Strange how Atlas Obscura does not mention the doctor's letter regarding their observations of James' body to issue a death certificate.
Given this information is on the first search result for "James Barry doctor" which happened to be the Wikipedia entry for Barry, it makes me wonder why this was left out.
What a beautiful story. Some people will say there is no discrimination anymore. Personally, I don't buy that - and I'm speaking from personal experience.
Even in the most enlightened places like HN, it is helpful to impersonate on line the kind of person that others readers would expect me to be, vs. being who I really am.
You know the old saying- on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog!
I feel that the younger generation has very little to no feelings of prejudice towards ethnic or sexual groups. I'm talking as a teenager myself. It's more the older people that generally discriminate.
It's possible that, over time, the problem will solve itself.
>Perhaps more important, though, researchers have found that men are prone to seeing discrimination as a zero-sum game. That is, they believe that discrimination against one group necessarily benefits another group and vice versa, so any policy that benefits African-Americans, for instance, harms whites, and any policy that benefits women amounts to discrimination against men. Fifteen years ago, younger men — and women of all ages — overwhelmingly rejected this view, but recent data shows that younger white men are now about as likely as older men to see discrimination as zero-sum.
Fifteen years ago one of the primary theories for equality was treating everyone equally with no distinction to race or gender. Liberty and individuals own ability to control their life was the agenda, and benefits of liberty should have been rather obvious for anyone that its not a zero-sum game. The abolishment of single-gender profession like that of the article, Rosa Parks and abolishment of racial segregation, and burning of gender specific clothing can all be said as a product of this theory and described as equality of opportunity.
The dominant theory today seems quite evident to be focused difference equality which is based on politics of action based upon treating people of different races and gender different but equal. Here local liberty and individuals freedom of choice can and often is sacrificed if the end result is predicted to provides less lower power differences in society. Affirmative action, diversity quota, and single-gender activities are all strongly associated with this under the concept of equality of outcome.
Trying to convince young white men to have less liberty and choices in life compared to others in order for society to have more balanced power distribution in the future is a quite hard sell, and I agree with those that describe that as discrimination. Trying to convince them to treat everyone as equals with no distinction to race or gender is not that hard, and by what I have seen in the last 15 years, already achieved in the age group that libeclipse mentioned. The observation in that linked article simply fails to acknowledge the different tactics used from 15 years ago vs now.
Yeah. They have gone through a schooling system full of 'positive' discrimination. As amusing as it is to say that I only have negative things to say about positive discrimination I actually feel that it is often terribly implemented, and that those who run round spouting such labels are often (though not always) the wrong people to be involved in enacting positive discrimination.
Before enacting any form of discrimination ask yourself this - is the group I am discriminating actually the group I want to target, or are they a proxy group?
It is all too easy to cite a gender paygap on the assumption that men and women both want the same things, but this isn't true. If you go to the wikipedia page [0] for 'Gender pay gap' you will find that direct discrimination is a very small part of the pay gap, and if you follow through to the EU links [1] you will find it is littered with the assumption that men and women should want the same things (work/life balance, family life, etc.).
To my mind the category of 'woman' is not a good one for assesing pay discrimination. It is an interesting proxy group yes, but it doesn't provide a useful means of going forward. You need to identify causes and treat the causes without discrimination from your proxy, only based on your member group.
Teaching negotiation strategies is a good thing to do, that treats a real problem. If you only teach women (as 'women in work' groups do) you create problems for men who aren't good, as they are now very likely to be the worst negotiators. If instead you use a real metric (say an evaluation for poor negotiation skills) as an entry requirement for the program you aren't hurting anybody and you are reducing one of the real portions of the gender pay gap.
In other words actually solving problems is hard and net positive, but using prejudices to simplify your problem is easy and can be zero-sum or even negative.
Some problems with your example of "teaching negotiation strategies":
- It assumes that discriminatory outcomes are solely created by behavioural differences (i. e. "Women would earn the same if only they were better negotiators"). While nobody is denying that behaviour is a contributing factor, it's hard to deny that there is some direct discrimination going on[0]
- It takes the existing structures as god-given, unchangeable fact, i. e. "Compensation is set in an adversarial negotiation".
- It assumes that the outcome of a process cannot be discriminatory if gender/race/age/... weren't direct inputs into the process, i. e. "we'd love to have more African-American engineers, but the Lacrosse-requirement has always been part of our hiring process".
- It places the full burden of change on the group that is discriminated against, i. e. "Teach women to act more like white men when negotiating".
- It fais to answer the question "What should I, an African-American, do to lower my chances of being shot at any random traffic stop?"
[0]: from your Wikipedia link: "A 2007 study showed that for identical resumes fewer replies were sent to men compared with women (it also showed that women do worse when they have children, while men do worse when they don't).[66] Another study showed more jobs for women when orchestras moved to blind auditions"
* the negotiation example was taken from the EU summary article as an example not based on the persons choice
* the gist of my argument is that people aren't all the same and have predispositions
* the 'stop yourself getting shot' argument is ridiculous. I was highlighting that discrimination based on proxy groups is bad. As for what to do if you are being discriminated against? Don't go for 'positive' doscrimination, identify the group you are being used as a proxy for and convince the people with power that you aren't them. Of course it isn't easy, but at least it doesn't shove thr problem onto somebody else.
"This actually seems to be moving in the other direction..."
That's not supported by the link you provided. That page says they're 'about as likely'. If it were moving in the other direction, it would instead say 'more likely'.
Moreover, the last sentence you quoted gets that info from a paper[0] which found no significant correlation of attitudes with age.
Even if it had found any correlation, the manner in which the survey was conducted wouldn't demonstrate that GP in incorrect. 99% of survey participants had graduated high school. It sounds like, though the authors claim the survey participants reflected the mix in the 2000 census, they've restricted their analysis to adults (18+ ?).
That might be because, in a lot of ways, it i̶s̶ can be true. If I (a white man) don't get selected for a job because of a diversity program that requires that x% of workers be a PoC, it does actively harm me because I would have (possibly) otherwise have been chosen for that job.
I'm not saying that this is always the case (or even that it usually is), but this scenario wasn't true 15 or 20 years ago.
For the record, as a social justice type, I think that the solution to diversity issues in the workplace isn't to enforce percentage figures - it's to figure out why the workplace isn't attracting members of X group, change it so that it is, and actively seek out applications from diverse communities. If you're doing everything right, you should almost naturally wind up with a diverse workplace. Of course, guess which of these choices is the cheapest and requires the least amount of change in culture. One can also be imposed top-down while the other requires cultural buy-in in the first place.
you should almost naturally wind up with a diverse workplace
That's a factual claim which implies that different groups of people are uniform in their preferences and thus you'd find equal representation of people across all fields. A lot of people find this to be an absurd proposition with a mountain of evidence to contradict it.
If cultural and workplace issues were the explanation for disproportionate representation in different workplaces then we would expect to see the countries which implement the most solutions to those issues have the most equal representations. In fact, what we see is the opposite. The Scandinavian countries have the best policies (generous child care, long parental leave, extensive anti-harassment and anti-discrimination training, board quotas) and yet they have even more gender self-segregation by occupation than other developed countries [0].
That's one interpretation, another one is that if you're that marginal of a candidate anyway you've probably benefitted a lot already by previous employers and institutions.
"but recent data shows that younger white men are now about as likely as older men to see discrimination as zero-sum."
This is not surprising.
In 1960, it's pretty easy to see how 'ending segregation' can be a win-win (or at least, not detrimental to 'whites'), and that a lot of social justice was needed to help people along.
In 2016, we still have more work to do, but a lot of progress can be made, and a Universities policy of requiring specific ethnic students to be accepted is technically definitely a 'zero sum' situation ... so it's not hugely surprising that public perception has shifted somewhat over time.
I'm not rationalizing it, I'm describing why perception has changed.
I you're a 'white guy' working in NYC in 1960, it's easy to see how desegregation is 'good thing' that doesn't challenge your status.
If you're a 'white guy' in Alabama in 2016, and know that 4% of the spots in your College have to go to 'people of colour' - in 2016, 50 years after desegregation wherein most people have at least some opportunity - you might be more likely to perceive that specific scenario as zero-sum.
I'm afraid you're in for a nasty shock. I used to believe the same - it wasn't until my late 20s that I began to realize quite how much prejudice remains in the world. Now I'm in my 30s I see it everywhere, and I'm shocked at how much I missed when I was growing up.
Not a snark - it is also possible that over time interactions with a few individuals could change you enough to ostracize entire groups - unless you explicitly guard against that.
This is the one I really don't relate to. There are plenty of terrible people in the world of every possible classification. I am always saddened when someone judges me because they had bad experiences with people of similar characteristics. I would never want to put someone else in that situation.
I've met lots and lots of horrible white dudes in the tech industry, but that doesn't stop me from assuming that new people I meet who fit that profile aren't terrible.
Perhaps none of the young people that you hang out with are bigots. Don't let that become a convenient excuse to ignore all the bigotry happening just outside of your sight--and, especially, far from progressive urban centers.
" It's more the older people that generally discriminate."
I believe younger people are often ageist, and also discriminate based on ideology, behaviours etc..
I also believe that though younger people have no resentment towards other races/genders, that they may have some systematically racial behaviours they are not yet developed the 'self awareness' of.
Finally, I'd suggest that a lot of 'systematic racism' - which definitely exists - may not be as perniciously bad as we think - it may have more to do with 'self selecting' behaviours. In Toronto, there is a strong 'Chinese community', 'Italian community'. They tend to stick to themselves a little more. Basically all of the 'roofers' in my hood were Italian. It's a stereotype but true. They hire their buds, and buds of buds. Nothing wrong with that. (I lived in the 'Italian community' and felt like an outsider, though I never minded it). When this kind of soft ethnocentrism is exhibited by a 'majority group' - it might be perceived as something different, i.e. derogatory, or 'racist'.
I think that the subject of this article would make a really great film ...
It's very useful for people with followers to promote an out group. This is just as true of high school politics as presidential elections. "It's them damn foreigners!" Tends to quickly move into racial or ethnic lines.
He means people discriminate on many other qualities and factors: age, class, profession, religion, appearance, language, grammar, accent, weight, education, political party, musical taste, programming language, text editor, etc...
A surprising amount of people feel like gay marriage was the final thing to implement for an equal society. There's an argument that equal treatment under the law results in equality in practice, which is of course incorrect, even if we did have equal treatment under the law (some things disproportionately affect minority groups, so just saying "we do it to everyone" doesn't help).
True, and it's actually worse than that--we finally have a national marriage equality law, but we don't have national employment or housing equality, which should be even more fundamental. And God help you if you happen to be trans.
There's a great deal of bitterness from poorer GLBTs that they've been essentially thrown under the bus by the gay rights movement. Marriage is important, but there's a lot of fair-weather activists saying "mission accomplished" when the basic survival needs of millions of people are still completely unprotected.
> bitterness from poorer GLBTs that they've been essentially thrown under the bus by the gay rights movement
This one seems weird to me as someone who is part of that community; the two issues seem orthogonal unless we're talking specifically about things like discrimination against LGBT employees and LGBT kids that are thrown out of their homes.
I guess the best explanation is that some people base too much of their identity on their sexuality and forget that they can also be active in more general human rights issues.
> This one seems weird to me as someone who is part of that community; the two issues seem orthogonal unless we're talking specifically about things like discrimination against LGBT employees
That's what we're talking about. I mentioned employment and housing protections. It is a fine and wonderful thing that bigots can no longer prevent you from getting married, but they can take away your job and your home at will, in large parts of the USA. That seems like a backwards way to go about it.
> I guess the best explanation is that some people base too much of their identity on their sexuality
That's kind of a nasty thing to say about people who are legitimately worried about their survival.
I would add discrimination is a common fir humans and will be. I discriminate all the time against people who are not my family. So based on groups, I would even say based on genetics because I prefer the ones who are very similar to me.
Bigots, mostly. And a lot of really naive people. But especially bigots.
After the 2008 election, I saw an article called something like "Racism is Dead." The author was saying that, with a black man in America's highest office, it's clear that black people are now fully equal and unimpeded in America.
So at this point I'm thinking he's just a naive, blinkered idiot. But he goes on, in a rambling and insinuative way, to basically say "Therefore, any black person who claims discrimination either has a persecution complex or is maliciously lying."
Open racism/sexism (and to a lesser extent homophobia) is very much out of fashion now, but there's still a major audience for people willing to vaguely imply (but never out-and-out say) that minorities are trying to snatch power from straight white people and need to be slapped down. It's very popular among people who want to enforce their bigotry while being too cowardly to say so outright.
The soft bigotry of "I don't see a problem from here, therefore there isn't a problem and don't you dare imply otherwise, because I don't think of myself a bigot and that's all that matters."
I imagine that if male doctors became so less preferred that one tried to pass himself off as female... The patients would robbed of their right to make an informed healthcare choice. That would be considered a type of fraud?
What of discrimination then? What happens when studies show females are better doctors than males? As a male, I would certainly feel compelled to choose a female physician in such a world in the absence of other quantitative data to make a comparison. Surgeons are a little easier to vet with well-documented outcomes..
It was a beautiful story - and one that I wasn't familiar with. I do hope there are more such waiting to be revealed!
I'll never forget seeing that comic in The New Yorker in '93. A colleague of mine clipped it out and pasted it on the wall behind his desk.
Also in that year, the New York Times asked readers at the end of the year how many times the word "internet" had occurred in the newspaper during the year. I believe the answer was ~200.
While everyone discriminates, I think the older generation is more in touch with egalitarianism than your generation. I'll give you a few examples,
Today, people refuse to acknowledge that domestic violence has male victims. This has NEVER happened in history. It's a modern phenomenon to reject victims based on gender. Perform a Google search for the entire year of 2015. You will not find one single picture of a male victim of domestic violence. Yet, ABS puts the figure at about 30% of victims as being male. Some Australian politicians have tried to legislate DV based on gender!
My local magazine has pictures of only girls on the front cover almost every issue. 50 years ago, you would almost always have a girl standing next to a boy.
A government organisation in Australia called 1800respect bombarded the TV with ads saying that the root cause of domestic violence was young boys "it's a boy thing" was the catch cry. They purposely targeted the demographic with the highest suicide rates who are most vulnerable to criticism.
Or Hillary Clinton's exit speech. What about this gem that not one media outlet commented on. Hillary's message of exclusion was clear. If you're a young boy you are not even worth mentioning.
"And to all of the little __girls__ who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams."
http://www.vox.com/2016/11/9/13570328/hillary-clinton-conces...
These are all legacies that have been created within the last decade. Never in history have we played such nasty gender games. It is the older people that are banging the drums saying "what the hell is going on?", not the younger generation. I am yet to hear younger people chime in to the conversation. I've had some doozy arguments with younger people who talk about revenge (to which I say "for what?") or "no, that's OK, that's equality".
Now, you could argue that it's not the younger generation that's controlling the media. However, there are a lot of young people on Facebook and Snapchat. Where's the outrage at the extreme prejudice we see today from the younger people? It's just not there.
What may surprise you is that I don't support a men's movement because of how toxic feminism is as a gender based movement. What I reject is the extreme gender prejudice that is so popular today. Almost every media in the western world is in the collusion and there appears to be no bar too low they will stoop to.
When I see young kids in droves calling out The Verge, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, BBC News, Fores, Vox, Vulture, Beast and all of the other prejudiced media outlets, I will know that you are right. Until then, I will assume the majority of people who give two hoots about egalitarianism are the older generation of men and women.
Please don't take HN threads on tedious ideological tangents. There are other places on the internet for people who feel passionate about this stuff—here, its predictability makes it off topic. We've asked you to stop doing this before.
>And to all of the little __girls__ who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams."
No woman has ever got the position she was after. It may be a little disheartening as a female to see the only woman who has ever come close lose the way Hilary lost. Males have no trouble finding a role model for the position. You're finding a problem where none exists - males don't need role models for that job but females do.
> In fact, most Australian media will only talk about homelessness of women.
Horseshit. This Australian sees most public discussion of homelessness as not mentioning gender either way.
> Yet, ABS puts the figure at about 30% of victims as being male.
Yes, men are subject to 30% of domestic violence, and it's an under-reported problem. But the women cop much more severe violence. The male victims don't need refuges in the proportions that females
> bombarded the TV with ads saying that the root cause of domestic violence was young boys "it's a boy thing" was the catch cry.
This is a gross misrepresentation of the DV ads. The core message of the ads wasn't "it's a boy thing", but "we socially train boys to disrespect women, let's do better".
> Never in history have we played such nasty gender games.
Nah, places like the US and the UK simply didn't give women the vote until a couple of centuries after men had it. Or let women own property freely, or so on and so forth. But since you're just talking about people saying 'girls' instead of 'kids', well, fuck, men/boys have been the default in public announcements for so long that it's ridiculous.
Yes, men have problems that feminism doesn't really recognise well (if at all), but you have a chip on your shoulder that is distorting your perceptions. It's bizarre that you get so worked up over a single utterance of Clinton's, yet pretend that the long history of "boy's clubs" excluding women from positions of power simply doesn't exist. As an Australian, are you aware that women were legally paid 2/3rds the rate of men as late as the mid 1970s? Or that as late as the 60s, women weren't allowed to secure loans without a male guarantor? Hell, in some states in the US, there's no such thing as rape if the couple are married. All of those things are a bit more than "girls, you can do it!"
By all means, raise consciousness for men's issues, but don't take the petty passive-aggressive swipe at women's issues in the process.
> Horseshit
> you have a chip on your shoulder
> It's bizarre that you get so worked up
Your account has a pattern of posting uncivil comments on HN, which we've asked you many times to stop. It's not cool, regardless of how wrong or annoying someone else is. It's also not cool regardless of how right your views are. Indeed, you discredit those by being a jerk, so if you care about these things, that is an extra reason to be civil.
Also might be worth noting that "While in London, she lectured extensively and became the first woman to have her name entered in the British Medical Register." - which appears to conflict with the facts provided in the article that's the subject of these comments.
Now that the pendulum has swung to the other side with female doctors outnumbering male doctors in NHS. There are questions being raised if this "too many female doctors" phenomenon is contributing to doctor shortage faced by NHS [1].
Of course, the actual solution to that is to build a society and culture in which men take as much of a role in raising their children - and yes, that means making sacrifices re their work - as women do. Otherwise, we're still clinging onto the old concept of the man being the breadwinner and the woman looking after the children, just in a new age where it's not economically possible to raise children on one wage alone, and that's bound to cause issues as we see in that article.
> Of course, the actual solution to that is to build a society and culture in which men take as much of a role in raising their children - and yes, that means making sacrifices re their work - as women do.
A major problem with this is that the only way women were historically able to dedicate their time to their families is by being prohibited from doing other work. As soon as you're allowed to work, working becomes a competitive advantage which means you have to do it. Jane works and Jane and her husband are bidding on the same house as you so now you have to work too.
In theory a solution might be to legally mandate a 20 hour work week and prohibit overtime so that both spouses will have time to work at home, but we all know that is not going to happen. Specialization is too great an advantage. Doctors work 80 hour weeks because it takes a long time to become a doctor and that schooling has to be amortized over many work-hours. If med school was 20 hours instead of 80 it would take 32 years instead of 8.
So the only functioning system is to have one working parent and one stay at home parent. We would have to somehow ensure that half of each is of each sex.
Historically this functioned by society treating fathers and mothers differently. If we want to treat them the same then how does the employer know which one should be prevented from working so they can stay at home without sacrificing a competitive advantage for their family?
There is also the related problem of how to convince men to spend less time on their careers if women continue to prefer men with higher incomes.
Of course, the actual solution to that is to build a society and culture in which men take as much of a role in raising their children
The Nordic countries have been pushing hard to move things in that direction. For example, in 2013 in Sweden, 25% of the parental leave days reimbursed were taken by men.
The thinking is that if both men and women end up taking as much parental leave after a birth, it evens out the "will this person suddenly disappear because a kid came into the picture" hiring equation.
It's important to remember that any form of incentivized or compulsory family leave will just shift the discrimination to people who are less likely to have kids.
While I'm between the ages of 25-45 I really don't to have to put "is single" or "has had a vasectomy" on my resume to avoid scaring off employers that can't afford to lose an employee for months.
In theory, it's supposed to balance out as women take on jobs that they wouldn't otherwise as a result of being able to share their childcaring duties. In practice, there's obviously all sorts of inefficiencies in the market to deal with - two people working part time might very well not net the same amount as one working full time and the other even less time. There's a number of issues to be solved, but that doesn't mean we should throw our hands up and say it's too hard.
Doesn't this assume that wages are determined by society desire to pay men rather than men desire to get paid?
So long dating success has a extremely strong correlation to pay grade for men, how will the incentive to seek higher pay grade going to go down? By changing culture to have men do a bigger role in raising kids, I don't see how we can predict any change in the aspects women has that correlates with success in dating. We would need the gender specific incentives for higher wages to change in order to achieve that.
> To explain the discrepancy, the researchers point to past studies that have shown female physicians are more likely to provide preventive care and psychosocial counseling. Female doctors are also more likely to adhere to clinical guidelines.
It doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult to teach men the importance of these things, though it might be a systemic thing (i.e. boys and girls getting taught different things about interacting with others from an early age, leading to different ways of thinking later in life). I'd like to know why men are less likely to do these things - an assumption that it's something intrinsic to male biology would be a huge leap.
Given this information is on the first search result for "James Barry doctor" which happened to be the Wikipedia entry for Barry, it makes me wonder why this was left out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_(surgeon)#Death