The "gray zone" problem as stated here is that it is easy for two people who are unlikely to develop a romantic relationship (say, two heterosexual men) to form a close working relationship. But in order to tear down the glass ceiling heterosexual men and women will need to form close working relationships, and sometimes those are misinterpreted as more romantic than they actually are.
This is the most important paragraph:
"I think the path forward is finding a way to tolerate this gray zone and accommodate it without simply shutting women out professionally. So I really do not think these shit shows help women break into business. I think they just reinforce the current paradigm where the people in power -- mostly men -- have reason to err on the side of shutting women out in order to protect themselves from potential scandal or accusations or similar."
This is a very complicated issue, but I don't think we are well-served by slandering one another on social media rather than having a reasoned discussion. Unfortunately the claims made in the current debacle are not permitting a reasoned discussion, either by mistake or design, which is incredibly frustrating.
Yep. 100% right. I like your generalisation of the original statement in that the gray zone is defined by obvious mutual romantic incompatibility. For example, a heterosexual man also can help a heterosexual woman in a total professional non-romantic way if he doesn't find her attractive.
Where I am really surprised is that you have a lot of issues like that in the computer/programming world (see related issues in conferences) where, we do not have these problems in other engineering areas. I am is bio/chemical engineering, working with women in basically all the fields from very men dominated domains (oil and gas, auto industry) to mixed (pharma/food industry), the only case I know of issues was in the army provider area. This is where I am surprised, please note that my contacts are mainly in Europe.
Maybe another question could be why these issues are endemic to the computer/programming world? Is it because all the other industries are pretty conservative? We have families and kids when we go home and we are not supposed to kill our social life by working insane hours to "ship". I have no answers, but I am happy to be in a field where I can work with men and women without these sexism issues.
I'd say it's not even that common in the programming world either. But the internet collects cases from all over the world, and the programming sites blow them out of proportion (is there a Hacker News for bio chemical engineering?).
There are sites that try to list all such incidents. If you compare them to the number of people and companies in the field, you realize not that much is actually happening...
I think feminists have also set a special sight on programming. I suspect it is because it is one of the few engineering jobs that seem compatible with women. Sorry for the stereotypes - I don't speak for all women, but consider that with programming you don't get oil on your clothes, you don't have to walk through mud all day, etc. That's why feminists think women should have more part in programming (at least it's a theory...).
This is the most important paragraph:
"I think the path forward is finding a way to tolerate this gray zone and accommodate it without simply shutting women out professionally. So I really do not think these shit shows help women break into business. I think they just reinforce the current paradigm where the people in power -- mostly men -- have reason to err on the side of shutting women out in order to protect themselves from potential scandal or accusations or similar."
This is a very complicated issue, but I don't think we are well-served by slandering one another on social media rather than having a reasoned discussion. Unfortunately the claims made in the current debacle are not permitting a reasoned discussion, either by mistake or design, which is incredibly frustrating.