I’ll readily admit Shanley’s style is effective in garnering attention, as this discussion proves. As such it may do more to raise awareness of some problems than a more mild-mannered approach. We’re all suckers for drama, afterall.
Nonetheless, there are good reasons for a more civil discourse, and they are well explained in this blog post:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
That’s true and in fact adds to @robertmeta point. I don’t think most employees would be happy to have the company fiddling with their personal lives. Also, I don’t see companies firing great employees (in competence and behavior) only because they are in a healthly relationship.
To prohibit relationships in the workplace is like stop-and-frisk: it generalizes specific behaviors to a large group of people that surely does not deserve that.
(I know you did not argued about it, at least in this coment. It is that it was a very good cue 
)
It’s kind of a bizarre allegation, isn’t it? Beyond the four word title, there’s very little similarity between the two articles.
Why should it be any higher? Why not focus on jobs that skew female? You’re starting with an assumption ( proportional representation ) with no evidence that it should be that way.
Or point out the fact that proportional representation is putting the cart before the horse. Why is it only a problem when women aren’t proportionally represented? Why aren’t there thousands of articles about the dearth of male Kindergarten teachers?
The premise, every job should have proportional representation, is preposterous and not based on any evidence.
Jeff, Jacob Kaplan-Moss is right and you are just wrong.
About your post:
The Asperger nonsense is nonsense. It seems you are citing it because either:
Points 1 to 3 have merit, but you seem not to be applying #2.
Points 4 and 5 are just crap:
Do you think a “feminist book club” would have prevented the terrible outcome at GitHub for everyone involved? As I mentioned earlier:
So, no, I don’t think that having extremely strict rules around dating at work is absurd. I think it would work to directly eradicate one of the main problems that affect women in exactly these kinds of environments, in exactly these situations.
As for eliminating the culture of drinking and alcohol at work events:
However, drinking amplifies these tendencies manyfold. My own father was a (mildly) abusive alcoholic and to me, his son, he was literally a different person when he was drinking. And not one I liked. I’m not going to invoke any complex survivor rituals here; it’s just the truth as I experienced it.
I agree with this. However, I was solely focusing on the low hanging fruit here with actions that the average man could understand and try himself. I completely agree that we are dealing with a highly nuanced problem that has to be attacked from many different angles – not just the ones I proposed. Not at all. I hope my article did not imply these were the only things men could do. It was more of a “top 5” list from my perspective.
The whole Titstare debacle was completely appalling. My reaction was literally, “how can this even happen?” I wrote this article for two reasons:
I think if all this article achieves is preventing the next Titstare, I would be ecstatic.
Also @Liz_Carlson I agree that the tone of the reply here from @johnvpetersen1 was not ideal. (I am not saying this in a passive aggressive “look at my tone policing argument” way, I am saying it because I honestly believe the tone of a response matters profoundly to the conversation.) Again I want to thank you for choosing to show up here and engaging in good faith. I blog about these topics not for page views, but because I want to learn about them and I want others to as well. That can’t happen unless there is an open, respectful dialog. Both you and @rachael – thank you so much.
Not that I don’t appreciate the other white men chiming in, but I am definitely beginning to see why you want female voices doing a lot of the talking on this topic.
Although I would like a world where there is true equality, I think that the skewing is more than just social norms. If you look a evolutionary biology, you will see that one of the traits that made us successful was work specialization. (Like many related species.) Because this predates sentience, there is a somewhat natural tendency to like and dislike certain activities. Just put a baby in front of group of women and a group of men and you know what I mean. The social norms around jobs are to a certain degree the codification of these tendencies.
The important part is to realize that, this may be fully and absolutely true on a statistical scale, but you must take each individual as unique. I know/knew a awesome day care worker (male) and an kick ass auto mechanic (female). There are many divergences from the norm and you should never ever stifle these divergences. This is what I think is the real crime. I don’t think we need perfect equality in all jobs, but someone who chose a job in any filed should be welcomed there, no matter what gene coding that individual has.
Finally all examples I know of people that where the odd one in their jobs, they were awesome at it, not because they where same, but because they where different. For example that day care worker was is by all children (boys and girls) because they can doe guy things, like play soccer with him. In addition his male stance gave him a certain authority that hist female coworkers lacked. Similar with the mechanic, she could really explain what was wrong with your car and what you should do to prevent that from happening again. She is someone you could trust and you never feel screwed when presented with a high bill.
I strongly disagree. I do not believe that fighting hate with more hate is an effective strategy. Furthermore, I question any group or movement that does.
Quite the contrary. I’m curious, which of these two statements do you feel will be more effective in reaching an audience?
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?
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.
I think if you believe in your message, you’ll believe in it enough to express it in the most effective way you can, so that it can reach and affect as many people as possible.
I love anger. By all means, be angry. Get mad. The only way change ever happens in this world is when people are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more.
But channel that anger into something effective, rather than public hatred toward other human beings which will be tuned out immediately and makes the world just a little bit worse for everyone in it.
I tell you this not because I want to silence you, but because I wish more people could hear you.
I will take direct insults any day over somebody who thinks being blatantly rude, telling other people how they should behave “for their own good” even in the face of those same people you’re “just trying to help” telling you repeatedly that advice like yours is part of the problem, but has the privilege of being able to couch that awful behaviour in pleasant-sounding language.
I’m British by birth. We might not have invented insulting the hell out of people while remaining unfailingly polite, but we did quite successfully steal it from the French and translate it.
Meanwhile, male geeks like Ted Dziuba or Zed Shaw get knighthoods for being snarky or angry about technical issues that largely don’t matter. Being insulting demonstrably doesn’t hurt your message if you’re male, if anything it makes you more interesting and rewards you with a bigger megaphone.
(Edit: Case in point. Is there any programmer in the world who hasn’t been forwarded a link to “Programming, Motherf—er” in the last few months?)
It’s only when a woman speaks out that everyone reaches for their smelling-salts.
Your beliefs about not supporting negativity should be superseded by your respect for attribution of other people’s work. I’m glad you added the link.
If a work directly influences your thinking, you are obligated to reference it out of intellectual integrity. You don’t get to choose to refer to it or not based on personal preferences: either it was an influence and a source, or it wasn’t. Of course your free to state whatever opinion you have of the work, but not to mention it at all betrays whatever points you’re trying to make, especially if you’re choosing to reuse the author’s own title for their work.
Personally, I agree with the many complaints that this is both impractical to enforce and not necessarily the problem.
I do object though to a culture of binge drinking. This is prevalent in many companies and does help facilitate unsafe conditions.
I also wish companies should use the “sponsor this conference” dollars for sponsoring hack nights, open source projects, travel expenses for speaker, balancing male / female speaker ratio, sponsoring tickets etc.
Its complicated and messy and often impractical for smaller companies to enforce (even defining dating is hard). I really wonder what women in tech think about this very issue? From various stuff I read and experienced, it seems that the “every day” minor backhanded remarks that play on stereotypes are far more painful.
My “Tone” wasn’t ideal? I’d like to understand specifically what I said that was threatening, harassing, etc… What we have is a person here who makes baseless accusations about me. My goal was two fold. First - to give some background on how I got involved in this discussion. Second - to challenge the assertions by Liz. Candidly Jeff, I’m only here because you sent me a link to this discussion saying that I might be interested. And again, I’ll echo my appreciation. And as you said, you don’t know me and I don’t know you personally. I never asked you to “defend” me. Liz is quite right, I can speak for myself.
I thought the words used in connection with you and your blog were extremely unfair. I do think you needed to do a better job of making clear how Sara Chipps’ words fit in. That’s a technical issue that I believe was remedied. You owed zero courtesy to Shanley re: her blog post. There was no plagiarism. It wasn’t even a close call. As to whether you need to, as part of good form, cite every influence - that is absurd. There is no style guide that requires that. And with all due respect to the “Feminism style guide”, I’ll take my cues from the Chicago Manual of Style.,
Clearly, when my name gets thrown around in a pejorative way, yes, I’m interested and yes, I will defend. Some say it isn’t worth the time. I disagree. I think it is important that when something grossly inaccurate about you is stated in a public forum, you have the right and should challenge those assertions.
And yes, I stand by what I wrote. And yes Jeff, your comments about my tone do leave me a bit nonplussed.
By the way, like the UI of this discussion forum. Well done.
Does anyone have examples of this rule being mentioned or enforced anywhere else? Because in decades of internet discourse I’ve never heard of it before, and to be honest it seems like it’s been made up on the spot to attack this particular author for not linking to this particular influence.
So, let me ask that question again:
What can men do?
It is not particularly clear what it is after this thread. I thought I knew, but I know nothing.
My husband started out ahead of me in baby care because I couldn’t get out of the hospital bed without blacking out for the day or two after giving birth, so he was the one changing and dressing out daughter. He’s also more patient than I am.
Of course, I’m the one who breastfed our daughter. She quickly learned that Mommy makes milk, Daddy makes pizza. 
Here’s to a world in which people’s duties can be determined by their strengths and interests, not their gender.
Gender equality is a falacy. You must not confuse equality of rights with gender equality.
We as a men and women we are naturally created different and we both are compliments.
Men complets woment and woment complets men. Woment have qualities that men dont have and
viceversa.
The problem is the femeninist are pushing the society to believe in this nonsense idea
that we are equal.
When we talk about equality, always always I listen the same cliché topics: "there are not
enough women here and here blabla " but I never listen some kinds of things that comes with
equality: responsability.
As equals, yes maybe your are competent but also incompetent. So always when a women is discarded
is "not equality, al the profession is ruled by men " but when a men is discarded " is because
not competent ".
So, if there aren’t so much women, what’s the problem ? Also, have you thinked that maybe the
women don’t like engineering related professions and is their own decision or preferences ?
Maybe this can help yourself to learn more in this subject:
Gender equality paradox
ROK
http://www.returnofkings.com/
5 reasons why the feminist movement if flawled ( yes, written by a girl )
I’m opposed to policies against dating co-workers, since they will inevitably be ignored. Punishment can then be selectively applied, such as Julie Ann Horvath’s being blamed for dating a co-worker.
Far better is having policies against harmful effects of dating, such as preventing someone from supervising someone that he or she dated.
It’s the self serving rule that like all such rules, is made up to suit a specious argument. The fallacy is an appeal to authority that isn’t an authority at all.