I recently reached a few high points in my career that coincided, not coincidentally, with some of the worst harassment of my life. It made me reflect on how my career has been defined as much in terms of misogyny as technical excellence (I’ve garnered quite a CV in both), and how I have struggled to explain to others my experience. This blog post builds on previous work, like Kathryn McKinley’s seminal post [1] and on Kate Manne’s books Down Girl [2] and Entitled [3], which frame misogyny through the lens of moral philosophy.
Kate defines misogyny as the enforcement branch of the patriarchy. While sexism is a set of beliefs, misogyny is a set of actions. As such, it is much more damaging to women. Worse, misogyny enforces a patriarchical worldview that the majority of the world holds as the morally correct one. Thus, when women break this norm (i.e., by demanding authority, recognition, space and not providing goods that men feel entitled to like domestic, emotional and mental labor), they are in the wrong. The men are seen as the victims, while the women enduring the misogyny are the bad actors. This viewpoint leads to justification of a number of vile behaviors perpetuated by men – even those men that claim to support and love women.
It is difficult to even discuss these issues because both sides are not using the same framework of what is acceptable “moral” behavior and what is not. Just like in distributed systems, we can’t make progress on this topic when there is disagreement on the underlying system model. These beliefs are so deeply held that, consciously or not, when people meet someone who challenges their beliefs, the cognitive dissonance can cause them to do something truly harmful. For example, my very existence as a moderately young, moderately successful computer scientist threatens some men’s sense of identity, thus making them uncomfortable and/or lash out. But if a successful woman in computer science makes men in our community uncomfortable, then we are not likely to have too many successful women in the community.
In this blog post, I will attempt to describe the system within which I exist as a moderately successful computer scientist and woman. I will highlight the fallacies that lead to women (1) leaving tech, (2) generally being anxious in our society, and (3) experiencing horrific harassment and misogyny.
Moral Fallacy #1: Woman != Programmer
Before women even write a single line of code, they are already at a disadvantage: when I was 6 years old, no one would look at my pigtails and white Mary Janes and predict that I would grow up to be one of the top operating systems researchers in the world. However, this exact prediction was so comically common for white men at MIT that my husband and I joked that we should sell a line of neonatal audio books on Paxos.
Of course, this prediction continues even while I am one of the top operating systems researchers in the world. If only I got a penny for every time someone said: you don’t look like a computer scientist, I could be Mackenzie Scott without having to marry an asshole. This comment is usually posed as a compliment, which I should graciously receive.
But it’s not a compliment. I don’t look like myself? I’m not a computer scientist? This mental dissonance is jarring. It feels like someone keeps slapping me at work and saying: Wake up, this was all a dream, you didn’t actually publish any SOSP papers this year!
After enough people question your ability to do your own job based on something as nonsensical as how you look, you really start to question your own sanity. When you are expected to thank people for the privilege, you know you’ve entered the Twilight Zone.
Not only is this setting absolutely bonkers for women working in tech, it has even worse implications when it comes to harassment. If we penalize a man for harassing a woman in computer science, we’re told we are “ruining his life”, but if a woman leaves because of harassment, she just “couldn’t cut it.” Why? This view assumes a moral framework where men are entitled to a career as a computer scientist or professor, while women are generously being allowed the same thing, which can be taken away at any time.
Moral Fallacy #2: Woman != Experts
As anyone who’s read Entitled – or ever used the Internet – knows, some men love to be experts. Men were born to pontificate, and women to listen. Not surprisingly, I have run into an excess of this kind of man. If you want an entertaining description of this experience, read Men Explain Things to Me.
What happens when a woman is an expert and a man is not? – a situation that I find myself in frequently. Then misogyny steps in to enforce what the men perceive to be the societal (and moral) norms. Not only do I have the gall to not look like a computer scientist, I have the gall to actually be better at it than them. This is obviously completely unacceptable and my fault.
Now imagine what happens to the average woman professor who must stand up every day and perform this act in the insane asylum. If any of them last long enough to inspire other women to join the field, they (the women professors and students) are rapidly disabused of this idea by the men in the classes that they teach. Yes, even professors find themselves harassed by their students. For example, in a recent discussion with a faculty friend, she mentioned that she has received numerous reviews that her voice is too high pitched. A physical trait that she has no control over and no impact on her teaching abilities is somehow a point of criticism. And this despite the fact that these professors quite literally have control over these men’s careers! The view that women can’t be experts is so strongly held that it causes some men to repeatedly harass the person attempting to teach them the things that they need to succeed.
Moral Fallacy #3: Woman == Good Feelings
Now that I have managed to make men feel embarrassed and insecure, they blame these feelings on me. No one else has made them feel this way before, and because men are famously good at emotional self-regulation, I must be the problem. Indeed, one of the things that women are responsible for in our patriarchical society is managing men’s emotions [4].
While men claim to be unemotionally seeking scientific truth in research, I have never seen a woman so personally invested and emotional about a research idea. Perhaps because women are not allowed to use “top computer scientist” as their entire identity since birth, we are better able to separate our research ideas from ourselves and coldly discuss their pros and cons. Or perhaps a lifetime of being told that it is our job to regulate our own emotions as well as those of the men around us has trained us to do pure science without messy emotions. But of course women are hysterical, and men are just passionate.
Since men do not know how to process these emotions, they lash out at the women that caused them. The women are the ones committing the wrong in their moral framework, so therefore they deserve to be punished. This punishment can range from refusing to speak to the woman – which is a really mature reaction – to actively harassing her.
Moral Fallacy #4: Women == Love
Many of the men that I interact with have been raised by wonderful mothers that taught them to be supportive husbands, and some of them even have daughters that taught them that my plight is real. However, as the Entitled book notes: many men have been and feel that they have a right to be adored by the women in their lives. It sounds ridiculous, but I am not their mother or daughter, and I do not owe them anything. However, since so many men only interact with women in this way, perhaps it isn’t surprising that they mistake me for one of these roles. In our society, men are generally not friends with women (unless they have been friend-zoned and worthy of pity), so the only models that men have for how to interact with women come from experiences with their mothers, wives and daughters.
Of course, the most pernicious form of these feelings is sexual harassment, when men expect women in a work setting to be open to romantic overtures of various forms, ranging from crushes to asking out on dates and even to stalking. I have always been perplexed by this situation because I do not see my workplace as a dating pool. But worse than this, because the only experiences that many men have for interacting with women is with family, they expect unconditional love or admiration and women must act flattered to receive it.
For the women, this situation is worse than insane. It would be like a random person on the street saying that they are part of your family and going home with you. But when you do not give them the love or respect that they think they innately deserve, the men will feel rejected and lash out. It may even trigger a feeling of rejection that they have had with family members, but I’m not a Freudian therapist, so I shouldn’t have to unpack that.
Moral Fallacy #5: Women != Power
It is not for nothing that computer science as a field shapes our world today. All of our titans of industry are computer scientists and none of them are women. In fact, the women that contributed to their success, like Melinda Gates, must be dismissed in service to constructing a myth and religion around these men. As long as computer science retains prestige, men will feel entitled to it and women not. There has been mountains written about this phenomena (and how women are only allowed to succeed in perceived lower prestige parts of the field).
One of the issues with not being allowed to seek power is that there are very few ways to protect yourself as a woman. I have spent the last couple years working on codes of conduct to prevent harassment. The most common question asked is whether we were using our power to punish men unfairly. Note that these are men who are actively harassing women with multiple incidents reported. And yet, people are still saying that these men are entitled to be in that space because it makes them uncomfortable when women are actively trying to take away men’s power and privilege.
Of course, the other side of the coin here is that as I get more senior, I experience more frequent and even worse harassment. As a relatively well-connected and successful member of our research community, I have various ways to deal with this harassment, but I shouldn’t have to spend so much of my time and energy on it. Even worse, I am now pulled into other situations where harassment is present because I am expected, as a senior member of the community, to help deal with these incidents. And of course, these episodes are increasingly becoming worse as I advance in my career– they inherently must reach horrible levels of severity to require my involvement. So even gaining power as a woman comes with a traumatic cost.
Conclusion
Being a woman in tech is insane. We do not work in the same moral system model as most of the people that we interact with daily and we can’t talk about it, because when we do, we are the ones portrayed as crazy or hysterical. In situations where we assume that people will behave in rational ways (e.g., when codes of conduct are not needed because we “trust” everyone), the default is simply to reinforce the patriarchy.
Men, do better! If you are in a position of power and want to be an ally, educate yourself by reading Entitled [3] and doing training on inclusive governance [5]. Even if you think you are a nice guy, there are plenty of other guys out there that are not so nice and dealing with the aftermath is much worse than preventing the harassment in the first place.
Share your stories
If you are interested in sharing an experience that this blog post brought to mind for you, please post here: https://github.com/iyzhang/misogyny. We welcome reports regardless of your gender identity; bystander reports can be incredibly powerful as well and are a good way for men to share how to be allies.
To post anonymously, simply make a new GitHub account. I have already added my issues to start.
References
- What Happens To Us Does Not Happen To Most of You. Kathryn S. McKinley. February 2018.
- Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyn. Kate Manne. 2018.
- Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women. Kate Manne. August 2020.
- I Am Not Responsible for the Anger of Men. Caitlin Knudsen. June 2019
- Inclusive Governance: Codes of Conduct Workshop. Emma Irwin. 2022.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the women of the UW Syslab for their feedback, Simon Peter and Dan Ports.
Irene Zhang is a researcher at Microsoft Research. Her research focuses on datacenter operating systems and distributed systems. The blog post can also be found at her website: https://irenezhang.net/news.