Totally agree. While I do think “newer coders” may very likely feel unwelcome, as an extension of the elitism issue, there’s no mechanism by which “people of color”, “women”, or “minorities” can even be identified... I fear people are subconsciously correlating these groups with “less able coders”. Obviously this correlation serves only to damage.
> there’s no mechanism by which “people of color”, “women”, or “minorities” can even be identified
That's a legit question: If people don't even know what gender you are/what color your skin is, can they actually be intentionally racist/sexist towards you?
Which makes me wonder if the actual wrong turn we took was making social media as prevalent as it is today. 20 years ago people on the www were really careful about sharing personal details. People liked their anonymity, there was equality in anonymity! Personal details were only exchanged with those deemed trustworthy enough after enough positive interaction.
But these days anonymity is nearly criminalized, while in some circles open self-display on social media is borderline worshipped as it has become the modern equivalent of "making it big on TV".
Somewhere in there is a relation between crappy TV casting shows, which most people only watch to see jurors be mean to the applicants, and social media. Nowadays social media are our modern TV casting shows and everybody can participate in being the nasty juror putting applicants down.
Note: I know that Stack Overflow ain't considered social media, but these days it feels like these dynamics are pretty much prevalent everywhere.
I was just thinking the same thing recently with all of the Facebook shenanigans. Anonymity was common sense on the net 20 years ago. Many who grew up in that time will recognise the sentence "We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias". The dream of the net was a world in which only words mattered.
We sold that out when our Github account, SO profile, email address proved to be useful for finding jobs or improving our social status.
To this day it just feels weird writing people, I only know from the meatspace (friends&family), there. It's such an utterly different MO compared to my usual Internet-interactions that I sometimes struggle how to express myself just because I actually know these people.
That's why I kinda liked having the Internet and meatspace firmly separated, since they started bleeding into each other it feels like everything has just gotten needlessly more complicated and hostile.
re: If people don't even know what gender you are/what color your skin is, can they actually be intentionally racist/sexist towards you?
Hmm, why do you think intentionally is important in that sentence?
It wouldn't surprise me at all if making the site unfriendly towards newcomers affected minorities more. That seems... bad? And if so, anonymity wouldn't fix it.
It's funny how being results-oriented seems to be counterintuitive to many people whenever a discussion touches on morality. Somehow the issue of good intentions (or lack thereof) overrides everything else.
> If people don't even know what gender you are/what color your skin is, can they actually be intentionally racist/sexist towards you?
Not directly, but often indirectly since in such a situation it is common to assume you are a white male. That's a bit off-putting if you are not one, but you might put up with it rather than clarifying your gender/race if doing so opens you up to a risk of direct sexism/racism
Other people assuming you are like them and treating you the SAME as they would treat all the other SO members is literally the outcome we want isn’t it? We’re being treated equally.
But now people are being offended because they aren’t being treated differently based on information the other parties don’t have?
What “we” want is a bunch of kinda aligned stuff to accomplish reasonably similar goals.
I don’t think SO wants people to treat people the same by starting with the assumption that I am like you. I think they want the opposite. I think they want you to stop assuming things about the person you’re talking to altogether, and start baking that caution into your interactions.
Try inverting your thinking - how would you like it if the only way you can get treated with respect is to allow others to assume you are something you are not? Its textbook alienation.
On SO its likely not as bad as the rest of the net, but it'd be naive to assume its perfect: harassment aside, I imagine obviously female commentators get a hefty dose of mansplaining thrown their way
> how would you like it if the only way you can get treated with respect is to allow others to assume you are something you are not?
Fair enough if you call people out when they know something about the person they're interacting with. But you're suggesting people are prejudiced because they thought the wrong thing.
Don't know about others, but for me the answer is:
A little bit. Not a huge amount, not because someone on the internet got it wrong. But because it is a reminder that I basically have to try and hide my gender on a huge part of the internet to not be harassed.
I already have to stay away from LinkedIn unless I am applying for a job due to guys thinking it is a dating site.
I have to pick ambiguous usernames that don't hint at gender.
I occasionally have to throw an account away on a site.
It bothers me that I basically have to pretend to be a dude on most of the internet because of assholes.
> It bothers me that I basically have to pretend to be a dude on most of the internet because of assholes.
At least on the Internet, you can pretend, in the meatspace, you simply can't.
I also wouldn't call these people assholes, it might be convenient but imho it's needlessly vilifying people for simply behaving like they are expected to and how they've behaved for the longest time.
Because for the longest time, and in most places to this day, males are expected to initiate contact, if they are interested in a relationship with a female.
Now, one could argue that's outdated and "sexist", but that doesn't change the fact that large parts of our societies (and our behavior) are still shaped by these expectations. It's not that people want to be assholes, people simply don't want to be alone and for the longest time, the most common and accepted solution for that was for males to initiate contact and woo the females.
Sadly this is an angle on all this that too often gets ignored in favor of some simplified narrative where all these guys are just a bunch of misogynists who consider women their property or something like that. While these types do exist too, it just feels dishonest to frame this whole issue like that.
Because as a male the reality of the situation pretty much boils down to this: You are either proactive and approach people or... you stay alone. I'm not trying to dramatize here, I'm just trying to point something out that seems to be largely ignored in these kinds of discussions.
Not everybody is a socialite who constantly meets new people without any effort, heck for the longest time we've been told that female brains are explicitly better at socializing that than male brains (or is that considered sexist now too?). So what are males supposed to do in this situation? Just sit tight until a female approaches them? That's pretty much a "forever alone" sentence for the vast majority of males.
That's why at some point for many males this becomes a simple issue of game theory: You can't meet new females without approaching new females, the more new females you approach the higher the likelihood that you will end up with one of them.
As sad and sterile as it might sound, in the end, it often just boils down to "trying often enough" and it's been that way for the longest time and I'm pretty certain this is engrained in our nature to a certain degree. Millions of years of behavioral evolution don't just vanish in a matter of years.
Yeah, kind of. True or not, I feel the assumption is that if I ask a sensible question or give a good answer, I must be a guy. I don't bother to correct, given the environment, so the stereotype is reinforced. But at the same time, I do want that gender ambiguity so I am treated as an equal. It's a funny catch-22.
I should note that on several sites this isn't particularly true - for example, on Academia.SE it's pretty easy to know/guess and the questions are often about these marginalized groups.
...and when they make Hot Network Questions, the influx of people from Stack Overflow is highly correlated with an immediate drop in the quality of answers and essentially the ruination of the question, to the point that several high rep users, myself included, have asked if we could opt out of HNQ as a concept.
Of course there are mechanisms. For example it is super easy to tell if an asker is indian, by their name. And often women chose names that allow a good guess. Other hints may also be contained in the name. Then there is the profile image, and of course the bio. And lastly, often the question itself can contain details that hint at things.
Yes, people can hide these characteristics, but they shouldn't need to.
> there’s no mechanism by which ... “women” ... can even be identified
_No_ mechanism? Seriously? How about when the user is named "Jane Smith"? Or, heaven forbid, they actually use a PROFILE PICTURE with their ACTUAL FACE. Oh god the horror!
I, as a white male with a caucasian sounding name have the privilege of being able to use my actual name on the internet. Women that want to be taken seriously don't even have that choice.
Sure over time women figure out that anonymizing their gender online is a wise strategy, but how many brand new programming-enthusiasts are going to learn this when they have negative first experiences on the most popular Q&A platform for programmers? How many never return to contribute because of those negative experiences?
It's no wonder you can't go to SO and find women, they either aren't contributing or they have effectively hidden themselves among the ranks of the men.
Yea, I am fairly certain I'm bastardizing the use of the word "caucasian" here. What I mean is that people with the name "Cory Klein" on their SO profile likely get treated differently than "Mohammud Bin Salmen" or "Lacey Richards".
meh. Loads of Asians pretending to be white women to see if they get away with more attention. Often in a while when they take photos we even see the reflection of the actual guy. They are have probably more "discrimination" for the bad questions than for being a "woman".
