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Helping Men in Tech Help Women In Tech

Judith on April 06, 2018

I went to the Anita Borg Institute's NY Male Ally Summit last week and learned so much about why men historically haven't mentored women; not ju...
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Vladimir Jovanović

I am really tired of this aggressive neo-feminism and I can't support generalizations like this one.

I have never seen situations you have described here in my 20 years of work and whenever I was in situation to help women colleagues - I have. Moreover, we stayed great friends even after we all changed jobs.

So, instead of painting all of us (white) men in this manner - try to think of it like this: if someone is misbehaving, it is not because of his gender or even skin color. It is simply because that person is a jerk.

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Moriah Maney

Just because you "haven't seen it", doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

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Vladimir Jovanović • Edited

I am sure that it does happen since not everyone is the same, but generalizations like you have mentioned will not help anyone. They will only divide us further.

How would you react if you found out that women behave similar to male colleagues? Scheming and gossiping behind their backs until they get fired, just because they don't like them?

Well, it also happens, but I am not lecturing entire female kind for the despicable acts of few bad apples.

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Moriah Maney

If you had taken the time to look, you'd realize I didn't write this post.

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Vladimir Jovanović

Sorry, I have replied through e-mail link and was brought straight to reply section.

Justifying generalizations is never good. One must really try to see both sides of the problem before giving into lectures like the one above. It is a problem that the world is going in that direction - too many passionate opinions, but not enough wisdom behind them.

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Judith

Vladimir,
Thank you for your honest comments. I think we all agree that bad behaviors at work hurt us all (men and women alike). Its so good to hear that your experience at work has been that women are being supported in their professional endeavors! My experience as a woman at work over the last 25 years (more than a decade as a software engineer) has been different. It is my hope and prayer that we all experience the same good fortune as you one day. Namaste!

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Ryosuke

Great advice. It's hard pounding some of these seemingly simple ideals into some people's brains. The patriarchy is strong out there, especially in the corporate space.

Gotta keep spreading the truth to offset this imbalance ✌️

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Judith

Thanks for your comment!

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Alex Holberg

First up. I acknowledge this is a sensitive and difficult topic to some, but here is my view (hopefully deprived of strong opinion)

The listed reasons are definitely not fictional. Generally (I know, I'm generlizing) women write code with above average quality, yet receive a lower income. At least so I've been told in a lecture on culture.

Issue is, much of it has roots in culture and psychee of people, which is very difficult to change. A male might not realize that he is contributing to a more hostile environment for females, because it is ingrained in his natural inclination to seek help among other males instead of going to a female, and thus not find it appropriate to go ask.

In that (constructed) scenario, the male can have all above listed actions well memorized, yet still not take action becayse of psychology.

Humans are weird. We polerize, label, justify, argue, and generalize things to try to logically work stuff out. Yet in the end, we're still sacks of emotions, hormones, and experiences stumbeling through decisions convinced it was the best outcome, guided more by our internal chemistry than any logic.

Yet that's just my point of view in the narrow slice of the world I call my life.

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Alex Holberg

To make things clear, I definitely support that genders should be treated equally.

What I don't endorse is the use of derogative words. It just polerizes the conversation and riles up participants. Derogatives makes people on the recieving end defensive because of what feels like a personal atack.

-Hence why I felt the need to add this comment. A word like "manteruption" might not seem harsh, but I definitely instantly distanced myself from your article and felt strong disagreement.

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Judith

Bravo! Well said!

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IsaacLeimgruber

Yeah I believe as well, but I don't believe your statement is neutral and I barely agree on anything else

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IsaacLeimgruber

And another thing. We are devs, young or old, but if our community does not take serious time to go through the statistics to give some shades to its words then don't expect anyone in the world to make informed decisions. I say this because I feel this post is overgeneralizing and not strongly backed up. If it is purely anecdotal please mention it but if your aim is bigger then please quote because we as a quite educated community should have higher expectations towards the informations we spread. We are the ones that manipulate the data the most, no one will do it better than us. If this community defends truth and nothing else and wants to shed light on social issue like this then I think it is fair to do it right.

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Judith

There is a yearly survey by Pew that you can see here:

pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/...

It is one of many surveys that are interesting. I would welcome a list of sources that look at the data and if you have any links you want to share that would be a great contribution to this discussion.

I did point out that I'm not an expert in the social sciences - I only know that I want to be part of the solution. These are not generalizations. Its widely agreed that this is happening all around us.

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IsaacLeimgruber

We don't need to be social science experts, we need to be able to read stats. Plain and simple. It happening all around us and you using the word "manterruption" are two very distinct things and the second is toxic. Even worse, I would argue that it advocates against what you want. You want women in the workplace to be seen as individuals by their peers and not like a group of persons that can perform low levels taks? Right, then consider men as individuals

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rouzbeh

The reason you don't see these 'facts' you seek is that more often than not don't release these numbers unless prompted by external pressure, internal issues that leak, or outright lawsuits against them for these types of practices.

It seems the considerations about the magnitude of the problem is quite the same among men and women.

How did you come to this conclusion? The % of people who thought it was a major vs minor problem has a huge disparity.

Even though I'm sure I won't get a decent response here and will probably let it go after this given your incomprehensible repetitive bashing of what was outlined in the post, I still wanted to point out that it is definitely people with mindsets like your own who persist and advance these problems by thinking they are overly objective of everything. This desire for 'facts' or data that would still never convince you not only will never truly exist. More unfortunately, it also makes you rally against anyone trying to pursue any sort of positive change whether they are victims of it or advocates of which I am both. Good luck on your quest of data you will more than likely find ways to refute due to personal bias of how it was gathered, modeled, or presented.

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IsaacLeimgruber

It is like you have no concerns about the actual reality at all. In this debate I have never seen anyone actually try to find coherent and reasonable reasons why this happens. Why? My point was that the article purposely sums the major and minor case to create a bigger sensation which is dishonest plain and simple. If you feel attacked at the first question on your dogma then maybe we have another problem

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IsaacLeimgruber

And I got to say I don't agree with you yet I won't go into personal judgement. As far as I am concerned, I know at least 5 arguments of people supporting the existence of a wage gap of magnitude around 20% between men and women. Can you say the same for the opposing camp?

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Ben Halpern

Thanks for a great post!

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Yechiel Kalmenson

Thanks for this post. And some of the comments just serve to reinforce the points made.

As human beings, so many of our biases and predispositions go unnoticed and don't make it past our subconscious, therefore when someone points them out to us our first instinct is to say "I never saw it, my experience was different".

It's up to us to recognize the biases inherent in our way of thinking and to do our best to be conscious of them so we can try and work around them.

Posts like this serve as occasional reminders to all of us who want to work on ourselves.

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Ross Henderson

Great post :) The more diversity in tech, the better.

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Judith

yes. Totally agree! So gr8 to have supportive responses in the male community! Thx for your support :)

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diek • Edited

Nice post, it's a common topic lately but we really need to be reminded from time to time.

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IsaacLeimgruber

Since you start the debate and our community owns the subject, what do you think of the google memo story?

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Judith

The google memo is not the subject of my post. I don't want to have a discussion based on "what I think" about it with you. I thought about your passionate comments regarding my post over the weekend. I can see that there is something about it that makes you angry. I sincerely hope that discussions like this will bring more issues like this into the light so we can all continue to work through them together! 🙏 Namaste!

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IsaacLeimgruber

Well you can bring them to light but if we don't discuss them and its just a statement then it is definitely not productive