November linkspam: Tech culture

[tim]

"How to be an ally to women in tech", Sarah Adams (2017-06-24)

"You now understand that this is true of every woman you work with. Every woman you work with is there, at the table, despite being told hundreds of times:

• you are no good
  
• you do not belong
  
• get out.
  

Another thing you need to understand before I tell this story:
After being beaten down so many hundreds of times, I cannot tell the difference between a sexist comment made:

• with mal intent
  
• due to subconscious bias
  
• or because the person just misspoke
  

There is no difference in how it affects me. At this point, it is just one long drone of you are no good.

(Every bit of this is true for me as a trans man, too, and there's not really any place for me to go to talk about it -- but, that will have to be another blog post.)


"The Myth of Psychological Safety", Liz Fong-Jones (2017-11-01). On "If you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression" and privileged people's self-reporting about psychological safety.

"A Clash of Cultures, by bunnie (2017-11-08):

• "Any engineer who observes a bias in a system and chooses not to pro-actively correct for it is either a bad engineer or they stand to benefit from the bias.”
  
• "When a man harnesses the efforts of a team, they call him a CEO and give him a bonus. But when a woman harnesses the efforts of a team, she gets accused of being a persona and a front.
  

Twitter thread from jaythenerdkid (2017-11-13)

“the world is full of stem grads who have no idea how to think critically about the world in which they live or the media to which they're exposed, but who somehow consider themselves analytical thinkers because they know how to do calculus”

"Your company's Slack is probably sexist", by Leah Fessler for Quartz (2017-11-14) - there's some eyebrow-raisey casual cissexism (the stuff about "female socialization" and "male socialization") and the conclusions are kind of underwhelming, but there's lots of great content in this article about gendered conversation dynamics and how men use them to hamper women's economic success, not just specific to Slack:

“Does gender influence our office’s electronic communications? When I began asking my colleagues, nearly every woman said yes. Overwhelmingly, men said no."

'‘Both the men and women she surveyed agreed that the debate was contentious, but they reacted to that contentiousness differently. Men would say things like, “Well, it was kind of aggressive, but as long as the slings and arrows weren’t aimed at me, it was fine,” or “This is just the way online conversation goes.” Some men said it was “kind of fun to go at each other’s throats,” or they brushed it off: “This is nothing; you should see the philosophy list.”

Nearly all the women, however, showed an aversion to the tenor of the debate. Common responses included things like: “The contentiousness made me not want to participate in discussion,” or “It made me want to drop off list all together.” Some went so far as, “People who speak like this are not good people,” and “This debate made me want to not be linguist.”'

“Already as toddlers, the idea that girls should take others’ feelings and desires into consideration before speaking or acting has formed,” says Herring. “And for boys, conflict isn’t just okay, it’s encouraged.” 

‘What’s more, Herring found, men posted messages that were sometimes 20 screens long, never apologizing for consuming others’ time—while women always apologized for long messages.’

‘…language and discourse conventions are created and enforced by men, for men’s advantage; so when women participate in public discourse, it’s almost as if they’re learning or adapting to a foreign language.’

‘Men also tend to dominate public channels, she says, often responding to others’ posts with declarative statements and dropping in links with no context.’

‘With microaggressions, there rarely is a smoking gun. But over time, these aggregate power displays can wear down women and minorities, leading us to question whether it’s worth sharing our thoughts at all.’

"The Tech Industry's Gender Discrimination Problem", by Sheelah Kolhatkar for the New Yorker (2017-11-20):

“It’s the imbalance of pay and power that puts men in a position to harass, that gives them unchecked control over the economic lives of women and, as a result, influence over their physical lives. These subtler forms of discrimination, familiar to almost any woman who has held a job, can in fact be especially insidious, since they are easier for companies, and even victims, to dismiss.”

Comments

[sonia]

Thanks for the links! Read the first one, noted the others for later. It helps to be reminded that I wasn't the problem when I was noticing and calling out sexism in my last tech job.

[tim]

The last two links should also be good reminders of that!