[yelsgib]

I find posts like this extremely frustrating.

Yes, I feel sorry for this woman.

However, I also feel sorry for all male programmers. A lot of male programmers I've met have extremely pent-up sexual drives. A lot of them do not feel comfortable with women or society.

The prototypical male programmer was extremely nerdy in adolescence, had minimal interaction with women, and sex life - forget it. Now they are working in a job where they can just do what they like - program - and a woman comes along with all those pheremones and everything. And yes he acts awkward and crazy because holy shit there is a WOMAN who does what he does.

I fucking hate all of this talk about "manchildren" and "brogrammers" and whatever else. Stop essentializing the problem. Stop the man hate. Fucking hell.

Do you really think the man who said:

"Oop, Katie's got the low cut dress on today! I know where I'm sitting!"

is a happy, mentally-healthy, well-adjusted human being? Hmmm? Where's the compassion for him?

Why is our reaction to superficial wrongdoing so fucking immediate and moralistic? As if he's not a person with his own problems?

I'm at a loss for words, this whole clusterfuck makes me so angry.

[theorique]

I fucking hate all of this talk about "manchildren" and "brogrammers" and whatever else. Stop essentializing the problem. Stop the man hate. Fucking hell.

If you're experiencing this pushback from women in the profession as 'man hate' that's certainly your right. I view it more as listening to a professional colleague telling a story from her perspective. I'm not experiencing it as hate, more as hearing from a woman 'this is my perspective'.

Do you really think the man who said: "Oop, Katie's got the low cut dress on today! I know where I'm sitting!" is a happy, mentally-healthy, well-adjusted human being? Hmmm? Where's the compassion for him?

Perhaps he's a victim too - none of us know the full story and we can speculate until we're blue in the face. But wouldn't you agree that his actions are highly unprofessional, creepy, and personally discouraging to one particular woman, and part of a broader pattern of discouragement toward women in technology overall?

I'm at a loss for words, this whole clusterfuck makes me so angry.

So what do you recommend to fix the problem? Where will you direct all that energy that your anger has activated?

[Strallus]

Maybe the problem can't be fixed. As long as techies remain predominately male, this problem will persist.

And why are they predominately male? Either- A: Men, for some unknown reason, like programming better. B: The sexist environment drives women away.

Whichever one it is, the problem will not resolve itself. For A, as long as men like it better, and there are more of them, women will be seen as outsiders. For B, as long there are more men, some of whom are sexist, the women will be driven away and the ratio of m/f will stay the same.

[cellularmitosis]

A or B?

Consider this thought experiment: if it is the case that there is a ton of interest by women in programming, but that interest is frustrated by the "star wars" factor, that would imply that there's a huge pool of untapped female programming power. Why hasn't an enterprising business person realized this and created the next facebook-killer or google-killer by assembling a team of all-female ninjas?

My first reaction to this experiment would be "Because they were frustrated before they had the chance to graduate with a CS degree".

And the response to that would be to examine what the rate of CS enrollment is at all-female universities, if such things (still) exist. (I don't know that data looks like yet. lazyweb, can you answer this for me?)

[msbarnett]

> My first reaction to this experiment would be "Because they were frustrated before they had the chance to graduate with a CS degree".

Well, there's more to it than that. Female participation was fairly high in the 70s, dropped precipitously through the 80s, 90s, and early 00s, and is only now kinda-sorta-maybe starting to recover.

The hidden factor in there is the Personal Computer revolution. Prior to it, men and women entered college on roughly even footing w.r.t. computer exposure in their life-to-date. Once the personal computer took off, though, a big gender (and race) disparity cropped up.

Boys who had their very own computer to play with in their formative pre-college years received it, on average, around the age of 14 (IIRC, I'll try to hunt the exact stats down later).

Girls and minorities didn't receive a computer of their own to use until much later (19 as recently as the early 00s, which is, critically, after most people decide what to major in).

Intro CS classes turned into highly intimidating environments where the males had significant computer experience and may well have spent several years programming already; girls were at a significant disadvantage and enrolment fell off fast as they switched to majors where they weren't starting off at a several year disadvantage versus their peers.

[ordinary]

Intro CS classes turned into highly intimidating environments where the males had significant computer experience and may well have spent several years programming already

When I started my first year of CS at uni, I had almost no experience programming and I definitely felt intimidated by the (many) fellow students who already had 5+ years of experience.

During one of my first labs, I was told to write a toString method for a Java class. I could not understand why the signature had to say "String" twice. A TA spent half an hour trying to explain it to me and eventually gave up in desperation.

[cellularmitosis]

ah, that's very interesting.

actually, my personal experience corroborates with that data. I'm a bit of an outlier, having switched to CS in my second year and never having written a line of code before then (my (male) classmates and coworkers are always shocked to learn of this, because they had all started programming at a much younger age).

[yelsgib]

Good questions!

Sure, the guy's actions are unprofessional (though I hate the term), and discouraging. I wouldn't say creepy. I really hate the term "creepy" because probably (and yeah, here I'm speculating) the guy has been called a creep his whole life. Probably he's even creepy. But shouldn't we feel sorry for such a person?

(United States) society has a really bad habit of locating blame on male citizens and not looking further for causes of their behavior. There are lots of examples of this, but a really blatant one is the current incarceration rate. We like to say "this person acted badly and they suck - I'm sure they have reasons - but they suck!" and stop the conversation there.

Like I said, I'm really sad that one of the effects of this big pile of sad men is that women are discouraged. But I'm also sad that they're sad - and that they engage in behaviors which make them more sad. For instance: unhealthy eating patterns, drug/alcohol abuse, gaming addictions, porn addictions, etc. I'm also sad that they're mean to other men - e.g. flamewars. I'm sad about a whole big bucket of things.

---

You're asking whether I'd classify his actions in a particular way (unprofessional, creepy, discouraging) and, for the most part, I would. The question (as you point out) is where to go from here? What do I do with all this anger?

One thing I'd like to do is fight back against the conditions that make the world shit for nerdy teenage boys. I'll take myself as a prototype here, but as a nerdy teenage boy:

1. Other teenage boys are mean to you 2. Other teenage girls are mean to you 3. Your teachers more or less hate you for being better than them at the subjects they teach 4. Your parents think of you as a failure because you're not dating/doing normal things 5. Society at large is disgusted with you (media portrays you as a creepy pervert, etc.)

I mean, let's keep things in perspective, here. This woman had a shitty run of things, but was she suffering? Really? I (and a lot of people I know) had to put up with 100x more intolerance and aggression on a daily basis from the time I was 10 until I was 18. From both genders. I was bullied. I was laughed at. I was scorned by family and teachers. Sorry if we came out a little malformed.

Hell, I'm not even bad at interacting with women, since my skin normalized and I had the luck of working at a big retail store where I had to interact with them a lot. I had girlfriends and such and now I'm married. Shit has more or less fixed itself, but it's not really my fault as such.

Yeah, so what to do? Let's create art which actively portrays the sex-starved teenage nerd boy as heroic, in his own way? Let's give him some love, as a society? Let's extol his virtues, maybe once? What support is given to these people, really?

The sick thing is that for every such nerdy guy I know who became successful (mostly the smart ones, and mostly as programmers) I know 5 who were pretty much crushed by the stress of all this and have never really recovered.

[theorique]

I hear that. I think it's a positive step to have compassion for both sides in this workplace disagreement. And I sure don't mean to paint low-cut-shirt-comment-guy (LCSCG) as irredeemably evil.

The reality is, in the situation under immediate discussion he's in the role of the victimizer and he's crossed the lines in the workplace. Is what he did illegal or even fireable? No to the first, and probably not to the second. Does it mean he should never be allowed to work in his field again? Hardly.

But is it reasonable for him to be required have a talk with HR about what's 'OK' and what's 'not OK' when dealing with colleagues? I think so. Gaining a better understanding of the way your communication lands on people is a very important step in maturity and growth. Better he should learn such a thing later, in the workplace, rather than not at all.

And you're right - maybe he has a past history that drives him to behave the way he did / does. Perhaps earlier in his life LCSCG was victimized too. Perhaps he has anger or resentment against the popular girls who laughed at him or the football players who dropped his books in the mud and pushed his face in it. I don't know. None of us do.

Maybe LCSCG, and others in similar situation, can get some kind of help - coaching or therapy or socialization - that helps him interact with others in a way that's more resourceful. I think that's a result that almost anyone would support.

[bmj]

I started to reply to the grandparent, then came across this and realized you've summed up my thoughts nicely. The key here is that living in a society, there is some level of civility (respect, really) that you should try to attain. I'm fairly certain that many of us here have been put down (or worse) at some point in our lives. And I'm sure, at some point in my life, I made some poor choices because of those experiences. But, the point is, you absolutely do have to learn that acting out in kind to someone else isn't a solution. The solution is to treat others as you wish to be treated.

[flatline]

I agree that the guy is probably suffering from his own insecurities, but the bottom line is that he allowed his issues to place him in a situation of antagonizing a co-worker, probably without any repercussions, which speaks to a general climate of discrimination against women in the workplace. Still, some of your other points are interesting and I feel are valid in a larger context. Zen monasteries in Japan were segregated - women were a minority anyway, probably to a very large extent, but there were women monks, and they were generally not allowed much interaction with the male monks. All discipline among the males fell apart when a woman was in their presence, as the culture really gave them no background for normal interactions between the sexes. The head monks chose to sidestep the problem -- what could they possibly do to address the ills of the society at large?

[yelsgib]

My point is that there is no "bottom line."

Your analogy to a Zen monastery is a good one. For a lot of men (myself included), programming/chess/mathematics/etc. is an ESCAPE from women. I feel like what has happened in the past 10 years (note I'm not saying this is "wrong" - just that it's what happened) is that these monasteries have been invaded by women and that men have been acting very awkwardly.

Here's the real issue, I think - these men are acting AWKWARDLY. They are dealing with their emotions poorly. They are not good at dealing with their emotions, especially towards women. But when did they ever say that they were? Did we stop to think whether this is the reason that they went into a profession which (for a long time) was almost 100% male? To not have to deal with women and their emotions towards women? Do you think that a man who has trouble interacting with women in a relaxed social setting will be able to deal with them well in a professional setting?

The real pain for me is that this awkwardness is being recast as evil, sexism, etc. There's a lot of hate directed towards it, whereas what it needs (paradoxically) is love.

[sadface]

There are many problems with your post. First of all, women used to be far more represented in programming than they are today, with nearly 40% of CS degrees going to women in the early to mid 80's. These rates have been declining ever since and are continuing to decline. This is not a case of "women invading the man's space" as you seem to think, this is a case of women fleeing it. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16digi.html?_r=2

Secondly, you pass off these crass remarks by male programmers as mere awkwardness from poor social outcasts. How then do you classify the same type of remarks when made by, say, construction workers to attractive passers-by? Are they merely sad social outcasts, or are they brutes for taking advantage of their social setting to harass and demean women?

Women are harassed regularly both in and out of the workplace, and the responsibility needs to be on the harasser to change their behavior, not on the harassed to "find compassion".

[yelsgib]

Yeah, I guess I was factually wrong about rates of women/men employment in tech. I'm not sure this is crucial to my original point, though...

---

Construction workers are basically social outcasts. They have low social and economic status. I am very sad for them and I don't think of them as "brutes" (which term is part of their oppression).

Don't get me wrong - I think of capitalism as more or less fundamentally oppressive. Pretty much everyone is being shat on by the system and we need to keep this in mind when we talk about justice and ethics. People are under stress. These problems are not easy to fix.

---

I'm really not saying that the harassed has to find compassion - I'm saying that we all do.

The issue here is that you can treat a single harasser as a problem to be fixed, but when "harassment" becomes a systematic/structural phenomenon you can't think about things in terms of changing individuals anymore. You have to start thinking about policy decisions and social movements. I'm merely saying that when the social movement takes place which tries to fix this problem, I hope it takes into account the idea that the people doing the 'wrong' are not brutes, evil, etc. but mostly sad and awkward.

[tptacek]

If you seriously feel a need to ESCAPE from women, I think you should consider seeing a therapist of some sort. A lot of the things you're asking people to feel sorry for do deserve sympathy, because they are signs of mental illness.

[ht_th]

It is not that simple to equate a (perceived) need to escape from women to a mental illness. Female groups do behave differently than male groups in that they assert dominance and rank by psychological means whereas in male groups this happens more via physical means. It can be very hard for both women and men to enter a 'different-gender group', let alone to get accepted and feel comfortable. Especially in fields dominated by one gender, like, for example, construction, programming, education and child care, or health care this lead to problems and strengthens the trend of one-gender dominance.

In the last decade or two primary education has become a primarily female field even to that extend that male teachers (and teacher students) have chosen to leave the profession because they didn't feel at home in that environment any more. If you talk to them you'll hear stories about, basically, psychological war-fare among their female colleagues that they didn't want to get involved in but were forced into nonetheless. In these instances feeling the need to escape from women is quite natural.

[mindstab]

So women who are demonstrably and statistically still suffering under male oppression now need to treat you softly and with love while you are accidentally crappy back to them? Nurture you back to health?

What was that you were saying about men not being puppies?

[yelsgib]

I do not feed trolls.

[wpietri]

Sure, he has problems. We all have problems. But when you make your problems somebody else's problems, you're still an asshole.

It would be great if one of his colleagues would pull him aside, explain some things to him with a LART, and suggest that he get a therapist and an Ok Cupid account. But that's not obligatory, and is definitely not the problem of the person to whom he's being an ass.

[tomkarlo]

Thanks for perpetuating stereotypes in the name of excusing unacceptable behavior. Many of these same comments could probably also be applied to stock traders and construction workers as well.

While it's unfortunate that some people fail to develop appropriately and learn to interact in an appropriately professional manner in the workplace, I don't know if that means folks have to feel sorry for them any more than if they failed to learn the appropriate technical skills to do their job. Interacting appropriately with the opposite sex and other ethnicities, etc., is a reasonable expectation of someone who wants to work in a modern workplace (and I don't limit that to the office or technology jobs.)

[yelsgib]

I think of stock brokers/financial workers as particularly miserable people - you can be rich AND miserable! I don't know any construction workers, but it really doesn't seem like a happy job.

It's not about excusing behavior, it's about talking about the reasons behind that behavior so that those reasons can be addressed properly. The proper way to address issues whose source is pain and suffering is compassion. Not "feeling sorry for" a person, but understanding that they too are suffering and including that understanding in your analysis of the situation. The point that I find very frustrating in all of this is that the suffering which causes "inexcusable behavior" is not being talked about. We're not talking about -why- men act in this way, except in flippant ways - calling them "manchildren," etc.

[tomkarlo]

Having worked in both finance and software, I don't think either group is particularly happier or more miserable than the other. Both jobs have tradeoffs. Neither is truly stressful in comparison to say, being a soldier, EMT or policeman. (I can't speak to construction - but it does have a high injury rate.)

We're not talking about grossly inappropriate behavior here. We're really talking about behavior that's sufficiently in the margins that an otherwise "okay guy" might do it because they just don't understand why it's problematic, or they don't realize they're doing it. (As opposed to really blatant sexual harassment or misogyny, which is still common in lots of other industries.) It seems to me that the issue with most of what the OP relates is simply rooted in ignorance and/or insensitivity, rather than any kind of suppressed suffering.

[mindstab]

Too bad.

Programing or any place in the world isn't some special place for poorly socialized men to hang out and ... what... hide? You know what would be good? Learning social rules and improving. Them maybe his life wouldn't suck and he could get a date. And you know what would help that? Being forced into social situations with women and being slapped when he steps out of line.

If you have a puppy and it pees on the floor, you don't feel sorry for it and lock it in the house so it can pee on the floor forever, you train it not to.

If we "just give up" on these men and leave them alone they will be miserable forever. If they are forced to learn (at a later age, you know what, all the rest of us learned this a long time ago) they maybe they can get on with their lives and not be miserable.

[yelsgib]

Yeah, wouldn't it be great if everyone was just totally psychologically normal? I bet everyone can just fix everything that's wrong with themselves. Everyone has a surplus of love in their life available to help them overcome their problems.

Men are not puppies, asshole.

[eropple]

Most of the time, there are many shades of gray on an issue. To my mind, this is not one. At my employer, our (not small) engineering department is probably around 10% female. I'm trying to think of anyone in the engineering department that would be so catastrophically unaware as to think comments like that to a female co-worker would be even remotely acceptable. I literally-literally can't fathom it, and I can't even conceive of working with such a person.

You're right: men are not puppies. They're human beings who are capable of owning their actions and changing their behavior if it is unacceptable. I would also say that someone so fundamentally damaged as to be unable to restrain sexist or racist behaviors is not a valuable employee regardless of technical skill or contribution--but unable is not the same thing as unwilling, and I have a hunch that those who are actually "unable" are few.

[beedogs]

So you're saying that anyone who makes misogynist remarks at work has some sort of "mental issue", and that because of this we should just let it slide, or at least be sympathetic?

Give me a fucking break.

Calling out negative behavior tends to be very effective.

[burgerbrain]

If you want to treat the symptoms, then by all means villianize the perpetrators.

If however you are interested in treating the cause, then I suggest you listen to what yelsgib has to say.

[yelsgib]

No. I am not saying that.

I'm saying that in this particular case a lot of the "negative behavior" stems from extreme internal pressures.

[eropple]

It's not the author's job to serve as a target for those negative behaviors. The responsibility lies with those whose behavior is unacceptable to find a way to operate, for lack of a better phrase, within expected parameters.

[beedogs]

And it isn't even difficult to do so, most of the time! Everyone has some personality traits they could stand to work on; those that don't will look for any excuse they can find to justify their continued poor behavior.

[InclinedPlane]

Being a victim is no excuse to victimize others.

[yelsgib]

There is no "nexus" of victimhood. I'm saying that we're hyper-focusing on one particular form of suffering.

[mattdeboard]

What. Are you... are you serious? I hope to god there's a rational point that you're trying to make, you're just making it very, very badly because you're so angry at the "man hate."

[j_baker]

What makes you think Jeffrey Dahmer was a happy, mentally-healthy, well-adjusted human being? Where's the compassion for him?

[yelsgib]

I have great compassion for Jeffrey Dahmer.

And do you realize that you just compared making an awkward joke to killing loads of people?

[j_baker]

I made no such comparison. It's called Reductio ad absurdum: http://www.iep.utm.edu/reductio/

My point was that if we accept your argument, we must also accept the patently absurd (at least to me) argument that one must have compassion for Jeffrey Dahmer, and it doesn't sound as though you disagree.

[yelsgib]

Why is it abdurd to have compassion for jeffrey dahmer?

[strangetimes]

I have a lot of compassion for him.

[dmor]

A serial killer

[mithaler]

I have sympathy for the outcast with poor social skills because of mistreatment by society.

But such an outcast ceases to be sympathetic the instant s/he makes someone else's life unpleasant. This isn't about "man hate"; this is about someone who made an offensive comment that made someone else uncomfortable. That's not OK, and we reasonably expect better socialization in our peers than this. If the person who made this remark is not a "happy, mentally-healthy, well-adjusted human being", then no matter how much compassion his condition might reasonably engender, he should get help.

Furthermore, by equating a lack of compassion for a man who is "not healthy" with "man hate", you implicitly claim that "men are naturally unhealthy". To me, this comes across as a greater denigration of men than any harsh reaction leveled at the oppressor.