The Ada Initiative fundraiser was a phenomenal success, and one of the cool results is that we’ll be having an Ally Skills workshop at Skepticon. That’s good, and I think they’re doing it right, with an expert to tell the men what to do and what not to do.
These things can go so wrong, though.
A conference celebrating Grace Hopper and women in computing did it in a terrible way: they had a Male Allies Plenary Panel in which a small group of big name male tech leaders (including a guy from GoDaddy, believe it or not) were put on the stage to tell everyone how good they are at supporting women.
I can guess how everyone of you reading that last sentence were cringing. You know what came next, right?
The assembled white men set out to tell the audience what their companies are doing to make women more welcome and how men and women (yes, that’s right—women, too) can change the boys’ club culture in tech.
Instead, they ended up reinforcing many of the stereotypes women are already all too familiar with. In essence, their advice to women was: Work harder, build great things, speak up for yourself, lean in. It got so bad that at one point, the audience started heckling the speakers.
See also Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s recommendations to women. This was so predictable that the attendees had bingo cards ready.
Now I do think the Ada Initiative is doing it right, and they aren’t putting guys on a pedestal to mansplain ally skills to everyone, but there is so much potential for guys to embarrass me for my sex. Like the time at an atheist conference when a white male atheist stood up to confront Sikivu Hutchinson, telling her that race wasn’t a problem in the atheist movement because he, personally, did not see color and was going to treat all the black speakers exactly as he would white people.
That’s what I dread. We’ll get a good presentation, the Q&A will roll around, and some wanker, like the pair who got their photo by the elevator sign last year, will be in attendance just for laughs and will ask some question that they regard as clever and pointed, and then I’ll just have to puke on their heads, right there in public. Really, public emesis is one of those things I hate. I won’t feel good about it. They’ll really feel awful. I just hope it doesn’t happen.
(There’s also the possibility that I’ll be trying so hard to be a good ally myself that I’ll say something stupid. That happens, too, and it’s even worse.)
A Bronx cheer is also juicy and makes a statement without staining the rug.
Maybe we could crowdsource pithy retorts to each of the Bingo squares. (We have enough brains here to feed a zombie apocalypse.)
I’ll give it a running start : “That’s a terrible misconception because ________________.
Too bad John Stossel has pretty much ruined the phrase “gimme a break” as a lead-in, cause it used to be a good start.
I try to not say stupid things out of respect rather than fear. I ascribe to the adage “you learn more from mistakes than succeses”. Of course, I’m not under the same scrutiny as PZ so this comment is now less than helpful, i think. Hmmm…imma stop typing now.
I’m confused by “calls a woman articulate”. Is that a dog whistle phrase that I’m not aware of? Has being articulate become an insult while I wasn’t paying attention? Do women just not like being described that way? Is it a standard way of damning someone with faint praise? A way of avoiding engagement with the content of a speech by focusing on the presentation? I’m sure there’s a good reason for it being there, but no clue what that reason is.
It’s a way of saying, “she sure is good at talking”, and is part of a standard stereotype of women, that they are chatty. It’s also got elements of the opposite: you’ll also see “articulate” applied to black people in particular, as if they’re surprised that they can actually speak coherently.
Basically, it’s patronizing.
I noticed that one too, stuartsmith. Maybe it’s something like describing a piece of art as “interesting”. I never saw what was so bad about that either. Would it be better to say it was uninteresting?
It’s a “you’re a credit to your race/gender” kind of thing. Like women are chatty but don’t say anything worth listening to usually so having successfully conveyed an idea that was worth paying attention to is worthy of note.
“Articulate” is about the way I put together my speech, not how I put together my ideas or about the content of those ideas.
I know that cringe, PZ. Even at this past weekend’s Moving Social Justice conference, we had too many audience questions that I distilled as “Have you considered white people?”
It’s worth noting the sequel to the Grace Hopper conference story, though:
1. The organizers did NOT go into defensive mode, but actually joined in on the hashtag created by the hecklers, and encouraged people to start a discussion about what they wished had been done differently.
2. When the CEOs browsed the twitter stream afterwards, they realized their mistake and they (three of them did, anyway) quickly organized a “reverse” panel, where they invited the women to talk while they simply kept quiet and listened. And took pages of notes.
An excellent example of how to learn from mistakes instead of repeating them.
I never really got the “articulate” complaint either. I think that’s because there’s some disagreement in expectations and terminology.
To me, “articulate” is a rare skill, essentially identical to “excellent speaker.” Because why else would you even mention it? But it can be taken to mean “not inarticulate,” effectively “capable speaker” or “functional speaker.” Which really is faint praise. You wouldn’t say that unless you were literally surprised the subject was consistently comprehensible.
The upshot of this is that the term is ambiguous, and if you want to compliment someone’s speaking skill, you should try to clarify the ambiguity, or use another term entirely.
Or maybe I’ve completely failed to get it. That’s always possible.
The one I’m not familiar with is “lean in”.
Is it bad to say that people should stand up for themselves?, and I know more than most how hard this is, but if you don’t stand up, no one will ever care.., they won’t not your friends your, family or your coworkers if you still have them. no one will care. chances are speaking out of turn will result in violence from one or all of those groups
Tony @ 11
I’m not familiar with that one either but I’m guessing it has something to do with this:
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead is a 2013 book written by Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, and Nell Scovell, TV and magazine writer
@andyethereweare
It’s putting the onus on women to change the culture when it’s men who largely have the actual power to change it. It also implies that women aren’t already standing up and completely ignoring that the sequel to standing up is almost invariably becoming a target for abuse.
Tony
It’s a martial arts metaphor. It comes from IT management theory called six sigma that supposedly is about team building and lean business models. It’s the equivalent of being told to roll with it when you are flung from a moving vehicle.
One woman standing up to misogynists…
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/10/15/all-of-gamergate-summarized/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/10/14/this-is-what-it-has-come-to/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/10/14/gamergate-is-getting-the-attention-of-the-media/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/10/08/anita-sarkeesian-on-forms-of-harassment/
Now will you face reality?
Tethys @15:
Ok, I understand now.
Thank you.
I think one of the key points of a bingo card is that the squares aren’t necessarily bad things, but cliched, trite and totally predictable. It might be something that became a buzz-word 5 years ago, or a token example that gets repeated ad nauseam.
Of course, some are downright awful.
I’ve decided to start calling this “yuppie racism”.
I can do that, because I was at one point a yuppie racist, just like the guy quoted here. It’s what they taught us in school:
“be colorblind and there will be no racism!”
it was ignorant to the point of being dangerously so.
Bring a spray bottle and try to condition people like you would cats.
ah, of course, in the “everything under the sun” department, I see I am already too late to claim it!
http://jbs.sagepub.com/content/21/4/445.extract
@Tony: The one I’m not familiar with is “lean in”. I say we all take the term back and make it a dance move so we can ID each other on the dance floor.
I think all corporate management efforts at team building would be much improved by dance lessons. I much prefer it as an effective approach to mutual cooperation, rather than the we are brothers in arms fighting battles to the death model that is so prevalent.
Tethys @15
I hadn’t heard of “Lean in” either. Also, I thought “6 sigma” was something the TV show 30 Rock made up to satirize corporate buzzwords.
John @22:
I’m game. I haven’t danced in ages, but I used to-a lot.
Six Sigma. I work under a similar system for the pharma industry, ICH.
5S, that was our 6 sigma at Boeing, the joke was ‘some stupid supervisor said so’
Six Sigma is simply quality control and best practices common to any form of project management with the added element of efficiency specialists who are denoted with various belt colors just like karate. The Art of War by Sun Tzu is commonly recommended reading for management specialists.. I can’t decide if the love of military precision and perfect efficiency is due to modern project management originating with the US Army Corps of Engineers, or it’s just that engineers as a group tend to enjoy quantifying things, precision, and the military.
Guys, the “Lean In” reference is about the book by Sandberg, whose advice boiled down to “JUST FAKE CONFIDENCE AND TRY HARDER AND BE NICER!” and the powerful white men will let women have more executive jobs. It was garbage. It wasn’t even new garbage. But it provided the white dudebros a woman to cite as proof of “See, I support women! I totes read Sheryl’s book and she’s so right omg! Women just need to try more!”
bell hooks did a viciously awesome take down of why it was crappy here: http://thefeministwire.com/2013/10/17973/
Bryce Covert at Forbes talked along the same lines: http://www.forbes.com/sites/brycecovert/2013/02/25/lean-in-trickle-down-the-false-promise-of-sheryl-sandbergs-theory-of-change/
yeah, all sounds like the old trope:
if black/poor/women/EVERYMINORITYEVER just tried harder, why there’s simply nothing standing in their way!
phht.
ignorant bullshit and rationalization at best, deliberate attempt to deflect at worst.
drst
Yes, that was already mentioned up at comment #13 by bargearse. The term does not originate in her book. The weird martial arts mindset of Six Sigma originated in, and is SOP in the tech industry. I have heard the metaphor about leaning in to blows so as to throw your opponent off balance or similar many times at management team building meetings. How the principles of hand to hand combat apply to team building has never been particularly clear.
“Articulate” is a lot like “lovely and talented.” It’s flattering on the surface, but the fact that it’s so often applied to particular kinds of people makes it suspect. Moreover, it’s so cliché and blasé that it’s basically saying “I don’t know enough about this person to introduce them properly or give them any meaningful compliment, but I also don’t want to say something that may come across as offensive, so here’s a neutral term that could apply to most people who would get up in front of a group of people and speak.”
Articulate. To me, it’s being used as a description of someone who is better spoken than the stereotype would have it. When they say it about Obama, I hear them saying that they expect African Americans to be unintelligent and to use ghetto language. Likewise, apparently, in this case. “She expresses herself well, for a woman.” or “For a woman, she has worth while opinions and she argues well for them.”
I smell bigotry.
Some people just have a hard time grasping, or maybe don’t want to believe, that the people who make jobs difficult for women are really, really interested in not recognizing them no matter their merits.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
15 October 2014 at 7:03 pm
Is it bad to say that people should stand up for themselves?,
One woman standing up to misogynists…
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/10/15/all-of-gamergate-summarized/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/10/14/this-is-what-it-has-come-to/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/10/14/gamergate-is-getting-the-attention-of-the-media/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/10/08/anita-sarkeesian-on-forms-of-harassment/
Now will you face reality?
I am unclear what reality you want me to face?
Is it being punched it the head ?
Is it having people try to kill me ?
Is it being robbed in front of cops ?
What is it you want me to face?
My friends that have been raped?
Maybe my friends that have died?
Or is it my friends that have been so badly damaged by what has happened in their lives that they will never recover, and will die broken, and miserable and sick.
Maybe you should be silent
Tethys @ 31
Oh wow. I’ve had to put up with this nonsense for at least the last 15 years, it’s probably the leading cause of cynicism in my workplace. I guess I’m lucky I’ve never encountered the “lean in” reference before.
that last should be Tethys @ 28 my bad
andyethereweare @ 35
Will you kindly GTFO until you can be coherent?
You said:
You answered your own fucking question: “chances are speaking out of turn will result in violence from one or all of those groups.” Then Nerd spells it out for you and you still don’t see it. It’s not the victim’s responsibility to stop the bully from bullying and sticking your neck out often only makes things worse. Get your head out of your fucking ass.
@38 YOU are profoundly stupid
Ok.
The truth is I am terrified of almost everything. the one thing I am not afraid of is physical violence, which seems madness
Seven of Mine don’t feel bad, it’s 4 am I still think that people should stand up and throw down..
there is more than average F**K YOU in me…
But it’s me I am afraid all the time.
Not someone you want to emulate…
@andyethereweare, 12
The point isn’t that standing up for yourself is a bad thing, it’s that women are already standing up for themselves, and have been for a very long time. They’ve been standing up for themselves for such a long time, in fact, that this is now considered to be the third or possibly fourth wave of organised women-standing-up-for-themselves. So, to suggest that they stand up for themselves is, frankly, a useless comment.
“Hey! Why don’t you do that thing that you’ve been doing all this time?”
Standing up for yourself is great, it really is, but pointing out that women need to stand up for themselves in order to get a fairer treatment in the business world kinda seems like they’re saying, “sure, we’ll treat you like real people, just as soon as you start doing what you’ve been doing all this time,” and expecting to be thanked for their insight. No, they’re already standing up, and, rather than telling them to stand up, businesses should start taking them seriously.
You are terrified of the English language, and of thinking clearly.
People who do stand up for themselves, especially women, are harassed and demeaned for doing so.
Don’t understand the TRUTH? The shut the fuck up and listen to women until you do understand.
Yep, you are somebody not to emulate. You preach, and can’t/won’t listen. Not the way to learn, with your mind closed and mouth open. Reverse that, have an open mind and closed mouth, and learning can happen.
After reading through the latter comments from andyethereweare, I was kind of at a loss for what to say afterward, but I’m going to have to sort of parrot Nerd @44:
@andyethereweare
In your first comment, you asked what was wrong about telling people to stand up for themselves. After being shown one reason why – that standing up for yourself exposes you to backlash from those who want to force you back down – you dismissed it, because bad things have happened to you too. Well, so what? Some bad things have happened to me too, so should I just dismiss your issues because of them?
If you don’t understand why something is a problem, fine, ask and take the answers you’re given, but if all you want to do is surreptitiously assert that something isn’t true and dismiss any correction on the matter, well, have you considered all the joys that fucking off might bring?
Hmm. My invisibility cloak seems caught in the “on” position….
Hmmm… I might just have to do that
andyethereweare is incoherent and babbling, but I have no problem noticing when someone says everyone should kill themselves and makes jokes about prison rape — and even thinks prisons should be a place for rape.
andyethereweare is now andyethereheisnot. Banned.
I’ve always hated “lean in” even as a man. I remember reading last year about a study showing the same stereotypes of men hurt men’s earning: Men who are not aggressive enough, or assertive or demanding enough, or not BS artists, also make less than men who exhibit those traits. Why would anyone defend an environment where the necessary job skills aren’t as important as how good a BS artist you are? I can only imagine it is the privileged who defend it, or those who clawed their way up.
I have been doing communications training and speaking practice to help my own career, but it is one thing to tell a loved one “I know it’s not fair but you’ve got to try this until things change” it is quite another thing to tell everyone they have to change but the people creating the negative/inefficient/hostile environment don’t have to change or are not responsible for it. That is why there is nothing “wrong” with telling one person you know, it is wrong to write books and speak as if that is the answer.
Even if they are correct that it’s tech-geek lack of social skills or some innate behavior, that’s still not an excuse. We should be rising above our baser natures, not wallowing in them and actually defending social Darwinism.
Ah – wow. Drive into work after reading the start of this and seem to have missed some really ugly bits that got tossed. I’m glad I missed it – that was getting weird fast. Yuck.
Seven of Mine – are you okay?
I just wanted to note that the space between “stand up for yourself” and “what a b*tch (aggressive / angry / offputting)” is one-dimensional, if it exists at all. It is an ugly presumption and an even uglier needle that you are expected to thread.
Ibis – I see you! Yep. It is all our fault for not cleaning up their mess, right? Ugh!
To my understanding, “articulate” isn’t really much of a complement – it merely denotes competence, rather than exceptional ability, and if mere competence is worth remarking on when encountered in a member of a minority, that implies that it’s unusual amongst that minority. Saying “that woman is articulate” seems to imply “most women are inarticulate”.
If you genuinely want to compliment someone on their communication abilities, I’d say the term you really want is “eloquent”. (Although I do note that Google shows the frequency of “eloquent” has declined since the mid 19th C, while the frequency of “articulate” has risen over the last few decades, so this may be one of those things where the connotations of words are in flux. Or it may be a British English vs American English thing.)
@ pHred
It’s quite a blow to be called stupid by someone who can’t compose an intelligible sentence but I think I’ll manage.
Also, you’re exactly right. Assertiveness, where it doesn’t get you abused, gets you labeled abrasive and difficult to work with. None of this “if you want to succeed you have to behave like men behave” shit actually works. If anything, it’s counterproductive as evidenced by the *ahem* thoughtful advice given by Satya Nadella this week.
@ Seven of Mine,
It was the “Ok.” that threw me. You are one of the kickback warriors around here. OTOH I am not sure what sort of response I would have to 39 either.
Haha, yeah it was just meant to be a dismissal like if you wanna just fling poo, have at it. I’ll be over here not giving a fuck.
PZ, don’t initiate public puke fests during an ebola outbreak!
Brian @9, thank you for the post-conference update. It’s a curious thing that a small group of wealthy guys can assemble an entire crowd to watch them learn basic shit about human decency. Here’s hoping that the post-conference reverse panel wasn’t just a PR exercise in damage control.
http://www.isixsigma.com/new-to-six-sigma/statistical-six-sigma-definition/ — I first heard about six-sigma with regard to Honda, Nissan, and Toyota, and how they had managed to strip away the American car companies’ financial advantage — the big dealership profits came from the repair shops — by producing cars that didn’t break down. They built to a six-sigma standard of only a handful of defective parts per million. The tech sector then co-opted this as a bullshit zen sort of mantra that had nothing to do with selling software and consulting services, but made the MBAs sound clever, like when they’d say “The Chinese character for risk combines the symbols for threat and opportunity” (not true, by the way). But at least the American car industry took six-sigma to heart and started making better cars.
PZ said:
Well, that’s precisely the sort of wanker who should be in an ally skills workshop, isn’t it? I mean, what other place and time in the universe are they as likely to learn how not to be (at least that kind of) a wanker?
Tethys #28
Honestly, I don’t beleive that this is true, or rather, I beleive that the people who promote things like ‘Six Sigma’ mean things by the terms ‘quality control’ and ‘best practices’ that are sufficiently at variance with any useful meaning of those words as to effectively communicate nothing.
By the blistering bollocks of Beelzebub that’s stupid. Even in actual martial arts, the whole colored belt rank thing is part and parcel of the transition from hand-to-hand combat techniques to sports (which is why there’s no real standard of what belts come where, although a loose consensus has developed in most regions). So, if the metaphor is based on ruthless combat (as the reading of The Art of War implies), they really shouldn’t be doing that. If the metaphor is that we’re all playing a big game together, there should be some very, very different behaviour patterns. (BTW, I’ve read The Art of War; it’s a good guide to military strategy, and as such contains a few tips that are useful for organizing any large enterprise, but there’s nothing uniquely applicable to the business world in there. Musashi’s Five Rings, another popular recommendation by these types of twits, has even less applicability to the business world, although it’s an excellent guide on how to be a badass samurai, if such is your ambition.
That’s leaving aside the inevitable question of what they mean by ‘efficiency’ (effieiently doing what? What inputs and outputs are they measuring? Are those, in fact, the relevant things to measure in this context?, etc. IME, the answers to these are pretty much always, in order, enriching the already excessively wealthy, the wrong ones, and no.)
It’s neither of these things. It’s that a) management likes a top-down, authoritarian structure for things, like the military has, and b) many people, especially engineers and those who’ve been to business school, mistakenly beleive that militaries accomplish things efficiently, which is patently absurd on the face of it. The confusion appears to arise because people conflate military precision and military effectiveness
with military efficiency, when in fact the three concepts are only tangentially related. Effectiveness is simply the question of whether a task gets done or not. Militaries are often very good at accomplishing military tasks like ‘go shoot those people’, or ‘blow that place the hell up’. The tasks in question are usually horrific and rarely of any use, but militaries are often very good at doing them. Efficiency, on the other hand, is accomplishing a specified task with a minimum expenditure of resources. Militaries pretty much intrinsically suck at this, since most of the things they do either shouldn’t be done at all or should be accomplished by nonmilitary means, which are cheaper. Precision, meanwhile, is often a bonus to efficiency, but excessive concern for precision can interfere with actually getting things done at a reasonable cost; if millimeter tolerances are good enough, it’s often more trouble than it’s worth to machine things to micrometer tolerances, frex. Many so-called ‘efficiency’ practices are like that; they’re counterproductive, because all the micromanaging stresses people out and pisses them off to the point that they don’t do as much or as good work as they would if some asshole with a stopwatch wasn’t leaning over them every fucking second.
Gretchen #57
Nah, those twits need a sort of remedial ‘Why you be less of an asshole’ workshop. Once they’ve mastered that, then they can move on to ‘How to be an Ally’.
plutosdad#49
The obvious answer is assholes and BS artists who have no useful skills, a type all too common in the business world.
@bargearse / Tethys
If it’s not nuclear war or global warming, I’m convinced humanity will be destroyed by the growing delusion that having a compliant process completely obviates the need to do things right and neatly dispenses with common sense. How can you check that the correctly named documents are there, but not give a damn whether they are nonsense from start to finish?!
And as anyone who dares to protest is clearly not a “team player”, those whose brain survived the washing can only suffer in silence…
That’s why inside a single company above scenario wouldn’t have played out that way. It’s only because it was in public that the “normal” corporate way of doing things (positive thinking etc.) didn’t prevail.
@Dalillama, Schmott Guy
Please, please, please write a bestselling management book that takes he business world by storm while I’m still hanging on to my sanity by a whisker!
I thought so too. The entire meeting was an exercise in stupid. No, my fellow employees are not samurai warriors or army enlisted personnel. I am not a military officer, I oversee customer satisfaction. Whythefuk would you treat all your employees as stupid peons if the goal you are trying to achieve is team cohesion and trust? Military efficiency is an oxymoron. If I wanted to spend my life filling out the proper forms in triplicate and dealing with authoritarian petty dictator types, I would have joined the military.
A few of the top corporations are starting to drop the Six Sigma ideology. The process works well when applied to building reliable vehicles, or manufacturing things that really need stringent QC standards such as pharmaceuticals or medical devices. It doesn’t work as a philosophy for managing people. The only team cohesion fostered by the Six Sigma training was all of the samurai jokes and John Belushi impressions. It was fun to mess with the occasional cranky demanding head engineer by politely offering to have the offending technician ordered to fall on their sword.
It also doesn’t work well for innovative ideas, which is why a lot of tech companies cropped it back to just be production oriented, and allowed new products freer reign until they are commercialized. Six sigma is designed for continuous improvement, not product innovation.