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Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

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Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#461

Post by Phelinofist »

baby wrote: post #116
throwaway20222 wrote: post #79

I also work in a very “woke culture.” In fact, as a straight, white, cis man I am in the extreme minority. I have been told that I can’t do my job which includes negotiating with LGBTQ+ companies because I am an “old, white, cis guy and there is always an unfair power dynamic there” just because of my identity. It is discrimination plain and simple, but I literally stand to have my career derailed if I fight back. On…

had to google what cis is: > A cisgender person (sometimes cissexual, informally abbreviated cis) is one whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth. For example, someone who identifies as a woman and was identified as female at birth is a cisgender woman. The word cisgender is the antonym of transgender.

I thought it meant "Commonwealth of Independent States", the CIS region

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#462

Post by Closi »

oirjjlksjmfljaj wrote: post #406
bvaldivielso wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not at all the way I interpret the article. The author empathizes with the male investors, and justifies their behaviour. If anything, she's blaming society, not men.

The author literally calls it "the problem of men clamming up." Empathy or not, they're saying the problem is male behavior. This could be framed as "the problem of taking grievances to the mob" or "the problem of overattributing behavior" or anything that puts responsibility for change on some group other than men, but it does not. Whether they're to blame or not, men are the ones behaving incorrectly.

I disagree, the author seems to blame women:

> "If there weren’t both women who made false accusations and an audience eager to hear and magnify such accusations, then the upstanding investors would have nothing to fear about being candid. But, unfortunately, both do exist."

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#463

Post by belorn »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #214
jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote: post #17

This is kind of the end result we're heading for, where you can only talk candidly with people who are equal or lower than you on the oppression hierarchy. The shitty part is that I'm pretty sure 99% of people are reasonable human beings but the media has to make it seem like that isn't the case so the risk equation changes. Similar to how kids used to roam around the neighborhood but now it's deemed too risky becaus…

I believe this phenomenon is more like overshoot in an underdamped system than being the end result. Rapid changes always lead to overshoot. I also think the amount of overshoot is proportional to the amount of sexism that was present in a society thirty years ago. I believe Northern Europe has been trending slowly towards gender equality since the 90s, and thus the amount of overshoot here is much less from the rece…

30 years ago the feminist and equality movement was very different from today's view, and not all for the worse. A lot of focus was then to eliminate gender in the ways people were treated, with the more extreme parts of the movement wanting to eliminate gender roles all together. Gender segregation in Northern Europe held the best numbers 30-40 years ago, and has only gotten worse since with pretty large strides. Gender segregation today is more like the 1920 than the 1990's.

women murdered per capita has indeed gone down, but so have the general murder rate. Men are still murdered far more often than women, and reached the highest ratio ever measured in the last summery by the government agency BRÅ, with around 77% to 23%. I would be careful to attribute such numbers to gender equality, especially since the trend seems to continue upwards.

The statistics for assault and sexual assault has similar complexity. The combined risk of being assaulted or sexual assaulted has been historically similar for both women and men, with assault being more common for men and sexual assault for women. Between 2012 and 2018 there were a major increase in sexual assault, and especially rape after 2015. The reason for this can't really be discussed since it involve an other political hot topic.

It still might be a rapid change that is causing people to overshoot, but it is likely a much harder token to measure. Changes in political power.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#464

Post by flumpcakes »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #279

This is real, and it's also a type of sexism. Not all forms of sexism or discrimination are acts of malice. The sexual harassment training required for my job speaks explicitly about disparate treatment. I do question one of the examples a bit. The idea of giving advice to female founder to step down as CEO in favor of a male cofounder sounds like bad advice. It's pointing out one rather drastic solution, rather than…

> it's also a type of sexism

I guess it depends on your definition of sexism. Reading these comments, and just general life experience, I believe different people have different definitions of what sexism is. Regardless of company policy or the law of your country.

Taking your definition of sexism I would say every interaction with a woman is a form of sexism. Everyone, at all times, tries to speak to another human being in a way that conveys a message. That manner of communication changes based on social norms. Which, as this article points out, currently seems to be differnt between the sexes.

Generally I believe people do try to "talk to their audience".

One example from my life: if I notice my colleagues have nice shoes, I point it out. If it was a female colleague, I probably wouldn't because of the risk of that social interaction "going wrong".

Someone could point out that complimenting someone on their footware is weird/wrong/shouldn't be done during working hours. If this is the case then I'm not talking sport or politics or local news or how you're kids are doing...

I think the article does a good job highlighting the downside of being hyper-aware of the social situation around a person trying to convey a message to another person, and how that could be labeled as inappropriate.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#465

Post by etempleton »

nonplussed wrote: post #230
nullsense wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like reverse sexism here. I totally get the behaviour here. You simply don't want to be on the receiving end of potential backlash when you're just trying to help someone. The calculus being you feel as if you might make a genuine remark only to receive a response interpreting said remark as the product of sexism e.g "out of persons A and B, I think B should run the company" where A is a woman and B is a ma…

One of the toughest things about discrimination is being able to prove it. I'm a white man, but I spent time living in Japan where I was an obvious minority. Some situations were clear to me that I was being treated a particular way because of my race. But then others were not so clear cut. For example, one time I was talking in Japanese with a group and someone kept repeating what I said like "He said...". I was get…

This. It can be a challenge for anyone in the workplace, but I imagine it is harder for minorities.

One of the best pieces of career advice I have ever taken was from this TED talk: https://youtu.be/KzSAFJBLyn4

The section on Abraham Lincoln. Perceive no slights. It changed the way I approach people at work.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#467

Post by dang »

c5o49t5b4QN4TU5 wrote: post #249

I’m a white cis male, and I work as a software engineer at a Silicon Valley unicorn. My employer is a perennial darling of the HN crowd, and is likely to continue its rocket ride in the years to come. I’ll be completely candid here: I have some kind of problem with women. This isn’t to say that I don’t like women or don’t want women to succeed. I just don’t want to associate with or be seen around women. I’m sure the…

We bend in favor of comments that share personal experience, but after rereading this one several times, I think it crosses into trolling ("I’d do more or less anything to get away from women", etc.) and have banned the account.

Edit: also, please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post. We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613077.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#468

Post by calylex »

Please stop treating social issues like this as if they're Physics. There is no clear path to an answer and the more we try to reason and argue about these topics logically the more futile the attempt, it's like kicking harder and harder while in stuck in quicksand.

The effects of trying to find the truth show themselves as bi-products that affect culture and society in unhealthy and unforeseen ways. You can never know the intent of someone or why they act the way they do, you can only guess and even that takes a special type of person who feels comfortable enough doing so (reads lawyers) and a framework that encourages such speculation (legal system [0] or stock market.) Speculative systems are toxic and are festering ground for bias. If we want to live in a world ruled by truth and facts ironically the way to do it is not by forcing ourselves to understand something that is not Physics as if it is and by the same methods.

Ignore everything that pops up on these topics if your goal is to create a better society for all.

[0] some legal cases are clear cut, I'm not referring to those.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#469

Post by mcguire »

retrac wrote: post #266
cronix wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where you can only talk candidly with people who are equal or lower than you on the oppression hierarchy Wouldn't someone talking to someone "lower" on the "oppression hierarchy" just be what we basically have today? That sounds like "privilege," or an "imbalanced power dynamic." I think you'll only be able to talk to equals, whatever that is, and by whatever metric is en vogue for that day.

I do some work with HIV prevention. Sometimes I give talks where I'm very blunt about the realities of HIV among men who have sex with men. I've watched people immediately shift from mild hostility and discomfort to wholehearted acceptance of what I am saying, when I tell them I'm gay myself. In that circumstance, I think it is clear that my sexual orientation is the basis by which they are judging the authoritativen…

https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-messe...

The Messenger Is the Message: Science Talk podcast, June 2020.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#470

Post by random5634 »

Separately, another area where upside / downside risk of providing feedback is no longer good is in feedback to rejected candidates for positions.

Folks have said this can still be done, but our office was burnt by giving feedback, and the person in general likes to argue with it which is already a drain.

So anyways, no more feedback to folks not hired - period! Luckily this applies to all hires, you don't know at the early stage if someone is in a protected class.

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