As a male who manages both men and women, I think the author is guilty of selective perception and unfounded bias. I have had women on my team cry in meetings, but I've had men on my team explode in anger. Neither is appropriate.
Women on my team often want to "gossip," but I've learned to recognize it for what it is: a (misguided) attempt to build rapport with me. I'm learning to redirect the conversation to be more positive. The men on my team are more likely to be jockeying for position, claiming credit for things they had small roles in, and generally exaggerating the truth. I'm learning to ask follow-up questions to get them to think twice before making any claims.
Males on my team are just as hard or harder to retain when compared to the women. I believe they're more likely to leave when they're passed over for a promotion or raise. Females at my company are perhaps more likely to leave because they aren't feeling close relationships. Keep in mind that the reason someone gives you for leaving is not always the real reason. The author doesn't seem particularly sensitive, so I wouldn't be surprised if she's getting "reasons" for quitting that are actually just evasions of hard topics.
These are all just my observations and experiences, but I'm sure there are plenty of studies showing the pros and cons of hiring men and women. Whether biological or cultural, I'm positive there are both pros and cons to hiring either gender.
Regardless, you should see my point: it's easy to get a little selective perception when you notice all the bad things about one gender. The fact that the author claims to be a woman and a feminist doesn't excuse a thing. That just means she's a woman and a feminist who stereotypes and wants to discriminate against women.
"I have become profoundly tired of being a therapist and a babysitter"
Then don't be one. I'm a female manager and as soon as that shit starts I shut it down. People only get away with that crap because people tolerate it and I notice they often tolerate it more with women. I don't. Someone who drains time with gossip or whining gets fired. Doesn't matter if they are a man or a woman.
Also notice she talks about a receptionist, not an engineer. I admit I have struggled finding admin staff like receptionists that aren't drama queens. If you hired men for those kind of positions they'd be the same– these are lower status jobs and attract people who can't do well in high-paid higher status jobs. Since I work with some IT construction I also work with lower-status men and they are also very hard to manage. They often quit to mooch off of others or are late to work because of fights with their girlfriends or whatever.
Throwaway for obvious reasons. Several years ago I managed a team of three male engineers and one female engineer (who was younger by the men by around 8-10 years) working on a typical software project complete with tight deadlines and the usual last minute rush. Two days before launch while trying to diagnose a particularly obscure bug the team digressed from trying to fix the bug to griping about which framework was used and why it was a bad decision and how unrealistic the expectations from the client were, etc. As a developer I can sympathize with this frustration so I let it go on for about 15-20 minutes and then I interrupted the group by saying something like "We can act like babies and whine and bitch about the things that are beyond our control or we can accept those facts, put our heads down and push forward like fucking adults". The language was rough, but I like everyone else had worked 60+ hours that week. The team begrudgingly agreed and after a coffee run went back to work.
The project launched on time the next day (Friday) and everything seemed fine. We all went out for lunch, toasted to success and hard work, and then went home early for the weekend.
On Monday, the female engineer didn't show up for work, no call, no email, and didn't respond to phone calls. Tuesday and Wednesday the same thing. On Thursday I received the "hostile work environment" claim stating that I had singled her out and referred to her specifically as a "bitch" and a "baby" and my favorite part, that we used sexist names such as "Factory Girl" in our everyday work environment. On Friday we met with our lawyer who explained that despite having three other witnesses that would testify that her story is shenanigans and that FactoryGirl is a commonly used library that we didn't name, it would be cheaper from a cost perspective and from a PR perspective to settle out of court.
The settlement cost more than the project brought in.
woah. That's really a shame and makes working in this industry more difficult. The fact that you have to be so careful around women or you'll be labeled sexist or get sued. I'm all for protecting people but people should also understand when it's work time and when it's play time.
>People only get away with that crap because people tolerate it
Man, did you ever nail it. The people who do this kind of stuff are needy, and they are frequently bottomless in their neediness. When they see someone who is patient or tolerant of their nonsense, they will lock in like rabid pit bulls (apologies to rabid pit bulls), and they will make that person responsible for their emotional well-being.
Now, once you've allowed them to go down this path, you're headed for trouble. You think you're just being nice or understanding, but you can never satisfy these people, so at some point you will have to draw the line. And when you do, they will perceive it as some grand slight because you were once so "kind" to them. Then, more drama, but this time you're the bad guy.
Bottom line: you can't entertain it for a second. As soon as it is spotted, cut it out like the cancer that it is and keep it moving.
Note, FWIW, that the article doesn't specify that she's in tech at all, and besides receptionist, there aren't really any roles specified at all. I think the first question everyone should be asking is, "what kind of jobs are we even talking about?"
So we went from sexist (op) to classist? I don't understand how you got away so far with all that "lower-status" shit. It's not only that you call some jobs "low-status jobs", but you went as far as calling people "lower-status men" just because.
You don't have to be low class to have a lower-status job. Lower-status jobs are just jobs that are lower paid and not as desirable to have. I grew up poor in the Deep South, my boss comes from a persecuted minority culture, and some of the folks with the lower-status jobs came from nice neighborhoods on the East Coast and went to private school, so at least in my line of work it doesn't intersect with "class."
English is not my first language, not even the second, but I'm sure you're misusing "status" here. Those jobs could be low paid, but not "lower-status".
By the way, you're implying that coming from the Deep South or "coming from"* (sic) a persecuted minority culture are two examples of low class, but I fail to see how is it related at all.
I've got the feeling that you rank people based on the job they do. It is a shame because you're missing many interesting conversations.
I agree with your points and approach to manage the genders differently. However, I also recognize the author is simply frustrated by her realization that these stereotypes are based in reality. She's basically sympathizing with the people who she disagree with as a feminist. She recognizes it wrong, but doesn't have the time to fix it. The easy solution, for her, is to hire a man.
When I shop for clothes I often look for a female to help me. In my experience I've had better results getting stuff I like with better advise from women. I know a man could sometimes be better, but I actively try to avoid men. It's just a simple filter I use to get to my ultimate goal quickly with a (perceived) higher level of success. I think this author is doing the same.
The anecdote/data statement is usually rendered "The plural of anecdote is not data" so your point is not strictly true. Obviously with enough consistent anecdotes, they can be considered as data, but n is going to have to be convincingly large... ;)
Its worth noting that the way that women interact with other women is different than how they interact with men or how men interact with women. IE, Clarissa's experience as a female manager is going to be severely different than yours.
One of the key differences I think, is that you think as a professional manager of people. The author thinks like a "do-er", a contributor, and is looking for people who work like her. She may be an unusual woman that tends more toward the male pattern of behavior, but that is just happenstance.
One thing you both agree on, is that (whether she hates it or not) there are common differences between men and women that extend beyond appearance. Where I differ with her: Whether chromosomes or upbringing or micro-biota I don't care, those differences exist, they are useful diversification and should be accepted, even though they each need to be managed in their own way.
I agree with you jasallen - I also believe that there are common differences between the genders, albeit for a wide variety of reasons and with a lot of variation between individuals.
I believe it's healthier to acknowledge that these differences are real than pretend that these differences don't exist. Unfortunately, this can also make things more difficult and complicated.
Now that the thread has been flagged by HN's flamewar detection, I'd like to point out that three people correcting a single misspelled word is about as low as online discussion can get. HN will be better if you can get over nitpicking and try to add something to the conversation.
With the ability to send personal messages, this could be mitigated, but it's no fun to point out how much smarter you are to a single person, rather than the entire internet, when correcting someone's speling or grammar.
I think this anonymous blogger should evaluate her hiring practices.
I have hired many women and men. If anything I have had fewer melodrama issues with women. The women I have hired are focused, analytical, meticulate and disciplined. I had exactly one so far leave for "soft" reasons; she wanted to pursue nonprofit work in a developing country and we remain on good terms.
In a manufacturing environment, I've had far more issues with gossip, melodrama and feuds with men. As I have brought more women in (not intentionally, but just because they were good candidates) many of those issues have disappeared and our production operations have become more upbeat with fewer personnel issues.
In general, I find a much higher incidence rate of irresponsibility among male production candidates: outstanding arrest warrants, inability to resolve past DUI offenses with the courts, domestic violence that spreads into the workplace, absenteeism, etc. -- all actual issues we have had to deal with.
Obviously not all male candidates are like this, and it would be wrong to draw the opposite conclusion. It is also fairly easy to weed these people out of the recruiting process, or, at worst, to part ways with them if we are not successful in catching it before hiring. But if you find you have hired a bunch of melodramatic and uncommitted women, you should probably ask yourself why your hiring processes selected people with those traits (hint: it is not because of their gender).
You have employees with outstanding arrest warrants and domestic violence issues? It kind of sounds like you also need to reevaluate your hiring practices...
Edit: I'd like to encourage people responding to this to consider the context: an article about why someone doesn't want to employ a certain category of people, and a response to that article about how there's lots of value to be found in that category, if only the author had better hiring practices. E.g. "somebody's gotta hire them" would apply equally to the article's female employees, and thus is also a criticism of hiring practices that exclude those "problem" people, which presumably includes the parent. IOW, the premise here is that you want to hire people maximally useful to your business. Maybe you don't think that's should be the point, but then you're having a different discussion.
Manufacturing is like that. I've bailed my guys out of jail (enough to get a quickie card from the bondsman), separated fights, etc. It goes with the territory.
If this is the case, then this is hardly a fair comparison. Reason 1 being women in manufacturing are typically in office jobs and Reason 2 being that, compared to the kinds of men who typically work the floor, just about anyone will look reasonable who works in the office, man or woman.
It probably isn't an equal comparison. The original poster might be in a completely different hiring situation from the blog writer. However, I've hired women to work on the floor in manufacturing and I prefer them. As the original poster said, less BS from the women, more reliability. On average, of course. There are no 100% shortcuts.
We have plenty of women in manufacturing, on the floor, occupying both lower level jobs as well as skilled trade jobs. I am not comparing guys on the floor with accountants.
> Reason 1 being women in manufacturing are typically in office jobs
"Nimble fingers" was one sexist reason to employ women, at lower pay rates, than men in many industries including auto seat making (because of the sewing) and electronic assembly (because of all those fiddly little components).
There are, and have been since the industrial revolution, very many women involved in manufacturing and industry on the shop floor.
This is still true in developing countries. e.g. FoxConn prefers women over men for assembly, but these days they can't be so picky. Most of those died in the recent Bangladesh factory tragedy were women.
The outstanding arrest warrants are caught in our recruiting process, prior to a formal hire. We usually work with the candidate to try to resolve them before bringing them on board (it is possible to have an outstanding arrest warrant and not be aware of it, for old nonviolent offenses).
Domestic violence you cannot catch in a background check, unless it's progressed to felony levels obviously. Domestic violence often evolves over time. That is a very challenging situation and we wound up parting ways. Ideally we would have caught symptomatic behavior in the interview process but typically people with those problems can be very good at masking it. Our process certainly isn't perfect, but as we continually fine-tune it we have fewer and fewer of these issues.
I have no doubt that all sorts of stuff slips through the cracks in all sorts of ways. I've certainly had really problematic hires. My issue is I'm trying to square "you have problematic female hires? I bet you just have bad hiring practices" with "our employees sometimes beat their wives". I'm not even saying you're wrong on the narrow point-- maybe the article's author is really bad at hiring women-- but I'm not sure you're in a great position to judge the effects of hiring process quality. Maybe figure that stuff out at hiring time is just hard, for both her and for you?
You're right, it is hard, at least for me it is. But I think how a manager reacts to errors made in the hiring process is important. I try to be introspective, and evaluate how we could have better identified that potential issue preemptively, and adapt our process for the future.
But I don't think that banning some incredibly broad demographic that includes 51% of the applicant pool is a sign that someone is really taking time to think about and fine tune the hiring process. I mean, I accidentally hire some people with drama issues, so my conclusion is don't ever hire women? That's the best process change I can think of? Not asking about conflict resolution experiences, or maybe a teamwork test, but just ban an entire gender? I just don't see how a good hiring process can come out of that kind of thinking. What if then you hire some men who don't communicate as well as they should -- then do we ban all men as well?
Basically, I think hiring is hard and so process based on simplistic rules of gender or skin color or whatever don't usually work well, and besides begin illegal in the US they're also usually a sign of a process that hasn't really been thought out.
By the way -- I re-read your comment, and if I understand it correctly it seems that your stance is because I've made hiring mistakes (even if they are subsequently and promptly corrected) that I should have no credibility to comment on this blogger's hiring process of banning women. I guess it's your prerogative to have that standard -- only those who haven't made any mistakes have credibility -- but, if we assume that anyone who's done a lot of hiring has made mistakes, the only people with credibility in your eyes are those who have done little to no hiring. Personally I wouldn't find that approach useful.
> it seems that your stance is because I've made hiring mistakes (even if they are subsequently and promptly corrected) that I should have no credibility to comment on this blogger's hiring process of banning women
Not at all. I've certainly made significant hiring mistakes and yet I have all sorts of opinions on hiring process. I'm only saying it seems like you would be less inclined to believe the fault must all be hers if your hiring process (which I'm assuming you put real energy into optimizing) also ends up giving you actual criminals sometimes. I'm not criticizing your criticism of her ban; I'm criticizing your diagnosis of hiring as the source issue.
I don't doubt that it's in at least some part her fault and I completely understand the impulse to write it all off as that (for example, it also does not jive at all with my experiences in working with women, who have always been super professional towards me), but it's hard to see how one could really come to that conclusions about her hiring process without knowing her, the nature of her business, how she treats women, the pool of candidates she has available, and--possibly most importantly--almost anything about her hiring process. Maybe she's an idiot, maybe she had bad luck, maybe she has jobs for which women, for unspecified reasons, aren't well suited for, maybe she has a terrible work environment, maybe her male hires are weird in a way that skews her view of things, or maybe she's even right, or whatever. I just don't see how you can conclude much about hiring practice from "Wow, I've had really bad female employees."
I should also be clear that I'm not defending her decision to no longer hire women. That's also a poor conclusion to make from her observations. If the overall point here is, "she should be thinking harder about how to create an environment in which women can thrive", then I agree.
Edit: it occurs to me that I may have misunderstood "I think this anonymous blogger should evaluate her hiring practices." I was taking that to mean, "you've ended up with bad women because you suck at hiring, and if you fix that, you'll have good female employees" But rereading your responses, it sounds like you might have just been saying, "you shouldn't be adding this ban on hiring women". If so, then probably this whole discussion has been a frustrating miscommunication.
So? The point of the post is that they think the article's author must have poor hiring practices and cites their own experience hiring as evidence. That's a perfectly reasonable line of argument and I'm not even defending the article on that point. But to the degree to which that evidence is applicable to the business described in the article, the parent's own employee issues are also comparable. If you want to say that manufacturing hiring is simply completely different than in...whatever the article's author does, then sure, but then what's the point of the comparison again?
I'd also point out that I don't quite understand why manufacturing hires should involve wanted criminals...
Somebody's gotta weld pipe, turn metal, and crank wrenches. I don't see Ivy leaguers applying. A guy who chose the wrong parents and learned to make bad decisions instead of good ones can get these jobs because no one else wants them, and they don't require that much skill.
Not quite. They do require just enough skill and just enough technical learning to filter out most of the non-college educated population, but not enough to attract any college grads. So you end up hiring the people with the skill who are generally intelligent but don't always (as you said) make smart life decisions. Usually pretty awesome people with a few issues.
Disclaimer: Family business (that I am not part of, but do tend to frequent) is a machine shop.
> require just enough skill and just enough technical learning to filter out most of the non-college educated
Ok, fair enough, although I submit that is pretty much the lowest working definition of a tradable skill.
I was, am, in the Navy. Have had to go to the jailhouse with sailors, and have had contract work finished late because the pipe fitters, welders, etc, put valves in backwards, forget to weld before charging the system, etc.
Are you sure that world where such people are unemployable is better? It is better for all of us if they can find employment somewhere. Otherwise they have no other choice then collect social checks or steal.
>You have employees with outstanding arrest warrants and domestic violence issues? It kind of sounds like you also need to reevaluate your hiring practices...
so, nobody should hire "problem" people? Typical "holier than thou attitude".
Exactly. Clearly I don't support domestic violence, but the alternative is to have them on the street or living on government assistance. Someone's gotta hire them.
Why should they? It doesn't mean that they're classist, or snobbish or anything. If the "problems" affect their work life, and as a consequence the profitability of the business, then it's a purely practical decision to make.
Now, some people choose to give people more chance than they deserve because they're nice. Nothing wrong with that. But make no mistake, someone who brings their "problems" to work doesn't deserve that job because they're not willing to put in effort to separate the two. There are dozens of willing, able, and motivated candidates who will do better.
You're not nice if you let your problems affect your work to a large extent. There is only so much we can expect an employer to bear. And to be honest, that largely depends on your usefulness to the employer. Unfortunately, that means that since lower-paid workers are more easily replaceable, that the employer is less willing to bear with the problems.
What do you mean by "aspire to work in factories?" When your job prospects are Fast Food, other Restaurant, Retail, or Factory / Warehouse job, is it "aspiring to work in a factory?"
I ask because I worked in Factories and Warehouses before going to college and becoming a programmer. Working in those places wasn't a "lifelong dream" but they were better than almost ALL alternatives for what skills I had. Better as in pay, benefits and not having to deal with people(customers) directly.
Not to detract from your point that highly skilled college graduates aren't flocking to factory jobs, just pointing out that those of us that have been there actually have actively sought those jobs out. I guess you could say I was "aspiring to work in a factory." Hell, when the average job everywhere else was 6-7 dollars an hour, a 15 dollar an hour factory job was a hot commodity.
You hit the nail on the head, factories can't be picky about who they hire because anyone who has a better option takes it, it was mostly about the idea that a factory could hire people with out warrants and still have employees.
I worked in a warehouse after high school too, nothing provides 'inspiration' to code like the alternative being stacking boxes.
I know it makes me sound like a bad person, but it wasn't even the effort or boredom of stacking boxes, but the dead looks in employees eyes that had been there for decades. I didn't want to end up in a loveless job. I love what I do now and would do it even if I were independently wealthy (well, not put up with PMs, etc), and that's more than I ever hoped to achieve while working in a factory or warehouse.
This is exactly what I was thinking when I posted, those people.
Did you happen to call them lifers? That's what we called them, I was pretty sure that their primary goal in life was to spread their misery to others.
I felt like Coolhand Luke there, one of the lifer managers really seemed to hate me because it was just a stop along the road for me, and made it pretty much his mission to make my life miserable which I countered by not being miserable, as an example one night he started by giving me 4 hours extra overtime, he was looking for me about 5 minutes before my 12th hour, so ducked around the racks for a few minutes before making it to the break room for my 30 minute paid break after 12.
He found me in the break room and I thanked him for the overtime, he was not impressed, then I asked if I could show up late the next day due to all the overtime I worked, he flatly refused and started telling me that first thing tomorrow I'd be sweeping the docks on the driveway.
So I get there the next day at 7 AM in full freezer gear (more OT because the stupid fuck was so caught up that he forgot about the 8 hours between shifts rule) find him and complain about having to sweep the docks, he smiles hands me the broom and tells me to get to work, get outside, beautiful day, take off my gear, throw my freezer jacket in a puddle, and start sweeping.
About noon, he finds me with a smile on, and I let him know I just got paid time and a half to sweep, and didn't even have to work freezer on this beautiful day, so he sends me to the freezer, and I refuse because my jacket is soaked.
Funny thing is he ends up getting in shit the next pay cheque cuz I'm way over on pay and way under on cases.
Yep, lifers, that is indeed what they were called. My last gig before I decided to go to college was a "corregated board" factory. 100+ degree (F) temps (pretty hot in the winter too), second shift type work (printing and cutting), and I played the "points" game with sick days/leave. Union job, so us noobs got stuck with the manditory overtime if the older guys didn't want it. You could use points to not have to work over, but you only got so much. I played it badly and they let me go. I was signed up for classes that next day.
I think part of the problem is that both you and the blogger are talking about hiring interchangeable bottom-level workers. I assume you're not talking about skilled labour like electricians and millwrights. You're talking about unskilled workers. Highschool-educated guys.
The blogger mentioned secretaries. Not somebody who has credentials they've honed and invested in.
Even without an education, a professional needs to build success to make the difference between a "job" and a "profession". People who don't have any credentials like that are basically used as interchangeable parts in the job market - one CSR or one stock-room worker is replaceable with any other.
And likewise, they can (and should) treat their employer as just as interchangeable. Everybody needs customer service workers. Everybody needs guys who'll push a cart and lift stuff.
I used to do software for steel warehouses. I met brilliant electricians and accountants and whatnot, but I also dealt with the truckers and the gals who worked the desk with the truckers. And that's where the difference was.
It's hard to discuss this stuff without being really, really classist, because I don't think it's about "class" so much as the investment a person makes in their career. But I think that this "investment" is what makes this difference - is it a job or a career?
It's true, there can be many issues with lower level workers. But in skilled trades it is common to find people who have interesting quirks to their personality, despite being very good at their job technically. I see this often in skilled machinists, welders, machine maintenance people, etc. Some people may call the quirks "unprofessional" but it can come with the territory.
Quirks are fine as long as they aren't destructive to others or to the common goal. Sometimes it does make it a challenge though because there just aren't that many people out there with the necessary skill and experience, especially in more specialized areas, so you wind up having to choose between someone with a fantastic attitude but limited skill and a very skilled tradesperson that takes a little more hands-on management (in the sense that you have to help them develop more empathy, to not quarrel, to communicate better with colleagues, etc).
It's definitely a fine line. Somebody with great skill can still cause too much havoc within a team and make it an undesirable place to work. You have to take action on that, because ultimately it needs to be a happy place to work. And it's not a pay issue either, we've hired people well into the six figure range who at the end of the day just couldn't develop functional relationships with others.
Hi everyone! Thank you for your comments and suggestions. I am the author of the post Clarissa ran on her blog. To clarify, every single employee I have is university educated. My secretary had a Master's Degree (she was young so the role was a stepping stone into a very different position). Not sure if that changes anything, but thought I would point it out.
"she was young so the role was a stepping stone into a very different position"
In the old days the secretary position was a vocation in itself. Now I see two types of people:
- someone who actually wants to do something else. They tend to at least not be stupid, but they aren't going to give a ton of time to honing their secretarial skills either and are going to leave as soon as they get the job they really want.
- someone who frankly just isn't very bright. Secretarial work is unfortunately not very high status these days. People who are ambitious and intelligent don't generally chose to be secretaries.
But you can't swing a cat without hitting an executive assistant three years out of college and using it as a stepping stone. The value proposition of being the boss's calendar-keeper has been reversed.
I've worked with great men and women in every field, secretaries included. But the blogger was talking about secretaries, so secretaries are obviously a pain-point for her. My point is just that you run into more sources of trouble in those jobs that have no barrier to entry - no investment needed for it.
That's a failure of people hiring secretaries, not of secretaries.
Take, for example, typing. Many people on HN will have fast typing speeds. But we also see that many people on HN want to wear headphones or have separate areas for work. There is talk of "flow". A secretary does not have these luxuries. They have to produce fast typing, with high accuracy, in combination with constant interruption. Good secretaries can type a letter while talking to someone.
Have you ever tried shorthand? Take a look at Pittman Shorthand. Take a course. Tell me it's not a barrier to entry.
It could be an income level thing. Not that I like making generalizations (and this is just the observation of other people's experience, I don't agree with this personally as I have no personal data to support the majority of observations which lead to it):
* At low incomes, women are responsible workers, men are irresponsible workers.
* At higher incomes (middle class), men are responsible workers, women are irresponsible workers.
It could come from the confluence of privilege and feminism, lower income female workers think they have to go the extra mile to prove they deserve the job, because feminism isn't ingrained in them, the communities they live in often force women into gender roles (they just happen to be the more responsible roles). Upper income female workers have ingrained feminism, but society still treats (via media, social interactions, etc) them like their old gender roles (ever see girls on teen TV shows? It's the most sexist shit I've seen on TV). This means they believe they are equal to men (which they are) but they also believe (due to society) that they can behave like society expected them to 50 years ago, which they can't if they want a job in the modern work place.
Many of our managers are also female. There isn't much drama between them and other female managers, or female employees. We work hard on getting the right people on board, and correcting the mistakes when we don't.
This is rather apples to oranges. Blue collar manufacturing work where women run at only 25% of the workforce and men have higher than national average crime rates --- you are bound to have more problems with the men.
Not to endorse the author's view, but compare the above to your typical white collar environment with a more even distribution of men and women doing similar, non-physical work. Easier to judge the gender differences there.
I addressed that. I do not make hiring decisions based on it because I do not believe there is a causal relationship that can (either functionally, legally or morally) be used as the basis for a hiring decision. Other factors are far more important.
>outstanding arrest warrants, inability to resolve past DUI
>offenses with the courts, domestic violence that spreads into
>the workplace, absenteeism, etc. -- all actual issues we have
>had to deal with.
Umm...maybe you just need to pay higher wages. Pay monkey wages, get monkeys.
Most of our production workers earn over $21/hr, up to $45-50/hr depending on the position. There are a few doing very basic manual labor (stacking small objects) that are more in the $14/hr rate, but I'm not really referring to them in the post.
It's a common mistake to think that in the skilled trades, people automatically behave much more professionally. Often very skilled welders or machinists have some interesting quirks to them, but they still get paid well and do a good job. We would only let them go if they started creating a dysfunctional team environment for others, and could not correct it.
I hope you're just Russian and incorrectly composed an aphorism. "Pay peanuts and you get monkeys" is I think what you were going for. Unfortunately, it came off as extremely classist.
That said, even your central thesis, pay higher wages, misses the fact that in a functioning market economy, higher wages isn't always possible, or even productive.
She writes: "I am also yet to have a single male employee come to my office to give me dirt on a co-worker or share an awkward gossip-like story. My female employees though? Every. single. one."
The Economist had an article which tangentially comports with her comment above:
There's a piece of info in that article that I think might be a part of the problem:
For men, the results were as expected. Hunks were more likely to be called for an interview if they included a photo. Ugly men were better off not including one. However, for women this was reversed. Attractive females were less likely to be offered an interview if they included a mugshot.
Without knowing much about the person who wrote the article (as it's an anonymous guest post), I know a lot of women, myself included at points in the past, can be very harsh and judgemental towards other women. There's an attitude among a lot of women, especially in youth, that other women are too emotional, gossips, obsessed with looks, and so on. Many grow out of this, and some don't. If there is any real psychological difference between women and men, I think this sort of unnecessary competition, jealousy, or general discomfort towards other people of our same gender is where it lies. I'm sure there's some interesting studies on this kind of thing out there somewhere.
I reckon sexual competition is at play here. Guys generally fare better in the mating game by associating with other good looking men. Assuming heterosexuality here for simplicity's sake, being a good looking guy in a group of good looking guys increases the chance that one or more good looking women will hang out with the group. Anecdotally men succeed in the mating game when mating as a group to group. Dunno why that is the case. Maybe a larger group communicates presence of a powerful male that females may try to vie for.
For attractive women, there generally is no benefit from being part of a group of attractive women, since it doesn't materially increase propinquity with attractive men as far as I can tell, but it does materially increase competition for the alpha male.
Basically, mating-wise, men win more often when they cooperate and women win more often when they compete. Anyone know of any science to support this observation or am I way out on a limb here?
Looks like just hypothesizing, even when admitting as much is downvote worthy.
Another hypothesis worth considering is that intrasexual selection tactics of women are tolerated in the workplace but those of men are not.
Across many species and many societies, male intrasexual selection takes places as overt direct competition (hand-to-hand combat, sports, male elephant seals). With females (again across species and across societies), intrasexual selection is more often indirect due to female choice.
Direct competition is observable and easily addressed. Indirect competition is not by virtue of being indirect. This means that the modern workplace does not afford the conditions for men to compete much if at all except via promotion for doing good work. There are not the same mechanisms and norms in place in many modern workplaces to direct energy spent on indirect competition to more productive outlets.
I expect another downvote here too because acknowledging the existence of differences between genders is only frowned upon when talking about humans, but whatever.
I've lived in North America, South America and Asia. In my experience, these observations span at least those three places I've lived in. The behavior of men in the workplace in Asia and to a lesser degree South America is worse than the major counterparts in the US, but only because those societies are more patriarchal and that behavior is not as frowned upon.
After far as the workplace behavior of women, I've found that it's approximately the same, but perhaps more muted in Asian cultures.
Again, all anecdotal here. So take it with a grain of salt. What has been your experience?
First, the study you referenced just shows that a sample of women were less likely to get interviews with their photo. From there it's just the authors throwing out guesses for their findings. Maybe HR workers are jealous, or maybe they're worried that attractive young women will cause drama at work. Based on this study, we have no idea.
Even if the guess that "female HR workers don't want to hire other pretty females" is correct, you have no idea whether the same would be true were the roles reversed. Would all-male HR departments be less likely to call attractive men for interviews? It's very possible.
The study you cite in no way supports the authors claim that women gossip more.
That is a fascinating study. It's definitely true that at both companies I've worked at, HR has been totally dominated by women.
So if it is true that women are discriminated against in the tech industry, why is that so, given that most people involved in the hiring process are also women?
The fact that attractive women are more discriminated against than plain ones is something that never occurred to me, I always believed it was the other way round. And I never considered that attractive men were treated more favorably. I think at the very least the study shows that discrimination is very hard to root out, and simply hiring along certain quotas doesn't really solve the problem at all.
HR isn't getting the final say on hiring, just on that first crack of filtering out candidates. In my experience, all the "vaguely-eligible" candidates are still going into the hiring manager's hand, at least in software.
I don't think I've said anything remotely offensive, I'm not suggesting that women are not discriminated against, I'm just saying that discrimination is not a simple issue as many people claim.
Well, you did also point out that HR is dominated by women. So that means that the hiring process is also dominated by women in quite a few workplaces. Combine that with the observations from the study, and all of a sudden we're put in the uncomfortable situation of explaining the apparently incongruent end-results of hiring processes favoring less-attractive women which doesn't fit the currently "accepted" paradigm of "men are sexist against women in the workplace".
And you're completely right, the issue is not simple in any way. We're stuck making half-observations, trying to make connections between disparate points, etc. But what that tells me is that we're dealing with a very vague, soft, and ultimately subjective issue. Which people are trying to measure using quantitative, hard measurements.
> I get extremely angry when I come across articles that insist there are gender differences that extend beyond physiology.
This is backwards. There are certainly psychological differences between men and women (see e.g. [1]).
However, assuming that statistical averages determine individual characteristics is also wrong. People are highly varied, and an individual's difference from the mean often dwarfs the mean difference between two populations (e.g. men/women). Add to this the fact that people are self-conscious and can change their innate behavior. Sex is a very poor predictor of an individual's psychological traits.
Looks like she's got an axe to grind, and doesn't like getting side-tracked by the topic you mention. As evidenced by her rant about it, and her comment-deletions.
I wouldn't condone hacking of the sort per se, but if were someone were to get into the relevant records and name & shame the anonymous author I would not feel any measure of sympathy for them.
She is clearly concerned about the situation. She is addressing it by blogging about it and asking a community for advice. And she's doing an important thing here by confessing and discussing the causes of discrimination from a perspective that you rarely get to hear (for obvious reasons). This is for the greater good. I would feel a lot of sympathy for her if she got in trouble over this.
I'm in the opposite camp, I think it's unhealthy to avoid discussing these sorts of biases.
If anything I think it's disappointing that you need to hide behind an anonymous veil to admit you have a problem. The author is inviting discussion, if not outwardly asking to be shown the error of her ways. What's the harm in having these discussions?
Wouldn't it be far more constructive to discuss and debate the author's views instead of making a passive aggressive attempt to incite an attack on them, simply because you don't agree with them? This sort of attitude can be dangerous.
It is great to see how many people are more interested in having a discussion than limiting themselves to emotional outbursts. My post was indeed meant to provoke a frank conversation about an important issue.
what? really? I feel like we aren't allowed to have the freedom of speech anymore.
It's A-OK to completely destroy lives and careers through shaming. It's a method of silencing the opposition for having an opinion you don't like. This is evil.
This women is just making an observation from her own experiences..and somehow it's wrong.
1.) Sharing an opinion and anecdotal experience on a blog
2.) Disclosing that you're participating in an illegal activity (discriminatory hiring practices)
Should she be doxxed and publically shamed for sharing her opinon? Of course not. But should the hiring practices of her company be looked into? Well, thats certainly a much more fuzzy area, because it is no longer a victimless act.
Until "Blogger Clarissa" gets a subpoena demanding that she hand over her emails with the guest blogger and testify as to her knowledge of the employer.
The problem is that is you need an aggrieved party...
With out knowing who the employer is there is no case, and the police can't investigate in right of the state because no crimes has been committed, nor is the jurisdiction clear.
Sounds a lot of bad luck (or bad hiring skills) that every single woman she hired was a failure. But every communication issue has two sides. I am pretty sure she reinforced - even if unwillingly - this behavior after reading this:
"I have developed a different approach for offering constructive criticism to male and female employees. When I have something to say to one of the men, I just say it! I don’t think it through – I simply spit it out, we have a brief discussion and we move on. They even frequently thank me for the feedback! Not so fast with my female staff. I plan, I prepare, I think, I run it through my business partner and then I think again. I start with a lot of positive feedback before I feel that I have cushioned my one small negative comment sufficiently, yet it is rarely enough. We talk forever, dissect every little piece of it, and then come back to the topic time and time again in the future. And I also have to confirm that I still like them – again and again, and again."
When you put so much effort on something that is not the focus, that thing becomes the focus. If a woman cries after a reasonable feedback and you spend a lot of time trying to justify and compensate on that crying, the crying become justified. So you just reiforced the behavior. But if you are sure your feedback was a fair one; just let it go. Let her cry on her own, without giving much attention to it. She will stop crying sometime, think about things more rationally and the next time she will take feedback differently.
I think the case is just that women express themselves different from men. Women cry at the spot and go emotional. Men keep the things for themselves and talk trash about you later on the bar. If you, as a boss, could listen to the men employees and tried to get some confrontation about the trash talk men do, this would reinforce the trash talking and a lot of new issues would appear on the professional realtionship.
It is just bad luck in this particular scenario that women express their emotion more strongly and vocational; so I think some conscious actions must have being taken so this particular behavior doesn't extrapolate in more serious issues.
Bingo. I think the major issue is that as a self-proclaimed feminist, she seems to divide the groups purely on gender.
Instead of putting them into different categories solely based on gender perhaps she should recognize that (in a simplified view) if there is a continuum of behavior, genders tend to have bell curves around areas, but that their distributions overlap. Ie, some women really just want the unvarnished facts.
Understanding that some men also like to get "sandwiched" negatives while some women just want the facts and move one - and that varies by person, not by "gender" alone.
"We talk forever, dissect every little piece of it, and then come back to the topic time and time again in the future. And I also have to confirm that I still like them – again and again, and again."
Maybe she should not talk forever, dissect every piece of it and then accept the same discussion again. If the problem is emotional unsuitability, this makes it worst.
Maybe she should cut analysis with something like this: "Dont worry about it, everybody makes mistakes. Just do not repeat the same one again." Or something similar. The point is to make them feel less insecure. Cushioning never works with intelligent people, putting past into past can.
You make interesting points. I am definitely open to reviewing my own communication style and how it may be affecting the outcome. That being said, does the problem lie fully with me or is this a trend other people are experiencing also?
Everyone is giving this woman a hard time, but I have heard my wife say something similar. I think a large part of what the (presumably male) posters here are missing is how differently women interact with other women.
In a decade of managing teams on and off, I have had more melodrama from male staff members than female. The major flameouts and freak-outs have all come from men. Given that I never got to 50% parity and we're talking less than 50 hires overall it would be a mistake to draw any major inferences from my experience, but the same is probably true of hers.
That said, different people need different management styles. But IMO this is mostly cultural, not gender-based. It happens that in Western culture there are gender behavioral norms that you have to allow for. This is something you just have to get over, because a) nowadays you'll never get away with only hiring people just like you and b) the benefits of hiring people from different backgrounds far outweigh the hassle of having to display some sensitivity and treat your reports as individuals.
"...we were two women, both mothers with very small children, opening a company in a very competitive industry."
I'm a teacher in adult education in the UK. The students, mostly but not all women, with lots of children/parents and other care responsibilities are, in my experience, the ones who hand work in on time and who really focus in lessons. They have so little time that they have to plan things carefully.
The younger students, mostly chaps, who have no responsibilities take the most management. "Go figure" as I think the Americans say.
Seriously: good luck to Clarissa but she would need a really good HR lawyer in the UK.
Edit: Just bought a copy of 'River of Shadows' as I'm into Muybridge. I could not give a kipper's dick about how the book's author behaved at a cocktail party (having never attended one), I'm interested in the content, you know, what she has to say on the subject. Good blog. Makes you think. Argue even. On my list.
Of the issues she describes, I have seen them in men as well. I have male friends who have quit with nothing in particular lined up next. I have a male coworker who cried in a meeting, and went to his manager to demand that I apologize for offending him and making him cry. Dirt and gossip? I get just as much from male coworkers as female.
I don't mean to undermine or invalidate her experience, but I feel that the sample is too small. At least, my experience is not consistent with hers.
Yea, I was wondering how she's not inviting a flood of lawsuits by saying that she's explicitly acting on these perceptions of hers. It was only until I came to the comments here that I noticed it was an anon author.
Except for me and my partner (founders, CTO and CEO respectively) all our directors are women. Females represent more than 60% of our company. We never had any of such events happening in the workplace. Immaturity is asexual.
This situation happened months ago in my company:
One female intern came to me, she was almost crying, telling she wanted to quit. She was about to tell me what happened but I only wanted to hear her only after she was a bit calmer. I told her to take the day off, since she had a son, she could use the day to do something more fun. At this point I thought that maybe it was some sort of problem with a phone call. She worked primarily answering calls and giving initial support to users.
After a quick investigation: some employees had a whatsapp group for sharing reddit links, gossip. She asked for an invite and was in the group only as a reader, months later she never reads the group messages and didn't realize the group now became a porn-heaven. Three engineers forgot that she was there made some vulgar comments about her, she discovered. After she confronted them they did some nasty sexual comments about her being in a porn-only whatsapp group.
The three nasty commentators were fired on the spot. Engineers often think code and their github account the is exclusive reason I'm hiring them. They argued about how that was their private, personal activity outside office hours, digging their hole deeper.
After firing them I had a private talk with every engineer and explained what happened and talked about the event. The reason I did this was to find another employees with the same mindset as the ones who were fired, and I did. They were fired weeks after.
One of the three nasty engineers was a woman, when confronted it was clear to me that she was either a sexist or some sort of misogynist.
I have a female friend who owns several womens fashion retail stores and so hires all females. She always asks in a job interview what they do in their spare time, if they answer that they hang out with their girlfriends all the time, doing girly stuff etc then they don't get hired because they end up causing bitchy problems in the workplace. If they answer that they hang out with a mix with guys quite a lot, they're never a problem in the workplace. It's worked for her for many years.
I wonder if the author is judging other women for not making the proper feminist choices 'mooching off a boyfriend' etc... Putting a magnifying glass on other women while not even noticing a male who quit to pursue a video game addiction. Someone cried in a meeting. So what? Who yells and pounds tables in a meeting? Why don't we just cover all the stereotypes about gender? Even if everything this author says were true, it doesn't excuse prejudging individuals based on their gender.
There aren't enough skilled people in the world. Don't cut the number available to you in half.
I can't say I've ever seen these problems with women at my work. I wonder if these issues stem from larger problems in the workplace.
For example, if there was subtle sexism resulting in devaluing the women's work, I could see why they would be seeking positive reinforcement from their female manager.
“Wait”, I said, “So, I did thank you then?” – “Yes! But you did not elaborate on what exactly you liked about them! Why didn’t you?” She had bought them with the company credit card and I actually did not like them at all, but I digress.
This is a startup? Why not just say: Actually, I don't like those. Also, why not just tell employees that you're not one for gossip? Did the author understand direct communications? How good was she at cementing close relationships with coworkers?
>Also, why not just tell employees that you're not one for gossip?
People have different definitions of gossip, the most common one being: 'something that other people do that's not as smart or interesting as what I'm doing right now.'
ossreality: your account is hellbanned. I'm not sure how informing you of such things flies on HN anymore, but to see so much wasted time is saddening to me.
Disclosure: MBTI has tons of issues and it's certainly not the end all for evaluations. There's a reason why HR folks aren't allowed to use it in most firms when recruiting. However, with that said, I think it's quite applicable in this case.
MBTI; NT vs SF. Find women that fall into the NT category and your problem is solved. This isn't an issue with gender as it is with certain individuals. Although looking at the numbers, you will encounter more women falling into SF and more men falling under NT. But, let me throw this out there, don't miss the chance to hire some great women simply because you've encountered some bad apples. You should simply tailor the initial screening phase to catch some of these unwanted behaviors. Additionally, you can employ the try before you buy option and remove bad apples within the first 90 days before they rot the tree.
Disclosure: Astrology has tons of issues and is not the end-all for evaluations, but she would do well to hire more people born under honest, steadfast signs like Taurus, Virgo, Libra, or Sagittarius and fewer drama-prone Geminis, Leos, Aries or Scorpios.
Right, because no men ever behave badly in the workplace?
Sure, there are stereotypical ways in which a small number of people from each gender behave like assholes and create toxic work environments. The solution is to not hire jerks and to get rid of them if you've made a mistake, not blame all ones ills on a particular group of people.
I read the article and AFAICT, the basic problem is right there in there in the first paragraph:
> I get extremely angry when I come across articles that insist there are
> gender differences that extend beyond physiology.
That's just ridiculous and ignorant. Of course there are differences between men and women that extend beyond physiology !! [1]
Reading the comments and the replies, the author seems to deny this fact and wants everyone to be behaviourally uniform.
On the one hand she is applying broad strokes and describing her own experiences with her male Vs female employees but on the other she wants to deny that some of these differences exist and can be explained 'beyond physiology'.
I read through a bunch of the comments and it seems like the author was a victim of her own attitude. She talks about how she intended to employ and empower women in her workplace. It sounds like she might have started with a pro-woman bias but it had the negative side effect of creating a more "casual" environment with the women than the men. The men continued to interact with her professionally but the women interacted more casually and therefore took feedback more personally.
I've personally worked in a number of professional environments with men and women and never seen this from any woman that had any sort of professional job. I have seen it among low paid wage jobs, but no more often than the violent or other harassing outbursts from men in those types of jobs.
I don't think there's enough information here to make any judgments one way or another. I find non-professional behavior has far more to do with the position held than the sex of the person inhabiting it. I have a hard time imagining a female VP, for instance, behaving so unprofessionally. Conversely, it wouldn't surprise me to see a sales guy acting like a jackass. It's rather more likely that one's professionalism stems from 1) the professionalism that's expected from someone in their position and 2) the effort the individual has gone through to reach their position.
Maybe women are too sensitive. Tell a girl at work her hairstyle does not look nice after she asks you, and she is mad at you.
Maybe men are too sensitive. Tell a guy at a sports bar his team sucks and they should be put out of the league, and you are lucky if he does not punch you.
So someone can write a post about women gossiping at work and how that creates all sorts of tension. And someone can write a post about how their boyfriend is so sensitive about his app that telling him the truth and saying it's kind of crappy will probably end up in break up.
Who is more sensitive? I have my opinion, but maybe all of this is a matter of perspective?
Women she employs are entirely different then all women I ever met.
I have never seen a women cry on meeting. I never knew any women that would "stay home to “figure out what to do next”". On the other hand, I have seen men leaving jobs without having another one lined up. I'm not sure whether she sees significant difference between the two or why she would care what employee is going to do.
I find it fascinating that she hires outstanding women and somehow ends up with selection of worst possible personalities. All of them are so super sensitive, that she can not communicate with them without extensive preparation. Maybe, just maybe her criteria for "educated, intelligent and highly articulate" actually select emotional and manipulative people?
It might be just my bias, but I suspect the "highly articulate" criteria. Highly articulate is advantage in some jobs (sales), but irrelevant in jobs like receptionist. Maybe she should look for "educated, intelligent, communicates as adult and in control of emotions" instead. She will get more introverts and less drama.
I also met women managers they managed not to become therapists for underlying - not even for needy employees. So, I suspect there is something in her behavior that encourages them to come into her office again and again.
Most of my direct reports are indeed in sales; exceptional communication skills are an essential requirement for everyone on the team, including the receptionist, as there is a very high volume of people coming into our office on a daily basis. I do find the last paragraph in your comment quite valid!
> People in the past 2 hours I have had to Spam 63 comments from losers who tried to inform me that “men and women are psychologically / emotionally, etc. different.” Once again, anybody who embarrasses him or herself by chirping idiotically “yes, men and women are different” will be banned outright.
"losers"? "embarrasses him or herself"? Yes, men and women are different, what's wrong with saying that?
Heh, what I find mildly amusing is the fact that in writing the blog post and replying the comments the author is just reinforcing the very stereotype that leads her to conclude that women are not worth the risk of hiring.
She is indulging the same type of drama she alleges is the cause of forming her opinion !!
Well... this doesn't match 95% of my experience. I've worked with several ladies(especially in my current gig) but only back in at&t do I vividly recall 3 very gossip-driven, melodramatic women. This was out from an org with like 40+ women in it. But those 3... those 3.... sheesh, you could see 'em coming a mile away. They just had issues in general and happened to be females.(sidenote: if any of you are reading this, you know who you are. The whole department knew who you were)
I've worked with more unpleasant men than women, but this tech so there's just more men than women in general. Yeah... I don't know where I'm going with this other than this blogger's experience is not an accurate representation of the employee-pool at large.
There could be some bias coming from the career paths these individuals are coming from. We can't know because she doesn't elaborate on her industry, but here's an example which would produce this kind of bias naturally:
If she employs engineers (or some other equivalent), there's a good chance they will provide little issues as they tend to be better-educated and more stable than average. They are also predominately male.
Other office jobs are a mixed bag and tend to employ average individuals, with a variety of education levels and backgrounds. This is often 50/50 or sometimes predominately female, such as in HR.
In that case, it would be more accurately comparing average vs. unusually well-educated individuals. Gender would only be proportional to this because of her specific business case.
Some women are really good at their job, really professional.
Other women are not good at their job and unprofessional.
It is the later that are being talked about here. The ones that paint their nails at work and then refuse to do any work until they dry. The ones that gossip and lie about other people to stir up trouble. The ones that refuse to do work and avoid doing work by reading romance novels, watering plants, making coffee, bringing in food, walking around with a clipboard and not doing anything, and wasting as much time as they can just to get that paycheck.
Some men waste time as well as do some of the things some women do to be honest.
I can't find the links now (signal to noise ratio is low given the search terms I tried), but I've heard on numerous occasions that there are a few landmark studies where men were given estradiol and other estrogens and that resulted in behavior changes that ape the behavior patterns that most frustrate the author of this essay.
Can anyone here point me to the experimental studies exploring the administration of sex hormone to the opposite gender and its effect on behavior? I've never read them myself and was curious as to their validity and the strength of the results.
Blog editor comment on TFA, referring to the post author ("Entrepreneur"): "In the spirit of full disclosure, Entrepreneur has been known to come to social gatherings with a list of controversial topics for the group to discuss so that the party wouldn't be boring."
It's worth noting that the Entrepreneur's friend feels the need to point out that she has a reputation of stirring up/manufacturing controversy. In light of this, the post makes a lot more sense: i.e. 'I'm saying something controversial to stir the pot.'
In most of my work environments, I've worked with a lot of females and I have to admit that some of the work behaviours outlined are behaviours that annoy me and actually drive me to move companies (citing it as a part of 'work culture'). HOWEVER I don't attribute this to a single sex because I can also see it in the males. Same goes regardless of race and age.
However I do believe that your gender does play a role in the workplace, whether you would like it or not. The only thing is that personality trumps gender stereotypes.
I am very disappointed that one of my "own kind" is disparaging women. If that's what females in this field encounter, no wonder there are so few. My deep disappointment cannot be expressed in words right now. Hiring is hard to get right, period. Why are we worrying about gender traits--this article is generalizing to the point of absurdity.
I feel motivated at this point, to change my name to a gender neutral one for hiring purposes.
When people see articles like this, it is affirming, and others will follow silently.
Well she's not inherently against women, or pro-men. But of course men (on average) have an advantage in acting like her ideal person, since it's closer to typical male behavior. So it's still not really equal.
Anyone who was ever a teenaged girl at any point in their life can confirm that the people who complain the most about drama are generally the people who create the most drama.
The view that our gender (glands, various gender-related cues, etc) influences our mind and behavior seems to be surreally unpopular these days. Many well worded essays on such in the comments.
If I could flag this, I would. This is an anonymous post on a completely irrelevant blog that has nothing to do with the world HN surrounds.
Is it too much to ask that Reddit/Tumblr-esque gender wars not be dragged into every online discussion forum available?
From the guidelines:
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Just look at the quality of the discussion this has spawned - pure and utter trash.
Please don't cite the HN guidelines while breaking them. The problem is not that a Lone Ranger has been lacking to gallop up and tell us not to be Reddit or Tumblr. The problem is that the community is divided.
Is it too much to ask that we suppress all discussion of gender issues on HN? Yes, that's too much to ask. Many are on-topic and obviously have to do with "the world HN surrounds". To deny it would be stupid and artificial, would alienate a large number of users with legitimate concerns, and wouldn't work anyway.
The problem is that most of the discussions have been deplorable. Given that, you pick an odd hill to rant on. This thread has some bad comments, but overall is better than median. There have been several thoughtful posts from people with relevant experience, including some women. Commenters have mostly been respectful to one another. There has been little juvenile trolling or angry defensiveness. Calling this "pure and utter trash" discredits you as an observer of HN.
The OP was trollish, its title outrageous, and its subject inflammatory. The fact that a thread here managed to hold up sort-of ok under so perturbing a signal, rather than immediately being thrown off, is if not a sign of improvement then at least a data point in a better neighborhood.
This is about start ups, it's about hiring and managing different genders, I've seen many great links posted which may help managers in start ups deal with gender issues. I've seen great anecdotal stories about managing different genders. Honestly I've seen very little gender flame war, perhaps because the original article was written by a woman.
Well, how do we know it was written by a woman? The post has about as much credibility as an anonymous rant written on a Tumblr blog.
It is an anonymous, anecdotal, generalised rant and little more and this type of content, as can be witnessed on a plethora of other popular online fora, tend to lead to the same things repeatedly:
- People charging in to furiously counter the generalisation with other shallow personal anecdotes - "Well I have seen men/women do x,y,z!", "In my experience men/women are even worse than men/women at x,y,z!"
- People charging in with the "not all men/women" argument
- People charging in to back the generalisation up and commit a rant of their own on men/women
- etc.
But the resounding repeated behaviour is people charging in, emotions on high, to exclaim shallow, generalised and anecdotal stories of their own. Mainly not to discuss the matter, but to push their agenda in the matter.
This drives the signal:noise ratio in the wrong direction and, if tolerated, degrades the forum as a whole.
I'm not saying that there isn't space for such discussions, but this is not the format for such discussion and only bad can come of it. If anything, mainstream fora have proven to be completely incapable of having rational discussions on gender issues - the more mainstream the less capable (see Reddit.com for example) - and HN is becoming more mainstream as people flood from such sites due to said degradation of the content there.
Can confirm, I've worked in a workplace where it was about 6 men and 48 women (no lie).
The gossip dear lord the gossip and cliques that were formed. The cattiness among each other, the talking behind each others back - it felt like high school on TV.
The guys were 4 on tech team and 2 on management.
The rest were sales girls, making calls to close sales in the higher-education sector. (Think e-learning master degrees). Never worked in a place with that many women so I don't have any other measuring stick, but yeesh did that leave me with weird memories.
It is not men who sabotage women and stump their career growth – it is women themselves!
I wonder if she is (subconsciously?) part of the problem. Now, I'm not saying that she overtly engages in that sort of passive-aggressive, competitive behavior (stereotypically female, but characteristic of the sexes about equally, if not more often by men, in the office context) against them... but it could be that she carries a subconscious bias that leads her to hire a different and possibly lower quality of women than the men she brings on.
If it seems far-fetched, consider the casual misogyny of a high school or college campus, and the vicious cycle it creates for young men. We're not talking about a raving woman-hater. We're talking about the average-case college male who thinks women are irrational, flighty, and manipulative. He's actually right-- about most of the women he pays attention to. That's the misogyny loop: guys who think ill of "women" tend to hang around low-quality women (high-quality women just avoid them) and end up confirming their own biases ("misogyny loop"). If he stopped focusing on the bubbly/popular girls with broken personalities (who get away with it, because everyone wants them) and took a representative sample, he'd realize that women aren't any worse or better than men. Of course, such guys are usually blind to their own broken personalities.
See, I've never seen these patterns she's described. I've worked with a lot of horrible people and only one of my top 10 is female... and, to her credit, she was pretty "active-aggressive" in her toxicity.
I know that these behaviors exist in workplaces, but I don't think they're especially gendered. Passive-aggressive, gossiping men are out there as well.
> If it seems far-fetched, consider the casual misogyny of a high school or college campus, and the vicious cycle it creates for young men. We're not talking about a raving woman-hater. We're talking about the average-case college male who thinks women are irrational, flighty, and manipulative.
What makes this an objective observation about men in college, as opposed to the selection bias that you think that these men (however many of them) have and the author of this article?
What makes this an objective observation about men in college, as opposed to the selection bias...
Are you assuming that he is making this observation in comparison to college women?
I think the observation has to do with who holds the preponderance of power. In the artificial age-segregated school environments we've created, young, inexperienced people dealing with the full flush of their hormones and newly matured bodies create their own "Lord of the Flies" society, largely free of the influence of older, wiser people. Natural human instincts create concentrations of power in a minority of popular individuals, and this power corrupts.
This is quite unfortunate, as young people in school are still forming their models of the world.
> Are you assuming that he is making this observation in comparison to college women?
I don't really care. Whether he thinks that college women are misogynist, or misandrist, or whatever is supposed to be the comparison; 'most college men are misogynistic' is a pretty stones-in-glasshouses thing to utter after having complained about other peoples broad generalizations being a result of selection bias. It's fine if it is backed up, but without substantiating it, why would I readily assume that this kind of judgement comes from kind of reasoned perspective, instead of just hanging out with the "wrong" people (which was what Michael originally claimed the author was doing)?
> I think the observation has to do with who holds the preponderance of power. In the artificial age-segregated school environments we've created, young, inexperienced people dealing with the full flush of their hormones and newly matured bodies create their own "Lord of the Flies" society, largely free of the influence of older, wiser people. Natural human instincts create concentrations of power in a minority of popular individuals, and this power corrupts.
> This is quite unfortunate, as young people in school are still forming their models of the world.
I was talking about men in college. People in university (Masters or lower) are in the age range 19-26, at least in my experience. Even if they are immature, which I won't comment on, there really isn't much of a breeding ground for this kind of environment where I go to school; everyone is responsible for handing in some compulsory assignments and showing up for the exams. How they go about doing this, is up to them. Unlike in high school, people aren't confined to hanging out at the same place from 8000-1500 (again; just my experience), and if some person is disagreeing to you, it is relatively simple to avoid them.
Michael seemed to talk about how these men view women is due to who they hang out with. And certainly, at a decent sized university, you're not strictly confined to whoever happens to take the same classes that you do.
EDIT: I see that the two O'Church fans have been able to get their jollies by now.
I also upvoted you, because I think your observation that there's a bunch of selection bias in Michael's perspective itself is right-on. However, I also upvoted Michael himself, because I thought his description of the system itself was also right-on. People can be aware of how systems work while still falling victim to those particular dynamics themselves. And on Hacker News, we try to critique the ideas themselves rather than the people behind them.
FWIW, in my own personal experience, most of the guys I went to college with were not misogynists. Most of them actually seemed pretty nerdy, with both men and women alike enjoying LARPing, duct-tape swordplay, D&D, and board games...and another group that enjoyed sailing and Kings...and another group that was all about music and arts...and another group that was all into technology & philosophy. This is probably a reflection of who I am. There were one or two people I can think of who were misogynist assholes, but I didn't really hang out with them much, besides reading about them in the school newspaper or hearing an exasperated sigh that mentioned them.
I also have not met many truly horrible people in the workforce, so I suspect that is also selection bias. I'm sure they exist; I just don't work for companies or teams where they make up a majority, I usually can sense them in the interview process and steer clear, or quit and find a new job if they start popping up.
Upvoted. HN is full of shallow younglings who self-righteously downvote to disagree. I miss the old days when PG discouraged that. (Not that that was ever effective, which is probably why the policy changed. It's just the climate was different.)
Michael seemed to talk about how these men view women is due to who they hang out with.
The point is that they have more agency when it comes to who they hang out with and associate with, compared to the stereotypical high school environments (and the lord of the flies tendencies that that can lead to, that you mentioned).
Okay, so a lot of college age folks choose to be in a "Lord of the Flies" dynamic. I'm not so sure they're completely aware of what they're in and I'm not comforted by the notion that they choose it. (Nor by my memories of my own choices in that direction.)
It seems that she is swinging from one extreme - from being enthusiastic about lifting women up and helping them, to actively avoiding them. But maybe a more balanced approach would yield better results?
Maybe the women just became spoilt by how accommodating she was? She says, for example, that she has to scrutinize every interaction with her women employees, for fear of the ensuing drama. Maybe she should just tell them to get over it? I don't know. But some people will readily bite the hands that feed them too eagerly.
Completely agree. If you treat people like children they will act like children. To be honest, the author of the post sounds like a somewhat spineless person who's too afraid of hurting people's feelings to manage effectively. The women percieve this and react to it, as perhaps the men do as well by completely ignoring her (not alpha, not a threat, no problems).
You can't tiptoe around people and also lead effectively. Yes, some people will cry. Some people will have angry outbursts. But you remain calm, let them cool off a bit, and then move on with life.
Holy shit this site. This crap is getting so much upvotes, the comments in here make me vomit. Where are the mods? surely they would never allow this kind of link on this site?
> She had bought them with the company credit card and I actually did not like them at all, but I digress.
She definitely sounds like someone I wouldn't want to work for. Apparently she didn't like the flowers "at all"? Who hates flowers? This is probably one of those cases where the person complaining might want to look inward as a first step.
EDIT: Oops, it was butterflies. Either way, is a picture of butterflies really some to not like "at all"? Just sounds bitter and angry to me. And why does she feel the need to "digress" and let us know that she didn't like them?
Considering that the writer goes on at length about how she feels she must treat women differently; "looking inward" would indeed be very much a good idea.
I'm not sure it would be productive, because I'm not seeing evidence of a lot of understanding about what motivates different behaviors in people, which is a skill a manager must have.
"Because she's a woman" is not an adequate explanation for why someone behaves in a particular way.
Only if you think that there's someone wrong with people who dislike flowers, but not enough to mention it or to do anything about it. What's your diagnosis, doc? And how did you rule out allergies so quickly over the internet?
If you had simply not uppercased this comment, it would be snarky but useful. Instead, it reads like an assault; it's the kind of comment a reader looks at and knows they can't use as the basis of a civil discussion.
Yeah, I figured that after I posted it. Oh well. (I'm used to using all caps on other mediums when I want to express meta-language/ideas and not natural speech, but I forgot that anything on HN that doesn't look 'respectable' gets downvoted quicker than INSERT JOKE NOBODY ON HN WILL LIKE)
Small talk !== Gossip. God, it's obnoxious reading like 98% of you.
You think "stuff I'm not interested in" is gossip, which is even worse than the assumption "Small talk === Gossip".
Look, adding a qualification or narrative component (predicates not strictly quantifiable over the domain) is a mark of conversation.
BUILDING RAPPORT is NOT GOSSIP.
BUILDING RAPPORT is NOT GOSSIP.
BUILDING RAPPORT is NOT GOSSIP.
BUILDING RAPPORT is NOT GOSSIP.
BUILDING RAPPORT is NOT GOSSIP.
AGAIN:
BUILDING RAPPORT is NOT GOSSIP.
VAGUENESS is not gossip.
It's SYSTEMATIC oppression. A laundry list of "why this, why this" at the end of a post COMPLETELY FAILS to grok what SYSTEMATIC/STRUCTURAL oppression MEANS.
Learn how to more categories of conversation. LEARN what speech genres are. Stop reducing everything to "gossip/actionable". Stop the elimination of human spontaneity. Stop building the ideal language that the ideal person must speak.
Please don't repeat lines several times for emphasis.
Please avoid assessments of the people writing comments (or call them "obnoxious"); focus instead on the arguments that dismay you.
It's unfortunate because I think there are probably valid points in this comment, but they've been worded in such a way that even people who disagree with you will be repelled.
This is such a bullshit misogynistic article that hurts women in the work force and makes sweeping inaccurate generalizations. If the HN staff have any once of morality and sense of equality, please delete this article from HN now and ban the author.
When prejudice reveals itself, costing you nothing, it's a time to be thankful. However, the prejudiced shouldn't be vilified as somehow subhuman. When you do that, you're taking a simple token and using it to lay a reductive judgment on a complex person. In other words, you are engaging in a form of prejudice yourself.
Grandparents watching Fox News or saying something racist over Thanksgiving dinner doesn't make them horrible people or evil. They are a product of their time, as are you. This doesn't excuse their behavior, but it doesn't by itself render them subhuman or worthy of hate.
Prejudice is best counteracted by engagement, commerce, and exposure. The vilification of political enemies in the US was understandable given some of the truly horrific things done as recently the 20th century. Today's 1st world should be a different place.
Grandparents are a product of their time? This is deep. I have to admit that I know people that are racist and they are not horrible or evil -- just wrong. And, some are old and some are young.
> the prejudiced shouldn't be vilified as somehow subhuman. When you do that, you're taking a simple token and using it to lay a reductive judgment on a complex person.
I didn't say they were subhuman or monsters, I said they were assholes. And they are, they are no different than the guy who cuts you off on the way to work. And yes, they should be ridiculed for it.
> saying something racist over Thanksgiving dinner doesn't make them horrible people
Yes, it does. It is basically the definition of horrible people.
> you are engaging in a form of prejudice yourself.
Nope. A prejudice is "preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience." I called the author an asshole based on their writings and actions. I will call my FIL an racist asshole when he spouts racist remarks. I didn't say everyone in the US South is a racist.
A prejudice is "preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience." I called the author an asshole based on their writings and actions.
This is "technically correct" in a naive sense, if you assume groupings of people and attributes like "asshole" can be treated like mathematical sets. I find that the hair-trigger and reductive application of pejorative labels anti-intellectual, divisive, and counter productive. It takes very little cognition to do such simple pattern matching and it cuts off any involved discussion. Often, the real motivation is self-aggrandizing at the expense of others. It is one of the pernicious behaviors I've often seen in bigots, who will also argue their "technical correctness" and cite examples to assert that their labeling is based on "reason or actual experience."
The real act of righteousness and courage is to live with people.
How does arguing over which news provider is more biased contribute anything to the argument you're responding to? All news outlets are biased. Fox is known by many people for taking it to an unrelenting extreme and it's perfectly acceptable to use them as an example of such without listing ten more networks.
I was writing for the majority HN crowd. (I utilize what seem to be trivial prejudices in my writing to keep it shorter. In reality, those prejudices are just as bad. Don't vilify, though!)
Women on my team often want to "gossip," but I've learned to recognize it for what it is: a (misguided) attempt to build rapport with me. I'm learning to redirect the conversation to be more positive. The men on my team are more likely to be jockeying for position, claiming credit for things they had small roles in, and generally exaggerating the truth. I'm learning to ask follow-up questions to get them to think twice before making any claims.
Males on my team are just as hard or harder to retain when compared to the women. I believe they're more likely to leave when they're passed over for a promotion or raise. Females at my company are perhaps more likely to leave because they aren't feeling close relationships. Keep in mind that the reason someone gives you for leaving is not always the real reason. The author doesn't seem particularly sensitive, so I wouldn't be surprised if she's getting "reasons" for quitting that are actually just evasions of hard topics.
These are all just my observations and experiences, but I'm sure there are plenty of studies showing the pros and cons of hiring men and women. Whether biological or cultural, I'm positive there are both pros and cons to hiring either gender.
Regardless, you should see my point: it's easy to get a little selective perception when you notice all the bad things about one gender. The fact that the author claims to be a woman and a feminist doesn't excuse a thing. That just means she's a woman and a feminist who stereotypes and wants to discriminate against women.