Anti-pattern theater: how to get women to quit

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/12/04/meeting/

by protomyth • 15 years ago

138 176 15 years ago

rachelbythebay.com

watmough2• 15 years ago

This is some awesome writing. Bookmarked.

qzio• 15 years ago

I agree, why the f are your comment down voted?

andrewflnr6• 15 years ago

I didn't downvote (can't actually), but some possible reasons are: * The writing style was not considered relevant to the conversation about sexism. * No one is interested in the GP's bookmark list.

fondue• 15 years ago

Something similar happened to my wife.

The President of their company would breeze by the lab. In an effort to keep employee salaries down he would casually mention how everyone in the lab was easily replaceable. I have no idea how one would casually mention this but he somehow managed to work it into the conversation. Needless to say everyone there in the lab got the impression that they weren't wanted. I think in the span of twelve months everyone woman there quit and moved on to better jobs. When my wife moved on she found a job with double the salary and a company that really appreciates her.

pkteison2• 15 years ago

What does "you are all easily replaceable" have to do with gender? It sounds like the president is just a bean counting jerk, no gender involved.

cowardoftheday• 15 years ago

He was purposefully creating an anecdote to illustrate what's wrong with the OP's conclusion.

jamesbritt3• 15 years ago

Such stories give the impression that you can say the exact same thing to both men and women, but women will by and large interpret it (or at least act on it) in a way quite different from men. I find that hard to believe.

For myself (a guy), if I worked someplace where I was often reminded how replaceable I was I;d be looking for a new job all the time. Likewise, if I was often told I was being "too emotional" I'd wonder if a) it was possibly true, and b) consider that perhaps I need to work someplace where my personality is a better fit.

In general, if you want to make anyone quit, keep telling them they are easily replaceable, or frequently lob baseless subjective criticisms at them.

davidhansen2• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure the author reached an entirely fallacious and baseless conclusion. My understanding of the events are thus:

1. An authentication daemon crashes periodically due to a bug.

2. "S" discovers that rebooting the daemon's host prevents this from happening for a while, and does so.

3. The author is paged( 5 times ), discovers the problem, and writes a kludge script to keep the systems running until the bug can be fixed.

4. During the post-mortem meeting, she identifies "S" for his role in the events.

5. A thin-skinned manager suggests the author was too hard on "S".

6. The author, without any evidence, concludes that the manager said this because she is a woman, and is hellbent on "pushing [her] out" of the team.

The reality is that thin-skinned managers and managers overly sensitive to maintaining office decorum exist everywhere, and they don't do this based on your sex. Citing anecdotal evidence, I can say that having a penis does not shield you from accusations of being "too hard", and that hearing this from managers, coworkers, or employees, likely has nothing at all to do with sexism or a desire to "push out" women.

briantrice3• 15 years ago

You don't seem to appreciate the amount of forethought she not only felt she had to commit to, but self-control to execute her communication that way, and that it still didn't work. Only an idiot would provide "evidence" to a subordinate that they were trying to push them out, in any case. Discrimination is very hard to prove, and it's easier to just "get away".

cperciva• 15 years ago

I'm not sure what you're saying here. People who are discriminating against women avoid given evidence of that fact, so a lack of evidence of discrimination is evidence of discrimination?

davidhansen2• 15 years ago

Ok. First, I will point out that my appreciation of her effort has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that her conclusion - that the manager or company in question is actively trying trying to force her to quit due to her gender - has zero support.

I can claim that my business partners are space aliens who read my thoughts and are plotting to colonize the planet all day long, but as long as there's no shred of evidence of this, the fact that nobody appreciates the lengths I go to wear tinfoil hats and research anti-alien combat techniques is meaningless.

Second, it "didn't work" likely because many extroverted bubbly manager types tend to perceive purely factual means of communication to be hostile. In fact, most human beings do this. This is the primary reason nerds with low or no psychological affect have a difficult time making friends, and are labeled "assholes" despite their lack of intention to actually be mean.

thaumaturgy3• 15 years ago

> The author, without any evidence, concludes that the manager said this because she is a woman, and is hellbent on "pushing [her] out" of the team.

Well, without any evidence that she presented. She's been working with this particular group, and we haven't. It's not unbelievable that there have been numerous other minor instances of some form of preferential treatment or sexism. She did, after all, consult with friends, with some foresight of what was coming. While some amount of skepticism on our part might be prudent, there's also no reason to outright disbelieve her, either.

> The reality is that thin-skinned managers and managers overly sensitive to maintaining office decorum exist everywhere, and they don't do this based on your sex.

Woah. That's a lot of certainty right there. How are you able to be so assertively positive that managers -- indeed, in this context, no managers anywhere -- do this based on gender? Even subconsciously? Even without meaning to maintain a tight-knit good ol' boys drinking group?

This is what never fails to amaze me, that enough people are so certain that there's no such thing as sexism in the technology industry. Meanwhile, someone else on Reddit or elsewhere posts a picture of a co-worker and the majority of the comments are, "she's hot, you bang her yet?"

philwelch11• 15 years ago

The whole point of the blog post was to illustrate an incidence of sexism at work. The blog post failed to do so. It seems willfully perverse to turn around and push the burden of proof on those of us who are simply pointing that out.

nimblegorilla• 15 years ago

The claim was "How do you piss off a technical woman so she will leave your team? It's easy. Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would never apply to a guy."

I'm a man and I've also been in the situation of overly sensitive office managers. Maybe this problem does happen to women more often than men, but to say that it never happens to men is completely untrue.

Playing the sexism card every time you run into a bad manager with a dysfunctional team seems like wasted effort to me. In the case above it's really hard for me to get past this developer's sour grapes to know if there was real sexism or just inability to recognize her (or anyone's) competence.

I'd rather see some thoughts on how a reasonably competent team loses a solid female developer.

bermanoid9• 15 years ago

Whether or not this incident was motivated by sexism, there's absolutely no indication, based on the facts presented, that it was. All that's there is a bare assertion that "wow, you were really hard on S" is somehow equivalent to "you're being too emotional" in terms of sexism, and that we should be offended.

Here's the relevant part, from the post:

It's a very bizarre and stunted conversation. The woman is clearly going to great lengths to not elaborate. She's answering things as succinctly as possible so as not to give you any way to claim that she's being emotional. It doesn't matter! You can still play that card!

Here's what you do. After the meeting, you get her on chat and you say "wow, you were really hard on S". It doesn't matter that she was answering direct questions posed by the boss and had to answer them. The more you accuse, the more it becomes true, so stay at it!

I don't see any hint of missing context, I plainly see the claim that "wow, you were really hard on S" is an accusation of "being emotional." Which is bollocks, plain and simple.

If there was more to the story, then it should have been presented if the author wanted to rack up page views by blogging about sexism in the field.

If there's not, then she is overreacting. Not because she's a woman, mind you. Because she really is too touchy about this.

Quite frankly, the fact that she's raging over and reading so much into a statement that is, by normal standards, extremely neutral, leads me to believe that even if she has been directly accused of being too emotional in the past, then maybe there's something to the accusations. Some people really are overly sensitive to perceived slights, and the fact that they're women doesn't necessarily mean the criticism is unfair...

Legion• 15 years ago

> Well, without any evidence that she presented.

Which makes for an ineffectual argument. It doesn't mean her point is wrong, but it means she failed to adequately support it.

pkteison2• 15 years ago

I agree, I see nothing gender based here. I'm a guy, and I've had a similar interaction with another guy on a team. He was pretty terrible, and I eventually decided the only way I could deal with him was to limit my interaction to bare minimum ("give him enough rope to hang himself"). It involved clipped matter-of-fact-no-elaboration exchanges like this example. My manager ended up blaming me for the other guy being terrible, manager said it was because I was not supporting this guy enough.

People can tell when you have an issue with someone on a team, even if you are very careful to do nothing 'wrong', because your behavior changes due to the being very careful. And managers don't necessarily assign fault in a manner that you would agree with, such as the terrible person is terrible is the root of the problem. The proper solution is to get out, which I did, and I'm glad to hear the author did. But to look for gender based explanations just seems overly paranoid.

andrewflnr6• 15 years ago

This is interesting. Moving from sexism to generally dealing with crappy coworkers: you can't just limit your interaction and distance yourself from them. Part of giving them enough rope is to make it clear that you're doing your best to help them (without unduly compromising your own productivity), and they're still failing. You have to perfectly walk the line between being nice and not enabling them to come out alive.

I'm still in school. This does not encourage me regarding entering the industry.

praptak• 15 years ago

> I'm pretty sure the author reached an entirely fallacious and baseless conclusion.

I read the article as demonstrating a particular dirty trick and it demonstrated it well. To me the fact that the trick can be used to discriminate against women was just a part of the background, not an essential part of the article.

That's why it doesn't bother me that the author omitted the proof of connection between her being female and the trick being used on her. By the way, what kind of proof would you accept?

jamesbritt3• 15 years ago

To me the fact that the trick can be used to discriminate against women was just a part of the background, not an essential part of the article.

I saw it as a tactic that can be used against anyone; there's nothing sex-specific about it.

fleitz• 15 years ago

It can only be used on women who give a crap about being viewed as emotional. The proper response to such a thing is more long the lines of: "Why does your job description list that you're looking for passionate (or whatever other BS they are feeding people to get them to view the company as anything more than a source of income) people? Passion is an emotion, you've preselected for emotional people and are now complaining about it, you really need to make a decision as to what kind of people you want at your company and act accordingly."

The work environment sounds screwed, good on the OP for moving on.

radicalbyte• 15 years ago

"W" is being a bit unreasonable by going off on one at "S". Both of them kludged a fix, although "W" was a little smarter.

But it sounds like "W" is the kind of antisocial geek who just has to explain how stupid their colleague is, and how much better they are.

From what I've read, this sounds more like it's related to "W" being a bit of a jerk than it is "W" being female...

ecdavis• 15 years ago

Er, really?

She gave direct, (presumably) factual answers to direct questions about a colleague's solution to a problem and that's "going off"?

Perhaps her tone was snide or condescending, but that information is not supplied in the post, so you can't really judge based on that.

brown9-2• 15 years ago

If S's fix is a temporary solution and he/she doesn't notify anyone else - especially the next on-call shift - there is a large bone to pick with S's actions.

npc• 15 years ago

Okay, you do realize that:

- the point of the post was not to prove that there is sexism in technology, but rather to show how sexism can drive away women

- that the existence of sexism in tech is one of the assumptions of the article, which is pretty reasonable given:

- sexism exists everywhere and there's no reason to think tech would be excluded

- the small number of women in tech

- the numerous other women who work in tech who have /said/ they've experienced sexism

- that she worked with these people for however long, and there's obviously numerous other encounters she's had with them that aren't relayed here because that wasn't the point of the article

- that just because men have a problem as well as women doesn't mean women cannot have that problem worse

- that there is definitely a range of social responses that are culturally permissible for men and not women, and that tech workers are not some sort of hyper-enlightened übermenschen who have utterly cast off the shackles of their culture and now see everything with perfect clarity

I'm not saying that we can know for sure that there was sexism involved here, but to call thinking that, "entirely fallacious and baseless" is complete and utter bullshit.

edit: gosh darn markdown

anigbrowl3• 15 years ago

If you claim sexism then you need to show sexism. None is shown here that I can see.

inopinatus• 15 years ago

Contrary to your claim (6) there is plenty of evidence for the likelihood of (5) being higher if the party is female e.g. see [1].

This is management 101 knowledge, so the "thin-skinned manager" (TSM) should've known it.

Which leaves two possibilities: incompetence or malice. However, the former option equates to a discriminatory position by default, so either way the TSM is guilty of sexual discrimination and is party to the constructive dismissal.

Interestingly that is independent of the gender of the TSM but the fact remains that women are more likely to be negatively treated with respect to emotional behaviour.

My disappointment is greatest to see the production of the old canard that "anyone can be treated like this", as though it is somehow acceptable to be an incompetent manager. It isn't.

Systemic and thoughtless sexism is alive and well and thriving in the IT industry. Stamp it out and reap the benefits of a huge and highly competent workforce segment. Ignore it and lose talent. Your call.

[1] Brescoll, V.L. and Uhlmann, E.L. (2008). Can an angry woman get ahead? : Status conferral, gender, and expression of emotion in the workplace. APS. http://socialjudgments.com/docs/Brescoll%20and%20Uhlmann%202...

philwelch11• 15 years ago

If you have a chip on your shoulder in re sexism, you will perceive every negative interaction through that lens.

Alternatively:

> How do you piss off a technical woman so she will leave your team? It's easy. Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would never apply to a guy. The easiest one of these is to say "you're being too emotional". Who's going to argue against that?

Making claims like that, in effect, is simply a unilateral claim of immunity against the accusation of being too emotional: it gives one the license to be as emotional as one likes, with any criticism conveniently pre-framed as sexism.

ams6110• 15 years ago

Generalizing, this applies to any "-ism", e.g. racism, sexism, antisemitism, etc. While I would never claim these no longer exist, in modern western society they are not the primary or even a significant factor in how a person is judged or treated at work.

kstenerud• 15 years ago

I'd argue that her monotone, 20 questions-style responses were counterproductive. You can see her boss having to fish for information, when all she had to do was:

B: So I was looking at the pages from this weekend and it looks like we had something bad on Saturday. What happened?

W: There were too many queries failing in the Netherlands. I got a bunch of pages in the middle of the night and finally tracked the problem down to a bug in the new authentication daemon.

B: So is it working now?

W: It's working under a kludge. I wrote a restart script for it, but we need to get a patch to fix it for real.

B: When did this start?

W: Sometime before my shift.

B: Who was on call then?

W: S. He rebooted the machines and the problem went away, but it came back again during my shift so I put in the auto restart as a stopgap measure until we could get a real fix.

Her treatment of S is harsh because she doesn't couch what she says at all to protect him, like you normally do in order to promote office harmony.

It's obvious that she's frustrated from her previous dealings with certain people, and their alleged sexism (which, unfortunately, is not demonstrated in her recounting). Unfortunately, her response is to attack a hornet with a sledgehammer (with corresponding collateral damage) and then blame the result on sexism.

lhnz• 15 years ago

My own strategy would probably be to slowly create talking points about empathising with the user and the good it does to products. This is fairly subtle and you're unlikely to be called out on it. Eventually your detractors will be playing in your frame when they next try to argue that you're 'too empathetic/emotional'.

That or just leave.

r00fus• 15 years ago

Bingo. If you can't find a way to tie any honest but possibly harsh comments back to either getting work done on time, customer satisfaction or (ultimately) the company's fortunes, you might be in the wrong.

As it appears that the blog author was in the right, framing is critical to put attitude in perspective.

I'm not a woman, I have been in situations similar to these and made similar responses and gotten different but functionally similar reactions (i.e., don't put blame where it belongs, you might make the incompetent person feel bad).

After trying to connect the success of that particular task to the project success and company welfare and getting nowhere, I eventually left.

shasta• 15 years ago

Ironically, this blog post brings to mind a different female stereotype: too much drama.

Tichy6• 15 years ago

I wonder if the women who complain about bad treatment in IT also read Dilbert. Just as a basic impression of what it is like to be male in the industry.

roguecoder10• 15 years ago

Because Scott "men are genetically programmed to rape so we shouldn't really blame them" Adams wouldn't possibly infuse his strip with sexist, martyr-complex, responsibility-avoiding, self-serving cultural portrayals. Nope, definitely not.

Not saying the tech industry is a bed of roses. But "this sucks for everyone" doesn't mean "so she shouldn't complain". It means "we should fix this for everyone."

Women have all the problems men have there, plus they are isolated, subject to sexist behavior and criticized heavily if they ever speak about their experiences. This is a case of "yes, and..." not "yes, but..."

If men don't like the way other men are treating them it is not women's responsibility or even possibly under their control. It definitely shouldn't be proposed as an excuse to dismiss or ignore women's feedback on how men treat them (which is both women's and men's problems, and is under men's control).

Tichy6• 15 years ago

I am not even a Dilbert fan, it just came to mind as an easy way to get an impression. (Office Space, on the other hand...).

It just sometimes seems as if when women say "men", what they mean is actually only the top 5% of alpha males they actually recognize as men. The rest of the male population and their plight does not even register on the radar.

Yes, the problems should be fixed for everyone, and I also can imagine there are problems specific to women. Not sure they are always sexist, though. For example I also face problems as a father when I take care of my child alone at times. It occurred to me it might have parallels to the situation of women in IT. Namely, usually mothers meet other mothers (on the playground, at home, wherever). Now, if I want to meet other kids on my "daddy day", I feel a bit awkward. I haven't created the same networks that my wife did - hooking up with mothers starting from birth courses to frequent playground and mother group visits. I suppose I could call her "other mother" friends and visit them with my son, too. But it would feel a bit weird, at least at first (haven't actually tried it yet), because I am not directly their friend, I am only the friend of their friend. I wouldn't blame it on sexism, though, it is simply evolved historically, because they went to more kid related courses than I did. Even if I change the diapers once per day and my wife does it 6 times a day, it creates a distortion.

I am all for fixing the problem, but blaming the wrong reason is very counterproductive to that. Just saying "it must be sexism" prevents people from looking at other possible causes.

true_religion5• 15 years ago

> Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would never apply to a guy. The easiest one of these is to say "you're being too emotional".

I'm nor sure this would never apply to a guy. Saying someone is illogical or "motivated by emotion, not reason", or is "overly sentimental" seems to be a common attack during geek flamewars.

It's also a fairly common attack during corporate shark feeding frenzies.

That it was once used to attack women in general (as opposed to individually) actually makes it more tenous to use it as an attack against a woman. The speaker in that case can be accused of being sexist, whilst if they called a man "emotional", it would force someone to address the accusation itself.

jeltz• 15 years ago

And as a bonus when used against a man you will at the same time question his manliness. So actually I think this low blow argument might be even better used against men, but works against women.

And for the specifics of the article. I see no explicit accusation of being emotional. "I was being hard on S" does not necessarily mean that the people being hard on another is emotional, since it could also mean almost the opposite: that you do not care about people's emotions. And this argument ("being too hard on") can be and is used on men.

I do not see how this article relates to sexism, rather it relates to various low blow tactics in corporate politics.

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

it is clear that author's emotions are out of control in both cases - during the described incident and when she writes the post. She fails by refusing to recognize that.

High-tech jobs are very stressful (after all, each of us is immensely smart and is surrounded by morons :) and managing and controlling the stress is a part of the job. Failure to do so is a professional failure, especially when it is support/operations type of the job. Instead of recognizing her problem and trying to deal with it, the author pulls the sexism card. Next time her boss and others may be not that fortunate, and it may cost them job, reputation and/or lawsuit.

wtvanhest• 15 years ago

It seems overly emotional to me to write this article.

(Maybe it is perfectly sensible, but to me, it seems overly emotional).

tkellogg• 15 years ago

I agree. I found the article very informative. I will have to try this new social pattern at my job to get rid of that bitchy UX designer.

gordonguthrie16• 15 years ago

This discussion is quite amazing. Someone with a high-quality technical blog writes a post about sexism.

Magically a huge stream of comments arrive:

"the author reached an entirely fallacious and baseless conclusion"

"without any evidence, concludes that the manager said this because she is a woman"

"Whether or not this incident was motivated by sexism, there's absolutely no indication, based on the facts presented, that it was."

"then she is overreacting. Not because she's a woman, mind you. Because she really is too touchy about this"

"she's raging over and reading so much into a statement that is, by normal standards, extremely neutral, leads me to believe that even if she has been directly accused of being too emotional in the past, then maybe there's something to the accusations"

"Playing the sexism card every time you run into a bad manager with a dysfunctional team seems like wasted effort to me."

"to look for gender based explanations just seems overly paranoid"

"It can only be used on women who give a crap about being viewed as emotional."

"I can claim that my business partners are space aliens who read my thoughts and are plotting to colonize the planet all day long, but as long as there's no shred of evidence of this, the fact that nobody appreciates the lengths I go to wear tinfoil hats and research anti-alien combat techniques is meaningless"

"it's related to "W" being a bit of a jerk than it is "W" being female"

"If you have a chip on your shoulder in re sexism, you will perceive every negative interaction through that lens"

"that, in effect, is simply a unilateral claim of immunity against the accusation of being too emotional: it gives one the license to be as emotional as one likes"

"It's obvious that she's frustrated from her previous dealings with certain people, and their alleged sexism (which, unfortunately, is not demonstrated in her recounting). Unfortunately, her response is to attack a hornet with a sledgehammer (with corresponding collateral damage) and then blame the result on sexism."

"this blog post brings to mind a different female stereotype: too much drama"

"that author's emotions are out of control in both cases - during the described incident and when she writes the post. She fails by refusing to recognize that"

"It seems overly emotional to me to write this article. (Maybe it is perfectly sensible, but to me, it seems overly emotional)."

The actual article begins with the paragraph:

"How do you piss off a technical woman so she will leave your team? It's easy. Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would never apply to a guy. The easiest one of these is to say "you're being too emotional"

This entire discussion is unbelievable - Rachel By The Bay ought to be a respected member of this community based on her blog - instead she is being attacked in a bizarre way.

andrewflnr6• 15 years ago

It's not that surprising. There's little or no clear evidence in the post that her negative experiences were more motivated by sexism than by more mundane personal issues. Her environment was definitely messed up, but can you point to compelling evidence that it was motivated by sexism?

Nobody wants to believe there's sexism in their industry. It's not surprising to see skepticism in the absence of strong evidence, even if it's not right either. It's much the same standard that would be applied to any controversial issue.

gordonguthrie16• 15 years ago

With all due respect there is precisely no evidence in any of her voluminous writing that (and I quote):

* she is overreacting

* she really is too touchy

* she's raging

* playing the sexism card every time you run into a bad manager

* overly paranoid

* a bit of a jerk

* [has] a chip on your shoulder in re sexism

* [has] license to be as emotional as one likes

* she's frustrated

* too much drama

* emotions are out of control

> can you point to compelling evidence that it was motivated by sexism

I haven't mentioned sexism - I have only mentioned the unbelievable response to her blog post. All her other blog posts are credible - why isn't this one?

calibraxis• 15 years ago

Personally, my evidence of institutional sexism (racism, etc) comes from glancing at rooms full of software developers, knowing a bit about the world (what gender have all the US presidents "coincidentally" been?), and simply asking female-bodied people. Not to mention probing my ideologies, and those of my fellow men.

Learning is an active process. You probably wouldn't be impressed by someone who demands that each Erlang blogger (in each random post) convinces them of Erlang's merits. Instead, they earn an informed opinion by actively exploring it and confronting their own prejudices.

You mention, "Nobody wants to believe there's sexism in their industry." If true, we're irrational men whose emotional wants strongly determine our beliefs.

A more rational approach is to want to believe the truth. I believe every society I know is fundamentally sexist, and the guys in them (including me) are sexist, growing up benefitting from our gender's privileges and being led to act in strange ways.

When I read this article, I can't demand that it convince me. (It's not her burden to convince sexist men of their sexism. Instead, it is up to ethical men to dismantle their privilege.) Rather, it has helpful nuggets on What Not to Do.)

Cushman• 15 years ago

It's just the next act of Anti-Pattern Theatre.

  Act I: In which a woman explains how and why she feels excluded.
  Act II: In which the male community excludes her in precisely the way she described.
  Act III: In which nothing has changed.

Okay, we should probably tighten it up a bit, but I say we take this show on the road!

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

I've observed this sort of behavior in groups where the group is invested in the allegation not being true.

My sixth grade 'safety patrol' volunteer group had a member who was very popular in school, but didn't do his 'shift' on the cross walk three times and was thus eligible for expulsion. Clear fact, clear rule, but a lot of people in the group didn't want to believe that the group tolerated incompetence in order to share popularity, and so many attacks were made on the methodology of taking attendance, scheduling shifts, and the definitions of responsibilities. As the 'weird' guy in the group it made perfect sense to me, here is a rule, here is a consequence, rule gets broken, consequence gets enacted. Picked up a lot of flack for that point of view.

So here we have someone who describes an experience she had a place that considers itself hip, cool, and generally superior to other places one might work. Her experience, and more importantly her interpretation of the experience, if accepted as true, reflects badly on that place. If you still work at that place, or hold it in high esteem, you have three choices:

1) Shoot the messenger - most common response seems to be this one, shoot the bearer of bad news and you can pretend bad news doesn't exist.

2) Shoot the process - this is where people who recognize that their first instinct is to shoot the messenger but are 'above all that' and yet do not reconcile the information with their own view of the world, attack the transmission channel and accuse the channel of being broken, biased, or both.

3) Hear the message, understand the brokeness it represents, and seek out ways to figure out where the system is broken and to fix it. Of course that doesn't necessarily involve a response directly to the channel so observers outside the conversation may not see the results at all.

This community is pretty small relative to the overall community of technologists, and it has some biases with respect to places, people, and concepts. I believe you are simply seeing one of those biases emerge as a side effect of the conversation.

gordonguthrie16• 15 years ago

> This community is pretty small relative to the overall community of technologists, and it has some biases with respect to places, people, and concepts. I believe you are simply seeing one of those biases emerge as a side effect of the conversation.

I don't think so. I think the tech community is pretty much up its own arse and thinks it is god-like and precious.

Techies really buy into the 'we are pure', 'we only deal with evidence', 'we are the best', blah-blah. All the great myth of meritocracy and guff like that.

Anything that points out this is not true and that Joe Coder might not be perfect and it just kicks off. Oh, yeah and plain sexism as well.

danilocampos2• 15 years ago

> I've observed this sort of behavior in groups where the group is invested in the allegation not being true.

Bingo. Men in tech are supposed to be evolved, egalitarian, meritocratic, all that.

So it stings a lot to have to face the fact that many of them are sexist pricks. Better instead to find some way to deflate that so they can continue celebrating themselves without interruption.

philwelch11• 15 years ago

> This entire discussion is unbelievable - Rachel By The Bay ought to be a respected member of this community based on her blog - instead she is being attacked in a bizarre way.

She's being "attacked" purely on the merits of what she wrote, which is exactly the way any man would be treated, exactly the way in which we treat each other in the comments, and exactly the way in which you are "attacking" us.

I actually find your comment far more "unbelievable"--though it doesn't come out and say it, and though it doesn't actually address any of the criticisms you cite, it has the strong implication that any accusation of sexism, baseless and flawed as it may be, is immune to criticism, implicitly because any such criticism is itself sexist. Which is the moral and rhetorical equivalent of suspecting any person who defends a suspected witch of themselves being a witch.

gordonguthrie16• 15 years ago

Phil

Kindly find me on Hacker News a single discussion thread which contains comments like this about a male writer of a blog post.

I signed up to this site 1557 days ago and I have never seen the like.

JulianMorrison4• 15 years ago

It's sexism. Sexists don't like being called "sexists" because in today's ethical climate, that label is disapproved. Actually being a sexist, however, is not. So they use lightly-coded language like drama, emotional, touchy, frustrated, paranoid and the sexism card. Thus, other sexists can applaud them without admitting to sexism. And on places like Hacker News, sexists can band together to defend themselves against accusations of sexism, using the downvote button to make opponents give up in disgust, leaving them to be sexists together and in mutual acknowledgement that they're not really sexist at all.

philwelch11• 15 years ago

It's communism. Communists don't like being called "communists" because in today's political climate, that label is disapproved. Actually being a communist, however, is not. So they use lightly-coded language like 99%, special interests, police brutality, and equality. Thus, other communists can applaud them without admitting to communism. And on places like Reddit, communists can band together to defend themselves against accusations of communism, using the downvote button to make opponents give up in disgust, leaving them to be communists together and in mutual acknowledgement that they're not really communists at all.

It's witchcraft. Witches don't like being called "witches" because in today's political climate, that label is disapproved. Actually being a witch, however, is not. So they use lightly-coded language like religious tolerance, atheism, rationalism, skepticism. Thus, other witches can applaud them without admitting to witchcraft.

It's pedophilia. Pedophiles don't like being called "pedophiles" because in today's political climate, that label is disapproved. Actually being a pedophile, however, is not. So they use lightly-coded language like equal rights, LGBT, gay marriage. Thus, other pedophiles can applaud them without admitting to pedophilia.

forensic2• 15 years ago

Part of the issue is that engineers believe they are perfectly rational creatures with no feelings. What this actually means is that they are unaware of their feelings and so their feelings control them without them knowing it.

Engineers can rarely see their own sexism precisely because, as a group, they lack self-knowledge and emotional intelligence.

Groups that lack emotional intelligence are always the most oblivious to their own prejudice. Outsiders consider it obvious that engineers are sexist. Engineers themselves are oblivious.

On top of that, engineers in general tend to have really inflated self-images. Many engineers just flat out think they are better than non-technical people. This arrogance means they are unwilling to accept criticism from non-engineers. Usually they deflect the criticism by claiming the person has no evidence or is making logical errors. What the engineer is really doing is missing the forest for the trees, being overly literal, failing to see things from the eyes of others, and demanding perfect evidence in situations where perfect evidence is unreasonable and unattainable.

makmanalp2• 15 years ago

Here is your argument: If you say "The easiest way to launch an undefendable argument against a person who is a brown elephant from mars is to claim that they have too few stomachs" and then I accuse you of having too few stomachs, obviously I am wrong, or there is something inherently wrong with my argument. This is false.

In addition, the fact that she was accused of being too emotional is supposed to a) only apply to women b) be a bogus argument in general and c) indicate sexism.

I know a) and b) are false because I have seen tons of men being too emotional and this causing real damage. A very very common example is when a product that has tons of hours, blood, sweat and tears invested into it has to be tossed because of strategic reasons. Employee X will not have any of that and will relentlessly lobby and defend the product, because the product is their baby. X is being too emotional.

In the author's defense, it didn't seem to me that the author was being too emotional in the incident. From the information provided, that is a false accusation.

About c), nothing in the story as it is seems to indicate sexism to me. Make no mistake, it looks like an unfair attack on the author. Maybe everyone hated her for some other reason, or maybe it was really sexist. We, as readers, do not know. Maybe there were other elements to the story, other events / conversations / attitudes that did not make it to the post. Who knows? If those did exist and were in there, maybe the sexism argument would be valid. Being unfair towards a person who happens to be a woman is not the same thing as sexism. The latter is a subset of the former.

When everyone in the comments accuse the author of being too emotional, they are probably referring to the fact that she is telling a story where sexism is not apparent (from the given evidence) and she is immediately attributing it to sexism.

This is a feared situation. People are afraid when someone who is in the abused side of an anything-ism call other people abusers without apparent reason. For example, I am middle eastern, and it's scary to other people when I start calling people who I don't get along with racists. This is similar to the sort of trump card argument that the author hates. It villifies the alleged abuser, even if they were not guilty, and the alleged abuser is in a disadvantaged situation to properly defend themselves. If I do this, inadvertently or not, this is considered a low blow.

You will see people all around you bending over backwards to avoid this sort of dynamic: Sheltered white people may act all nervous and awkward around people of other races because they try to act nice but come off overly fake, german people may do the same when conversation is started about jewish people (as if it was them, not other people, that caused the holocaust or as if they were guilty by association) and hell, even some MIT students will not say where they graduated from unless specifically prompted, because they are afraid to be percieved as the stereotype of high and mighty jackasses and not fairly as themselves.

The point is, sexism is a serious accusation that is not to be thrown around lightly these days. If it is to be made, there needs to be serious evidence. Otherwise, it's just foul play. Unfair attitude towards a person who is a woman is not the same as sexism.

gordonguthrie16• 15 years ago

You write a long post the need for serious evidence in response to a post which documents a series of accusations against Rachel By The Bay for which there is precisely no evidence what so ever.

The posters didn't say (as you did) nothing in the story seems to indicate sexism to me. They said a whole load of other stuff for which there was no evidence.

Perhaps you would like to take it up with them?

roguecoder10• 15 years ago

Why would his lack of sufficient stomachs have anything to do with whether or not he is right? It is a green tie argument, or in debate terms, fails to clash. It is just an excuse to avoid engaging with the actual point.

In other words, your analogy still supports his point.

vectorpush• 15 years ago

Rachel By The Bay ought to be a respected member of this community based on her blog - instead she is being attacked in a bizarre way.

She is not being attacked. If you disagree with the items you quoted then you should present your counter-arguments. Nearly every post you quoted is a rational opinion which deserves a fair refutation. It's insulting for you to aggregate these comments and then pass over them with blanket disregard under the defense that she is a respected member of the community, as if we should all put on the kid gloves when applying criticism to her blog post. Ironic.

gordonguthrie16• 15 years ago

> Nearly every post you quoted is a rational opinion which deserves a fair refutation

Not they are not. They are mostly emotional attacks presented without any evidence.

> It's insulting for you to aggregate these comments

How so?

> as if we should all put on the kid gloves when applying criticism to her blog post

The comments I quoted weren't criticising her blog post they were attacking her as a person.

Confusion2• 15 years ago

Why do you assume guys are never criticised in this way? HN is full of responses claiming some guy is wrong, overreacting, looking too hard for a certain type of explanation, defending against something that should be ignored, having a chip on ones shoulder re <something>, claiming blanket immunity against X, that there must be 'more history to it', etc. In all cases, these are instances of the guy being perceived as being overly emotionally involved in the subject.

bermanoid9• 15 years ago

If that is the entire point of your blog post, then you'd best make damn sure that you're not "being too emotional" in your accusations therein.

A lot of people, myself included, think that she was being too emotional, and hence unreasonable, in her accusation of sexism in this post, without ample justification. The fact that she paid lip service to the criticism beforehand and tried to chalk it up to sexism does not absolve her from it.

Similarly, even if I say "Some people will call me racist, but they're just minority-lovers..." before I launch into a tirade about how much black people annoy me, I'm still spouting bullshit. The fact that the present author is taking an oppressed viewpoint rather than a majority one does not change the burden of proof.

anigbrowl3• 15 years ago

Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would never apply to a guy.

But I would totally tell a man that he was being over-emotional about something. I've done so numerous times, in numerous contexts, and I've let my own emotions get in the way of my judgment on several occasions. It's a normal thing; I think most people would prefer not to work with someone who's an unreadable robot, but friction and frayed tempers can cause problems of their own from time to time. Criticizing a colleague is always awkward, and most managers would try to mediate away such conflicts within their team. Why does the writer think this is an exclusively female issue?

mkopinsky3• 15 years ago

For further context, see http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/06/04/fireandforget/ "Fire and Forget, or Sexism in Software Engineering".

waveman2• 15 years ago

Her complaint here, one of many many complaints of sexism, seems to be that her manager is unhappy that she loads him down with complaints and too much detail that he doesn't want to know.

She puts this down to sexism. It's not clear why this is sexist. She is wasting his time. If he is like most managers he is very pressed for time and he doesn't need his time wasted.

In this case, sexism is a redundant explanation because other, better, simpler explanations are available. in Bayesian theory this is technically called "explaining away" and it is a good thing. Fact A is not evidence for claim B if explanation C is better.

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Bayes/bnintro.html

wpietri• 15 years ago

Note that you've gone from "It is not clear to me that it is sexist," to "She is wrong about the explanation."

That something isn't clear to you only means it isn't clear to you. She is in possession of an enormous volume of information about the situation. You aren't. The reasonable conclusion isn't "sexism is a redundant explanation"; it's "perhaps she has not revealed the information the led her to her conclusion".

Now ask yourself: why did you so quickly leap to the particular erroneous conclusion that sexism was not the problem? There are a lot of erroneous conclusions to come to. Or you could have come to none at all.

parfe2• 15 years ago

Ah sexism. I love it when I sees it. This thread just oozes it! In fact, most of the posters here write with the exact sexist bent the writer warns about.

* Explain she overreacted; tell her she is wrong.

* Claim her feelings have no merit; tell her she is wrong.

* Tell her you know how she should feel; tell her she is wrong.

* Flatly deny she encountered sexism; tell her she is wrong

* Change the discussion to center on men; minimize her response by associating it with a trivial issue "everyone" has to deal with

dlitz• 15 years ago

How do you suggest that a non-sexist person should deal with a situation like this, without privileging the claims of the writer?

roguecoder10• 15 years ago

Engage with behavior, not state of mind. "Your report was factually incorrect in X, Y and Z respects" would be fine. If by "too emotional" they meant "was yelling at me in the hall" then the correct response is "the way you are speaking to me is unacceptable" and to take it up with HR.

If she's wrong, that's what they should be engaging with. If she's treating them badly, that's what they should be engaging with. If they are just providing excuses not to take her seriously, they aren't dealing with a situation at all; they are just being jerks.

Basically, any approach should lead to concrete suggestions for changed behavior that would improve the bottom line of the company. "You are too emotional" is neither actionable nor measurable, so it is entirely unhelpful. "You were rough on S in there" is also neither actionable or measurable: if she didn't get any of the facts wrong and S looked bad, it's S's fault he acted in ways that looked bad, especially if she was responding to direct questions.

Any culture that prioritizes covering up responsibility rather than failing transparently, finding the root causes and fixing them is doomed in the long run anyway.

bermanoid9• 15 years ago

So you really think that she did encounter sexism, based on her description of the dispute?

Because that's where I question her. This situation reeked to me of one engineer trying to shovel shit onto another one, and the response seemed to be that of a more level headed manager trying to defuse the situation so that nobody ended up fired.

Which is not something that I'm willing to pin on sexism without some evidence. Especially having been the relatively-level-headed manager (in a male-v-male situation) in the unfortunate position of being between one engineer and his rival, which is unfortunately not a very rare situation, given the types of personalities that take on sysadmin jobs. It's not pleasant, and given the expense of finding new engineers, trust me, you're willing to do anything to avoid having to fire the (seemingly competent, despite the intra-office-feuds that might arise) ones that you have, including telling the better sysadmins to shut the fuck up and stop complaining about their colleagues.

potatolicious• 15 years ago

What if she is wrong?

The problem with this discussion, and the reason I'm not otherwise participating in it, is that because I have a penis I'll automatically be accused of sexism if I do not agree with the author's claims.

This isn't about getting at what happened, this is about everyone needing to tip-toe on eggshells because whenever this topic is raised, everyone is automatically wrong. If you're a woman who brings up sexism, you're automatically too emotional or oversensitive. If you're a man who dares question a particular case of alleged sexism, you're sexist, but you're just too sexist to know that you're sexist.

I dislike your insinuation that someone who claims sexism can't be wrong. I also dislike the amount of psychoanalysis that's going on in this whole thread, including yours.

Everything in this thread eventually boils down to: you're a woman, you're emotional. You're a man, you're pig-headed. The whole thing is a gigantic exercise in absurd extremes that have little basis in reality.

parfe2• 15 years ago

>What if she is wrong?

And what if she is? Debating the correctness of her interpretation only distracts from her point that If you act in the way described towards an engineer you could make her feel like the author.

>I dislike your insinuation that someone who claims sexism can't be wrong.

The comments here focus on the event itself rather than dealing with the actual topic of the blog post. People care more about inconsequential details than the social and professional implications the author describes.

waveman2• 15 years ago

I read her blog because it has some interesting ideas. However it reminds me of PZ Myers' blog in some ways. There is the same repetitive theme of how stupid all these people are compared to moi.

"Within six months, they had an actual user-affecting outage directly attributed to things on that team. We hadn't had any of them during my tenure running that service."

"As I've said before, enjoy your pages, guys. "

Maybe this is just typical sysadmin arrogance / all users are ID10Ts.

I also see signs of a paranoid attitude:

"I knew it was going to be a disaster and they'd use it against me".

Playing games of passive-aggressives:

"I was going to be cold and dry and only answer exactly what was asked of me."

Really if you drop of load on a co-worker in a team meeting you are going to get some blowback.

Her blog is also full of complaints of women not being treated fairly eg:

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/23/hiring/

(has to walk across the road to get to her car)

Unleash the white knights!

adaml_623• 15 years ago

Your last comment about origAuthor desiring a secure environment to work in and extending that desire to the carpark is a bit rubbish.

If your employees have to be at work after dark then you should definitely organise safe conditions for them to get home. Women are more sensitive to this because they get attacked/raped by strangers a lot more often than men. It's the real world. You have to deal with it.

HNers should be able to deal with it when they realise they are wrong and need to change their thoughts and behaviour.

DanBC2• 15 years ago

> Women are more sensitive to this because they get attacked/raped by strangers a lot more often than men.

Men are much more likely to be the victim of violence from strangers than women.

The vast majority of violence (including sexual violence and rape) against women is from people they know; "friends", husbands, colleagues.

This is a minor point though; I do agree that employers need to provide a safe environment for employees, and that women feel more at risk in dark car parks.

gordonguthrie16• 15 years ago

I worked in an office in the centre of Glasgow near the red light district.

One night one of our help desk girls (yes she was 18ish) was going home and a 'punter' asked her if 'she was working...'

'No' she says and he then punched her in the face and knocked her unconscious.

Unleash the white knights? Indeed.

Scootah2• 15 years ago

I worked in helpdesks for just shy of a decade, from office junior in a dev shop, to level 1 in a dialup ISP, then through pretty much every available tech role up to microsoft tech lead at for a top 5 in the world hosting company and senior tech escalation for a top 5 in the world domain registrar. I've been working as an IT contractor in enterprise (government, large industrial, large corporate) environments for the last 5 years.

I've personally seen

- a boss with a policy to only hire ugly or fat girls, because pretty girls distract the geeks

- a level 2 engineer passed over multiple times for promotions, because she wouldn't say fuck in the presence of three or more members of the senior engineers group

- a systems engineer bumped to team lead, then project lead, then solutions architect, generally held to be the best boss anyone in her group had every worked for and one of the highest delivering tech leadership resources in the company, quit and start a business outside of IT when guys who were consistently performing below her metrics in other teams were getting better bonuses and better base salaries, and she was being told that there wasn't money to go around for her.

- an enterprise architect come back from maternity leave (10 months) where she had been effectively part timing (10 to 30 hours a week) because the incompetent guy who'd taken over from her was hopeless and kept calling her for help, who was told that because she'd been out of the current technology scope for so long she'd have to go back to the help desk for 6 months to come up to speed and she'd then be eligible to apply for a promotion, if she did a good job. The incompetent guy who'd been badgering her for her time through her maternity leave was made permanent in her old job.

- Company christmas parties organized behind the girl's backs - so that they could be held at a strip club, while the girls got stuck holding the fort while everyone else got paid to go to the pub.

The christmas party incident, the three girls who got stuck in the office were told to their face that it was a random selection and they just happened to come up. Three girls in a pool of 40 resources, and they happened to all come up? For a party that they hadn't been told about, at a strip club?

I worked with a girl once who probably wasn't as talented/knowledgable as most of the guys in the tech pool. But she was by far the hardest worker. Absolutely crushed our ticket system metrics consistently. But could never get a promotion. At first it was just air excuses 'oh, Dave just deserved it this time.' and things that were maybe plausible. Then they got thin - guys with less experience who weren't very good and way under performing compared to her getting promotions? They just did better in the interview. She started to get pissed about it - as she was passed over for about a dozen different promotions opportunities when the majority of her peers in the tech pool agreed that she should have had the promotion - she worked her ass off. Then she got a reputation for being hard to work with and a complainer - because she had the temerity to be pissed about the blatant discrimination. Any guy who had to put up with that crap would have been just as hard to work with.

My experience has certainly been that competent girls get fucked over in IT. And yeah, everyone in IT will be on the shitty end of a bad management decision if you hang around long enough. But almost every IT job I've had, and every competent girl I've worked with has had a laundry list of bullshit like that.

When your job is diagnostic investigation and repair - you learn to start looking for linking factors and commonalities. You get good at root analysis. It's not hard for anyone who isn't an asshole to see that the crap women go through in enterprise IT, almost certainly has something to do with their gender.

Tichy6• 15 years ago

I don't doubt your stories, but they seem to be unrelated to the article presented here.

Scootah2• 15 years ago

Really I was just trying to illustrate that the author is being cast as overly emotional when describing a very calm and restrained response to an irritating situation - when in her situation I'd probably be livid and far more emotional in my response. As would most guys.

Almost every guy in IT I've ever worked with gets emotional, angry, sarcastic, abrasive, abusive or annoyed when stupid and inconsiderate people (ie users, coworkers, bosses, jerks in general) waste their time or make them deal with unnecessary stupidity). I've never heard anyone suggest that those guys were menstral, or unsuited to working in IT because of it. Guys working on call after often short tempered, upset, frustrated and generally emotional from the lack of sleep after a lot of call outs - but when a girl goes through the same thing, guys in IT are often and consistently dicks about it, and act like they don't behave the exact same way.

Girls cop a huge amount of gender biased abuse in enterprise IT (in my experience and observation) and generally take it with at least as much grace as any guy takes user stupidity - and then has to put up with user stupidity as well.

I'd never have survived in IT with the shit the girls I know have had to put up with. I'd have found another career very early. When a woman with legit tech chops and a decent length career behind her in IT isn't a man hating bitch - I generally think she should get a lot of leeway for having a bit of a temper - not the kind of lynch mob response that showed up in a lot of the conversations about Rachel.

Confusion2• 15 years ago

Interestingly, she assumes and reinforces the stereotypes herself:

  Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that
  would never apply to a guy. The easiest one of these is to
  say "you're being too emotional".

This is plain false. Guys also catch flack for being too emotionally invested in something all the time. Someone proposes a solution, you criticise it and they get overly defensive? Someone reports on an issue and is really harsh about the person that caused it? Someone's performance goes subpar, but when confronted, they are afraid to tell you what's wrong? That's all emotion and they will all be called out for it by a decent manager.

  Here's what you do. After the meeting, you get her on chat
  and you say "wow, you were really hard on S".

Here she again assumes guys never get this line from their manager, which is again plain false. Good managers will call guys out on internal rivalries, lack of empathy or whatever other emotional reason there was for 'being really hard on X'.

These kinds of statements reinforce the stereotypes, because they reiterate the perceived status quo, where guys are non-emotional and thus never criticised for it. That whole line of reasoning is just wrong for anyone that wants to push for more equality. More equality does not mean showing women are more like the stereotypical men: it just as often means showing that men are more like stereotypical women.

AndyKelley• 15 years ago

After consuming this article, the update, and the comments here, this is the take on the situation I'm walking away with:

1. The manager was unjustified in saying that W was "too hard on S".

2. Based on the story in the article, it's not fair to say that the manager's unjustified statement was based on sexism. There isn't enough evidence to conclude that.

3. Rachel very well might have experienced sexism in the situation she wrote about and various other ones, and Rachel simply didn't explain it well enough in her article, or could only remember this ambiguous example where it's not entirely clear that there was sexism.

msellout• 15 years ago

For those of you who believe that the incident described is not not one of sexism: the author's purpose is to describe an incident and explain to you that it is, in fact, sexism. Her goal is that you watch yourself more closely that you do not create an incident similar to the one she described.

Whether or not the incident described was, in fact, sexism, it could have been and similar events should be avoided.

wccrawford• 15 years ago

At my previous job, people would get mad at me for 'throwing someone under the bus' because I would simply tell the facts about a situation, and it ended up being that someone else screwed up. Apparently I was supposed to keep quiet and take all the wrath on myself instead.

That's what's happening here. I'm male, she's female, and it happened exactly the same way. She's taken a common (and bull) occurrence and decided it's sexist, when it's not. It's just a bad situation, possibly with a bad company.

What they're really telling her is that she should have taken one for the team, and they would have expected any other team member to do the same. She actually succeeded in her 'show no emotion' gambit, but had no idea she had done so.

I actually agree with her that women are accused of being emotional more than men are, and it's due to stereotypes.

And I agree with comments here that say men are just as emotional about their work. I certainly am.

But the problem isn't that women are told they are too emotional. It's that mean are -not- told that. And they need to be.

cafard• 15 years ago

At best, I'd say that there must be some context missing.

blangblang• 15 years ago

Replacing all forms of "woman" with the appropriate form of "employee" and neutering pronouns doesn't seem to change the story at all.

Anti-pattern theater: how to get women to quit

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