You know what hurts about that sentence? The word “they” and the word “us”. Usually, I like to think that when PL people speak of “us”, that I’m included in that “us”. But apparently there are PL people for whom “us” doesn’t mean “PL people”, but rather, “PL guys”.

— @lindsey on Twitter

Chris Martens, a Ph.D student at Carnegie Mellon who studies connections between proof theory and programming languages, was repelled enough by Swierstra’s comments (and their apparent acceptability in the community) to comment that she’s avoiding any future involvement with the Haskell community:

thank you, haskell community; i’ll be over here programming in languages too ignored to earn your shitheaded sexism.

— @chrisamaphone on Twitter

A female computer science professor and recent Ph.D graduate who prefers to remain anonymous wrote:

It is NOT our job as female CS grad students to be attractive. Our job is to do research and we should be taken seriously in that. We are not bait, we are people.

And in a comment on my original post, Dreamwidth user megpie71 wrote:

Or, of course, they could be getting me and women like me – the plain ones. The wallpaper women. The women who have their feet stepped on by the men trying to talk to their “pretty friend”. The ones who weren’t and aren’t pursued, and who have largely dropped out of the beauty race because it’s no fun putting in the hard yards to try and reach the finish line when you know you’re not going to even get any kudos for participation.

Because, let’s face it, trying to meet the criteria for “attractiveness” in this society is an exhausting exercise. If I were to be attempting it, it would take every single minute of my conscious day (and I’d probably be having trouble sleeping as well). It wouldn’t leave much room for the hard intellectual yakka of actually doing programming, because I’d be attempting to deal with an ever-shifting set of goalposts, and that is hard work in and of itself. Plus, of course, I’d be doing it on a microscopic calorie load, because the major determinant for “attractive” in this society appears to be “thin” (and I don’t have the body type or the metabolism for thin). Which would, of course, make intellectual work even more difficult.

I gave up on attempting to look pretty, or attractive, or anything like that years ago. Instead, I work on being valued for the thing I know I have going for me – I’m intelligent and I can turn that intelligence to things like programming. I’m good at intellectual stuff. If I were a guy, that would count. It would be worthy of respect on its own. But of course, because I’m female, that doesn’t count if I’m not also an appropriate object for the male gaze. Instead, I just fade into the wallpaper.

I think megpie71′s comments in particular demonstrate how many women feel when even the slightest suggestion is aired that they exist in their professional communities to be attractive, to provide visual pleasure for heterosexual men. Certainly, not all women are the same, and many women might not find Swierstra’s remarks to be sexist (just as some men did find them to be sexist). Comments that discourage women’s participation in general aren’t necessarily repellent to every individual woman.

Swierstra’s remarks were also potentially alienating to any non-heterosexual men who were present, as they reflected an assumption that he was speaking to an audience of people who found women, and only women, “attractive”. Finally, there is a tacit understanding when one talks about “attractive” women that one is talking about women who have cissexual bodies, are thin, aren’t disabled, and are in a particular, narrow age range. Apparently, so the thinking goes, if you’re a woman and not all of those descriptors apply to you, maybe you shouldn’t think about learning Haskell, as your presence wouldn’t make the Haskell Symposium more attractive (to heterosexual men).

One of the boys

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