Criticizing a woman, even calling her a bitch, is not misogyny. Misogyny is hating women because they are women. What OP described is just heckling.
And what OP did is white knighting, i.e. a man defending a woman, because she's a woman, in order to appear virtuous. Like posting about it on HackerNews.
No, what he did was reinforce what is acceptable social behavior in that situation. While the specifics of the situation may have spurred him to act quicker or in a case he wouldn't have, that's irrelevant. The behavior being called out is unacceptable no matter who is giving the talk. People did not attend the talk to hear people heckle the talker, there are other forums for that (stand-up, and there are some talks which might be more comical and some light heckling might be acceptable).
Rude behavior was called out. It's rude regardless of the people in each position in this scenario.
> Criticizing a woman, even calling her a bitch, is not misogyny.
Calling a black person a "nigger" isn't racism -- but (outside of specific contexts that weaken this conclusion) its a pretty strong indication of racism, and (subject to pretty much the same contextual considerations) not addressing it normalizes racism, whether or not the actual utterance was motivated by racism. The same is true with "woman", "bitch", and "misogyny" in place of "black person", "nigger", and "racism".
> And what OP did is white knighting, i.e. a man defending a woman, because she's a woman, in order to appear virtuous.
I don't see any indication that it was done "in order to appear virtuous", which is, you correctly note, an essential feature of white knighting.
Nah, heckling takes volume. You don't heckle sotto voce for just your buddies to hear. You do it at the top of your lungs for everyone in the room to hear. Say what you like about heckling, it takes a certain degree of grit.
Funny, "Dog-whistle" is the loudest dog-whistle I know, for strawmanning. "We all know what you really mean, wink wink, nod nod, and therefor you are a bigot / racist / etc."
I wonder how much of this regrexit sentiment is actually present and how much of it is just isolated incidents being held up as if they are representative. By the same media that predicted the outcome entirely wrong.
You, like many others, miss the most important part of DongleGate. She shamed the supposed dongle-joke offender on Twitter with their picture, which was unambiguously against the Code of Conduct, for it bans harassing photography. She did not only fail to see the hypocrisy, her actions were deemed heroic and she compared herself to Joan of Arc.
This was a clear sign to anyone paying attention that Codes of Conduct were never about policing behavior objectively, but instead were to be wielded as a weapon to shame and attack particular groups of people based on a political ideology of victimhood.
Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson all project a proud, willful disrespect of philosophy, which has been noted and argued about on HN substantively. I'm sure Tyson's Internet superstardom with the Reddit and Imgur crowd has nothing to do with the instant backlash against only criticism of him though, right?
I'm not sure I understand why you're irritated. There's a pox on all of them at HN, and a pox there shall remain.
Controversies about these characters mostly aren't interesting (in HN's sense) whether they're in the key of zeal or the key of critique. Whoever's flagging them is doing us all a favor.
> being unable to get anyone to hold a private conversation with them
Are you really surprised, right after that "Glass wall" story was posted here about one woman's terrible tragedy of having to deal with a male executive who briefly talked to her in an office stairwell? Convincing herself the entire office was about to think they were having an affair?
And you're surprised men are less eager to approach women than men in tech?
I don't think I've ever in my professional career observed someone being feverish and flushed and assume that it had something to do with sexual tension. Men just aren't that observant.
More likely, I would assume you were either sick or anxious because of some work-related conversation. Neither of which is a reason to be concerned vis-à-vis office politics.
Also, can I offer a suggestion to your problem? Couldn't you make up a little white lie and tell your coworkers that you had a very minor medical condition that resulted in being feverish and flushed often but that there were no other serious effects? No need to name anything, but that should take care of your worry about getting an email every time you sneeze and also deal with your concern about constantly having your obvious symptoms be misunderstood.
I no longer work at that company. I often told people very honestly things like "I have respiratory problems and allergies" without naming my condition. I did that kind of thing quite a lot.
No, I am not overreacting. There is still more to the story and I plan on writing more in the future. If my point of view is not your cup of tea, it isn't exactly required reading. If it helps other people, good. I write in some sense for myself.
I rewrote this from a rather snide to a bit more neutral comment; but are you aware that just because you don't that doesn't mean that others don't?
Or that even if all men really aren't observant enough, which is also a rather daring statement if I may say so, that still leaves room for women noticing it and communicating this more explicitly.
It's exactly the point I'm trying to make. I've never heard of anything like this happening, anywhere, ever. Even in casual settings. Nor have I observed that a normal response to sexual arousal is to be feverish and flushed.
To draw the type of conclusions that she is claiming, her coworkers would have to (1) be incredibly observant (2) reject all of the most plausible explanations for a very unlikely explanation and (3) care.
This is Ockham's razor.
I have a friend that is abnormally paranoid. He thinks everybody is out to get him and sees devious plotting from the most innocuous of situations. "those two guys at the water cooler are plotting to make me look bad at the meeting today" - type stuff.
Chances are they are not.
All I'm saying is that it sounds like fear of taking a wrong social step at work seems to be affecting her performance, not to mention increasing her anxiety.
It could perhaps be healthy to reconsider whether her assumptions are reasonable or not.
The thing is that she never said the thoughts were reasonable; it's perfectly possible that she acknowledges she's a bit over-sensitive about it just like you might do something out of fear that you'll be thought of as incompetent or unsuccessful.
On the other hand; thinking that this kind of thing is never discussed is rather naive. There's plenty of people who are very observant about these kinds of things and will happily discuss them when the opportunity arises. We even invented a word for it: gossiping.
Regardless of whether it's nature or nurture, women in at least Western culture are used to focussing much more on the subtle interpersonal dynamics of situations.
It could be due to something as simple as hormonal differences creating more interconnections between hemispheres or historical oppression having given rise to a form of power play that by it's nature needed to be concealed from men.
Whichever it is, it creates a different kind of sense-making and internal dialogue. Right here, you're taking that 'kind' of internal dialogue and branding it as the sort of tripe for which women deserve to be excluded by men.
That, even disregarding the fact that you accidentally wrote this to the author of said post, is exactly the kind of stuff sexism in tech is made of.
"I'm worried people might think something's going on between me and So and So. So I'm going to act in the most suspicious way possible around them and assume nobody has my superior observation skills, especially not those men who keep perpetuating the glass ceiling by treating women differently."
So that's reason to treat employees like lepers and impose your paranoia on them? You weren't taking his feelings into a count, you simply declared them as something to be managed, and you as the authority. Did it ever occur to you that you might've been wrong?
See, the problem is that the people who complain about this are also the ones who say it's valuable to add women to a group of men (or indeed the reverse), because it results in more balanced decision making.
It can't be both. Either men or women are (as groups, i.e. averages) innately differ on the social vs analytical axis, and diversity is a net plus, or gender is entirely socially constructed, and adding women to a group shouldn't do anything in aggregate.
Studies point to the former rather than the latter.
Stupid analogy: I hate it that only tall people seem to design store displays of pants. Remarkably, tall people don't seem to notice that putting the small sizes on the top shelves and the larger sizes lower does not make sense. It's because they have a different experience of reaching for things on shelves. Height diversity, though, makes for a better user experience.
It is true in my stupid analogy that tall people and short people do have genetic differences, as on average they innately differ in height. But it is not their innate genetic traits that makes these tall people ignorant both on the social and analytical axes when designing store displays.
There's a big difference between "on average, women are more socially adept while men are more mathematically adept" and "women socially understand things at a level most men will never achieve". The former is a statement about averages; the latter is a statement about absolutes.
It's okay to make generalizations based on imperfect correlates - like gender - as long as you understand they're generalizations, and are open to revising your judgment if new, more specific information appears. The comment that sparked this thread didn't evidence any of that understanding.
You have a weird definition of 'innate'. Socially constructed effects are still effects. You still want a mix of people that have different traits and skills, even if they have nothing to do with biology.
So your demand of advocates of inclusiveness is to either a) concede that their support for female participation stems from a belief in the existence of a sensory mode or organ which only females have; or b) concede that women have nothing to offer which cannot be replicated by men and therefore there is no need to include them?
You can't see a third possibility in between those two?
"Victim blaming" implies you know for sure who the victim is. Given that this is nothing but one big he-said-she-said, I will instead reserve judgement.
We have someone who's been accused of being unable to take criticism and being vindictive. She responds by throwing a public tantrum and blaming all of Github for it. If the shoe fits... Why is she so convinced that post is about her anyway? Unless there was some truth to it.
The tech feminists never seem interested in taking the high road, and instead optimize for maximum drama. Don't complain about being a public figure when you broadcast your life on Twitter.
If there was something specific and genuine that happened, and the person in question wished to do something about it other than attract a lot of attention, I imagine they'd post a lot more detail other than "I was harassed, HR made up a story, GitHub has a sexist culture".
GitHub, like any company, wouldn't say anything about an individual HR case.
We should be reserving our judgement of what happened - personally, I'll wait a month or two and ask GitHubbers what they actually think when I see them - but this isn't a professional way to handle something.
He didn't judge her or Github with respect to the "incidents" in question because we have no facts on those incidents. What we do have facts on is how such the here-say is being publicized by one individual. In that respect, it's fair to judge those specific actions while reserving judgement of the actions involving the actual incident being discussed until a later date when more facts have been made public.
> Given that this is nothing but one big he-said-she-said
At least the linked article seems to just be a "she said", so, unless there's more info somewhere, I don't think this has even reached the he-said/she-said stage.
And what OP did is white knighting, i.e. a man defending a woman, because she's a woman, in order to appear virtuous. Like posting about it on HackerNews.