I have a slight resentment towards the complainant in this article who accused her boss of sexism for giving her feedback on her speaking mannerisms during presentations (voice "going up an octave at the end of statements").<p>I managed a junior, female engineer who did exactly that --her voice turned up at the end of sentences, making statements always sound like questions-- and I noticed this only happened during stressful presentations, not in regular conversation or team meetings. It destroyed any authority in her voice and made her sound rather childlike. I worked on it with her <i>without</i> mentioning the pitch shift itself (to not make her self-conscious and possibly worsen the problem) but instead I worked to increase her overall confidence when speaking and when running meetings. And I was so happy when I saw her run a multi-team meeting with a strong, steady voice.<p>I resent the notion that if I had mentioned the pitch shift, I could be labeled sexist.
Her story about having to turn over nude photos of herself, stored on her personally-owned (edit: apparently a work phone) phone, to Apple lawyers sounded very awful.<p>She's got a summary of it all here: <a href="https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html</a><p>She also appears to have a few smoking guns, like this:<p><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8o4fb3VEAEDVHM?format=jpg&name=large" rel="nofollow">https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8o4fb3VEAEDVHM?format=jpg&name=...</a>
One of the employees has posted her version of events online in great detail here: <a href="https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html</a><p>Strangely, her timeline about Apple begins in March with an article she published about her health problems. I remember the story was #1 on Hacker News that day: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688965" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688965</a> She was having health problems and believed they were the result of toxic waste somewhere on the site of her apartment complex property.<p>I remember that the details of the story didn’t really support her claims as significantly as she suggested. I detailed my concerns in the HN thread about her other toxic waste battle: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26689837" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26689837</a> The summary is that she was living in an upper floor apartment but she assumed something in the ground was causing her medical symptoms. She found evidence that an old toxic waste container might be buried somewhere on the 100 acre property surrounding her apartments. She used some questionable measurements (heart rate change of 10bpm and spurious readings from a generic indoor VOC monitor) to try to bolster her story, but it didn’t make sense that the thousands of other people on this site weren’t experiencing severe medical issues even though her apartment wasn’t close to the supposedly toxic ground.<p>She is apparently also waging a significant battle against her apartment complex and the city for the issues she believes were caused by a toxic waste container that was supposedly buried somewhere near her old apartment.<p>I bring this up because she highlights this story as the start of her Apple timeline on her site I linked above and brings it up many times throughout her Apple writings. She seems to imply this was somehow related to her harassment claims at Apple, though I’m not sure what she’s exactly implying with that claim.
As a previous (male) Apple Cupertino employee, this <i>really</i> resonated with me:<p>"The biggest obstacle for making progress at Apple is the culture of secrecy and alienation."
all of the best advice I've received, in terms of having a positive impact on my career, has been tone policing. I've learned (as a mildly autistic person) that only a small number of people have the confidence to tell me what I'm saying wrong, and how I'm saying it wrong, and what to say to have more impact. I would love to understand the psychology of taking people helping you and turning it into oppression.<p>Some of the best tone policing I've received has been from women.<p>The idea that people are getting tone policed and instead consider it being sexist is interesting to me.
Not sure about the claimant's voice actually "going up an octave at the end of statements", but such speech patterns are common. I noticed this everywhere in Australia, especially among younger people, and regardless of sex/gender.<p>There's plenty of material written about it, such as <i>Speech Patterns: Uptalking</i> [1] (which has a section about its prevalence in Australia), and there's an interesting if navel-gazing BBC article [2] from 2014, <i>The unstoppable march of the upward inflection?</i> - note the question mark in the headline there. (The article mentions how bosses/older people tend to frown on this tic; quite a good read, IMO.)<p>And re the written word, I've increasingly noticed question marks in non-interrogative text (including on HN), which to me is the same thing as the uplift terminator in speech. Matt Levine [3], the Bloomberg finance writer, tends to do this a lot in his Money Stuff column/newsletter, in fact his writing is littered with this device.<p>I really don't understand why some people react so negatively to what I'd describe as quite a nuanced form of expression, unless it's along the lines of grammar pedants who don't appreciate that language always evolves; who imagine that the evolution ended when <i>they</i> learnt to speak and write.<p>I'd appreciate feedback on my thoughts/observations here, from other HN folk?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/uptalk-high-rising-terminal-1692574" rel="nofollow">https://www.thoughtco.com/uptalk-high-rising-terminal-169257...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28708526" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28708526</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...</a>
As I mentioned in the other thread [1] the Sept 1 charge (shutting down pay discussion channel in slack) is right on a current battleground for labour rights in the US. With new pro-labour NLRB chair and general council its highly likely they are going to push hard on this charge to try and reinforce rights to organize in company spaces.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28372867" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28372867</a>