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Sexual Harassment In Tech Is As Old As the Computer Age (ieee.org)
Tekla Perry writes: Historian Marie Hicks, speaking at the Computer History Museum talks about how women computer operators and programmers were driven out of the industry, gives examples of sexual harassment dating back to the days of the Colossus era, and previews her next research. "It's all a matter of power, Hicks pointed out -- and women have never had their share of it," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Women dominated computer programming in its early days because the field wasn't seen as a career, just a something someone could do without a lot of training and would do for only a short period of time. Computer jobs had no room for advancement, so having women 'retire' in their 20s was not seen as a bad thing. And since women, of course, could never supervise men, Hicks said, women who were good at computing ended up training the men who ended up as their managers. But when it became clear that computers -- and computer work -- were important, women were suddenly pushed out of the field."
Hicks has also started looking at the bias baked into algorithms, specifically at when it first crossed from human to computer. The first example she turned up had "something to do with transgender people and the government's main pension computer." She says that when humans were in the loop, petitions to change gender on national insurance cards generally went through, but when the computer came in, the system was "specifically designed to no longer accommodate them, instead, to literally cause an error code to kick out of the processing chain any account of a 'known transsexual.'"
Hicks has also started looking at the bias baked into algorithms, specifically at when it first crossed from human to computer. The first example she turned up had "something to do with transgender people and the government's main pension computer." She says that when humans were in the loop, petitions to change gender on national insurance cards generally went through, but when the computer came in, the system was "specifically designed to no longer accommodate them, instead, to literally cause an error code to kick out of the processing chain any account of a 'known transsexual.'"
That's funny, in my 35 year career as a software engineer I've had my share; perhaps 40% of my managers have been women. And they were generally pretty good too. I can't say the same for the men managers I've had. There were one or two who were atrocious.
And yes, I'm male.
The feminists find they miss it because it means men either don't find them attractive anymore or are at least just flat out ignoring them.
A normal man who flirts with a normal woman isn't being an asshole, even if he doesn't immediately stop. Plenty of women who end up in happy LTRs will laugh and say "his persistence is what got me" or something to that effect. Women usually don't respect men who obediently go away the moment she says "not interested."
Granted, there may be a cultural difference here. I'm a southerner working in a big metropolitan region in the south. I have never seen ANY of the sort of in-your-face behavior in our offices that one would believe is par for the course on the West Coast. So my assumption is normal flirting and push-pull, not "hey babe, wanna fuck in the bathroom?" to a female colleague.
PGOTUS confessed. We have it on tape.
Confessed to what? Consensual relations? Why do you care. There's no evidence that he ever did what he was talking about, they would have been consensual anyway (that's what "let you do it" means), and besides, it was just typical locker room bragging.
By your standard, there's no evidence that Franken did any of the things he has been accused of either.
There are literally photos of it. He took photos of himself groping sleeping women. It doesn't get much more clear-cut than that.
There is absolutely no evidence of Trump or Moore ever doing anything wrong. Ever.
And if the man does it 10 times a week, to a different woman each time, it's 10 single incidents.
And if the woman gets 10 unwanted comments a week, from a different man each time, its 10 single incidents.
Correct, though I know that was just a lame attempt at reductio ad absurdum. If a woman isn't interested in one man, that's no indication that she's not interested in another. What you wrote works in the other direction, as well. Yes, women can (and do) harass men; and men do, in fact, get hit on at school and in the workplace.
Going back a few years, to 1999, I was being harassed nearly daily by a girl at school. Every day during lunch she would make advances in front of over a dozen other kids sitting at our table and every day I would make it clear I had no interest. After a couple months of this, she decided she would get back at me for rejecting her by flipping it around and claiming I had harassed her. It did not go well for me; and the experience has made it difficult for me to take a woman's claim of harassment at face value. Yes it happens, yes it's awful, but underhanded shit like what happened to me also happens. In the end, there was justice and it went much worse for her, but it's still not an experience anyone should ever have.
Basically, what happened is that I was called into the office and there was the principal, counselor, and a cop waiting for me. They read through a list of things she had said to me (that she claimed I had said to her -- and some of them were very obviously said by her as they were things a girl might do to a boy or might ask a boy do to do her, worded as the girl would have said them) and asked what I had to say about it. My response was to ask for a pen and paper, telling them I had a written statement to offer. I then wrote the names of everyone who sat at the same lunch table as us on a regular basis, handed it to them, and told them those people would be able to back up her story if it was true.
Wording it that way was my only mistake, as they took it as an admission of guilt and suspended me. Home life was, let's just say, not good during the following 3 days before they decided they should maybe actually interview some of the kids on my list. They interviewed a total of three before they had heard enough; one of those three was a nerdy little shit (who I'd never really paid attention to by then, but who later became one of my best friends) who carried a tape recorder around and had a habit of recording things for no particular reason. He, of course, recorded lunches, which meant he recorded what actually happened, proof that she was the one who said the things she claimed I had said, and proof that I had tried to put a stop to it.
In the end, I got a shitty apology from the school that did nothing to make up for the trauma I suffered at home (not the girl's fault, I blame my father for his reaction) but she got expelled. Not for the harassment, mind you, but for the false claim.
And that's how it should be, really; the punishment for falsely claiming someone harmed you should be much worse than the punishment for what you're claiming. And I mean provably false, as in there is some actual proof that things didn't happen the way it is claimed they happened; of course, the accused simply being found innocent shouldn't be enough to trigger false charges prosecution. Presumption of innocence and all that, you know?
And if 10 men do it, and 1 woman does it, that means it's okay for everyone to do it.
Now this is a fine example of reductio ad absurdum against "whataboutism", good for you. I mean, you think you're arguing against natural and respectful interaction between males and females, wherein one backs down when it is made clear the other has no interest in them, but whataboutism is wrong and needs to be put to an end, so thank you for arguing against it, even if you think you're doing something else.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Have you read or watched the news AT ALL in the last two months?
The common theme is not "Some woman made a complaint about something innocent and that ruined a man", it's "Some men harassed, and often assaulted, women, and sometimes men, over a period of decades, and HR assisted those men and covered it up."
It virtually never goes to court. And until a few months ago, men could be pretty openly accused of virtually everything under the sun, and remain influential. The complaints against Roger Ailes, Keven Spacey, Bill O'Reilly and the yet to be touched director of certain X Men films, went on for decades, often leaking into the public, and nothing, NOTHING, was done.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.