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My First Hand Experience With Sexism

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Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#41

Post by SilasX »

tomp wrote: post #24
draugadrotten wrote: post #17

> “Women are incapable of making the tough decisions necessary to run a profitable company on low margins.” - CEO of a Women’s Product Retailer Frankly, I think the CEO was pulling this guys leg and wanted to see how he reacted when his buttons are pushed. That is a situation that frequently occurs in customer meetings and you don't want your rep to blow up in the customer's face. That said, did you see the recent Sw…

> you see the recent Swedish study of 125.000 companies that proved Just a minor nitpick, studies don't prove anything. Even experiments (in Physics) don't prove anything unless different people can reproduce them repeatedly. But (statistical) studies prove nothing at all, they merely hint at a correlation.

What if I told you there are standard meanings of "prove" that aren't so strict?

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#42

Post by sp332 »

meritt wrote: post #18

> "Now I really empathized with all the women who were victims of assault or rape." You interacted with a bad person or two and suddenly you're able to empathize with victims of assault and rape? What? Exactly how minimal is your understanding of those issues to equate them accordingly?

He didn't say anything about equating them. He also didn't say he felt the same as those people. (You might be confusing empathy with sympathy?)

Edit: she -> he

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#43

Post by jotux »

meritt wrote: post #18

> "Now I really empathized with all the women who were victims of assault or rape." You interacted with a bad person or two and suddenly you're able to empathize with victims of assault and rape? What? Exactly how minimal is your understanding of those issues to equate them accordingly?

Here's a fundamental problem with text-based communications. You interpret, "Now I really empathized" as "I've never empathized before but now I do", whereas it seems the intention was to state, "I empathized with them before but now that I've had a new experience I can understand their situation more and have greater empathy."

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#44

Post by arbutus »

tomp wrote: post #28
arbutus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The only real sexism prevalent in the tech industry are the groups of militant feminists setting up endless, patronizing, segregated "coding for girls" meetups." It's easy for this kind of thing to be completely invisible when this is your attitude. Sexism in the tech industry is alive and well, and there are a lot of good reasons to have meet-ups for both girls and women. When you immediately start lashing out abou…

I don't understand his post the same way. He said that the only sexism prevalent in this industry is the "girls code"-type sexism. Sure, sexism exists everywhere and always, as does racism and other -isms. Simply said, people will be jerks. However, it is unreasonable to draw conclusions for the whole industry based on the behaviour of one such jerk, that just happens to be a male sexist (I'm sure you'd find female s…

I don't need to base my opinion off of one guy's account of an incident in a blog post - I have a laundry list of my own very unpleasant experiences as a female developer to base my opinions on. I've also spoken to a great deal of other women who have a very similar list of very similar experiences. A lot of these experiences have aspects that are specific to the tech industry.

If you only have insight into industry sexism as far as one or two jerks, it's likely because you aren't a part of the affected demographic.

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#45

Post by nawitus »

oh_sigh wrote: post #32
draugadrotten wrote: post #17

> “Women are incapable of making the tough decisions necessary to run a profitable company on low margins.” - CEO of a Women’s Product Retailer Frankly, I think the CEO was pulling this guys leg and wanted to see how he reacted when his buttons are pushed. That is a situation that frequently occurs in customer meetings and you don't want your rep to blow up in the customer's face. That said, did you see the recent Sw…

> that proved women-run companies makes 15% less profit? Correlation != Causation. What if women are more likely to start companies in fields where profit margins are lower?

Even if correlation is not causation, that's not evidence that causation is not an explanatory factor.

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#46

Post by meritt »

sp332 wrote: post #42
meritt wrote: post #18

> "Now I really empathized with all the women who were victims of assault or rape." You interacted with a bad person or two and suddenly you're able to empathize with victims of assault and rape? What? Exactly how minimal is your understanding of those issues to equate them accordingly?

He didn't say anything about equating them. He also didn't say he felt the same as those people. (You might be confusing empathy with sympathy?) Edit: she -> he

I didn't confuse empathy with sympathy.

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#47

Post by waterlesscloud »

draugadrotten wrote: post #17

> “Women are incapable of making the tough decisions necessary to run a profitable company on low margins.” - CEO of a Women’s Product Retailer Frankly, I think the CEO was pulling this guys leg and wanted to see how he reacted when his buttons are pushed. That is a situation that frequently occurs in customer meetings and you don't want your rep to blow up in the customer's face. That said, did you see the recent Sw…

At the risk of jumping into a flame-pool...

That study is interesting, since it seems similar to studies indicating women don't negotiate for higher salaries as often as men do.

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#48

Post by henrikschroder »

facepalm wrote: post #38
draugadrotten wrote: post #17

> “Women are incapable of making the tough decisions necessary to run a profitable company on low margins.” - CEO of a Women’s Product Retailer Frankly, I think the CEO was pulling this guys leg and wanted to see how he reacted when his buttons are pushed. That is a situation that frequently occurs in customer meetings and you don't want your rep to blow up in the customer's face. That said, did you see the recent Sw…

Pretty funny, because "Google For Entrepreneurs" has spammed my G+ timeline all week with studies on women led companies making more money. Well actually not studies, just infographics making that claim. Glad to see some counterexample - I think it is always naive to assume "just put a woman on top and the company will do x% better/worse".

Both claims might be true, it could very well be the case that women-led companies have higher revenues than average, but re-invest more of their profit margin in the workforce than average.

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#49

Post by sp332 »

meritt wrote: post #46
sp332 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't say anything about equating them. He also didn't say he felt the same as those people. (You might be confusing empathy with sympathy?) Edit: she -> he

I didn't confuse empathy with sympathy.

Hm, maybe. Anyway I don't think the empathy was for being raped, but for being ignored.

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#50

Post by gagege »

untog wrote: post #11
mynameisasdf wrote: post #7

This article is incredibly badly written and lacks any real thought about the matter. So he had one interview with some douche CEO and now jumps to the conclusion that: >"Sadly, sexism is alive and well in my industry. " >"Now I really empathized with all the women who were victims of assault or rape." Fucking really? I've been a developer for now over 11 years and must have met thousands of other devs from countless…

Only once, ONCE, have I ever met someone who made a women-bashing comment similar to what he is talking about. I'm guessing you're not a woman. Now, I'm not trying to make judgement on the article either way, but I don't think you can really say "I've only ever seen sexism in tech once" when you aren't someone that actually experiences it.

Why not? That's like saying, "You have to have been shot by a gun to be able to say 'I've only seen someone get shot one time.'"
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