Matt Giuca
Thanks for posting. I had a quick look through it. While a lot of it is common sense, it sounds like common sense that some people need to hear. (I hope I'm not among them.)
This is a humility that I hope more men can learn: that we often enable sexism, not through malice or laziness, but simple blinkered lack of awareness. I have learned over time, and thanks to outspoken women, that many practices I took for granted are harmful by tacitly permitting an exclusive environment. Hopefully I will continue to learn and improve.
Though I must say, I find some of those points fairly demeaning towards women, actually.
In particular, the "Do compliment" section seems to be suggesting that, unlike men, women need an extra special amount of coddling or they will give up.
Yes, that's what I used to think of that section also. Now, though, I see it more that these compliments are good for everyone, and women are *right* to expect them and to be put off by how unsupportive the community seems in the absence of that. So I try to make an effort to compliment more anyway, without regard to gender.
"If she learned bash scripting more quickly than you did, tell her so. Say, "Wow, you learned bash scripting after X months. It took me 2*X months to learn that.""
That was actually one of the examples that made sense to me the first time I read it. It's a fine example that a compliment doesn't need to reference appearance or sex or anything but the merit of the effort.
It seems to be suggesting that men should treat women the way loving parents might treat an eight-year-old, shying away from criticism, and taking great pains to give self-deprecating compliments. Can't we just treat women as fellow hackers?
I think the way we treat fellow hackers is quite shitty, quite regularly, and I wish more of us would refuse to put up with it. If improving that means we give more compliments to everyone, so be it. It's also very common for we men to fall into the “just world fallacy”: because we don't experience sexism very much if ever, we tend to assume the world is already balanced in that regard, and efforts to improve women's lot in our community are framed as disproportionate. The truth, of course, is that women are *presently* disproportionately the victim of long-term institutionalised sexist attitudes (whether those attitudes arose in the past by malice or neglect or ignorance or all three). So any work to improve that is necessarily going to focus more on the needs of women than of men, and it will hit men's awareness in that light.
(Perhaps I'm just sensitive to that specific style of compliment, as if I catch myself using it, I feel dirty afterwards. It seems to implicitly be suggesting: "Even I, with my vastly superior knowledge of computing, took 2*X months to learn that particular thing. Well done on having bested me in this one specific area.")
Huh? Where do you get the implication of condescension? It sounds exactly the opposite to me: speaking to another person as an equal. “You did that in half the time I did it, well done.” If achievement-based compliments sound automatically condescending to you in that way, then yes, I'd say you may be over-sensitive. The brains of men and women are different; the sex of a person is expressed throughout the structures of the body, and the brain is no exception. It's a fact that, if we value the principle of sexual equality, we do need to alter practices that may be less off-putting for men than for women. But there are also a great many things that we can improve to make an environment safer and more pleasant for *every* member, regardless of sex. I see complimenting any person on their achievement, without referencing their sex or discriminating on that basis, to be one improvement of many. -- \ “[F]reedom of speech does not entail freedom to have your ideas | `\ accepted by governments and incorporated into law and policy.” | _o__) —Russell Blackford, 2010-03-06 | Ben Finney