[RulingWalnut]

Very much not challenging the experiences in this post but I will say:

“I believe everyone can become a good professional as long as they’re willing to learn.”

was most likely speaking to her youth than her femininity.

Source: Myself as someone who has given advice to a lot of different interns/new grads along the same exact lines.

[koyote]

I almost stopped reading there. That sentence, no matter how I try to interpret it, seems like very common and genuine advice to a new graduate starter.

[tclancy]

Why stop reading there? No one is right all the time and the author is probably younger than you. But her experience is also different from yours. It would be good not to assume they are wrong simply because you think they misunderstood something.

[koyote]

> Why stop reading there?

I said 'almost'.

If you started reading a blog post on a topic and the very first example in the opening paragraph is a clear misinterpretation then it is quite natural to assume that the rest of the post will follow that trend. That's all part of critical thinking and the automatic assessment of trustworthiness any human being will engage when reading/listening to someone's ideas/opinions/experiences.

I gave the article the benefit of the doubt and continued reading; the rest of the post illustrates clear discrimination experiences so I am glad I continued reading.

[mcavoybn]

I had the exact same thought. I skimmed through the rest of the article. The author's frustrations seem to center around the fact that she is a diversity hire, which is made even more evident by the discussion in the comments. The excuse is that they are "raising awareness" but this is something we are all painfully aware of so it comes across as "my personal anecdote about {buzzword}".

Some of the best and worst co-workers I've had in my relatively short career have been women. In my experience, women are much more sociable than men and bring a certain positive energy to a team, but are less competitive with the other men on the team. Men will always compete AGAINST other men FOR women. They want to be the alpha, which fundamentally means that they get the most women.

This means that women won't bother to compete with men and vice versa. Hiring a woman to work on a team of all men is probably exactly like hiring a man on a team of all women. It will bring undue, subversive, and potentially aggressive behavior between team members of the opposite sex because of the fundamentally sexual, subconscious forces we are subject to as human beings.

[lostcolony]

It might be! He -might- say it to every intern on their first day. But the problem with many statements or questions that land poorly, even ones not tied to race, gender, etc, is not the intention of the person saying them, but the experience of the person hearing them.

For instance, "are you supposed to be here?" may be a perfectly reasonable question asked purely because the asker doesn't recognize the person, and they would have asked it regardless of skin color, gender, etc. However, if you've heard things like that all your life, if your lived experience is that the majority don't expect someone of your gender or skin color to be in the exclusive areas they frequent, it can't help but hurt, and feel exclusive based on your gender, skin color, etc. You can't help but wonder "would they have asked that of me if I was a white man?", etc.

This doesn't mean the question asker meant anything by the question, but it does indicate a lack of sensitivity to the lived experience of the person here. You can compensate for it by learning about and recognizing that lived experience and reformulating the question; for instance "Hi! I don't think we've met; what do you do here?" for my example, or "Welcome aboard! I'm really excited to see what you accomplish here. My goal is to make sure this is a really positive experience for you, and my hope is that you'll be able to learn a lot while you're with us" for the original.

[arp242]

This is a problem I've been thinking about for the last week: how do you know a specific instance of something is sexist?

Sure, you can look at statistics and say that sexism exists, and that's all very important, but that doesn't really say all that much about individual social interactions, just like statistics about crime rates of ethnic group X doesn't really say anything about individual who belongs to ethnic group X.

A few years ago I tried to help someone on Stack Overflow who asked a series of very basic Python questions about the same piece of very basic code by pointing out that they're probably better off getting a Python book and actually learning the language first, as Stack Overflow is not really a mentoring platform. It was phrased fairly encouragingly (I thought anyway) and was intended just to help them in their struggle to get started with Python, but the person didn't take it very well and accused me of racism :-/

Perhaps the “everyone can become a good professional as long as they’re willing to learn” comment was especially patronizing towards her purely based on the fact that she was a women, or perhaps it wasn't. It's almost impossible to say for sure, especially not based on this one sentence devoid of any context. In my Stack Overflow example I know there wasn't any racism involved because I didn't even notice the person was Indian until after he made that comment, yet the person was still left with a feeling of a racist interaction. It was a shitty situation for everyone involved.

[asdff]

Reading between the lines, that says you aren't a good professional right now and have a lot to learn. That would be fine to tell to your nephew sitting on your knee or an undergrad you are mentoring, but I wouldn't say something like that to a coworker, that's being a jerk. If they got the job, clearly they are professional enough to work at your holy megacorp.