Combatting Internet Sexism

Great Debates
1

Inspired by this video by Emily Graslie of The Brain Scoop. It’s a six-minute video, but here’s a summary: A viewer asked Ms. Graslie if she had experienced sexism, or parts of her job she didn’t like. She notes that there are a lot of sexist comments on her YouTube channel. She relates how she found 13 STEM related channels hosted by men with more than 400k subscribers, 7 of whom have more than 1M subscribers, while she only found 4 STEM related channels hosted by women with over 160k subscribers (none get to the 1M mark). She notes that it’s not a numbers game, but there are significantly fewer women, and she’s concerned that people are more concerned with her appearance than her content. She gets her male director/editor to read some (admittedly really bad) comments she’s gotten. She ends with a request that both men and women should call out internet bullying and sexism, and encourage more people to create content.

Disclaimer: I’m a straight male, and the first time I saw Ms. Graslie, I thought “Dang, she is both smart AND pretty cute!”, which is probably not the most enlightened response, but then I also didn’t comment as such on her videos.

This video brings to mind two questions:

  1. **How bad is online sexism and bullying? ** While no amount of sexism or bullying is appropriate, there’s a difference between “2 out of 1000 comments I get are creepy, the rest are supportive” and “998 out of 1000 comments I get are creepy, the rest are supportive”. (Ms. Graslie notes on her video that the vast majority of comments she gets are positive) On one end, the appropriate response is probably to just ignore the comments; taking an overzealous PC approach to less than 1% of comments is probably counterproductive. On the other end of the spectrum, it’s worth making a big stink if the problem is pervasive, because many worthwhile contributors to STEM education would bow out of creating that content if they don’t want to deal with the harassment (and who can blame them?).

  2. How best to fix the problem of online sexism and bullying? Apparently YouTube videos and message board posts are not cutting it. :stuck_out_tongue: Or maybe they are - I’m not sure how you would track the rise and fall of something as qualitative as sexism over something as broad as the internet (or even just YouTube comments). Some companies, like Google and Blizzard, are trying to attach people’s real life names to their comments, in an attempt to shame them into good behavior. This has led to much hue and cry from people that like the mask of anonymity, and it doesn’t seem to have cut the problem down (or maybe it has?).

I also feel the need to point out that mere difference of gender ratios in a field is not necessarily a bad thing. Sure, there are fewer women in Computer Science, but there are also fewer women in Construction. There are fewer men in Early Childhood Education, but there are also fewer men in some of the Social Sciences. If these differences are due to sexism (in either direction: a man being bullied out of being a kindergarten teacher is as bad as a woman being bullied out of a programming position), then that needs to be eliminated. But if women WANT to be a teacher and don’t have any desire to be a programmer, that’s worth celebrating, not condemning.

I don’t have the answers; maybe it starts in that kindergarten classroom, maybe it IS awareness through social media, maybe it’s being having your real identity and your online identity be one, maybe it’s something I hadn’t thought about. But I figure the dope usually has many and varied insights on any matter, so I bring it here.

Ironic Postcript: the YouTube ad I get when watching the movie was a fragrance ad when a guy snaps his fingers and causes a woman’s clothes to fall off. Perhaps that answers the first question with: It’s pretty bad.

2

What is a “STEM related channel” ?

3

There are a pretty large number of sexist comments posted on the internet. I understand why a women working in the technical fields would be upset by them, but unsure how to deal with it. On the one hand, when someone is being a sexist pig, it would be nice if the other posters immediately labeled him as such, and then shunned him from that point forward. But on the other hand, some people would only have their sexist attitudes confirmed by that sort of treatment, and would be motivated to post more such comments. So I don’t know.

4

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

5

A channel that posts STEM-related content. The Brain Scoop, for example, focuses on Natural History, museum curating, animal and plant preservation and so on. There are other channels like Vi Hart who does math and music, Smarter Every Day and MinutePhysics that do physics. Veritaserium for general science and so on.
I don’t know how to stop sexism and bullying and if the dope is in any way a microcosm of the internet as a whole, there are a lot of people on the internet who do not simply lack understanding but are fully aware of the pain they cause and enjoy it. My preference is for a zero-tolerance blocking policy.

6

I think its basically a subset of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Dickwad Theory. If you have open comments, then your going to end up with bored teenagers using them to make hackneyed sexist (and racist, xenophobic, etc) jokes to get a rise out of people.

I don’t think a solution exits. If you want to play on the internet, you have to develop a thick skin, or resign yourself to getting upset nearly continuous by people that aren’t really worth the time.

7

I believe Bryan’s confusion was because he was (as was I) unfamiliar with the acronym STEM.

8

It’s an acronym that’s enjoying a lot of currency these days, though.

9

Perhaps you are right. I discarded that possibility, though, because he didn’t ask what STEM meant, but what a STEM-related channel might be.

10

My apologies on not defining my acronyms! I get annoyed when other do that to me and didn’t even think when I was doing it myself.

There’s certainly a possibility that you’re right here - which would be unfortunate.

But that brings up the question of: If everyone’s getting these comments, why call out the sexist/homophobic/whatever comments? I understand if you’re a woman you’ll be more sensitive to the sexist comments, or if you’re gay you’ll be more sensitive to the homophobic comments. And I’m not saying you have to tackle larger issues if you can solve smaller ones. But if bigoted comments are inherent to the field, do we just accept that, or is it still worth calling out specific examples?

11

Of course it’s worth calling out specific examples. When we say, “It’s inherent to the field so you should either deal with it or pack it in.” whether we mean to or not, we aid in creating these negative environments.

12

“Don’t feed the trolls”. I think just ignoring them, or if its your site, silently deleting them, is the best course. In most cases comments like that are just trying to get a rise out of people, so engaging with them just amuses them and wastes your time.

After all, if your on a STEM related site, you probably want to discuss STEM related issues, not go back and forth with “BigNutz97” in comments over his saying a blogger has nice tits.

13

While I agree with your last sentence here, I’m not sure I buy the rest.

There’s an argument (one that I feel you’re dancing around a little) that women are on average slightly smaller and less muscular than men, and therefore it’s perfectly reasonable that they should be less represented in, say, construction jobs. Except I think that’s flawed reasoning: construction jobs are not all about brute strength for one thing, and men are represented in that field far out of proportion to their relative strength advantage. (I freely admit that’s an opinion, though, and haven’t delved into the physiological research yet this morning.)

Similarly, women are stereotypically perceived to be more nurturing, kinder, yadda yadda, and therefore it’s reasonable they should be more greatly represented in healing and teaching professions. Again, a deeply flawed argument.

In both cases, I’d agree that technically a gender ratio difference is not necessarily a bad thing, but only inasmuch as that difference is representative of a difference in actual skills and abilities between men and women, and I’ve seen little to convince me that the latter even exists in most cases. So yeah, the wild disparities in sex representation in different fields is due to sexism, on a societal level.

Of course, your point hinges to some degree on our definition of “bullying.” If a man chooses not to teach kindergarten because societal messaging tells him that it’s “women’s work” or that he’s somehow less masculine for that choice–or that he’s not going to be good at it–I’d argue that’s not “bullying,” but is nevertheless a sexist societal construct.

More to the point, when societal messaging continues to tell young women that they are not as good at STEM fields as men are, I can’t say it’s “bullying” except in the cases of individual interweb trolls and shitheads. But it is a societal sexism unfounded in reality.

And, IMO, a societal ill that must be addressed. But on a societal level, and that begins with DNFTT.

14

I mean, it’s not just ‘lol, tits’. Graslie has said she gets a lot of ‘helpful’ comments that say things like, ‘You should dress more revealingly to get more views’ and 'Wow, you’re hot! I’m gonna call you Nerdy Hotness!" Things that the commenter feels should be construed as a compliment but makes the person being objectified question whether it’s their body or their material that garners them attention.

15

There probably are a few people who deeply, honestly, believe that these are compliments. Those people are idiots.

I suspect the majority, however, are absolutely intending them to be dismissive, patronizing, paternalistic, and demeaning.

16

I would say that if it’s a very short sexist comment, make a very short response. “Oh look: another stupid sexist asshole.” Then back to the regular thread. I would not write a lengthy and well-formatted response to any of that stuff.

17

I heard a similar comment made about gamers recently, and the conclusion was “It’s not a gaming problem, it’s an Internet problem”. And I think the above is exactly right: it’s not just about sexism or bullying or homophobia or YouTube or what-have-you, it’s that People on the Internet Are Fuckwads. Give people a chance to opine on other people without fear of significant consequence and a sizable percentage will spew the worst kind of incoherent rhetoric just because they can. People (collectively) suck.

18

I think changing an attitude is useful. Changing social attitudes, though, takes time. And I always see attempts like this that point out wage or gender differences are trying to force the attitude change before it’s ready.

For instance, I was at a company that did an internal audit of a large department that I was a supervisor in. The report comes out and the corporate heads all get furious at my state’s command structure because the women working in my department were all paid, on average, 25% less than the males in the department.

That’s right on the general national average, so no one even looked twice at it. The bad part was, one woman was part time (30 hours per week) and had she worked full time she wouldn’t be missing that 25%. The other woman was brand new (something like 6 months at that point) and was paid our default first-year salary. All the men in the department made that salary for their first year, too.

The external auditors were trying to justify their paycheck by “finding” something. (Or were inept.)

When you control for other factors, most of the paygap goes away, at least for professions you earn under $100,000 a year for. Unfortunately, we don’t have good data on why that is, only people’s pet theories.

It could very simply be that fewer women determine their success by a pay stub, so when they take a job they don’t negotiate as hard for the dollar signs, once their needs are met. It could be that there is a glass ceiling and the men in control of all corporations think that women will give up and make room for “the men to do the real work” because they only make 80% on average of men.

The problem is, we don’t know. So there is room to grind any axe you wish to grind that might be related to Men’s vs Women’s treatment in society at large.

19

I subscribe to Brain Scoop and I saw that video a day or two ago. Frankly, I think the idea of internet sexism, while it definitely exists, is an overblown issue. I’m a computer scientist by trade and, like most other STEM related professions, it’s male dominated. In a perfect world, these fields would probably have more even representation between the genders, but that’s a complicated issue and I don’t think it’s clear cut that it’s inherently wrong that it isn’t more even. That the gender disparity continues to exist in STEM related content on the internet isn’t surprising and, in my mind, seems to just be an extension of the same issues that exist in the real world rather than an internet specific phenomenon.

That all said, the sorts of comments that exist on YouTube are a completely different animal, but I’d argue that it’s not really a fair comparison. I hear sexist comments at work seldom, certainly not to the same extent that I see them on YouTube, but I also work with educated adults working in a profession environment. The comments on YouTube come from the entire spectrum of internet users, so the fact that there’s a much higher incidence of sexism isn’t all that unlike how I’d probably expect to hear a lot more if I were to sit in the lunch room at the local high school.

So, really, I think that, for the most part, the same issues that face people in the real world are more or less the same ones we see on the internet. The only real difference that is unique to the internet is the whole anonymity aspect that allows people who might otherwise be more restrained with their ideas in a face-to-face conversation to just speak their mind, and of course the plethora of trolls and straight up assholes who take advantage of anonymity. Anonymity leads to breakdowns in basic social constructs that are at least partially enforced by peer pressure, shame, accountability, or reputation.

Frankly, on thinking about it, it might even be a good thing that we’re seeing some of this disparity between the internet and real life due to the anonymity because it forces us to actually see these aspects that might otherwise go unspoken. That is, at work, someone might know better than to make a sexist comment, and so we may not be so aware of just how sexist someone is until they’re in a situation where they don’t have to be held accountable for it. So, perhaps it’s really just a better reflection of where we are as a society, assuming we can control for the people just hamming it up for fun.

20

I think ignoring or silently deleting is the way to go. Responding only makes sense if one believes that it will change the behavior of the poster. Since I believe the posters are largely trolls then it will only reinforce the behavior.

People who make these kinds of posts are pathetic losers who can’t function in society. They only way they can get a response from people is to make over the top ignorant posts. Ignore them.