The article makes an observation that online communication favors a typically male communication style. That does not make you, your coworkers, or your company bad or inconsiderate people. There is no reason to respond defensively to an article like this, because it is not an attack. It is an observation on how modern work environments may favor one style of communication over another, and what role that gender socialization has in all of this.

What's important to gather from reading an article like this is that people are different. They communicate differently. Keep that in mind when you are communicating with them, because you may unintentionally be limiting their potential to contribute.

I think this (the defensiveness elicited by "here's why you're sexist" articles) is an unfortunate side-effect of overloading the term sexist to mean two nearly-opposite things ("subtle background prejudices that affect everyone and everything" and "overt toxic beliefs that you should be fired and shunned for having").

Further, the conflation between the two is intentional by some as a power grab.

> male communication style.

I'm sorry but WTF does this even mean? Every individual person has it's own communication style AFAIK.

The keyword that you seem to strategically be removing is "typically". Yes, everyone has their own style of communication. From the article:

> Gender socialization helps explain these findings. “From age two or three, kids show patterns where little boys are more assertive and girls more indirect,” says Herring.

If we are going to discuss an article based on studies supporting the idea that men and women are raised to communicate differently, we have to accept that there is room for some generalizations with how people communicate.

Exactly, it is already sexist for the author to make such a generalisation.

The idea of being always available on Slack is bad for all programmers regardless of gender. Flow requires long periods of uninterrupted work. Sometimes intense thought outside of sitting at a computer. Slack sets up the expectation of instant communication from non-devs who don't follow the same schedule.

It's interesting how the author reads the male behavior as indicating authority/confidence/etc. I usually just read it as poor social skills and general lack of awareness.

> ... the ones who posted blunt statements, or dropped in links with no context. They responded to others’ statements with sharp critiques, “no,” or radio silence

I haven't seen many (any?) people fitting this description on my company's Slack, which makes me think this is more a reflection of culture in the author's workplace than of Slack as a medium.

I've just logged into our Slack.

Seems we only share links to interesting GitHub repo's, issues on stuff we use and interesting blog posts about code/software architecture and devops related stuff.

Zero sexist messages.

But here's the thing: All male team. All white aswell. Are we an exception?

> That virtual signaling at the very end was precious. Look how beautifully they've bonded over Trump-hating. I'm touched.

Maybe meanwhile men are probably doing actual work while they are chatting about Trump? #justsayin'