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A quick reminder to read the article before commenting. HN usually has a better track record of this, but this is a particular issue people are sensitive about so don't draw your conclusions from the title alone.
Female founder friend (non tech space) was in a female focused incubator / competition. She got only one set of somewhat critical feedback - ie, lacks experience in X and Y which are key in product space Z.
She posted a comment on her social media focusing on this feedback as "criticism" that came from a sexist guy "of course". It was pretty easy to draw the line to the three panelists, one of whom was a guy. Ouch.
In a previous life, I'd worked in a awesome (female led!) product company. While I had no experience prior to this, I quickly realized that the product itself and its quality etc was almost irrelevant to success, the X and Y mentioned by the male panelist was unfortunately everything, which you'd only know if you were in the space itself. The female led company I worked for was bought out by a (male led) competitor, who then using much strong x and y skills - cleaned up. Company I worked for got basically nothing.
Fast forward - my friends business not doing so great, she asks me for feedback. I said nothing other than enthusiasm. Partly because I was really enthusiastic - she'd put her heart into this project. But her comment on social was in my mind - I had no desire to be next sexist guy "shooting down" an idea
She's out of the business I think mostly. Anyways, this parallels the take of the article.
My wife, who is a second wave feminist that believes that women should be given the same opportunities, but are not victims, ran across some of the craziness a few years ago.
She was in a tech forum where a woman was complaining about her experience at a company. It amounted to this woman having a perception that she was not being valued as much as a male colleague and was immediately jumping to the conclusion that it was sexism. My wife jumped in and suggested that from the sound of things, it sounded like there may be some other things going on that this person could work on and that it may have nothing to do with sexism etc..
The other people in the forum, including men, crucified my wife for those statements. This along with her daring to suggest in other women in tech forums, groups etc. that not every piece of feedback that is not positive is sexist led her to be banned from several women in tech organizations. Many would not even tell her why, but if they did it was for "being harmful to women" and "suffering from internalized misogyny" among other things.
Given her experience alone, not to mention other things we have all seen in the community none of this is surprising to me. Ironically, one of her concerns when she saw the "micro-agressions" etc. trend take hold, beyond the fact that she felt it was trying to fix one wrong with another, was that it would lead to this...and here we are. [edited for clarity]
Feminism as it is practiced today in the West is a lost cause, but it's been dying for decades. Like many movements around social justice it was hijacked by radicals and became totalitarian in its beliefs, to the point that it brings dubious value to or even harms the interests of most women.
The big topics like violence against women have not been properly addressed and feminists focus instead obsessively on minor topics like abuse of Hollywood actresses or gender imbalance in software engineering.
The strategy has also changed - such factions are focusing less on equality and more and more on taking something for themselves, transforming the dialogue into an us versus them and turning it hostile. The problem with this thinking is two-fold:
1) One can take only so much before the ones that are being taken from push back, especially since there's no shortage of groups that want to take.
2) Other factions also want a piece of the pie and don't care about female victimhood. Feminism has for example failed to tackle both culturally influenced violence against women perpetrated by misogynist immigrants and the zero sum game they play with transsexuals.
She's lucky to have been kicked out from such a toxic environment.
What I do personally is to just avoid all of these people.
I have the impression it's harder to avoid them in California because people are particularly brainwashed over there - which is one of the reasons I avoid California as well.
There is a form of entitlement that is becoming pervasive where people believe they will walk the world and face none of its ills. If you are a woman you will 100% deal with sexism. If you are a minority you will 100% deal with racism. If you’re not in the ‘in group’, you will deal with isolation. This is part of life.
We as a society only step in collectively when these things happen at an egregious level (what was going on in Hollywood), but if you think you won’t face some degree of it in your daily life then you are just not covering your bases. One must have the resiliency to deal with some of it, and that is fair and reasonable to expect because the contract is we are tolerant of imperfect humans as a society (that those who are sexist and racist have a flaw but are not evil, and we tolerate this imperfection through patience). It’s never going anywhere.
If nothing else this will be an interesting time for historians to look back on. At some point sanity must set in and after that I wonder how they will reflect on this period.
The problem is that a number of good movements have been infected by the "right to not be offended" crowd. Once that happens, you're no longer allowed to disagree or ctiticize lest the mob tear you to pieces.
I'm really glad to see this here. I don't have a better word readily available than sexism for trying to talk about patterns like this but when I use the word sexism, I think people think I mean "Men are intentionally exclusionary assholes just to be assholes because they simply hate women." and that's never what I'm trying to say.
I find my gender is a barrier to getting traction and my experience is that it's due to patterns of this sort and not because most men intentionally want me to fail. But the cumulative effect of most men erring on the side of protecting themselves and not wanting to take risks to engage with me meaningfully really adds up over time and I think that tremendously holds women back generally.
I think gendered patterns of social engagement also contributed to the Theranos debacle. I've said that before and I feel like it tends to get misunderstood as well. (Though in the case of Theranos it runs a lot deeper in that she was actually sleeping with an investor.)
On the contrary, it shows a clear imbalance of power towards repetitional destruction, something that was always in a women's arsenal but much less so in a man's (which would favour, let's say, settling things in a fight).
So, considering you are the potential carrier of a nuclear power it makes sense to thread carefully.
The problem isn't sexism. The problem is that being wrongly labeled as a sexist is a socio-economical death blow while the accusers gets scot free. This imbalance in power has to be settled somehow and I think this is a pretty good solution.
Basically the me too movement and the way in which men cannot defend themselves from sexual accusations back fired. Very predictable that this happened, there’s no easy solution.
What's sexist is the lack of agency ascribed to women, as in: success/failure is something that happens to women and something men work for/through. That is the textbook definition of objectification, very much the norm even today and in my mind perpetuated by modern woke feminism framing everything as "we're being oppressed", singling out men's contributions to the situation and ignoring women's own.
I have the deepest sympathy for any hardship you have experienced. From the conversations I've had with my sister and colleagues, it's obvious sexism and its effects are real.
That said, your post frames it as if your career is not in your own hands. Please afford yourself some more agency. I have overcome a narcissist parent, academic failure, classism and depression, working my way up to programming and a college degree on my own dime. I find it's fundamentally unproductive to see yourself as a car vendor mascot, being dragged whichever the wind blows. Engage with the people holding you back to get what you need and change your environment if there's no other way.
I found "Nice girls [still] don't get the corner office" (the second edition added the "still") by Lois P. Frankel educational. The book's about her practice as a career coach for women and lists the mistakes her clients make to subconsciously sabotage their own careers. Of the 101 errors in the first print, I recognised a good 30% in myself. All this to say: it's not because there's sexism and perceived sexism that there's nothing else going on.
It's more like reverse sexism here. I totally get the behaviour here. You simply don't want to be on the receiving end of potential backlash when you're just trying to help someone. The calculus being you feel as if you might make a genuine remark only to receive a response interpreting said remark as the product of sexism e.g "out of persons A and B, I think B should run the company" where A is a woman and B is a man is simply far too likely to be met with "well of course a man would pick another man" than "it seems they carefully evaluated the attributes and qualities of A and B and B is likely better suited". The former response is itself sexist as it's basing assumptions about the decision on attributes of gender first and foremost, hence it's a sort of reverse sexism if you will. And the man's move here is sexist also in the regard that his calculus of the reverse sexism response is also based on the assumption that this dynamic exists and presents a real danger and it's all based primarily on gender too.
Sexism all the way down on both sides.
I've come to understand in life through experience there are a very thorny class of problems that I don't know of a proper name for, but have formulated my own concept of the "non-native speakers dilemma". It goes as follows:
You're on a bus and while listening to two strangers conversing you realise you can't quite understand what they're talking about. As a native speaker you feel perfectly confident that you know the language and you are simply missing context shared only by the individuals talking and hence it isn't possible for you to understand the conversation, and not because you don't know the language. If you are a non-native speaker, and depending on your level, you often start to doubt your abilities, and can never be fully sure if you simply don't understand because you're missing context that's not possible for you to obtain or there are gaps in your language skills that still need to be filled.
I had this realisation on the bus about a decade ago when learning Japanese. But I've often thought back to it in certain situations and these kind in particular seem to crop up a lot.
One example I overheard was a female engineer talking to another female non-engineer outside their workplace just about their experiences in their jobs. I heard the female engineer remark something along the lines of "the Architect often shoots down my ideas because I'm female".
I sat thinking to myself... That's interesting because the architect shoots down my ideas too (different workplace, so I don't _know_ her situation) but it's certainly not because I'm female, because I'm not female, but it's probably because I'm an intermediate level Dev with lots to learn and the idea has some flaws in it that he can see that I can't.
In this case I'm a "native speaker" so to speak, so I can be perfectly confident my thinking is accurate with respect to the reason why it's getting rejected. The female engineer is the so called "non-native speaker" where this pernicious dynamic exists making it nigh on impossible to confident that your assessment is accurate.
Curious if that metaphor makes sense to others, or if others ever noticed the same thing?
This meshes with an experience I had a few years into my career which I'll never forget and had definitely influenced and will continue to influence my future interactions with women in tech.
I, cis white guy in the bay, was hired as a consultant to help build out a product and was pair programming with a woman founder & new engineer and made some passing comment about the CSS quality not being "ideal" or something of the sort. This was later brought up as something that they interpreted as some kind of sexism which completely caught me off guard and put me in a very awkward position of having to respond to that and explain that it was just poorly phrased, not sexism.
In the grand scheme this was very minor situation, e.g. no managers, HR, or social media involved, just between a few people on the project, but it's something I'll never forget and had colored how I interact with women going forward.
Basically I just want to avoid that ever happening again because if you're on the "No I'm not sexist" side of the argument, you've basically already lost in how society engages these days.
The payout matrix for "give honest advice / don't give honest advice" has changed, radically. Then some people noticed that, and then their behavior changed to match. It isn't punishing anyone, it's adaptation to a new risk. The "Pence Fence" is a defensive strategem and it didn't arise in a vacuum. It is a costly defense, too, so it being kept up is likely worth the cost to mitigate the risk.
Most of what comes after when discussing the issue is "how to 'fix' this 'problem.'" by encouraging men to speak anyway. But that is the wrong approach, because it relies on people changing their behavior back like hurling themselves on grenades -- you can't count on it. Still high-risk, low-reward. Perhaps even no-reward. Making plans on people (well, men in this instance but it could be anyone) being irrationally drawn to self-sacrifice is not going to pan out, especially if your reputation is destroyed in the mix after. Leaping on grenades typically earns a medal, but here it gets you vilification.
>>The payout matrix for "give honest advice / don't give honest advice" has changed, radically.
It has always been that way. In 'How to win friends, and influence people' Dale Carnegie brings forward this wonderful concept of letting people win arguments, suffering fools gladly, and almost always agreeing with people. Unless something very big is at stake.
Giving advice, being critical and helping people through feedback is almost always a bad idea. For starters you must let people fail. This has benefits, it helps them learn from experience and is a character building experience. If the person refuses to learn from experience, well then whatever feed back would be useless anyway.
Just see how many people require walking around them on egg shells. You have to handle their feelings with kid gloves, or have your career destroyed.
Even in general things, good advice is available in mainstream media and advice for ages. People still have bad finances, and lifestyle diseases. Advice, feedback mostly don't work.
I'm not a woman but I'm a minority in other dimensions.
I've always felt labels such as "female-led", "female-owned", "<insert minority-led>" do the opposite of what they intend to do. That is, they paint a picture that this minority group is not capable enough and need a lot of hand holding so everyone please bias your decisions towards their success to the detriment of other groups.
If that's not enough, currently there are few repercussions for false sexism/racism accusations. I've seen some men lose their career even though the accusations turned out to be a coordinated revenge and were false.
All these together makes dealing with a minority group a lot risky and potentially a headache.
I believe the solution is to keep existing anti discriminatory laws but also ensure false accusations are sufficiently punished/disincentivesed
If you are a woman you can easily counter this behavior by labelling it and saying that you don't have a porcelain skin. Bonuspoints if you laugh about a guy giving you super bad feedback and how this did not bother you.
Putting people at ease around you (especially customers) is a critical entrepreneurial skill.
You can't blame people for being cautious when a lot of people are buying into victim-narratives and convinced to act against their "oppressors".
The other day, I was in a Zoom meeting with another man and a woman. The call had too much latency, and the conversation was a tad heated, so we were all interrupting each other to some extent—but I noticed halfway through that I was interrupting the woman more, and she was speaking the least. Just like in all the research. While I certainly didn't go silent for the rest of the meeting, I made a concerted effort to let the woman talk more, and I'm glad I did, because she had good things to say.
I'm aware that I have the same biases as the rest of society. I do my best to recognize them, and, where applicable, to add a small mental counterweight before making decisions. I don't think this always leads to better outcomes, but I do think it's a net positive. And if investors act on similar frameworks, they've probably doomed some companies and saved others. The future is unknowable, and we'll never know what would have happened.
I wish this investor had acted out of a desire to be a better person, or a more successful VC, rather than from fear of a mob. I'm not a fan of mobs. But none of us are immune to cultural biases, and we should second-guess ourselves accordingly.
In general, on a high latency call, if you find yourself interrupting someone, you can just "pass the mike" back to them once you're done.
A simple "Sorry <name>, I cut you off, you were saying?" does wonders and makes it clear to everyone that the next person who should be speaking was the one who got interrupted.
It is not necessarily your bias against women. It is equally possible that the woman is not self-confident enough to interrupt you more often.
Recently I had a zoom meeting with two women. One of them was a bit shy and quiet, and the other one constantly interrupted me and the other woman. There was nothing gender-specific in that encounter.
Similarly, in other meetings there are often some men who stay quiet (but obvs nobody cares about them).
Possibly we should let shy people talk more. Regardless of whether they are women, men, black, gay or whatever.
Or maybe not. Maybe you need to be self-confident and a bit bold to lead, because if you don't, you won't be a good leader anyways even if you were given time to speak regardless of your sex. I don't know.
Slightly off-topic, but I've found that dialing into Zoom calls via phone sometimes alleviates the latency, at least for audio. I'd rather have bad A/V sync with less audio latency than perfect sync but more latency.
Just a tip that's helped me in similar situations!
I can see this happening with myself (male, for the record). I'm usually someone who gives feedback quite frankly, am more critical of others' (and my own) work than average, etc.
Over recent years I've read so much about women being passed over, cut off, terms like "microaggressions", women getting less talking time in meetings, etc., that's it's made me extremely self conscious.
It's not even that I'm afraid of getting in any actual trouble if I say or do something wrong, it's just that I'm generally already somewhat anxious about how I behave around others and this has made me extremely aware of any time I might be too harsh, not really listen to someone, etc., that I've probably gotten overly sensitive.
>> And the consequences of being accused of sexism by an online mob have now become so extreme that many investors don’t want to risk it anymore.
I'm glad someone said it and I'm glad that that someone is a woman so that there's a chance this message won't immediately get drowned in sexism/male privilege accusations.
This trend isn't going away anytime soon, In fact I think it's just ramping up and is accelerating, especially with the racism narrative the main stream media outlets started to heavily push ~2 years ago and the big identity movement. It will continue until there is consensus, that this climate is bad, for everyone involved. I don't see that happen anytime soon, the cancelations will continue until moral improves.
I saw some improvement in the Netflix movies getting less extreme over time. Emily in Paris was the first movie where the woke Netflix made fun of itself using French people / culture as props. Disney and Netflix had to lose billions of dollars to understand that the loudest voices may not represent the majority of the people.
I don't think a trend can get much bigger than primetime TV. Watch Bush era TV and you will find obsession with topics we now find irrelevant. We are getting to the top, I think.
I'm glad to see this here. I think people in general do not pay much attention to externalities. I wish to see people take a more holistic/deontological view of the fight for equality across all mankind (shit, is that a microaggression? personkind?). I'm not convinced that this over-correction ISN'T net positive either, but there is an ingrained assumption in the zeitgeist that it is a pure fight for a better world for those trodden upon. I don't think the case is so clear cut and I worry about the deafening silence when I look for introspection among those riding this wave of power. People who do not question the righteousness of their cause are frightening, whatever the cause may be. Nothing is righteous, everything is complex, I wish this was something that we could hold tightly in our collective consciousness. Subtlety and nuance is never as easy or attractive as brashness. I guess that's the nature of the beast, who would willingly attack themselves to prevent their own abuse of the power they've newly gained? Only a rare few, I doubt that will change.
It’s worth noting this issue/disutility. But I don’t give it a lot of weight vs. the historical default.
Presumably this doesn’t occur if a female VC is giving that advice to females founders; maybe this will be an additional incentive to actually promote some women to be partners. VC is one of the most male-dominated professions around.
More generally, it’s easy to look at just the costs of a social change, without remembering to weight against the benefits. If this issue is one of the costs, and reduced sexual harassment of female founders is the benefit, then I would ask women who have been in this position how they weigh the two (having not experienced either I wouldn’t presume to know how much the benefit is actually worth to female founders, and since the costs and benefits are both incident on them, it’s not really my place to choose).
But I’d hazard a guess that most women would prefer not to get hit on / harassed as they fundraise, at the expense of sometimes not getting fully candid feedback.
I agree, but I don't think that means you can only ever speak about the gains. Ignoring costs leads down disingenuous roads, and not necessarily the best path to change.
If the resulting cultural is permanently clammier professional relationships between men and women.. I have a hard time believing it's things going right. OTOH, I don't really think there is a permanent "clamming up." Hopefully it passes. It's not like everyone was gender blind in 2015 either.
Regardless of what we think of wider issues, I think Femfo is probably observing something real.
This article is really only the tip of the iceberg. If you're a man in a position of authority, and you're worried about the consequences of you or anybody in your team accidentally stepping on a "diversity" land mine, what's the best way to avoid the problem? Don't hire any women in the first place. You may get some shit from HR for not meeting your diversity targets, but the calculus is increasingly starting to tilt towards this being the lesser evil -- unless you're a talented woman who doesn't get hired because of it, that is.
This goes beyond founders. We're seeing this problem at the level of developers, technical writers, and design folks. In some teams, critical feedback given to our female colleagues would almost always be twisted and escalated as sexism. One time the situation worsened until no one would say much, other developers had to take on extra workload and fix low quality work from other developers. Good engineers started quitting and the team crashed and burned.
In other teams, the folks are super cautious about hiring women because of an increasing number of such incidents. I'm also seeing this other trend where we are willing to hire women from within the company because they're a known quantity, while hiring few or zero women from outside, while accepting men from within and outside the business just based on their capabilities.
The article is right on many levels. I myself rarely share controversial or difficult feedback with female colleagues or acquaintances unless I know them very well, and know they will take it the right way. It's just not worth the professional risk to me.
I don't know if this is the exception, and I work with several female colleagues at various levels of seniority where we are professional and open. Whatever - it's a sad state of affairs.
I have worked with couple female developers and I had many interesting discussions on the whole problem of being woman developer.
Here some random thoughts / observations:
Hiring women because "we need at least one woman on the team because of the quota". Would you like to know you have been hired because the team is forced to have a women and everybody knows it?
Same company. I have received an email that you can "get bonus if you refer a friend that gets hired." Then a list of how much you can get depending on position. Then a note -- "if a woman, the reward is tripled".
Promoting women before they got enough experience. Similar to above. You have been put on a fast track for promotion but you haven't had time to get the needed experience. Everybody knows this (and discuss behind your back) but nobody is going to tell it to you. Now you have two problems.
On topic of feedback, people need feedback to improve, but female developers will not get it. All-positive feedback is no feedback at all because you are nowhere closer to knowing what you are doing wrong. I have personally been doing some pretty stupid things (like taking credit for other people work) until somebody told me and I fixed it. I wonder what would I do if nobody dared to tell I am doing anything wrong, or if my salary or position in the team had nothing to do with how well I am actually doing?
Just because guys can't be hitting on girls in the office doesn't mean it isn't there, but now it is more comical.
Just because people aren't supposed to discriminate women doesn't mean it is not there. Male developers seem to be in large part focused on the fact the words are spoken by a female rather than their merit. I have seen concrete examples. It kinda seems it is still true you need to (at least in some cases) work twice as hard to prove anything, but now male employees got better at hiding their discrimination. I am half decided that maybe all the focus on discrimination achieved is push the discrimination underground.
Discussions quieting down when you show up. Or tame behavior when eating lunch. Guys reminding other guys that a woman is present. Supposedly because it is not proper to behave like that (but it is fine when only guys present?) Imagine this happening every time.
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
I don't mean 'good' and 'bad' absolutely—that's above my pay grade. I just mean good or bad for HN, relative to what we're trying to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... If you want to smite enemies or fulminate snarkily, that's your business—just please don't do it on HN. It's not hard to find platforms that welcome that sort of engagement; we're trying for something different on this one.
Edit: this thread has over 1000 comments now; if you want to read more of them, you need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918&p=3
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918&p=5
[+] [-] nooyurrsdey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] random5634|5 years ago|reply
She posted a comment on her social media focusing on this feedback as "criticism" that came from a sexist guy "of course". It was pretty easy to draw the line to the three panelists, one of whom was a guy. Ouch.
In a previous life, I'd worked in a awesome (female led!) product company. While I had no experience prior to this, I quickly realized that the product itself and its quality etc was almost irrelevant to success, the X and Y mentioned by the male panelist was unfortunately everything, which you'd only know if you were in the space itself. The female led company I worked for was bought out by a (male led) competitor, who then using much strong x and y skills - cleaned up. Company I worked for got basically nothing.
Fast forward - my friends business not doing so great, she asks me for feedback. I said nothing other than enthusiasm. Partly because I was really enthusiastic - she'd put her heart into this project. But her comment on social was in my mind - I had no desire to be next sexist guy "shooting down" an idea
She's out of the business I think mostly. Anyways, this parallels the take of the article.
[+] [-] lgleason|5 years ago|reply
She was in a tech forum where a woman was complaining about her experience at a company. It amounted to this woman having a perception that she was not being valued as much as a male colleague and was immediately jumping to the conclusion that it was sexism. My wife jumped in and suggested that from the sound of things, it sounded like there may be some other things going on that this person could work on and that it may have nothing to do with sexism etc..
The other people in the forum, including men, crucified my wife for those statements. This along with her daring to suggest in other women in tech forums, groups etc. that not every piece of feedback that is not positive is sexist led her to be banned from several women in tech organizations. Many would not even tell her why, but if they did it was for "being harmful to women" and "suffering from internalized misogyny" among other things.
Given her experience alone, not to mention other things we have all seen in the community none of this is surprising to me. Ironically, one of her concerns when she saw the "micro-agressions" etc. trend take hold, beyond the fact that she felt it was trying to fix one wrong with another, was that it would lead to this...and here we are. [edited for clarity]
[+] [-] blub|5 years ago|reply
The big topics like violence against women have not been properly addressed and feminists focus instead obsessively on minor topics like abuse of Hollywood actresses or gender imbalance in software engineering.
The strategy has also changed - such factions are focusing less on equality and more and more on taking something for themselves, transforming the dialogue into an us versus them and turning it hostile. The problem with this thinking is two-fold:
1) One can take only so much before the ones that are being taken from push back, especially since there's no shortage of groups that want to take.
2) Other factions also want a piece of the pie and don't care about female victimhood. Feminism has for example failed to tackle both culturally influenced violence against women perpetrated by misogynist immigrants and the zero sum game they play with transsexuals.
[+] [-] jokethrowaway|5 years ago|reply
What I do personally is to just avoid all of these people.
I have the impression it's harder to avoid them in California because people are particularly brainwashed over there - which is one of the reasons I avoid California as well.
[+] [-] runawaybottle|5 years ago|reply
We as a society only step in collectively when these things happen at an egregious level (what was going on in Hollywood), but if you think you won’t face some degree of it in your daily life then you are just not covering your bases. One must have the resiliency to deal with some of it, and that is fair and reasonable to expect because the contract is we are tolerant of imperfect humans as a society (that those who are sexist and racist have a flaw but are not evil, and we tolerate this imperfection through patience). It’s never going anywhere.
[+] [-] kylebenzle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kstenerud|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megablast|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|5 years ago|reply
I find my gender is a barrier to getting traction and my experience is that it's due to patterns of this sort and not because most men intentionally want me to fail. But the cumulative effect of most men erring on the side of protecting themselves and not wanting to take risks to engage with me meaningfully really adds up over time and I think that tremendously holds women back generally.
I think gendered patterns of social engagement also contributed to the Theranos debacle. I've said that before and I feel like it tends to get misunderstood as well. (Though in the case of Theranos it runs a lot deeper in that she was actually sleeping with an investor.)
[+] [-] nswindows|5 years ago|reply
So, considering you are the potential carrier of a nuclear power it makes sense to thread carefully.
The problem isn't sexism. The problem is that being wrongly labeled as a sexist is a socio-economical death blow while the accusers gets scot free. This imbalance in power has to be settled somehow and I think this is a pretty good solution.
Posting this anonymously since I'm not insane.
[+] [-] Thorentis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dageshi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] internetslave|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ridethebike|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etripe|5 years ago|reply
I have the deepest sympathy for any hardship you have experienced. From the conversations I've had with my sister and colleagues, it's obvious sexism and its effects are real.
That said, your post frames it as if your career is not in your own hands. Please afford yourself some more agency. I have overcome a narcissist parent, academic failure, classism and depression, working my way up to programming and a college degree on my own dime. I find it's fundamentally unproductive to see yourself as a car vendor mascot, being dragged whichever the wind blows. Engage with the people holding you back to get what you need and change your environment if there's no other way.
I found "Nice girls [still] don't get the corner office" (the second edition added the "still") by Lois P. Frankel educational. The book's about her practice as a career coach for women and lists the mistakes her clients make to subconsciously sabotage their own careers. Of the 101 errors in the first print, I recognised a good 30% in myself. All this to say: it's not because there's sexism and perceived sexism that there's nothing else going on.
[+] [-] cistercianic|5 years ago|reply
Do you believe that people should take potentially career-ending risks to benefit you?
[+] [-] nullsense|5 years ago|reply
Sexism all the way down on both sides.
I've come to understand in life through experience there are a very thorny class of problems that I don't know of a proper name for, but have formulated my own concept of the "non-native speakers dilemma". It goes as follows:
You're on a bus and while listening to two strangers conversing you realise you can't quite understand what they're talking about. As a native speaker you feel perfectly confident that you know the language and you are simply missing context shared only by the individuals talking and hence it isn't possible for you to understand the conversation, and not because you don't know the language. If you are a non-native speaker, and depending on your level, you often start to doubt your abilities, and can never be fully sure if you simply don't understand because you're missing context that's not possible for you to obtain or there are gaps in your language skills that still need to be filled.
I had this realisation on the bus about a decade ago when learning Japanese. But I've often thought back to it in certain situations and these kind in particular seem to crop up a lot.
One example I overheard was a female engineer talking to another female non-engineer outside their workplace just about their experiences in their jobs. I heard the female engineer remark something along the lines of "the Architect often shoots down my ideas because I'm female".
I sat thinking to myself... That's interesting because the architect shoots down my ideas too (different workplace, so I don't _know_ her situation) but it's certainly not because I'm female, because I'm not female, but it's probably because I'm an intermediate level Dev with lots to learn and the idea has some flaws in it that he can see that I can't.
In this case I'm a "native speaker" so to speak, so I can be perfectly confident my thinking is accurate with respect to the reason why it's getting rejected. The female engineer is the so called "non-native speaker" where this pernicious dynamic exists making it nigh on impossible to confident that your assessment is accurate.
Curious if that metaphor makes sense to others, or if others ever noticed the same thing?
[+] [-] xbar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] throwaway192874|5 years ago|reply
I, cis white guy in the bay, was hired as a consultant to help build out a product and was pair programming with a woman founder & new engineer and made some passing comment about the CSS quality not being "ideal" or something of the sort. This was later brought up as something that they interpreted as some kind of sexism which completely caught me off guard and put me in a very awkward position of having to respond to that and explain that it was just poorly phrased, not sexism.
In the grand scheme this was very minor situation, e.g. no managers, HR, or social media involved, just between a few people on the project, but it's something I'll never forget and had colored how I interact with women going forward.
Basically I just want to avoid that ever happening again because if you're on the "No I'm not sexist" side of the argument, you've basically already lost in how society engages these days.
[+] [-] at_a_remove|5 years ago|reply
Most of what comes after when discussing the issue is "how to 'fix' this 'problem.'" by encouraging men to speak anyway. But that is the wrong approach, because it relies on people changing their behavior back like hurling themselves on grenades -- you can't count on it. Still high-risk, low-reward. Perhaps even no-reward. Making plans on people (well, men in this instance but it could be anyone) being irrationally drawn to self-sacrifice is not going to pan out, especially if your reputation is destroyed in the mix after. Leaping on grenades typically earns a medal, but here it gets you vilification.
[+] [-] kamaal|5 years ago|reply
It has always been that way. In 'How to win friends, and influence people' Dale Carnegie brings forward this wonderful concept of letting people win arguments, suffering fools gladly, and almost always agreeing with people. Unless something very big is at stake.
Giving advice, being critical and helping people through feedback is almost always a bad idea. For starters you must let people fail. This has benefits, it helps them learn from experience and is a character building experience. If the person refuses to learn from experience, well then whatever feed back would be useless anyway.
Just see how many people require walking around them on egg shells. You have to handle their feelings with kid gloves, or have your career destroyed.
Even in general things, good advice is available in mainstream media and advice for ages. People still have bad finances, and lifestyle diseases. Advice, feedback mostly don't work.
[+] [-] darkhorse13|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sooheon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerash|5 years ago|reply
I've always felt labels such as "female-led", "female-owned", "<insert minority-led>" do the opposite of what they intend to do. That is, they paint a picture that this minority group is not capable enough and need a lot of hand holding so everyone please bias your decisions towards their success to the detriment of other groups.
If that's not enough, currently there are few repercussions for false sexism/racism accusations. I've seen some men lose their career even though the accusations turned out to be a coordinated revenge and were false.
All these together makes dealing with a minority group a lot risky and potentially a headache.
I believe the solution is to keep existing anti discriminatory laws but also ensure false accusations are sufficiently punished/disincentivesed
[+] [-] cynusx|5 years ago|reply
Putting people at ease around you (especially customers) is a critical entrepreneurial skill.
You can't blame people for being cautious when a lot of people are buying into victim-narratives and convinced to act against their "oppressors".
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|5 years ago|reply
I'm aware that I have the same biases as the rest of society. I do my best to recognize them, and, where applicable, to add a small mental counterweight before making decisions. I don't think this always leads to better outcomes, but I do think it's a net positive. And if investors act on similar frameworks, they've probably doomed some companies and saved others. The future is unknowable, and we'll never know what would have happened.
I wish this investor had acted out of a desire to be a better person, or a more successful VC, rather than from fear of a mob. I'm not a fan of mobs. But none of us are immune to cultural biases, and we should second-guess ourselves accordingly.
[+] [-] jfim|5 years ago|reply
A simple "Sorry <name>, I cut you off, you were saying?" does wonders and makes it clear to everyone that the next person who should be speaking was the one who got interrupted.
[+] [-] lightgreen|5 years ago|reply
Recently I had a zoom meeting with two women. One of them was a bit shy and quiet, and the other one constantly interrupted me and the other woman. There was nothing gender-specific in that encounter.
Similarly, in other meetings there are often some men who stay quiet (but obvs nobody cares about them).
Possibly we should let shy people talk more. Regardless of whether they are women, men, black, gay or whatever.
Or maybe not. Maybe you need to be self-confident and a bit bold to lead, because if you don't, you won't be a good leader anyways even if you were given time to speak regardless of your sex. I don't know.
Don't look for sexism in every encounter.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] globular-toast|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubatuga|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|5 years ago|reply
Just a tip that's helped me in similar situations!
[+] [-] fermienrico|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ta-ffsmcu|5 years ago|reply
Over recent years I've read so much about women being passed over, cut off, terms like "microaggressions", women getting less talking time in meetings, etc., that's it's made me extremely self conscious.
It's not even that I'm afraid of getting in any actual trouble if I say or do something wrong, it's just that I'm generally already somewhat anxious about how I behave around others and this has made me extremely aware of any time I might be too harsh, not really listen to someone, etc., that I've probably gotten overly sensitive.
[+] [-] ridethebike|5 years ago|reply
I'm glad someone said it and I'm glad that that someone is a woman so that there's a chance this message won't immediately get drowned in sexism/male privilege accusations.
[+] [-] snicksnak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xiphias2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipnon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] errantspark|5 years ago|reply
"You must beware of shadows."
page 109 of The Little Schemer
[+] [-] theptip|5 years ago|reply
Presumably this doesn’t occur if a female VC is giving that advice to females founders; maybe this will be an additional incentive to actually promote some women to be partners. VC is one of the most male-dominated professions around.
More generally, it’s easy to look at just the costs of a social change, without remembering to weight against the benefits. If this issue is one of the costs, and reduced sexual harassment of female founders is the benefit, then I would ask women who have been in this position how they weigh the two (having not experienced either I wouldn’t presume to know how much the benefit is actually worth to female founders, and since the costs and benefits are both incident on them, it’s not really my place to choose).
But I’d hazard a guess that most women would prefer not to get hit on / harassed as they fundraise, at the expense of sometimes not getting fully candid feedback.
[+] [-] dalbasal|5 years ago|reply
If the resulting cultural is permanently clammier professional relationships between men and women.. I have a hard time believing it's things going right. OTOH, I don't really think there is a permanent "clamming up." Hopefully it passes. It's not like everyone was gender blind in 2015 either.
Regardless of what we think of wider issues, I think Femfo is probably observing something real.
[+] [-] luckylion|5 years ago|reply
"She has internalized misogyny". Being a woman doesn't exempt you from being targeted by the woke mob.
[+] [-] throwitaway12|5 years ago|reply
We don't have to walk on egg shells when speaking. Men and women can still interact like it was before I started reading about such insanity.
[+] [-] Clewza313|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] korginator|5 years ago|reply
In other teams, the folks are super cautious about hiring women because of an increasing number of such incidents. I'm also seeing this other trend where we are willing to hire women from within the company because they're a known quantity, while hiring few or zero women from outside, while accepting men from within and outside the business just based on their capabilities.
The article is right on many levels. I myself rarely share controversial or difficult feedback with female colleagues or acquaintances unless I know them very well, and know they will take it the right way. It's just not worth the professional risk to me.
I don't know if this is the exception, and I work with several female colleagues at various levels of seniority where we are professional and open. Whatever - it's a sad state of affairs.
[+] [-] docflabby|5 years ago|reply
Anything you say can be taken as offensive and the crowds bay for blood.
[+] [-] lmilcin|5 years ago|reply
Here some random thoughts / observations:
Hiring women because "we need at least one woman on the team because of the quota". Would you like to know you have been hired because the team is forced to have a women and everybody knows it?
Same company. I have received an email that you can "get bonus if you refer a friend that gets hired." Then a list of how much you can get depending on position. Then a note -- "if a woman, the reward is tripled".
Promoting women before they got enough experience. Similar to above. You have been put on a fast track for promotion but you haven't had time to get the needed experience. Everybody knows this (and discuss behind your back) but nobody is going to tell it to you. Now you have two problems.
On topic of feedback, people need feedback to improve, but female developers will not get it. All-positive feedback is no feedback at all because you are nowhere closer to knowing what you are doing wrong. I have personally been doing some pretty stupid things (like taking credit for other people work) until somebody told me and I fixed it. I wonder what would I do if nobody dared to tell I am doing anything wrong, or if my salary or position in the team had nothing to do with how well I am actually doing?
Just because guys can't be hitting on girls in the office doesn't mean it isn't there, but now it is more comical.
Just because people aren't supposed to discriminate women doesn't mean it is not there. Male developers seem to be in large part focused on the fact the words are spoken by a female rather than their merit. I have seen concrete examples. It kinda seems it is still true you need to (at least in some cases) work twice as hard to prove anything, but now male employees got better at hiding their discrimination. I am half decided that maybe all the focus on discrimination achieved is push the discrimination underground.
Discussions quieting down when you show up. Or tame behavior when eating lunch. Guys reminding other guys that a woman is present. Supposedly because it is not proper to behave like that (but it is fine when only guys present?) Imagine this happening every time.