[wpietri]

He did literally both use rank sexist stereotypes and suggest women should be pushed out of men's labs. There's just no denying that. He did that as part of what he may have intended to be a joke. But when your audience doesn't laugh, it's a bad joke. If one is going to joke about a fraught topic, there's a strong obligation to succeed.

Even taking it as entirely sincere and well meant, something I don't think women in science are obliged to do, his "solution" is apparently for women to just ignore the sexism, something that places the burden for men's sexism on women. That is also sexist. So again, this looks like a failure to me.

I therefore think your theory this is a false positive is incorrect. I think the most that you can claim is that the level of outrage is disproportionate to the particular offense. But that analysis ignores the extent to which sexism is utterly commonplace in a society that has oppressed women for centuries and is still working its way out of it. So you can argue that this wasn't perfectly fair to this one guy, but it's not disproportionate to the problem this guy was part of. And a) that rings of himpathy to me, b) that ignores the much, much greater degree of unfairness caused by sexism, and c) that focus itself helps protect sexism. If fairness is really what's motivating you, your time is better spent on the many early-career women continually being harmed and pushed out of the sciences, not one old white guy who is already back doing what he wants to.

[loup-vaillant]

> his "solution" is apparently for women to just ignore the sexism, something that places the burden for men's sexism on women. That is also sexist. So again, this looks like a failure to me.

That I can concede.

> If fairness is really what's motivating you, your time is better spent on the many early-career women continually being harmed and pushed out of the sciences, not one old white guy who is already back doing what he wants to.

Agreed. This cuts both ways, though. Attention directed at slandering the guy on Twitter is attention not devoted to actually help discriminated women.

[wpietri]

If slander were the point, sure. But for a lot of the people calling out sexism, etc, the point is not really the one offending guy. It's the caste of guys who have been supporting and benefiting from the problem that the current focus is symptomatic of. It's the system itself. But humans mostly don't think in systemic terms act to solve systemic issues. They work in terms of narrative, of example.

[loup-vaillant]

If the point is not the one offending guy, how do we justify his sacking? We could say we needed to make an example of someone, and that ended up being him, but I bet my hat it wasn't a conscious choice.

My problem with this whole thing is that our attention is focused on the visible things, instead of the real things. Harassment to name one tends to happen quietly, subtly, often away from witnesses. There's also a good chance that sexist jokes in public speeches are a consequence of a sexist atmosphere more than they are a cause. While they should indeed be addressed, we should be wary of fixing the symptom (looking good on the internet or in front of journalists), without addressing the actual cause (toxic work environment).

[wpietri]

He was hired for leadership/advocacy positions and compromised his value as a leader/advocate, so I can see why he resigned.

I agree that his behavior was driven by the cultural artifacts of patriarchy, but the very best way to continue that culture is to have leaders who are comfortable with the those artifacts or are clueless about eliminating them.

I'm all for anything that fixes toxic work environments, of course. And there are many subtler approaches. But as the UMich situation shows, those approaches often fail. Existing systems are good at sweeping incidents under the rug. So I am also all for giant public reactions to failures that are so painful for the organizations involved that change actually happens.

As an example, consider Brock Turner's judge Aaron Persky. His prominent himpathy for a rapist made him an internationally known figure and cost him his judicial seat, the first CA judge to be recalled in 80 years. Was this fair? In one sense no, in that other judges were surely equally bad in going easy on rapists that they identified with. But on the other hand, he was part of an institution that had 170 years to get its act together on rape. So although I would have preferred that the CA legislative branch had fixed this problem at any time in the past, they hadn't. And you can bet that a lot of male judges who would have scoffed at, say, mandatory training have taken careful note of what happened to Persky.

If you think you can swing the creation of effective training programs or other more real interventions, definitely go for it. But if not, then I think you'll have to get comfortable with the big-failure-and-strong-reaction model. Because as a general rule, the people who have the power to drive systemic change are not doing much about America's endemic sexism and racism. Until that gets better, activists are going to keep using the powers they have, a big one of which is making big examples of visible problems.

[loup-vaillant]

Persky sounds like a good example of… being made an example of. Maybe not fair, but definitely useful: it very likely had a real effect on the remaining judges.

> If you think you can swing the creation of effective training programs or other more real interventions

Actually, I'm totally for utterly destroying the reputation of an individual, or an institution. It just have to be done for the right reasons. Take for instance rape culture as was prominent 5 years ago in several French business schools (it's not over yet), that I've learned about just this week. I confess I seriously had no idea. So the problem had (still has) several facets. First there's the general mood, which is blatantly sexist and demeaning to female students. Then there are a shocking string of sexual assaults, as well as many rapes and rape attempts (like 10% of all female students being victims of attempted or actual rape during their stay at the school —possibly more, probably no less).

It would appear the only way this can change is external pressure. What happens needs to be publicly visible, so we can have a scandal and apply popular pressure. The problem is what exactly what we should be scandalised by, how much, what punishments we wish to exact. If we fire a student or a professor for making a sexist joke, there's going to be serious backlash, downplay, and objections —including from me, see this whole thread above.

Which is why I believe it is best to punish the worst offences first: rape, attempted rape, failure to properly punish those, sexual assault… in roughly that order. Few will seriously object to a public scandal involving a strong presumption of rape. Few will seriously object to dissolving student organisations that routinely (or even just once) set up the conditions for repeated sexual assaults (to give one example: invite the girls first, give them free unlimited strong drinks for 2-3 hour, then let the boys in, all worked up and horny).

Once you get the ball rolling, it's easier to crack down on the sexist jokes. React with disgust, make them uncool, not fun any more, passé. And give a serious slap on the wrist if such happens at a public event (like a temporary suspension). Just focus on the rapes first, if only to gather sympathy.