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My First Hand Experience With Sexism

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Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#51

Post by meritt »

jotux wrote: post #43
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."

Actually I didn't think he wasn't empathetic before but even if I had, that's not the issue here: I interpreted him as saying experiencing workplace sexism provided him with first-hand insight into sexual assault and rape.

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#52

Post by joesmo »

I'd have cut the interview short to show them that this is unacceptable. They know what they've done and that it's wrong. After the fact, there really isn't much that one can do. Move on and try to find a place where the CEO isn't an asshole. As for it being a test, I doubt anyone is that stupid. He knew what he was saying.

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#53

Post by untog »

gagege wrote: post #50
untog wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.'"

It's absolutely nothing like that. I'm not even sure where to start on breaking down how wrong that comparison is.

To attempt to mirror your example, it's actually like an Army general sitting in HQ saying "Well, I've only ever seen our guys get shot at once!" when his units are being decimated on the battlefield.

(Please don't read into that comparison. I am not actually attempting to compare women to battle-ready soldiers and men to lazy generals)

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#54

Post by waterlesscloud »

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?

The next sentence is far worse, in that it explicitly says the situations are "equivalent".

>"To me, this was equivalent to videoing an assault or rape, doing nothing to stop it and later claiming you didn’t have a part in it."

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#55

Post by peterwwillis »

joesmo wrote: post #52

I'd have cut the interview short to show them that this is unacceptable. They know what they've done and that it's wrong. After the fact, there really isn't much that one can do. Move on and try to find a place where the CEO isn't an asshole. As for it being a test, I doubt anyone is that stupid. He knew what he was saying.

> I doubt anyone is that stupid

Apparently you haven't met many CEOs.

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#56

Post by jotux »

meritt wrote: post #51
jotux wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Actually I didn't think he wasn't empathetic before but even if I had, that's not the issue here: I interpreted him as saying experiencing workplace sexism provided him with first-hand insight into sexual assault and rape.

>I interpreted him as saying experiencing workplace sexism provided him with first-hand insight into sexual assault and rape.

Again, a terrible problem with text on a webpage. Someone will interpret your statements in an unexpected way and there's no face-to-face dialog to explain your reasoning or reword your statement to better explain it to your specific audience.

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#57

Post by Moschops »

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…

Yeah, so the blogger can't deal with CEOs and other authority figures

You've mistaken "hyper-competitive dickhead" for "CEO" and "authority figure".

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#58

Post by rosser »

arbutus wrote: post #12
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…

"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…

Apologies; I fat-fingered the down button when I meant to +1 your comment. Might someone reading along at home please help remedy that for me?

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#59

Post by protomyth »

He says he doesn't like "alpha males" because he believes that code for "type of person is an inexcusable justification for being an asshole". Then he goes through with the rest of the interview and realizes "How could I just sit there and not say anything?".

An alpha male[1] would have stopped the interview right there. Expressed his displeasure that the CEO could even think such a thing, particularly since he was running a company with products for women, and further speculated on how appalled he is that the CEO would then utter such non-sense[2]. Get up and walk the heck away.

Defend your damn convictions, when the need defending. Not is some whiny blog post afterwards.

1) or an alpha female, although they wouldn't have got an interview and no one is that stupid to say those things if they did to them (right?!?)

2) my Dad's favorite saying when his sons did something foolish as youths was "I am amazed and appalled. Amazed you though up such a thing and appalled you did it."

Re: My First Hand Experience With Sexism

#60

Post by facepalm »

henrikschroder wrote: post #48
facepalm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe - I actually don't think it's very interesting, because I doubt "women" are the deciding factor. It seems more likely to me that women prefer certain types businesses, that for random chance did well in recent years (ie Social Networks vs mining or car manufacturing).

I dug up one of those papers, by Credit Suisse, and it was exactly as I thought: counting from 2006 onwards women led companies performed better than others. But if women were the factor, why didn't that effect show before 2006? (Not sure if it was exactly 2006, but some recent year). It's well known that if you are allowed to pick the time frame, you can make any investment look good ("if you bought stock x in year y, you would have tripled your investment in 10 years" - but you would have lost everything in year 11...).

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