andreakate's comments

It's disappointing (though not surprising) to hear your story about Math Overflow and your location. I think the more we talk about it the more aware people will be so thank you for sharing.

The scientist in me also finds your experience very interesting. For the most part we think of these online platform as "anonymous" because we aren't conversing face to face. Yet our biases find other ways to creep in, often unnoticed.

This is really interesting because I've worked on Wall Street as well and I know exactly what you mean but have never really been able to articulate the difference you've just pointed out. Working on Wall Street I had lots of male friends, not just colleagues. For the most part I felt included and was treated as competent. I also dealt with a fair amount of sexual harassment. Most of it was under the guise of joking/"locker room talk" that I just ignored. Sometimes, particularly from the older men, it was more physical and made me feel very uncomfortable.

The allegations against Google actually really caught me off guard because, in my experience, a lot of men in Silicon Valley seem like they're almost too... progressive (if that's the right word) to overtly harass their female peers the way men on Wall Street sometimes do. On the other hand I really struggle with inclusion in tech in a way that I never did in finance. I often feel dismissed by my tech colleagues. Both personally and professionally. Experiencing that sort of divide is much more difficult to explain and, to your point, much more difficult for me to navigate. Not to diminish women who have been sexually harassed at work, I'm one of them, but this silent divide takes a much bigger toll on me personally.

Thank you for pointing it out.

My personal opinion is that the person raises a valid point but I would’ve taken them more seriously if they had left the #MeToo part out of it. I lived in Boston so perhaps I'm more aware of it than most, but Media Lab has a long history of addressing social issues with innovative technology. They even have a research group dedicated to it.[1] It's one thing to dislike Media Lab's involvement in social activism generally, it's another to dislike Media Lab's involvement with feminism. My opinion of Media Lab is pretty unaffected. These “awards” are just PR to help with fundraising. I think Snowden won a few years ago. It’s just about who will drum up the most conversation.

Where I struggle with being a woman in tech is how dismissive many people can be of their female colleagues. As with any discussion that happens behind the safety of a computer screen that attitude seems to be amplified on HN.

In my experience, the assumption seems to be that women have to “prove” their tech competence where men are given the benefit of the doubt until they demonstrate incompetence. For example, I’ve been told that I “wouldn’t understand” code that I wrote. I’ve also found that my StackOverflow account gets better and more productive responses when I use the display name “Andrew” instead of “Andrea.” Just this morning I had a potential investor ask me to name my “silent tech partner.” An odd request considering I was very clear that I had no partners but it was simply inconceivable to him that I had managed on my own.

And that’s on top of the difficulties women face in male-dominated fields generally. In my prior career[2] I’ve had a coworker grab my ass in the elevator because I was wearing “fun pants.” (They were navy blue.) As an accounting student intern I attended a mandatory “Women@Deloitte” event that consisted of a fashion show and tea party while my male counterpart got to do actual work. And as an attorney I once brought a team of my direct-reports (all men) to a Board meeting only to have the new Director that I hadn’t yet met ask me to go to the kitchen to get him a cup of coffee.

As a woman, each of these things in isolation is frustrating, but I have a job to do and I try to brush them aside and let my work speak for itself. Aside from the elevator ass-grab I really, truly, don’t believe that any of these slights demonstrate intentional sexism. But that makes it all the more frustrating to try to tactfully navigate (tolerate?) these realities and then hear conversations and see posts/comments that dismiss or flatly deny that women deal with things like this on a regular basis.

Worse still are the comments that being a woman in tech is “actually easier” or “a hiring advantage.” I can assure you it’s not easier and I challenge anyone who reads this to make a new HN, SO, or even email account that indicates your gender is female and use it for a few weeks to see how differently you’re treated. Most importantly, I think it needs to be said that even if it there were some sort of affirmative action happening in the Valley I don’t want to be hired or funded just because I’m a woman. I simply don’t want to be dismissed because of my gender. Given HN’s obvious skew towards intelligence/education I really struggle to understand how so many of my brilliant colleagues just can’t seem to understand why this is a problem for us.

[1] https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/civic-media/overview/

[2] Full disclosure: I'm a 30-year old self-taught female programmer. My technical knowledge/skillset is probably about that of a recent graduate. Before I quit my job to focus on my start-up full-time I worked on Wall Street as an attorney and also happened to oversee the Information Security team. I suspect I’m more accustomed to working in a male-dominated field than most females. I (wrongly) assumed that Silicon Valley couldn’t be any worse than Wall Street. It seems that Wall Street’s culture has at least had the benefit of a generation of women working with them while Silicon Valley is still adjusting.

Have you watched it? Seed yield has absolutely nothing to do with the scene I was referring to.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/20/supreme-court-mons...

Professor Iris Bohnet of Harvard wrote a fascinating book called "What Works" that you might find interesting. What I really like about the book is right from the jump Bohnet basically says all this "diversity training" and "PC culture" stuff is a waste of time and an uphill battle. We all like to pretend we're unbiased but Bohnet tells the truth from the outset: everyone has biases. The book focuses on systems that emphasize equal opportunity and remove some of those inherent biases we all have.[1] Bohnet's premise is that we'll get better results if we stop designing systems with the faulty assumption that most people/systems/institutions aren't biased in some way or another.

There's a chapter about "blind auditions" that Orchestras began to implement in the 1970's that you might find interesting.[2] After reading that chapter I remember wondering how much we're overthinking a lot of these issues and whether we might be overlooking some pretty easy changes that could have a significant impact.

One interesting fact from the blind auditions study was that even without being able to see the musician they were able to demonstrate bias (likely unconscious) when women wore high heels to their audition because the sound gave away their gender. It's really fascinating some of the ways we unconsciously "judge" those around us.

[1]https://hbr.org/2016/07/designing-a-bias-free-organization

[2]https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...

Can confirm. I have this thought about tech on HN about once a week. Though I will say this thread is relatively tame compared to others I've seen today.

You should watch Food, Inc. on Netflix. They have a segment on Monsanto and how farmers have no choice but to buy seeds from them but the prices are so high most farmers are barely able to keep their businesses running even with subsidies from the Federal Government.

I'm stuck in the two pair camp as well and I cannot for the life of me understand why Apple makes a 3.5mm to lightning adapter but won't make a lightning to 3.5mm adapter. I have a great pair of headphones that use the lightning cable but I travel a lot and my MacBook along with every airplane uses 3.5mm so I can only use them with my phone. It's maddening.