I try not to make this site about my personal grievances about people and attitude, and only about my code, but it does come back to code many times.
“I thought you knew what you were talking about. Never mind.”
That was actually said to me, about three years ago, when someone realized my name, Mika, was a woman’s name and not the male ‘Mike’ he’d thought it was. This was after pages upon pages of testing and debugging. The moment someone corrected him as to my name, and gender, he stopped listening to me. At the time, WordPress was my hobby, and so I decided he wasn’t worth my time anymore and walked away.
Then he followed me ‘home’ and emailed me saying women like me should stop trying to do tech support, and just find someone who knew what they were talking about. I deleted the email, blocked his email from my inbox and my blogs (using Sitewide Comment Control), and moved on.
If you need a reminder of the abuse and harassment we face daily, please read about the ping-pong theory of tech world sexism or No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry. In both cases, the content may upset you.
The problem is that I can’t tell you how to deal with people who want to chase you off the internet, and if you should or should not fight them. I can tell you how to prevent them from getting further into your life once you’ve decided that you’re done with them.
I talked about this at WordCamp Minneapolis earlier this year, and the steps to Detoxify Your Website remain valid. In fact, those are my best methods for self protection. I use them today, not just when people are mean to me but when I know I cannot be nice to them. Some people rub you the wrong way and you know you’re going to lash at them. It’s okay to prevent yourself from talking to them.
That’s how I deal with them.
Don’t Reply If You’re Angry
If I’m angry I tell them “Hey, you’re making me angry right now and I can’t talk fairly about this, so I’m walking away. I promise I’ll come back, but I need to cool down.” If they follow me after that, they get blocked and I don’t go back. Respect people who need to step back and cool down. If it’s not a situation where I have to reply, I reach out to my friends in the same arena. “Can you talk to this person for me? I’m too angry to be sensible.”
Set Boundaries and Stick To Them
I’m very firm about this with plugins. If I emailed you a plugin thing, like I had to close your plugin, asking me to update you on Twitter or Slack doesn’t actually do anything except annoy me. Yes, Aaron, we’re friends and yes, that still annoyed me. The real reason replies to plugins take time is that I don’t have a TARDIS, so unless you can invent one, it’s best to give folks at least 48 hours to reply. But replying to an email and then pinging me on Slack and Twitter is the equivalent of the phone call “Hey, did you get my email?”
I totally get that the subject is important to you. It’s important to me too. But you’re not helping me. So I draw a line and say “Hey, don’t ping me about the email. Reply to the email. I’ll read it and reply back.” That’s my boundary. I like it. It lets me cool down if I’m mad (see the previous note).
Don’t Feed Trolls
Lara Littlefield taught me a great phrase. “This makes absolutely no sense.”
To quote her:
I will reply “this makes no sense” to any comment that expresses misogyny or racism.
That’s my new reply. I’m using it. If someone drops into misogyny, racism, or anything of that ilk, they generally do it in a way that shows me they’re not going to listen. It’s like Godwin’s Law. Once you’re at the Nazi place, conversation is over and you’re not getting anything good about it.
That makes absolutely no sense.
Have People To Vent To
I bitch to my friends when I’m angry. I start with “I’ve very pissed off, it’s not at you, but I need to rant.” And guess what? My friends will let me bitch. They let me complain in language that is inappropriate and not well thought out. They give me a free pass to say horrible things. They let me get it all out. And then they help me be constructive.
You guys are pretty cool.
But it only works because I start with where I’m at and what I need. Sometimes they ask “Do you need to rant or do you want help figuring out what to do next?” Sometimes I don’t know, and that usually turns into “Rant away, Mika, and we’ll see what comes next.” Find those people. Keep them in your life.
Don’t Air Dirty Laundry
If you have a fight with someone, don’t plaster it all over the news. I’d say ‘and don’t subtweet’ but sometimes it helps. The real thing is that you don’t want to hurt your friends. Friends can be pretty vile to each other when we fight, so remember that you are friends, and try not to destroy things. Don’t blog post or comment about how so and so sucks. Don’t say the horrible things in public if you can help it.
You can’t go back from that.
The internet remembers.
Comments
6 responses to “Internet Abuse”
Besides from a few comments on your blog we don’t know each other. You might have noticed when I subscribed to it 🙂 I told you I was surprised you’re female when you posted about your name and it being mistaken to be a male one.
I read this post. I read the articles you linked to. This is all really sad. I don’t see myself as sexist in any way but I often think about the possibilty I might not be aware of sexist behaviour in myself. I can’t really say for sure.
When I led a small team I didn’t really care about the gender when hiring. With colleagues and superiors I often liked it more to work with women. You know why? Not because I’m soft (well, that may be) or because I’d think women are soft, but because I had the feeling that with women work could be done. In all-male meetings I felt it was more important to be seen as the one with the biggest balls. Figuratively, of course. Half the time it was only about who as the toughest wolf in the pack.
But what I get the absolutely least is that I always heard techie colleagues complain about there been basically no women in the industry. And then, when a woman gets hired the exact same things described in the game dev article happened! You know what? That’s what happens:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCEx6PXpLPs
I’m rambling. I’m somewhat angry. And I want to tell you that finding out your gender didn’t change my view of you in the slightest. Your posts are interresting and all the comments I’ve seen of you are straight, helpful and very concise. In my opinion only an idiot would take your gender into that evaluation.
Best wishes!
@Floutsch:
I second the last two sentences.
There is too little time in the day to be measuring “egos”. The time I worked in that situation was the time I fled from it as quickly as possible.
Either an idea is good or it is not. Doesn’t matter who it came from. I think really want annoys me the most is that with my speech impediment, people assume I am a moron, so they don’t take my suggestions seriously.
I don’t care. I give suggestions on the off chance someone would listen and improve their code. Whether they take that advice or not is up to them.
To be honest, I never understood this whole gender bias thing. It seemed kind of dumb and the kids that expressed those thoughts seemed to have some predilection to putting everyone down.
Then again some of my heroes in computer science are women or gay. So who am I to judge someone when Alan Turing and grace hopper exists. Where would we be now if some bullied them out of CS.
I am aware that Turing was in fact bullied out of his life and that is a shame. It is part of the reason, I try so hard not to bring such trivial and irrelevant matters up in discussions about code.
Either your code sucks and here is how you can correct it or it doesn’t and I will want to learn from it if possible.
My motto is to try not to give in to crazy. People tend to reject it for obvious reasons. As such, my general mode is to keep discussions to the same app. So of twitter, not jump to email. If email then not jump to twitter or blog.
One last point of contention for me is that I always have to question the statement of racism or X, where X is subjective internal motivations of a person. Certainly, in the example you gave, the actions of the person clearly shown intent and motivation of the person. Where I disagree with the person you quoted is where I disagree with anyone who imposes their interpretation of someone’s motivation on another person.
Or I think person A is X, therefore person A is X.
I am not sure where the interpretation comes from, but I when it comes to text conversations, I would rather someone clarify their position.
Does not really say much as to what or where the misunderstanding is. Which part did not make sense? which part needs clarification?
If the belief is that the person is X, then that will bias anything the person says to X, even if that person meant Y.
From my encounters with a few people in the WordPress community, it seems some are more inclined to wield the ban hammer at any thing that could remotely be offensive. I am not sure what to think about this.
The subjective nature of the topic of when to use the ban hammer has always seemed to leave much to be desired. As someone who has been banned from communities and seen others banned for similar nonoffenses, it does not seem to always be clear from either side what is right.
Of course there are people who only wish to see the world burn and any attempts to prevent them from raining fire seems to also have accusations of censorship. Not sure if that is simply part of the act or real.
As an asshat, I can’t really apologize for other asshats or clowns. But I will say that nothing I write or say is because you are a woman. If I go too deep into crazy, then well, just remind me and I will try to back off until the crazy dies down.
@Jacob Santos: It actually works quite well.
Don’t think of it as being used in actual conversations. Think of it as being used when people say things like “I didn’t know your lead developer was a woman. Never mind.” or “There are obvious differences between men and women, and that’s why fewer women are in code.”
There are people who can learn and there are people who can’t. You can tell who can’t pretty damn fast.
Thank you for sharing this story, Mika. It’s a scary but extremely important one. Slowly, bit by bit, we’ll get to creating safer spaces for female identifying and other less privileged groups of developers. Until then, we just have to stick together and reassure each other when the going gets tough.
@Lara Littlefield: Generally the men I surround myself with aren’t those men, which means when I run into one, it’s shocking. It’s like bouncing off a wall I didn’t know was there. I reject that reality and just keep on going forward. But not silently. I go pretty loudly these days. I’m hoping it helps…
I’ve lived for decades with people often assuming I’m male. Curious how credibility vanishes when it’s discovered one’s gender. Hilariously on the phone, a guy who interacted with me and then met in person commented h. “thought I’d be taller”. WTF?