Closer To The Ideal

Susie Bright was invited to come speak at Blogher. The invitation pleased her, but the subject did not:

This time, however, I was surprised which panel I was asked to join; it was pitched to me as “how to make safer spaces online.”

My first reaction was like a child being asked to put on my seat belt for the 100th time: Ugh. “But I don’t want to be safe online, Mom!”

When I think of all my ambitions for my blog or my writing, I think of being influential, incendiary, funny, poignant— never “safe.”

Susie Bright recounts her own history as a women’s rights activist, and recalls the crippling effect that concerns over creating a safe space could have:

Pretty soon, certain organizations of the feminist left were ground to a halt, because at any moment, someone could pipe up in a meeting: “I feel unsafe when you say that, Mary!”

There was nowhere to turn. Debate had no recourse in the “safe zone,” and the “victim” won, smugly, by suppressive default.

It’s rather amazing that everyone put up with it, and never rejected its childishness. Can you imagine interrupting a legitimate argument to complain that it had to end because it gave you a stomachache?

As the left pissed its faltering assets down a PC drain, the right-wing embraced some of the same coddled language. Is America safe for children? Are video games safe for teenagers? Shouldn’t women stay inside and be safe instead of being subjected to god knows what in the brazen streets?

Of course, this wasn’t anything new — it’s centuries-old protectionism - but the pseudo-feminist sheen gave it new legs.

That centuries old protectionism has never been a friend of women’s rights. It arises from the kind of paternalism that argues that women are weak and need to be protected, and the “protection” tends to involve a loss of freedom. But a confluence of factors allowed arguments about safety to make headway in the courts:

The next group to pile onto the Safe-T Garbage Detail were the corporate litigators. This was a huge leap. You had institutions that were truly guilty - are truly guilty - of staggering sexism and discrimination. They would freeze out and exploit their female workers without a second thought. Get some more coffee while you’re up, dear!

When a few women tried to mount a legal campaign against the worst offenders, it turned out that one of the few things they could nail these fuckers to the wall for, was for cultivating an “unsafe” atmosphere.

To a large extent, Bright sees the issue of safety as a distraction from the underlying class issues:

Here’s a tip: Wanna stop the cycle of “safety panics” at your workplace? Give each person who works some privacy and dignity.

Then look at the pay scales of everyone in the company, and give all the secretaries, assistants, and janitorial staff a gigantic raise. Watch how suddenly, all the “unsafe” feelings disappear as if by magic!

I think she sums up the situation fairly well. I don’t think more pay equals more safety, but I do think both reflect a crucial underlying set of values. The organization that respects its workers and pays them well is going to have less harrassement than the organization that disrespects its workers and pays them low wages.

Not all harrassement comes from the leadership. In fact, studies show that the majority of sexual harrassement happens between workers who are nominally peers. However, how much harrassement will be tolerated is certainly indicated from the attitudes of those at the top. The leadership of any organization signals, through its policies and its pay scales, how much respect it has for the people working in that organization. Lower ranking staff are at all times aware of how much real respect the leadership has for the workers. And those who wish to harrass will be concious that they can get away with more when they are in an organization that has no respect for its workers.

Heather, at her blog The Needle’s Bewitching Eye, writes of her own experience with sexual harrassement:

However, by the time I left the job, not only had I realized I wasn’t even helping the company, but I had also become a victim of gender harassment myself many times over. I worked in one of the two organizations which was supposed to SET THE EXAMPLE for the rest of the company (the other being the Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action, or EEO/AA group); I had a B.A. and an M.S. in criminal justice; and I dealt with severe violations all day, every day; but I couldn’t even manage to protect myself from victimization because I worked in a dramatically male-dominated field.

In fact, I had reported my own situation to the EEO/AA group no less than five times — and WON the investigation every time. The problem, though, remained because, as the only female employee in my group, I was the only one complaining about gender harassment, and so it was rather a simple solution to just ignore me. I actually was told often, “Nobody else has a problem,” and after I heard it enough times, it did start to sound an awful lot like, “You are crazy.” Even the EEO/AA investigator (who was a male, by the way, and a very decent one, too) couldn’t help much with that, since he couldn’t be in my shoes all the time. I had to deal with reality, and I had to deal with it alone. It was as natural to my male bosses and coworkers to treat me as a second class citizen as it was for them to urinate while standing. It would never have occurred to them to analyze their own actions, and even when someone pointed out to them exactly how they were treating me differently from everyone else, they still had difficulty seeing it for themselves. More importantly, they refused to change their behavior. Or maybe more accurately, they didn’t think they SHOULD change their behavior because I was ONLY a woman and therefore not worth showing that much respect.

Heather’s experience points to how difficult it is to stop harrassement in an organization that has ingrained contempt for women. The law is a blunt instrument, it will often fail to reform an organization that does not want to reform.

What Susie Bright reminds of us is how a company can use old fashioned paternalism to create an illusion of safety - for instance, put a filter on web browsers so no one can look at porn. Such a policy doesn’t protect employees from sexual harrassement at work, but it does give the company something to point to if they are ever brought to court. They can say “See how much we care about our workers? We won’t let anyone look at dirty pictures.” Such paternalism as this takes for granted that women are weak and need to be protected. It’s questionable whether this form of protection is ever necessary in a firm with a genuine respect for all of its workers. To put this the other way round, I’ve never worked at a firm that filtered out porn, and there was never a need for such a filter because at the places I’ve worked the whole culture of the business has communicated that professional, respectful behavior is expected from everyone at all times.

I need to post something to inaugurate this blog, so I will start by reposting some comments I wrote over at Burningbird.

Shelley Powers suggests one of the things that leads to gender disparities in the tech world:

If Tim Bray wants to get a better idea of why there aren’t as many women seemingly interested in Ruby, Rails, or associated technologies such as Ajax, he needs look no further than sites like Ajaxian. In all of the time I’ve been reading the site, it covered women–our contributions, as writers, as techs, in any capacity–a grand total of three times. Which is why I decided to unsubscribe from the site today. It’s not for everyone interesting in Ajax–only the boys interested in Ajax.

Someone in the comments suggested:

I think part of it, at least in the RoR world, is that there’s just so much focus on who the hotshots are, and so so much cronyism.

My thoughts:

I don’t know if it’s useful to look at this issue on the micro level. Questions like “Does the RoR community have enough women?” miss the point. The problem is large scale. The number of women receiving advanced degress in computer science peaked in 1989 and has since been in steady decline. That number is, I think, a useful metric for measuring women’s participation in computer science. Whereas women have made dramatic gains in the legal profession, the medical profession, and in managing large enterprises, they have lost ground in the computer industry.

I’ve yet to hear a great explanation of what’s chased women away from the tech industry. The decline since 1989 is easy to measure, yet most of the explanations that I’ve heard are contradicted by the dramatic gains women have made in the law and medical industries.

Consider a few of the most simplistic explanations:

Women don’t like hard science? Nothing is tougher than organic chemistry, which tens of thousands of women have had to master on their way to becoming doctors or “nurse practitioners” (the highest level of nursing).

Women don’t like long, brutal hours? I’ve a friend who just went through the UVA medical school. During her last year of school her average work week was 90 hours. Sometimes it was longer. 90 was the average.

Women are no good at math? I could repeat my comment, above, about organic chemistry, which involves some tough math, but I’d also like to add that I’ve been doing programming in script languages for 12 years now, and I’ve never needed advanced math. Not all programming involves gyroscope stabalized frictionless vector navigation for NASA space craft.

Women require balanced lives, and are unwilling to spend time away from their families? Relative to law and medicine, the tech industry provides more flex time and more chances to work at home. Also, women do put in long hours in the fields of law, medicine, management and marketing. It’s just tech, in particular, where women have been driven out.

Women are drawn to the more artistic side of things, they don’t like technical stuff? Pure sexism, but even if it was true, it wouldn’t explain why graphic design for the web (the artistic side of web work) has become so male dominated, with stars like Eric Meyer and Dave Shea keynoting every design conference.

It’s clear that women have been chased away from the tech field since 1989. The numbers are clear about that, and match what anecdotal evidence most of us can offer. But why? I’ve yet to have a eureka moment, where someone offers an explanation so clear that I simply jump and go “That’s it! That explains it all!”