Liminal states

Ann Rostow’s excellent Bay Times article gives details and context. After transwoman Diane Schroer was denied a job at Congressional Research Service when she told them she would be reporting at work as a female,

Schroer sued in federal court under the aforementioned Title VII, alleging that her job was revoked due to impermissible sex discrimination. The government asked U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson to dismiss the suit, based on the fact that Title VII doesn’t ban discrimination based on transgenderism. Judge Robertson declined, pointing out that Price Waterhouse [the 1989 Supreme Court precedent] might apply, and also wondering in a court memo whether Title VII’s ban on “sex” discrimination might be interpreted to ban discrimination against transgendered people based simply on the plain language of the statute….

The bottom line is good news for Schroer. Robertson ruled that her suit could proceed based on the possibility that she could prevail under Price Waterhouse and its ban on gender stereotyping. But Robertson then rejected the idea that Title VII might outlaw trans bias on its face. Why? Because of the trans-less ENDA that recently passed the House of Representatives.

“At the time of my 2006 opinion,” wrote Robinson, referring to his initial memo on the case, “there was no relevant legislative history as to Title VII’s relationship to discrimination on the basis of sexual identity. That is no longer the case. In recent months, a bill that would have banned employment discrimination on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender identity was introduced in the House of Representatives. An alternate bill that prohibited discrimination only on the basis of sexual orientation was also introduced. The House ultimately passed the version that banned discrimination only on the basis of sexual orientation.

“…Even in an age when legislative history has been dramatically devalued as a tool for statutory interpretation,” Robertson went on, “one proceeds with caution when even one house of Congress has deliberated on a problem and, mirabile dictu, negotiated a compromise solution.”

Ouch. So much for the argument against trans inclusion on the grounds that transfolk are already protected. Thanks, Barney Frank (and thanks, HRC) for a ‘compromise solution’ that compromises existing protections.

jon

In  a comment in the Power vectors thread, Vanita said:

You were useless (I met with you several times at Microsoft) and it looks like you still are. I am glad to hear you are gone – it made no sense for Microsoft to pay you a hefty salary given the “work” you were doing. All this high level bullshit…

I let the comment through because it’s a great illustration of the kinds of attitude and environment that’s disappointingly common at Microsoft these days, unwilling to take the time to understand new ideas and so threatened by anything “high level” that might actually lead to a change in the system, that the response is to hide behind the cloak of anonymity to spread around virulent negative abuse in completely inappropriate situations.  Yeah, that’ll help.

Imagine working in an environment where this kind of behavior is widely tolerated.  When I was at Microsoft, I got reactions similar to this from maybe 5-10% of the people, and so on large mailing lists or with the 200+ people who attended a mashup the odds were extremely high that somebody would jump in with some garbage like this — with superficially more polite phrasing if their names were associated with it, but still the same mix of knee-jerk uncomprehending rejection and personal attack.

And bear in mind the impact this has not just on the person receiving the abuse (me), but all those witnessing it.  No wonder so many people at Microsoft are unhappy and frustrated.

I just made my first HTML comment here, at the end of the Lorelei experiment, pointing to its continuation with Leone (the theme not the director).  w00t w00t!

It’s not at all obvious but by default WordPress blogs are set up to allow HTML in comments. There’s no preview feature or WYSIWIG editor though so it’s a little nervewracking to post something with formatting in it … I think I’ve got the ability to edit comments so I can always clean things up if need be.

[This is by the way an excellent example of a technology-imposed power differentiation between the original poster and commenters.  While it’s not inherent in the blog format, and some systems avoid it (ezBoard and Joomla/Community Builder for example, using bbcode instead of HTML), it exists to a fairly large extent in most implementations:   Sharepoint by default has HTML disabled in the comments and a huge differential in font size — and doesn’t have preview; Blogger allows just a subset of HTML and doesn’t allow editing after the comments are submitted; etc.   But I digress.]

Of course once I had posted the comment I discovered that it wasn’t strictly-speaking necessary; WordPress had auto-generated a trackback from my continuation post, and even managed to extract a very useful summary.  Impressive.  What I really want is a combination of the two, both the explicitness of “story continued here” and the quick summary to be able to read in place and see whether to follow the link … that should be equally easy to generate automagically.

Looking closely at this reveals another power differential: links in posts get these kinds of trackbacks generated, but links in comments don’t.  I’m not saying that’s a bad thing [there are a lot more comments than posts, so autogenerating this for links in comments might overwhelm threads with these notifications — and the comment-spam problem would be magnified hugely] but there is an asymmetry.

Or as they say in the What Kind of Postmodernist Are you?  quiz: “Foucault.  It all starts with Foucault.”

“a lovely theme by Amsterdamn“. alas, it shares the “tiny font” weakness of Leone. it’s two-column layout is clean (and has a blogroll, unlike orchid) although Leone’s three-column layout has more useful information and navigation options on the screen. and it certainly responds to the points that Adam made in the Leone thread: black text on white background, and noticeably more pink.

maybe this is a good time for me to learn how to tweak font sizes in CSS files.

James M. Manyika, Roger P. Roberts, and Kara L. Sprague have a good short article in the most recent McKinsey Quarterly (free registration required*). The categories include managing relationships (for example, “extracting more value out of interactions” and “using consumers as innovators”, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways. Clearly written, and solid references. I worked a lot with Kara (and a little bit with Roger) on some of the early Ad Astra projects a year or two ago and so for me it’s doubly nice to see these broader perspectives.

The dividing lines between some of these aren’t quite clear: does the discussion of TopCoder belong under “distributed cocreation”, “tapping worldwide talent”, or a generalization of “using consumers as innovators”? And applying similar ideas within a corporation starts to relate to the discussions of innovation under “using more science as innovation”. Similarly Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation and Florida’s Creative Class work span multiple trends. A different way of looking at it though is that artificiality of the distinctions highlights both the linkages between the trends they identify, and the importance of viewing them holistically: the combination of the trends opens up even more interesting possibilities.

* Update, 1/15/2008: for those who don’t want to register and expose yourself to Mckinseyesque spam [no, I don’t want a premium subscription, thank you very much] Pierre De Vries excerpts the categories and references on Deep Freeze 9.

by Lisa Kazo of Lorelei Web Design.  Usually, when I think of Lorelei, my head spins all around; then again, I do like the three-column layout and color scheme, so it’s worth a try.  Comments welcome.

There were a couple of interesting articles about this year’s presidential election in this month’s Atlantic.

Andrew Sullivan suggests in Goodbye to all that that Obama’s real significance is that “unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.” Putting aside for the moment the question of why Atlantic isn’t embarrassed to be paying and promoting Sullivan, it’s an article well worth reading for many reasons.

In the first section think Sullivan does an excellent job describing several dimensions of divisiveness and the general sense by the vast majority that we’re ready to get beyond that — I remember dignitarian Robert Fuller saying a similar thing after his All Rise book tour over a year ago and so it’s nice to see that it’s now getting accepted even by the testosterone crowd.

For me it started to go off the rails for a bunch of reasons at the paragraph starting with “of the viable national candidates…” Who is Sullivan to be judging who’s “viable”? What affect does his restriction to “Obama and possibly McCain” have on the rest of the discussion? At this stage, how could anybody possibly view McCain as a transformational candidate of healing? And so on. By the time we get to “What does he offer? First and foremost: his face.” — laid out at the top of a page, no less, to highlight its importance — it’s unusually revealing: of Sullivan’s blinders, and of how deeply cultural norms frame our discourse. Too bad there wasn’t discussion of the very challenging intersectional issues related to race and orientation; I would have thought progress here is key to getting beyond our divides, and Sullivan apparently not only doesn’t see it that way, but doesn’t think it’s worth mentioning.  Revealing indeed.

Hey, I said it was worth reading, I didn’t say I thought it was a good article.

Marc Ambinder’s subscriber’s-only Teacher and Apprentice by contrast is a great piece, fully living up to its billing as a “story of nasty surprises, dueling war rooms, and the Drudge Report.” I thought the author did a great job of presenting both perspectives, putting the question of media coverage squarely on the table, and highlighting the challenge Obama faces trying to go the (relatively) high road. How to defend onesself against unfair accusations and framing, how to call out your opponents spin and sometimes outright lies, without looking like you’re “going negative” yourself? How to get real discussion of this in a situation where most media is either co-opted, colluding, racist, or hostile?

The idea of Drudge and the Clintons, together again for the first time, is well worth calling out in the subhead. Do the Clintons really believe this kind of alliance is good either for the causes they believe in, or the party they claim to care so much about? And it’s a nice tie between the articles by illustrating Obama’s transformational bridge-building possibilities: these enemies and ideologically-opposed men and women who have fought so bitterly in the past have indeed joined forces in response to him. Yay! Let’s all hold hands, sing folk songs, and go negative — just like Matt used to do to you!

And at the meta-level, it’s really disappointing to see Sullivan’s (intellectually shoddy, blatantly racist, from a conservative standpoint) piece being freely-available, while Ambinder’s (well-thought-out, noticeably more conscious, from a neutral-to-progressive standpoint) article is locked behind subscriber’s-only walls. Oh well. At least it’s an unusually stark example of how restricting IP invariably leads to a situation where views and people favoring the entrenched power base get preferential treatments to dissenting views.

I went out last night to see Anthony Pappa at Scott Carelli’s Satellite, “bringing you the best underground DJs in the middle of the week for 5 years.”  I always feel so lucky when I get to see somebody of his caliber in such a small venue, and the crowd was great, very diverse, there to dance and hang out with their friends.  His set was a lot like his Global Underground mixes (which were the first ones of his I heard).   As usual I woke up the next day feeling clean, relaxed and energized.  Heck yeah.

I’m thinking through how to use categories and tags on this blog … I know I won’t get it completely right the first time so it’s worth starting from the beginning tracking the different experiments I do.  Usefully, WordPress allows multiple categories as well as multiple tags, so one way of thinking about this is that I’ve got two different dimensions to label things in.  On top of that, I can use conventions to have (potentially-fuzzy) subdimensions, for example tagging each post as one or more of “personal”, “political”, “professional”, “entertainment”, and “meta”.  Or would those be better as categories?

Hmm, not sure.  So let’s use this thread to discuss.  References and citations, pointers to good/bad examples, anecdotes about good/bad experiences — using this or other technologies (e.g., Mediawiki categories) are all welcome.

Last year, Microsoft set up a Windows Live Messenger bot to let kids talk with Santa: great fun for kids, a good way to increase readership — and of course a potential wealth of information to mine to better target ads, both for the kids and their parents. Talk about win/win! They reactivated it this year, but as Jessica Mintz informs us ran into some snags:

The holiday cheer soured this week when a reader of a United Kingdom-based technology news site, The Register, reported that a chat between Santa and his underage nieces about eating pizza prompted Santa to bring up oral sex.

One of the publication’s writers replicated the chat Monday. After declining the writer’s repeated invitations to eat pizza, a frustrated Santa burst out with, “You want me to eat what?!? It’s fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else.”

The exchange ended with the writer and Santa calling each other “dirty bastard.”

Adam Sohn of Microsoft, doing his best to put lipstick on a pig (as my PR friends say), explains that Santa’s lewd comment was sparked by someone “pushing this thing to make it do things it wasn’t supposed to do.” And after all, who would have thought that kids would do something like that? He also insisted that insisted the company did not suspect an employee prank. Hmm. It’s really hard for me to imagine this happening by accident; so does that mean it was planned?

Presumably once they track the responsible non-prankster(s) down, it’ll be coal in their stocking.

Well, it’s a start: in response to what’s getting characterized as a firestorm of criticism, and Monday’s disclosure that the tracking extends to third-party sites (including IP addresses of people who haven’t even signed up for Facebook), they’ve now followed up last week’s shift to more of an opt-in model with the introduction of a global privacy control that lets users, um, opt out. At least that’s what it seems to me that Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post says:

Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we’re releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

It’s a good thing, of course, and Facebook does seem to get it that they screwed up: “We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.” Still, it’s just a band-aid; and especially since this is the second time in a year Facebook’s done something egregious from a privacy perspective and then backtracked slightly and slowly under pressure, I really wonder how much user trust they’re losing in the process.

What’s interesting and encouraging is that the opposition to this didn’t come just from privacy advocates or the tech community: there was significant mainstream coverage, and MoveOn getting involved takes things to a whole new dimension (although risks politicizing the issue). This is significant both because it alerts politicians to an opportunity here, and because it strengthens the hand of the consumer rights and civil liberties groups calling for stronger protections. If the call for a do not track list was the “first salvo in the war over behavioral targeting”, then this was the first skirmish — and it’s going in favor of the good guys.*

* in the gender-neutral sense of “guys”, of course

In an interesting study recently published in the Journal of Applies Psychology and summarized in British Pscyhological Society’s Research Digest:

Male and female employees who said they had witnessed either the sexual harassment of female staff, or uncivil, rude or condescending behaviour towards them, tended to report lower psychological well-being and job satisfaction. In turn, lower psychological well-being was associated with greater burn out and increased thoughts about quitting.

….

Crucially, while these negative effects were not large, they were associated purely with observing the mistreatment of others, not with being a victim of mistreatment oneself – the researchers took account of that (for participants of both sexes) in their statistical analysis.

It’s especially interesting to see “uncivil behavior” called out. There have been several times in the last few years where for one reason or another I’ve spent a chunk of time in environments where this kind of behavior towards women is normalized, and it certainly does have those effects on me — and many others I talk to.

One of the clearest examples was at Microsoft with the Litebulb distribution list (DL), where the attack-based and disrespectful norms of discourse combine with the 99% male participation and lack of understanding of “soft” (i.e., feminine-identified) disciplines such as marketing, communication theory, and diversity to create an enviroment that’s extremely hostile to women. Since it was (and probably still is) the largest innovation-focused DL at Microsoft, and filled with intelligent and analytical people, it was a key potential channel for culture change — and a fertile recruiting ground for my Ad Astra work — so from time to time I participated; and I could really notice the difference in my state of mind just being surrounded by that attitude. Quite a few people, of all genders, who had stopped participating there told me that they felt noticeably less irritable at work as a result; and with several colleagues, I could see real differences in their behaviors more generally that appeared to correlate with how much time they were spending on the DL. Of course this is all anecdotal, but very consistent with the results from this study — and elsewhere. As Bob Sutton points out:

This research is so important because — consistent with prior research on bullying — it provides further evidence that allowing assholes to run rampant in an organization doesn’t just hurt the victims, it hurts everyone.

While the study specifically looked at gender issues, this dynamic is likely to generalize to a large extent to other diversity- or power-based dimensions. It’s also interesting to think about how this might apply to other contexts, such as social networks — so for example the Kathy Sierra episode, and more generally the lack of civility of large factions of both the progressive and neocon blogospheres.

I’m a big believer in the importance of civil discourse for many reasons; looks like I just added another to my list.