I don't mean 'good' and 'bad' absolutely—that's above my pay grade. I just mean good or bad for HN, relative to what we're trying to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... If you want to smite enemies or fulminate snarkily, that's your business—just please don't do it on HN. It's not hard to find platforms that welcome that sort of engagement; we're trying for something different on this one.

Edit: this thread has over 1000 comments now; if you want to read more of them, you need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918&p=4

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918&p=5

She posted a comment on her social media focusing on this feedback as "criticism" that came from a sexist guy "of course". It was pretty easy to draw the line to the three panelists, one of whom was a guy. Ouch.

In a previous life, I'd worked in a awesome (female led!) product company. While I had no experience prior to this, I quickly realized that the product itself and its quality etc was almost irrelevant to success, the X and Y mentioned by the male panelist was unfortunately everything, which you'd only know if you were in the space itself. The female led company I worked for was bought out by a (male led) competitor, who then using much strong x and y skills - cleaned up. Company I worked for got basically nothing.

Fast forward - my friends business not doing so great, she asks me for feedback. I said nothing other than enthusiasm. Partly because I was really enthusiastic - she'd put her heart into this project. But her comment on social was in my mind - I had no desire to be next sexist guy "shooting down" an idea

She's out of the business I think mostly. Anyways, this parallels the take of the article.

I asked them what their boss was (female) and their bosses boss (female) and til a few months before, their bosses bosses boss (was female and recently changed to male). Was not a happy look I received.

And 100% there is sexism/racism in workplaces but in my small bubble of the world it feels a reasonable proportion of people put these kind of excuses on their lack of progression over looking inward, but I've tended to work in more progressive environments so maybe I've missed what the wider world is like.

https://inconvenientconsiderations.blogspot.com/2021/03/hero...

I'm much, much more likely to feel like I'm walking on eggshells around women, this happens with men also, but more in a personal setting.

This combined with the whole metoo movement certainly didn't help women in receiving frank feedback or mentorship.

In my view there are few things more rewarding than taking control of our lives, and stop blaming others for our own shortcomings.

https://inconvenientconsiderations.blogspot.com/rss.xml

https://inconvenientconsiderations.blogspot.com/atom.xml

An otherwise cool female coleague kept making claims people were misogynistic, at first I thought she was joking or that she did have some claim, because someone made an unintentional mysoginistic joke.

Then I left the company, and I talked with an ez coleague who was promoted as a team lead.

The guy was into some new age stuff, about helping everyone, and she was slaking/not interested; the higher ups wanted to fire her.

Not my friend, he really believed in her.

When it was clear she was about to be fired, she complained about him to the HR, that he's sexist and all that.

That guy was the least sexist guy I've ever met and the only one caring for her.

"mysoginistic" in the sense of "I literally hate women" or in the sense of "I think women are less capable than men" or "I liked a physical feature of her"?

There's more to choose from, the list of things that are called "misogyny" nowadays has gotten incredibly expansive.

I witnessed such a joke, from a brogrammer -- he thought it was funny, but noone else did, especially knowing how sensitive the female coleague was -- someone broke a pot of plants and he said "Why should we clean it, we have plenty of women around here" -- I just know the guy, the tone of his voice, and so forth, and I know he just tried to be funny, but at the end of the day, that was a sexist remark, we knew it, he knew it after he said it, he should have apologized, but he didn't.

But that was the only instance that struk me as sexist, and the guy always helped female coleagues, in no way did see any other "bad behavior" from him, it was just that guys generally have thicker skins when it comes to jokes and jabs, and he was usually very friendly, I've worked in male teams that were outright toxic, he was nothing like that.

Of course, high school kids haven't learned etiquette and don't care, but we want to hold higher standards in the workforce.

It was just unprofessional I would say.

For instance I can appreciate a dark joke that would clearly be sexist/racist/antisemitic/homophobic, I can even reproduce it in a like-minded circle of people, and I still don't consider myself sexist/racist/homophobic.

You can make a sexist joke without being sexist, but it can still be inapropriate/unprofessional, and it can still cost you dearly.

I've had my haircut mentioned at work… because I'd had a haircut. It's people trying to be nice or make conversation, and neither of those things are unprofessional.

I understand your point, of course, but it does not actually explain theirs.

I work from home so the only person who remarks on my hair is my wife, and her comments, if overheard, might pass for misandry. I'm trying to forment a Twitter mob against her in response.

It's not just a regular weapon, being acused of sexism or sexual harassment or God forbid rape is a nuclear weapon, it can do such tremendous damage to an innocent man with zero damage to the one making false allegations that there's no wonder men a really careful.

We have reached a local peak for sexual equality, but I don't think it is possible to move forward as long as mens lives can be completely destroyed by false allegations.

That was exactly my point.

Sexism in the workplace has gone from normalised, to being recognised as a potential issue, to having a process which can deal with it all within my lifetime. To expect a perfectly executed deescalation undoing hundreds of years of history across all of society is disingenuous.

Respectfully, this shouldn't be on the person from whom advice is being sought, but on the asker.

"Or better yet, be honest with the female friend that you wanted to advice, pointing out what she had done before and expressing your apprehension in providing critical feedback?"

If someone asked me this, I'd probably think they used hashtags like #redpill or were into bashing Ellen Pao or something. It comes across as, "you can't say anything these days without being offensive, men in tech are soooo mistreated."

Wise moderates don't even join the conversation on social media. A wise decision for an individual, but it's harmful to all of us collectively. One negative side effect is people assume that everyone is an extremist of one stripe or another.

the problems genders face are interrelated, invalidating all men that complain about something just because of a history specifically disenfranchising women will not help your cause

Interesting. I hesitate to accept your interpretation as the universal one, because my experience has been that there are ways to express these concerns without coming off as a bigot. Perhaps more education, awareness or discussion is required.

Please share with us. I can't think of a single way to express these concerns without looking like a "red piller". The mere fact someone even has concerns marks them as suspicious and harmful.

Background - I'm actually on the left a fair bit. So one issue - you are not supposed to really ask minorities / women to explain / teach you / help you deal with these issues because it in fairness burdens them. I'm not looking for that either.

In terms of my colleague who I'd mentored in past (before things had gotten more extreme). I think others have made good suggestions - do you want some suggestions that may have already been made (it's never truth really - just another persons guess) or comfort.

Well, yes and no. I can see how it's a burden, but they're also the people with the most hands-on experience. If they won't explain, how can anyone else learn?

Because it is a serious problem, and not solving it is not acceptable. Of course men, or whichever the privileged group in any particular case is, have a responsibility to listen and learn, but that only works if someone is willing to explain.

Although I'd love to agree that it's the responsibility of the oppressor or privileged group to fix the problem, it has got to be a collective responsibility. You can't help people without the involvement of the people you're trying to help.

Take a sociology class at your local community college, read a book, read some blogs/articles by women, people of color, and other minorities.

There are a lot of really good ways to learn from the people who have taken the time to write/speak about the issues they face.

Thank you for pointing this out. You’re absolutely right on this one, and I would retract my suggestion if HN allowed me to edit the previous comment.

People need to think about it in terms of incentives, what incentive do I have to try communicating with an incredible mindfulness and scrutiny that I might then fail at. The failure to do so properly could have potentially endless downsides? The default incentive is always going to be avoidance as much as possible. Not because of any desire to be sexist, but because is the instinctive path of least resistance.

not OP but the silence is a feature that allows you to actively listen[1] which is impossible when trying to come up with an answer while the other person still speaks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_listening

Even if only 5-10% of people took offense, it's not worth it to speak your mind.

When public discourse magnifies the risk of your comments, you'll tend to be risk averse also. Once upon a time, your opinion would be spoken almost all the time, and perhaps put in a letter rarely. The effort for anyone to raise hell over a minor quibble would involve spreading the word, and doing so enough to find the rare people with a tendency to join you. Go back decades and that is infinitely less likely.

Now, chances are your comment is in writing or recorded, and even if it isn't, the quibbler can broadcast their version of events to increasingly wider circles in seconds, at no cost and with virtually no effort.

I delete half of the comments I start writing online, thinking "What's the point? At best, one person appreciates it. At worst, thousands want to argue."

But in real world it is not true, and risk of witch hunt based on lies/misinterpretations substantially increased in last years.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.", attributed to Cardinal Richelieu.

I agree that there shouldn't be, but as life advice this is a bad thought to operate from. If someone doesn't like you or what you've said, there's always a way to put you in a bad light. With discourse that contains a lot of risk, it's probably better to just avoid it.

The Socratic Method is similar. But it differs because it is trying to expose a contradiction in thought about a particular subject through questions. Whereas you can trick others into critical thinking about a subject just by helping them think critically in general, and it can be done without the use of questions.

God bless. :)

Thoughtfulness is for the aware, and many investors aren't even aware of how they can be raked over the coals by a bloodthirsty mainstream outrage machine for something minor, petty, completely misinterpreted, or intentionally twisted for click bait.

Personal example. A friend mentioned that a new hire at her work didn't have to go through as much interview training as her, and she was wondering if she should take offense. If she were a guy, I would have said something along the lines of "come on, 'amount of interview training' isn't a real status marker, you're getting worked up over nothing". But I strive to be an effective communicator, so I couldn't just bluntly refute her feelings like that; it'd sound like I'm denying the very real ways that women can be subtly mistreated in the workplace. Instead I clammed up, and she ended up deciding to file an HR complaint, which is unlikely to have a positive impact on her career.

Is there any way I could have told her what I thought without being misunderstood? Sure, maybe, if we'd had 30 minutes to sit down and talk about a bunch of abstract principles. Is there a strategy that would have fit inside the 30 seconds of conversation we had on the topic? I don't think so.

What about: "I personally wouldn't have cared about that." -- then you didn't say what you thought she should do, instead just what you yourself would (not) have done.

And she could have used that as a data point when making her own decision.

And, optionally continue with: "you got more education than X, I wonder if that might as well mean that the company decided to invest more money in you, maybe a good thing for you. Maybe X could have filed a complaint about that as well"

Of course the problem with this is that the facade will crumble at some point because the person doesn't exist.

Not everyone that you speak to is objective or level headed.

Maybe they're low-sugar and crashing. Maybe their dog just died.

You have absolutely no way to prepare for all of the ways someone will be ill-equpped to handle their day. And this is probably a high percentage of people at any given time.

But we can't afford a society where everyone treads on egg shells.

Others too.

First because "Effective communication requires effort" from BOTH sides.

And also because others can deliberately misinterpret your words for their own gain, or because they're biased, or because they've been primed by factors outside your control, or for lots of other reasons...

>If someone is unable to clearly express themselves without being misunderstood

That has been the case for everybody for the entirety of history.

There are better or worse ways to express something, but there's no foolproof way to express even the simplest thing in a way that you "wont be misunderstood".

Sometimes even saying "yes" or "no" with the wrong tone (or what the other person perceives as the wrong tone) can be misunderstood.

Yes, but we only have control over our own side and have to make it as easy as possible for the receiver to do their part.

https://youtu.be/3WMuzhQXJoY

If that is the case, then it doesn’t invalidate what I’m saying. I’m not saying it’s impossible to create unambiguous statements. What we’re talking about here is complex conversational speech, especially in regards to sensitive topics that people feel strongly about. And specifically, we’re talking about the usage of such speech in everyday interactions, in which words have to be formed on the fly at a rapid pace.

I'm agreeing with you.

However Brendan Fraser's character tries to phrase his wishes, the devil finds a way to mess him up.

What I do believe is that as the speaker I have to do my very best to make sure the receiver can understand what I'm saying, they have to do their part too, of course.

If the speaker neglects to choose their words with sufficient care, or the receiver doesn't make an effort in their interpretation then the balance of understanding tips away from being 50/50 and chaos ensues.

Sibling comments mention all kinds of secondary factors such as mood, bad faith, bias, but these are clear violations resulting from the offending side not making the necessary effort to meet half-way.

Not really. We have a responsibility for the effects of our actions. There is a practical limit to how far we can take worrying about those effects, but that doesn't mean the responsibility goes away.

The same is true for considering how different audiences will interpret your words. You have a responsibility do take those interpretations into consideration but there is a practical limit to how far it can be taken.

However, I believe the listener shares some of the responsibility to consider other (possibly more generous) interpretations beyond their initial reaction.

If both parties do this, is is remarkable how quickly disputes get resolved. If neither party does this, a conversation accomplishes nothing.

Doesn't it? I might sneeze and inadvertantly cause a typhoon in Malaysia through the butterfly effect but I can't possibly know or predict that, so how can I take responsibility for it? What does "responsibility" even mean if it's practically outside of your control?

I would argue that the limits of our responsibility are defined by practical limitations. We can't take responsibility for accidental negatives, any more than we can take credit for accidental positives. If you tried to account for your entire impact on the universe, regardless of the practicality, you'd be paralysed with indecision.

The point is that the line for what you are and are not responsible for is a grey and fuzzy one that depends on the context the the decision, the magnitude of the decision, and your own capabilities as an agent.

My point is that the limitations of trying to understand how your words may be interpreted are similarly based in practical considerations.

If you can lose your job because someone misinterpreted what you said (or chose to misinterpret something clear), then that "practical limit" can get quite high...

>If both parties do this, is is remarkable how quickly disputes get resolved. If neither party does this, a conversation accomplishes nothing.

Well, if every person loved each other, then there would be no crime either!

Put differently, expectation is half of sensing. That insight goes back at least as far as Helmholtz.

We'll simplify down to three elements: the serialization process, the communication medium, and the deserializatiom process.

The serialization process is our speaker. How well can we represent our data in a line protocol? Do we lose fine details, maybe data types get converted? Do things get entirely mistranslated, like a zero value becoming a null? A speaker can do a poor job converting their thoughts (data) into words (serialization format).

The medium is how the data gets exchanged. Maybe details are lost (again) via headers being stripped, or sourced getting over written. People can lose a lot of information based on medium as well, in particular text based communication, different cultural context, or just a noisy room.

Finally, there's deserialization. No matter how well formed your line protocol, how reliable your medium, the receiver can have a library that incorrectly decodes the data. Ints can become strings, zeros can become nulls, formatting can be lost.

So, as you said the speaker is responsible for being thoughtful and careful, but even if they are the listener can get the wrong message due to their own flaws or even just circumstances. And that is leaving aside intentional misrepresentation, which is a problems unto itself.

"Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept"

It seems to me this can defuse some communication issues between people too

> People can lose a lot of information based on medium as well ...[including] different cultural context...

Perhaps I missed what you mean?

I am deeply aggrieved by your clear insinuation that your parent comment is a dim-witted noodlehead.

This is backwards.

You have no control over how other people think, behave or react, let alone how they interpret your words.

Your words can be effective or ineffective conveyors of your thoughts. You are responsible for your words.

Your listeners can be effective or ineffective listeners. They are responsible for their interpretation.

But distilling an idea can take lots of time. In the startup partner scenario, one want quick, honest feedback and start the discussion to refine the idea.

Holding up ideas from your partner is... Less then ideal.

It was basically as part of scoring of ideas. I think in the weaknesses box the panelist had noted lack of experience / plans with respect to X and Y. So while I would make a suggestion, this was probably more in critique space.

The issue was more - unless you'd been in the space, you wouldn't realize that THIS issue was actually perhaps very important in the products success. Since I'd been a part of a business that had gotten TROMPED on for a similar set of non-product issues - it hit home.

She was in a tech forum where a woman was complaining about her experience at a company. It amounted to this woman having a perception that she was not being valued as much as a male colleague and was immediately jumping to the conclusion that it was sexism. My wife jumped in and suggested that from the sound of things, it sounded like there may be some other things going on that this person could work on and that it may have nothing to do with sexism etc..

The other people in the forum, including men, crucified my wife for those statements. This along with her daring to suggest in other women in tech forums, groups etc. that not every piece of feedback that is not positive is sexist led her to be banned from several women in tech organizations. Many would not even tell her why, but if they did it was for "being harmful to women" and "suffering from internalized misogyny" among other things.

Given her experience alone, not to mention other things we have all seen in the community none of this is surprising to me. Ironically, one of her concerns when she saw the "micro-agressions" etc. trend take hold, beyond the fact that she felt it was trying to fix one wrong with another, was that it would lead to this...and here we are. [edited for clarity]

The big topics like violence against women have not been properly addressed and feminists focus instead obsessively on minor topics like abuse of Hollywood actresses or gender imbalance in software engineering.

The strategy has also changed - such factions are focusing less on equality and more and more on taking something for themselves, transforming the dialogue into an us versus them and turning it hostile. The problem with this thinking is two-fold:

1) One can take only so much before the ones that are being taken from push back, especially since there's no shortage of groups that want to take.

2) Other factions also want a piece of the pie and don't care about female victimhood. Feminism has for example failed to tackle both culturally influenced violence against women perpetrated by misogynist immigrants and the zero sum game they play with transsexuals.

What I do personally is to just avoid all of these people.

I have the impression it's harder to avoid them in California because people are particularly brainwashed over there - which is one of the reasons I avoid California as well.

We as a society only step in collectively when these things happen at an egregious level (what was going on in Hollywood), but if you think you won’t face some degree of it in your daily life then you are just not covering your bases. One must have the resiliency to deal with some of it, and that is fair and reasonable to expect because the contract is we are tolerant of imperfect humans as a society (that those who are sexist and racist have a flaw but are not evil, and we tolerate this imperfection through patience). It’s never going anywhere.

It's also quite geographic - in this case I mean US-centric (and spreads to rest of the western countries). Ie in eastern europe/former eastern bloc, there wasn't so much sexism, all women had to work and generally things were way more balanced. Not saying it was perfect, almost nothing there was, but to see current trends from that perspective looks like a bit as western world going slightly cuckoo.

> It's also quite geographic - in this case I mean US-centric (and spreads to rest of the western countries). Ie in eastern europe/former eastern bloc, there wasn't so much sexism, all women had to work and generally things were way more balanced. Not saying it was perfect, almost nothing there was, but to see current trends from that perspective looks like a bit as western world going slightly cuckoo.

have spent the past half a decade living in various countries from the former Eastern block mostly working for local companies and not much exposure to the outside. Over here women are generally more comfortable with choosing jobs in STEM and the male reaction to them isn't seen as competition or as toxic as it seems in US. idk what's the reason but perhaps they are not allowed to behave like princess barbies by their parents. But as you indicate the whole cuckoo from the US is spilling over to this region as well. Thanks to Instagram (beauty standards and trendsetting) and US propaganda that tells people how to apply any kind of norms (which is compared to "old" countries massively divisive).

I'm not saying people in the Balkans are less sexist (OMG no :D) but they seem a lot more chill in dealing with this issues. The number of times I had women use the most profane insults hurled at the opposite sex simply because this is how they speak (they swear a lot over here) often balances men's mysogonystic remarks.

edit: clarity

Exactly, probably more sexism, but the discourse around it and life in general is not venomous. My theory is that when you have real (economical) problems you tend to focus first on what matters.

I wouldn't say that the Eastern Bloc had it better. Based on the experience of my own mother and others from her generation, women both had to work and take care of the children. But the roles were very well defined and people didn't waste time debating everything ad nauseam, for better or for worse.

No, what’s happening there now is indistinguishable from a religious movement. You’ve got prophets, holy books, commandments, taboos and shibboleths, confessions, original sin, the whole works.

If you wait for other people to spontaneously agree with your outlook on like then the wait will be exceptionally long time even when measured in millennia.

There’s a saying “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”

I find my gender is a barrier to getting traction and my experience is that it's due to patterns of this sort and not because most men intentionally want me to fail. But the cumulative effect of most men erring on the side of protecting themselves and not wanting to take risks to engage with me meaningfully really adds up over time and I think that tremendously holds women back generally.

I think gendered patterns of social engagement also contributed to the Theranos debacle. I've said that before and I feel like it tends to get misunderstood as well. (Though in the case of Theranos it runs a lot deeper in that she was actually sleeping with an investor.)

So, considering you are the potential carrier of a nuclear power it makes sense to thread carefully.

The problem isn't sexism. The problem is that being wrongly labeled as a sexist is a socio-economical death blow while the accusers gets scot free. This imbalance in power has to be settled somehow and I think this is a pretty good solution.

Posting this anonymously since I'm not insane.

The men are assuming based on the female founder’s gender _alone_ that she might accuse him of sexism.

Regardless of how rational this fear is, they are stereotyping new female founders they’re meeting for the first time based on what an X% of other female founder’s have done in the past.

For the men, it’s probably a risk/reward calculation. Keep your head down and be polite and have ~0% chance of being accused of sexism. Or, speak up and maybe ruffle some feathers and have a ~X% chance of being accused of sexism.

You can see the problem on both sides of the equation, but withholding advice based on gender alone does meet the definition of sexism, regardless of the intentions of self-protection rather than hate.

Would you describe this person as "racist" against Russians? I don't think a reasonable person would apply that label. I think they'd say they're responding rationally to the specific circumstances of their immediate situation. That sort of behavior shows no inherent animosity to Russian people in general.

(And before anyone cries foul, I'm not in anyway saying sexism accusations in 2021 corporate America is anywhere near the same as the KGB. I think that should be patently obvious. The reason I picked this specific example was to stretch the underlying logic to a situation that's clear enough to be cut and dry situation.)

Yeah, they're making decisions and treating someone differently based on the person's (anticipated) race. Something being rational doesn't make it not racism.

> That sort of behavior shows no inherent animosity to Russian people in general.

Racism has nothing to do with animosity. Consider that men have the opposite of animosity towards women and yet sexism is something between humans.

That's the really tricky part with racism, not the mindless extremism. What is the acceptable limit between rationalism and racism? Is there one? If we take the example of the GP with Russian secret services, if 99% of the Russian speaking people you encounter are from the secret services, does it make it acceptable to discriminate against the 1% to save your life? If yes, then what is the limit? 50%, 10%, just one person, ...?

No court. No sensible attempts to truly examine the truth. Just a firing squad.

In this context, even "Good" Russians, fear the "Bad" Russians, for they may be labelled 'collaborators', and face the firing squad too.

What the actual fuck? Did you read the context? Hungary in 1956: they would fear those Russians!

Our hypothetical clam doesn't know that the speaker is in the KGB or equivalent. They're stereotyping based on rumours, ethnicity and background. It doesn't matter that they are behaving prudently, it is pretty clear-cut that they are making decisions based on the racial and ethnic stereotypes they know.

I'm the bearer of bad news here. Sometimes racism is a rational response. Strive to make it not so.

I really don't know how to make this any more clear to you, you almost there. And now think an inch further...

If the accused also have a powerful position at a company, then that company also faces large liabilities, both reputational and financial. Everyone knows that the costs of litigation in the US are astronomical.

It is less known but equally true that the costs of arbitration (and to a lesser extent, mediation) can be high. Prohibitive for a startup, still painful for a larger company. Which means that all a potential accuser needs to do to get their pound of flesh is threaten litigation, and name an amount less than what would be paid in arbitration.

So our current system, on social media and in the courts, puts a tremendous amount of power in the hands of those who might accuse. And yes, the gender _alone_, or protected minority status _alone_, is enough to set off alarm bells in an executive who has already been burned.

Are they, necessarily? This could be entirely up to expected value and cost/benefit. Right now, current day, on average, the amount of power and attention wielded by a woman making an accusation of sexism is far larger than that which would be wielded by a man. This gender skew in outcome causes the cost/benefit calculations made by advice givers to also be gender-skewed. As a result, women get one cost/benefit calc, and men get another.

The problem is precisely systemic societal inequality and sexism. It's sexist to automatically value the word of one gender over that of another. However that is essentially what our society does in this context, made worse through social media's amplification of the mob mentality. It's this amplified societal gender skew which is the problem.

The way out of this is to value and respect evidence. The way out of this is due process and the concept of innocent until proven guilty. The way out is through principles which we know can counteract the evils and dysfunction of the mob, which we have known and codified, and whose value has been borne out by history, since nearly a millennium ago. Only this time, let's apply these gender neutrally.

Even if the gender of the accuser has no effect on the probability of the person accusing someone of sexism, it has a massive effect on the probability that such accusations are believed and weaponised by the public / mainstream media.

2. Advice (which is essentially a gift of knowledge/experience) is not something you are entitled to by virtue of your sex.

3. A man cannot be said to be 'sexist' when he chooses not to give advice that could potentially incriminate him, especially falsely. If a person (whether a man or a woman) chooses to keep silent, and especially where no fraudulent aspect is involved, that is part and parcel of doing business. You are not entitled to call a person 'sexist' just because they do not want to give advice to you.

4. There are virtually no consequences to the woman who accuses. Yet in comparison, the long-lasting consequences of an investor being falsely accused in public far outweigh any advantages to the contrary. This is enough to make any man clam up, and is a legitimate cause to withhold advice.

5. More importantly, in a commercial setting, no one is obliged to give you an advantage just because you're a woman. If you expect such an advantage/benefit because of your gender, then you are being sexist. A woman who wants to do business should not posit that a man is actively being 'sexist' if he chooses not to help her. That makes no sense.

So, women are being segregated before having any occasion to accuse men of sexism, and yet you claim that they would face 'no consequences' if they actually did?

Men are refusing to giving advice, because there is past history of women falsely accusing them of being sexist when they do give it. Your claim purporting that it never happens - i.e. 'before having any occasion' - skews the time-perspective. And is against the odds that male investors have faced, which is why they now clam up.

This is nothing to do with 'segregation' - that's a silly interpretation on your part. Investors are wising up to hold their tongue, than to let aspersions be (falsely) cast upon them otherwise.

The fact that the wolves would be out regardless of the veracity of the claims, and that there is no viable avenue for recourse here aggravates this.

Wrapping this up as "sexism" is the same kind of logic that gets you the removal of women-only sports as "sexism".

Not necessarily. In a social situation, you may be more afraid of what other people will think than of what that one person will think.

If that one person misreads you and hates you, it's not some big career-ending problem. It only becomes a big career-ending problem when a whole lot of other people agree that you doing X is some major issue that "obviously" was rooted in some kind of nefarious intent, such as sexism.

The problem is that the story will usually be told by the person who misunderstood the argument, and the other side's defense wouldn't have as much reach. "X is a sexist jerk" will gain way more clicks, attention and support than "I thought X was a sexist jerk but actually I misunderstood and we're all good - nothing to see here".

Furthermore nowadays there are plenty of people out there who love the drama and will be more than happy to keep pouring fuel into the fire, either for entertainment or in an attempt to virtue-signal how "better" they are by (appearing to) care about the issue. Worse, entire industries (social media) happily profit off this and encourage it by promoting the divisive content.

generally agree but have seen plenty cases on social media where the barrier to that agreement was incredibly low. I've even watched myself at times backing the wrong side -out of solidarity[1]- simply because I followed that person already for years and agreed to most of their other opinions.

[1] and what monster would not "always believe the victim"? As a proud father of a gorgeous and smart daughter I have an almost automatic response to see women's rights as something I need to protect. I'd always be harsher on my won sex when it comes to blame or "whodunit" (I'm aware of it so I'm able to counter it but no doubt that this pattern is always present like some muscle memory)

This doesn't contradict anything I've said. If anything, it reinforces it.

Instead of playing semantics by saying that "it is technically sexism" (and I'm not saying I agree with whether it actually is or not), we could choose to at least stop phrasing the situation like that.

The real problem is the cancel culture. That's what needs to be fixed. A twitter mob shouldn't be able to cause as much damage as they do. There should be laws preventing people from being fired because of social media. Maybe everyone who's ever been fired or had negative career consequences due to a twitter mob should get together and bring on a massive class-action lawsuit. Force twitter to fix their toxic lynch mob problem, and let that be an example for any other social media company that wants to capitalize on harmful gossip and mob behavior.

No, the real real problem is that in while there is some behavior that is obviously $BAD and others that are obviously not $BAD, there's a large range of behavior for which it's difficult to tell whether it's $BAD or not.

Consider the criminal justice system. Some people are obviously guilty and others are obviously innocent. But in between, there are lots of situations where it's difficult to tell whether the person is guilty or not. Vow to be more "tough on crime", and innocent people spend years in jail (or worse, end up executed). Vow to protect the innocent, and lots of guilty people get away scot-free. And there are criminals who are very good at exploiting this uncertainty.

There was a very insightful essay I saw many years ago which I can't find now unfortunately; but the main point was this: In superhero comic books and movies, the real superpower is certainty. The good guys always know who the bad guys are; it's just a matter of defeating them. In the real world, we have plenty of power to defeat the bad guys; it's just not always clear who the bad guys are.

So take the example from TFA, where the investor thought male founder A would be a better CEO than female founder B. Implicit bias is a real thing, and has been proven in dozens of studies. (For instance, where people are asked to rate the qualifications of a range of CVs, where the gender of the name on the resume is randomized.) Does the investor think A is better than B because of implicit (or not-so-implicit) bias? Or is A genuinely a better fit than B? It's basically impossible to know; even the investor themself may not know.

In the past, things swung very heavily toward "let the guilty go free", which meant implicit bias was allowed to stand unchallenged (leading to more men in leadership, leading to more implicit bias). "Cancel culture" is an attempt to swing things the other way. But it falls victim to the "certainty superpower" delusion: they think they know who the actual bad guys are, and end up taking down innocent people in the process.

What's the solution? In some sense there is no solution: until we have an Oracle of All Truth which we can consult, we will always have uncertainty; which means either punishing the innocent, letting the guilty go free, or some mixture of both. The best thing we can do is honestly acknowledge the situation and try to balance things as best we can.

Incredible.

In TFA, this precise same individual did the reverse first. It is hard to argue bias, when someone worked to get a better founder, female, to be CEO...

Yet this is dropped, ignored, in your comment.

So here we see, that even those actively showing non-bias, are labelled as likely biased still?!

If people's prior actions are no longer any remote indication of bias or not, all is lost.

Decision maker still could have bias towards men or women generally, but in those two cases some other factors could outweigh this bias, even if it actually was present. No way to tell.

The article also mentions this topic, by listing some factors that may influence decision in such situation:

> The degree to which men hold back on their advice depends on 1) how much is at stake and 2) how much they trust you. For example, you’ll be much more likely to get candid advice from an investor who has invested a lot of money in your company and you’ve known for years vs. a panelist at a tech conference giving feedback onstage who doesn’t know you and hasn’t invested in your startup.

Precisely. Yet one of these two was being used as an example for unconscious gender bias.

Why were both examples not used, or conversely, one showing a bias benefiting women?

Answer: because the bias is, that all men are biased.

> Answer: because the bias is, that all men are biased.

So, in a discussion where we're discussing the possibility that women might see anti-woman bias where none exists, we have a situation where a man sees anti-man bias where none exists.

"even the investor themself may not know"

The above fragment is what really 'got to me'. I agree that some people may have an unconscious bias. Yet from a few studies, showing some have this bias?

I hear this now spoken of as gospel. As if the very fiber of the male being, is to have this bias. So to this:

"a man sees anti-man bias where none exists."

I say -- I don't think so. Because this 'unconscious bias' theory is a bias in itself. It's like claiming all women have victim mentality, or all women are 'queen bees'. It just isn't so.

But we can't fix it by doing otherwise—asking people to stop being "overly" cautious—either. Another comment put it best: that solution is akin to asking people to self-sacrifice, except that at the very least jumping on a grenade gets you a medal; in this case, it gets you vilification.

You would need someone like Google CEO (with the support of the board) to say: jumping to accusations will get you in trouble. Just because it's criticism doesn't make it sexist. We don't care about your social power pseudo scientific theory and we will not settle in court. Stop making the work place toxic. Then you need to have this sentiment repeated by other powerful people.

Chances of that happening in US in coming years? In my opinion about zero.

And those rumors kill careers, as TFA mentions.

> The risk is still there from the first contact to the last.

This is correct, and that's why this problem is very likely only going to get worse... And the people being cautious still won't be the ones to blame.

> But in any legal setting this will get shut down immediately

Outrage mobs don't need a legal setting to ruin someone's life (or livelihood).

I feel like we're probably not talking about the same thing.

Question: Would we, on average, expect an outrage mob response of the same size and magnitude when a man makes such an accusation? Whether or not this is justified by historical injustice is irrelevant here. What's salient is whether or not there is a gender skew.

If there is such a systematic and large societal gender skew, then we should expect people's cost/benefit calculations regarding the exposure to the risk of such accusations to also be skewed in a way that is large, systemic, and gender unequal. In a word, the way our society works around accusations, current day in 2021, is itself highly sexist.

Therefore, if we don't want systematized sexism, then we have to eliminate gendered skew in these cost/benefit calculations. We already know the mechanisms for the way out of this. It's codified in various legal systems, and in the values of historical liberal societies and philosophies. They are called respect for evidence, innocent until proven guilty, and due process. When society applies these principles gender neutrally, the gendered skew in individual cost/benefit calculations will even out, on average. Society will have eliminated another form of sexism, and the world will be a better place.

When one says "believe women" somehow in preference to believing men, this is a contributing factor. To avoid the gendered skew, it would be obviously impractical to say, "believe everyone." Hence: respect for evidence, innocent until proven guilty, and due process. Applied gender-neutrally, this is our way out.

In short, the tremendous power we've given mobs based on accusations not-requiring evidence is itself highly sexist, and this distorts our society to also be more sexist.

The only way rumors kill careers is if we fear the rumors.

If everyone is giving honest, straightforward feedback, then everyone has a rumor about them and it becomes powerless.

But if most people are afraid and one person gives honest feedback and is subjected to a rumor, the one rumor seems significant.

I guess I brought up the legal stuff because I think believing rumors is silly in general. If you’re actually the subject of discrimination, you should prove it in court for the benefit of yourself and society.

I’m not sure that we’re disagreeing entirely. I do agree with what you’re saying as well. Just hoping we can chart a new path.

But this leads me back to my previous comment: this isn't a feasible solution because it means basically asking people to self-sacrifice until the "rumors" lose power.

This is very naïve. For this to work, either people would have to be omniscient, or some karmic mechanism is ensuring that "justice always prevails." Let me assure you that neither is the case. I know this, because being different and being a minority, in various times and places, was enough pretext to let people attach falsehoods to you, and have it widely believed. We know this from false accusations in the Jim Crow US south. I know such things from my personal experience.

However, those mechanisms aren't the only ones. No-one is completely immune from such accusations, except for fleeting periods of extreme popularity and societal goodwill. A lie will get seven times around the world, before the truth laces its boots. This, too, I know from personal experience.

The question is this: Do we want mob mentality to be the arbiter of justice? Nearly a millennium of jurisprudence would firmly tell us: NO!

What's more, the mob mentality is clearly sexist! And it's the mob's sexism which is the root of the problem. On average, isn't there a much stronger mob reaction from a woman's accusation of sexism over a man's? It's this difference that gender-skews the cost/benefit calculation. This difference is itself sexist.

Justice doesn't come reliably from the mob. Instead, what we get is bias that results in more sexism. Funny that.

I think we're never going to reach an agreement so I'm cutting out.

The last thing I'll say is that there's a difference between this particular situation and historical resistances to oppression: If you were to even call this situation "oppression", it would only lead to further ridicule and ostracism, perhaps would even get most of the few people who might have sided with you to turn on you as well.

Like I said earlier; jumping on a grenade gets you a medal, the people who protested during rights movements are heroes. The ones you're calling now to self-sacrifice would very likely be considered "some more toxic males who finally got their just desserts".

Of course, I hope I'm wrong. In fact, I hope a better solution is found.

It is irrelevant that the majority does not actually think this way.

What is relevant is if there is a vocal minority who has power over you and your career that does. And any of the majority who steps out of line in opposition to this power structure individually gets destroyed.

You seem to be mistaking your desire for fair and righteous social dynamics for what actually is today: a Kafkaesque environment perpetuated by fear of anyone speaking up and then becoming a target for the mob and ruination.

Maybe you don't believe this, or maybe this isn't your experience, but take it from many of hundreds of commenters here, this article, or countless stories just like it that this is very real and justified fear.

This is quite literally exactly what has been happening, and it seem like it will continue happening because the loud minority has everyone else by the balls.

I think the difference for this particular case is that the people who have to stick their necks out are the people who generally don't have much to lose if the resistance fails. (Obviously this isn't the case for the larger discussion around combating sexism, where individual women bear the brunt of the risk, but for this particular advice-giving bit, it is.)

I feel like "giving into the fear of being labeled" doesn't fully capture the risk involved. For many people that labeling means the end of their career, or at the very least a lot of personal and professional embarrassment, plus a big negative mark on their record. I have a hard time looking down on anyone too hard for giving in to that fear.

Individuals will consider their jobs and thus their dependents' welfare more important than risking being publicly slaughtered to fix a mindset that's pretty ingrained now.

Without an explanation about which parts people find disagreeable, assuming thats how people are even using the voting system here, I have no idea what the real world consensus is or what they wish for it to be

You made this comment hours and hours ago. Yet in that time, 'what is grey' has changed. Things have been voted up and down. And who's to say that 5 years from now, 10 years, the 'web theme' of this site won't change.

And then grey means something else.

Now what you've said has changed, due to how the 'culture' on this site has changed.

Meanwhile, there have been people examining comments, and actions, people made even decades ago. Comments and actions taken out of context, single sentences quoted out of paragraphs from emails/etc, and then social media destroys them without care.

Not only must people now 'clam up' against current threat, but all potential future threat. A comment well received by a friend, can 20 years later be taken out of context, that context being historical, cultural, and personal.

And on top of all of that, a friend can become an enemy 20 years later, for entirely non-sexist, just normal person-to-person reasons. People can and do change over time, sometimes not for the better.

So:

* fear what you say now

* fear the future, for people will misquote 20 years later

* fear even female friends, for some may change over decades, and destroy you later

I don't think this is here now. But if the perception of what is happening continues much longer, it may.

Heck, I recall reading an article which coached men to "never be alone with a woman", for "she could claim anything later". This thought process makes it highly difficult to even give advice in private!

This isn't exceptional or even new, it's been solid advice for anyone in a position of public visibility for at least the past thirty years. The same goes for being alone with teenagers: It doesn't take that much effort to have witnesses and keep the door open, especially considering what a volatile other party will do to your life if you don't.

All it takes it is for a girl to even utter ‘that guy is kind of creepy’, and boom, people will extrapolate from something as simple as that.

Even the law, which is usually the last to evolve, clearly understands the difference between a death caused by self defense and murder.

Well, I think that unlike women or bin-binary people, a man wouldn't be able of accusing another man of sexism in his direction.

Regardless, we’re talking about social judgements. In a legal setting the burden of proof would be on the accuser.

And like many legal outcomes, just being accused is its own stigma. Someone accused of murder but then later (let's say objectively, truthfully, correctly) found not guilty will expect to face social discrimination and alienation. It's not right, but it's unfortunately how people operate.

With female its the potential unknown predictability that causes the fear.

Risk is the combination of chance of occurence with effect. If the effect is large then a tiny chance is worth making active protections against.

Given what we've seen in the past few years and how such incidents appear to be on the increase, the chance doesn't even seem that tiny.

It is treating people differently based on the damage that they can do to you. Generally a woman accusing you of being sexist is will do more damage than a man doing the same (not universally, but usually). So while the outcome is equivalent the decision is based on the very real threat, not the gender.

The words sexism/racism often get confused with discrimination.

Oxford definition of “sexism” via Google:

> prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex

The definition of sexism seems to include discrimination. What definition are you using?

So labelling anything where two genders are treated differently as 'sexism' or 'sexist' I don't think actually matches the modern usage of the word. I think the difference is it's usually used in a negative connotation and the type of discrimination is seen as non-acceptable - for instance most people wouldn't call a girl-band or boy-band sexist because they select their members based on gender, while most would call an employer sexist if they had a generic business and tried to segregate their teams into single-gender teams. Most people still don't have a problem with boy bands (i.e. a male-only-team in a music workplace), thus not sexist, but do have a problem with male-only-teams in other workplaces, thus sexist.

Enforcing a rule isn’t discrimination. The rule itself may or may not be discrimination.

> Most people still don't have a problem with boy bands (i.e. a male-only-team in a music workplace), thus not sexist, but do have a problem with male-only-teams in other workplaces, thus sexist.

They get the label “boy band” after they form. If they were a mixed gender group (like a workplace) and kicked out a talented female musician because they wanted to be male-only, that would be sexist.

Also, I hate to break the illusion for you, but boy bands are often planned as such and are manufactured by the record labels. It’s not a coincidence, for example, that the spice girls are all girls - that’s because they only auditioned girls because they were making the spice girls.

That's why I stated it is a semantic discussion.

On the one hand, I think this redefining is good. Because when we talk about the problems of racism and sexism, the prevalent form of negative discrimination (so in the west, racism by white people, and sexism by males) are what we tend to mean.

On the other hand, other forms of discrimination also happen, and we need words to describe them. Racism and sexism used to describe that, but by now such describing tends to feel bad. It tends to feel like drawing an equivalence between e.g. a white person not being able to use the N-word being 'just as bad' as the oppression faced by black people in America.

I feel we need separate words for both the systemic (non intentional) oppression of people by sex and gender. And discrimination based on sex and gender in general. Originally racism and sexism used to describe the latter. Slowly we are moving towards having it mean the former, without having new words for the latter. Ideally wish we had just come up with new words for the latter. But that would have lost some of the power that comes from calling someone a racist or a sexist.

In conclusion, semantics matter, and are hard.

If that is what comes to mind when people talk about white discrimination, then there is a large disconnect in the discussion when talking about the semantic meaning of sexism and racism.

If two people apply to a university and the critical distinction why one got excluded is race, then that is a negative discrimination. If two people are accused of identifical crime and the the critical distinction why one got a harsher sentence is race, then that is negative discrimination. If two people are illegally demonstrating on the street and one get violently assaulted for doing so, and the critical distinction is race, then that is negative discrimination.

Some of that negative discrimination harms white people, some black people, some both in different circumstances, and there is many more situation where such discrimination occurs. Same in regard to gender.

The woke reactions would be like: It’s really saying, "I don’t really see what makes you you". We want you to see the benefit of the diversity people bring to the table. Being colour-blind used to be woke, now it's whitewashing.

My comment: apparently they need the attributes to define the identity they rally around. You can't not see them anymore because it is interpreted as ignoring their identity.

What's different is the moral color of the sexism. If Eric treats women differently in his workplace because he thinks they should be raising babies, not writing code, our cultural norms say Eric is a Bad Person.

Now suppose Bob genuinely believes women and men should have equal opportunities and career paths in the workplace. But Bob treats women differently in his workplace because he's afraid of a false accusation that ends up with him getting sued, fired, having his reputation ruined, etc.

Then we'd say that Bob isn't a bad person. Or at the very least, he's not anywhere near as bad as Eric. He's just trying to do his best to protect himself from a social system he doesn't control, that will grind him up if he gets caught in its gears.

If you take the definition of "sexism" to be "treating people differently based on their gender," the case against Bob is airtight. Bob's literally a sexist: He treats women differently because of gender.

I think the reason you're trying to argue Bob's not a sexist is because the word "sexist" itself is normative. Sexists are Bad People like Eric. Bob's not a Bad Person, so we shouldn't use the word "sexist" to describe him, because "sexist" has a moral color -- part of the meaning of the label is that you're a Bad Person.

In other words, if you say Bob's not a sexist, you must be taking your definition of "sexist" to be something else. Treating women differently for a certain kind of reason.

With this more nuanced definition of "sexist," it's possible that Eric's a sexist and Bob is not, even if their actual actions toward women are the same.

To properly describe what Bob is, you might need to create a new word to describe someone who treats women differently, but in a morally neutral way (or at least a lighter shade of grey).

Racism might also benefit from having a term that fills this linguistic / conceptual niche. ("Systemic racism" might have fit the bill at one time, but I think that particular term has become colored -- pun intended -- by a moral connotation.)

It didn't used to be a spectrum and it's a terrible innovation that it's viewed that way today by so many. Racist used to refer to people that believed in the inferiority and superiority of certain races. Only recently has it become socially acceptable to accuse someone of racism or sexism at any sign of prejudice. This is a major cause of the divisiveness in the culture today and if you're doing it, you're part of the problem.

When we talk about people's prejudices it causes us to examine potential solutions in a productive way. When we accuse someone of being racist or sexist, we imply that they're beyond redemption, and we can skip right to hating them and feeling superior about ourselves.

Anyone interested in having good faith conversations should actively avoid labeling anyone or any action as a racist or sexist. The genuine racists and sexists are usually more than happy to self-identify as such. Everyone else, and I mean everyone else, is just a mixed bag of good and bad prejudices that can, with work, be improved over time.

At anything that the most hostile interpretation possible could somehow construe as racism/sexism.

And basically, anything can be construed as racism/sexism given some of the current definitions.

Sitting peacefully on your couch minding your own business is racism, according to Kendi/diAngelo.

Treating women equally and not achieving perfect equality of outcome is sexism. Treating men and women differently in order the achieve equality of outcome: also sexism.

Leaving women to make their own choices, which may not exactly match men's, is sexism.

Giving women candid feedback is so sexism. Not giving women candid feedback: also sexism.

Yeah, and that is weird, isn't it?

Because most people nowadays would not consider it a sexist action for a woman to cross the street because there is a man walking.

In fact, these days it seems to be demanded of men to notice the situation and cross the street if they are walking near a woman, so to self-discriminate. And the man would be considered sexist/misogynist if they didn't self-discriminate this way.

It's all so wonderfully self-contradictory.

In my opinion, the nuance is whether the difference is truly because of gender or if gender is just something with a high correlation.

For example, if an average man says to me "give me your wallet or I'll beat you up", I'm likely to do it since I'm on the smaller side. If an average woman did that, I'd say no. So maybe it seems like sexism at first, but then I consider, if a woman threatened me who was the size and build and general risk of an average man, what would I do? I'd hand over my wallet.

I'm sorry if it was interpreted this way (I know some people want this, but this is not what I'm advocating for).

> Isn't the entire point that we want less of it?

This is goal. But we also can't solve a problem if we don't acknowledge it. To do that expanding the definition helps. BUT if you expand the definition you need to also respond differently (this is where I disagree with what we see). We need to see nuance that there's a big difference between rape and not being as open with advice due to potentially becoming a social pariah. Our responses to these should be extremely different (which is what I'm advocating for). But this also means we need to recognize our progress (which I've been accused of for dog whistling having said that).

I just think we need to stop making our fights over diction and about philosophy. If we're placing diction over philosophy we'll never solve anything and always be fighting. We can never have unanimous agreement on diction, that's just not how language works (words evolve). So the question is if your disagreements with me mainly over word choice or if we have disagreements in philosophy (and are they minor or major?)