[Quick prefatory update: HN's throttling algorithm has decided, on the basis of five comments counting this one over the space of the last hour, that I'm "submitting too fast". It'll therefore be a fair while before I am able to respond to the replies I confidently expect this post to provoke.]
You know, at base, I think this is a class issue.
No, I don't mean in the Marxist sense, so all you libertarians who're even now clearing for action and double-shotting your broadsides, hold off a minute and finish reading first.
I mean it's a class issue in the sense that acting like the assholes these women have found themselves forced to put up with, throughout their careers in our industry, is stigmatic of a complete lack of class.
Our industry, after all, revolves around a profession. We arrogate unto ourselves the title of "engineer", despite the complete lack of licensure or regulation commensurate with every other industry whose professionals bear that title. It is therefore incumbent upon us to behave in accordance with our pretensions -- and especially so, I'd argue, given the relative lack of rigor which characterizes our industry as a whole.
Now, maybe I'm just an effete, precious little snowflake. But I have absolutely no desire to associate with people who behave in the fashions described in the open letter published by Manian et al., and in a thousand other places, by a thousand other women, who are themselves remarkable among their fellows in our industry only in that they're courageous enough to tell their stories -- despite the excoriation they know full well will come their way in response -- in hopes of provoking change.
Such people lack class. They lack taste and refinement. If nothing else, they lack the basic good sense to recognize unprofessional behavior in themselves, and to acknowledge the solid reasons why the constraints of professionalism exist at all.
Speaking of which: I've recently participated in a couple of HN discussions around the topic of office politics. From them I have gleaned the impression that a lot of engineers consider office politicking to be something which just gets in the way of getting the job done, and is undesirable therefore.
To engineers who share that opinion, I point out that what we're talking about here also gets in the way. Unless you're willing to declare flat out that women have nothing to offer the industry, or unless you prefer to imagine that the women who've described maltreatment at the hands of their supposedly professional male peers are just lying out of some conspiratorial urge or other, I don't see how you can evaluate this situation any other way.
Anyone who reviews my comment history on HN will recognize quickly enough that I have no particular fondness for feminism as a movement, or for feminist theory, much of which strikes me as ill-argued and overly reliant on an axiomatic infrastructure which is not so sturdy as its proponents seem to believe. Worse, by the lights of feminism per se, someone like Adria Richards, who reacted to a vaguely tasteless joke in so spectacularly ill-considered fashion as to end up getting three people fired, has no cause for reproach.
On the other hand, I see no reason why it's necessary to have any fondness at all for either of those things, when the problem, at its base, is that there are too many assholes in our industry with no sense of how to behave. It's not a question of "how to treat a woman", as though that were some sort of magical separate category. None of the shit we're talking about here is anything you'd be inclined to put up with for one minute, if anyone directed it at you. That it's directed almost universally at women, instead, makes no difference. These behaviors, in themselves, are utterly unacceptable in any even remotely professional context. That they're so widespread in our industry -- indeed, that they're suffered to exist at all in our industry, to say nothing of the degree to which they're actually tolerated -- gives every one of us a bad name.
I don't like that. I refuse to tolerate the company of the people who are responsible for it. I'm not looking to start a movement; I'd be crap at it and there are already far too many of those to begin with. I'm just looking to see those of us in the industry who do have class, who do have taste, behave accordingly with regard to those who don't.
No doubt some of them will realize why they've been excluded, and will learn better. Great! That's what ostracism is for. If they can show they know how to behave themselves like grown adults, they're welcome to join those of us who never needed remedial education on the subject to begin with.
And, equally without doubt, some of them will never figure it out, and, like MRAs, MGTOWs, and others who prefer abandoning society over learning to interact with it, will grow bitter in their increasingly self-inflicted solitude. Those, we're better off without, and to hell with them.
I think a lot of what you're talking about has more to do with an apparent inability of some people to act with any sort of common sense around other human beings rather than 'class'. This happens in any workplace (my mother was a secretary, and had to leave one of her companies because her boss was consistently making advances), but in technology especially so.
Perhaps this is a symptom of the social environment a lot of programmers seem to have in common. A lot of us spend our teenage years alone or with a small group of very close friends. Because of that, certain people might not develop a full understanding of social customs, or worse: deride them as 'silly'. This is a fundamental mark of immaturity, and most people and most programmers grow out of it. Some people don't, and I think it's especially common among programmers because they (and yes, this is stereotype) tend to be very solitary.
People like us tend to spend a lot of time online, where you can make sure you only talk to people who are very similar to you (case in point: HN). Not being forced to talk to people with different opinions results in stunted social growth. A huge part of life is learning to interact with people who are different than you.
When you throw someone who doesn't have a lot of experience with social norms and is used to having everything their way into an office work environment, they generally don't mesh well.
> I think a lot of what you're talking about has more to do with an apparent inability of some people to act with any sort of common sense around other human beings rather than 'class'.
Some of it, maybe. A lowered standard of functional adulthood for such people doesn't seem like it would do them any favors; instead, it'd deny them the very feedback they need to learn better.
Immaturity doesn't strike me as the major problem here, though, unless you want to argue that the average degree of social maturity in our industry resembles that more commonly expected on a grade-school playground.
Even if that were true, then the maltreatment under discussion would be a lot more evident than it is to those of us who aren't its targets, because those who engage in it would lack the necessary cunning to choose their target and their context so that a complaint can be dismissed as he-said-she-said. Such cunning requires at least some capacity, whether cognitive or intuitive, for social analysis -- enough so, in fact, to exceed the minimum threshold for "I didn't understand what I was doing was wrong".
This being true, your choices are either to assume the existence of a feminist conspiracy aimed at the overthrow of the existing industry, or to assume that those men who are most responsible for the problem under discussion know very well that most of us would utterly refuse to put up with their shit if we saw it going on, and that's why they make sure that we don't.
I totally agree with you it is a class issue. May I put it in other words? an asshole issue. How to behave around other "human beings" has been forgotten and a culture of attacking the different has evolved.
Why? Perhaps to protect the individual ideas and create echo chambers where people feel "safe" from criticism. Although without criticism (critical thinking), and without dealing with real world evidences... I fear we're getting nowhere.
It is a pity that something as MRAs exist: why should anyone need a specific gender movement to protect its rights. It is a failure that MGTOWs exist: why should anyone hate the environment created around its gender.
You know, at base, I think this is a class issue.
No, I don't mean in the Marxist sense, so all you libertarians who're even now clearing for action and double-shotting your broadsides, hold off a minute and finish reading first.
I mean it's a class issue in the sense that acting like the assholes these women have found themselves forced to put up with, throughout their careers in our industry, is stigmatic of a complete lack of class.
Our industry, after all, revolves around a profession. We arrogate unto ourselves the title of "engineer", despite the complete lack of licensure or regulation commensurate with every other industry whose professionals bear that title. It is therefore incumbent upon us to behave in accordance with our pretensions -- and especially so, I'd argue, given the relative lack of rigor which characterizes our industry as a whole.
Now, maybe I'm just an effete, precious little snowflake. But I have absolutely no desire to associate with people who behave in the fashions described in the open letter published by Manian et al., and in a thousand other places, by a thousand other women, who are themselves remarkable among their fellows in our industry only in that they're courageous enough to tell their stories -- despite the excoriation they know full well will come their way in response -- in hopes of provoking change.
Such people lack class. They lack taste and refinement. If nothing else, they lack the basic good sense to recognize unprofessional behavior in themselves, and to acknowledge the solid reasons why the constraints of professionalism exist at all.
Speaking of which: I've recently participated in a couple of HN discussions around the topic of office politics. From them I have gleaned the impression that a lot of engineers consider office politicking to be something which just gets in the way of getting the job done, and is undesirable therefore.
To engineers who share that opinion, I point out that what we're talking about here also gets in the way. Unless you're willing to declare flat out that women have nothing to offer the industry, or unless you prefer to imagine that the women who've described maltreatment at the hands of their supposedly professional male peers are just lying out of some conspiratorial urge or other, I don't see how you can evaluate this situation any other way.
Anyone who reviews my comment history on HN will recognize quickly enough that I have no particular fondness for feminism as a movement, or for feminist theory, much of which strikes me as ill-argued and overly reliant on an axiomatic infrastructure which is not so sturdy as its proponents seem to believe. Worse, by the lights of feminism per se, someone like Adria Richards, who reacted to a vaguely tasteless joke in so spectacularly ill-considered fashion as to end up getting three people fired, has no cause for reproach.
On the other hand, I see no reason why it's necessary to have any fondness at all for either of those things, when the problem, at its base, is that there are too many assholes in our industry with no sense of how to behave. It's not a question of "how to treat a woman", as though that were some sort of magical separate category. None of the shit we're talking about here is anything you'd be inclined to put up with for one minute, if anyone directed it at you. That it's directed almost universally at women, instead, makes no difference. These behaviors, in themselves, are utterly unacceptable in any even remotely professional context. That they're so widespread in our industry -- indeed, that they're suffered to exist at all in our industry, to say nothing of the degree to which they're actually tolerated -- gives every one of us a bad name.
I don't like that. I refuse to tolerate the company of the people who are responsible for it. I'm not looking to start a movement; I'd be crap at it and there are already far too many of those to begin with. I'm just looking to see those of us in the industry who do have class, who do have taste, behave accordingly with regard to those who don't.
No doubt some of them will realize why they've been excluded, and will learn better. Great! That's what ostracism is for. If they can show they know how to behave themselves like grown adults, they're welcome to join those of us who never needed remedial education on the subject to begin with.
And, equally without doubt, some of them will never figure it out, and, like MRAs, MGTOWs, and others who prefer abandoning society over learning to interact with it, will grow bitter in their increasingly self-inflicted solitude. Those, we're better off without, and to hell with them.