@all the men in this thread who noticed your mechanics/car dealers/whatever being openly sexist in dealing with your wives:
What did you do? How did you then put your privilege to work to call out your fellow men?
Your anecdotes about noticing sexism are great, but even better would be something other than playing silent witness and collecting ally cookies. Thanks!
…yup.
2010 timeframe the company I worked for hired a new female CTO. Even looking back only seven years ago, I’m amazed at the way she was discussed and treated even as recently as that. I’ve since worked for Wikimedia, and saw firsthand what a diverse, inclusive workplace was like (and that was only four years later). That makes me cautionsly optimistic for the future, current US political climate notwithstanding.
Well I don’t need to justify myself to you, but here goes. As I said, rather than allow the salesperson to ignore my wife, I deliberately make myself unavailable if necessary for her to be able to have the conversation. It would be idiotic and overly confrontational for me to confront the salesperson and accuse them of sexism or misogyny simply becasue they chose to speak to me. In individual cases we don’t actually know the reason they might have done so, but we nevertheless have noticed the pattern and seek to interrupt it. I guess I could ratchet it up a notch by asking the salesperson why they are seemingly ignoring my wife. Seems like a bit of a dick move, but I’ll give it some consideration, nevertheless.
I’m a long way from screaming “misogynist sexist pig” into their face, or demanding their resignation/sacking if that’s what you’re getting at.
My dad was a big fan of the “just keep walking out of the office until I get what I want” tactic. Embarrassed the hell out of me when I was younger. Now I’m like “dad was onto something.”
My husband will smile vaguely and say “Oh, I don’t know anything about [thing]. She’s in charge.” It’s true for cars, anyway.
Although once we were in Best Buy and he was trying to buy a copy of the Desperate Housewives video game and the salesman kept talking to me instead. He was buying it because he’d worked on it.
Similarly, a ~3 years back I gave a big presentation to people in my company on development best practices for stuff I work on. I mentioned a great resource was Tess Ferrandez’ blog at Microsoft, which I brought up briefly to show.
My boss at the time previously worked at Microsoft for some 10 years. He said, “Oh yeah, I’ve met Tess. She’s a lot less attractive in person than that picture suggests.”
I just don’t get it sometimes. He knew too I was recording the presentation and comments from the audience (his request), and still said it without thinking.
Go back ten years, and that was absolutely the norm. Go back twenty years, and I was participating in that culture without even thinking about it, the entire tech department was openly teasing female tech workers back then.
There’s been progress. Not enough and not quickly, but there has been progress. The important bit now is to not allow folks to declare “victory” until we actually reach gender parity.
Etsy has been held up in the past as a hallmark of that philosophy. A few years ago their management team noticed their user base was 90% women, but their team was almost 95% men, and worked hard to get that towards the 50/50 split it should be.
It would have been brilliant if someone had immediately replied:
“How is that relevant?”
Not to be a contrarian or anything, but I feel that Mrs. Pao is really not a great figurehead for fighting online sexism.
She:
-Is/was (?) married to Buddy Fletcher, who was running a huge scam with peoples’ retirement accounts,
-Had a complete trainwreck of a “sexual discrimination” case (where, if anybody bothered to read the transcripts, would realize that pretty much everything was an unprovable allegation or was reported to and appropriately handled by her superiors at KP),
-For some reason decided to sue after the statute of limitations had run out for most of the charges(?!) and suspiciously for exactly the amount that her husband Buddy Fletcher was in the hole for at the time.
For the record, I 100% agree that sexism in tech is a huge problem and needs to be addressed. I’m trying to raise both of my girls to have a interest in STEM, and I don’t want them to have any discrimination against them in an already-highly-competitive field. This should IN NO WAY be considered as ANYTHING other than a criticism of Pao herself as an inappropriate rallying figure for a good movement.
I agree that men who notice sexism and bigotry should speak out, but I just really like that nowadays there are actually some white men who acknowledge the horrible, casually nasty treatment women in tech get.
This is not sarcasm.
For years, my co-workers acted like frat-boy assholes looking for someone to haze. When this is the culture, even moderately decent human beings can get roped in to share the “fun”.
And as someone who co-owned & worked at an auto body & repair shop, even when I go into an auto parts store and ask for exactly what I want, I’m talked down to & treated like an imbecile. If the husband is there, he gets the attention & respect, and I just get ignored.
Seeing people responding in a forum that they see the sexism, bigotry, and other toxic social and cultural norms that women* have been complaining about having to slog thru to get anywhere in tech, well, for me that shows that first steps are being accomplished. Social and cultural norms are hard to change, and change in them has to come from within.
Thanks for taking the first step - identifying the problem. Spread your opinions around, and maybe some more steps can be taken. You can’t just wave a wand around and eliminate this.
Preface: yes, there is sexism and it is bad and should not happen.
But here’s an interesting bit of anecdata: last year I was in San Fransisco with a friend of mine. We’re both techies, around the same level (senior leads).
We had set up meetings at a few tech companies with our peers. You know, call it intercultural tech exchange. Talk tech with a few techies or more, maybe have lunch. Learned a bunch. Anyway, we went around to Twitter, Uber, Google, Pintrest etc.
Two interesting observations: the companies had quite a few women working there even though their tech teams were much more male (this is still a numbers game; there are just way fewer women to work in those jobs and that will only get fixed as education allows women from a young age to contemplate gaining that kind of knowledge [my theory is that one cause is the high number of female teachers who have little tech interest imprint upon young girls]).
But more relevant here: my friend is a woman. And even though I am quite social and knowledgeable … it was as if I was hardly there! She was the focus in almost all these meetings. And this was not due to the guys merely wanting to sex her up. I think at least the techies are aware of the lack of women and a competent woman programmer is VERY interesting to them and courted. In the professional, job sense of the word.
I thought it was fascinating. The feeling described of being ignored at the car dealership? I know now how the women feel.
Now, of course, I gather at the upper levels (CxO level) this is absolutely different. But the lead devs do seem very aware and a woman techy, even if she were to be only barely competent, has a VERY easy time getting a job in tech.
That sounds like a good move to me. Maybe I’m a dick, but when someone openly disrespects someone for bigoted reasons and the interaction involves me, I’m going to confront them about it. And if the disrespected individual is someone I even remotely personally care about, I’m not going to be gentle about it. But even if it’s a total stranger, I refuse to be used as a platform for bigotry however slight. Bigots have their push-back coming to them. Jerks prey upon the unhealthy desire of others to avoid friction. They’re not going to stop being jerks privately, but they might amend their bad behavior in public only if others let them know they won’t tolerate it.
Um, who here suggested anything of the sort?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I do what I think is right, I do it because I think it’s the right thing to do. If I want cookies I’ll bake my own thanks.
It seems like a lot of people have been raised or cultured to regard good manners as simply being nice to everyone no matter how rotten they behave. However well-meaning the motivation, I consider conciliation towards bigots to be a social disease.
You have those kind of folks on one hand, and people who believe that ‘free speech’ means they can say whatever they want with no consequences whatsoever on the other.
SMH
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