201–210 of 342 posts
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?
Why is wondering aloud how sexist/creepy the bulk of male programmers are more acceptable than wondering aloud how untalented the bulk of female programmers are?
I think both behaviors are rather low shaming behaviors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what would happen if someone found out who this "elite developer" was.
Probably nothing. There would maybe be a few blog posts about it. Their comments would be filled with men defending his actions and suggesting that anyone calling him out was lying, that the real problem is "women that get offended too easily" or "women that don't get jokes," and straight-up male superiority.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"since men at large are not discriminated against based on their gender." Uh, hello there - that's a huge assumption. I think they are discriminated against very much, but I guess no point to discuss on HN :-/ I'll only say that I don't enjoy having to spend time away from my kid. "A female posting pictures of a man at the conference wouldn't be signaling that men don't belong in the group" Very confusing? I thought…
Yes, men are discriminated too. I'm sorry about your situation. I encourage you to write about your experience and we can talk about how to help you. Your experience doesn't mean we shouldn't work together to support women who are being discriminated. The survey questions used in the study certainly don't reflect what we normally think of as "rape". But even if the statistic were 1 in 10, it is still a huge problem f…
I never said that I wouldn't. In fact I googled those links yesterday because I am interested in the subject and like to research how to help. Understanding what is really going on seems to be an important first step, and throwing false numbers around won't help with that in my opinion.
"I don't understand why the "inspiration" behind the harassment matters."
That was my original question: what does it matter if it was sexist or not? To classify it as "sexist" seems to be an extremely awkward way to describe a crime of harassment. Imagine somebody with a blue shirt was murdered, and the conclusion was "the murderer really didn't like blue".
I thought sexism was bias or discrimination against people based on their gender. How is posting fake nudes of somebody on the internet bias or discrimination? It's just harassment/stalking. Sure, make it a data point in how likely women are to be victim of such a thing. But I don't see the point of calling it sexist. I don't think anybody at that conference applauded those actions, for example - even if they were sexist (except for the perpetrator, if he was indeed among the audience). Because those actions were simply criminal harassment.
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…
There is a LOT of blatant sexism in the tech sector. The more specialized you get, the worse things get. It's a pretty well documented problem (e.g. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/sexual_harassm... for a collection of security related anecdotes). This kind of culture turns away lots of tremendously talented people, and those who choose to endure a culture which seems to be slanted against them generall…
At this point, I'd say it was the opposite of well documented and that's a problem. We do not have the statistics on this since it is not being reported to law enforcement or another body that collects these statistics. Does tech have more incidents than lawyers, plumbers, or actors? Don't know and I wish I did. I believe that it is a problem, but I cannot point to finding or study.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> ...a 22yo guy persistently pursuing a girl who clearly isn't interested...
To be fair, you came >this...I wonder if maybe a huge root cause of this problem is simply that there are few enough women in our field that any attention from men feels like it's too much? I have to imagine that if you got regular, "Hey, are you busy Saturday night?" inquiries from different guys, you'd start to feel a little like chum in shark-infested waters.
It seems hardly a week goes by without someone bringing forward a genuinely awful case of harassment, abuse, or worse, and that's only the stories horrible enough to make the front page of HN. So, who the fuck is doing this and how do we make them fuck the fuck off?
I kinda understand why some people's response is to doubt that this could really be happening, because it is pretty fucking unbelievable. But it seems that it really is happening, and it's undermining some pretty central notions of the meritocratic, no-bullshit character of the community. This kind of thing is pretty outrageous bullshit.
OK, to a certain extent we must accept that there will always be assholes, and the kind of spite and vindictiveness the OP relates sounds like the behaviour of a disturbed, obsessive individual, but there must be a way of deterring such behaviour. What more can we do here?
It's somewhat encouraging to read the comments here and note that for a change they are not already overrun by aggressive apologists for the continuing misogyny in software development.
[1] That some people arguing on the 'wrong' side here are not doing so for misogynistic reasons doesn't mean that nobody is; part of the problem is that you can't easily tell the difference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Please, tell me, how would comments look if someone did the same thing, but for the guy? HN is getting better at being less aggressive and at being more constructive with criticism. Perhaps you can find an example where a male dev had pictures of his face, and pictures of another man's penis, posted to a website with his name and email address. And, when you find it, HN will be supportive of that man and will conde…
Even if there is such an example, you really need to have your head stuck firmly up your ass if you're willing to argue that it would have anywhere near the same social and emotional impact. Perhaps "outing" a developer as gay could have a comparable impact for men, but that would only apply in predominantly homophobic communities. Which in turn says a lot about this community's attitude towards women. If it wasn't h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It is indeed tricky. I want to give developers a positive association with our company and with me as an individual. Being confrontational does the opposite.
Most people (despite the arguments here, which are mostly about either semantics or arcane ethical points) think that the way the guy you described behaved is unacceptable. You're one of us, a hacker, and you don't deserve to be treated like that. I can't imagine you'd get anything other than a positive association from standing up for the rights of hackers to get on and live their lives free of that kind of harassment and bullying.
I don't really understand why people don't mention this more often: the kind of bullying that women in tech receive now is pretty much the kind of bullying that male geeks got from non-geeks twenty years ago. It's not really anti-women so much as it's anti-people-being-geeks; society at large may have (grudgingly!) accepted male geeks, but female geeks are still getting abuse for being more interested in computers or science or whatever than in what society thinks they 'should' be doing. As such, this affects all of us and we all need to be pretty damn clear that we won't stand for it.
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'…