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>> let the downvotes rain upon me > I downvoted because of this bad faith portion of the comment. He predicted downvotes, and you provided them. Maybe the faith of that comment was good, after all?
And your thoughts on the latter half of my comment, where I suggest the entire tone of the post was to invite a negative response to confirm his martyrdom syndrome?
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Propositioning to her is not really sexism, but it's inappropriate and unprofessional.
Propositioning a woman who you manage at work is sexual harassment and sexist.
By your logic, every person that only dates people of a particular sex is "sexist", which is completely ridiculous.
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Propositioning a woman who you manage at work is sexual harassment and sexist.
Sexual harassment? Sure. Sexist? Sorry, no, that's just silly. By your logic, if a male manager only propositions female subordinates, it's sexist, because he isn't also propositioning male subordinates. That's not sexist, that's a side effect of the male manager being heterosexual. By your logic, every person that only dates people of a particular sex is "sexist", which is completely ridiculous.
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There's no reason it can't be both. Your theory that sociopath executives only exploit people for money and not for other things they personally enjoy is not one that matches my experience. And of course there's a long history of the "old boys' club" excusing sexist abuse with a "boys will be boys" mentality. So even if we didn't have a lot of evidence of how bro-y Uber was, your notion that they somehow escaped soci…
I think I wasn't clear enough: I'm really pointing at HR, not at general company management. You're absolutely right: corporate executives definitely do exploit people for things other than money (such as sex). I'm only looking at the situation where some manager is sexually harassing someone, and then HR protects the harasser because he's high-up in the corporation. HR isn't getting anything out of this harassment, other than keeping their jobs and furthering the financial interest of the corporation.
I do get your point about the boys' club thing, but I do think it's pretty common for female-led HR departments to also protect abusers. To me, it's just pure sociopathy: HR wants to protect the corporation at all costs, and the person running HR simply doesn't care about the victims at all.
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I remember reading that post and being surprised how little of it was actually sexism (the only thing I saw that qualified was the thing about the shirts), and how much of it was just maltreatment of programmers of all types. But I guess if you have to slap the label "sexism" on it to get it to be taken seriously, we take what we can get.
Did we read the same blog entry? Her first manager propositioned her for sex almost on day one. HR lied about that managers past issues and told her suck it up or receive a negative review. She received a negative review anyways (changed after the fact - her in-person review was positive). This blocked role changes and made her ineligible for graduate tuition reimbursement. Leather jackets for the men, women told to…
At my current company, they like to buy corporate-branded clothing for employees too. T-shirts, polo shirts, and sweatshirts/hoodies are what they normally get. The last time they got some shirts, I went to go get some, and they were all in L, XL, and XXL sizes. I'm a tall guy, but I'm slim and wear a size M. Other employees, including guys who wear size S, all thought I was weird for not wanting a free sweatshirt that's too large and baggy. Also, there were no female sizes that I can remember, it was just all those huge sizes.
Also, there's the issue of just how far the company needs to go to cover everyone. How many different sizes should they get? My last girlfriend could not wear most normal sizes; even XS was too large for her, and she needed XXS if she could find it. She usually bought her clothes in Asia when she went back there because the only stuff that usually fit her here was in children's sizes (her size is pretty average for women however where she comes from). What does the company need to do for people who are at a size extreme? Quite possibly, the clothing vendor my company uses doesn't even have a size to fit my ex-gf.
But yeah, not even bothering to get the jackets in any women's sizes at all is pretty blatantly sexist.
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Sorry, but you don't quite understand what sexism is. A quick review is in order. For hundreds of years, women were in effect property of men. They would go from being controlled by their fathers to their husbands. Their legal rights were narrowly circumscribed, and their practical rights were even smaller. This is on the decline, but the changes are quite recent. Women couldn't vote until 1920. It wasn't until 1974…
>even at newly formed companies in that most forward-thinking industry, tech. I dispute this heavily, I've worked in both tech and some traditionally other heavily male dominated industries, like construction and oilfield work. While both have their sexists, I find that the problem is far worse, and far more accepted in tech than either. Blue collar workers often just have an old fashioned view of the sexes, but tech…
> as extolled by the post above.
The post above that was killed by downvotes?
Why is HN such an outlier, and how is it holding out for so long and resisting this dominant, anti-woman culture of the tech industry?
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That's not the conclusion here. The conclusion is that there are many axes of oppression and one does not invalidate the other. The kind of thinking you describe was more common in the 60s and 70s but has fallen out of favor after the rise of black feminism and intersectional analysis. Race does not bind more tightly than other aspects. Ableism exists. But the existence of white people who suffer in a myriad of ways…
> The conclusion is that there are many axes of oppression and one does not invalidate the other Yet this is the inevitable consequence of intersectional analysis.. It describes a way to calculate value discrepancy of opinions based off group membership of the opinion holder. This is just an attempt to overcorrect the "axes of oppression" from sins of the past. The solution moving forward should not be to sin in the…
This reeks to me of a similar argument against gay marriage, where there wouldn't be nearly as much violence towards them if they didn't try and demand their rights immediately.
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This community. Tech. HN. Sometimes these discussions, as here, go relatively well. But that's relative. There's still a lot of misogynist nonsense, both subtle and blatant, and I can watch my antisexist posts get voted up and down. But quite often they go poorly. That's something that's easy to miss if one isn't intentionally antisexist. And since sexism is something guys can ignore if we want, it's especially easy…
My experience here on HN, over the recent past few years, has only ever been consistent with this thread. Anything that could possibly be interpreted or misinterpreted as sexist gets voted down into oblivion. As do any defenders on abstract principles, or who take neutral stances. This very comment of mine could be interpreted suspiciously as insufficiently antisexist, and be downvoted too. Further, I use HN as a pro…
>“I felt a wave of relief wash over me when I remembered that I worked at a large company, one with a sizable human resources department,” I feel like someone needs to run an education campaign on what HR is and who it works for. HR is there to protect the business. They aren't there as some moral arbiter. If you reported sexual harassment to HR you are going to be part of an equation - is it better for the business…
If that's the case, who do you report sexual harassment to?
In my opinion if you consider your position and you do want to pursue complaining about harassment the first thing to do is contact a third party for advice. In the UK you can contact acas.org.uk who will give impartial advice about what your rights are. I'm sure there are equivalent organisations elsewhere about what your rights are, if you really are all out of options contact /r/legaladvice but obviously take that advice with a pinch of salt.
A good rule of thumb is you need contemporaneous records of what you're complaining about - whether that is a diary or inducing the person you're accusing to put their suggestions in writing (eg, via email) and keeping a copy of that outside of work. Telling people outside of work what's happening also helps.
Obviously solving these sorts of problems within the company's HR system isn't great, but it really is the only resolution you can have beyond law enforcement, and even if you succeed in getting your harraser disciplined or removed your career will be damaged. But the point is that if you know your legal rights and have a strong record of what you're complaining about then the HR equation changes- no longer are you someone to brush off, now you're someone who poses a legitimate threat to cost the company money (and more importantly, if the HR person screws up dealing with the issue it'll be a black mark against hem, so they may well decide it's best to take your side). But remember, every single meeting, every single issue needs recording, time and date. And it's for the exact reason this article demonstrates - if you have a noted timeline saying "25th July - I complained about X, I was told "A",27th July- HR told X, 28th July - X initiated a performance conversation with me" it becomes much much easier to demonstrate retaliation - and because it's easier for you to prove, it makes it much more likely the company will want to avoid you actually demonstrate that in arbitration or court.
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It is certainly inappropriate and unprofessional. But it's also sexism, in that for centuries men here have been using power to push women to have sex without regard to their actual interest. E.g., marital rape didn't become a crime across the US until 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#United_States
That isn't sexism, similar things happens all the time in gay relationships. Similarly men murdering women in relationships is not sexism, since gay men murder their partners at a higher rate than straight men. So it isn't sexism, it isn't about men hating women, it is just about men committing a lot more brutal violence on average. Or in this case, it is just about men being a lot more forceful about sex than women,…
You could be right that men have some innate tendency to commit more violence. But what they also have, as your excuses here make plain, is more social license to commit violence. The former, if true, is just a fucked up fact our evolutionary history. The latter, though is very definitely sexism.