What Can Men Do?

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“I don’t think the question is whether the doll is boring, unimaginative toy, but more what type of interaction and scenarios it encourages.”

My daughters have constructed every kind of scenario imaginable with them. They spend hours of imaginative play, having the dolls (I’m including stuffed animals here) act out every kind of role you could think of, and some that you couldn’t think of.

They build rooms, machines, spaceships and who knows what else out of pillows, books …

You’d just have to see it, I guess.

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I tend to agree with the earlier Jeff.  Do we really need another article about the gender gap in tech? Everyone knows about it now.  Very few, if any, effective solutions have been proposed.  We are failing to address the most basic and seminal question about this issue: why is this a problem?

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While I appreciate the content of this post, titling it ‘What Can Men Do?’ frames the discussion by excluding women in tech. I almost stopped reading at that point. Why not title it ‘What Can We Do?’. Women need to be just as aware and supportive of co-workers that aren’t the default young white male.

Programming, while challenging, doesn’t require you to be a genius. Like you suggest, standard web development is much closer to brick laying than most would feel comfortable to admitting. With that said, biological arguments for lack of women in programming fall flat, since differences in mathematical ability between women and men are very small. Here’s a slideshare if you would rather see this in graph form:

Is there then something cultural that skews the numbers toward men? Probably, yes. There were more women in programming back when it was not a prestigious profession, and seeing that programming has probably gotten a lot easier over the years with better layers of abstraction, there should be more, not less.

From the smithsonian mag (www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programming-used-to-be-womens-work-7180610)

As late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”

[…]

What changed? Well, male programmers wanted to elevate their job out of the “women’s work” category. They created professional associations and discouraged the hiring of women. Ads began to connect women staffers with error and inefficiency. They instituted math puzzle tests for hiring purposes that gave men who had taken math classes an advantage, and personality tests that purported to find the ideal “programming type.”

How do we combat this? To start with, we should increase exposure at an earlier age (programming is also useful in many other stem fields), and create a more inviting workplace. I cringe when I still see things like codebabes popping up on hacker news. We have work to do.

Women often fail to advance in their careers because not enough maternity leave is given, and will usually sacrifice their careers over their family. A good way of avoiding this is by giving mandatory maternity leave for both genders. Raising children is not a woman’s problem, it’s an everyone’s problem.

Going though your advice:

Abide by the Hacker School Rules

This could also be titled: be a good mentor/co-worker. In addition to this I would suggest a pull-request style code reviews. Since the code review is done before changes are merged into master, this prevents random code refactors from 3rd parties. Knowledgeable parties can comment on the diff, you can get more eyeballs on the code to spot simple errors, all while the original dev is in charge of changes.

It’s a positive feedback loop. Of course you need to take care in phrasing your comments, but there are style guides on that too.

People have a hard problem separating critique of code from comments about themselves. Even the best of us will write crap code under time constraints/stress. Don’t take it personally and keep comments civil. Also don’t feel threatened by a competent person that is not a default young white male. We have enough to deal with from impostor syndrome to deal with that drama.

Really listen. What? I SAID LISTEN.

Or don’t assume I’m incompetent If I’m not a default young white male. I know it’s hard, but please try.

If you see bad behavior from other men, speak up.

Sadly this is why we have HR, and why flat orgs probably don’t scale very well.

Don’t attempt romantic relationships at work.

This one is a bit tough. If sparks fly and you enter a romantic relationship, one or both parties should be prepared to find a new job immediately. For an engineer in the current economy, this isn’t too big of a burden.

Also, until both parties have semaphored interest outside of work, please treat your female co-workers as you would your male co-workers. We’re there to work, not to be easy dating material.

No drinking at work events.

Just as bad things can happen at an informal happy hour. If you know you’re a bad drunk maybe you shouldn’t drink.

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Respectful or not, I can’t help thinking that you are not listening to or understanding my words. I’m choosing not to, but to be honest, that makes me want to raise the volume to an unrespectful one to you in response.

But the fact that something you have said in respectful discourse makes me emotional doesn’t devalue me or what I say, no matter how I respond, and feminism has my back on this point 100%. You cannot understand feminism without understanding this.

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I don’t think anybody here is trying to devalue you or what you say.

What I saw Jeff doing was stating what type of content he prefers to promote on the forum he has developed over the past ten years. You may disagree with his decisions, and frankly I’m not sure he correctly balanced this principle with the need to give credit where it’s due, but this is his blog, and he gets to make that decision.

Ignoring someone in 1:1 in-person conversation because they are bringing emotional intensity can be invalidating.

Choosing not to read or link to a stranger on the internet based on a sampling of its content is exercising judgment over one’s own personal resources.

You may reply that’s how it feels for you, and I obviously can’t say you’re wrong, but that isn’t binding on Jeff or how he runs his own blog.

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Saying things in such a way that the people you seek to influence can hear you is a skill. In my judgment, Shanley Kane’s tweets fail to demonstrate this skill. Does that mean she is less of a person and her concerns are not real? No. It just means she has failed to articulate those concerns is a manner in which people will hear them, and she would likely meet with more success if she could do so. If this post were riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, fewer people would read it than otherwise.

It is true, that part of this is also that we need to learn to cut through some of that and hear the message behind that.

But it’s a big Internet. I choose not to use my time and mental energy being cursed at to receive a lecture. That’s my right.

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I think you mean well, but claiming that there isn’t a problem because you can’t see it doesn’t help.

First off, a woman that goes through the gauntlet of an EE/CS degree and follows through to getting a tech job is more likely to be a fellow geek than not. Just because some people have women bits, doesn’t mean they’re a different alien species.

Yes. Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Also see: Object permanence - Wikipedia

Thank you. That’s quite nice to hear.

For you.

Would you expect your male co-workers to be interested in you in more than a collegial manner?

You can still behave inappropriately and be a geek. Have you not read about the numerous incidents of sexual harassment at technical conventions and comic-con? The fact that a woman had to create red and yellow flag cards for defcon to flag inappropriate social behavior is absurd. singlevoice.net

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It is possible to understand without agreeing. The argument seems to be that one cannot ever criticize the way a feminist expresses a message. Not her feelings, but the message.

The idea that the rules of polite discourse vary depending on whether you are a man or a woman is not one that is going to survive scrutiny. It is not devaluing a person to say that they are being rude. It is pointing out that they are rude.

'Tone Policing" is merely used as a method of shutting down discussion. It is not a rhetorical device.

This is one of the central problems with modern feminism, that if you don’t agree 100% with not only the goals, but the method of achieving those goals, you are an enemy who must be attacked.

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I really don’t understand how people can think @codinghorror has plagiarized that other blog post. I have read them both and except for the (rather generic) title and the general topic, there is really nothing they have in common. They both suggest different things “men can do” and also are structured differently. Maybe my understanding of plagiarism is different/wrong, but that is most definitely not plagiarism.

So, anyone care to enlighten me why so many people get upset about this?

Regarding the post itself: I am in the camp of people who think the points #4 and #5 are not addressing the actual problem and can do more harm than good. If people cannot stay “professional” at their workplace after a breakup or cannot drink responsibly, then those people have to change/need help. Having a beer (or some other alcoholic beverage) after work with your colleagues or at a company event should certainly not be mandatory but also not forbidden. If company related consumptions of alcoholic beverages always end up in binge drinking where some/all people loose their ability to be decent humand beings, well, I think there’s a problem worth addressing… but that doesn’t appear to be very common to me.

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Honestly, Shanley is wrong for the manner of her response. You can put someone in their place and still have class, I agree with Jeff.

You can argue with Jeff about not linking to her all day long, but at the end of the day it is HIS decision.

There was a video of a Norwegian talking to scientist on men/women choosing pictures at birth. I suggest you watch it, interesting stuff.

I will say something about office romances. You just need people to know that everyone has to get along and regardless of the past, PUT IT BEHIND YOU (as far as breakups). What people need is open communication. There is nothing good that will come from frustrating your work force and forcing rules on them that defy a basic human drive. If you can’t be professional for any reason, then it just time to get help. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, that’s how things should operate at all times.

People can be casual at work and date in their personal time. As long as employees know to keep it respectful and professional, all is good. Why would you want employees that would be a jerk or harass someone for any reason? People have to learn to manage their own lives and situations, that’s the real issue.

Not allowing people to do something that is really their own business is just telling in the long run, that they can’t handle being a professional adult. Many people meet at work or school and considering you will meet people with shared interest, it’s quite unrealistic to expect certain people to not get involved at some point.

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I totally agree that diversity of opinion is a great idea. But, I question the notion that the industry is lacking diversity as significantly as seems to be accepted.

In any application or website today, are there not generally a team of people working on it beyond developers? In fact I almost always am working at least with designers, and usually also some kind of project manager or business contact. In all of those non-development roles, women have much higher representation than they do in development.

So in general, the end product has the diversity of opinion sought. In fact would you not all agree that when considering how a website or application works in terms of what the user sees, the developer often has LESS input than the other roles do?

Where true diversity of opinion is probably lacking is the fundamental research into computer science, and also tooling. So if you REALLY want diversity of thought as far as development goes, more women developers do not help at all - because they are using a giant stack of things all built with a pretty specific mindset in mind . In fact what you want is more women in CS research or building the tools that help develop applications, to get diversity in at the base of how people can approach programming. I’m not even saying the current approach is wrong, just that it’s pretty narrow and could stand more expansion.

It’s not even a male/female issue, it’s probably a thing that keeps LOTS of people of all kinds away from programming. Every now and again we catch glimpses of the truth in this, with things like ungodly things being built in Excel by people who are not programmers but clearly love to program - in Excel. If we could capture the essence of why that worked for someone in a more general language/framework sense, would not we naturally accrue a much more diverse base of developers? Probably even more women.

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I am so sick of this diversity nonsense. Where is the concern about the dearth of male kindergarten teachers? Why is it only a problem when women aren’t represented proportionally? Its ridiculous.

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And gynaecology? That tends to skew male, I think.

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The whole point was to take responsibility and say, yes, we men need to own our part of the problem. There are many other parts of the problem, but taking responsibility within our gender for our part of the problem is the theme. Hence the title.

I don’t believe math has much if anything to do with programming skills.

Also thanks for that Defcon link, I had forgotten about that – excellent example.

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One thing that particularly annoys me is overreaching feminist arguments. It presents a quite legitimate target which distracts people from the real issue. The reason that this bothers me so much is because I feel like we should use all our resources to achieve a measurable change and move on to the next step, like a computer program. If we try to solve multiple problems in parallel (some of which some of us may not even think a problem), we will inevitable delay the solution to the problems which we all agree exist and should be fixed.

This post provides one such argument:

  1. Diversity leads to better products and results

As illustrated in this Cornell study along with many others, diversity improves performance, morale, and end product. More women engineers means building a better internet, and improving software that can service society as a whole. Building a better Internet is why I started doing software development in the first place. I think we can all agree this is of utmost importance.

  1. The Internet is the largest recording of human history ever built

Right now the architecture for that platform is being built disproportionally by white and asian males. You’ve heard the phrase “he who writes history makes history”? We don’t yet know how this will affect future generations.

How can architecture be decidedly male? I like to refer to the anecdotal story of the Apple Store glass stairs. While visually appealing, there was one unforeseen consequence to their design: the large groups of strange men that spend hours each day standing under them looking up. As a woman, the first time I saw them I thought “thank god I’m not wearing a skirt today.” Such considerations were not taken in designing these stairs. I think it’s probable, if not easily predictable, that in a few years we will see such holes in the design of the web.

Here, #1 is the real argument which I believe in wholeheartedly. #2, however, is the overreaching distraction. With a high degree of certainty I can say that the method in which bits are delivered from Facebooks servers to my own home computer makes no difference whether I am a man or a woman. If the argument was meant to say that there might be some technological improvement which was missed because of the lack of female input, that is argument #1. The content of what is being delivered may have the sort of flaw that #2 is talking about, but that is not part of the architecture of the internet. It is quite literally at the presentation layer. Accordingly, the presentation of the internet is controlled by the individual website and not some designated group of men. This is true under the assumption that the presentation is only limited by the imagination of the website creator, which may not have been true a decade ago, but I feel fairly confident is true today. In conclusion, I feel like argument #2 is an overreach that quite frankly adds little value to the very important argument.

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Given this exchange:

Let’s say your accusations are true (but are they? can you provide evidence? I think shanley’s public Twitter feed is ample evidence of public vitriol and hate directed at everyone, every day, for months on end.) For the sake of argument, let’s accept that what you say is true. That this particular person is some kind of known troll and therefore not a good example.

Why wouldn’t one, then:

  1. Not reply at all, and immediately block this person.

  2. Alternately, reply in the form of “you are a known harasser and you are not welcome here”, then block, so that others can see and judge for themselves.

Both seem a lot easier and more effective than multiple replies. And option #2 would assist future women who would know to steer well clear of this individual, it’d also leave a helpful black mark on their public record for anyone to find (future employers?).

Instead, option #3 was chosen: to reply to what, to the outside observer, looks like reasonable criticism with two tweets containing:

  1. name calling and expletives
  2. a personal attack on their physical appearance

I find it personally sickening that 12 people “favorited” a personal attack on someone’s appearance. That is profoundly disturbing to me, particularly in the context of feminism.

Even if this is “appropriating the harassment”, as you propose, I guarantee you that any future Internet citizen who happens upon this public exchange will have absolutely no idea what this context was, and will simply see it as I saw it: a vile and hateful response to a reasonable criticism.

Is that a good outcome? For anyone?

If you consider this a flawed example for some reason, just browse the public feed, there are dozens if not hundreds of other examples of actively spreading bile and hatred one could cite.

Honestly, I don’t know this John V. Petersen person at all, and I don’t care to defend him.

But I do care deeply in the idea of respectful discourse between fellow human beings. And that I will defend.

You can be extremely angry and still come from a place of deep respect for and love of those you disagree with, in working together for change. MLK speeches consistently move me to tears with anger expressed out of such deep compassion. They are incredibly compelling for that reason, and as I’ve said before, there is no higher example of persuasive writing I have ever read in my entire life.

For example in Whatever Happened to Civility on The Internet? back in 2007:

For an example of effective criticism of the strongest kind, I can think of no better piece than Martin Luther King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail. I re-read it every year, and each time I’m floored by the passion behind this incredible persuasive essay – and the deep anger and frustration it presents in such rational terms.

This legendary essay demonstrates the fine art of disagreement: the ability to respect the people you disagree with, and to earn their respect in turn. The only way to do that is to be civil, reasonable, and rational.

Ultimately, I reach the same conclusion I did with @Tess, earlier.

I sincerely appreciate you coming here to engage in reasonable terms with me on this matter.

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You should be a politician. I feel like the sort of discourse you are working so hard to curb is especially present there.

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The problem is that it does (alter value) in the perception of the person who receives the response. You yourself may feel any possible response does not change the value of yourself or your argument, but if enough people see it otherwise you have either lowered or raised the ability to impact how others think based on the response, especially the recipient. It impacts everything you say in the future, so how can the content not affect value?

You can’t for example curse someone out in one second and then drop down into a rational argument without being taken less seriously thereafter.

I also don’t see how the same value can be placed on what is said vs. who someone is. They are distinct.

Who a person is and thus their inherent value cannot as you say change based on what they say. What anyone says though, is inherently only as valuable as how it accomplished the goal of saying anything - to communicate with the person you are talking to.

I don’t see abuse as being communication so much as provocation, therefore to me it seems like abuse as a response has no value. Expressing disagreement strongly but acknowledging the other person is a person, has a lot more absolute value and effect - which again has to be the goal of even speaking to begin with. If the speech is directed at someone but is not intended for them, even that changes the value of what is said in relation to everyone but the speaker.

feminism has my back on this point 100%

I think a philosophy or movement that does not factor in human nature faces great difficulty in whatever they try to accomplish.

I consider myself a feminist and I don’t agree with the concept that a person respond in any tone without repercussions later on, so I don’t see how feminism can be 100% for it if I am not. That seems to be kind of an overreaching claim.

I consider myself a libertarian also but cannot think of a statement I would make where I would be able to say “Libertarianism has my back 100%” because I cannot control everyone else’s definition of libertarianism.

They do this in some european countries (I think Sweden), does anyone know if these countries have a higher percentage of female developers?

Most people’s perception is that Doctor/Lawyer has a far greater financial reward that Programmer (Despite that probably not being very true anymore), so lots more people of both sexes are willing to suffer abuse in the attempt at entering those fields. I don’t know it is productive to lure people in to any field who go there chasing money alone, there are a lot of people who become lawyers and are not happy they chose that route…

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Jeff, I am inclined to respect your stance on positive contributions but when you choose to enter a conversation about a long-lived topic with significant academic research behind it, it behooves you to do some basic research first.

Just as, for example, when asking for technical help one should search and research first (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/how-to-ask).

In gender studies (and broader studies around privilege) Tone Arguments are effectively considered a basic logical fallacy. When you engage in them, you are basically telling the entire existing community that you don’t care about the work that has been done previously.

Whether you agree with that stance or not doesn’t matter. You are persisting in behaviour that has repeatedly been shown to be disrespectful and negative towards the community you are trying to engage with.

You think of the vitriol engaged in by some as disrespectful, and you chose not to amplify negativity. These are not bad principles, and I really and truly do admire them. However, choosing to ignore the conventions of the community you are engaging with is also disrespectful.

Why is this important? My understanding of the background of this thread is that Anil Dash amplified Shanley’s original What Can Men Do (https://medium.com/tech-culture-briefs/a1e93d985af0) post. You saw this, and had a strong reaction to Shanley’s presentation of the arguments which you found negative. You and Anil discussed it briefly on twitter (you then deleted your side of the conversation, for some reason) and you felt that you could restate a woman’s feminist arguments so as to improve them without providing any background about why you were doing it.

That course of action in and of itself is somewhat intellectually dishonest but not necessarily horrible. But when called on it, you then argued against tone.

These two actions are why you’re getting such a strong negative response from some people. White Knighting and defending that through Tone Argument. You are indulging in basic tropes of being a bad ally and in continuing to debate the validity of Tone Argument you are putting yourself on the wrong side of the people for whom you are advocating.

This is one of those times where you need to stop and try to listen. Not to me but to the people who wrote the geek feminism articles I am quoting.

(I am sorry for the inline URLs, but as a new user I am limited to two links)

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So you’re saying these two statements are both completely valid?

  1. Hi Bob, I’d agree with your point A, but your point B contradicts C and D, which I outlined above. How can you reconcile the two?

  2. Hey Bob-a-job, you fkstick, can you even FKING READ you idiot? Did your mum drop you on your head as a fing baby? You’ve totally ignored points C and D. Your whole argument is fing WORTHLESS. Srsly. People like you are the reason the world is so F**ED UP.

And if you state any objection to the latter, that is merely a “tone argument” to be disregarded?

It’s a fair point. So let me explain.

I really didn’t think a list titled “What Men Can Do” that opens with the palpably dismissive sentence “here is what you can do so you can stop asking me to do your job for you” and includes “start a feminist book club at work” … was doing a great job of actually reaching men, the audience it is intended for, the audience in the very title of the article.

And that’s a shame. Because as a man I realize this is our problem too. But getting men to help means you have to actually reach them. So rather than just criticize, I thought I would try to help. My blog reaches men. Lots of them. I am good at reaching men. Hence, I wrote a list that contained simpler, more practical and actionable items… for Men To Do. You know, take responsibility for our own actions as men.

And I posted it on my blog, because as the original article advises us:

Use your platform. The writing and work of men in tech gets much more attention…

So I did.

I believe men can help, and should take responsibility in owning their part of the problem. I’m pretty sure we have the same basic goals, though our methods are different.

However, expressing the above felt like a public criticism of the other author, something that was received extremely poorly when I tried it on Twitter. I got back hatred, and bucketloads of it:

I felt that expressing even more public criticism of this author on my blog (to contextualize this blog post), versus Twitter, would result in even more vitriol and hate being pushed out into the world, versus rational dialog. So I was silent about it.

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Re the plumber analogy. I built a house ( $0.5e6 ish budget) last year and am a lead dev for a multi-million dollar software project. I managed the build and did the software dev at the same time.

Sysadmins are like plumbers as they deal with all the crap, and have to deal with some really unsavoury stuff. (dev-ops are like electricians …). Software devs are like carpenters. Precision work, understanding how to achieve the spec given the system constraints, lots of time spent staring into space followed by writing notes onto the nearest available unfinished surface etc ect. The main difference is that the carpenter’s spec is physical, and the end-user or PM and the carpenter can relate to the physicality of the artefact. For a software dev, the artefact is not physical and it’s manifestation occurs via a often difficult intellecutal process prior to implementation. I think for standard work it’s quite reasonable for the carpenter to work through a PM in order to achieve the artefact. In my experience in software devs greatly benefit from close interaction with the end user. For a carpenter that makes the job much nicer in terms of non-financial reward (for a good client), but having a PM who does not intimately understand the client in construction is much more achievable.