Not Feminism 101

Politics
388

This is a really good distillation of the problem.

It’s worth noting that the phenomenon above isn’t unique to the software team thing. People who advocate for more inclusive spaces get burnout. I see it in academia, too: The noble desire to have more women seminar speakers, on panels, etc. leads to women getting inundated with speaker requests. I try to solve the latter problem by passing on the names of five women, preferably junior, every time I get a request I can’t take, but that’s still semi-uncompensated labor I’m doing for someone else.

I dunno, maybe everything is a pyramid scheme.

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389

Look at the big picture: Yes, technically you’re doing their work for them by providing alternate possibilities. But the reason they contacted you in the first place is because they respect your authority on the subject matter. When you tell them that person A, B, C, D, or E would be an acceptable alternative, those names start being recognized as additional authorities in the field. They’re more likely to get contacted in future. And when they are, and are told that you recommended them, most of them will pay it forward by doing the same thing in turn.

It’s the “old boy’s network”. We have a lot of catching up to do.

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390

Right, I do it because I’m looking at the big picture, but I increasingly doubt that the big picture actually exists. But men (and women, but mostly men) refuse to step up and actually look for speakers on the topics in which I’m an expert. It’s not that these women are hiding - their names are on papers and book chapters, sometimes right next to mine. The only conclusion I can arrive at is that male colleagues want to look like they’re doing something to improve diversity, but foist the labor off onto marginalized people (who they secretly think should be doing it).

That’s a very tiring dynamic, and it’s not one that has measurably improved in the time I’ve been a scientist. What improvements there have been have come from unrepresented people stepping in and improving things.

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391

It deadens me how many people refuse to see the coercion in this kind of bullshit. Romantic, my fat ass.

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392

Well, it amuses me to imagine him playing until his fingers fall off, then packing up and going home, too sad and sore to masturbate. I do hope the lady sticks to her guns. Could very well be she mightn’t have left in the first place if he hadn’t been the type to pull such a mockworthy feat of narcissism out there where everyone can see.

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Four months? !!! He’s 34 and they dated for FOUR MONTHS and he’s doing this???

No. When you’re 34 and a four-month relationship breaks up, you get drunk, have a good rant with your closest friends, watch TV until you’re numb, and then get going again. You may not feel like dating for a while if you were really into the other person, but you don’t pull this shit.

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As a few posters in that Twitter thread said, I’m heartened that so many people were posting in agreement that this was creepy, manipulative behavior. But I’m also a realist: this particular situation is in Bristol in the U.K. No way the comments would be half as reasonable if it were a media story here in the States.

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Any kind of development is fraught with cultural issues. Handholding of any kind for STEM tasks is good, as is refactoring tools so they are less obscure and more accessible.

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398

Yet another round of research telling us what we already know. It made me think immediately of @mindysan33, but of course it affects a lot more of us than ‘just’ female professors, as they point out at the end of the article:

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399

Note that it was for a business school. I would not be surprised if the same did not hold for some other subjects, but I suspect that business schools and economics (along with comp sci, maths and physics) would be particularly bad.

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400

I dunno man. We’re a bachelor of Arts. The comments I see from students about our female faculty vs. our male faculty is amazingly gendered. :confused:

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401

I really don’t think that’s accurate. If gendered perceptions of people’s competence develop before college starts (and we have every indication that even really little kids have gendered ideas about roles), we’d expect to see this across all fields.

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402

I can offer this small anecdotal datum. I had the advantage of growing up in Southern California during the 1970s, when a fairly concerted effort was being made to erase gendered notions of superiority in professional roles. My parents, though fairly liberal Democrats, made no especial effort to help or hinder this cultural movement, but at least gave lip service to it. That is to say, they were older than the parents of most of my peers, and not activists by any stretch of the imagination, but both solidly believed that women could work and think and vote just as well as any man. At any rate, I was taught from infancy that women were the equal of men by every measure of competence imaginable, in any and every field of work there was. And so I never questioned it. The couple of times some lunkhead on the ballfield told me I “hit like a girl,” I was kinda flummoxed, as most girls I knew who were even slightly interested in sports hit better than I did, and a couple of them were like Tatum O’Neal in The Bad News Bears.

Most of my teachers were women, including my high school calculus teacher (who struck me as having a better grasp of the topic, and a better ability to teach it, than the male math teachers I had). In college, the trend continued; with the exception of an English professor who had a curious resistance to writing that might be considered remotely entertaining to read, all my female professors were top-notch, and though I can’t speak for how anyone else treated them, I respected them. In my professional life, somewhat the same story. Although there has long been a boys’ club vibe to the positions of power in Hollywood, I have been fortunate to work on shows created by and run by women. On Pretty Little Liars in particular, the network execs were mostly female, the showrunner was female, the line producer was female, the post producer was female, two of the three editors were female, and fully half of the writers and directors were female… and it was one of the best work environments I’ve ever been a part of. I’ve never had a problem answering to a woman. Never has it occurred to me that one of those women might have risen to her position of power and authority through any means other than luck and hard work and overcoming the inherent sexism of the culture and the industry.

But that’s the mindset in which I was raised. I didn’t come to such a progressive attitude through my own discovery; it’s simply how I was taught since early childhood, and because it happened to be true and correct, I was able to resist the cultural forces that occasionally tried to convince me that women weren’t as strong as men, or not as technical-minded, or were simply too flighty and emotional to be entrusted with serious tasks or responsibility. Such ideas were unsupportable nonsense in the family in which I was raised, in the community in which I was raised, and so I always mocked them, not learning until adulthood how common and deep-seated such ideas are outside my spheres. Now I know men who have trouble working for female bosses, but those men are insecure dipshits and I’m happy to let them know that.

My overall point is that yes, this is definitely a problem that is much easier solved by bringing up kids with the right attitudes. Once the damage is done, it’s much harder to change people’s minds. Early childhood education is key.

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403

Funnily, it’s that kind of thing that kept me from seeing how bad things still are, for a long time. My mother has always had a large measure of financial independence and our parents expected us to do our share of the heavy lifting work, school required all students to take wood/metalworking and home-ec. Girls regularly excelled in math and science at my school.

It wasn’t until later that I started running into invisible walls that guys never seemed to deal with: fighting with doctors that there was really something wrong with me and that, no, a different antidepressant won’t fix it, because that’s not the fucking problem. Arguing with salespeople that no, I don’t need feature X on my VCR or TV and yes, I do know what I am talking about. Watching a coworker expect cookies and hero points (and getting them form many!) for leaving to pick up his daughter from daycare – while women are still told to figure out their priorities if they even consider doung the same.

So you’re right, it can work, but only if everybody is onboard and we don’t let it blind us (or worse, help us buy into bad messaging).

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Oh, I see that sometime. I get a few dudes who think they don’t need to treat me with any respect. I will say, that given how much older I am than my current crop of undergrads, they seem to be less inclined to that bias.

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On the first day of her new job as head of maths at her new school my daughter was asked, quite unironically, by a deputy head why she wasn’t in school uniform.

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Based on my school experience, if I grew up with a gender bias it was that women teachers taught languages, English and biology while men taught maths,mechanics, physics, geography. Chemistry and history were gender neutral. So I guess I have simply expressed my own prejudice.
(Though my statistics teacher was a woman and she was so good at it that I rapidly drifted in that direction while doing research.)

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I loved Pretty Little Liars. I thought it was so amazing to see teenage girls presented as smart, cunning, motivated. To me, the girls in that show were more like the people I knew, the ones who were heading to Ivy Leagues. They were worried about things, a lot, things that were grown up and not insipid. I like how the adults in their world totally impacted their lives with their own secrets, which also felt very true to high school.

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From the Washington Post; I’m copying and pasting as this is behind a paywall

The firm that brought us ‘Fearless Girl’ was underpaying women, U.S. government says
By Mary Hui October 6 at 1:21 AM
Play Video 1:05
Statue of girl stares down Wall Street bull for Women’s Day

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Placing the diminutive, grade school-aged girl in front of the massive bull on the eve of International Women’s Day was a way of calling attention to the lack of gender diversity on corporate boards and the pay gap of women working in financial services, a spokeswoman for State Street Global Advisors said. (Reuters)
The financial services firms that introduced the world to “Fearless Girl” will pay $5 million to settle federal allegations that female executives were paid less than men in the same positions.

The agreement follows an audit by the Department of Labor in which investigators say that State Street Corporation has discriminated against more than 300 female and 15 black senior-level employees since Dec. 1, 2010, paying them less in base salary and bonus pay per year than white male colleagues, even “when legitimate factors affecting pay were taken into account.”

These individuals will receive back pay with interest from the settlement fund.

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In an email statement, State Street said it disagreed with the agency’s findings but “made a decision to bring this six-year-old matter to resolution and move forward.” It did not admit wrongdoing in the agreement.

The deal marks a public relations blow to a firm that has been outspoken about its mission to increase gender diversity in corporate boardrooms.

This year, a subsidiary of the Boston-based firm famously commissioned a 50-inch bronze statue, the “Fearless Girl,” to face off against Wall Street’s iconic Charging Bull, as part of an advertisement campaign on National Women’s Day.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio posed for pictures with the pint-size statue.

“Fearless Girl” was a potent symbol proving that women can — and should — be an important part of the financial sector, the firm previously told The Post.

Companies with diverse leadership teams perform better over the long term and make better investments, the firm said.

As part of its aggressive push to increase the number of women in prominent leadership positions, State Street has called on companies to add more women onto their boards. It also looked for ways to invest in companies that had women in prominent positions.

In its campaign for greater gender diversity, State Street has also had to come to terms with its own shortfalls. At the time “Fearless Girl” attracted international attention, the bank only had three women on its 11-member board of directors and five women on its 28-member leadership team.

Last year, the firm launched its SPDR Gender Diversity exchange-traded fund. The fund, known as SHE, tracks a basket of stocks of 100-plus companies that the firm judges as industry pioneers in putting women in leadership positions.

However, Bloomberg News reported that the firm has more often than not voted against gender pay shareholder proposals, according to Fund Votes.

As part of the settlement, State Street must also conduct an analysis of pay for current senior-level employees and make salary adjustments for “any statistically significant compensation disparities.”

Renae Merle contributed to this report.

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