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Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

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Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#831

Post by temporalparts »

neycoda wrote: post #814
raducu wrote: post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a previous workplace. An otherwise cool female coleague kept making claims people were misogynistic, at first I thought she was joking or that she did have some claim, because someone made an unintentional mysoginistic joke. Then I left the company, and I talked with an ez coleague who was promoted as a team lead. The guy was into some new age stuff, about helping everyone, and she was slaking/not…

> someone made an unintentional mysoginistic joke "mysoginistic" in the sense of "I literally hate women" or in the sense of "I think women are less capable than men" or "I liked a physical feature of her"? There's more to choose from, the list of things that are called "misogyny" nowadays has gotten incredibly expansive.

I think the concept is pretty straightforward? It's if you believe women The last one, "I liked a feature of her" is not misogynistic absent of context. The context here is really important. It's like saying "I like your haircut". Did I pass up promotion for another person in a non-modeling job because they had a shitty haircut?

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#832

Post by kamaal »

at_a_remove wrote: post #365

The payout matrix for "give honest advice / don't give honest advice" has changed, radically. Then some people noticed that, and then their behavior changed to match. It isn't punishing anyone, it's adaptation to a new risk. The "Pence Fence" is a defensive strategem and it didn't arise in a vacuum. It is a costly defense, too, so it being kept up is likely worth the cost to mitigate the risk. Most of what comes afte…

>>The payout matrix for "give honest advice / don't give honest advice" has changed, radically.

It has always been that way. In 'How to win friends, and influence people' Dale Carnegie brings forward this wonderful concept of letting people win arguments, suffering fools gladly, and almost always agreeing with people. Unless something very big is at stake.

Giving advice, being critical and helping people through feedback is almost always a bad idea. For starters you must let people fail. This has benefits, it helps them learn from experience and is a character building experience. If the person refuses to learn from experience, well then whatever feed back would be useless anyway.

Just see how many people require walking around them on egg shells. You have to handle their feelings with kid gloves, or have your career destroyed.

Even in general things, good advice is available in mainstream media and advice for ages. People still have bad finances, and lifestyle diseases. Advice, feedback mostly don't work.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#833

Post by dang »

neycoda wrote: post #816
undefined1 wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe she was talking about Queen Bee Syndrome? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_bee_syndrome

But saying a woman has queen bee syndrome is misogyny, right?

Would you please stop posting flamebait comments? You've done it repeatedly in this thread already. We're trying for more substantive discussion here.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#834

Post by andrewguenther »

lsiebert wrote: post #829

If someone avoids certain social situations or conversations out of anxiety that women might suddenly think they are awful, might that not say more about them than about women? When people talk about accusations of sexism like they are a hidden landmine someone might accidentally step on, it makes me wonder about the person's soft skills. Not just the inability to have insight into what might come off as sexist, but…

This assumes all parties acting in good faith. A single bad actor can override years of good faith because the cost of an accusation is so great. Whether that accusation is substantiated or not, it can ruin a person's career. So yes, it can be a hidden landmine because the conversations that ensue are not always rational.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#835

Post by emptyparadise »

dcolkitt wrote: post #734
awb wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s probably both. The men are assuming based on the female founder’s gender _alone_ that she might accuse him of sexism. Regardless of how rational this fear is, they are stereotyping new female founders they’re meeting for the first time based on what an X% of other female founder’s have done in the past. For the men, it’s probably a risk/reward calculation. Keep your head down and be polite and have ~0% chance of…

Okay. Let me draw an analogy. Say you're in occupied Hungary circa 1956. Whenever you hear anybody walk by speaking Russian, you clam up for fear that they might be Soviet secret police. Would you describe this person as "racist" against Russians? I don't think a reasonable person would apply that label. I think they'd say they're responding rationally to the specific circumstances of their immediate situation. That…

There are only two things I fear in life: Soviet troops and women.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#836

Post by wreath »

Nextgrid wrote: post #613
zenexer wrote: post #537

> I’m not going to suggest a solution to the problem of men clamming up. This is more of a public service announcement than anything else. Is there a solution, though? How do we work around this? I think most of us would like to reach a point where none of this is a concern, and we can just get on with working—yet the prospect of a future without sexism almost seems hopelessly optimistic. Is this just one of those pr…

The problem isn't sexism/racism/etc per-se, and more the current culture of airing dirty laundry in public, amplified by hungry mobs and social media companies who profit off the resulting dumpster fire ("engagement" as they call it). Furthermore, beyond the media (whether social media or traditional media - print, TV, etc) industry profiting off it, some people's careers are entirely based on this problem persisting…

> I think this problem is mostly specific to the tech/media industry. There are plenty of other industries where racism & sexism are no doubt present, but overall people in these industries seem to be busy working and making money (which is the end-game of work at the end of the day) instead of constantly being offended.

What are those industries where they have software engineering positions open but w/o the SJW types in them? I'm interested...

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#837

Post by rorykoehler »

gerash wrote: post #529

I'm not a woman but I'm a minority in other dimensions. I've always felt labels such as "female-led", "female-owned", " " do the opposite of what they intend to do. That is, they paint a picture that this minority group is not capable enough and need a lot of hand holding so everyone please bias your decisions towards their success to the detriment of other groups. If that's not enough, currently there are few reperc…

I completely agree. I don't care about any of those labels. They're meaningless unless you are starting a very specific business like woman's healthcare or whatever.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#838

Post by wreath »

LockAndLol wrote: post #307
igorkraw wrote: post #223

I'm a bit sad about how eager everyone is jumping on the idea that "candid advice" will always be construed as possibly sexist. I'm from Germany and we are famously blunt, so maybe there is a cultural aspect to this, but to me candor != risk of sexism. If your advice is candid, it also shouldn't leave any ambiguity..."I'm unsure about you doing the pitch because the last N times you froze up and you seem nervous agai…

Remember that you are on an American website with a heavy, American audience. You have to learn to dissociate European (in your case German) discussions and experiences from American ones. Don't "import" their problems, ideologies, opinions, etc. It seems like many non-Americans simply do not make the context switch and once they leave the Ameri-sphere (e.g talk to fellow non-Americans), they talk about American topi…

I see the same thing happening with American colleagues pouring down on us, non-Americans, all sorts of American-society-specific problems and making new workplace rules based on that. I wish neither of what you or I are describing was true.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#839

Post by unishark »

temporalparts wrote: post #831
neycoda wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone made an unintentional mysoginistic joke "mysoginistic" in the sense of "I literally hate women" or in the sense of "I think women are less capable than men" or "I liked a physical feature of her"? There's more to choose from, the list of things that are called "misogyny" nowadays has gotten incredibly expansive.

I think the concept is pretty straightforward? It's if you believe women The last one, "I liked a feature of her" is not misogynistic absent of context. The context here is really important. It's like saying "I like your haircut". Did I pass up promotion for another person in a non-modeling job because they had a shitty haircut?

I think the problem was the "unintentional" part, which seems to be contradictory.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#840

Post by skc »

dageshi wrote: post #8
DoreenMichele wrote: post #5

I'm really glad to see this here. I don't have a better word readily available than sexism for trying to talk about patterns like this but when I use the word sexism , I think people think I mean "Men are intentionally exclusionary assholes just to be assholes because they simply hate women." and that's never what I'm trying to say. I find my gender is a barrier to getting traction and my experience is that it's due…

Genuine question, if you were a man in that situation, what would you do?

If SV is run on candor as the author believes, then surely the solution is to state empirically why you think the roles should be swapped?
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