from Hacker News

The most alienating thing that happened to me as a female engineer

by warrenmar on 6/17/16, 7:37 AM with 92 comments

• by King-Aaron on 6/17/16, 8:21 AM

  I really don't want to make this sound like I'm diminishing OP's experience, because from the sounds of that the experience sounded awful. However I've experienced pretty much identical treatment over a very similar thing (music) and I'm a male software dev. Wanting to listen to something quiet because the loud commercial radio/adverts that always run are pretty distracting. I can completely relate to her experience as I get similar comments.

  The all-male t-shirts, the work mentor being creepy, things like that are shocking to hear and ruffles my feathers as someone who was raised with very strong morals by my parents. However I tend to feel that bullying (on a more basic level) will happen to anyone if you give a group of people (in an stablished social clique) the chance.

  I'd like to say though (if the blog OP is on here), massive effort sticking with the industry and not letting it get the better of you, good job.

• by dimgl on 6/17/16, 8:25 AM

  This happens to both females and males. I've worked in toxic environments where normal things I do and like are ridiculed. I've had the COO of a company tell me that "my girlfriend sounds like my hand".

  I've also worked in environments where everyone respects each other and their differences. This may have been happening simply because you were working with toxic people who simply didn't like you, and less because you were a female.

• by soft_dev_person on 6/17/16, 8:22 AM

  As a male who hates sports, I can relate. However, it has nothing to do with gender.

  The inappropriate touching in car event was more worrying, I think.

• by ZeroGravitas on 6/17/16, 8:17 AM

  You know it's bad when that creepy story about the car is just thrown in as an extra, with no fanfare whatsoever.

• by nikki-9696 on 6/17/16, 3:44 PM

  I'm a girl, and let me just say that if someone wanted to watch Friends, I'd laugh at them too. Have we considered that the show is just stupid and everyone there knew it except OP? Look, there's no accounting for taste, but if I watch something that no one else on my team watches, but they all watch something else, I would not consider that to be alienating. I also wouldn't make them change the channel. I would, however, make fun of baseball the entire time I was sitting there watching it, because I hate it, and all my co-workers will tell you how much I enjoy making fun of sports. They are never offended by this. They find it amusing. And we all get along just fine.

• by marvel_boy on 6/17/16, 8:12 AM

  "If I had walked in, and baseball was showing on the television, it would be completely unthinkable for me to grab the remote and change it to Friends. If I had done that, the outcry would've been thundering. People would question my social skills."

  Good point. By the way, what a bunch of asholes!

• by greenleafjacob on 6/17/16, 8:30 AM

  What does the TV story have to do with gender? I don't think gender adds anything. It would be no less rude if they were all die hard Firefly fans and watched re-runs every night, and author changed it to baseball.

  I won't defend the other anecdotes though.

• by zer0defex on 6/17/16, 10:23 AM

  How does she know gender actually had anything to do with the difficulties she was/is experiencing? Sounds like the author may be what the book "Leadership & Self-Deception" terms as "being in the box", which is to say her own behavior/attitude is doing way more to manifest these scenarios, much more than anything her co-workers probably have done. Something about this article just seems off... 90% of it complaining about not getting to watch a certain TV show at work (could she not go to her own desk and watch whatever struck her fancy?), while the much clearer example of sexual harassment in the car is tacked on the end as little more than an afterthought...

  Then again, she comes across as rather passive, so I wouldn't be surprised if she's also uncomfortable with confrontation, so maybe this is her way of passive aggressively sticking it to the person in the car story? Who knows..

  My advice: find a female power executive to serve as a mentor / career coach for a few months. Ideally a real hard-ass that pulls no punches when it comes to getting shit done, knows her shit and gives zero fucks whether an employee is male, female, penguin, or alien provided the work is done right, done well, and delivered on-schedule and most importantly, has no qualms about laying down the wrath of god on any employees slacking off and/or delivering shit quality work.

  Seeing someone like that in action up-close and personal, while also benefiting from their input and guidance on her own situations encountered would I think pay huge dividends toward future career growth and happiness.

• by nicolas_t on 6/17/16, 9:11 AM

  Well, I'm male and I've been in the same exact situation multiple times. I do not like sports. I find watching sports on tv to be an absolute boring waste of time.

  Try suggesting in Europe, that you don't want to watch a soccer match and instead would like to watch Friends (which I like incidentally). It'll be met with ridicule.

  If there's something on the tv and soccer match is coming, you can be 100% sure that people will change it to the soccer game without even asking.

  I don't think that's a question of sexism, it's just a question of shared culture and the fact that most people cannot imagine that there are people that do not like soccer. For some people, someone not liking soccer is as shocking as someone declaring himself an atheist during the times of the inquisition.

  There are a lot of problems for women in tech but I think that in the case of sports, it's a behavior that touches equally men and women who do not like sports.

• by x0 on 6/17/16, 9:01 AM

  Christ there's some ugly comments down the bottom of this thread. I always thought Hacker News was a bit more professional than reddit, now it seems the only difference is the comments calling her a "feminist", "c--t", "retard" are downvoted below threshold here.

• by crimsonalucard on 6/17/16, 10:24 AM

  She's just being treated as a bro. Dudes are just immature like that. The touching is different though but I won't address that. Anyway to give my explanation more color, let me tell you about one of my "bro" friends.

  We go to college together and we always make fun of each other for our differing tastes in TV shows. He likes pokemon, which I think is for little kids or adults with developmental problems while I like game of thrones, which he thinks is a show only liked by people who enjoy watching penises on television as the show periodically flashes one into your face for no reason. We make fun of each other about this all the time because we're bros, in manspeak this means we're just close friends.

  I've had worse pranks played on me by said bro. One day I left my computer unattended and unlocked. He took control of my computer, changed the background to a giant wet penis; Took a screenshot of the page; made that screenshot the background then proceeded to hide all the icons and menu bars on my desktop. The end result was essentially what appeared to be a frozen computer screen with the background replaced by a huge penis. I thought it was some crazy virus as even restarting my computer didn't work. I spent the next ten minutes trying to debug the situation all the while staring at a giant penis. Funniest thing ever, we both got a good laugh out of it.

  I mean this prank could be interpreted as inappropriate depending on the situation and person, but the point is neither me nor my friend would be willing to treat each other so "inappropriately" if we didn't feel close.

  So in short, both sides have made social errors. Their actions were immature and they failed take into regard your discomfort as a woman, while the OP misinterpreted their intentions as sexist.

  The resolution to this situation is easy. Ask him to stop... or join in on the fun. Openly declare their tastes in baseball as stupid and mindless. How could any sport be more boring? Everyone would've definitely got a good laugh if you were the one who pulled off that remote control prank.

  You must also keep in mind that you are still in a situation where majority rules and you must honor that situation as you're the only person who wants to watch friends, it would be disproportionately unfair if they catered to your tastes instead of the majority.

  Whatever the OP chooses to do I honestly believe that her coworkers actions were not intentionally discriminatory.

• by sandisk5 on 6/17/16, 9:48 AM

  If they all arrived at the same time each night (dinner) then new entrants may simply think that the others just got there and simply haven't changed the channel to the normal channel yet, perhaps they didn't see the remote or were in a conversation when they entered, so by grabbing the remote and changing the channel to the normal program people aren't disrespecting the other people who really aren't watching the program but are simply laughing at the most recent entrants.

  Also some seat belts are non-obvious, especially in a fancy sports car, and people help other people with seat belts all the time. Perhaps the driver has given a lot of people rides in his fancy car and has seen many people struggle with it. Perhaps x seconds didn't seem long to her but to him, who knows how it works, it seemed like she was having a problem.

• by nabla9 on 6/17/16, 9:09 AM

  Imagine the same situation in UK, you are foreigner and everybody is watching cricket.

  Cultural alienation is not somebody's fault. It happens when you are minority in a group that has different culture. In these kind of situations basic politeness and hospitality would lessen the effect. The solution is not to watch Friends sometimes to distribute boredom more equally.

  People who have been born in monoculture are not usually aware of the work needed to have fun and inclusive social event. Outside the work those who are alienated leave. The "mandatory fun" in workplace may need work from the host to be inclusive.

• by greybox on 6/17/16, 9:11 AM

  I think the way the community has reacted to this post is pretty disgusting and I think says way more than the actual post does about sexism in engineering

• by joe563323 on 6/17/16, 8:58 AM

  Might be it hurt her genuinely.

• by namaemuta on 6/17/16, 9:57 AM

  So... has she even considered that her question was silly because everybody assumed that everybody can change the channel without asking it? like when an adult in a meeting of adults ask for permission to go to the toilet. That usually makes people laugh because it's a child thing.

  And about Mike, the one that changed the channel for the joke, has she thought that he was well known for doing that kind of jokes and because of it he was confident doing them and people didn't mind at all?

  Maybe OP got personal because of her own insecurities and didn't even bother to consider that her interpretation was wrong.

• by beemboy on 6/17/16, 8:49 AM

  Lots of males here providing shameful confirmation of the same thoughtless behavior the OP is calling out (finally after all these years). By focusing on specifics most commenters here seen to be missing the point that subtle marginalizing behaviors cause harm in unseen ways.

• by adwn on 6/17/16, 8:29 AM

  To summarize: Most of the team wants to watch progam A; watching program A during dinner is an established team ritual; author wants to change channel to program B, which is "met with incredulity and laughter". Some time later, program B is running; team members come in and want to change the channel to program A. And that latter event is the most alienating during her time at Microsoft.

  Wat.

  It gets better: Because program A is baseball, and program B is Friends, and since we all know that baseball is a man's program, and Friends is a woman's program, this is really about gender discrimination and sexism.

  > People would question my social skills.

  I really do.

• by mgraczyk on 6/17/16, 8:27 AM

  Wow, if that's the most alienating experience she has had, I am envious. As a male engineer who does not like sports, I've had far worse experiences involving outright ridicule when I asked to watch something besides a game.

  I didn't blog about it though, because I have real problems far more vexing than not having 100% compatibility with my coworkers.

• by sklogic on 6/17/16, 9:01 AM

  Does it matter at all if she's a female? She is just a minority in terms of preferences. If a male wanted to watch, say, football while the rest of the crowd settled on a baseball, things would not have been any different.

  In the aircon control wars majority always wins, so why would it be different with a TV?

• by goldenkey on 6/17/16, 8:30 AM

  What else is to be expected when working with people who have next to no social skills in organizations that have next to no soul?

• by sedlich on 6/17/16, 8:45 AM

  Why is it so difficult to have the empathy to say: ok every n'th day we switch to program B for her? Because too many mens clubs lack empathy and respect. It's that dead simple. (I am male).

• by Swizec on 6/17/16, 8:29 AM

  > If I had walked in, and baseball was showing on the television, it would be completely unthinkable for me to grab the remote and change it to Friends.

  Why?

  I wonder if she ever tried, or just assumed it was unthinkable. I suspect it was less unthinkable than she thinks it was. From the rest of the story, it sounds like not only was it thinkable for people to try to change the channel, it was expected even. Otherwise the joke wouldn't work.

  As people on imgur like to say: Do Thing. Maintain eye contact. Assert dominance.

  You have to establish boundaries. If people are doing shit you don't want them to, stop them. As a general rule, people will treat you the way you let them treat you.

  edit: I wonder how many people downvoting me are assuming I write this as a member of The In-Group. Okay I am a guy, but that's where the ingroupness stops for various reasons that would take a while to list.