Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quietest person in our group meetings is a guy. Nobody will ever let him speak, I guess.
Is that outside your control? Or can you hand the "mic" to him
He's a man. It's his fault.
Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
981–990 of 1001 posts
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#982Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems naive. When you see Twitter threads cancelling people, your colleagues aren't going to make a dent in that mob even if they are brave enough to stand up for you on public platforms. Honestly, if it's so risky to give candid advice to anyone, why take the risk? There's no reason to. They can make it on their own afterall.
It probably is naive. But my point is more about the fact that it seems to very rarely (never?) be people who are champions of diversity getting cancelled because of one comment they made that got taken out of context. That seems to be what people in this thread are scared of. It's invariably the latent misogynist who's been saying and doing misogynist things their entire life, and this time things erupted instead of…
How would you know what the people being cancelled are like in real life when all you see of them are one sided Twitter rants?
Honestly, you could draw parallels to victim blaming. He deserved it because he didn't cultivate allies to defend himself against false accusations of sexism/racism/*ism
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#983My wife, who is a second wave feminist that believes that women should be given the same opportunities, but are not victims, ran across some of the craziness a few years ago. She was in a tech forum where a woman was complaining about her experience at a company. It amounted to this woman having a perception that she was not being valued as much as a male colleague and was immediately jumping to the conclusion that i…
Feminism as it is practiced today in the West is a lost cause, but it's been dying for decades. Like many movements around social justice it was hijacked by radicals and became totalitarian in its beliefs, to the point that it brings dubious value to or even harms the interests of most women. The big topics like violence against women have not been properly addressed and feminists focus instead obsessively on minor t…
preach
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#984Being completely honest and sincere here, I started responses to a couple of the comments, but decided for both that I didn't want to deal with the possible bashing, downvotes, etc for providing even a reminder of what the point of the original article was and that this issue of men not wanting to give critical feedback because of possibly getting dragged through the mud. I'm not sure if this is irony or just sadness…
Sounds apt, not ironic
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#985Earlier quoted context omitted.
If nothing else this will be an interesting time for historians to look back on. At some point sanity must set in and after that I wonder how they will reflect on this period.
At some point sanity must set in There’s a saying “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”
Particularly apt in light of the modern metaphor of a "marketplace of ideas".
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#986I'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…
What's sexist is the lack of agency ascribed to women, as in: success/failure is something that happens to women and something men work for/through. That is the textbook definition of objectification, very much the norm even today and in my mind perpetuated by modern woke feminism framing everything as "we're being oppressed", singling out men's contributions to the situation and ignoring women's own.
I have the deepest sympathy for any hardship you have experienced. From the conversations I've had with my sister and colleagues, it's obvious sexism and its effects are real.
That said, your post frames it as if your career is not in your own hands. Please afford yourself some more agency. I have overcome a narcissist parent, academic failure, classism and depression, working my way up to programming and a college degree on my own dime. I find it's fundamentally unproductive to see yourself as a car vendor mascot, being dragged whichever the wind blows. Engage with the people holding you back to get what you need and change your environment if there's no other way.
I found "Nice girls [still] don't get the corner office" (the second edition added the "still") by Lois P. Frankel educational. The book's about her practice as a career coach for women and lists the mistakes her clients make to subconsciously sabotage their own careers. Of the 101 errors in the first print, I recognised a good 30% in myself. All this to say: it's not because there's sexism and perceived sexism that there's nothing else going on.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#987I have worked with couple female developers and I had many interesting discussions on the whole problem of being woman developer. Here some random thoughts / observations: Hiring women because "we need at least one woman on the team because of the quota". Would you like to know you have been hired because the team is forced to have a women and everybody knows it? Same company. I have received an email that you can "g…
A FAANG-ish company hires almost every female in my Alma-mater every year. For a male-female ratio of 250-50, they somehow end up hiring 5 men and 45 women.
Sure, these women are talented, but behind their back everyone does say that they get in due to their gender, and not because of skills.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#988Consequences are one hell of a thing.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#989Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like I'm being downvoted into oblivion by insecure male investors. Perhaps they are bitter about lacking the gumption to handle such situations professionally and ethically? Perhaps they avoid any and all critical conversations with the people they work with? Enjoy watching all of your ventures fail! Or maybe it's: conducting themselves like professionals while concealing their sexism just breaks their poor ric…
It should be obvious why your comments were downvoted and flagged: they broke the guidelines. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? You can easily make your substantive points without breaking them, if you want to.
Done.
Sorry I fulminated, fellow hackers. I will do better.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#990Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is described in the article isn't sexism - it's fear. Fear of being labeled as a sexist.
You're treating women differently based on their gender. That's literally sexism. What's different is the moral color of the sexism. If Eric treats women differently in his workplace because he thinks they should be raising babies, not writing code, our cultural norms say Eric is a Bad Person . Now suppose Bob genuinely believes women and men should have equal opportunities and career paths in the workplace. But Bob…
So if I work in a department store, and I direct the women to the lady's clothing section, and the men to the men's clothing section, I am a sexist? Or if I'm a hairdresser, and I charge women the price of a women's cut, and men the price of a men's cut, then I'm a sexist? Your black and white definition is nothing other than an attempt to double-down on calling more things sexist than they actually are. It does not pass the common sense test. Sexism always has negative connotations. If the person is not viewed as a bad person (as you say) for their actions, then their actions were not sexist.