People who already have power do not need props and schemes, because, well, they have power. I know that if I grab my boss’s crotch during a meeting and he says ”you have thirty seconds to convince me not to fire your sorry ass right now”, every witness to the event and everybody above him in the corporate hierarchy will back him up.

A man tempted to do the same thing to a woman less powerful than himself does not have the same assurance that he will suffer consequences for his bad behavior, and you can’t just create that sense of assurance by fiat. (As the Readercon debacle indicated, even written policies are no guarantee.) So people of good will are still trying to figure out how to hack the social environment to achieve a better culture, and until the rules of that culture become second nature to us all, then those social hacks will seem like, well, hacks.

They're not.

The cards enforce the very thing they're trying to prevent.

Your tactic of putting your hands over your eyes and ears has been tried, at length in the past. It hasn't ever worked wherever it's been tried.

Like Hollaback, this is a very imperfect, but apparently effective solution. I appreciate your appeals to straw Feminism, but "women should react the same as men to every situation to 'prove' they are strong" is not it, it's a mess of privileged assumptions.

I'll concede that imperfect but effective solutions are probably necessary to help foster this sort of equality in the long run, though, and the more people who step up and take responsibility for pushing the change (regardless of gender), the better.

Totally. Putting your hands over your ears and eyes isn't going to get us to that point.

I don't doubt that worldwide, men suffer sexual and physical assault from the opposite sex at a lower rate than women.

However, in developed countries, I wouldn't be surprised if it's closer than we collectively think. Here is an informative article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/07/feminism... Men are probably less likely to report incidents due to humiliation or rather, lack of action. Checkout comments on stories when boys get sexually molested by female teachers. Oh yeah, the boy is supposed to love it because he's a boy! Very different when the genders are reversed. Castrate the man! Execute him! Or how about physical assault? Did Elin Nordgren serve any time or get lambasted by feminists for assaulting Tiger Woods? Nope. In fact, she got a tidy settlement.

Thanks sethg, I see clearly now.

(He didn’t actually assault me, but I later learned that one MIT fraternity had nicknamed him “the NAMBLA man”, and a while after that there was an article in the school paper reporting that he had just done time for rape.)

When 1 in N women can serve in the military without being raped by their fellow servicemen, then we can talk.

And then can we have the conversation wherein you attempt to defend your apparent belief that people dying in service of their country is superior to people being RAPED BY THEIR OWN COUNTRYMEN in service of their country.

If people in the armed forces were killed by their fellow soldiers at the rate women in the armed forces are assaulted and/or raped (which would mean a Fort Hood massacre every _week_), it would get a lot of attention, and the perpetrators would actually be prosecuted instead of shielded from consequence. But when a victim of assault reports it in the military, the consequences usually fall on the victim and the perp gets to walk. I think any rational human would find that sickening.

I also take umbrage with your sugarcoated characterization of rape as "involuntary sexual intercourse," as if it could happen by accident. There is no such thing as "involuntary" sexual intercourse. Sex requires consent. If consent is not given or is revoked, it immediately becomes assault and/or rape, and the person who disregards that becomes an assailant and/or rapist. Your use of dismissive, diminishing rhetoric to describe (or even excuse) the traumatizing act of sexual assault/rape is a lame and misguided attempt of political correctness of your own preference. Which is a nice way of saying that you're propping up rape culture.

I don't know you, but based on your comments you seem to have very little to no empathy for victims of assault. I would implore you to examine why that is.

I agree that the props idea is stupid, but men do have things differently. Men don't have to resort to using crazy schemes largely because women overwhelmingly don't approach men. And men who are sexually or physically assaulted by women have a significant fear of being ridiculed by society for not fighting back (or in the case of sexual assault, enjoying it).

I've worked mostly in corporate environments. If I had to characterize a type that was in need of sensitivity training, it usually wasn't the tech guys, it was the "business" type (marketing, finance). Of course that's just my experience.

It's likely a factor but you're putting the cart before the horse.

Women have broken into countless so-called "boys clubs". Doctors, lawyers, marketing, etc... How is tech an exceptionally hostile environment towards women?

agpen is criticizing boys' clubs, a term that encapsulates a certain culture, behaviors, and set of beliefs. The gender of those participating in that culture is typically male, but women can and do perpetuate boys' club cultures on their own, often because that's the only way they can gain admission. It's fairer to see criticism of boys' clubs as a criticism of that culture and set of behaviors, and the idea that one must participate in those behaviors in order to be accepted, not of men in particular.

How is tech an exceptionally hostile environment towards women? http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents - Schneier links to this in the OP. If your response to that is "sexism happens everywhere," well, I'd like it to stop happening everywhere, and I'll start with my home turf.

What are these cultures, behaviors, and beliefs exactly?

To me, boy's club is another rhetorically nebulous term like patriarchy created by the girl's club. As long as we're speaking of generalizations, let me tell you about the girl's club. I used to date a girl that went to an all women's college. Every time I visited her in the dorms it was customary for everyone to yell out, "alert, man on board". When we ate at the cafeteria, five girls(FIVE), walked up to her and informed her there is no need for her to be dating a man. Without any consideration to my presence. Despite this unwelcoming atmosphere many were eager to inform me of the boy's club, patriarchy, and male privilege like they were reading a script of political talking points. These are women that are socialized to be hateful towards men and are blinded by this hate. They are socialized to feel like victims even though they go to a fancy school the average male couldn't afford.

Yes, there are gender centered problems that need to be addressed. But there is a lot of non-sense rhetorical noise out there created by the girl's club. It's like the girl who cried wolf.

The includes links to studies (like Sapna Cheryan, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Saenam Kim, Classrooms matter: The design of virtual classrooms influences gender disparities in computer science classes, Computers & Education, Volume 57, Issue 2, September 2011, Pages 1825-1835, ISSN 0360-1315,) that show a "lack of ambient belonging", that is being alienated by other group members, was the primary cause, and another that interacting with sexist male engineers lowered women's performance ( http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~billvh/LWSIvHB.JPSP.09.pdf)

Few people seem willing to accept that the lack of women in tech has something to do with men, but it does. Included the "high school girls" who aren't interested: the Girl Scout's study found that the biggest thing keeping them out was expecting to face sexism if they chose those professions.

This is not unrelated to how they're turned off further after and into their careers.