LOL – that’s the “white man” you and a bunch of others were defending for a main part of the argument, weren’t you.
He laid into me there pretty intensely in about 10 paragraphs, where he implied he had the power to sue me, but suggested he would not because I was insignificant (…what a relief!)
I’m glad people on this thread are speaking against the condescension women, who’ve joined this discussion, have to deal with for saying anything against the grain.
I just wanted to say – it’s cool you are seeing the light on this.
But even if I wasn’t “respectful” – that doesn’t mean we can’t have the potential to learn from one another. I don’t want to be seen as “nice” so another woman can be seen as the “bad” one.
I don’t need anyone’s personal approval or thanks because I was more “respectful” than another woman, and I hope you can respect that.
What I was trying to express was that Jeff defending his appropriation by saying that Shanley’s tone is inappropriate is akin to a logical fallacy, in that it is a violation of convention.
Something else that men can do - the whole purpose of this thread - is to support feminists using feminist conventions. We can assume that there are reasons for them even if we don’t know those reasons yet, and we can support them. These conventions exist as a result of decades of effort, effort that we’re often unfamiliar with.
Many of us male feminists have been participating in these conversations for years but for us it is always a matter of choice. We get to opt in and out of thinking about feminism as we choose. Women do not get to opt in and out of thinking about how they are treated by men.
As men, if we want women to be treated better we can start from the assumption that the conventions identified have merit. We can stop defending our violations with additional violations.
Jeff’s appropriation was a violation. Defending his appropriation because he does not like Shanley’s tone was a further violation. Raising the voices of “good” women over “bad” women is additional violation.
These violations are a subset of the violations that men have performed repeatedly for decades and if we actually want to help change that we can listen when people are telling us over and over and over again that we’re fucking up and that we’re causing additional damage. We can stop, and process and listen and hear rather than fight and defend and nitpick and justify.
We can listen.
It is also true that conventions are always debatable, even these. Just because they are well established does not mean they are without flaw. Though I myself am quite convinced they are extremely sound conventions, I can appreciate why someone may not agree. Disagreement and debate are healthy and respected.
However, when discussing how men can support women? That is emphatically not the right place to debate convention. That is the place for us to listen and act.
I am deeply uncomfortable with how much time you’re spending trying to convince everyone that Shanley should be ignored. A majority of your comments in this thread directly or indirectly are about tactics and tone of Shanley or others. Looking at your replies to others on twitter is similar.
I may respond more fully to why I find your response to me inadequate (in short: you expect too little of people), but if I do it will be on my own site. At this point responding would drive more traffic here which is magnifying the error you made when you decided to write a blog post without even acknowledging Shanley and which you continue to make by putting so much energy into policing her tactics.
I’m sorry, I just can’t buy this: [quote=“robdrimmie, post:177, topic:1851”]
Something else that men can do - the whole purpose of this thread - is to support feminists using feminist convention
[/quote]
Here’s the reason, staying within the “bounds of feminist discourse” is just epistemic closure under another name. Without engaging the rest of culture, you have no hope of achieving your goals.
As to other points, the only appropriation was of the title, I don’t see anything close to appropriation, much less plagiarism.
Jeff, as near as I can tell, didn’t reference convention at all in the OP. That arose out of what could only be called a disproportionate response by Shanley.
I do not think anyone should be ignored, I’m merely making the case that amplifying hatred is not an effective way to spread a message. It causes a lot of people to tune out, and it makes the world a little bit darker for everyone in it.
It really bothers me to see hate expressed towards other human beings. And I find it profoundly disturbing that others would openly endorse this as some kind of activist strategy to achieve a goal. They are human beings, just like us. Aren’t they?
That’s great!
It’s a starting point, and as you said:
If this article could accomplish just that, I do think that is forward progress. (Can I again say how appalling and embarrassing that whole debacle was?) I hope nobody reading my article thought of it as the complete and final list of the only things that anyone can do to take on this complex problem. I certainly did not intend it that way.
I know you don’t want to drive traffic here but as a courtesy if you could link your response from here so I and others can find it, read it, and learn from it, I would appreciate that.
Citation needed - Never in my half a decade of professional development have I ever heard this. Anyone can be just as anecdotal as you
Citation needed - Also this sentence doesn’t mean anything
Citation needed - Reverse the roles with HR, swap women with men and boom, you’ve got any gender dominated field behaving in exactly the same way.
I would even suggest that women are the better future devellopers. Because software development is gearing more and more towards user friendly web applications. So more of the work is about communicating and figuring out what the software should do. The theory is that women are better at that because they are not arrogant jerks.
Wow, are you implying women are now more likely to succeed in software development because of the high level of abstraction now achieved? You realise that this is incredibly offensive and plays into the stereotype that women are better communicators? You also seem to be confusing software development with requirements gathering.
I’ve seen some truly disturbing comments on here but I am mostly disturbed by Jeff’s “commandments”. I’ll let 1 and 2 slide because that’s just common sense but telling us how to act, conduct relationships and even consume alcohol is beyond the reach of what this article should of been. Articles like this only widen the gap as it seems to be very “Make sure you handle all women with gloves” and it’s belittling to both men and women. Women can look after themselves and if they can’t, they should be encouraged to rather than encourage men to come to their aid.
@codinghorror, I you are interested to move forward on this topic, I suggest you contact Jim & Michele McCarthy and see what you could do together. They are great culture hackers and are currently working on the same vision.
The bottom line is this - people shouldn’t be allowed, unchallenged, to make unsubstantiated claims about others that are defamatory. As a forum host, you don’t want that headache. Since I was the target of those claims, I spoke up. Is what I did sabre rattling? I guess you can say that - but given the nature of what I was responding to, does it matter?
Thank you Jeff so much for this post. It helps so much when the men speak up. Great post. And it makes me remember when one of my stepdaughters(at a very young age) decided she wasn’t good at math and one decided she was good at math. My husband and I talked to both of them and told them that these large conclusions were bullshit and that they were good at everything at this point. And both of them ended up being good at everything, especially the one who “thought” she wasn’t good at math. She ended up doing great in math classes, math testing, etc. There is definitely cultural pressure for girls to steer away from math, science, technology. We need to turn that around NOW. We need all those great minds involved in such important endeavors.
How can you call something the best of humanity if it was designed while excluding the input of half of humanity on principle? You’re assuming that humanity’s feats are as good as they possibly could be without the inclusion of women, which is precisely the implicit sexism that stops us from allowing women to unleash their potential. For all you know, if women had been historically deemed equal we would have taller skyscrapers, fewer oil spills, and got the internet a hundred years earlier than we did. Indeed, how much faster can we innovate, and how much better can our innovations be, if we give twice as many people in the population access to the tools and environments that foster innovation? Women (of all kinds) are the bulk of that potential.
And we are making efforts to recruit all underrepresented groups. But you have to start somewhere, and if we can’t make progress with equity for women (the slightly larger half of humanity) how can we expect to make progress with other groups? If we fairly treat women who are otherwise as similar to white privileged men as possible, then how the hell can we expect to include deaf gay African midgets? Including women is the low-hanging fruit, and while you always keep the difficult bugs in mind, you fix the glaring problems first (or perhaps, add the most beneficial features first). Historically women’s rights have preceded other rights for exactly this reason.
I’m a techie, computer geek and a programmer. I’m a car guy who owns tools.
I’m also the father of two girls, ages 7 & 9.
They have iPads. They have a Wii. They have 400 pounds of Lego, a few toy cars and a zillion dolls.
They also have helped me work on the car and they even have their own real tools.
I’ve even tried to show them “what dad does” on the computer.
And they mostly prefer to play dolls and Lego. We got rid of the toy train after no one played with it. At the end of the day, you can’t make anyone interested in something. If my girls aren’t interested in STEM, they’re not interested - even if they’re good at math, they just might not care.
Everyone should have the opportunity to try it, but I’m not going to be a nurse. I don’t expect my kids to become welders. (My friend’s 11 year old daughter can weld!)
So if you are on the receiving end of defamatory comments, if you speak up, one is about a eye for an eye? My eyes are pretty wide open here and I see 20/20.
1st : this discourse thing makes it hard to post a comment on correct item - i just won’t read every 300 entries - so the reply is to the first thing shown. Blame discourse (the old thing ro make coddinghorror comments was easier to use)
2nd: Don’t attempt romantic relationships at work.
Studies shown that most relationships - are not funded in internet or dating sites. Even not in clubs or at festivals. Most relationships are funded AT WORK. So destroy a natural thing with a stupid rule.
3rd no alcohol: Typical american. Take of your american glasses, in other parts of the world that is a natural thing. A work party without alcohol mostly means: out of 100 people only 10 go to the party. If you have free food.
4th think about why you think that you need more women in a job? The university of Bremen overs: Software Eng. solely for women. No math! No men! Easier! And no big chance for a job afterwards.
Is that what you want? A sterile work environment where nobody should have contact with others except for work things? The studies that shown that mixed teams produce better outcomes have also 2 interesting things :smile (I dont wan’t a smile, bad discourse thingy, i want":")
the output gets better with one women in group. if more then one women is in the group the output decreases
the output of the women in the team is irrelevant. The output of the males in a team gets better.
I personally think the intense focus on programmers is shortsighted. It saddens me that most of what I see is where popular culture happens to point out or become popular on the blogosphere or tumblerverse. This kind of discussion needs to happen at all levels of society and not just the elite.
This quote, from a great article, frames up the issues facing women in the much larger ecosystem of technology in general (emphasis is mine):
Beyond the layers of middle- and working-class American workers who make the work of Silicon Valley possible, there is a huge workforce invisible to most Americans who manufacture our electronics. I’m hopeful that most people are generally aware of the working conditions in some of these manufacturing plants in Asia, India, and South America: 14 hour work days, worker suicides, living on-site at the factory in cramped barracks, workers going into debt just to get a job, and allegations of use of child labor.
What many may not know is a huge portion of the workers in these factories are women-- and they are usually in the lower-level, most gruelling positions. While it is difficult to identify with people you may never actually meet, or conditions you can’t personally see, each of us in the US really shows our callousness to these women every time we buy a cell phone without considering how it was made. Ultimately, while much of the work to change these labor conditions will come from activists on the ground, people in the U.S. have a powerful role to play as major consumers of these electronics.
When we consider feminist and anti-racist activism in the tech world, we ought to ask ourselves what will make the lives of the most marginalized and underrepresented groups in tech better. While as a woman programmer, the weight of brogrammer sexism feels overwhelming to me, a part of me asks: how many women’s lives will I actually improve if I focus only on fighting brogrammers? What would the women who made my iPhone think if I spent all my time fighting for codes of conduct at conferences I go to, and none fighting for better labor conditions for factory workers?
Moreover, how many people’s lives could we improve if instead of worrying about whether VCs fund enough women, we instead advocated for redistributing their wealth back to the people whose labor they became wealthy on? I realize these kinds of questions are sensitive to bring up, and I don’t want to dismiss the existing work of amazing activists in the tech world. But at some point, if we truly care about ending sexism, racism, and classism in technology, we have to recognize that tech justice goes way beyond the lives of marginalized people in the world of programming.
And to tie this back to the original article. Take a moment to consider that 'puter that your kid is dragging around. Another article puts it into perspective:
Have you ever thought about how the metal parts in your smartphone were sourced? If you’re a proud owner of an Apple device, that could be shocking for you to learn that Guardian found last year that unregulated tin mines, Apple’s suppliers, employed child labour, damaged local environment and caused 100-150 miner fatalities on average every year. Perhaps, you would feel guilty using your iPhone now, wouldn’t you?
I realize that this isn’t how popularity works, and that in the grand scheme of things doing something for social-justice is good no matter how it came about, but please take this moment to consider the plight of those affected that don’t have as strong of a voice in the popularity contest of concerns.
My community college told me that the point of which most girls decide computers is not what girls play with is roughly around middle school. They where taught this from peers, their parents, and parents of their peers that proper girls play with computers (this also includes video games, etc.). I have no evidence to support this other than what my teacher has told us for what she was going to do for the summer, which was teach a summer class full of middle school girls the basics of programming.
This divide has also made a safe haven for sexists (and generally do*chenozzles) in the industry. I can’t be the only guy that get annoyed with these people.
Anyways, that’s my 2 cents.
It’s called confirmation bias. That is the reason the older generation in many fields have to die off or retire before new theories start to be accepted.
There are reasons for everything. The problem is that sometimes they’re bad reasons, and not everything is worthy of support.
For instance, a hypothetical group of people who are collectively angry at the same perceived enemies, and who are used to talking amongst themselves with little need to be respectful of those who they disagree with, may develop a community standard saying that hateful attacks on their perceived enemies are OK simply because they all find those attacks satisfying and cathartic.
I wouldn’t call that a good reason, and I wouldn’t say that once they begin interacting with people outside their group, outsiders are obligated to support that particular standard. In fact, that standard is an example of what’s wrong with epistemic closure – it degrades your ability to have meaningful or persuasive interactions with anyone outside your group.
