I fully accept that sexism could be driving all of the incidents laid out.
But ...
If one person tells you r=2 is a bad idea, maybe you listen. If two people say it, then three. Well at some point you are an idiot if you keep ignoring. And Google(?) is not known for employing idiots.
If you have to interrupt your co-workers discussion with "put down the crack pipes", I would like to suggest that it might be worth considering that being blanked in the aggressive and frustrating way described is really unprofessional. I mean deeply revealing of a lot of anger and problems. Which means her team is made of of men who have some serious issues, life-crippling levels of sexism.
Or
Well, maybe being prepared to shout that the team is so wrong they are smoking crack, indicates that it is worth looking at the glass house around us.
Getting on with others is hard. In a high pressure work environment it's very hard, in one where Aspergers is just next door for most of the industry, then its even harder.
Running good technical teams is hard and we get it wrong more often than not. Which is why "don't flip the bozo bit" is a vital piece of advice.
But I would also suggest that don't flip the -ism bit without looking deeply at our own behaviour is important.
We live and we die. I was born in 1971, the year of a sitcom called "Love thy neighbour" where the 'joke' was a black family moved in next door. The range of deep seated -isms in my head is vast. But it is a fallacy to think that my head is the only broken one on the planet.
I take my steer from a man with a truly broken head - John Nash was right - we live in a Game Theory world, where actions breed reactions and re-reactions.
In some egregious cases the -ism is so bad it is clearly offensive, and clearly intolerable. Let's say it's order of magnitude out of whack.
In other cases, less so. Women, ethnic minorities, LBGTG and others are at disadvantages because of who they are thats got to be wrong. But we are in a ever shifting game. And the secret of winning the game is not winning, it's improving - changing us.
Want my opinion on the best path to business success. Therapy. Seriously.
I have met billionaires and tramps, people who sold all their possession dn people who have ten of everything, the ones I am jealous of are the ones who have peace. They were not the ones with the money.
There is sexism, racism and every other ism around. It seeps into every day life and it is never acceptable to just let it lie. But just as challenging something there and then is cause for for ing those responsible to look at and question their base assumptions about how they behave, there is always room to look at our own assumptions, for we are all playing a game called life, there is no umpire, no final score, no second round play offs.
Sometimes other people's problems are an opportunity for us. Sometimes just move on.
The first example, the HR one - where you just assume the women are the non-technical personnel and the men are the technical personnel? That one I believe because I know I've done it myself numerous times.
Too often this debate is painted as a battle of good vs evil, either derisively by its detractors or heroically by the firebrands. It's not good versus evil. It's just natural habits we've built up because technical women are really freaking rare. When I'm being interviewed by a woman, I assume she's HR and not tech because I think less of women... but because 90% of the HR people I've been interviewed by were women, and 100% of the technical people I've been interviewed by were men.
It's not some evil decision to keep women down, not even any kind of sexism of thinking less of women... just subconscious assumptions because we're used to the fact that the ladies in the room aren't really part of the technical side of the discussion.
Spot on about a lot of it being unconscious assumptions, not premeditated evil.
But that doesn't make it any different from the point of view of the recipient of such treatment. In some ways it's worse, because people don't even _realize_ how they're treating you, which they sure would if they were doing it on purpose.
This sort of subconscious cultural assumption is _exactly_ how discrimination can easily happen even when no one is explicitly out to get anyone else, and is one of the most important things to try to address...
And that's what the author is exactly outlining in her post: everytime someone brings those things up, a lot of the answers are like yours.
"What if it was just a misunderstanding or a coincidence?"
That's bullshit. You weren't there, OP was.
I love the innate nerd skepticism, but at times like this it really is our worst enemy.
Who would you rather listen to- a sane, reasonable and relatively smart person (based on her credentials and accomplishments) giving you their take on things for which they were physically present; or the little voice in your head that says "but it was probably just a coincidence!", even though you have zero knowledge of the situation except for what you just read of it?
If there were two blogs, written by sane nice sounding engineers, and they gave two different sides to an unpleasant story?
I ammcoming at this from the point of view of a ex-manager who has had to deal with situations where, yes, something and someone has gone too far, but it is far from obvious that there is a guilty party and an innocent party. Just a seeping morass of grey and you get to play referee.
I think I am saying that it's the tiny daily cuts that really deeply wear people down, but it's the big obvious infractions that we can actually spot, call out and deal with.
So as far as I a middle aged white guy understand it, the -isms are mostly background radiation, in some teams and organisations there are great people who act as boron rods, soaking up the crap and turning things into a pleasant place to work. At other places not so much. Work at the former.
I've had my fair share of assholes who want to monopolize the discussion in my life. But in a team setting, even the most know it all, egocentric douchebag amongst them would not ignore me or disallow me from contributing after multiple attempts and gestures indicating I had something to say. And I'm generally not that assertive. Nor has anyone every questioned my recountings of them as "did you really have input relevant or were you just misunderstanding the boys talking?".
I've never had an interviewee doubt my credentials or question the role I claimed. Especially not regularly.
Sure I too will ask around about settings or capabilities if I'm not geting the answer I want, but I sure wouldn't go grudgingly back to the team's expert after I asked some random guy in the next cube over, and say "oh random guy said to do it the way you suggested too, so let's do that."
Finally, that there is a pattern here is suggestive of something. Given the other posts rachel has written, I'm not so sure that any of this is her just coming across some way, she seems like a pretty competent engineer, which according to everyone in these discussions of sexism seems to be all you need to not experience these issues. It really does seem to me like the type of bullshit that women generally report encountering, so I suspect it isn't just that she is the only woman who never experienced sexism, and instead has a rare personality type which results in symptoms identical to sexism.
I fully accept that sexism could be driving all of the incidents laid out.
But ...
If one person tells you r=2 is a bad idea, maybe you listen. If two people say it, then three. Well at some point you are an idiot if you keep ignoring. And Google(?) is not known for employing idiots.
If you have to interrupt your co-workers discussion with "put down the crack pipes", I would like to suggest that it might be worth considering that being blanked in the aggressive and frustrating way described is really unprofessional. I mean deeply revealing of a lot of anger and problems. Which means her team is made of of men who have some serious issues, life-crippling levels of sexism.
Or
Well, maybe being prepared to shout that the team is so wrong they are smoking crack, indicates that it is worth looking at the glass house around us.
Getting on with others is hard. In a high pressure work environment it's very hard, in one where Aspergers is just next door for most of the industry, then its even harder.
Running good technical teams is hard and we get it wrong more often than not. Which is why "don't flip the bozo bit" is a vital piece of advice.
But I would also suggest that don't flip the -ism bit without looking deeply at our own behaviour is important.
We live and we die. I was born in 1971, the year of a sitcom called "Love thy neighbour" where the 'joke' was a black family moved in next door. The range of deep seated -isms in my head is vast. But it is a fallacy to think that my head is the only broken one on the planet.
I take my steer from a man with a truly broken head - John Nash was right - we live in a Game Theory world, where actions breed reactions and re-reactions.
In some egregious cases the -ism is so bad it is clearly offensive, and clearly intolerable. Let's say it's order of magnitude out of whack.
In other cases, less so. Women, ethnic minorities, LBGTG and others are at disadvantages because of who they are thats got to be wrong. But we are in a ever shifting game. And the secret of winning the game is not winning, it's improving - changing us.
Want my opinion on the best path to business success. Therapy. Seriously.
I have met billionaires and tramps, people who sold all their possession dn people who have ten of everything, the ones I am jealous of are the ones who have peace. They were not the ones with the money.
There is sexism, racism and every other ism around. It seeps into every day life and it is never acceptable to just let it lie. But just as challenging something there and then is cause for for ing those responsible to look at and question their base assumptions about how they behave, there is always room to look at our own assumptions, for we are all playing a game called life, there is no umpire, no final score, no second round play offs.
Sometimes other people's problems are an opportunity for us. Sometimes just move on.
Edit: I got a bit carried away sorry