Alienating Atmosphere
bliki: Alienating Atmosphere

There are many factors that lead to the troubling
  DiversityImbalance that we find in the software
  community. Some of these, like the problems in teenage education
  that discourages girls from STEM subjects is a long term problem
  where our profession can't play a central role in fixing 1. But one factor that comes down directly to us is
  the alienating atmosphere that hangs over the tech community.

1: 
      There are a number of initiatives out there to encourage HDA
      teenagers to get involved in programming, such as Black Girls
      Code and Technovation Challenge. 
    






One of the hardest things about talking about this alienating
  atmosphere is that it's something that's experienced very
  differently depending on who you are. For most middle-class white
  guys like me, it's something we've rarely experienced. Yet for
  many people in HistoricallyDiscriminatedAgainst populations it's a
  constant indication that “you're not welcome here”.

One of the sharpest technologists I know is a woman who has been
  in the industry for a long time, much of it in technical leadership
  roles. There's nobody I'd rather have at my side in an important
  architecture meeting or reviewing a draft of mine that's veering
  into deep language theory. Yet she still says that she feels a
  reaction as she walks into a gathering of techies where nearly every face
  is different to hers, a little voice saying “this place is not for
  you”. If such a reaction still strikes someone as accomplished as
  this, we shouldn't be surprised to see it elsewhere.

That basic reaction is set off just by the disparity in numbers,
  which is a long term problem to solve - but it can amplified by
  things within our short term influence. Sexually-oriented jokes tend
  to reinforce a men-only locker-room atmosphere which many women do
  find alienating. Many women have had real incidents of harassment,
  such jokes remind them of that. And although the chances of a
  serious incident are slim, they are not zero. 2


2: 

Physical attacks are rare, but do sometimes happen. Recent
      statistics in the US indicate that 2 per thousand women
      suffer rape or sexual abuse each year (4 per thousand for
      younger women). Another survey
      focusing on college women found 35 women per thousand per
      year suffered sexual victimization in college.

It's also important to note that the fear of an attack, even
      if irrational, is still a factor. As one reviewer commented “I once
      had a rather unpleasant experience with a male colleague, I
      spoke up and took a stand and pretty much held my own. But after
      that, I couldn't shake off the fear for days together, that he
      might turn around and physically harm me! This was probably the
      farthest thing from a possibility - but that thought was with me
      with an annoying amount of conviction. And every time I take a
      stand I feel a pinch of that.” 

Someone can be very sure intellectually that there isn't a threat
      of a physical attack, yet the debilitating emotion is still there.
      These reactions come from triggers that are deeply
      ingrained in our culture.


If you have any doubt about how ugly this can get, just peruse
  the comments on a blog or news entry whenever this kind of thing
  comes up. The bile that falls on people who criticize
  alienating incidents is both vile and sadly predictable. Ironically
  the bilers often complain about censorship infringing their right to
  make sexual jokes, but not acknowledging that fear of the intermobs
  imposes its own censorship. I know several articulate women who will
  not post their opinions because they don't want to have to deal with
  this inevitable backlash.

There's an important asymmetry here. I've occasionally been on
  the receiving end of some nasty satire, but that's not such a big
  issue for me because I'm in a position of relative influence in the
  software world as well as part of a historically powerful group. For
  people from historically-discriminated-against (HDA) populations the
  dynamic changes. Such attacks reinforce the history of exclusion and
  oppression, and trigger fears of physical attack. Merely the fact
  that people think it's ok to make such attacks makes it clear that
  “your kind is not welcome here”. 

Trying to clear internet atmosphere of this feels like trying to
  deal with global warming - what can we do?

A first start is just to be aware that different people will
  react differently to the same things. One person might not find a
  remark offensive while it really hurts someone else. A phrase I've
  found useful in the past is
  I can't choose whether someone is offended by my actions. I can
  choose whether I care. If someone reacts in an hurt way to
  something I say, I don't get to say “you can't be offended by that”.
  Their reaction is a result of their life experiences, which will be
  different to mine. Often HDA people gets lots of these small hurts,
  individually they don't mean much - but the sheer
  quantity has a big cumulative effect.

While I can't tell someone if they should be hurt or not, I can
  choose whether I care about the hurtful feeling. And it is a choice.
  I have offended some people when I've said we should treat gay people
  equally. In that case say I don't care very much. It's my choice
  that I'm not concerned about hurting the feelings of homophobes and
  I accept responsibility for that decision.






I do care, and think we as a profession should care, about this
  kind of thing with HistoricallyDiscriminatedAgainst
  groups. Correcting these long-term discriminations takes time, and
  can't be solved by just saying “we're all equal now”. An alienating
  atmosphere against women, both in our profession and on the wider
  internet, reinforces an injustice that's been perpetrated for
  thousands of years. While I cannot be responsible for what my
  ancestors did, I can take responsibility to play what small part I
  can in cleaning up their mess.

I don't find it straightforward to learn about what causes
  alienation and how to avoid contributing to it. I try to pay
  attention to incidents when they come up and to listen to those who
  feel attacked. Not all women are alienated by an act, so I have to
  make a judgement about what proportion of people are going to react
  - is it just this one person, or is this individual the only one of many who
  felt brave enough to speak out?

I've found it valuable to find people who I can
  confidently talk to about these issues, and I certainly recommend
  searching out a few people who can act as guides. It's important to
  get a variety here, as different people react differently - it's
  easy to miss things by generalizing from opinions that are too few
  or not diverse enough. I feel that these steps have increased my awareness
  over the years, but it's far from being a territory I can be
  confident in.

Once we can begin to sense the alienation in the atmosphere the
  next step is to try to create environments with cleaner air. An
  example is how many conferences now have code of conduct policies
  designed to spell out that certain behaviors are not good manners.
  They can (and must) reinforce this by making it easy for people to
  make complaints and dealing with them swiftly and fairly. Yes, there
  is a risk that specious complaints will be made, and these are
  frustrating, but in practice the problems due to these are much
  smaller than the problems that never get reported. 3

3: 
      The best study into this that I could find indicated that false
      report rate was somewhere in the range of 2-8%
    

One question is what people in the majority groups should do when
  they detect some miasma in the air. If I hear a bunch of guys making
  sexual jokes in clear earshot, should I intervene? I don't find this
  an easy question to answer. I don't have high confidence in my
  ability to detect whether a group I care about is going to be
  offended by things that I personally don't find offensive, so I'd be
  reluctant to overreact myself. 

But I agree with the notion that the standard you
  walk past is the standard you accept. Many women are sick
  of complaining about this kind of behavior because these
  complaints often only lead to more trouble. So I think it's
  important for all of us to battle against this miasma, to intervene
  when someone is fueling the bad air and to support someone's right
  to speak up and say they are feeling excluded.

So I believe I have the responsibility to act when such
  things happen but I say this with trepidation, I have that British
  thing about wanting to avoid fuss-and-bother, so my natural
  inclination is to let things go when I'm feeling offended. I know
  that even in the last few years I've missed opportunities to speak
  up when I should, but I know that I should not let that stop me from
  doing better in the future 4. We must change this culture of silence.

4: 
      It's difficult talk about what to do because different
  cases are so varied. Even with a specific example, I frequently
  find myself at a loss. I've often thought
  about what action I should take if I found myself in an audience for
  a talk that uses sexual imagery to illustrate its concepts. I know I
  should do something, but I confess that I'm unsure what it
  should be - which gives me little confidence that I'd do the right
  thing.
    

In particular we must avoid supporting this alienating
  atmosphere. Sadly such support appears when people attack those who
  are trying to fight it. Often women who complain about alienating
  incidents are told to “grow a thick skin”. I find this kind of
  support for NetNastiness deeply annoying. 






I value people with good ideas and don't consider the thickness
   of their skin. Anyone driven away from expressing innovation or
   writing excellent code is a loss to all of us, however unoffended
   we think they should be.


Further Reading

Amanda Hess gives a sad but worthwhile summary of attacks
    against women online. These are wider than just within the tech
    community, but are typical of what women have to deal with here too.

Ashe Dryden writes about the risks and
    rewards of speaking up to oppose the alienating atmosphere in
    tech. The post includes responses to common misconceptions and suggestions
    of how to help.

Often it's seemingly tiny things that contribute to the
    alienating atmosphere - things that are just one droplet of miasma
    on their own, but form a big cloud when you run into them every day.
    Do read Kat
    Hagan's excellent post describing them. Derrick Clifton has a
    similar piece on common reactions to racism.  
    

Birgitta Böckeler writes the frustrating story about how the modern image of programmers
    as anti-social males came about.





Pink and Blue

When preparing the illustrations for the article, I puzzled
       a good bit about whether to use the pink and blue colors you
       see here. Many people, including me, object to the gender stereotyping
       of these colors and I don't like to reinforce it. But in the
       end I felt that using the gender
       associations of these colors helped the illustrations
       communicate better (as opposed to using more neutral colors). I
       also tried using light and dark brown in a similar way (as the
       alienating atmosphere is true of race too) but pink/blue scheme
       provides more striking color.



Acknowledgements

     My thanks to Ashe Dryden, Adria Richards, Adrienne Hisbrook,
     Andrew Slocum, Chitra Sachdeva, Graham Brooks, Jim Gumbley, Linda
     Rising, Peter Gillard-Moss, Rebecca Parsons, and Trisha Gee for
     their feedback on this post.
   
