“Men” is too large of a group to do anything actionable.it would be equally absurd to ask what women can do.
@codinghorror I’m glad to see that you are willing to consider and respond to the feedback you have received here, that cannot be easy. However I am also disappointed by this response and believe that your “linking to negativity” justification is a poor one.
I believe there are a number of ways you could have provided some attribution or recognition of existing work even without linking to it directly. The problem I see is not a debate about the proper use of <a> tags or nofollow attributes but rather your particular instance of the all too common pattern of excluding women from and erasing their participation in programming as a field and even discussions of their involvement in programming. Given that you seem to believe you have advice to share about how men can work to create a more welcoming environment for women in programming I think it is reasonable to expect you to be aware of this as a persistent issue and to have considered how you could write your own thoughts without apparent disregard for or ignorance of existing work you are building on.
In addition your reply strikes me as dishonest and a diversion. You have posted a screenshot of tweets made after your post as some sort of justification for not linking to a blog post? How many links removed from “hate and vitriol” does a page need to be before it becomes acceptable for you to cite? How does your disapproval of her communication in one context contaminate her work in another?
I am aware of the content of Shanley’s feed. I think I can understand why you don’t like it. I do not understand why you would choose to post this.
I have to agree with the no relationships at work rule from the view point expressed by my female colleagues that when they were working in computer science (university) or software development (industry) often they had to deal unnecessarily with the responses from their predominantly young, unattached, male colleagues along the lines of “she’s a girl, she’s looking into my eyes, it’s must be love.”
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I am not a fan of Zed Shaw for the same reasons I listed above. Never have been. Ask him if you don’t believe me. He’ll tell you. And you’ll note that Ted Dziuba has been profoundly less snarky/angry in public since his brother died recently.
Also, being snarky (programming, motherf**ker) and angry about a topic isn’t quite the same as spreading hate directed specifically at fellow human beings, is it?
It is a fair point, and that’s why I updated the article. The difficulty is I was unable to express why I was uncomfortable with the citation in the blog post since my last attempt at reasonable criticism was met with public hate.
In general your reply was OK, but I felt that references to libel, slander, etc came off a bit like saber rattling. This is a topic where I think it’s helpful to be extremely careful in the words you choose and the tone you use. You’ll notice that someone in this conversation you were speaking to has since removed all their posts. Which is completely their right, but I find it unfortunate.
I advise everyone reading this to browse the public feed and scroll back a few weeks, maybe even a month and decide for themselves what they think. Really examine the public history here predating any of this.
Why did I post it? Because reasonable people like @berkun asked, “why didn’t you cite?” and the explanation for why I didn’t cite is twofold:
- I am deeply uncomfortable with this level of hate directed at fellow human beings in public by this author.
- I didn’t feel like I could bring up my criticism in the blog post in the context of a reluctant link as the last time I tried to do that (in Twitter, prior to the article), it resulted in more hate being broadcast into the world, and nothing constructive.
The best way to explain those two points is to show the data, which in this case is the public feed. Just scroll back a few weeks and decide for yourself what you’re seeing and what it means.
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Always an interesting topic - but the suggestions seem a little unrelated to the problem. Sure we should respect and listen to each other, sure we should not over-imbibe at any work related event. But really, do you think that people not drinking or beginning romantic relationships at work is going to do anything to solve the issue of having so few women in the IT space. These suggestions - all of them, may (or may not) make an IT work environment more inviting to women - but as a woman in IT, I really don’t think that will do anything at all to change the numbers.
The problem with all these suggestions - whether they are taken on in the workplace or in a university setting is that they are too late.
The commentary on child-rearing is far more to the point - when women are expected to understand complex ideas, encouraged to fail and try again, taught and reinforced that smart is better than pretty and overall treated as if they have just as much to offer society (not just their family) as their male counter-part, then maybe we’ll start seeing more women in technical fields.
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Although I understand your fears about relationships at work (and I agree) I think that light drinking events related to work are fine and are actually good for bonding with coworkers, sharing stories about your kids, the car you’re working on, that cool place you visited on vacation etc.
Sometimes work can be “all go” and you don’t get the time to get to know each other.
If the event includes rounds of shots… then yes, you likely do not want it to be an official “work outing”… but enjoying a couple of drinks, good food and a “let your hair down” attitude once in a while is fine, otherwise you might as well sign up for work at Innotech!
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.
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You’re right, I worded my statement poorly.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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- 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.
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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.
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@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.
They will be at agileCULTURECON 2014/ Boston. Maybe an opportunity to set up a meeting.
Jeff…
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.
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I think it does matter, I think that was the entire point of much of what I said here. Eye for an eye and everyone is blind.
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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.
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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!)
My girls will be what they will be.
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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.