"Women: Need another beer? Let one of our friendly (female) event staff get that for you." I suppose it varies with culture, but I can't imagine any of the women I know getting upset about that line. So a genuine question, are we getting to a point where you need to think so much before actually saying anything? Personally, even if I were the butt of a mildly racist joke I would probably enjoy the joke than be offend…
As a woman, and a woman in tech at that, I'm not /upset/ by it, but it does bother me. It bothers me that the organisers assume the attendees will all be straight males and therefore interested in the fact that the servers are women. It bothers me that it plays on the antiquated notion that "women are there to serve". It bothers me that women are being treated as a 'perk', full stop.
How to Apologize
81–90 of 179 posts
Re: How to Apologize
#82I'm a bit torn on this whole issue, I wonder if somebody could give me some perspective. There are two conflicting things I don't like here. In the first place, I don't like when people are so sensitive that there's no room for a harmless joke. In most cases I really would say "oh come on lighten up." On the other hand, among us computer programmers, there's so much social ineptness (and perhaps outright disrespect f…
The issue with this kind of behavior is that it intimidates and/or repels professional women. It doesn't set an appropriate tone.
If you were a woman with a degree in CS who was potentially interested in seriously participating in this event, would you want to to hang out with a bunch of beer-swilling jerks making passes at barmaids? Do you want to be one of a small number of women serious about hacking, feeling inadequate around the girls with tight tops with the beers? Probably not -- but that is the picture that the event organizers were painting.
It's not a matter of bringing in the "PC police". It's about respect.
Re: How to Apologize
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they prefer men, that's already handled. So what's your point? I see what you mean though. Increasingly, there are a lot of professional women in these things. Might be a tad insulting. Eventually, they'll have to start hiring stud muffins to compensate I guess!
but I don't think wanting women around a sausage fest is sexist. It's being male. Sure, that's being (heterosexual) male, but you are making the same assumption as the original event-planners did: all of our attendees will be male. There is nothing in the subject material of the event (their API discussion or whatever) that would interest a female. This is the thinking that strikes me as sexist: all developers are ma…
Re: How to Apologize
#84Step one .. realise what you've done wrong. Step two .. don't do it again.
Re: How to Apologize
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For instance, I might have an opinion that we should bring back slavery. A totally offensive opinion, yes, but dammit, I'm entitled to have it. I think this is confusing two very different things. You are "entitled" to have this opinion in that (a) you shouldn't be locked in prison for stating this opinion and (b) I am not allowed to beat you up for having this opinion. However, that opinion is wrong . You should s…
> but the root problem is the sexism, not the ad copy. I agree it was a very sexist thing to write. It makes me wonder though: 1. Which is worse, hiring an all female serving staff (perhaps wearing uniforms that would be considered particularly attractive to heterosexual males), or acknowledging that you have done this by writing about it in your invitations? Is it inappropriate (always and everywhere) to hire only a…
(Not Hooters)
Re: How to Apologize
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, we don't live in "a world where people aren't putting pornography on their slide presentations" — we live in a world where it happens pretty regularly. Sexism is deeply embedded in the culture of the software industry; in that context, there isn't really any such thing as a "harmless joke". These "jokes" continually reinforce the thought that women aren't welcome in our community.
Maybe the women need to come back and make fun of these people for being shitty at humor. EDIT: I dunno, I'd just hate to have to resort to being uptight as a solution. Plus it could backfire.
I try to put myself in the mindset as follows: I'm a white guy. If I were in a club that had 90% black patrons and some people were making jokes about 'whitey', I don't know if I'd want to speak up in that environment. Even if the jokes are not intentionally intimidating, and I'm technically 'in the right', it's still going to feel intimidating pushing back and standing out.
I imagine it feels similar for a woman in a 90+% male environment pushing back against jokes like this. There's the uncertainty of 'am I overreacting?' and 'how will I be perceived if I push back?' weighed against wanting to speak your piece.
Re: How to Apologize
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a woman, and a woman in tech at that, I'm not /upset/ by it, but it does bother me. It bothers me that the organisers assume the attendees will all be straight males and therefore interested in the fact that the servers are women. It bothers me that it plays on the antiquated notion that "women are there to serve". It bothers me that women are being treated as a 'perk', full stop.
But for men, the ultimate perk is a good woman. Is there something wrong with wanting women around? I've seen actual sexism in the workplace but I don't think wanting women around a sausage fest is sexist. It's being male.
Re: How to Apologize
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's nothing wrong with it, certainly. However, the correct way to have women around at your conference is to make your conference interesting to women in the field , not hire them to serve beer. From the perspective of wanting women around, this "perk" basically says that they've given up on getting women in the field to want to come to their conference, and the only way to get them there is to hire them. It's pr…
This, I agree with. My job is not to change society though. My job is to enjoy my life and guide my kids. That's it. And I'll enjoy it more with some nice women around.
Re: How to Apologize
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, saying that you like chicks is not sexist. Implying that women are for getting beer is sexist. Saying that the presence of hired female staff is a "perk" is sexist.
Why? I enjoy women.
Re: How to Apologize
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
But for men, the ultimate perk is a good woman. I'm a man, a mostly hetero-normative one, who disagrees. The idea that there is something undesirable about a situation that gets it called a sausage fest is not about being male per se, it's part of a very large set of assumptions about gender and sexuality that are fairly pervasive and ingrained and present enough that they are part of identity for a lot of people. Th…
Dude, we work all day with a bunch of other men. It's boring as hell. If we can get some women in the context of our passions, that is awesome. You sound like someone who is apologetic about their manhood, to be honest. It's unfortunate. Look up Bill Maher's rant about the feminizing of America.
I don't work all day with "a bunch of other men". From a literal standpoint, my workplace is about 1/3 female. It's a small shop, but out of the 4 people writing code there, one of them is female. Even if that wasn't the case, it wouldn't be something I even thought about too much, because when I deal with people I tend to view them as people, not as points on a gender scale.
Maybe I'm just much more left-brained than most people I know. I get absorbed in my work, and I get absorbed in discussing it with peers, regardless of their ... well, anything. A large part of the time, I don't know if the people I'm talking to in those discussions are male or female or whatnot. Their sex is, frankly irrelevant when it comes to the stuff we're doing. Variety and diversity are good to have, but I don't think humans are so static as to be boring because of a ratio skew. Because they're people. Not genders or sexes.
I'm not "apologetic about my manhood". I'm "someone who treats humans in the same manner unless they give me reason not to, and calls out pointless things when he sees them". I also do not happen to fall very much in line with western male stereotypes. I never have. I was not raised in anything near a home that thought that feminism, particularly the more recent waves of feminism, had any sort of legitimacy, I know about that school of thought, and others that have had influence on me because I read a lot of books as a kid.
Something being sexist doesn't mean that someone is necessarily consciously or purposefully stomping on or belittling some other group of people. It means that there are needless disparities about something based on sex. Thinking that a conference would be better just because it had more women or less women or more men or less men or more hot vapid men or women or more people of sex B for no reason other than because there aren't any there is sexist. "Sausage fest" has pejorative terms. It's normally used to refer to keggers, not hackathons. People who go to keggers at least can know that part of the reason people go to alchohol-fueled parties is to find sexual partners, giving at least a reason for the term. Not hackathons.
There's nothing intrinsic about having a penis and testicles that makes me less of a person if I don't fit into the behavioral profile of the ideal western male. There are 7 billion people, even assuming biological trends in behavior directly linked to sex that are unaffected by cultural pressure, that's more than enough for it to be ridiculous to try to shove all of any group of people into an absolutist box, and tell them they sound like they feel sorry about some intrinsic thing about them.
If you're getting bored just because someone with different jibbly bits isn't around, I would suggest finding something that isn't so boring to do. The world's a fascinating place.