Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower (2015)(medium.com)
medium.com
Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower (2015)
https://medium.com/@katylevinson/sexism-in-tech-don-t-ask-me-unless-you-re-ready-to-call-somebody-a-whistleblower-e5d545e547b0
4 comments
Author here, wasn't advocating for this. Proving intent in court is an extremely high bar, and means that a lot of stuff, such as fraud, goes unpunished. So, I'm not sure that this is appropriate for many issues, especially ones like violent crime.
What I was advocating for here is that people who are not directly wronged step up and help out. If a man behaves inappropriately towards me and I say something, it is (quite reasonably) often mistaken as a threat. I've never been a man so I don't know for sure, but I suspect that if a male colleague stepped up, took the person aside and said something privately, that this might go a lot better.
I want to shift the focus away from the person who did something wrong and towards minimizing and fixing harm. Too often we focus on the person who did a bad thing. Unless there is reason to believe that the person hurting people is dangerous or unable to stop hurting people, I'd much rather focus on "what are we going to do to fix this situation" than "what do we do with the person who caused this?"
What I was advocating for here is that people who are not directly wronged step up and help out. If a man behaves inappropriately towards me and I say something, it is (quite reasonably) often mistaken as a threat. I've never been a man so I don't know for sure, but I suspect that if a male colleague stepped up, took the person aside and said something privately, that this might go a lot better.
I want to shift the focus away from the person who did something wrong and towards minimizing and fixing harm. Too often we focus on the person who did a bad thing. Unless there is reason to believe that the person hurting people is dangerous or unable to stop hurting people, I'd much rather focus on "what are we going to do to fix this situation" than "what do we do with the person who caused this?"
This is, unfortunately, the bane of microaggressions. A lot of inappropriate behavior slips under the radar: anybody who calls it out is accused of making too big a deal of it. A man might be slightly more effective than having you call it out, but it would have to reach a fairly high level of impropriety.
It may help when somebody says, "Hey, X was talking, and I want to hear it." Fixing it immediately helps more than a talking-to afterwards: the odds are good that they don't even remember interrupting you, and if they're not intent on taking it to heart, they won't. They'll often feel the callout was a disproportionate harm, way worse than whatever it is they did.
But a lot of men won't even notice. I've missed a lot of them, or rationalized "that wasn't so bad" and quickly forgotten about it.
You're correct that we should focus on minimizing and preventing harm, but it's just really hard.
It may help when somebody says, "Hey, X was talking, and I want to hear it." Fixing it immediately helps more than a talking-to afterwards: the odds are good that they don't even remember interrupting you, and if they're not intent on taking it to heart, they won't. They'll often feel the callout was a disproportionate harm, way worse than whatever it is they did.
But a lot of men won't even notice. I've missed a lot of them, or rationalized "that wasn't so bad" and quickly forgotten about it.
You're correct that we should focus on minimizing and preventing harm, but it's just really hard.
Yeah I agree that catching things in the moment is also great. It's all just tricky.
I would like to see this principle applied to society in general, and I'd like the default assumption to be that people are not malicious until proven otherwise.