I feel that to an extent the above article misses the point. It strains to draw this distinction of "remember that women want to be treated like people in a work context but also that women are different than men and you should remember that too." Its exhausting and puts the emphasis on the wrong place.
You know why people like Adria Richards are hypersensitive about dick jokes? Because women are a minority in programming and being a minority sucks. If there were as many female CEOs as male CEOs in tech and we knew as little about Marissa Mayer's child-care situation as we do about Jeff Bezos's, nobody would give a fuck about dick jokes. Women aren't the minority in tech because men make dick jokes--(some) women are sensitive about men making dick jokes because they are in the minority. When people don't feel awkwardly self conscious about their place in the power dynamic, they are free to laugh at jokes like a normal person.
Fix the representation problem and all of this will take care of itself.
I think he's saying that being a minority and feeling like a minority makes you sensitive to basically everything. Dick jokes just happen to get included in that.
Not sure I agree, but that is how I interpreted his post anyway.
Well that's the thing with this community. We think we're clever enough to avoid basic human nature and NOT discriminate a minority. I believe this can happen with dedication and extreme stories like the pycon's one to remind us of how being a minority sucks when people act too human.
No, I think he meant what he said. If there wasn't an unbalanced representation of genders, the sensitivity would be less because there would be less self consciousness about your gender in the situation.
You can fix the numbers for gender, considering they are in fact the majority of the population. There is no associated power disparity for blue eyed people. Racial minorities will always present a problem.
Women are humans. Some of us (humans) find toilet humour funny and a great way to escape situations, some of us dislike it and find it unprofessional, some of us just don't give a fuck.
Just talk like you talk, be aware of alienating people you care about, fuck those you don't, and do cool shit.
I like toilet humour. It is silly and fun and stupid. It is ironic and whatever fucking poops. Fuck off telling me and other humans how to be.
Immature people can appear sensible and be totally professional in their language. Some of the most interesting, awesome, intelligent and mature people I know are fans of toilet humour.
Shut the fuck up, don't alienate awesome people (by putting tits in slide shows, duh), and keep making awesome code.
Men, and especially white and Asian men, are afraid and confused because other people have this powerful weapon they can use against them called "getting offended". The rules for how it works are fuzzy and not printed anywhere and anyways they vary from place to place. So men, and especially highly logical men, are scared, curious, and very motivated to try to figure out the rules.
In recent cases of sexual harassment at conferences, the rules were very clear-cut. The lesson was "don't touch a woman that doesn't want to be touched by you" or "don't put porn in a presentation", for those few men dense enough not to know that in the first place. Conferences learned a lot and got serious about being safer places for women. Pycon was a leader in that.
But this time everything is scary and confusing. People don't know what lesson to take. So they're blindly groping for an answer.
There are people that have the "I'm offended" weapon and people that don't. As far as I can tell offending a woman or a non-Asian racial minority is considered to be a Very Bad Thing. It might even get you fired. And there are no rules. Every person is different and you don't know who you will offend and who you won't. Adria was spotted playing "Cards Against Humanity" at the conference and I would assume that I would be safe making almost any joke in conversation with someone that played CAH. But I would be wrong and she would kill my job with her special weapon.
There's good reason these groups have these weapons. They have historically gotten the shit end of the stick from everybody else and we are sensitive to any potential bias compensate for that. But with power comes responsibility and we can't go using our weapons unreasonably if we are all going to get along.
I don't mean to have a "irrelevant racial tinge" and you can correct me if you think I'm wrong, but my read is that white and Asian men don't have this weapon, unless they are disadvantaged in some other obvious way. For example, if a handicapped white man got offended at someone making some statement related to that handicapp it might be treated with the same gravity. But most don't have the weapon, so they are scared and confused and grope for understanding (like the OP).
I've never been to /r/MensRights. I guess I'm not supposed to say things like this. I could just think forbidden thoughts to myself, but I would rather engage in dialog with others to learn more.
Adria was spotted playing "Cards Against Humanity" at the conference and I would assume that I would be safe making almost any joke in conversation with someone that played CAH. /But I would be wrong and she would kill my job with her special weapon/
Yes, white and/or Asian guy. Live in fear. The rules have changed. There are no rules. Bullets won't harm the women unless they're made of silver. The garlic thing is a myth; they'll just laugh at you before they use their terrifying "I'm offended" fangs to rip your throat out. Keep dogs outside your door to spot the Terminators and the gay people who look just like real humans.
Some guy just lost his job you know. Yes he's a member of a majority and yes majority members have an easier time in their field on average than the minorities in it. But that doesn't change the fact that he suffered real harm and he has three kids to feed. Your flippancy is chilling.
The worst thing to come out of the pycon event is that reasonable people like the OP are trying to "get" why this was a case of sexism. The answer is that it wasn't, and many posters, including women, have pointed out why. It's an issue of professionalism, not sexism. This kind of post of is exactly the reason why some have remarked that Adria may have set back her cause.
i disagree. he seems to be saying that the industry needs women because of the new and different, "grown-up, nurturing, ..." perspective they can bring to the table. i think the industry needs women because, well, when you arbitrarily exclude half the human race from contributing, you are unquestionably losing something of significant value.
the thing is this: women have already gotten a raw deal by being socialised to find sex uncomfortable, and by living in cultures where sex has been linked to aggression. the problem with the pycon incident was not that anything was intrinsically wrong with dick jokes, but that it was creating a hostile environment in the context of a playing field that was already tilted.
the critically important thing to take away, in my opinion, is not that "women are different" (because that lumps women into one group and men into another, and posits that there is less variance within the groups than across them), it is that women live in a different environment than men do, and that while men are unaffected when they forget this, women are reminded of it every single day. (look up microaggression theory for a lot more about this.)
"women have already gotten a raw deal by being socialised to find sex uncomfortable"
The counter to this is that they should be made more comfortable by not ~forcing~ them to pretend to be comfortable with awkward conversations in professional situations. Some things aren't as progressive as you imagine.
Right, but plenty are attempting to sidestep this comfort level and any contextualization, demanding that women enjoy lame dick jokes for the comfort of the men around them.
that's exactly what i was trying to say. the thing to do is notice the context that leads women to disproportionately find sex jokes uncomfortable, not to conclude that "women are different from men and therefore..."
1. States known facts incorrectly showing poor research (Alex Reid was not the PlayHaven developer fired and so this statement is almost certainly not what he wanted to be saying The event I'm referring to is the fiasco at PyCon involving Adria Richards, Alex Reid, Playhaven, and SendGrid.(http://blog.playhaven.com/addressing-pycon/)
2. Recommends placing women on pedestal
3. Recommends taking women off pedestal
4. Ends by recommending women be placed back on pedestal Perhaps the reason we've had so much trouble maturing is that we don't have enough women to help us make the transition from child to adult. Their attitudes, their ways of thinking, different from ours, may be the very things we need to complete us as an industry, and a profession, and as a craft. It seems to me we need these women in order for our profession to become a profession.
Do a lot of guys approach coding with a conquest mentality? I found this sentiment particularly interesting. I've always had a more creative / constructive mindset while coding and curious / scientific mindset while debugging. As a male programmer, I'm curious if I live out in the tails of the distribution, or if Uncle Bob is less average than he assumes.
I came here to talk about this, because I also really don't feel that way. I feel more like I'm struggling to say something, and bugs are manifestations of my inability to be terse and precise. When everything comes together, it feels like I've communicated perfectly and eloquently. I get exactly the same feeling from programming as from debate, but my goal in both cases is simply to acquire the right understanding and be properly understood.
I think my mindset is similar yours, but I relate to what the author is saying because it reminds me of some of my coworkers who I find a little tiring.
I'd say it depends on the problem. For myself, bug fixing, sorting out a bad performance problem, those are issues of conquest.
Developing a new product, adding a feature, that's like tending a garden.
In one project I can be proud of slaying dragons and nurturing a flower. I like the balance.
Guys today are the not too distant descendants of guys who where fighting in wars, hunting, fishing. The feeling of conquest, discovery, risk taking, competition was there for a long time whatever the causal relationship testosterone, genes, environment, evolution, not sure but it was there.
Well now we sit in cubicles, typing on keyboards, sometimes drawing on whiteboards. However our brains and bodies, hormones, basic desires are still not too different those who hunted and fought in wars. So now instead of a bringing down a huge bison, we re factor a shit-ton of code. Or implement some killer features. It provides some of the similar sensation of accomplishment, bragging, feeling good and important.
I'm sorry but I disagree with your opinion. Women are welcome in the tech industry but many parents (not all) simply don't encourage their daughters to be programmers because in truth it can be a very unsocial introverted career path. Who really wants their kid to sit in a chair for 14 hours a day staring at a dull light. At first everyone loves the idea of little genius engineers until their kid is on the machine for a whole week and turns into a techno-zombie. If my kid has a passion for it then fine, if not then I am secretly relieved.
Sales, finance, construction, military, agriculture and religion (if you consider that an industry) could learn more from this lecture than the tech industry. I grew up working in construction and farming, interned for sales reps, and created tools for the finance industry. The tech industry is a woman's best friend compared to those work environments. At least in tech you can commit code and be solely judged by the quality of your work and not your sex, age, race, or physical abilities.
I went to school for a female-dominated profession (yes, there are quite a few out there where the balance goes the other way). I can assure you that if you find the things men say offensive, you haven't heard anything...
I want to add the caveat that I am NOT attempting to appeal to hypocrisy.
While I agree that there is a limit, I don't see how calling languages "estrogen" is offensive and I don't understand how calling a hat "cute" is offensive.
Maybe its because I grew up in the 90s, when the world starting embracing the insanity that is the PC revolution. We've (and I mean "White Men") made it a point to relabel and rename everything to be non-offensive. Blacks are no longer African Americans. Indians are now Native Americans. The guy cleaning your toilet is not a Janitor, but a Maintenance Technician. The Secretary is now a Front Office Assistant. Parents started raising their children on Barney the Dinosaur and that is pretty much when it all fell apart.
For golly, people. We've created a purely insane world, where even mild jokes have become Purely Offensive and Crude. We have to bite our tongues and be careful of everything we say, and I hope you can see how that this attitude has created an unhealthy ecosystem for everyone involved, including the well-meaning welcomers and the curious, ultimately destroying any ability to progress past 2001.
I really don't want to believe that the programming world is so pent up about sexuality. I want to believe the industry as a whole is highly intelligent and mature, and if a women goes on stage and says something silly about a Cute Cowboy Hat some dude is wearing, we don't see it something offensive or threatening to men.
I can't imagine that other industries go through this so much. Certain branches of marketing, spas, hair cutting, anything to do with writing, fashion, among many other professions are female-dominated. The men who enter simply enter and understand that they are entering into a world where yes, they will be told in no uncertain terms that she is not feeling well and just started her period. He will be told in no uncertain terms that size does matter. He will be told things he cares to never hear about again, but he joined into that smallish arena so he has to accept it.
It's all an illusion, people. Men and women both talk smack and say gross stuff. We can't whitewash everything and pretend that we will never say something stupid but if it isn't something that would be offensive on Ellen Degenerous or The Voice -- which say way worse things than you'd hear at a conference -- then it should be fair game to say in your presentation: the trash those people say on those TV shows are more offensive than anything any presenter would consider saying. I'm not saying the PyCon should be Married with Children the Sequel. I'm just saying to let small stupid words go by and don't hang onto every small word as an offense. You can create drama anywhere, and it just so happens that programming is an easy target to fuss up and create drama because the men are so convinced that they are wrong that they've allowed themselves to be put on the defense at all times, and there is really no logical or good reason for it, no matter how much you write about the justifications of this attitude.
> While I agree that there is a limit, I don't see how calling languages "estrogen" is offensive and I don't understand how calling a hat "cute" is offensive.
To be frank, you don't see these things as offensive because you're ignorant. I grew up in the same era as you did, and I'm guessing you just had the misfortune of not being asked to walk in another person's shoes. You go ahead and enjoy all that delicious privilege.
> I don't see how calling languages "estrogen" is offensive
When I first read this in the article, I cringed. Then, when he further tried to 'explain himself' with, "I was mostly making a joke about how seriously C++ programmers take themselves compared to Java programmers," I cringed even harder. IT'S OFFENSIVE TO SAY THAT ONLY MEN TAKE THEMSELVES SERIOUSLY IN PROGRAMMING. It boils down to men = serious and women = emotional, flippant, hysterical, etc. It's a horrible horrible analogy and quite frankly I'm surprised that didn't blow up in his face even more than it did.
> I don't understand how calling a hat "cute" is offensive.
Again, ignorance. Would you tell a male admiral that his hat was "cute"? This is a classic case of infantilizing women, which makes it seem like Grace Hopper's brilliant, groundbreaking work was just another finger painting that can be tacked onto the refrigerator. "Aww, look at what the cute little girly did! Go run along now and put away your EasyBake Oven."
>> To be frank, you don't see these things as offensive because you're ignorant. I grew up in the same era as you did, and I'm guessing you just had the misfortune of not being asked to walk in another person's shoes. You go ahead and enjoy all that delicious privilege.
Amazing how you can write such stuff about someone that you never met. I'll just say you're dead wrong and not bother extrapolating.
The rest of your comment is representative of the very crap I am railing against. You're reading way to much into it and now you want to create drama and tons of deeper meaning into something means almost nothing at all.
EDIT: I just read your comment downstream about Affirmative Action. Fwiw, I am a white guy that went to an all-black school. When I say that, I mean, I was like 1/3 of the entire white population. Regardless, blacks didn't like AA either. I'll let you figure out why.
While we're enjoying our "delicious privilege", I hope you're similarly enjoying your oh-so-righteous victimization complex. Taking offense when no offense is intended is the very picture of being the fun police. You're the kid on the playground who would beg to be let into the game, but then run, crying, to tell his/her (see how neutral I'm being?) mother as soon as he/she got fouled, and then would complain when no one wanted to play with him/her. No one likes that kid.
>> It boils down to men = serious and women = emotional, flippant, hysterical, etc. It's a horrible horrible analogy and quite frankly I'm surprised that didn't blow up in his face even more than it did.
While perhaps not the most innocuous choice of words, testosterone is associated with aggression and strength because testosterone makes you aggressive[1] and strong[2]. Strictly speaking, his statement is not even talking about genders, it's talking about hormones.
Please be civil. I asked you nicely when you were complaining about death threats and you ignored it. I've flagged that comment and the three comments since then. This isn't the place for sarcasm, all-caps, insults, or flame wars.
>When I first read this in the article, I cringed. Then, when he further tried to 'explain himself' with, "I was mostly making a joke about how seriously C++ programmers take themselves compared to Java programmers," I cringed even harder. IT'S OFFENSIVE TO SAY THAT ONLY MEN TAKE THEMSELVES SERIOUSLY IN PROGRAMMING.
Disclaimer: not defending dizzystar.
The way I interpreted it was that, compared to Java programmers, C++ programmers have a "macho" attitude about being "real programmers," which as a phrase is riffing on the idea of the "real man." Again, not that women don't possess the quality "real" in any way whatsover, but just that I can't even think of what the female equivalent of macho is. Perhaps Bob Martin would have done better to say that the C++ community suffered from excessive testosterone. That's what I believe he was implying, but as he says, we're both just Wilson talking over the fence here.
While this is true, technology and society are conspiring to make society even more coarse and making coarseness even more acceptable. (for example, tweeting and txting and expletive usage among teenagers and beyond). Not only that, but there is also a slow moving trend away from the separation of work and home, professional demeanor and casual demeanor at work. This blurriness contributes to this kind jocular humor creeping into the workplace. There is also the facet of how this is perceived by a people in a society (how in France double entendres are quite normal and sexual repartee btwn the sexes is in metropolitan areas present).
Watch family TV shows form the 70s. Did they say things like "Mom, this sucks"? Watch a family TV show from modern times. It's normal to hear teenaged characters say that on TV. Does anyone even think she meant to say "Mom, that sucks dick"? The ellipsis would have been tagged mentally in the 70s --not today.
What I'm saying is that college/crude humor has crept into society wholesale. Unless there is a societal move away from that, it'll be hard to decouple that from people, even in a professional setting. There would be two forces in opposition and the demarkation is getting blurry.
IMO, this comes from the ideology that the reason underprivileged groups are underprivileged is because of negative social expectations that have a negative subconscious effect on their performance. I don't find it completely convincing (there is much evidence which refutes it), but there are some small experimental studies which support it. I find it plausible that in a group where the minority is extremely small the effect may be large and significant.
You Americans have a real love story with this political correctness thing that I'll never understand, when I say love I mean bashing it.
In the past it was the commies, now that they're gone I believe this is a good way of saying why things fell apart and why the are not as good as in the old days, if they were ever that good.
Ellen Degeneres or The Voice or any of the other false equivalences you're desperately reaching to make is not the professional technical workplace.
If you run in any of my technical circles, put on a technical presentation, or otherwise represent at a technical conference, and you make "jokes" that are sexual innuendos of any kind or are otherwise unprofessional....
You will be gone. Gone.
Count on it.
The tech world created these shitty circumstances for women and this shitty little drama because we males in that world have behaved abominably. Over decades.
Guess what? Now we're going to start demonstrating that we can be professional, or heads are going to roll. Continually.
"sexual joke" are not necessarily "sexist jokes" and there is no particular reason to say that women are somehow traumitized by the mere mention of sexuality. Is making sexual jokes at a conference unprofessional? Yes, but it's unprofessional regardless of the gender of anyone or everyone in earshot. Whether it's unprofessional enough to justify:
"You will be gone. Gone."
"Count on it."
is quite clearly a subjective matter. All I can say is, don't invite me to represent at any event you put on. Being professional is one matter, catering to PC bullshit in the misguided belief that you can avoid even the remotest possibility of offending someone, is quite something else.
It's not about "the remotest possibility of offending people", it's about the cultural background that a large penis is pushed as a dominating, masculine thing, and being in a room of 80% male attendees and someone makes a "big dongle" comment (for example) skews the environment in a male-friendly-masculine-dominance way and a female-unfriendly way.
In the same way that being around a group of really rich people and saying you missed an appointment because your car broke down and they say "didn't want to get the weekend car wet, eh? Why didn't you hire one for the day you cheapskate! Hahaha!".
It's not the mention of money that matters, it's the automatic dismissal of your life situation as something that doesn't happen to real people - it isn't even a concept - to all the other people in the group, and how alienating that scenario is to be on the 'wrong' side of. The implicit pushing of the idea "everybody" is rich and because you aren't, well, you aren't really a person. Not really.
And you say "hey, I couldn't afford one, I missed whatever it was and that sucked for me" and they say "what do you want me to do, pretend I'm a pauper forever and never talk about money? That's just political correctness GONE MAD!".
But the request is not "they should pretend to be poor", it's more like "they should consider your situation as a real person and then not say something that sounds like a clueless bozo said it".
Since you've started this analogy what am I doing in that group of rich people if I don't belong there? Also, do I really want to be there or am I doing it just because it's cool or whatever?
I hadn't decided, but it ought to be something basically irrelevant to the point, so not a country club or a networking event with potential investors. Maybe you were pushed by family obligation into visiting your spouse's rich relative at their lakeside property and all got invited next door to a barbecue. How's that?
They're all rich and friendly, they're basically "nice" people, and you're not rich in their league. They're "trying" to help you fit in, but somehow everything they say just helps to heighten the feeling that you aren't equal and don't belong. You roll with the punches, you aren't offended, but you are alienated. You'll make the best of the night, but next time you'll try harder to avoid going.
Which is fine for an informal night with strangers, but it's not the feeling a trying-to-be-inclusive professional event wants to invoke in significant fractions of the population. It's the difference between them "trying" to be friendly (in quotes - meaning acting how they would act to each other to be friendly) and actually being friendly in the all you have to do is whatever it takes sense.
Speaking of PC bullshit, let me quote from the agile manifesto website [1] (emphasis mine):
> This freedom from the inanities of corporate life attracts proponents of Agile Methodologies, and scares the begeebers (you can’t use the word ‘shit’ in a professional paper) out of traditionalists.
It looks like you've already been unprofessional by using that word :-) By the way, I don't want to be part of those events, too.
> "sexual joke" are not necessarily "sexist jokes"
There is absolutely no point to this statement. Inappropriate comments do not need to be tied to a particular group of people.
> there is no particular reason to say that women are somehow traumitized [sic] by the mere mention of sexuality.
Thanks for the man-splaining. Are you, by chance, on a tour of inner city high schools telling black kids about how affirmative action is unfair to white people?
> Yes, but it's unprofessional regardless of the gender of anyone or everyone in earshot.
Oh ok, so you're fine with an offensive joke being offensive, you just have an issue with the fact that a woman brought it up. Got it.
> All I can say is, don't invite me to represent at any event you put on. Being professional is one matter, catering to PC bullshit in the misguided belief that you can avoid even the remotest possibility of offending someone, is quite something else.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I will happily stand by any and every thing I've said here, but I feel no need to defend strawmen and intentional misinterpretations.
Better yet, just go back to Slashdot and do your trolling there.
What exactly did men do that was so terrible to women -- in this industry -- that you feel like everyone has to make amends, and anything that "could" be a sexual joke should result result in the drama bomb we just seen or any ultimatums?
I did NOT suggest that you should be making bathroom jokes on stage. I DID suggest that calling a hat "cute" is not the slightest bit offensive. Seriously zero need to call for an apology over that.
You know what this drama bomb does to your profession?
-- It makes your profession unwelcome to me (male) and to many other people who would like to join in. We just had a post on the front page yesterday written by a woman who found this whole hoopla offensive and I am willing to bet excellent odds that women don't want to be part of this drama either.
Why?
-- The immaturity and the way you handled this stuff, as a community, is so incredibly shameful and backwards that I simply refuse to be a part of it. I would love to go to PyCon or similar places, but this makes it look like your profession is virulent and everyone is at each others throats, and any small spark is going to light a huge fire of controversy. I don't want to be a part of a drama bomb and I don't want to be part of a club that is openly succumbing to every whim of Drama Queens and Drama Kings.
Grace Hopper, one of the most accomplished computer scientists not just of her day but ever. Rose to dizzying heights in the US military because they needed her so much. A towering giant of the field. So when the picture of her comes up on screen, does the speaker say any of this? Does he acknowledge her greatness? No. He says she's wearing a cute hat. All her accomplishments and ability reduced to how she looks in a hat.
The problem here has absolutely nothing to do with the hat.
This debate is entirely moot without context. I imagined/read it as something like:
>"...Ah, and this absolutely brilliant woman started that trend. Just look at her, a beacon blahblahblah wrapped in that cute hat."
If neither of us have been there, its pointless arguing the statement. My point is simply that when I do such talks I frequently inject humor into it, just the way he had. Reading it as a completely isolated comment seems highly unrealistic to me.
When you give your talks with humour injected, do people in the audience come to you afterwards and suggest that your remarks were unhelpful to some people in the audience, as someone did in this case? In essence, do people politely complain to you about what you said?
If they did, would you ignore them and carry on injecting your humour?
Maybe because I'm young and I don't know "how it works" yet, but I would hate for the Tech industry as I know now to become "professional." To me, the tech industry is one of the few places I can work without wearing a suit and tie everyday and still make more than 6 figures. I don't want my presentations to be "censored" because someone has a stick too far up their ass. I don't want the next Linus to be fired because he was "unprofessional" in the way made a statement. Maybe I'm trying to cling too much to College, but I like being able to talk to my co-workers as friends and not robots where work goes in grunts come out.
I get people aren't 100% politically correct. I'm black and some people still panic when the word "nigga" plays on their speakers. I know its a song, not KKK propaganda, and I'm not going to give a lawsuit for "oppressing" me with your taste of music. I think its important to consider people's intents for their action. I think thats crucial for maintaining the "hippie" culture of Silicon Valley. I'm a grown man and I know women have periods and men have dicks. You know what pisses me off more than sex jokes? Cat Jokes. I fucking hate cats. If I can keep myself composed over a shitty 5 second cat joke, I think most people can make it through a man saying a woman has a "cute navy hat."
Lastly, I understand there are lines however. The CouchDB porn star talk was way over the line. That is something I don't even understand how most guys would be comfortable with. All I'm saying is we should recognize when people are being hyper sensitive and when people are really being insensitive.
Being in an industry where there is still a chance to do new things and be judged on our work instead of other things is pretty great.
We just need to be sure that we all act with the maturity and respect befitting our good fortune--this includes dealing politely with things we disagree with, and having the good grace not to cause drama over dumb shit.
When I say that I think we need to be more inclusive of women, the last thing I'm saying is that we need to turn every company into an HR police state (trust me, I've worked in those places before and they're hellish).
However, I think I can touch on one of your points to help explain why these seemingly petty word choices are more important than most people think.
> I understand there are lines however. The CouchDB porn star talk was way over the line. That is something I don't even understand how most guys would be comfortable with.
Your response to the CouchDB talk was similar to many people in the tech community, which (correct me if I'm wrong) was, "how did they even think that that would be a good idea?"
Well, chances are the CouchDB guys wanted to be funny and push the envelope a little to generate buzz about their product. But when we're constantly surrounded by this subtle sexualized environment in tech, our perspective changes as we become desensitized to it. So, what may have seemed to be a slightly risque presentation to the CouchDB presenters becomes a much bigger deal to people on the outside looking in.
While it might not seem like a man saying "and look at that cute little hat" about one of the most respected women in our field is a big deal, consider it in the context of what women see or hear at that conference on the same day:
* booth babes
* "dude, I fuckin raped that shit" (related to any job 'done well')
* being groped in an elevator
* scantily-clad women on every desktop background for entire rows of machines
* constant unsolicited flirtation and getting 'checked-out' (and being called a bitch after you say no)
* Guy 1: "I swear to God, this bitch that works with me never does anything right." Guy 2: "Well, I saw on Reddit that a lot of women's brains just aren't designed to program. They're designed for raising children and..." Guy 1: "Making sandwiches" [Both share a laugh]
* "Wow, I'd totally fork his repo."
It's just like...enough already, you know?
Also, I just want to point out that, no matter what the severity of the offense is in the tech community, there are always people that try to diffuse the conversation by saying,"Now, I consider myself to be a die-hard feminist, but we need to learn to pick our battles..." yada yada.
Here's part of Matt Aimonetti's infamous response to the criticism of his CouchDB presentation: "The topic of my talk was obvious, and I would have hoped that people who were likely to be offended would have simply chosen not to attend my talk or read my slides on the internet."
> consider it in the context of what women see or hear at that conference on the same day:
I think this is the problem with my perspective here. I don't have experience with any of those other things. At the company I work for, nobody thinks booth-babes, sexualized desktop wallpaper, or bland acceptance of horribly sexist stereotypical "humor" is a good idea. We wouldn't attend a con where any of those were the norm; we'd probably boycott it.
And since we don't have those things, the dongle-jokes seem a lot less like "adding onto the pile."
How confident are you in this prediction? You sound very confident -- "Count on it." -- but hoping that something will happen and being certain that it will actually happen are two different things.
I was presenting at a tech conference last year and was trying to discuss the essence of PHP, and I accidentally uttered the phrase "php-ness". Accidental, it got a small chuckle, and we moved on (8:30am session time IIRC - not enough coffee yet). I'm glad someone didn't record it and sue the organizer or try to get me fired over it.
I'm curious how these situations are handled in Germany or France or anyplace where sexuality is not as much of a cultural taboo as in the US, though the tech industry may be just as gender-unbalanced.
> Men, can you imagine how hard it would be if all the women were constantly, and openly, talking about tampons, cramps, yeast infections, cheating, being cheated on, Trichomoniasis, faking-it, etc? I don't know about you, but It would make me feel out of place.
You're right--you don't know about me. I fully wish this were the case!
The place I want to work is the place where people are people, not separately "men" and "women": and people like fart jokes, dick jokes, cramping jokes, faking-it jokes, what have you. They also like pictures of cats!
...or, at least, when you ask them by themselves, they do. But something strange happens when you ask them in a sufficiently large group: suddenly they'll say there are certain things that are horribly offensive, even though they're not "personally" offended!
Now, someone with some evolutionary-biology experience can probably give you the full low-down as to why, but here's my (limited) understanding: when we're in a group of people large enough, and who don't know one-another particularly well, we start to think we might have the opportunity to mate with someone else in the group without that becoming a "sore point" for the group later on (especially if the group isn't closed to new people entering/leaving.) So, we start to enforce these "global social norms" on one another, even if we don't agree with them ourselves. We do it so we can show we can "do the dance" of mating, that we're clever enough to avoid slipping up in the complex social machinery we've instantiated, and thus we sort ourselves into rankings of social ability. Both the people in higher and lower rankings subliminally know their position, and so the people in lower rankings are subconsciously proscribed to submit to those of higher rankings when a rivalry springs up for the affection of a potential mate. Thus, the people best at the dance have the most choice, and we call that something like "charisma."
We drop the whole dance when we end up in groups of "just friends." If nobody around us is a potential mate, why bother? Around friends, we tell all the fart jokes we like, and nobody gets offended. But take those same friends and sit them at a fancy banquet--where strangers can hear them--and suddenly they'll be shushing one another to prevent those jokes from slipping out!
Now, in my opinion, the whole etiquette game is a game--and you shouldn't be playing games at work. It's easy enough to avoid when everyone at your workplace are friends--and this seems to be the real goal that employers are trying to foster through "team-building": the ability for everyone to see one-another as someone to goof off with and tell silly jokes, not a potential mate (and especially not a potential rival for mates!) But it rarely succeeds, precisely because humans are intelligent and observant social animals, who notice when, despite the trappings of "friendship", nobody really cares about what anyone else did on the weekend, nobody will actually keep in touch with anyone else after they move on to another job, etc.
I don't know how to solve the problem, other than to form companies solely from people who are already friends (like YC tends to do!) and then not grow them at all beyond that :)
> Men, can you imagine how hard it would be if all the women were constantly, and openly, talking about tampons, cramps, yeast infections, cheating, being cheated on, Trichomoniasis, faking-it, etc? I don't know about you, but It would make me feel out of place.
Would. Not. Give. A. Fuck. Talk to me about whatever shit is bothering you, make jokes about it. The time I start thinking you are a self-absorbed douchebag is when you act like a self-absorbed douchebag.
> Men, can you imagine how hard it would be if all the women were constantly, and openly, talking about tampons, cramps, yeast infections, cheating, being cheated on, Trichomoniasis, faking-it, etc? I don't know about you, but It would make me feel out of place.
I've been the only male in a female dominated IT department before, and you know what... it does feel a bit awkward being a minority. It's not fun, and you always feel like something of an outsider in a sense, even when the other people are friendly and accept you. But at the end of the day, being offended is a choice... you can choose to take offense, or not take offense. And there's a huge gap between something that's merely offensive and actual "abuse" or "sexual harassment". When I worked with all those women, I just went in, did my thing, treated them like equals and did my work. We weren't ever really "friends" and I never hung out with any of them outside of work or anything, but that never mattered. The money they paid me to work there spent just as well, regardless of any of that shit, why should I worry about getting worked up over gender differences and the occasional joke about premature ejaculation or penis size.
Not in an IT dept, but when I was going to school, I worked in a restaurant where I was the only male most of the time. Well, I was a shift manager, and all the shift managers and store manager were females except me (4-5 others). I got the crap shifts, had my schedule changed on a whim by others, and was often given crap tasks - moving/unloading stuff "because you're the man - I can't lift that!" It was funny for about a week, but never got any better. Regional manager gave me no support - he didn't want to be seen as disciplining any of the female staff for fear of some sexism/discrimination lawsuit. Eventually I left, but not soon enough.
Funny you mention this, as I was told by the hiring manager at a wendy's that I worked at that she was hiring me to "do the man work", which meant unloading and putting away truck, working grill,taking out the trash, etc... Never really thought about that until now...
IIRC, the issue started because one of the shift managers was pregnant, and couldn't do some things - fair enough - it doesn't last forever, and I'm fine with helping out now and then, but not being taken advantage of. And really, most of this stuff really wasn't heavy - boxes of up to 25 pounds on occasion, but rarely ever more than that, and there was trollies and carts and stuff to move heavy stuff around (and usually delivery drivers would unload stuff to a fridge or freezer for you anyway. Give them a nice cup of coffee and they'd handle some of the shifting in the freezer too :)
On this kind of situations I usually follow the "vulcan" philosophy described by Wayne D. Dyer in "Your Erroneous Zones".
It comes down to "you choose how you feel". There is nothing I can do to make you choose a different feeling so I dont' need to bother trying.
Needless to say, you gotta be smart and avoid or apologize if you can help it, but in my opinion, the whole pycon situation would not be a big deal if everybody understood that concept.
I didn't like the premise of the article because it made out women to be some kind of foreign entity in the industry, in the author's words, "our industry".
> I do not want the women in our industry to feel unwelcome.
I know it's completely good-natured, but these kind of statements make it seem like males single-handedly have the power to make women feel unwelcome or welcome... which causes a divide even further. The phrase "there are ladies present" is just strange to me, like males should be hyper-aware of the foreign entity that is present. Gives the same effect as "there are elephants present" in the room. No matter - we should be aware that /people/ are present and dick jokes, etc. have no place in a professional setting.
I do agree that the locker talk happens. On numerous occasions, the males around me have talked about seeing breasts and other (straight) male oriented topics.
I think you're actually pretty close to hitting the nail on the head. Of course I'm not even female and I find some of the things you're talking about tiresome... (Perhaps the issue is not exactly sexism, but infantilism?)
Even more draining is the 'treat the customers like sheep' sneering Wall street trader attitude that some of my coworkers seem to have, and which seems to be subtly propagated via attitudes about using analytics and machine learning. We can herd our customers through subtle cues established through artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. Nearly every day there's discussion about manipulating process and appearance and verbiage to get a 1 or 3 or 2.5% higher conversion ratio, or cultivating a community via social media through keeping up appearances - schedule your tweets, re-tweet funny things, know your audience, etc. Analytic your customers 'till the cows come home to understand which navigation items to put where and see 'how' your customers user the 'product.' Create your own market. Etc. But it's all so artificial. I can't remember the last time anybody seriously posted anything looking at fulfilling an actual meaningful need, or their customers as actual people.
Even for employees I think it's very disconcerting to have a public pitch about how you care about customers and are part of a community, then behind closed doors stereotype them like they're some sort of bovine herd who can't tell alfalfa from the compost bin and joke about it. (Maybe this isn't normal? But it feels normal in my experience. To a certain extent I can't even help but participate. What can you do but joke about people still using IE 6 or 7 or who think the Internet's 'Turned Off' or whatever the random point of tech ignorance is for the day? When so much of the world relies and depends on the Internet without understanding it or having a clue or realizing how they're tracked or what legal protections they don't have for their Facebook posts and more, it's really hard to have respect even if you can pay it lip service.)
Quite frankly, I think things might be so bad that plenty of men find things off-putting. But it does fit in pretty well with a narrative of slavery/conquest versus nurture.
(If you're going to downvote maybe say why you think differently? I hate it when it's left as a mystery.)
Note that I'm writing this 2am because I just returned from Lebowski Fest LA, so my judgement may be warped by both the lateness of the hour and my personal admiration of The Big Lebowski (henceforth abbreviated as "TBL")
I wouldn't use those names in a work environment, although if I came across them already being used, I'd probably see them primarily as references to TBL and not as references to porn. And remember, both LogJammer and Treehorn are both mocked as completely ridiculous in TBL, and not admired in the least.
I guess what I'm saying is that if you're trying to gauge how offended to be, consider that any offensive nature of the names were almost certainly due to tone-deafness rather than maliciousness.
(In a non-work environment, I'll be dropping potentially crude TBL references all the time, because it's a hilarious movie. Say what you like, at least it's an ethos.)
Do you mean, what would their reaction would be upon recognizing where those names came from? My reaction, in order, was (1) ugh, gross; (2) whoever named the service were being douchey idiots; (3) how much I dislike this aspect of the porn generation; (4) I would not feel comfortable using that software.
It was a logging service at Google back when I was working as a pager monkey. There were some people who really wanted me to get it integrated with one of our tools.
I didn't know anything about the movie at the time and so didn't get the reference.
I am getting so sick of this story. How many millions of man-hours were wasted this week by people being offended that Adria Richards was offended? I saw this story on the BBC and CBS today. Before long, one (or both) of the fired employee victims will hire Gloria Allred to file a wrongful termination lawsuit and we'll be subjected to this circus for months.
this story just set the stage to have the conversation about why women have a hard time in tech, and things like the difference between direct harassment (which everyone agrees is bad) and creating a hostile atmosphere (which lots of people don't get).
This is very simple. Women have an instinctive revulsion of anything that could be construed as sexual. This is no doubt a relic of our early days as a species, where a sexual context that a woman had not pre-approved could mean a costly nine month pregnancy. This is why its not just dick jokes that women consider offensive, but even something as simple as calling a hat cute. If it can be construed from your words that you are a male who sexually desires females, then the words will result in women taking offense. It doesn't matter if its not directed at any woman present, or if the idea of a presenter sexually assaulting a conference-goer is inherently absurd. These are our instincts, and you can't change them.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine why this is your problem to solve.
The "probably" part is definitely a "just-so" story. It is unfalsifiable. As for the hypothesis that the revulsion is instinctive, well, the only other possibility is that it is learned. But if its learned, then this conversation wouldn't be happening in the first place. It wouldn't be a big deal. The only reason this conversation is even capable of happening is because everyone already implicitly believes that women and only women are instinctively repulsed by direct or subtle sexuality that isn't pre-approved, that is, it is a violation of their core values and therefore we have a problem to be solved.
If men will admit to themselves what they already know and believe, they will be better prepared to handle themselves to avoid conflict with their female counterparts.
I agree with this, fully and unequivocally. I have to wonder if "there are ladies present" might also be construed as sexist. Maybe we just shouldn't use toilet humor in situations where we're not absolutely sure everyone will find it appropriate.
Warning: offensive, but to demonstrate a point...
I once interviewed a guy who decided to wear a t-shirt to the interview that read "Thousands of my potential children died on your daughter's face last night". There were no women there. I was not really even offended (toilet humor is really hard not to giggle at, if for no other reason than I'm still 15 in my head somewhere). I was, however, careful not to let on that I noticed it at all. On the way out, he asked for a tour (he thought he was getting the job). When another coworker commented on his shirt he said "Yeah, I got another one that says 'Swallow it or it goes in your eye'." It was a 5 person company at the time, and none of them were female. Still, he wasn't getting the job; anyone with that much disregard (dare I say arrogance) for other's feelings isn't getting the job.
It's not about having men or ladies or kids present; it's about having a mutual respect for others, and being conservative about what setting they think toilet humor (or any humor) is appropriate.
There's gotta be something fucked up about the culture for men in a dominantly male environment to joke with each other with brags about aggressive sexual dominance over women and expect to retain their jobs, or in this case get hired by strangers.
It's so easy, too. To be transgressive by attacking women within an environment where there aren't many powerful ones around. Why not racial humor? I'm sure there are many ways to brag about humiliating different racial groups.
I'm far from a prude, but there are women out there trying to make a living in this world. I don't think it's a lot to ask that people keep this kind of shit at home, even if they think it's funny.
He wore that to an interview? Jesus. I'm all about the informal meet-and-greet, but that clearly shows that he had zero respect for you or your company.
Heh.
I've been defending my right for penis jokes those last three days, but in that case I'll totally agree (and my sword is yours).
The right for our "penis jokes" also entitles us to a moral responsibility: be "a bit" sure we can make these jokes to our audience (though I admit I don't check/care for people around whose ears have long reach, but this is another debate), which is why you ought to be a little self-conscious of what you are wearing.
On the other hand, this makes me cringe a bit... I bought this hoodie that says "Cool story bro" (obvious reference to the meme), what if I stumble upon persons who will understand this as me "perpetuating the testosterone bro-culture that is driving women away from tech"?
If we start drawing the line somewhere, how do we know someone else didn't draw it earlier or later to ours?
I personally have been taught that even if someone instantly bombs the interview, you have to make them feel like they were given a decent shot so that they won't get upset and try to sue you.
Sadly you can't even give feedback on what people did wrong because anything that you say can and sometimes will be held against you in a court of law.
At the time, I was young developer being asked to interview a somebody. If I'm honest, I was a little prideful that I was interviewing him, and not one of the other, more mature developers, so I took him through the process.
I think, knowing what I know now, and feeling confident in who I am as a developer, I'd probably at least ask about it in the interview. I'd say "Why did you choose to wear that shirt today?" Serious question. I'd be interested. Maybe the answer is "Because I don't really want this job" and then it's clear. Maybe it's "Because I don't want to work at a place that gets offended easily" or maybe it's "Because I didn't have any other clean laundry." I cannot think of a valid reason to wear that shirt to an interview, but I'd at least be interested in his reasoning (though he's still not getting the job).
Thanks! I've contributed to an interview or two, but I haven't yet been tasked with the responsibility to cut one short if a serious red flag like that came up.
Lordy, we seem to live in hyper-sensitive times where everyone parses simple humor through a filter of scrutiny looking for some reason to be offended (often to be offended on behalf of some other group). The wisdom I have mostly heard, and agree with, is to be sensitive and respectful when making a joke -- but if they can't handle humor that was intended to elicit fun, then f__k 'em.
You know why people like Adria Richards are hypersensitive about dick jokes? Because women are a minority in programming and being a minority sucks. If there were as many female CEOs as male CEOs in tech and we knew as little about Marissa Mayer's child-care situation as we do about Jeff Bezos's, nobody would give a fuck about dick jokes. Women aren't the minority in tech because men make dick jokes--(some) women are sensitive about men making dick jokes because they are in the minority. When people don't feel awkwardly self conscious about their place in the power dynamic, they are free to laugh at jokes like a normal person.
Fix the representation problem and all of this will take care of itself.