My "data" is every woman I know in tech sharing this story with a comment like, "A version of this happened to me" or "I know so many people who have had this happen to them." Also multiple stories of women reporting harassment and being forced out of companies, as well as multiple women I know signing NDA's as a condition of receiving severance pay to avoid discussing a company's poor treatment or management of harassment.

Have you tried asking them? It feels vaguely ridiculous to expect hard data and facts on things of "people told me". I know I have female friends who have told me similar stories, but I couldn't for the life of me remember how many, nor would I want to start iterating these anecdotes to a stranger on the internet. In exactly the same way it would be to start statistically analysing any other statement on "people told me [x]".

As for the latter, putting lines in the sand is a good way to be seen as not wanting to listen... I'm not saying that's what you're doing in this case, just how it comes across. Like, you've decided in advance what you want the result from the discussion to be, and no woman will be able to cross whatever standard you've chosen for inappropriate propositions (even when this is totally untrue).

A very large part of the problem is that claims of harassment are waved away, and the same people are allowed to harass again and again. There's a lot of evidence pointing to "believe women when they say they are harassed."

I didn't say anything about disbelieving any women - I take issue with simply "guessing" that stuff like that happens all the time. That is just confirming bias with bias, completely removed from reality.

Apart from that, I wonder what evidence you are talking about? References? How often are claims waved away? Or is that just something you intuitively know?

And by the way, people coming out in response to such an article is also just classic confirmation bias. You need to put stories in relation to the total workforce before you claim almost everybody gets harassed.

I remember a thread a few months ago where said the twitter feed google had up for promoting working at google was evidence google wasn't interested in hiring male coders anymore.

If only you applied such rigorous quantitative standards of evidence to your own claims.

I did look and we disagree. Perhaps you can quantify what you saw?

I'll give it a shot, going through the first 100 tweets or so counting men, women, skin colors, is that what you mean? Hope to get round to it later in the day.

And btw I think it gives the impression they don't want to hire men, it doesn't prove that Google doesn't want to hire (white) men. But if they are interested in hiring white men, they might check the message they are sending out.

For sure their reputation is so good that white men will probably still apply in droves, so whatever (same probably goes for women and PoCs, anyway). But in my opinion they will also drive away some people. (edited to add "in my opinion")

And as I said - it is fine if you disagree, but at least there is something tangible to disagree on. That's different from simply playing into some stereotypes. Seriously, you are defending here the equivalent of "I have heard all blacks are criminals, and therefore it is true, no matter what you say". Wtf?

>But they will also drive away some people.

What evidence do you have for this?

My feelings :-) Granted, that is not yet "some", only one, but with millions of white men on the planet, chances seem high others see it the same way.

If you really want to nitpick, quantify my sentence with "in my opinion".

Absolute confirmation bias.

I can't wait for your quantification of the life at google twitter.

So what's your conclusion?

HN won't give me a reply button further down, and I want to go to bed, so I am replying here:

Yes, it reflects demographics of the US, but not demographics of tech or demographics of Google employees. So the account definitely doesn't reflect life at Google in an unbiased way.

Also, I tried to err on the side of counting too many whites. For example I counted this screenshot from an animation movie as two whites: https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/824649101069455361 I counted the blurry people in the background of this office: https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/817466019526610947 but I only counted 2 PoCs here despite the further pictures with more https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/822528000646381568 I also missed a lot of pictures because I didn't realize the retweets wouldn't be in the "media list".

I just made it up on the fly for a quick, simple metric. It would be better to decide beforehand what counts, for example if the person should be the item of a news story, should be presented as an engineer, stuff like that. And a longer time. I think I had 150 people, so the animation picture alone accounted for more than 1% of the final count of white people. As I said, some office shots greatly raised the white people count, counting only people who were subject of major stories would have lowered the percentage a lot.

Maybe you are jumping to conclusions because they confirm your beliefs?

Actually I had no idea what the demographic percentages of the US were before I looked them up.

Your original point was that you thought Google wasn't interested in hiring male engineers anymore. The current demographics of Google are irrelevant to Google's hiring strategy. Why would they be?

You're not only displaying confirmation bias in the way you are trying to undermine the clearest quantification you have access to, but you're also avoiding your original statement.

You initially presented the lifeatgoogle twitter feed as evidence, and you had no quantifiable evidence that it was biased. Now that you do have a quantification, you're walking back the importance of that evidence. Perhaps you're doing this so you can maintain your poorly quantified view?

If only you gave as much latitude to other people.

My claim about them not presenting any white males was from another time - do you recall by any chance when it was? As I explained, the sample size I used now was small, and a few pics can have made a big difference. I think when I made the claim there were different pictures, that is why I said more data should be looked at (to reduce random variation). I probably wouldn't have made the claim about the current timeline.

And again - I only used one simple metric, which already shows bias (it doesn't represent the actual demographics of Google employees). You assume now that metric is conclusive because it fits your conviction. By looking into more aspects the picture would be more clear.

And where do I not give latitude to other people?

>You assume now that metric is conclusive because it fits your conviction.

No, you're now walking back your claims because the one metric you have quantified doesn't fit your conviction. At the time you claimed that by simply looking at the feed you could tell it was biased. You initially made the claim that the lifeatgoogle twitter was related evidence to your claim that google wasn't interested in hiring men anymore. I'm not silly enough to claim that a brief perusal of a twitter account can be extrapolated into a claim about a company's hiring strategy.

Thanks to your quantification, we have some evidence to suggest the lifeatgoogle twitter is fairly representative of population demographics along gender and racial lines, at least in the US. I don't see the data as conclusive of anything more than that.

This time around there were more white men, I think - in part because of some specials like Tensor Flow, or a picture from an actual office.

It is still biased against white men (if it is supposed to reflect the actual distribution of Google employees), but not as extreme as last time. I really would like to find the date of my last comment about it. Also perhaps simply more data is needed - a single picture with several people could shift the results here, because I checked only pics from 2.5 months.

Also better methodology needed, this was just a quick shot looking into one simple metric.

You're again, falling victim to confirmation bias by rejecting the best quantification you've provided yet.

Lets examine the data you've provided - 29% white women, 19% women of color, 21% men of color, 30% white men.

This data is entirely in line with the demographics of the US. About 50/50 on gender and 60% white. In fact, given google's global hiring reach, these figures are actually biased towards white people - while about spot on for gender. This entirely contradicts the point you were originally pointing to this twitter feed as confirmation of.

If anything, this thread has just made me newly impressed with Google's approach to inclusion. It's also really, really obvious that the person you are responding to isn't able to reconcile seeing PoC and women with their own world view.

Huh wtf - what does seeing women and PoCs have to do with a "world view"? You think I am not aware that women and PoCs exist?

Exactly. You don't understand. So stop talking and start listening to the women around you, yeah?

> Personally I haven't heard many such stories from women in tech.

Women learn from a very young age to be very selective about who they trust, in a much more nuanced way than men do.

If you haven't heard such stories from women, it's quite probably because they're not comfortable telling you such things.

There aren't even that many women in tech who could tell such stories. Your argument is really quite worthless because it could be used to prove anything.

In any case, as I mentioned in another comment, a collection of stories is not a good way to gauge the problem. You need to put it into context - number of women in total, and also, what happens to men. Stories like this suggest that only women ever have bad experiences at companies. But you can find lots of male reports of being unhappy at a company, too. Why isn't that reason for men to quit in droves? Presumably the Uber-woman is happy with her new job at Stripe, too.

Consider that you may not be a safe person for women to tell such stories too, if your first instinct is going to be to minimize and dismiss.

I didn't minimize or dismiss any woman's story: the isssue here is the reference to imaginary women's imaginary stories. I can not dismiss an imaginary story, because it doesn't exist.

The issue is that because of bias against men, few people even realize that they are talking about completely fabricated assumptions in this thread.

And again: there are not even that many women who could tell such stories. I'd say 1 in 20 software developers at companies I worked for were female. So it is not a case of me not being told things by women on a significant scale. The women didn't tell me such stories because those women don't exist to begin with.

It would be nice to believe that all these reported events are exceptional, and to an extent they are atypical, but it is indicative of a fairly broken work culture that such things happen.

Until recently, I'd only ever read accounts of bad things like this happening at certain conferences, and not seen anything first hand. A few months back, one of the female staff on our team changed their github picture. When mentioning this in conversation, it turned out that random people (not physically at work, but github users who did not know any of us in person) were harassing/propositioning her solely due to that image. What sort of screwed up person does that?! People should be able to do their jobs without dealing with crap like that.

There have been a few high profile incidences of fairly bad things happening over the last year; see the code of conduct introduced at some conferences after some of them. Some people just don't know how to behave appropriately, sad to say. This story being a poster child for how not to behave, and how not to handle the situation properly if you're in HR.

And regarding the last paragraph, I'm not talking about anything in the workplace between colleagues or otherwise. I'm talking about creepy strangers propositioning people they have never ever met or communicated with, on github. github is not a dating or hookup site for strangers. It's for sharing and collaborating on code. There are other, more appropriate, sites for dating- and hookup-related activities with willing participants who opted into it. No one wants or needs to deal with strangers propositioning them through the tools they use for their professional work. You should not feel required to hide your appearance or identity to be comfortable doing your job without being harassed, unsolicited, by strangers.

The codes of conduct are unfortunately sanctimonious non-sense to beat people over the head with. Those who champion them never apply the rules to themselves, and those who really want to harass pay them no heed. This was already the case with Adria Richards and her dongle joke offense, where she harassed a guy by putting his photo on Twitter and cost him his job, and got lauded for it by gender activists and news articles alike. While citing the code of conduct.

Real harassment is already illegal. Conduct policies can only serve in the gray area where people do not want to get police involved, but still want to exact some form of retribution and punishment, often by playing the politics game. It empowers the wrong people for the wrong reasons. It also creates the illusion that tech is particularly nasty, when the exact opposite is true: despite what activists claim, it is far more meritocratic than most industries, and far more reliant on tools and methods that emphasize work over personality and identity.

The propositioning, this is a fact of life: men propose, women dispose, and it's creepy unless he's attractive. Fact is, people like to date people with similar interests, they meet in all sorts of contexts, and some are more tactful about it than others. That doesn't mean it's automatically harassment to be flirted with outside of a dating site or bar night, or that it's never welcome.

One asshole manager is just one asshole manager, and such crudeness is the exception, not the norm.

Some people would love to receive just an ounce of affection and appreciation just for merely showing up, so being able to complain about it is the luxury of the desirable. Especially when, as I've often seen, it's paired with exasperated stories of how so-and-so just won't take the endless "clear hints" that have been made, but a polite but firm "sorry, flattered but not interested" is never actually provided. We are told we must be more empathetic, but the empathy for the socially awkward or the lonely, those who are bad at reading social cues, that's never on the table. All this talk of "safe spaces" seems to vanish once it's the real nerds and geeks, the 'losers' who need consideration.

Just keep in mind, HR is mostly a female-staffed endeavour, and the passive aggressive and underhanded interaction described is certainly not typical of male interaction styles. If it's a poster child for how not to behave, I don't think those griping about techbros and misogyny are quite thinking through the implications here.

I don't think tech is more meritocratic then other jobs. Various signalings and posturings and confidencw often count so much more then merit. We don't even know how to define merit and never ever talk about what merit is.

Also, if she reported you to hr, then you should consider it hint clearest possible. We are not even talking about subtle misunderstandings here, he invited new employee to have sex.

Stop blaming douchebaghery on geekiness or nerdiness, most geeks are not like that.

Also, there is little direct about male keeping business info away from competitor or retroactively lowering her review scores to keep her. The politics there was ugly as fuck and had zero to do with merit.

The code of conduct also implies (male) visitors of conferences are rapists unless told otherwise. I personally find it very off putting if a conference of meetup has such a code of conduct. Not because I want to rape or harass (I don't), but because it is insulting.

I think if you organize an event, you should be allowed to assume your target group are good people. For people who nevertheless step over the line, the normal standards of decency apply and they can be dealt with, CoC or no.

finding data about underreporting of sexual harassment in the workplace is by definition difficult, since it is by definition not being reported, so anecdotes are all we have in many cases.

If you want a source though, here is one: (https://hbr.org/2016/10/why-we-fail-to-report-sexual-harassm...)

In this case, the data is moot. It doesn't matter if 10% of women experience this, or 90%. Whether or not it is a problem is not in debate. It is a problem. Preventing sexual harassment is everyone's responsibility, even if you are not the one harassing.

Of course the scale of the problem makes a difference. People are also being murdered on a daily basis, but we don't claim it affects the labor force at scale (like "there is a shortage of women in STEM because they have all been murdered"). Just like murders should be prevented, sexual harassment should be prevented. But that doesn't necessarily make it a large scale problem.

As for the linked problem, I criticize that it doesn't properly define sexual harassment. The comparison here is to a guy who proposed sex on a first work day and threatened a stunted career. Is that really what women experience all the time. Or is it mostly that an unwanted colleague is attracted to them? The methodology is also not clear (very likely they only asked women, which seems rather one-sided. For "real" crime there is a reason for there being courts and judges).

If you think a comment shouldn't be on HN you can downvote it or flag it.

There's a high karma threshold for voting. There's a lower karma threshold for flagging. Flagging (I think) should be reserved for serious violations. The flag button appears if you click the timestamp of the post.

Please do not talk to anyone, male or female, like this.

Please stop posting uncivilly and unsubstantively like this.

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