Misogyny at CHI

I recently had the pleasure of presenting a late-breaking-work poster at CHI. You can find my extended abstract here. But that’s not what I want to write about. I want to write about how men ask questions of women at conferences.

I attended many paper sessions during CHI, and something that struck me was the lack of self-reflection evident in how senior male academics (I am guessing gender here, I hope I can be forgiven) ask questions of (typically more junior) women and those of other marginalised genders, particularly those of colour. At CHI, only 5 minutes are given for questions and the moderators were strict on this. I noticed that often 3 of those minutes would be taken up by men, usually older white men, extemporising on why their particular research interest was absolutely crucial to improve the work. Or they would ask questions that made the implicit assumption that the speaker was incompetent, having failed to consider something fundamental (that the speaker probably thought too basic to bother mentioning). In fact, at one point a friend and I were both complaining about “that really rude question some guy asked of the speaker, who was a young woman of colour” and it took us a few minutes to realise we had been in different sessions. “The plural of anecdote is not data” but I am confident that a more rigorous qualitative evaluation of the questions asked at CHI would align with my casual observation: the HCI field has a misogyny problem, one that is racially coded.

Of course, as a semi-regular attendee of NLP conferences, racialised misogyny at conferences is not entirely surprising. However, it was disappointing to discover that it also occurs within a field such as HCI, where practitioners are typically far more engaged with questions of power. I suspect that some academics think questions of their relative power are the concern of positionality statements and study design, and fail to extend this reflexive practice to their every day lives. If they did, they would surely reflect on the impact of a senior male academic publically criticising young women of colour. Some meetings could be an email, and some critiques could be a private conversation with the speaker, formulated to advance their work without shame.

I otherwise thoroughly enjoyed CHI, and I learned a lot from the extremely varied expertise on display. However, this trend left a bad taste in my mouth.