Further, in the era of #MeToo, the chasm between men and women in the workplace will grow wider simply because of liability issues. One man's innocent, casual conversation with a female coworker can these days become that woman's #MeToo moment, aired publicly, both in the court of public opinion and in courts of law. This ultimately causes fewer interactions between men and women in the workplace - especially between direct reports and their managers - which can easily lead to fewer advancement opportunities. This is borne out in data. According to a recent study, almost 30% of male managers say they are not comfortable working alone with a woman — more than twice as many as before, according to the same study [1].

I would suggest that articles like this focus on incidents that everyone can agree is atrocious and actionable behavior. If failure to interrupt a group of women talking amongst themselves at a conference is now a #MeToo moment, it's just going to cause deeper concerns about liability, which will in turn cause even more backlash.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2018/02/06/amid...

That's what I thought initially as well. But the proper way to frame this is to ask: out of the population of men who would join a group of 3 men, how many would also join a group of 3 women? You and I aren't even part of the first group.

> This ultimately causes fewer interactions between men and women in the workplace

That's a real problem. The #metoo movement is great in getting the word out, but the backlash suppresses any men of trying to get it right. You can't expect people to make progress if they don't try, and if they try, they will make mistakes. It should be ok to make them and not get demonized in the process.

Tbf, because of stories like this, I feel almost uncomfortable talking to my female coworkers - I immediately tense up and I have no idea what I can or cannot say, I carefully weigh up my every word to make sure it doesn't, even accidentally, have a double meaning or something that could be seen as patronizing, offensive, or flirty. As a consequence, I would genuinely rather not talk with women in the workplace and just avoid the risk altogether, which I am sure is just making the problem worse.

She says team members would openly express that they wouldn't hire women because they would just get married. I don't know about you, but that seems like something obviously dated and wrong. Growing up, both my parents worked, and that was the norm. It's been the norm for a long time. Women aren't new to the work force. So why do people think this? In any case, it should be obvious not to say things like this.

Then she says a professor followed her beck to her room and tried to forcibly kiss her. That's something obviously wrong, right? It should be easy to say "I won't follow and forcibly kiss anyone." That's like good manners 101. Basic stuff we learn in 1st grade.

The sexism described here isn't the sort of thing you'd let slip by accident. There's no double meanings here. It's just bare faced disrespect for women. So please, relax. You don't need to walk on eggshells to avoid being a complete jerk.

And if you still aren't sure how to talk to women, I would take the articles own advice: Try talking to them like a person.

It's of course rude to insert yourself into many conversations. That's just a social convention.

> Avoiding women in workplace is essentially sexist. And for non-sexists there is no reason to do so.

So you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Given how easy it is for public opinion to shift, I certainly wouldn't want to take that chance. Who would want to interact with people like that in a professional setting? I wouldn't, and I try not to.

Lets look at some notable #MeToo cases in the last year

1. Harvey Weinstein - Dozens of women accused Weinstein of assaulting, harassing, or raping them.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-ove...

2. Matt Lauer - Fired for inappropriate sexual relationship with a coworker. Not an isolated incedent, as many women came forward through his career with reports of sexual assault and unwanted sexual advances.

http://people.com/tv/matt-lauer-sexual-harassment-assault-al...

3. Mario Batali - Accused of sexual misconduct by multiple female employees. Repeated reports of Batali groping the breasts of women who worked for him.

https://ny.eater.com/2017/12/11/16759540/mario-batali-sexual...

So where is this "innocent conversation" you mention?

I was present, as were a handful of other women. None of us were ever followed up with to ask if this was a legitimate accusation. The accuser was given a red carpet to a choice team. The accusee was given additional workload to carry and taken out of a position of authority and placed in a punitive program.

I have seen this happen twice in the last 3 years.

Do not take this as defense of the examples you mention, but as a warning against unintended consequences that simply don't ever show up in the press because they aren't highly visible and won't draw clicks, especially if they go against the status quo. If you need further evidence, look at the speed to which a concrete, evidence backed accusation with respect to google's hiring practices got flagged off the front page, whereas this thread is still much higher ranked after much longer time and fewer votes.

Not those cherry-picked examples obviously? Do you have access to every single report in the world? Is it impossible that some might not be completely legitimate and can act as a way to retaliate?

I’m reading this on the phone, so it’s likely I might have missed it, but does the article mention #MeToo in the context of the men vs. women groups complaint you mention? If not, it’s uncharitable to imply that the complainer here is trying to equate sexual assault with discrimination.

IMO the main problem with contemporary gender conflicts isn’t going to be “incidents that everyone can agree is atrocious and actionable behavior”. Because it’s not hard for society (usually) to act on such egregious incidents. It’s I guess a good thing that professional women don’t have to constantly worry about violent sexual assault, but the author is raising the issue that seemingly innocuous behavior can still be substantially harmful.

What is innocuous and what is not can still be a matter of healthy debate. But it’s worth noting how difficult it can be for even egregious behavior to get called out.

I think many people can agree that Susan Fowler’s blog post about her time at Uber constituted outright horrible behavior. HN commenters seemed very united in this sentiment [0] and I think many tech observers would agree that it wasn’t one very huge chip that set off the clusterfuck that was 2017 for Uber.

It may seem looking back that Fowler’s whistleblowing would inevitably cause such massive outrage. But re-read her post, which is almost as nostalgic as it is outraged. It’s not just about the harassment she faced, but the institutional resistance and denial that she, and more than a few other women faced — clearly, their complaints back then were not the level of clear cut incidents that you think should be focused on. And Fowler’s whistleblowing was just a personal blog post — not a big NYTimes expose —- written months after her departure, and likely only possible because she had the time and means to think about things and not worry about career implications. It’s very easy to imagine an alternate timeline in which she just didn’t get around to writing about Uber because even she, as she says herself in that post, was incredibly thankful and fulfilled from her work at Uber, sexual harassment aside.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022

I disagree with you that there is no reason to do so for “non-sexists”. Because no one knows how a given person may interpret a given conversation or activity, combined with the severe consequences from the social media mob that even something as simple as an unsubstantiated tweet can inflict on one’s career or an entire company these days, the only way to avoid liability is to minimize interaction between opposite sexes in the workplace. In this environment, it’s the only rational thing to do.

We have unleashed a virtual lynch mob, ready to instantly torch the life of anyone that stands accused of even moderately inappropriate or questionable behavior. Worse, there is no statute of limitations or standard of proof required to activate the mob - a tweet is enough. That is wrong and creates a toxic environment for everyone.

In other words, people who "battle sexism and discrimination" can very well tip over and become sexist and discriminatory in the attempt to fix those exact issues.

They can become Monsters too.

The second part of this quote applies to. "If you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you".

If you fight sexism and discrimination long enough, you yourself will go under the spotlight and you'll eventually be judged for what you did. Whether good or evil.

"Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be 'blamed' for one's own inferiority/failure. Thus, one was thwarted not by a failure in oneself, but rather by an external 'evil'...Ressentiment comes from reactiveness: the weaker someone is, the less their capability to suppress reaction. According to Nietzsche, the more a person is active, strong-willed, and dynamic, the less place and time is left for contemplating all that is done to them, and their reactions (like imagining they are actually better) become less compulsive. The reaction of a strong-willed person (a "wild beast"), when it happens, is ideally a short action: it is not a prolonged filling of their intellect." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment#Kierkegaard_and_N...

History is filled with people who fought for a just cause, only to then turn around and become unjust themselves (IIRC from history, the french were really good at it).

It doesn't matter how much of the way you got and how much of it has yet to be walked, it's completely irrelevant to "becoming the monster".

If a man accuses me of sexual harassment, that would be pretty easy to disprove (I’m straight) and most people would believe me. If a woman accuses me of that, in a MeToo world, my career is over, even if there is no evidence and I didn’t do it (being that we are living in the MeToo world, I guess I should say that for the record I have not ever knowingly sexually harassed anyone, and have never been accused of it).

What downandout meant was that it is dangerously easy for a woman, if she were so inclined, to destroy a man's career with unsubstantiated claims of sexual harassment. It is much harder for a man to do that to another man, if both are straight.

I'm really not sure where the sexism comes in. Perhaps you could enlighten everyone.

Your knee-jerk reactions, calling people names ("sexist", "disgusting", "wrong and harmful" etc.) are the problem, not downandout's measured observation, and in fact it is exactly what he is talking about. When there's so many people like you, where is the debate? It's just pitchforks and lynching.

Do you have any verified example of this happening?

For example, there's a difference between some of those guys getting physically aggressive and the one guy who basically said he'd never worked with a woman and didn't know how to talk to her.

Is the latter example okay? No, not really, but we must find a way to not lump that guy in with the physically aggressive guy. The second guy appears to be simply ignorant, but at least open minded enough to admit ignorance and try to awkwardly break the ice to move forward cooperatively.

Men and women have only worked together for about 40 years, which in anthropological/cultural time is basically nothing. We haven't figured out the rules yet. Is dating colleagues completely banned? Doubtful. That means we're going to have to accept some awkwardness between people who are trying to figure out if they like each other. But we can simultaneously say it's inappropriate to grope someone, it's not okay to call someone the "token" whatever, etc.

It's not quite the same thing as how men and women worked together historically. There was probably more segregation back then too (and rampant sexism).

Yes, it's important not to conflate those two very different behaviors. At the same time, however, we need to recognize that both are symptoms of the same underlying issue — and that's the thing that we ultimately have to change, not its case-specific behavioral expressions.

"Not as bad as" is a fallacy.

Maybe that's implicit in what you're saying, but I think it's likely to be more effective when considered consciously. It frames how we think about the interaction.

We need something else to call this guy other than sexist. Something at least slightly positive like likely ally.

This seems key. Especially if it's "relatively rare but intensely negative events" (as seems to be the case).

Imagine if for every one of these stories, a colleague of the person dealing with discrimination or peer of the discriminator had tapped them on the shoulder and said, "Professor, what the fuck are you doing? That's sexist, and you're a terrible human for having done that."

And imagine if after three times of the above their peers had said "This is a pattern of behavior with you. We'd feel better if the department were headed by someone with different values."

Discrimination survives on awkward tolerance.

I think the problem is that this stuff can be very hard to detect. If there's even the slightest chance of negative repercussions then the few responsible will stop talking.

In the "Well, why wouldn't you comment on a woman's pregnancy when evaluating her for a job?" sense.

There are certainly overt, aggressive, predatory stories included. But the bulk are things I can see being said in social or professional company.

Or as Colleague B puts it: "When asked for a paragraph, my first reaction was that I didn’t have the sort of big bombshell stories being looked for."

Borderline, casual sexism is important to vocally fight too.

Perhaps. Ideally. Eventually. But in a choose-your-battles context, borderline casual cases are fodder for contrarian denialists to minimize the over-the-line serious cases.

Focus on vocally fighting the most important or most fixable problem first, to make progress.

Can you imagine how stressed and miserable you’d be, how untrusting and isolated, if your every interaction carried significant and unknown risk of turning out as described in the article? How many of the self-styled introverts here would be able to get out of bed after the hundredth time someone they thought was a colleague or a friend acted as described in the article?

What you’re saying was said to black people during civil rights, and women trying to get the vote. What you miss is the pervasive and cumulative effect of casual, constant shit, peppered with outright abuse.

Why do so many people keep insisting on believing that the problem is specific to the technology fields? Women face these kind of problems everywhere that they have to interact with men.

"Look, we were harassed and discriminated against all through high school! We would never treat anyone like that."

(1) I'm in technology for 20+ years, and didn't know this sort of thing happens, and

(2) Technology people often like to think that we're in a meritocracy, in which smart/good people do well, regardless of whether they're male or female.

These stories, along with many others, have shattered my naivete. We're just as bad as everyone else -- and maybe worse -- and need to actively combat it.

Straw man? I prefer to think of it as "I work in tech and I am glad these issues are being publicised and (I hope) enough people think it's a big enough problem that finally it's being addressed, I hope seriously."

I can't do anything about, say, mining, construction, advertising, film, retail...but I can have some influence in tech and life sciences businesses.

Does me talking about 4 somehow imply all the other real numbers aren't real?

Yes, women face these kinds of problems in more than just computer science or technology in general. However this article and this post are talking specifically. Perhaps they feel that they cannot fix a problem that exists "everywhere" and are focused on their narrow slice of the domain. This does not prevent you from talking about other slices of the domain, or the entire domain, or working to reduce the problems women and others face in whatever piece of the domain you choose.

Also, at the risk of producing a defensive reaction -- why do you believe that the poster believes the problem is specific to the technology fields? What in their statement leads you to the conclusion that they think this is an isolated problem?

And yet for years and years and years the constant refrain from the establishment has always been "nah, it must be that women are just bad at this job" or "nah, it must be a pipeline problem". Nobody wants to look themselves in the face and ask whether or not they are part of the problem. Either through not taking women seriously in the workplace, always questioning the work and fitness of women in a way that men don't experience, or allowing a hostile work environment where sexual harassment happens and everyone just sweeps it under the rug or looks the other way.

Women have been telling each other these stories about what it was like to work in tech for decades, and they've been telling anyone, including guys, who would listen for years and years as well. Why has it taken so much work for people to actually pay attention?

I agree completely, and it's incredible that so many people with exceptional critical thinking skills could dismiss the universal, consistent reports of the witnesses to these events, in favor of the analysis of people who have no experience at all - themselves and other men. And that includes me: WTF was I thinking? Everyone who experienced these things said the same thing, people who had no direct experience said otherwise, and I believed the latter? If everyone in Honolulu said the grass in Hawaii is dewy in the mornings, and everyone in Ohio said it isn't - why would you even ask the Ohioans?

The same applies to the treatment of African-Americans by law enforcement. African-Americans have been talking about it for generations, the same stories over time and across the U.S. Why did it take videos for me to believe it?

My guess is that it comes from accepting social norms of the people around me, and dismissing people I didn't interact with. The solution, IMHO, is interacting with people outside your group and people telling their stories, as they did in this article. If you want to know what's really happening on issues like these, forget all your theories - just ask and listen (and zip it). The most ardent theories suddenly become insubstantial in the face of evidence.

Maybe it's because I'm self employed, so I don't have regular "colleagues" to tell me these things.

Mybe it's because I (and other men) didn't make it clear that we were willing to listen, although I sure hope not.

For whatever reason, I believed that sexual harassment is occasional. Not as pervasive, and not as constant as the growing number of stories has made clear.

The more stories we hear, the better (I think) things will be. So keep telling these stories.

In my case, it was because I had a frank conversation with a female friend, where she told me a few typical stories. Things like her sitting on the bus, and the guy next to her will suddenly start touching her, or trying to kiss her. With her giving absolutely no sign of interest and not knowing the person beforehand (she's actually gay). And similar stories in other situations.

She said it happened to her about 10 times already. This is the kind of clear-cut sexual harassment which I naively thought was rare, but apparently is so common, that it's just shrugged off as a nuisance in many cases. It completely changed my perspective on just how common this is for women, even if I believe only a minority of men act in this way.