Last year at FooCamp I went to a panel about women in tech (I believe I was the only guy) for two reasons: 1) I have no qualms about offending people if I feel my point is valid, and in fact enjoy being in situations where I risk such things (I find it incredibly rewarding to have meaningful discussions about things that are considered taboo). 2) To find out what the problem was Let me clarify #2: I didn't see a prob…
Damn: I missed the edit timeframe on my comment. I just realized that Skud was actually at the panel I went to. She was one of the main people I had this discussion with, and I have a "geek feminism" sticker from it sitting on my desk. Small world!
Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment
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Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you do not understand. You think my problem is that 'many people disagree with [me] on what should be the boundary of free speech.' This is incorrect. I am not making a normative argument about what the boundaries of free speech should be. Frankly, I don't know exactly where they should be; where many people see boundaries I tend to see a grey area, and my ideas on this tend to shift around a bit. It is much easi…
The problem I refer to is the invocation of 'free speech' to dismiss complaints about all undesirable speech, inclusive of that which may qualify as criminal. Who has done this? I'd be curious to see which posts you believe do this. I suspect all you will find is a set of posts which assume MikeeUSA committed no criminal acts. This is the assumption I'm working under, based mainly on the fact that no one has even acc…
Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment
#283Skimming over the comments here, once again I find myself distressed at the large number of men in the tech community who just don't get it . Whether it's sexist jokes, inappropriate language or illustrations, or plain old stereotypes, it sometimes feels like the tech community's firmly stuck in the 70s. The worst thing is that none of this is difficult to solve, it just involves growing up, frankly.
This is mostly nerds wanting to have something to argue about. For reasons I can't put my fingers on, nothing seems to irritate nerds more than the idea that they're oppressing people; it probably has something to do with the fact that so many of them were picked on growing up. The reality is that the stuff we're talking about here would, for the most part, be a firing offense at most companies.
I'd like to just add a bit (edit: okay, a rather long-ish bit...) about how a reasonable, non-sexist guy could end up assuming that things are not that bad in the industry, whereas a reasonable women can have experienced more sexism than in other industries, and both can be "right". All without the typical (and IMO, rather cynical) assumption that guys are just playing along, encouraging it, or putting on blinders. And also (more importantly) without the assumption that men in the industry are any better or worse than in any other.
This should make both sides pause a bit before they scream about how unreasonable people on the other side are being...
For a lot of men, the skepticism is not over whether actions are sexist or not, but over how often they actually happen.
My argument is that this difference in perception is almost exclusively due to the extremely lopsided sex ratio in tech, not due to people in tech being any better or worse: I don't know exact numbers, but let's say somewhere around 10% of tech workers are female (in my experience it's even worse than that, but I don't know for sure, industry-wide).
Going with that number, that means that out of a random sample of interactions between other people that you (let's assume "you" are a non-sexist guy that can accurately recognize sexism when you see it) personally witness over the course of a career, only 18% will be between a man and a woman. As for the percentage of sexist guys (I'm making the simplifying assumption that a guy is either sexist or not-sexist - I could easily remove this restriction and replace it with a probability distribution, but it would needlessly complicate things)...I'm not sure about that, but let's aim high and say it's 20% (I don't think more than 20% of us would, for instance, show pantless pictures of ourselves, send harassing e-mails, proposition an intern, ask about kids at an interview, etc.). Even when a sexist guy interacts with a woman, we should probably assume that it's a reasonably small percentage of those interactions, maybe 10%, where he'd actually say or do something offensive, especially with someone else present.
[Again, all these numbers are pure fiction, placeholders for the purpose of demonstrating the extreme effect that the sex-ratio has, rather than figuring out anything in detail]
Put that all together, and let's say that you, a not-sexist guy, witness 1000 interactions between other people at work during some time period. By these estimates, only 3 of those interactions would be "sexist interactions." The problem seems rather small when you look at it that way, and in fact, it's small enough that statistical variation could mean that you never end up witnessing such interactions at all, even if they are happening at your place of work.
Now, the meat of the argument: consider, instead, the point of view of a woman. 18% of all of her interactions are with sexist men, and 1.8% of her interactions involve a guy acting sexist towards her. By the percentages, that's a sixfold increase over what you would notice as a man, even though the actual frequency of sexist behavior is the same.
I think that's where this sort of discussion breaks down: those of us that are not sexist, but are not women, see an apparent level of sexism that is six times lower than what women observe in their own work interactions, and that's arguably the difference between the perception that sexism is pervasive and oppressive, versus barely worth considering. And it's all due to the sex ratio - if it was 50/50, then the percent of interactions that are sexist that men observe (holding the other numbers the same) would be 50% * 20% * 10% = 1%, and what women observe in their own interactions would be 50% * 20% * 10% = 1%, so there would be an equal perception of sexism.
We all need to keep this in mind to bring some sanity these sorts of discussions: girls, it's not that the men that doubt this are assholes or privilege-denying-misogynists, it's that they truly, honestly witness sexism less often than they would if they worked in a field with a more balanced gender ratio, and it's not necessarily that they're complicit or ignoring it. And guys, the women aren't being whiny or weak, they truly, honestly experience a higher percentage of sexist interactions than they would in a field with more women.
FWIW, all of this applies to any minority situation, and is (IMO) one of the biggest unrealized factors that leads to disagreement whenever these arguments come up.
Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment
#284A couple of points if I may: 1. If you speak at conferences, especially about a non-technical subject like "women in FOSS projects" (which is more likely to get sexists riled up), you are going to get unwanted attention. Pretty much every speaker who speaks on a controversial, or non-technical, or just media-glamorized topic is going to get harassed - if not hacked. It happens all the time to men and i'm sure it happ…
I just want to address your first point. The harassment women get is much, much worse than men. Me and my wife are both computer scientists, and have both given talks at many conferences. My wife and our female friends consistently get much more, and much worse, harassment than me and our male friends. There is no comparison, and over time I've seen it grind several women down to the point where they just give up (fo…
Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
>(once had somebody on HN tell me that women are genetically less likely to want to do tech![!!!!!!!]) Are you trolling? That does not seem to be a sexist or retrograde statement.
I think this highlights the problem nicely: the recipient of the comment took it that way, and you don't seem to understand her response.
Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn: I missed the edit timeframe on my comment. I just realized that Skud was actually at the panel I went to. She was one of the main people I had this discussion with, and I have a "geek feminism" sticker from it sitting on my desk. Small world!
I think that was probably me with the stickers. Skud and I had vaguely similar hair for a while. I am the one with the wheelchair so while people have confused us, actually it's quite easy to tell us apart!
Anyway, I'm going to shut up before I mix up more people :-P.
Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Women get a whole other dimension of online harrasment that men don't. For a gaming-centered sample, look at http://fatuglyorslutty.com/ .
Yeah, men have absolutely never been accused of being fat, ugly, or accused of having a societally unacceptable number of sexual partners. What exactly is wrong with the idea that we shouldn't harass anyone? What is wrong with the idea that all people are created equal and that people don't need special privileges or protections based on gender/race/sexual orientation?
Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can barely believe the things I'm reading on this page. Lots of comments similar to "It's just trolling, get over it." And "she's just reinforcing negative stereotypes of women by not being strong enough to handle the internet." And "men deal with negative comments all the time and don't whine about it." These are the exact attitudes that are the problem! Why can they not see this?
Could you clearly state "the problem"? Based on what has been posted, it's hard for me to clearly see a problem beyond "in a society with free speech, some people will speak in ways that others dislike." That is a legitimate (unsolvable) problem, but I don't think it's the problem you are referring to.
But they are an example of people who are apparently unwilling to acknowledge that maybe the harassment some women receive online or in the workplace could possibly be outside the realm of their experience. We have one group of people, women in tech, who are saying that they are being harassed (and providing examples of specific threats against them). Then we have a certain subset of men in tech who are saying "I know better than you do, and I say that you aren't being harassed any more than men are." That attitude is the problem (as well as the people in the community who don't immediately call them on it).
People with no personal experience in the matter saying it's not a problem and ignoring the fact that those who do have personal experience are saying that it is. And I think you could make a case that the underlying cause is that somewhere deep down they believe themselves "smarter" (or something) than women. How else can you tell someone that their own interpretation of how they are treated is incorrect?
Does that make sense?