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No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

polygon.com

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Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#151

Post by cristianpascu »

s1300045 wrote: post #119

It is sort of related. It's a rant. I have many friends in the STEM field, or friends I play video games with. And I simply cannot introduce them to any of my females friends, or any friends from different social circles for that matter. They are a special breed of people, brilliant and quick, and they are also egotistic and mean. They are very quick to make jokes of your mistakes or shortcoming. The way they pry and…

I'm not sure what should one expect from people dedicating high percentages of their life in front of a computer in an activity that does not enrich your personality in any conceivable way. Killing digital zombies is just that. Do you expect empathy? Self-control? Being ideological about it, as in threat women equally, is a far fetch. Gaming industry is a smaller sister of a bigger one, and there, I assume, no one expects their clients to stay away for sexism. Yes, porn. Teenagers, in age or spirit, have a combination of hobbies.

My point. As a woman that works in an industry that cultivates a-social behaviour, lack of empathy, egotism, and so on, don't expect utopia like social orders. It's just unrealistic. Same goes for porn, movies, fashion, gaming. It's like fighting the symptoms but ignoring the causes. It's like trying to cool down the air around your town to fight global warming.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#152

Post by cheez »

eli wrote: post #146
cheez wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An anonymous woman in tech is not the same as a woman publicly writing about her perspective on women in tech. Change "woman in tech" to something like support for/against gay marriage. I may have my own opinion, but once I voice it, I'm a target.

I don't think I agree with your premise, but even if I did... what's the point you're trying to make? That women would be safer if they never voice an opinion?

Nope. I'm saying no one is free from this sort of behaviour when they put themselves in the public eye. Look at sports-related tweets after a big loss.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#153

Post by autokad »

cyorir wrote: post #140
eli wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there's some value there, but my experience is that you can rarely solve a "people" problem with a purely technical solution. Also, as a society, I'd like to think we can do better than "sorry about the rape/murder threats, we'll try to hide most of them from you"

Agreed. Applying filters hides the symptoms without treating the underlying illness, which is a society that is infested with sexism. We can treat the symptoms by filtering but at the end of the day we need strategies for making society less sexist.

get over yourself. you should see the things people say to me in facebook chess let alone playing starcraft. its not because im a male or female, its because people are assholes but we dont need some sort of mind police to 'solve the problem'.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#154

Post by oldmanjay »

oldmanjay wrote: post #80
frio wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Women are the niggers of gender," the email said. "If you killed yourself, I wouldn’t even fuck the corpse." That's the first line of the article. That's banter? That's equivalent to being "fat" or "dorky"?

Depending on the recipient's emotional state, being called "fat" or "dorky" can be worse. There's simply no valid objective way to decide the equivalency or lack thereof.

Clearly my downvoters have never been insulted while suicidal

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#155

Post by enraged_camel »

cheez wrote: post #58
eli wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying... but I think you're getting downvoted because it's dangerously close to victim-blaming. No matter what they wrote, nobody ever deserves graphic threats of rape and murder. And, c'mon, by your definition pretty much anyone with an internet presence and an opinion is a public figure, and therefore a "target." I don't think that's a helpful way to approach the problem.

In the area of competitive sports, it is pretty common to receive death threats for athletes who do not perform well. I'm not saying it's right. It's not. I'm saying that the reader needs to tease apart the two.

>>In the area of competitive sports, it is pretty common to receive death threats for athletes who do not perform well.

You are making this comparison because you haven't fully thought things through. In your mind, death is worse than rape, therefore receiving death threats is worse than receiving rape threats. But it's not so simple.

Rape threats are significantly worse than death threats, for a similar reason that killing children is worse than killing adults. Women are a vulnerable group in society -- they are smaller and physically weaker than men on average, and are socially oppressed on top of that. If both rape threats and death threats are an attempt at exerting power (with no intention of actually carrying through with the threat), then rape threat is a lot worse because it exploits a vulnerable group in the most mentally damaging way possible.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#156

Post by Jemaclus »

tomp wrote: post #113
Jemaclus wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best thing to do as far as internal harassment goes is to basically have a no tolerance policy from the higher-ups. Not so much a "you'll get fired" thing but having everyone step up and say "Hey, that's not cool" when someone makes a sexist joke. At my job, we had a guy for awhile who would post funny pictures in chat. Every once in awhile, he'd post something NSFW (not necessarily nudity) and all the gu…

Personally, I disagree. I have no problem my coworkers saying dick/sex/insulting/racist/etc jokes, whether they are male or female. If I worked at a company that claimed to have a "relaxed" office culture (i.e. most startups, not corporations), I would strongly voice my opinion that such censorship is inappropriate. The recent case of an Attlasian developer making a joke about his girlfriend at a conference comes to…

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? It's not about whether you're cool with it -- it's about whether everyone is cool with it. Just because you like dick jokes doesn't mean that your female coworkers (or any of them, really) are comfortable with it. Since you can't speak for everyone, and some people can't speak up for themselves without making themselves targets, then it's your responsibility as a member of the team to make a judgment call: is this appropriate or not?

If you decide it's inappropriate, you should say something.

If you decide it's appropriate, don't.

I'm not advocating censorship, but I am advocating that you should push back if someone's doing something offensive. Your female coworkers are probably more likely to go to HR or the CEO to complain (in a relatively safe manner) than to speak up in "public", especially amongst a bunch of men who think "it's just a joke" or "it's just banter." And I'm pretty sure we both agree that talking to HR can make the whole thing way worse.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#157

Post by arrrg »

Zikes wrote: post #147
arrrg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you quite understood what that article was talking about … you seem quite confused. I’m sorry.

If I seem confused to you, that is a failing on both our parts. Let's take a moment to correct that. On the issue of the author's hypocrisy, I have clearly stated the contradictions in the article which satisfy the definition of the term. I don't think there is any confusion on that and after another read I don't think my comments on that point specifically could lead you to believe I'm confused about that issue. So,…

The linked article gives men actionable advice on how to support women. It does not tell men what their experience is.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#158

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

Jemaclus wrote: post #68
EarthLaunch wrote: post #6

What should a game studio to do counter this and make its employees safe from it?

I think the best thing to do as far as internal harassment goes is to basically have a no tolerance policy from the higher-ups. Not so much a "you'll get fired" thing but having everyone step up and say "Hey, that's not cool" when someone makes a sexist joke. At my job, we had a guy for awhile who would post funny pictures in chat. Every once in awhile, he'd post something NSFW (not necessarily nudity) and all the gu…

> I think the best thing to do as far as internal harassment goes is to basically have a no tolerance policy from the higher-ups. Not so much a "you'll get fired" thing but having everyone step up and say "Hey, that's not cool" when someone makes a sexist joke.

What you describe is not a zero tolerance policy. A zero tolerance policy requires punishment and "Hey, that's not cool" is not punishment.

If an employee is harassing another employee, he or she should be punished. Depending on the nature of the harassment and the employee's prior violations of company policy, the offending employee should absolutely understand that termination may result.

> At my job, we had a guy for awhile who would post funny pictures in chat. Every once in awhile, he'd post something NSFW (not necessarily nudity) and all the guys would just say "lol" and the women wouldn't respond at all. What should have happened (and I'm guilty of not doing this) is that all of the other men should have stepped in and said "Hey, you know, that's not cool."

This is precisely why your approach to the problem doesn't work: the first response of the people you're asking to say "Hey, that's not cool" is to "lol" when presented with a NSFW picture at work. This is simply a reflection of the fact that some percentage of employees are not mature and professional enough to have developed an awareness of the environment they're in.

It's silly to expect self-policing from folks who don't understand that a NSFW photo that might genuinely be amusing when shared outside of work can be incredibly awkward or offensive when shared at work.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#159

Post by NotAtWork »

cyorir wrote: post #140
eli wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there's some value there, but my experience is that you can rarely solve a "people" problem with a purely technical solution. Also, as a society, I'd like to think we can do better than "sorry about the rape/murder threats, we'll try to hide most of them from you"

Agreed. Applying filters hides the symptoms without treating the underlying illness, which is a society that is infested with sexism. We can treat the symptoms by filtering but at the end of the day we need strategies for making society less sexist.

> Applying filters hides the symptoms without treating the underlying illness, which is a society that is infested with sexism.

This doesn't follow from the symptoms being cited, which is that a small subset of people say incredibly offensive and inappropriate things online.

If a million people see a video, and 1% of the people respond, and 3% of the people responding are crazy, that's 300 crazy people responding. If each crazy person sends 15 emails before finding a new thing to obsess about, that's 4,500 threatening or otherwise crazy emails in response - which certainly seems like a flood to the person being responded to - but doesn't actually tell us anything about the population watching the video, at large, except that it has a similar percentage of crazy people to society at large.

Continuing the hypothetical: if you assume a normal person only sends 2 emails, then you only have 19000 normal emails to 4500 crazy ones, because crazy people are more talkative. At 1.2 emails for a normal person, It's 11000 to 4500, which makes crazy emails over a quarter of all messages received in response - a vastly disproportionate number considering they were 3% of respondents.

One thing that automated filters can provide is sentiment analysis and looking at related messages, to pull out the underlying distribution of people responding (and hence seeing it's just people being people), rather than just seeing the surface level "We have 25% crazy emails!"

I would have to see a much more detailed analysis of the emails, responses, and distribution of them to conclude that it's a widespread problem, rather than a small crazy contingent being amplified above their importance by just posting a lot.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#160

Post by StereotypeTreat »

s1300045 wrote: post #119

It is sort of related. It's a rant. I have many friends in the STEM field, or friends I play video games with. And I simply cannot introduce them to any of my females friends, or any friends from different social circles for that matter. They are a special breed of people, brilliant and quick, and they are also egotistic and mean. They are very quick to make jokes of your mistakes or shortcoming. The way they pry and…

All stereotypes and stigmas, or only those that fall disproportionately on the White and male? Are women hysterical, Blacks lazy, and gays promiscuous as well?
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