<story><title>Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t</title><url>https://www.thecut.com/2017/08/ellen-pao-silicon-valley-sexism-reset-excerpt.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Joeri</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s easy to get hung up on the particulars of Pao&amp;#x27;s story and get sidetracked into defending or judging her, but I feel that is besides the point. I am more interested in the wider notion of why she wrote this article: to point out that sexism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn&amp;#x27;t be.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m wondering though: is this just about sexism, or is it about professionalism and maturity? Getting hit on by someone higher up the hierarchy than you can make it impossible to do your job, so that behavior is clearly unprofessional. But getting yelled at by your boss for shipping a bug is also unprofessional, and can also make it a toxic work environment. I&amp;#x27;m not saying the two are the same, just that both are examples of unprofessional behavior that many places will tolerate.&lt;p&gt;Isn&amp;#x27;t it time we have conversations about what it means to be a professional in tech? Maybe other industries suffer less from these things because they have a longer history and have more guild-like working practices, where professional behavior is more clearly defined. In tech people get away with wildly unprofessional behavior as long as &amp;quot;they get stuff done&amp;quot;, and personally I never felt that was acceptable.&lt;p&gt;Maybe this stuff is also sort of everywhere. Plenty of industries have toxic working relationships. Why isn&amp;#x27;t professionalism part of standard education tracks? I studied CS and I never learned about what it means to be a professional software developer. How do you have productive conversations with coworkers? How do you organize your work effectively? All of these things you&amp;#x27;re supposed to figure out on your own, but looking around I can tell that mostly people never do, or only do so after decades of getting it wrong.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dmix</author><text>I can&amp;#x27;t imagine anything more unprofessional than raving about meeting a washed up porn star and then talking about sex workers in the company of people you are not intimately familiar with. Although you could say it was a &amp;#x27;social&amp;#x27; moment on the jet, not a professional meeting (as Pao seems to believe it was) where there should always be much more latitude on conversation topics, it&amp;#x27;s still very distasteful.&lt;p&gt;I normally have a very high tolerance for talking about any topic but anyone who says that stuff in public and not in the small company of close friends has bigger issues than just 
sexism.&lt;p&gt;As others have pointed out most of these situations sound like grown men acting like frat boys or teenagers, not adult males with a singular problem with how they treat women. These are men who need to learn how to act around other adults and how to treat people with respect in public. Or at a very minimum leave it for your off-time among close friends in private.&lt;p&gt;Software has largely confronted the &amp;#x27;brogrammer&amp;#x27; issue publicly, and I believe is working to improve itself, but it&amp;#x27;s well known that finance is still heavily influenced by untamed frat boy culture. This is a culture where these immature boys don&amp;#x27;t get their behaviour properly confronted and corrected. Especially when you throw personal wealth into the occassion.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t</title><url>https://www.thecut.com/2017/08/ellen-pao-silicon-valley-sexism-reset-excerpt.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Joeri</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s easy to get hung up on the particulars of Pao&amp;#x27;s story and get sidetracked into defending or judging her, but I feel that is besides the point. I am more interested in the wider notion of why she wrote this article: to point out that sexism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn&amp;#x27;t be.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m wondering though: is this just about sexism, or is it about professionalism and maturity? Getting hit on by someone higher up the hierarchy than you can make it impossible to do your job, so that behavior is clearly unprofessional. But getting yelled at by your boss for shipping a bug is also unprofessional, and can also make it a toxic work environment. I&amp;#x27;m not saying the two are the same, just that both are examples of unprofessional behavior that many places will tolerate.&lt;p&gt;Isn&amp;#x27;t it time we have conversations about what it means to be a professional in tech? Maybe other industries suffer less from these things because they have a longer history and have more guild-like working practices, where professional behavior is more clearly defined. In tech people get away with wildly unprofessional behavior as long as &amp;quot;they get stuff done&amp;quot;, and personally I never felt that was acceptable.&lt;p&gt;Maybe this stuff is also sort of everywhere. Plenty of industries have toxic working relationships. Why isn&amp;#x27;t professionalism part of standard education tracks? I studied CS and I never learned about what it means to be a professional software developer. How do you have productive conversations with coworkers? How do you organize your work effectively? All of these things you&amp;#x27;re supposed to figure out on your own, but looking around I can tell that mostly people never do, or only do so after decades of getting it wrong.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cthulhu_</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d argue it&amp;#x27;s not about &amp;quot;in tech&amp;quot; though, as another commenter pointed out, this is a completely different world of private jets and deciding where to spend the hundreds of millions these people have on, betting on their 10 million investment becoming a billion. This is the &amp;quot;snorting coke off a model&amp;#x27;s ass for lunch&amp;quot; world, not tech.</text></comment>