sexless-ness is, as you observe, what's supposed to be done already ("All dictate that professionals... treat both women and men equally"). Do you think we believe that we're practicing sexless-ness and then not doing so in practice? Or that there are unconscious or systemic effects at play as well that conscious dedication to sexless-ness isn't affecting?
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