"When female executives spoke more than their peers, both men and women punished them with 14 percent lower ratings."
I've seen similar comments before and even going as far as saying women were harder on women than men when moving up in a career. It's deeper and more complex than men versus women. I've heard my share of anecdotal stories from women who say the same thing, women are their harshest critique and most difficult challenge. It seems daunting, how do you even begin to change that.
"He announced to the writers that he was instituting a no-interruption rule while anyone — male or female — was pitching."
That is excellent, and sad, that we have to go back to grade school etiquette to let people find a voice. It's true though, if a team member isn't trusted to have a voice they shouldn't be a part of the conversation. If they are a part of the conversation they should have the respect of the rest of the team enough for them to shut up and listen, then respond. Spirit sticks!
>>> I've seen similar comments before and even going as far as saying women were harder on women than men when moving up in a career.
This is probably the one single point I've seen completely overlooked in every men vs. women debate.
As someone who's been in management, I can't count how many times senior executives who were male wanted to promote a woman to a more senior role, only to have other senior women disagree to such an extent, it caused a scene. This is probably one of the more interesting dynamics in this conversation which is often brushed aside.
One of my colleagues once made the comparison how men are always in the "alpha" mode. Always trying to be top dog, always trying to outdo their peers for the top roles. He said this is just as prevalent with women, and most people never see it because women tend to be more, shall I say more "backstabbing" than their male counter parts.
This also opens the door to having one or two self-promoting types control the conversation by commenting early on and to never stop talking. I find its helpful to interrupt people sometimes as it helps cut the BS in meetings.
I doubt there's an easy fix here. My take is that there's a larger aspect not addressed in the article: women simply aren't socialized to be socially aggressive. The same way women often won't negotiate salary and then we wring our hands over women's salaries. How about of instead changing everything to suite these women, we encourage them to be more socially aggressive? Its not like these things are pleasant or easy for men either. I feel like if I didn't learn how to act this way, I wouldn't be competitive at my job. The same way I see loads of shy male techies who never speak up and don't contribute much and don't end up promoted or appreciated. I think its a skill that can be learned and things like "oh I'm INTJ, oh I'm a woman, etc" are excuses. Why aren't some people motivated to learn the proper social skills? As a previous shy person, I know that this is just a learn-able skill.
I don't think we need to make meetings longer and "nicer" and if we did, it would just lead to resentment and fleeing of talent to company B where that talent can thrive without a lot of politically correct baggage holding them back. Now company A is a bunch of quiet milquetoast types unable to engage in argumentation and eventually not be competitive against a more aggressive company.
Lastly, a lot of the more quiet people I've worked with are so because they just don't have a lot of good ideas. They're bureaucrats and desk jockeys or are ultrafocused on their little niche of the world and add the same things over and over regardless of context. Yeah, the TPS reports might be slow to load, but this isn't the time or place for it, yet the TPS manager has literally nothing else to add. Maybe those without much to add should be quiet.
The Harrison Bergeron-ing of all things really isn't the way to go. I really wish more people understood that.
> women simply aren't socialized to be socially aggressive
The article makes the point that women are socially penalized when they are aggressive. It's not a lack of socialization into aggressiveness, but rather an active socialization into passiveness.
Yeah sure, but how? It's not like you can pass a law one day and the next the values of every person in the country will have changed.
In my experience values drive law more than law drives values. Marijuana has been illegal for some 40 years (or more!) in the US but that didn't make everyone think it was bad. And now the fact that so many people are unconvinced that marijuana is bad is changing the laws and it's being legalized all across the US.
Critical theory is fine but "trying to fix the system" implies that there is some method by which the system can be fixed other than "everyone has to just grow up" since I don't foresee an "everyone must grow up" law being terribly successful.
EDIT: Let me state that I don't necessarily think the current state of affairs is OK, just that it's a fairly intractable problem that won't get solved quickly. I can figure out what's wrong with my car and install replacement parts. I can figure out what's wrong with society but there aren't any replacement parts.
Not to mention, the only system I can think of where competition, which is what we're really talking about, was systematically eliminated was the USSR and other implementations of communism, which were both economically and socially a disaster. There's a lot of feel good stuff when we talk about fixing things, but the "thing" that needs to be fixed is sometimes a feature and not a bug.
The USSR is also a good example, especially with women's rights. There was a top-down equality decree without any sort of legitimate social movement. In practice, women in the USSR, outside of propaganda, were treated poorly and once the USSR fell, Russians just naturally fell into their deep patriarchal views which are mainstream there. If anything, women have it worse in modern Russia because of the USSR's heavy handed idealistic decrees.
The Harrison Bergeron-ing all things is a terrible path and we should definitely encourage people to rise to the challenges of their environment, and celebrate those who do.
But that doesn't have to be the end of the story. Some of the challenges that women face in the workplace can't be solved simply by those women. I think that was a major point of the article. There are common subconscious biases that businesses would be well served to address. That doesn't have to mean that businesses treat anyone like victims. It means they aren't necessarily maximizing the value of their human resources. I don't think there's a single optimum strategy for running business meetings, but we should certainly better understand the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches.
women simply aren't socialized to be socially aggressive.
There are biological factors at work here too - the hormonal balance in a man versus a woman (testosterone, etc) leads to widely divergent levels of observed aggressiveness in almost all contexts (social, physical, etc).
Feminism and such isn't "men vs women", it's "women being put down". Women can be misogynist against women (heck there are gay people opposed to gay marriage, humans, eh?)
Yes, because it's probably impossible to solve the problem of women being harder on women, just as I think it's impossible to solve the problem of men being harder on other men (in the grand scheme of life, not just looking at the workplace). It's human nature. If you don't account for that, you could, without realizing it, "solve" the problem of men being harder on women in a professional context, then end up pushing the gender politics past the point of being helpful.
EDIT: I edited my reply to clarify some points just as you responded. I have now addressed your first question, and your second question is based on a misunderstanding due to poor wording on my part.
EDIT EDIT, because I seem to have triggered HN's flamewar detector and it's not letting me post anymore:
>I've been ignoring this premise for the sake of argument, but now it's time to raise an objection: Men aren't harder on other men. Both men and women are harder on women.
Yes, I do believe men are harder on men than on women in the grand scheme of life, even if I concede that men can be harder on women in business and the workplace. Men are significantly more likely to be victims of violence from men than women are, whether in public life or in war. Far more men than women are incarcerated in the United States, where they are subject to worse treatment at the hands of guards and other prisoners alike than women are. A woman being raped is a tragedy, a man being raped is a literally a joke, a timeless staple of "edgy" comedians. Fathers expect significantly more from their sons than their daughters. A young woman living with her parents after college is natural; a young man is ridiculed. Men with problems are often not taken seriously by their peers; instead of lending an understanding ear, they're told to simply "man up" and bear it. Their problems are certainly not taken seriously by the media, which claims that their problems are insignificant compared to those faced by women and that they need to "check their privilege." Perhaps it should not be surprising that men are more likely to commit suicide than women.
Some of those ideas, especially one about the expectations of fathers for a man's success, hint at another element of sexism: the patronizing way that men can expect less of women. If you agree that this element exists and sucks, then you are conceding that men are more critical of men than women. I'm not trying to sound like a "men's rights activist" or anything, but it boggles the mind how people can believe or disbelieve the same fact depending on when it suits their argument.
>>dssacco
>I have to disagree however. Most insults that men give other men attack their masculinity, which is implicitly sexist.
That's a great point historically, but in my experience it hasn't been true for a while, and the majority of middle-class men wouldn't tell a man to "stop acting like a woman" these days. When a man is told to "be a man," the subtext is not "because you're acting feminine," but rather "because you're acting childish," or perhaps "because men are not allowed to express weakness." You can choose to interpret this as "all men are sexist because they're holding men to a higher standard here," or you can interpret as "men are not allowed to do something natural that is extremely important for mental health." Yet you don't hear anyone complaining about "interalized misandry," people always manage to reframe everything negative about the male experience as a matter of misogyny. As if we aren't allowed to have our own problems unless they involve women.
1) Why should we assume it's "probably impossible to solve the problem of women being harder on women"? 2) How could we solve "the problem of men being harder on women without realizing it" if, as this article illustrates, we can measure the genders' responses to one another independently?
Edit: I've been ignoring this premise for the sake of argument, but now it's time to raise an objection: Men aren't harder on other men. Both men and women are harder on women. This article itself demonstrates this. (It's more complex than just "being harder on." But, in the context of this article I take "being harder/easier on" to be short for "tending to respond negatively/positively to verbal contributions, regardless of the contribution's merit.")
I think we all pretty much agree on what is happening and how complex the issue is. What I'm unhappy about is how quickly people seem to reach simplified answers. I'd be amazed to find out that the answer to such a complex question is anything but a long list of many seemingly unrelated things.
Don't get me wrong, misogyny and bias are on that list, but I don't have nearly enough information to even reason about how much of an impact they have compared to all the others.
You bring up an interesting point about men being more harsh on other men than women.
I have to disagree however. Most insults that men direct to other men attack their masculinity, which is implicitly sexist. When men put other men down by likening them to females or female behavior, they are putting down both men and women, but under this model I'd have to say females appear to suffer more, if only because a man can (and is encouraged) to change his behavior to align with masculine values. A woman cannot do this (or cannot easily do this) because she is ultimately perceived as female regardless of her behavior.
You can argue that men are more openly critical of other men than women, but under the model I explained above, men are overwhelmingly more critical of other women, which really gets down to another core issue - men conflating sexism with open, explicit criticism ("it's okay for me to do this with guys but not girls") and ignoring the vast underbelly that is subconscious, unexpressed (but no less acted upon) sexism.
I'm open to arguments refuting this, but this seems to be about the size of it - ultimately, many men innately regard females to be lesser to the extent that they use femininity as an insult.
What about females telling other females that they are "bossy", mothers discouraging their daughters from being "such a tomboy", the need to look pretty, etc.
These insults work both ways - males use them to encourage other males to adhere to the stereotype, but so do females (in a less direct way perhaps).
I'm downvoting simply because feminism isn't any one thing. To try and define it is a fool's errand. There is no generally accepted definition. It's "no true scotsman" to the highest degree.
My personal experience makes me think that being minority might be one of the important factors, if not the most important one. Minorities are regularly ignored and interrupted in meetings while the majorities, unless explicitly reminded, don't feel it.
I don't mean the majorities do it intentionally. Some of them, when reminded they are interrupting, apologize sincerely. It could be deep in human's conscience.
Not always. This is highly culturally dependent. For example, it's widely felt that Irish people (actual Irish, not Irish-American) are critical of other Irish people who succeed: "Look at him. Who does he think he is? Is he better than us?" etc. ...whereas it's widely felt that Americans admire other Americans who have succeeded.
I didn't, but maybe some people felt that comment didn't add to the discussion. All you wanted to do was injected a single politically charged word into the discussion, you had no insights to add or thoughts on how it applied to this story in particular. It was low effort overall.
Seems now with this additional post that you just made your original post because you wanted to play victim or start an argument, either way it isn't making you look any better and still doesn't contribute to the overall discussion. In particular as you barely waited 5 minutes before declaring yourself a victim.
> Make a feminist point on HN, get downvoted to hell and beneath.
That's not true at all.
I think you got down-voted because you missed the point of the comment you replied to. (I think) the point was that even if you get rid of patriarchy, you'd still have to deal with women putting each other down. I guess that's noteworthy because it's easy to forget when you read an article like this one. I am constantly amazed by how poorly we treat each other. All of us, really.
But how much of women putting other women down is due to patriarchy? What if it's all due to patriarchy? What if getting rid of patriarchy solves it all?
The way patriarchy is usually defined by feminists, women putting other women down (at least to the extent that that is because the women being put down are acting in a way that is outside of the fixed gender roles held by the women doing the putting down) is an example of patriarchy, not an effect of it.
Let me see if I got this right. You're saying "normal" women putting down "weird" women would fall under the agreed upon definition of patriarchy? How is that not just xenophobia/mobbing?
I can't tell if those are rhetorical questions or not. Part of it might be patriarchy, but I'm pretty sure for the most part it's just nature at work. Women competing with other women for the attention of men doesn't sound new to me.
The parent comment implied without evidence that that all women putting down women had nothing to do with patriarchy. I gave a reason as to how it might (to a possibly massive amount) be due to patriarchy.
And what if "nature at work" isn't so natural? Go back 50 years and people would say that it's unnatural for 2 men to love each other.
I worry that we're now viewing all of society's interactions through a prism of demographics and privilege. The prevailing cultural narrative is now that your demographic is your destiny. Too much success is granted to privilege and too much failure is blamed on society.
In my formative years, the rule for proper behavior seemed very simple: treat everyone the same, no matter their demographics or background. Now it seems there is a different ruleset for every demographic group. It all seems very retrograde and divisive.
You are articulating the zeitgeist of the culture: equal treatment is enough.
You are failing to accept the measured fact that people who think they are giving out equal treatment, are mistaken.
Privilege blinds you. There are problems you never see, that if you knew about you'd be all like "Shit, seriously? that really happens? That's awful". But because you never know, you fill in the blanks with your own privileged experience and so erase them. There are problems, like this one, where your eyes believe they have seen equality, but a camera and stopwatch measures unfair treatment.
You need to stop being so trusting of your own inputs.
Those "different rules for every demographic" are there to (crudely) rebalance the scales. They aren't really different rules. They are compensating for the fact that supposed neutrality is skewed hard. Think of them as komi in go.
And the concept of privilege is there to teach you how the real world works, because unaided, you'll never see it.
A nice explanation of privilege. I'm not super fond of the term, since I hear too many people use it as an attack instead of a conversation starter. Its hard to convince someone they're wrong, that has to be a delicate conversation.
Maybe: Do your best to treat everyone equally, and be aware of just how insanely hard this is for ANY human being to do.
I would go with "Try to 'overcompensate' when it comes to repressed groups; only then will you trick your brain into more genuinely equitable behavior."
It's similar to how, as a rule of thumb, we would do well to "over-document" our code. We're so close to the source that things that we consider "obvious" (due to constant exposure) are absolute headscratchers for people reading the code for the first time.
I put "overcompensate" in quotes because our brains are poorly equipped to judge equity objectively. We have to use hacks like "You cut the cake, and I'll choose which half is mine" for that reason.
It seems the topic of privilege often arises to promote empathy in some roundabout way. I just think empathy is a good concept that stands without the help of privilege. It's possible that pointing out the disparity in privilege can guilt empathetic emotions into some -- but this message then becomes unfairly reserved for those deemed as "privileged". Empathy is good for everyone. Privileged or not.
Nobody's arguing against empathy. And simply saying that privilege is "unfairly reserved" (without any qualifiers) begs the question.
We're saying that privileged people are often blind to their own privilege and others' disadvantages. To them (and I'm in this group), and thanks to things like hedonic adaption, a position of privilege feels like their "natural" state. To have some of that privilege taken away feels like a loss, even though it was nothing they earned on their own in the first place. To illustrate: How often do people hear heterosexuality applied as a pejorative label?
> And simply saying that privilege is "unfairly reserved"
I meant the promotion of empathy is being unfairly reserved. Empathy is a universally virtuous principle. To preach it at cis white males excludes others from the joys of this enlightenment.
> To them (and I'm in this group)
This is what confuses me. Why is privilege seen as a membership of a group rather than a behavioral fact about human existence? If you took someone you considered "under privileged" and gave them "excess privilege", surely they too would employ "hedonic adaption". Point being, it seems privilege can be reasoned about in principle without employing group mentality.
> To illustrate: How often do people hear heterosexuality applied as a pejorative label?
On the surface we can reason that pejoratives are bad. Beneath that we can reason that some people are victimized for being different. And beneath that we can reason that empathizing with others helps us act in more caring ways.
I think the promotion of kind language is valid and good, but I feel like it's less useful than the promotion of empathy, because the result of empathizing most likely encompasses the benefits of kind language and much more.
> You are failing to accept the measured fact that people who think they are giving out equal treatment, are mistaken.
People who try to be good are sometimes bad. How does that negate the original intent?
> Privilege blinds you. There are problems you never see, that if you knew about you'd be all like "Shit, seriously?
It's odd that people who preach about privilege fail to reason about it in principle. Privilege isn't something everyone has and fails to recognize. Instead, privilege is allotted to a select few - who without the help of the underprivileged would remain blissfully ignorant of their position.
Privilege, much like justice, has become a loaded word to signify ones vigilance against another group of people without sounding like a bigot. There's nothing wrong with trying to treat everyone with excellence. No one is obligated to engage in this speculative oppression olympics in order to reserve preferential treatment for the victors. That kind of nonsense is a fools errand.
> In my formative years, the rule for proper behavior seemed very simple: treat everyone the same, no matter their demographics or background. Now it seems there is a different ruleset for every demographic group. It all seems very retrograde and divisive.
When you're a kid, you believe in fairy tales like that. But the fact is, your brain is a heuristic machine. It comes to snap conclusions, and you often don't even know why it is you feel a certain way or believe something you do. And studies back this up over and over again. If you just commit to "treat everyone the same" you are de facto committing to making life unfair for women.
I appreciate your intent. But as a sexual minority myself, I would be insulted if someone treated me differently because of it, even if they meant well.
By all means, we should confront our biases, but for me the answer isn't layering new biases on top of old biases.
I actually liked the article's prescription. Not because of gender issues alone, but because I've worked in offices where the smartest people in the room were also the quietest (both men and women).
> I worry that we're now viewing all of society's interactions through a prism of demographics and privilege.
I don't see why this is something to worry about. Perhaps you mean that you worry we're now viewing all of society's interactions exclusively through a prism of demographics and privilege. That would indeed be a problem, but I don't see any reason to believe that it is actually happening. It seems to me that that make-your-own-destiny, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps narrative is still alive and well.
Ideally we would want to keep both things in mind: people can make their own destinies but we need to respond to social dynamics that make it harder for some people to self determine than others. It's not about different rulesets, its trying to build a ruleset that achieves a certain equilibrium between giving everyone equal, unearned, social advantages and trying to maximize the aggregate social advantages conferred.
Also, how much was the rule actually observed back in your formative years? I feel like mysoginy and inequality are issues that are only slowly and recently becoming tthought about and reconsidered by the North American societies.
The world is already divided, in terms of class now more than in recent times (in the Western world), people are simply realizing it. Of course your ideal would be nice and a good goal to strive for/recapture. But whether that happens depends more on government policy than politeness.
In the past people were probably more divided on racial, sexual orientation, or other lines.
If anything, these results are showing that currently, and hence in the past, people have been judged harshly based on their demographics. It's not true that everyone was judged based on their own merits in the past.
It's just that people are starting to recognise it, and try to counter act it.
the thing is that this perceived cost is actually much tinier than it may feel to a privileged individual. feel-good rules like "treat everyone the same" havn't cut it, objectively, statistically. there are real injustices that sail completely under the vantage point of privileged individuals but are doing real systematic harm
A little meta-observation: across HN discussions of topics like these, I notice over and over, the same commenters posting abundantly, vociferously, and stridently in support of what I might loosely term the pro-social-engineering side of the debate. I worry that this might falsely create an impression of consensus when there is in fact none, especially considering the potential social penalties for voicing dissent.
There also seems to be, for males, a certain prestige to espousing this type of ideology, and it seems to increasingly be being used as a form of social signalling (not in the least because it is oppressive to males not occupying the very highest social strata, incurring a real cost for them, hence being a somewhat honest signal).
I think that I was banned for what I said backs up your statement and my original comment.
--
Very good observation. It's unfortunate that this topic seems to allow for zero debate. There are quite a few reasons that someone wouldn't want genders treated different, but even stating that is an invitation to massive down voting.
I'm still sad we lost meritocracy. I come from a poor background and am a minority but today I'm a successful developer. I fought my way up the chain with hard work, self-study and being good at what I do. It's sad that now a lot of the same people who didn't like that I was advancing are now espousing the urgent need to eliminate meritocracy (which is really the only thing I can call the ladder I climbed up) in favor of identity politics.
Refocusing on 'gender equality' is a great way to exacerbate economic inequality by distracting attention from the latter issue and crippling certain groups from advancing effectively.
Not saying this is a conscious thing, but this seems to be where incentives are leading people.
Possibly the reason why you get downvoted is because you say silly things like "we lost 'meritocracy'", like it's some sort of team sport, or it's a war and ground was lost to the enemy.
If you want to be treated better, then perhaps not tar everyone who disagrees with you (or even all feminists) with that brush you're using. You say you're talented, so perhaps use that talent to focus your commentary appropriately, rather than engage in silly us vs them 'sides'.
We (myself and others) did "lose" meritocracy. It was a valid philosophy and important part of business culture until recently when it's become banned by hr/pr.
> If you want to be treated better, then perhaps not tar everyone who disagrees with you (or even all feminists) with that brush you're using.
I'm just disagreeing. I'm also not complaining about down voting. I was BANNED; that's the type of reaction I was talking about. I'm not saying we should ban feminists from discussion. I don't have to agree with people to allow them to speak their mind. Apparently that doesn't work for non-feminists though. That's precisely my point.
On its face, it is obvious that there are differences between males and females at all age groups. I think a core issue is when we try to pretend like males and females are the same.
In male dominated workplaces, women find it difficult to adapt to how men do things.
In female dominated schools, boys find it difficult to adapt to how girls do things. When 98.1% of pre-school and kindergarten teachers are female it's no surprise that boys are disciplined more often, disciplined more harshly and test poorer on reading and other academic achievement measures than girls. Elementary school as a whole isn't much better with 90% of teachers being female. The first 6 years of each boy's academic life is spent trying to adapt him to how girls behave and how girls learn.
Failing to adapt in such a manner leads to punishment and recommendations of holding him back until he is as mature as his younger female peers despite his academic ability.
This is interesting - I've noticed that sometimes when I'm with some women colleagues in a social setting, I'll be completely ignored when making a comment (and of course, I get slightly butthurt by the experience). I wonder if this is on some way related to the problem outlined in the article - I'm being a pushy interrupting man, but because I'm in the minority, I can get frozen out for a change. Then again, maybe† it's a 'person' thing rather than a 'gender' thing.
It's pretty common that in any given group, the subset of people who have good ideas and the subset of people who are comfortable dominating a group conversation are not entirely the same.
One strategy that I've found is sometimes helpful that recognizes this fact is to start group decision making by having everyone write ideas down independently on sticky notes for, say, 5 minutes. This means every person present ends up with a physical representation of the fact that they have ideas, sitting in front of them on the table.
Then, in a second phase, you can put them on a board and organize them, evaluate them, vote on them, etc. Since the ideas are now sticky notes on a board, they can be evaluated (more) independently of the person who articulated them.
The first time I participated in something like this, it felt like Kindergarten, and I didn't really appreciate it. But after some practice, I've come to appreciate that it gives every member of a group the chance to contribute ideas, without having to simultaneously finesse the holding-the-floor game.
There are anecdotes of trans men (female to male transsexuals) noticing this. They are the same person mostly and do the same thing, yet they get treated much better.
There was one trans man who is a scientist and has published under female and male names. Someone, who didn't know, remarked that he was much better than his sister.
It'd be interesting to see a blind comparison of his pre/post-transition articles.
I say this because I could _totally_ see making that transition to male representing a removal of a big chunk of subconscious stress about how he was "lying to the world" about his gender by presenting as female. This could translate into an improvement in the quality of his post-transition work.
There have been many similar studies performed that showed materials with female names are ranked lower than those with male names[0]. Same thing with black vs white-sounding names[1].
> I would want to see this experiment repeated trans females who (assuming the presented hypothesis) should see the inverse relationship.
Yep, there are ancedotes about trans women just as you predict:
> Joan Roughgarden is a biologist at Stanford who lived and worked as Jonathan Roughgarden until her early fifties, and her experience was almost the mirror image of Barres’s. In her words, “men are assumed to be competent until proven otherwise, whereas a woman is assumed to be incompetent until she proves otherwise.” In an interview, Roughgarden also noted that if she questioned a mathematical idea, people assumed it was because she didn’t understand it.
> I suspect a better (and likely cheaper/easier) test is to take the same papers and present them under a male and female author name.
There have been published scientific papers looking at (sort of) this. Send out job applications for a lab manager, and randomly assign a male or female name. Same job application otherwise. Male applications get more job offers and more money.
I believe the scientist you're talking about is Ben Barres at Stanford. I know people who have worked for him and he's a truly exceptional scientist and mentor. He's been pretty outspoken about his personal experience on how women are perceived in high-power science, I'd encourage a google for "Ben Barres Feminism" to see a few articles.
"There was one trans man who is a scientist and has published under female and male names. Someone, who didn't know, remarked that he was much better than his sister."
An alternative explanation: After the sex change he was no longer suicidal and was able to perform much better at the university. I'm not claiming to know which explanation is the correct one, but things aren't that simple.
Sure it's possible. However trans women scientistst report being treated worse[1], and studies show women are ranked less than men for identical job applications for science[2]. Which all adds up to "women being treated worse than men".
Unfortunately this seems like a bootstrapping issue now. If women are viewed differently for speaking up, it's because people aren't used to women speaking up. :(
I'd love to see these discussions recorded and more objectively graded. I can not fathom a room full of people in a story meeting that isn't over flowing with interruptions and shot down ideas.
Now I'm not saying that these issues aren't real. Or that women don't run into issues that men don't have or have with less frequency. What I am saying is that these tales are anecdotal and we need more objective assessments if we have any hope of making any improvements.
This is why it's important to have things like affirmative action - and in fact to scale that right down to informal conversations. Your experience of simple obvious facts is lying to you. You'll think a woman is taking more than her fare share of time when a numeric time measurement would show her being sidelined (as well as interrupted, ignored, and poached from). So you need to swallow your feelings of indignation and your naive realism, and measure.
Ok, you can break the stopwatches, I'm sure that will make people more comfortable talking to each other.
EDIT, because HN isn't letting me submit new replies: It was hyperbole. I don't care if it's an actual stopwatch, if you record everything on cassette and tally up the minutes later, or if you use some hip new cloud SaaS bespoke locally-grown web-scale meeting management software. When you implement patronizing means of policing human interaction like this, you stifle conversation and make people feel like children.
I'm especially aware of this at the moment, because HN is patronizingly preventing me from making any new posts because I happened to submit some replies too quickly. A dumb algorithm intended to police flamewars is making discussions ITT needlessly difficult to read, and preventing me from posting suggestions for the HN Algolia Search people in another thread. It is just as annoying and counter-productive to "rate limit" people in real life for the crime of impassioned discussion.
Another suggestion mentioned in the article is that of anonymously submitting and "ranking" ideas prior to the meeting. This is literally an "upvote" mechanism with all the familiar flaws of groupthink and trying to assign quantitative value to ideas. This works poorly enough on the internet, let alone in person.
The point is that we need stopwatches (etc.) to make visible social dynamics that we would not otherwise observe, and then try to make social rules (not necessarily laws) accordingly. It's folly to simply feel our way along based on anecdotal experiences which are themselves infected with the biased sought to be measured (as well as suffering from limited data).
Nobody is proposing that the remedial social rule itself rely on a stopwatch.
I'm playing the devil's advocate here for the most part but surely today it does not need to be anything as intrusive as a stopwatch. You could conceivably track who gets to speak for how long and any interruptions that happen in live meetings with software running on your smartphone, and you could certainly do so in voice chat meetings. There may be a marketable product in this somewhere.
My theory is that gender inequality (less women than men, or vice versa) will cause the minority gender to have less of a say.
It seems supported by the article's last example:
"Professor Burris and his colleagues studied a credit union where women made up 74 percent of supervisors and 84 percent of front-line employees. Sure enough, when women spoke up there, they were more likely to be heard THAN men."
Speaking as a man, I would prefer that we use the term woman. As in, "Speaking as a Woman". The term female is without species. Female giraffe? Female water buffalo? Female human!
They're referencing the structure of the phrase "Driving While Black". It gets the feeling of oppression across in 3 words in a way that "Speaking as a Woman" would not.
Speaking as a male, I would prefer we use the terms male and female. Because they don't carry all the anglo cultural connotations that come along with "man" and "woman".
I don't think so, apes speak to each other and you cannot understand them. Dolphins speak to each other and you cannot understand them. Speaking is not a human only action.
While yes, they were going for a poetic comparison to 'Driving whilst black', I'd prefer we use 'woman' as the noun and 'female' as the adjective. 'Woman driver' and 'woman CEO' are phrases we see that don't have the counterparts 'man driver' or 'man CEO', for example.
This type of specienormativism is an example of the pure bigotry that is holding all of us back! Who are you to say that the speaker is not a female giraffe? Why do you assume she wouldn't be?
We all have the right to self-define, and then brutally ostracize people who reject our self-definitions.
Note that you changed it from "while" implying temporary, to "as" implying permanence. The temporary-ness of the title has a very strange angle having nothing to do with the story. Given the title I expected a story about the experiences of MtoF trans- people speaking out. Which would have probably been more interesting than the actual story.
This really doesn't match my experience. Women at my workplace aren't afraid to speak up at all. It helps that about half of our middle management roles are occupied by women.
It seems your experience actually does matches up with the author's thesis. As in the credit union with 74% female supervisors, companies with higher female makeup purportedly had less difference in the way female and males were perceived when they spoke up.
I've seen this go down in a critical theory graduate seminar where all three of the women in the seminar would routinely be opposed/interrupted by their male peers to the point that they just had to call it out.
Maybe we need to create conference rooms where everyone is in closed off little rooms and everyone speaks anonymously? Otherwise, I don't know how we easily combat this seemingly deep-rooted bias.
There was this one time I was watched a whole bunch of old media agitprop reciting various tropes on how things should be and when I did what TV told me to do, people responded negatively! It doesn't matter if those people were also exposed to the same trope and became skeptical of it based on their own experience... or if my imitation of the trope was ham fisted... I'M THE SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE HERE. How dare others have opinions of how my favorite trope should work!
Wait. Why did the women allow the male to run with their idea? Why didn't they continue and run with it themselves? Are we supposed to sit patiently watching the gears turn until person A thinks of the idea themselves?
It's a meeting. Speak up, run with ideas, contribute. If you're gonna be mousey you're gonna get run over. Male or female.
The women didn't "allow" anything. They began to speak and their ideas were finished by men, with the rest of the meeting nodding along with them. When there's a female minority and an implicit cultural approval for this type of behavior, it's more than just 'pull yourself up by your ideological bootstraps'. It's easy to say "just do it" when you've never been in an environment that subtly discounts your contributions, no matter how good they are.
It's so irritating that not being gregarious is called mousey, because it's definitely being stated as a knock. As if people can't make excellent contributions without yelling the loudest.
I'm not a woman, and I'm not a minority, but being around my wife (an extremely intelligent, introverted engineer), it's easy to watch the implicit privilege that men use when relating to her. It's easy for them to steal her ideas. She is constantly, constantly challenged by every young man with something to prove, no matter how right she is, no matter how much experience she has in the matter ("Are you sure? Why don't we do it this way?"). It's downright exhausting. If she calls someone out on it, men think of her as "a bitch". If I point it out to them, they often say things like, "Oh wow, I didn't realize I was doing that". Or, they say something defensive like, "Why can't she stand up for herself?"
Sorry for the rant, but this logic is so defeating for actually creating a positive workplace that encourages contributions from everyone, not just 24 year old Messiah-in-training.
In a meeting time is limited. Are you suggesting everyone wait around while she finishes her thought when another person could say it quicker?
What your wife needs is not someone white knighting for her (you or this article). She needs to take lessons in assertiveness to build her confidence so she can get her views across and not be ignored from basics like a weak voice or poor posture. It's not rocket science and it's not a huge male conspiracy against women.
What is true is women are less likely to be assertive, in life and in the workplace. And that can be fixed. It just won't be easy.
Are you suggesting everyone wait around while she finishes her thought when another person could say it quicker? ... She needs to take lessons in assertiveness to build her confidence so she can get her views across and not be ignored from basics like a weak voice or poor posture
How could you possibly know that from what he posted? You're introducing your own conception of her, and attributing things to her that were no where in his post. Her lack of assertiveness, confidence, weak voice, poor posture, etc were created purely in your mind.
Ah, but the woman will be negatively perceived for that action. If even powerful women speak less consciously because of negative reactions, there might just be more than smoke.
What if we started believing women when they tell us their experiences?
> What if we started believing women when they tell us their experiences?
I have a ratio of around 1:10 female:male from my tech staff. I have not seen this "powerful women speak less consciously because of negative reactions" from women any more or less than I see in men. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I am saying it's natural for variation to exist and it's not exclusive to women.
But whatever, keep pushing that narrative. It hasn't worked in 12 months, but maybe today eh.
I'm a 6'6"/198cm man with broad shoulders and a very deep voice. And yet I constantly get talked over by people, so I know what it's like. If you plough on, you're considered the interrupting arsehole. I've had times when I've been halfway through my second or third sentence and people just start talking over me, and when I plough on to finish my thought, I get the looks like I'm the problem. I've had the same thing happen when I've tried to recover an idea that I introduced but someone else took and ran with.
You call it 'being mousey', but it's not about being timid - there are social effects in play here, and it's often not worth the social cost to 'power through'.
Edit: thinking further, I think a part of it is upbringing. I was raised to believe that interrupting people while they're speaking is rude. The people who talk over others are generally the same people; they seem to have had upbringings where conversations were more free-for-all, fight to make yourself heard. I'm not sure, just seems to fit.
I think it's not so easy, unfortunately. A while ago I read an article that woman who are eager to argue in business are perceived as bitchy, while men with the same eagerness were perceived as ambitious (by both men and women). In my experience, there are many such subtle discriminations that makes it hard for women to speak up.
It seems to me, in my unscientific personal experience, that men are much more likely to interrupt, and when interrupted, they have a rather amazing ability to keep talking through/over the interrupter even if the interrupter continues. IMO women are more attuned to listening and will stop speaking because they are interested in hearing what the other person has to say. I've seen many "conversations" where two men are just talking simultaneously, nobody can understand what's being said, and whoever keeps talking longer is the one who prevails.
> Speak up, run with ideas, contribute. If you're gonna be mousey you're gonna get run over. Male or female.
Not only do women face more adversity in this area than men, but you're also writing-off valuable contributions from entire personality types. What if someone in your org has information that is useful that doesn't get shared because they aren't comfortable in the meeting setting you outlined?
Also, think of the talent that you're not able to acquire or retain because this is how meetings are run. I, for one, probably wouldn't stay in such an environment for long.
Not all personality types thrive in the meeting environment you've outlined. The environment I'm envisioning based on what you've said is one where interruptions are the norm, you must be willing to talk over people to get speaking time, and you must be very socially assertive with your ideas.
I know many more-introverted people who wouldn't be comfortable in that environment. I know several talented engineers that wouldn't contribute ideas in that sort of environment. And I, myself, would probably leave a company if that sort of meeting was in the company's culture.
> Not all personality types thrive in the meeting environment you've outlined
I agree. But if the employees want to thrive in a workplace that has such environments then they need to compete or leave for a more suitable environment. Complaining that it's because of X and Y with anecdotal evidence and proposing solutions that slow down idea flow doesn't help anyone.
I think the article kind of addresses this point when talking about 1) the overwhelming frequency which this happens to women over men and 2) the negative perception of women who do voice their opinion. In a lot of ways not speaking up means protecting yourself from negative perception in the workplace.
I've seen similar comments before and even going as far as saying women were harder on women than men when moving up in a career. It's deeper and more complex than men versus women. I've heard my share of anecdotal stories from women who say the same thing, women are their harshest critique and most difficult challenge. It seems daunting, how do you even begin to change that.
"He announced to the writers that he was instituting a no-interruption rule while anyone — male or female — was pitching."
That is excellent, and sad, that we have to go back to grade school etiquette to let people find a voice. It's true though, if a team member isn't trusted to have a voice they shouldn't be a part of the conversation. If they are a part of the conversation they should have the respect of the rest of the team enough for them to shut up and listen, then respond. Spirit sticks!