The vocabulary is absolutely flawed. These are very bold claims which need to be backed up with facts.

For instance, the behavior is clearly spelled out here:

    One day, one of my supervisors jumped to my defense at a team event, in an awkward display of sexism.

OP explains how she felt and tells us exactly what action caused her to feel that way. However:

    The group started insinuating...

    They also made remarks implying...

These don't tell me any actual actions, just how she interpreted them. I'm left to judge the second two quotes by the severity of the action in the former.

I was thinking the same.

I'm a man an being recently made more aware of how some females friend perceive some so called "un-harmful cheesy jokes" I often advocate to my boss or college that they shouldn't make such jokes because you can never now how they are perceived.

However to escalate the problem up to the HR you need at least some ground. At some point she said than HR asked here to explain what she found was offensive. And she suggest that asking what was offensive was itself offensive. This is pretty meta.

I don't see how HR acted badly they needed to known exactly what happened in order to act. I mean you cannot pretend to be a whistleblower but kept being shy or vague about words used. And you can't say it was edited by the press, it's a blog.

So if OP is here please be clear did the manager say something like: "Guys please don't be to hard on my sweet little girl, you know she can't handle it"

And then colleges could have gone "Hey here come the boss's bitch!"

This I can understand, not vague and redacted sentences. Because unless you are precise (and sometimes graphic) sincere skeptical people will always wonder if it was your colleagues attitude or you perception that was flawed.

Nope but you just have to be aware of the repercussions. My boss is really a nice guy, but for wathever reasons, he and some colleagues started a gimmick about one of my female coworker that she was "forbiden" to make a fourth kid because we needed her too much at work.

While initially fun (because she clearly stated that she wanted only 3 kids as a personal choice) this joke had become cheesy and hurtful for her. She was actually starting to feel guilty because they were so insistant.

And this situation sucked because she's a great coworker, a great mum and she didn't deserve to feel guilty. Especially since no-one really cared in truth, it was just "a joke". So I told my boss and he stoped quickly and now everybody involved feel better. He was just sincerely unaware of the impact of theses recurring jokes.

So yes of course you can make joke but it's just critical to be aware that you can sometime unwillingly hurt people. And when that happen you should just stop this joke and maybe even apologize (depending on how far you went before you realize your joke wasn't funny).

I see it this way as well.

I would strongly argue that the by far most important thing is how the receiver interpreted the actions, though. Of course expanding on the actions themselves might help others understand better, but as far as I can understand, being met with scepticism for what you describe is part of what makes the experience so hopeless after bringing the courage to follow up on something uncomfortable.

> just how she interpreted them

That is EXACTLY the root of the problem. People interpreted them differently. Especially if there are a country / cultural difference.

I actually agree about the (mis)labeling - I was not consciously doing it, if it makes a difference. It is something I will be cognizant of in the future. My point was to simply say that there is more to managing harassment than is presently being addressed. I have to work with men all my life, and I cannot do that if I start making them uncomfortable now ! This is the problem with this situation to begin with - it is so fraught with conflict even if everyone has the best of intentions.

Why did you leave out details about the initial issue? You described being defended by your manager - and you implied he only defended you because of your sex; he is sexist. This seems very important in this context.

At what point did sexist discrimination enter the scenario? That's what's not clear. If the original offense against which the employee was defended by her manager was inherently sexist, then the defense need not be viewed as being inherently sexist.

(i.e., a manager can and should defend an employee against sexist behavior, and such defense isn't a priori sexist behavior itself even though the defensive behavior wouldn't have ever taken place if the employee weren't of their particular gender, which would of course make it otherwise look sexist.)

also, when the hostility started, one of the men actually went - "it's like that now, is it ?". As if I had changed my behavior since my incident ( which i hadn't ). I have gotten called hottie, haughty like a supermodel, comments about needing to lose weight, comments about being unmarried, and much worse. These statements were also ALWAYS implied in a conversation, never direct. that's what makes it difficult to identify or confront.

> These statements were also ALWAYS implied in a conversation

Can you quote one example?

space - impossible to cover everything in 10-12 minute read. sexism can also be non-verbal, which again, is hard to convey.

Yep but so the counsel I would give to anyone in such an undesirable situation will be the same I give to everyone that is subject to any form of harassment in workplace : Gather proofs!

A good friend of mine just get out of an impossible job position where she was under constant oppression of her boss and one of her subordinate (that incidentally was a friend of her boss)...

She started documenting everything so that when thing escalated she had proofs to show the big boss and guess what the big boss sided with her. But she left anyway for a better work environement.

But guess what, this story involved only women (boss, big boss, subordinate). So that's why I think that no matter which "type" of discrimination you met at your job place (sexual, racial, physical, age, etc...) the common response is "document you experience". Cause you'll need this to sound credible.

PS: For people who can read french, I'll recommend reading the "comme convenu" story of the illustrator Laurel. She had documented the bad experience her family has gone trough in the form of a web comic book. They choose to co-found a startup in California but were basically hostage of a startup CEO that hold them using financial and visa menace. (The story is not yet finished) https://commeconvenu.com

Great point about recounting instead of describing, it's really important to stay objective in such cases, especially as both sides (there are more than two however) continue to get more aggressive and vocal, each, maybe unconsciously, trying to push an agenda. This means like you said avoiding using ambiguous descriptors that can mean one thing for someone and something different for someone else. I would at this point add that through personal experience I'm led to believe the author entirely in the objective part of her description, one day we'll be able to partially criticise what people do or say without having to also point out to others that we agree with them, just not yet.

Very well said. This was my reaction, and in other comments here my objections along these lines are being interpreted as malicious and/or victim blaming. I do really want to understand versus being told how to feel about it.

I'm not a witness to this story, but the description closely resembles two different things that happened at Apple in the late 80s and early 90s. I was acquainted with some of the people peripherally involved in both.

The story's description of Apple's response could be from people involved in those incidents. It sounds exactly the same.

This is true with a lot of things that people have strong feelings and beliefs associated with, and -isms are good examples of it.

For plenty of people, the moment they see 'sexism', 'racism', etc it's over. They are either rooting for you, or mentally preparing arguments against your case, and things you say/write becomes largely irrelevant.

> I would put this in almost literary terms: I don't want events to be described, I want them to be recounted.

That's a great idea and, if applied, is going to save a lot of time in fiction writing. For example, chapter 3 of Ulysses can now be just:

  Stephen walked on the beach, sometimes with his eyes closed, and sometimes looking at the sea.

Described/recounted maybe isn't the best way to put it.

I'm okay with description, I just find that the most effective literature tells a story that implies something rather than explicitly spelling that thing out.

Perhaps an example:

"Fred was very sad his cat died because it was given to him by his father."

"Fred, upon learning of the death of his cat, a gift from his father, broke down in tears."

That's in 3rd person. Even in 1st person...

"I was very sad as this was the cat given to me by my father."

"I recalled the day my father gave me that cat and it brought tears to my eyes."

(Poor Schroedinger...)

People do lie, but that doesn't mean we should assume they're always lying.

I don't believe you can prove anything. I mean to say that's my perspective on the universe: that it is physically impossible to prove anything. At the same time, you can't live your life that way.

If I second guess the way my brain is interpreting light reflecting off objects all the time then I'd never leave my apartment. Of course I'm skeptical of how my brain interprets light sometimes, and not infrequently I was correct to be skeptical.

I view stories like this similarly. Could this story be deliberately misleading? Sure. Could it be accidentally misleading? Sure. Could it be dead-on accurate? Yep. We've each got to make a choice though, and that choice is going to be basically arbitrary despite whichever method we use to justify it. Someone might say "I know she is lying because she used this term which liars always use plus I read this story about a woman making up harassment charges to elicit sympathy." Another person might say "I know she is telling the truth because the same thing happened to my cousin."

In my case, I found myself believing the essentials of the story as I read it. My reasons for that are a black box to me. I suspect they'd become clear if I sat down and thought about it but even if I understood my own reasoning, it would still be arbitrary with regard to the events that did/did not occur. Point being: no one can faultlessly reconstruct the truth about a series of events from X number of words written about that event. And to think that you can is arrogant.

The only thing I'd try to advise is to not get dogmatic about your belief or disbelief (in this and other cases) and be ready to change your opinion if new information comes to light later.

>I don't believe you can prove anything. I mean to say that's my perspective on the universe: that it is physically impossible to prove anything.

Tons of things can be reasonably proven. A videotape of an incident can pretty much settle a dispute as to what happened for example, except if very special arrangements are involved (the camera angle hides the actual act, etc).

Key word is reasonably.

Sure, there might be only one person on the universe, and all of us are in his dream, and we do arbitrary things, plus he changes the past. That will be difficult to refute to prove something. Or magic exists (which we can't prove it doesn't) and changed the facts of a cases -- e.g. it was X that stabbed Y, but a magician transformed as X.

That said, why would you want to prove something beyond "reasonably"?

It's called the benefit of the doubt. You're free to believe one person is telling the truth and one person is lying, or that both people are telling what they believe happened, or whatever, but making that decision before getting both/all sides of a story is not the best way to get the facts.

Just like someone shouldn't read this woman's story and say that everyone above her at Apple should be fired, you also shouldn't read it and say that she's obviously just too sensitive or lying.

>It's called the benefit of the doubt.

Shouldn't that benefit extend to the other sides of the stories?

What happened to the "Auditur et altera pars" (hearing the other side) before assuming anything and awarding the benefit to just the one you've heard?

In this particular case, my thinking says Author is probably telling the truth. She has really no incentive of saying anything at all, she can keep it all to herself.

On other hand - never in my career, I have seen HR truly standing up for the Employee. The goal is always to deflect and maintain plausible deniability. I have never read a single story on Internet that highlights those HR heroes we deserve.

HR are paid employees of the company. They care for the company's interest's first, any other employee's second.

TL;DR know your audience