It's good to see the laws of yichud into the workplace and other work related areas too. Paying extra attention to what you say is just an extension to that since it's impossible to have a shomer guard what's being said and how it might be interpreted.
Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
871–880 of 1001 posts
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#872Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, this scenario isn't exactly uncommon in the startup world. It happens all the time. But because she's a minority female and her competitor is a white man, it suddenly becomes an example of white supremacy and the patriarchy conspiring to oppress her. Doesn't this sort of thinking basically make these notions into a conspiracy theory? Every piece of evidence interpreted in a way that it supports the chosen narrati…
You have to be careful not to confuse a misuse of an idea for the whole idea itself. When life sucks and things go wrong we often look for something to blame on days when we're not at our best. People who have experienced mistreatment because of some general characteristic have an easier time finding targets to blame "racists!" "sexists!" "-phobes!" unreasonably for their problems. We're all unreasonable sometimes. I…
*You have to be careful not to confuse a misuse of an idea for the whole idea itself.
Alot of people seem to confuse them, to the tragedy of both the people believing the misuse is the idea, and to those trying to genuinely use the idea to be heard or to spread good.
*When life sucks and things go wrong we often look for something to blame on days when we're not at our best.
*There is this issue where movements to empower and unify have a tendency to shit to blame and divide.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#873This goes beyond founders. We're seeing this problem at the level of developers, technical writers, and design folks. In some teams, critical feedback given to our female colleagues would almost always be twisted and escalated as sexism. One time the situation worsened until no one would say much, other developers had to take on extra workload and fix low quality work from other developers. Good engineers started quitting and the team crashed and burned.
In other teams, the folks are super cautious about hiring women because of an increasing number of such incidents. I'm also seeing this other trend where we are willing to hire women from within the company because they're a known quantity, while hiring few or zero women from outside, while accepting men from within and outside the business just based on their capabilities.
The article is right on many levels. I myself rarely share controversial or difficult feedback with female colleagues or acquaintances unless I know them very well, and know they will take it the right way. It's just not worth the professional risk to me.
I don't know if this is the exception, and I work with several female colleagues at various levels of seniority where we are professional and open. Whatever - it's a sad state of affairs.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#874I'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…
On the contrary, it shows a clear imbalance of power towards repetitional destruction, something that was always in a women's arsenal but much less so in a man's (which would favour, let's say, settling things in a fight).
So, considering you are the potential carrier of a nuclear power it makes sense to thread carefully.
The problem isn't sexism. The problem is that being wrongly labeled as a sexist is a socio-economical death blow while the accusers gets scot free. This imbalance in power has to be settled somehow and I think this is a pretty good solution.
Posting this anonymously since I'm not insane.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#875Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a woman, I adopted this solution about a year ago. I will literally tell new teammates, "Look, I'm new to this career, I have a TON to learn, and I would love to be critiqued and given advice on how I can improve. I operate under a good-faith policy, so I will always assume you're being helpful and not condescending, unless you're overwhelmingly insulting (ie: telling me women aren't made for leadership roles.)" I…
The problem is you can retroactively change this policy at any time and re-interpret past comments.
Can she? Why would she? One could just as easily say "The problem is that a man can be dismissive and condescending towards you and retroactively claim that he was just following your advice to be candid".
If the issue being debated here is an actual problem in (American?) tech business culture, the attitudes and principles that GP commenter is describing are a great step towards solving it. Deep-seated mistrust in the motivations and intentions of others are at the root of the problem, and the road to exacerbating it is paved with bad-faith-assuming hypotheticals.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#876Earlier quoted context omitted.
Care to define what those "fairly minor infractions of the groupthink" were? With respect, and I'm not saying this is you, but often I've heard that type of line - and then when you get into the detail, the firing was an obvious correct decision. Edit: lol @ the downvotes, you can k!ss my @ss. Glad to have you here as I guess you were rejected from Parler.
Given the context is the dogmatic approach to office culture, this comment is super ironic. Of course the firings were a correct decision from your (insane and skewed) perspective.
>>Given the context is the dogmatic approach to office culture, this comment is super ironic. Of course the firings were a correct decision from your (insane and skewed) perspective.
Without the facts of the matter, you're talking out of your h'arse.
Either firings are legal or not. They have nothing to do with office culture.
Insane and skewed? ... yes, yes you are. Well done for identifying it, it's just your aim is about 180 degrees wrong. I imagine you have that issue frequently in life.
Have a nice day :) (you absolute, unmitigated pr!ck, lol)
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#877Female founder friend (non tech space) was in a female focused incubator / competition. She got only one set of somewhat critical feedback - ie, lacks experience in X and Y which are key in product space Z. She posted a comment on her social media focusing on this feedback as "criticism" that came from a sexist guy "of course". It was pretty easy to draw the line to the three panelists, one of whom was a guy. Ouch. I…
This victimhood mentality is atrocious and is something I recently wrote about. I don't normally do this but here's a shameless plug if anyone wants to read a bit more about this phenomenon. https://inconvenientconsiderations.blogspot.com/2021/03/hero...
I've found that women in particular seem to really try to avoid any form of "open conflict" and seem to have a much harder time taking any form of "criticism".
I'm much, much more likely to feel like I'm walking on eggshells around women, this happens with men also, but more in a personal setting.
This combined with the whole metoo movement certainly didn't help women in receiving frank feedback or mentorship.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#878This meshes with an experience I had a few years into my career which I'll never forget and had definitely influenced and will continue to influence my future interactions with women in tech. I, cis white guy in the bay, was hired as a consultant to help build out a product and was pair programming with a woman founder & new engineer and made some passing comment about the CSS quality not being "ideal" or something o…
> made some passing comment about the CSS quality not being "ideal" or something of the sort
Not saying you weren't the subject of over-reaction, or not, but I think this is an example of sub-par feedback. It would be better to point out the issues in concrete terms, and say this is something that should be addressed, and why. And if you can't do that, you should ruminate on it until you can reify whether it is wrong, and what ought to be done, and why. Do this with anybody. If they argue with you, they'll be arguing only on technicalities, not personalities.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#879Earlier 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.
You are right, I should have said sexist joke. I witnessed such a joke, from a brogrammer -- he thought it was funny, but noone else did, especially knowing how sensitive the female coleague was -- someone broke a pot of plants and he said "Why should we clean it, we have plenty of women around here" -- I just know the guy, the tone of his voice, and so forth, and I know he just tried to be funny, but at the end of t…
Even that example is very suspect - lampooning sexism is not sexism.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#880Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the problem. America was supposed to be the land of the free, where anyone from anywhere could have an opportunity didn't matter who they where. Instead we created African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Gay-Americans, Straight-Americans, Native-Americans, etc, and everyone is out for themselves. And everyone is against one another. Female-led, Black-led, Latino-majority, who gives a fuck. Do…
Sadly, it is not as simple as that: Imagine a society of squirrels and hamsters where squirrels have been oppressing hamsters for centuries. Then, one day, they decide to stop doing that and treat everyone the same. On average, a young squirrel will come from a family that is vastly richer and better educated than a young hamster. So, if they have to compete "fairly", the hamsters will remain much poorer for centurie…
If you begin by dividing society into squirrels and hamsters then of course you already lost.