Google only acquired male parts of startup company; and more #siliconvalleyfail

Article in New York Magazine about a startup company with four men and one woman ("Amy") acquired by Google. Google elected to only hire the four people with their male bits flipped.

The four men were code monkeys engineers, and Amy was a UX and product designer, and co-founder who contributed tons of ideas. Apparently Google gave massive signing bonuses and salaries to the men, but did not hire her or compensate her during the company acquisition.

Put yourself in this position for just a second. You helped found a company, you contributed major ideas, you got it to the point where Google decides it's worth slurping up. But then:

Do you have any clue what that feels like? It's horrible. It's people saying: "I don't respect you because of how you were born." 

It's impossible to imagine this rejection if you are a majority member. Well, I can tell you - it hurts. A lot. Probably one of the hardest pains out there.

The worst part about me reading this article is that this week alone I heard stories about TWO amazing, brilliant, talented, superstar women completely leave their rockstar jobs to adopt non-rockstar occupations. 

Why did these brilliant, talented, incredible women leave their rockstar occupations? Because they couldn't handle the sexism any more. They had no fight left in them. 

What can you do? Well, sponsor the heck out of / promote the professional women you know. 

1) Talk about women to others: "Jane Smith is doing AMAZING work related to yours, you should check out her papers." 

2) Invite women: "Let's invite Jane Smith as a keynote speaker, her research rocks" "Let's ask Jane Smith to lead this project, I think she'd do a fantastic job." 

3) Suggest women when you're poaching people: "Let's see if we could recruit Jane Smith to our department." 

and, if you're a journalist:

4) Interview women. Some publications do well at this, some are still in the stone ages. There are women scientists out there, and they have opinions and interesting things to say too!

And, if you're google, don't be evil. (Write that one down!).

Pop Quiz: How we discuss woman in STEM

As scientists, engineers, and thinkers, I know several of you are interested in the phenomenon of the subtle ways in which women in STEM are diminished by sexist language and behavior. Sticks and stones, perhaps, but even this stuff is critical to addressing if we truly want to make progress and enable a cultural shift. (See also, death by a thousand paper cuts).

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize progress relies almost entirely on the shoulders of mass media. Yesterday NPR had a story about Hollywood Health and Society, which consults with writers about how to write correct and useful story lines on healthcare and climate change*. Turns out the majority of Americans learn about science and healthcare from fictional TV- surprise!

So, writers, you have an important job to do. You need to portray scientists as they actually are. No putdowns, no pedestals, and definitely no tropes.

*Ahem*.

Ok, ready for the pop quiz?

Part 1: Read these quotes, and list all the tropes. 

1) "For Janet Yellen, Obama’s Federal Reserve nominee, quiet patience paid off"

2) "Though he says she hasn't been a superstar economist like her husband, George Akerlof, who shared the 2001 Nobel prize, and her achievements have been overshadowed by Bernanke and former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, she is a great role model for women, because throughout she has proved her intelligence, technical expertise, creativity, and her ability to cooperate with others and work hard."

Part 2: Consider the following two Wikipedia summaries**. What's different? (Hint: check the things in red). 

Pencils down!


-------
*We need this for Computer Science. Nearly every computer whiz portrayed in television is a socially inept caucasian man and/or psychopathic underachiever woman. And speaking of which, while I'm happy Elementary attempted to discuss P ?= NP last week, though there were some problems as Lance points out. More importantly, why was the woman a professor at some podunk university I'd never heard of, and the man was a professor at Columbia? And all she did is teach. And, PS, sexy librarian trope.

**This is my next project. It is positively absurd how women are described on wikipedia in comparison to men. Not just scientists - musicians, actors, artists, writers, athletes - pretty much every profession. Women quietly cooperate and have babies! Men invent things and lead.

A boy called Sue

Kim O'Grady writes, "I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume and landed a job".

The tl;dr version is: Kim was an experienced engineering/business person who was applying for jobs. Sent out dozens of resumes to top places, did not get a single interview. Sent out his resume to a bunch of lower tier places, still no interview. Finally, he realizes they are taking "Kim" to mean he is a woman. So he adds the prefix "Mr." to his resume, sends it out again, and immediately lands interviews.

My first name is Kim. Technically, it’s gender neutral, but my experience showed that most people’s default setting in the absence of any other clues is to assume Kim is a woman’s name. And nothing else on my CV identified me as male. At first I thought I was being a little paranoid, but engineering, sales and management were all male-dominated industries. So I pictured all the managers I had over the years and, forming an amalgam of them in my mind, I read through the document as I imagined they would have. It was like being hit on the head with a big sheet of unbreakable glass ceiling.

This is so sad. It reminds me of neurobiologist Ben Barres' experience, where after giving a seminar as a Ben after his transition from Barbara someone in the audience remarked, "Ben Barres's work is much better than his sister's."

The one I hear a lot in my field is, "X is a superstar" or "X is gifted", and always "X" is a man. I've never heard a woman referred to as a superstar or being gifted in her field. I've also never heard of a young woman referred to as a child prodigy.

Terrifying, Escalating Sexism

A lot of people in the tech community have been abuzz about the recent story of Adria Richards, and I'd like to comment on it as a woman in technology, and as an observer of some pretty scary, sickening behavior.

Adria is a developer evangelist and a woman of color who attended PyCon, a large conference for Pyton developers. Up until today, she was employed by a company called SendGrid.

Here is a timeline of what has transpired as I understand it:

1. Last Sunday, Adria was at a keynote talk at PyCon. Two men behind her who work at PlayHaven, Alex Reid and "Mr. Hank", made inappropriate jokes about forking and dongles. It is worth noting that both Alex and Hank were clearly wearing company T-Shirts, and were attending this event as Gold Level company sponsor representatives.

2. Adria tweeted about how their joke was unprofessional and posted their photograph. She blogged about the incident, and how it was not inline with PyCon's rule of proper conduct for the conference. She also contacted the PyCon organizers. [1]

3. The chair of PyCon, Jesse Noller, addressed the parties privately, and amicably resolved the issue in order to continue a peaceful conference. [2]

4. Hank is fired from PlayHaven. He posted an oddly worded apology in Hacker News, mentioning they didn't mean anything at all sexual about their jokes, how it was just her interpretation, and, by the way, getting fired "sucks" because he is a father of three. [3]

5. Adria posts a kind note to Hank on the thread, apologizing for him losing his job, and encouraging his company to reconsider their actions. [4]. Several people attack her for this apology, actually, though Hank comments that he thought the gesture was kind. [5].

6. A petition is started online to save Hank's job, entitled, "Give the mistreated employee their job back". [6]. I've grouped the comments into common sexist tropes to help make it easier to skim.

Supporting the family man: "Dude, the guy has three kids and really enjoyed his job and is getting fired over the sensitive feelings of an already biased towards men female? Right on guys."

Bashing the feminists: "So it has come to a point where feminists have to make every joke between some friends a personal attack. This woman wasn't even involved in their conversation. She didn't even understand their jokes and yet the guys have to suffer for it? It's not fair."

Lighten up it's just a joke: "You should fire every developer who has ever made a harmless joke about about "forking", "fscking", or "Big O". Because god forbid people have fun while they work."

"If they were honestly fired for making a dongle joke to themselves and some over reacting bitch felt the need to get so pissed off I don't think I want to live on this planet anymore." 

Godwin's Law (Comparisons to Nazism): "Shameful. Just shameful. I, and others in the very liberally-oriented music industry have done this same thing at conferences, meetings and corporate get-togethers for the last 35 years now. There is no harm associated with this kind or type of behaviour, other than offending the occasional feminist shill... When did we become Nazi Germany and begin to turn in our fellow citizens for crimes of "humour" or "sexism?" Give the damn guy his job back, willya - and stop being so politically correct..."

"People like Adria Richards are little more than fascists"

"Please don't support her oppression and viciousness." 

One woman is all women: "This is absolutely disgusting! Adria Richard's actions have made it difficult for women to be properly accepted in the tech industry!"

I'm going to pause here, because I think if we review the facts thus far we can agree that perhaps this situation could have gone differently. As many people in these comment threads have stated, would it not have been better for Adria to have simply addressed the commenters directly, rather than calling them out publicly on Twitter? Perhaps. But at this point the cat is out of the bag, and I think here we can see in (5) that Adria expressed sincerely that she wishes Hank had not been fired.

7. Sometime around Wednesday, Jesse Noller starts receiving threatening phone calls, which scare him and his wife. [7]. Apparently the harassers do not like the fact that he helped pioneer (and enforce) a Code of Conduct for PyCon, in order to make it more welcoming place to women and other groups underrepresented in computing. [8].

8. Adria receives death threats, rape threats, racial slurs, sexist slurs, and calls that she kill herself.  Here are several:

"Cunt of the Year" goes to early entry @adriarichards. [t1]

"I'm pretty sure that Adria Richards has set women in technology back 50 years. What a bitch." [t2]

"Did that desperate attention whore and "diversity hire" Adria Richards get the wrong guy fired?"[t3]
"@adriarichards Shut the fuck up stupid bitch and go to the kitchen" [t4] 

"@adriarichards you need to kill youself tranny what you did was wrong"[t5]

"@adriarichards you are a stupid uneducated filthy nigger who deserves to die" [t6]

"@adriarichards You are a pure cunt for what you did. I hope you get Cancer and die a slow and painful death. I will celebrate your death" [t7]

"@adriarichards THIS COCK OF MINE IS BURNING RED ITS LOUD ROAR TELLS ME TO RAPE YOU" [t8]  

9. On Wednesday, Adria receives a photo of a, "beheaded woman, bound and stripped, with the caption 'when Im done.' Next to it was [her] home address and phone number."[9].

10. Several petitions demanding Adria be fired are posted, on change.org and elsewhere. [10].

11. On Thursday, someone (Anonymous(?)) posts on pastebin that while they think these petitions are great, they doubt SendGrid will pay attention to them. So, instead, the threaten SendGrid: [11]

...You[r] client list has also been obtained by Anonymous. They have already begun harassing your customers. These include obnoxious phone calls, emails, denial of service attacks, online vandalism and defamation, and even real-life harassment...Anonymous has analyzed your business model, and based on your clientele and competitors, you are very vulnerable. They are very focused on this.

Your financial backers have also been targeted for the same harassment. Normally, when a venture capitalist puts money into your organization, a bond is forged through your idea or product gaining the confidence of your financial backer for future returns. This is a strong bond that is not easily broken through petty harassment. However, if any of your backers have something embarrassing or illegal to hide (sexual misconduct, tax fraud, etc), Anonymous WILL find it (they are good at doing this) and make it public.

Real life harassment is an escalation that comes into play based on how long this situation is allowed to play out. It is not affected by the effectiveness of the previous forms of harassment. Even if your customers and financial backers are dropping like flies (or the opposite, entirely unaffected), this will still happen if Anonymous still maintains an interest in this situation. Doxing is a term used to define the discovery and dissemination of all personal information, including but not limited to home address, phone numbers, credit card numbers, your medical records, what brand of toothpaste you buy, etc. If some of the more talented members of Anonymous take an interest into this, every employee of Sendgrid becomes a target, starting at the top. For your reference, this is already happening to Ms. Richards as per standard protocol.

...You do have a choice to make at this point: Do nothing, or Publicly announce that Ms. Richards will be fired. The opportunity to stop this growing mob in its tracks before it tries to tear Sendgrid apart is as simple as publicly announcing Ms. Richards' firing. Now, you also have the opportunity to be sneaky about it and just publicly announcing the firing but not actually do it. But if Anonymous ever finds out, they will bring the full fury on you and your company. To put it in perspective, not even secure government websites are safe. If you believe you can tough it out, by all means, do nothing.

12. Later on Thursday, SendGrid is victim to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. [12]. Adria's personal site was also attacked (though hers is protected by CloudFire). Kris Holt has a good break down of how these attacks were organized on 4chan. [13].

13. SendGrid announces on Twitter and Facebook that they have fired Adria Richards. Immediately their posts get a lot of "likes", and very vile comments against Adria are posted. [14].

And here we are.

Three things greatly trouble me about all of this:

1) Rape Culture. Death threats. Racial and Sexist name calling. None of this is ok, ever. I don't need to explain this further, do I?

2) 4chan-ers/Anon/whomever managed to easily cyberbully SendGrid into firing Adria. If I was a CEO of a small startup company with 130,000 customers and received a threat like that, I might acquiesce too. It's a credible threat. (Though, I probably would have first contacted the FBI before acting.).

3) Although he's not getting as much press, I'm also troubled by the fact that Jesse Noller is getting threats. Based on some comments I've read of his on github, it seems like his heart is in the right place with both the original Code of Conduct and its revisions.

In any case, there are a lot of factors at play in this story, and this is a complex situation, but I think it all warrants a larger discussion. I welcome your comments.

Seeing sexism in academia - moving up the ranks opens the eyes

A few years ago I remember reading an article about the fact that as women become more senior in their disciplines they start to encounter more sexism. For a long time I've been trying to figure out how that worked - was it that senior women encountered senior men more often, and were thus encountering old attitudes?

Recently, after a particularly upsetting incident, I realised what it is. It is that as we become more senior and have more experiences, we simply see sexism more. We are more aware. As junior women, when we encounter a microaggressive comment, it's just one papercut. Maybe it's one of those very subtle papercuts that you don't even notice until a few days later when you use rubbing alcohol.

But as you become more senior, you become more aware. You start counting these comments, and noticing them more and more.

"What's the big deal? Who cares what they say?" the well-intentioned male colleague says. The big deal is that at work I am Scientist first, Woman second. Men that treat my science as secondary (or even peripherally) to my gender insult my intelligence and insult my years of hard work to get to the place I am at.

Furthermore, the fact that these comments are unequally delivered is particularly infuriating. If, when my male colleagues had newborns, people said, "OMG! How will you survive as a professor??? How will you keep your research program afloat?! AUGH!!!", it would be ok. If, when my male colleagues wore colorful clothing, their senior colleagues stopped them in the hallway and said, "Please don't take this in the wrong way, but that shirt really brings out the color of your beautiful eyes.", it would be ok.

But it's not equal. Women-as-mother, women-as-sexulized-object - these take first place. Women-as-scholar, woman-as-professor is in the back seat.

So what do I do in these situations when they happen to me? First, my heart starts pounding. I think, "This is A Moment! I am supposed to Say Something!" Then, I stop. I realize this person is just clueless. They have no idea that they are saying all this dreadful stuff only to women and not men. They honestly have no earthly idea. Finally, I ask myself if this is a Teaching Moment or not. It usually is not, at least not right then. 

These attitudes are so ingrained in our culture, they are just a part of how many people think. Publically humiliating the offender will not suddenly make them change their ways. But sometimes I desperately want to.

What the hell, Dell?

Last month, Dell ran a summit in Copenhagen with over 800 attendees, including Michael Dell himself. As an MC for the event they hired Mads Christensen, who apparently is well known in Denmark for making racist, sexist, and other sorts of remarks in bad taste.

Christiane Vejlo was in the audience and tweeted and blogged about some of the comments Christensen made. He started out by noticing the majority of people in the crowd were men and said:

"The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy". 

Then he points out the very few women in the room and says, "What are you actually doing here?" 

... 

After the break Mads Christensen shares with us his whole “show” about the bitchy women who want to steal the power in politics, boards and the home. “Science” he calls it and mentions that all the great inventions come from men. “We can thank women for the rolling pin,” he adds.  And then the moderator of the day finishes of by asking all (men) in the room to promise him that they will go home and say, “shut up, bitch!”.

Sigh.
The worst part is apparently Dell's response to complaints were along the lines of, "But, of course we support women! We were just trying to be funny. Ha ha. Can't you take a joke?"
I guess they realized this wasn't a good reply, so then they said something along the lines of, "We're sorry if we offended anyone." That "if" suggesting it is a woman's (or man's) fault if they were offended.

Molly Wood at CNET recently wrote about the event, and noted that apparently Dell has a precedent of being rather anti-women. In 2009 they had a marketing campaign suggesting women only used computers for dieting and shopping (you forgot knitting!), and it also settled a $10 million lawsuit over pay discrimination.
Dell, I am shaking my rolling pin at you. (Which I can do when I'm not baking your face off.)

Discrimination in an inverted hierarchy

Today at Scientopia I discuss the issue of inverted discrimination in the workplace, for example, when a student acts racist/sexist/ableist against a professor, or a department head discriminates against a CEO.