Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Speaking up

sazzy.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 342 posts

Re: Speaking up

#131

Post by mwetzler »

h2s wrote: post #2

Are there any high profile women in this industry who haven't been treated like shit in some way such as this? What a nasty bunch of people we are. Are we (developers) the douchey 80s guy of the 21st century?

On Friday I pitched my company to a room of 150 developers, since my company was a hackathon sponsor. I was the only female speaker out of about 15.

Afterwards, a well-known, elite developer asked me if I programmed. When I said yes, he said that made me 50% less attractive. Then he asked me if I cooked and cleaned. To my face.

You don't have to be high profile to deal with this stuff. Just being in a room where you're 1 female out of 15 males is enough to get this kind of attention.

Re: Speaking up

#132

Post by fatbird »

_b8r0 wrote: post #57

When I speak at conferences, it's not unusual for me to receive heckles. It's part of a thing where a lot of people who know me know that I'm pretty good with banter and will usually respond with a put down or your mum joke in good nature. It's mainly because I grew into conference speaking in a hostile conference environment, and also I've done a bit of stand-up now and again so you get used to it. The problem with…

Here's one: Instead of engaging them as a standup comic, willing to cross swords with a heckler (which likely encourages them), make up a three line response about how "this is a tech talk at a conference, please don't heckle, it just wrecks things for everyone." In other words, deflate the situation by being bland in your reply, and only bland.

Re: Speaking up

#133

Post by paperkettle »

Skywing wrote: post #111

How would you combat this scenario, though? If the person who is doing this has not been caught, then is it really a good idea to publicly state how much of an annoyance he or she is being? (I say she, because seriously, it could be another woman as well. Everybody is assuming it's probably a guy. We've all seen how mean women can be to other women, though. I grew up with 2 sisters and their friends ... I've seen a l…

I think the goal is general awareness about sexism & harassment present in the industry.

Even she doesn't make the specific offender more accountable by speaking up, she raises awareness and hopefully makes everyone less tolerant of this kind of outrageous stupidity.

Re: Speaking up

#134

Post by gavanwoolery »

DanBC wrote: post #66
gavanwoolery wrote: post #40

Sorry about your treatment. :( (And here I go into down-vote territory... :D) Before I say anything, let me say clearly I am not sexist; I am a strong advocate of equal rights (key word: equal). Some of your attacks can definitely be attributed to sex, but it's bad propaganda just to throw them all in the sexism bucket, or treat sexism like it is the norm. I know several females in the industry who are not afraid of…

> and have never been attacked on the basis of their sex Do you really know this, or do they just never ever mention it? I agree that everyone with enough followers will be the victim of attacks. But those attacks often take the easy route - someone who is Jewish will have anti-semitic rants posted about them; a woman will have graphic depictions (in text or imagery) of what people "want to do to her"; etc. It's fine…

Thanks - all good points :) As usual, the small sample of women I know is not necessarily indicative of anything, but of all the women I know, not one of them has complained about sexism; for all I know any of them could have been subject to it.

I have been subject to a few attacks myself over the course of my life for being born a Jew (although technically I have always been more of an atheist or agnostic). But it never once bothered me that much, because I know many Jews have had it far worse, both in the past and present. Likewise, I kind of cringe a bit when we complain about these #firstworldproblems, because there are women who are getting stoned to death for cheating on their husbands right now. I don't think that sexism should be ignored, but I do think we have a tendency to focus on the most trivial (relatively speaking) instances of it.

Re: Speaking up

#135

Post by rachelbythebay »

mwetzler wrote: post #131
h2s wrote: post #2

Are there any high profile women in this industry who haven't been treated like shit in some way such as this? What a nasty bunch of people we are. Are we (developers) the douchey 80s guy of the 21st century?

On Friday I pitched my company to a room of 150 developers, since my company was a hackathon sponsor. I was the only female speaker out of about 15. Afterwards, a well-known, elite developer asked me if I programmed. When I said yes, he said that made me 50% less attractive. Then he asked me if I cooked and cleaned. To my face. You don't have to be high profile to deal with this stuff. Just being in a room where you'…

I wonder what would happen if someone found out who this "elite developer" was.

Re: Speaking up

#136

Post by overgryphon »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #26
pja wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is why you need moderated communities, because otherwise the assholes will dominate the discourse in your chosen milieu and drive out anyone they deem unacceptable. Very often it's women. I don't know why but either there's a class of developers who feel personally threatened by women in their chosen profession, or it's personal: some individual has believed themselves to be entitled to that woman's attentio…

Regarding your second paragraph, I think it's primarily a clash of two situations: software development by its nature attracts men who are socially awkward, and the women that are attracted to software development tend not to be there for the attention. Software development has a broader appeal now than it did twenty years ago, and in spite of the numerous cases like this one, there seems to still be a growing popula…

The software development community attracts socially awkward people by accepting them- and consequently accepting behaviors that are not seen as acceptable in most parts of society.

For example, most of the software development community would see a 22yo guy persistently pursuing a girl who clearly isn't interested as innocent, awkward, and empathize with the guy's rejection (or lack there of, since he probably doesn't have the courage to directly ask her out). They wouldn't consider how it feels to the girl have someone watching you, following you, looking up private information online, and invading her space.

Re: Speaking up

#137

Post by jellicle »

mwetzler wrote: post #131
h2s wrote: post #2

Are there any high profile women in this industry who haven't been treated like shit in some way such as this? What a nasty bunch of people we are. Are we (developers) the douchey 80s guy of the 21st century?

On Friday I pitched my company to a room of 150 developers, since my company was a hackathon sponsor. I was the only female speaker out of about 15. Afterwards, a well-known, elite developer asked me if I programmed. When I said yes, he said that made me 50% less attractive. Then he asked me if I cooked and cleaned. To my face. You don't have to be high profile to deal with this stuff. Just being in a room where you'…

You know, naming names is probably one of the best ways to combat this. Silence helps the asshole keep doing it.

I understand the reasons why you might not want to. It's tragedy of the commons problem; you get no benefit and possible detriment from naming names - only society as a whole benefits.

Nevertheless you should. It's the right thing to do.

Re: Speaking up

#138

Post by gavanwoolery »

fatbird wrote: post #129
gavanwoolery wrote: post #40

Sorry about your treatment. :( (And here I go into down-vote territory... :D) Before I say anything, let me say clearly I am not sexist; I am a strong advocate of equal rights (key word: equal). Some of your attacks can definitely be attributed to sex, but it's bad propaganda just to throw them all in the sexism bucket, or treat sexism like it is the norm. I know several females in the industry who are not afraid of…

(And here I go into down-vote territory... :D) The name of the fallacy this demonstrates is "poisoning the well", as in implying that anyone who downvotes you is just afraid to hear the truth, man........ sexism like it is the norm As we keep discovering, sexism is the norm for women in general and specifically in our industry. Your blindness to this fact is not evidence to the contrary. I know several females in the…

Wow talk about fallacies! :)

Here is one for you:

The straw man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

I am accepting that I am going to be down-voted, not challenging people not to do it. See above fallacy.

As we keep discovering, sexism is the norm for women ... We hear about one sexism case every few weeks here on HN. Of the many thousands of females in IT, do you think they are all just playing the silent card? Or maybe sexism is the infrequent case, not the norm? Sexism is rare for a pretty good reason: lawsuits. Of her 30,000 followers, how many have made sexist remarks? Less than 10? Seems like the norm to me...

We seem to have this conspiracy that sexism is all over the place, it's just that 99 percent of women are being silent about it. Does sexism exist? Yes. Is it frequent? Probably not, but everyone is entitled to their opinion on the matter.

Re: Speaking up

#139

Post by nollidge »

detst wrote: post #124
timsally wrote: post #90

Whenever an instance of blatant sexism comes up, an attempt is invariably made to rationalize away the fact that a sexist act has actually occurred. We have had two such attempts made here so far and I expect more. One commentator is attempting to advance the baseless theory that the bully did not care about the sex of his victim. This particular individual even goes so far to say that "the biggest problem" is the al…

How do you know the motivation of this person? Every time one of these stories come up, someone tries to call other people out for rationalizing. It's not rationalizing, it's calling it as they see it: someone being an asshole. If you want blatant sexism, FTA: "no offence, I just don’t relate to girls speaking about the industry at all, I learn better from guys". That's sexism. It's not denial if you don't know the m…

Do you legitimately think we could remove gender from the situation and it would've played out in the same way?
Post reply on HN