The point is, in the lean management organization you don't really have someone to take you aside and tell you to stop being a dick.
This is especially problematic when trying to overcome culturally calcified gender discrimination. What you're describing as being a "blunt bastard" could very well come off as male-privileged locker room talk. In the sports world there have been numerous attempts to contort locker room talk as somehow gender neutral, just a function of personality, some women talk that way, not all men do, and so forth. These arguments miss the forest for the trees: there does exist a culture of male privilege that is overwhelmingly less welcoming to women.
But how do we distinguish between this possibility, and the possibility that we are treating women as delicate flowers who can't deal with 'bad words' or blunt criticism?
In the Victorian era, until relatively recent times, men were expected to refrain from swearing or discussing 'serious' subjects such as war or politics when 'ladies were present'.
The usage (or not) of blunt words of criticism or profanity in informal company documents (e.g. code comments, pull requests) isn't necessarily a gendered thing. It speaks to the company's culture, but it nevertheless feels like a step backward to suggest the corporate equivalent of "gentlemen need to mind their language when ladies are around".
> These arguments miss the forest for the trees: there does exist a culture of male privilege that is overwhelmingly less welcoming to women.
Where there are problems that affect both genders, they should be tackled as that - treating a 'loud people' versus 'quiet people' problem as a male privilege problem is unbelievably problematic since it plays into the 'women just can't cope with men being honest' bullshit, and ignores the fact that men can be quiet and women can be loud. This devalues women's contributions and effectively silences discourse about how to deal with quiet men and loud women (and in this tale the latter was a big part of the problem), and basically is a net negative for everybody except the loud men, thereby reinforcing gender role designations and privilege structures.
> What you're describing as being a "blunt bastard" could very well come off as male-privileged locker room talk.
And in that case, once again, I've failed at "remember who you're talking to". The manner in which I LART somebody if it's necessary is tailored to the person, because people are all different.
> The point is, in the lean management organization you don't really have someone to take you aside and tell you to stop being a dick.
Given that Shadowcat has next to no hierarchy and yet we do have somebody - me - I'm not entirely sure how to respond to that except perhaps to say 'oh, bother' and disappear in a puff of logic.
You're bending over backwards to avoid admitting sexism exists in tech. That's like saying both men and women engage in locker room talk, so there's no sexism in professional sports and in fact it's sexist to imply that women can't handle locker room talk. We've heard that one before.
> You're bending over backwards to avoid admitting sexism exists in tech.
I'm saying that sometimes the answer is to remember that people are different full stop rather than jump straight to gender as the key difference, which may give you a mistaken analysis of the problem. If you have a situation that disadvantages quiet nice people and most of your quiet nice people are women, this results in negative outcomes for women but the best path to a solution is to figure out how to fix it for -all- quiet nice people.
I've made no claim either way in this thread so far as to whether sexism exists in tech - what I've done is to point out certain things that were cultural/management fuckups in general rather than specifically sexist, and to suggest that calling them what they are will make them easier to fix. It seems reasonably likely to be true that the origin of the bias against 'quiet nice people' comes out of gender roles, but that which is sanely classifiable as structural sexism at an institutional and cultural level by the time it manifests at the ground level is hurting everybody holding those personality traits and is therefore best dealt with as it is.
Or: Patriarchy theory is a useful analysis tool but I'm damned if I'm going to try and teach it to everybody if I can get results at least as effective much more quickly by making them realise they're being an asshole to nice people.
Honestly, I would rate the probability as pretty high that the culture also has a sexism problem, and that there will be plenty of issues that are best addressed in those terms, but that's orthogonal to the point I was trying to make.
theorique, it's like asking whether complimenting someone passing on the street is a nice sweet thing to do or outrageously sexist. You could come up with rationalizations either way. But it's ultimately about the environment that it creates and how women (or minorities) feel in it. And that's up to the women, not the dudes rationalizing the status quo.
This is especially problematic when trying to overcome culturally calcified gender discrimination. What you're describing as being a "blunt bastard" could very well come off as male-privileged locker room talk. In the sports world there have been numerous attempts to contort locker room talk as somehow gender neutral, just a function of personality, some women talk that way, not all men do, and so forth. These arguments miss the forest for the trees: there does exist a culture of male privilege that is overwhelmingly less welcoming to women.