I’ve also had this thought. A few people I’ve showed this too are explicitly bothered about the what-if-it’s-a-result-of-the-patriarchy; one person is tempted to identify as a Samwise character, but reluctant to because Sexist Overtones. I...don’t think this is the right response. It’s a bit like saying “no, I’m going to be a doctor instead of a nurse because women are pushed into nursing by The Patriarchy.” Maybe it’s true, but it’s orthogonal to whether an individual will like nursing or medicine more (although, honestly, they’re not that different).
Other thoughts: everyone who wrote publicly about this was female, but most of the people who have emailed me privately to thank me for the post are male. So… Men feel more shamed about wanting to be sidekicks than women do?
I’ve already had the thought that the message I’m sending might be bad if it spread to society as a whole, because women may be pushed harder away from being CEOs than from being their executive assistants (or whatever the dichotomy), and even a well-written and nuanced pro-sidekick message is going to get parsed as “smart lady says your place is as an assistant.” (If a man wrote this post, the message would be different, but I’m not a man.) I still this this message is pretty positive for the LW/CFAR/rationality community to hear; its biases run in different directions.
I am not going to generalize from myself, only think aloud. I think I could feel comfortable as a sidekick, but it seems like in many situations I don’t get this option.
Part of that is related to gender stereotypes: In the past, whenever I stopped being a leader in a relationship, my then girlfriend usually quickly replaced me with a guy who enjoyed that role. (I know there are also relationships with the opposite dynamic, but I never experienced one.) Another part is about money, which indirectly is also related to gender stereotypes: I feel a pressure to make a lot of money (maybe it’s just in my head, but so far I haven’t met any volunteer to pay my bills, so I treat it as real). Leaders make more money than sidekicks.
Sometimes I get into leading position by being the first one or among the first ones who care about a problem. If there are other people interested in the position later, they usually easily succeed to push me away, because I am not good at status fights and I don’t enjoy them. Sometimes I am even happy that someone else took the role instead of me, although I may complain about some consequences later (such as completely losing the ability to influence things).
But this is all along one dimension. I would actually prefer a role of an expert: to be fully responsible for one aspect of the problem where I feel most competent, and leave other aspects to people who feel competent there. No a second-in-command, not a general-purpose assistant, but a domain expert: making decisions within my domain, and only providing suggestions elsewhere.
Unfortunately, it often doesn’t work this way. I understand that even with domain experts, there needs to be a role of a leader: someone to make decisions outside of domains of all experts, someone to decide situations where two experts disagree, someone to choose project priorities and budget, etc. But, as Dilbert has shown us is various colorful ways, it often ends by the leader questioning all decisions of the domain experts, effectively wasting their contributions. In open-source programming I usually took the role of a translator, sometimes of an internationalization expert.
I think I am an egalitarian by nature. I am not professing a political opinion here; it’s simply how I naturally behave unless forced to act otherwise. Sometimes it seems like people really don’t understand this: they instinctively understand the roles of the master and of the slave. (Ironically, even people who publicly profess equality often have strict hierarchies; just different than their perceived enemies.) It’s probably a very strong human instinct. And there are the few weird people where this instinct somehow fails; they passionately refuse to be slaves, so they are pattern-matched to masters, but they also fail to behave like real masters, which confuses and irritates the others. On the other hand, I suspect that egalitarianism doesn’t scale well. So, my optimal role would probably be a member of a small group of equals; a specialist at some domain.
I’ve also had this thought. A few people I’ve showed this too are explicitly bothered about the what-if-it’s-a-result-of-the-patriarchy; one person is tempted to identify as a Samwise character, but reluctant to because Sexist Overtones. I...don’t think this is the right response. It’s a bit like saying “no, I’m going to be a doctor instead of a nurse because women are pushed into nursing by The Patriarchy.” Maybe it’s true, but it’s orthogonal to whether an individual will like nursing or medicine more (although, honestly, they’re not that different).
Other thoughts: everyone who wrote publicly about this was female, but most of the people who have emailed me privately to thank me for the post are male. So… Men feel more shamed about wanting to be sidekicks than women do?
I’ve already had the thought that the message I’m sending might be bad if it spread to society as a whole, because women may be pushed harder away from being CEOs than from being their executive assistants (or whatever the dichotomy), and even a well-written and nuanced pro-sidekick message is going to get parsed as “smart lady says your place is as an assistant.” (If a man wrote this post, the message would be different, but I’m not a man.) I still this this message is pretty positive for the LW/CFAR/rationality community to hear; its biases run in different directions.
Maybe because most LW readers are male? I am not sure it necessarily leads to the conclusion that
I am not going to generalize from myself, only think aloud. I think I could feel comfortable as a sidekick, but it seems like in many situations I don’t get this option.
Part of that is related to gender stereotypes: In the past, whenever I stopped being a leader in a relationship, my then girlfriend usually quickly replaced me with a guy who enjoyed that role. (I know there are also relationships with the opposite dynamic, but I never experienced one.) Another part is about money, which indirectly is also related to gender stereotypes: I feel a pressure to make a lot of money (maybe it’s just in my head, but so far I haven’t met any volunteer to pay my bills, so I treat it as real). Leaders make more money than sidekicks.
Sometimes I get into leading position by being the first one or among the first ones who care about a problem. If there are other people interested in the position later, they usually easily succeed to push me away, because I am not good at status fights and I don’t enjoy them. Sometimes I am even happy that someone else took the role instead of me, although I may complain about some consequences later (such as completely losing the ability to influence things).
But this is all along one dimension. I would actually prefer a role of an expert: to be fully responsible for one aspect of the problem where I feel most competent, and leave other aspects to people who feel competent there. No a second-in-command, not a general-purpose assistant, but a domain expert: making decisions within my domain, and only providing suggestions elsewhere.
Unfortunately, it often doesn’t work this way. I understand that even with domain experts, there needs to be a role of a leader: someone to make decisions outside of domains of all experts, someone to decide situations where two experts disagree, someone to choose project priorities and budget, etc. But, as Dilbert has shown us is various colorful ways, it often ends by the leader questioning all decisions of the domain experts, effectively wasting their contributions. In open-source programming I usually took the role of a translator, sometimes of an internationalization expert.
I think I am an egalitarian by nature. I am not professing a political opinion here; it’s simply how I naturally behave unless forced to act otherwise. Sometimes it seems like people really don’t understand this: they instinctively understand the roles of the master and of the slave. (Ironically, even people who publicly profess equality often have strict hierarchies; just different than their perceived enemies.) It’s probably a very strong human instinct. And there are the few weird people where this instinct somehow fails; they passionately refuse to be slaves, so they are pattern-matched to masters, but they also fail to behave like real masters, which confuses and irritates the others. On the other hand, I suspect that egalitarianism doesn’t scale well. So, my optimal role would probably be a member of a small group of equals; a specialist at some domain.