This resonates a lot:
At some point, we told design they couldn’t sit with us anymore, and surprise! It backfired! Now, not only has the field and profession of web design suffered, but also, we build shitty websites.
I’ve seen talented people—mostly women—pushed out of making websites because their skills—mostly CSS—weren’t valued as much being a React plumber.
It fucking sucks.
So when it comes down to the root of the problem, perhaps it isn’t CSS itself but our unwillingness to examine our sexist ideas of what is worthy in web development.
A brilliantly written piece by Laurie Penny. Devestating, funny, and sad, featuring journalistic gold like this:
John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder.
The value you want form a CSS expert is their CSS, not their JavaScript, so it’s absurd to make JavaScript a requirement.
Absolutely spot on! And it cuts both ways:
Put CSS in JS and anyone who wishes to write CSS now has to know JavaScript. Not just JavaScript, but —most likely—the specific ‘flavor’ of JavaScript called React. That’s gatekeeping, first of all, but the worst part is the JavaScript aficionado didn’t want CSS on their plate in the first place.
This instance of collective action from inside a tech company is important, not just for the specifics of Google, but in acting as an example to workers in other companies.
And of all the demands, this is the one that could have the biggest effect in the US tech world:
An end to Forced Arbitration.
I’m currently making my way through Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks. In that book and in this article, she describes how Britain squandered its lead in the field of computing through indemic sexism. There’s also the remarkable story of Dame Stephanie Shirley.
As a community, we love to talk about meritocracy while perpetuating privilege.
This is playing out in full force in the front-end development community today.
Front-end development is a part of the field that has historically been at least slightly more accessible to women.
Shockingly, (not!) this also led to a salary and prestige gap, with back-end developers making on average almost $30,000 more than front-end.
(Don’t read the comments.)
Here’s a snowclone I can get behind: X is too important to be left to men.
I am convinced that it is not the girls that must change, but rather society’s view of “computing” and the whole culture of the computing industry.
With the advent of artificial intelligence, this is about to get really serious. There are worrying signs that the world of big data and machine learning is even more dominated by men than computing in general. This means that the people writing the algorithms for software that will control many automated aspects of our daily lives in the future are mainly young, white men.
Deb Chachra:
If research on biases has told us anything, it is that humans make better decisions when we learn to recognize and correct for bias.
Author = Laura
Guy = Erik Spiekermann
All’s well that ends well in this tale, and it prompted my entry for the subtweeting Olympics.
Cynthia Lee didn’t write the clickbaity headline, but she did write the superb article that follows it, methodically taking the manifestbro apart:
Its quasi-professional tone is a big part of what makes it so beguiling (to some) and also so dangerous. Many defenders seem genuinely baffled that a document that works so hard to appear dispassionate and reasonable could provoke such an emotional response.
This is what I was trying to get at with my post, but here it is explained far more clearly, calmly, and rationally.
In the end, focusing the conversation on the minutiae of the scientific claims in the manifesto is a red herring. Regardless of whether biological differences exist, there is no shortage of glaring evidence, in individual stories and in scientific studies, that women in tech experience bias and a general lack of a welcoming environment, as do underrepresented minorities. Until these problems are resolved, our focus should be on remedying that injustice.
We men face shame and firing if we say the wrong thing. Women face the same plus rape threats, death threats, and all kinds of sustained harassment. So women can’t speak up safely and therefore they would have to watch their male colleagues discuss how a woman’s brain determines her interests. How impossibly maddening that would be.
I really should know better than to 386 myself, but this manifesto
from a (former) Googler has me furious.
Oh, first of all, let me just get past any inevitable whinging that I’m not bothering to refute the bullshit contained therein. In the spirit of Brandolini’s law, here are some thorough debunkings:
- Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.
- Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.
- And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.
manifesto:
Okay, with that out of the way, let me get to what really grinds my gears about this.
First off, there’s the contents of the document itself. It is reprehensible. It sets out to prove a biological link between a person’s gender and their ability to work at Google. It fails miserably, as shown in the links above, but it is cleverly presented as though it were an impartial scientific evaluation (I’m sure it’s complete coincidence that the author just happens to be a man). It begins by categorically stating that the author is all for diversity. This turns out to be as accurate as when someone starts a sentence with “I’m not a racist, but…”
The whole thing is couched in scientism that gives it a veneer of respectability. That leads me to the second thing I’m upset about, and that’s the reaction to the document.
Y’know, it’s one thing when someone’s clearly a troll. It’s easy—and sensible—to dismiss their utterances and move on. But when you see seemingly-smart people linking to the manifestbro and saying “he kind of has a point”, it’s way more infuriating. If you are one of those people (and when I say people, I mean men), you should know that you have been played.
The memo is clearly not a screed. It is calm, clear, polite, and appears perfectly reasonable. “Look,” it says, “I’m just interested in the objective facts here. I’m being reasonable, and if you’re a reasonable person, then you will give this a fair hearing.”
That’s a very appealing position. What reasonable person would reject it? And so, plenty of men who consider themselves to be reasonable and objective are linking to the document and saying it deserves consideration. Strangely, those same men aren’t considering the equally reasonable rebuttals (linked to above). That’s confirmation bias.
See? I can use terms like that to try to make myself sound smart too. Mind you, confirmation bias is not the worst logical fallacy in the memo. That would the Texas sharpshooter fallacy (which, admittedly, is somewhat related to confirmation bias). And, yes, I know that by even pointing out the logical fallacies, I run the risk of committing the fallacy fallacy. The memo is reprehensible not for the fallacies it contains, but for the viewpoint it sets out to legitimise.
The author cleverly wraps a disgusting viewpoint in layers of reasonable-sounding arguments. “Can’t we have a reasonable discussion about this? Like reasonable people? Shouldn’t we tolerate other points of view?” Those are perfectly sensible questions to ask if the discussion is about tabs vs. spaces or Star Wars vs. Star Trek. But those questions cease to be neutral if the topic under discussion is whether some human beings are genetically unsuited to coding.
This is how we get to a situation where men who don’t consider themselves to be sexist in any way—who consider themselves to be good people—end up posting about the Google memo in their workplace Slack channels as though it were a topic worthy of debate. It. Is. Not.
“A-ha!” cry the oh-so-logical and thoroughly impartial men, “If a topic cannot even be debated, you must be threatened by the truth!”
That is one possible conclusion, yes. Or—and this is what Occam’s razor would suggest—it might just be that I’m fucking sick of this. Sick to my stomach. I am done. I am done with even trying to reason with people who think that they’re the victimised guardians of truth and reason when they’re actually just threatened by the thought of a world that doesn’t give them special treatment.
I refuse to debate this. Does that make me inflexible? Yep, sure does. But, y’know, not everything is worthy of debate. When the very premise of the discussion is harmful, all appeals to impartiality ring hollow.
If you read the ex-Googler’s memo and thought “seems reasonable to me”, I hope you can see how you have been played like a violin. Your most virtuous traits—being even-handed and open-minded—have been used against you. I hope that you will try to use those same traits to readdress what has been done. If you read through the rebuttals linked to above and still think that the original memo was reasonable, I fear the damage is quite deep.
It may seem odd that a document that appears to be so reasonable is proving to be so very divisive. But it’s that very appearance of impartiality that gives it its power. It is like an optical illusion for the mind. Some people—like me—read it and think, “this is clearly wrong and harmful.” Other people—who would never self-identify as sexist in any way—read it and think, “seems legit.”
I’m almost—almost—glad that it was written. It’s bringing a lot of buried biases into the light.
By the way, if you are one of those people who still thinks that the memo was “perfectly reasonable” or “made some good points”, and we know each other, please get in touch so that I can re-evaluate our relationship.
The saddest part about all of this is that there are men being incredibly hurtful and cruel to the women they work with, without even realising what they’re doing. They may even think think they are actively doing good.
Take this tweet to Jen which was no doubt intended as a confidence boost:
I disagree with you about the memo, but I always have and continue to admire your work and your giant contributions to CSS. Thank you! ♥️
— Brandon Flynn (@btflynn) August 8, 2017
See how it is glibly passed off as though it were some slight disagreement, like which flavour of ice cream is best? “Well, we’ll agree to disagree about half the population being biologically unsuitable for this kind of work.” And then that’s followed by what is genuinely—in good faith—intended as a compliment. But the juxtaposition of the two results in the message “Hey, you’re really good …for a woman.”
That’s what I find so teeth-grindingly frustrating about all this. I don’t think that guy is a troll. If he were, I could just block and move on. He genuinely thinks he’s a good person who cares about objective truth. He has been played.
A nasty comment from a troll is bad. It’s hurtful in a blunt, shocking way. But there’s a different kind of hurt that comes from a casual, offhand, even well-meaning comment that’s cruel in a more deep-rooted way.
This casual cruelty. This insidious, creeping, never-ending miasma of sexism. It is well and truly intolerable.
This is not up for debate.
Normally a McSweeney’s piece elicits a wry chuckle, but this one had me in stitches.
Humans are also far more likely to “literally cannot right now.” I have never met an automaton that literally could not, though I have met some that theoretically would not and hypothetically might want to stop.
Those who want to use science to support their views – especially if they seek to undermine equality efforts in the workplace – must make an effort to fully inform themselves about the science of human nature. They may be disappointed to learn that it’s not as simple as they think.
For more, read Angela Saini’s book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story.
An excellent rebuttal of that vile manifestbro, and an informative history lesson to boot.
You can’t cherry-pick a couple of scientific studies you like and use them to justify your arguments against diversity programs, while carefully ignoring the mountains of other scientific studies that show both how and why diversity programs are good, beneficial to all, and worth investing in.
I wish I could be this calm in refuting pseudoscientific bollocks, but I get so worked up by it that I’d probably undermine my own message. I’m glad that Faruk took the time to write this down.
An excellent potted history from Cassie on women in computing.
NASA’s “Keypunch girls” would work in cramped rows translating programming instructions onto paper pads, whilst the machine operators would sit in comfort, feeding the code decks through card readers and enjoying the esteem of the end result (I imagine it a bit like Mad Men, but with more sexism and astronauts).
Adult training represents a way into coding for millions of women who never learnt when they were younger. Meetups such as those run by organisations such as Women Who Code and Codebar can introduce women to the collaborative, problem-solving world of programming.
When I wrote about Reddit and Hacker News, criticising their lack of moderation, civility, and basic decency, many people (invariably men) responded in defence of Reddit. Nobody defended Hacker News. Nobody.
Oh, and all of you people (men) defending Reddit? Here’s your party line …I find it abhorrent.
Here in the UK, there’s a “newspaper”—and I use the term advisedly—called The Sun. In longstanding tradition, page 3 of The Sun always features a photograph of a topless woman.
To anyone outside the UK, this is absolutely bizarre. Frankly, it’s pretty bizarre to most people in the UK as well. Hence the No More Page 3 campaign which seeks to put pressure on the editor of The Sun to ditch their vestigal ’70s sexism and get with the 21st Century.
Note that the campaign is not attempting to make the publication of topless models in a daily newspaper illegal. Note that the campaign is not calling for top-down censorship from press regulators. Instead the campaign asks only that the people responsible reassess their thinking and recognise the effects of having topless women displayed in what is supposedly a family newspaper.
Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism project has gathered together just some examples of the destructive effects of The Sun’s page 3. And sure, in this age of instant access to porn via the internet, an image of a pair of breasts might seem harmless and innocuous, but it’s the setting for that image that wreaks the damage:
Being in a national newspaper lends these images public presence and, more harmfully for young people, the perception of mainstream cultural approval. Our society, through Page 3, tells both girls and boys ‘that’s what women are’.
Simply put, having this kind of objectification in a freely-available national newspaper normalises it. When it’s socially acceptable to have a publication like The Sun in a workplace, then it’s socially acceptable for that same workplace to have the accompanying air of sexism.
That same kind of normalisation happens in online communities. When bad behaviour is tolerated, bad behaviour is normalised.
There are obvious examples of online communities where bad behaviour is tolerated, or even encouraged: 4Chan, Something Awful. But as long as I can remember, there have also been online communites that normalise abhorrent attitudes, and yet still get a free pass (usually because the site in question would deliver bucketloads of traffic …as though that were the only metric that mattered).
It used to be Slashdot. Then it was Digg. Now it’s Reddit and Hacker News.
Thx to Reddit & HN, “hacker" has moved away from its clever nerd (Wozniak) & rogue agent (Mitnick) connotations towards “misogynist asshole”
— Jason Kottke (@jkottke) March 25, 2013Some days Hacker News and Reddit are nothing more than the Westboro Baptist Church of the Internet.
— Faruk Ateş (@KuraFire) March 21, 2013I’m terrified every time I blog about anything even slightly controversial that someone will post it on Reddit or HN. That says something.
— CultureOfFear & BEES (@juliepagano) March 19, 2013In each case, the defence of the bad behaviour was always explained by the sheer size of the community. “Hey, that’s just the way it is. There’s nothing can be done about it.” To put it another way …it’s normal.
But normality isn’t an external phenomenon that exists in isolation. Normality is created. If something is perceived as normal—whether that’s topless women in a national newspaper or threatening remarks in an online forum—that perception is fueled by what we collectively accept to be “normal”.
Last year, Relly wrote about her experience at a conference:
Then there was the one comment I saw in a live irc style backchannel at an event, just after I came off stage. I wish I’d had the forethought to screenshot it or something but I was so shocked, I dropped my laptop on the table and immediately went and called home, to check on my kids.
Why?
Because the comment said (paraphrasing) “This talk was so pointless. After she mentioned her kids at the beginning I started thinking of ways to hunt them down and punish her for wasting my time here.”
That’s a horrible thing for anyone to say. But I can understand how someone would think nothing of making a remark like that …if they began their day by reading Reddit or Hacker News. If you make a remark like that there, nobody bats an eyelid. It’s normal.
So what do we do about that? Do we simply accept it? Do we shrug our shoulders and say “Oh, well”? Do we treat it like some kind of unchangeable immovable force of nature; that once you have a large online community, bad behaviour should be accepted as the default mode of discourse?
No.
It’s hard work. I get that. Heck, I run an online community myself and I know just how hard it is to maintain civility (and I’ve done a pretty terrible job of it in the past). But it’s not impossible. Metafilter is a testament to that.
The other defence of sites like Reddit and Hacker News is that it’s unfair to judge the whole entity based purely on their worst episodes. I don’t buy that. The economic well-being of a country shouldn’t be based on the wealth of its richest citizens—or even the wealth of its average citizens—but its poorest.
@adactio if Reddit does something “good" it’s one community, it does something bad it’s “not all reddit”. It’s such a dull argument.
— David Singleton (@dsingleton) June 10, 2014That was precisely how Rebecca Watson was shouted down when she tried to address Reddit’s problems when she was on a panel at South by Southwest last year:
Does the good, no matter if it’s a fundraiser for a kid with cancer or a Secret Santa gift exchange, negate the bigotry?
Like I said, running an online community is hard—Derek’s book was waaaay ahead of its time—but it’s not impossible. If we treat awful behaviour as some kind of unstoppable force that can’t be dealt with, then what’s the point in trying to have any kind of community at all?
Just as with the No More Page 3 campaign, I’m not advocating legal action or legislative control. Instead, I just want some awareness that what we think of as normal is what we collectively decide is normal.
I try not to be a judgemental person. But if I see someone in public with a copy of The Sun, I’m going to judge them. And no, it’s not a class thing: I just don’t consider misogyny to be socially acceptable. And if you participate in Reddit or Hacker News …well, I’m afraid I’m going to judge you too. I don’t consider it socially acceptable.
Of course my judgemental opinion of someone doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to anybody. But if enough of us made our feelings clear, then maybe slowly but surely, there might be a shift in feeling. There might just be a small movement of the needle that calibrates what we think of normal in our online communities.