However, if you are too focused on hiring female engineers, you can bring the overall quality of the team down.
Now I do not mean female engineers are any less competent compared to male engineers, but I will give an example from personal experience.
The manager at my current day job has (in a team meeting) expressed that "females are better". The reasoning was that females are more creative and in general, more social. This idea of "females > males" was expressed multiple times over my time here, and it has really begun to take off. In our last round of hiring a co-op, our team lead said "the new co-op has to be a girl". In the screening phase, the team lead decided we would not interview a few of the male applicants, for no specific reason. We then picked 2 people (1 male, 1 female) for interviews. The female candidate was interviewed by myself, a co-worker, and the team lead. This candidate was not exceptional in any way and was not more skilled than the other candidate. She was hired the second the interview ended.
A year prior, we had a female co-op student who was on a 8 month term. 3 months into the term, she was given an offer by the manager for a full-time position. This offer was in secret, and other teams were not to hear about it until her last month. As she was still in school, she expressed that she wanted the job but wanted to finish her last year and graduate. And so the position (and budget), was saved for her for the year, regardless of whether or not she was able to graduate.
I have no problem against hiring female engineers. However, hiring female candidates over male candidates simply because of gender is discrimination, and that's not something I agree with. This kind of discrimination can also be detrimental to the success of the team/company.
Simple example: Let's assume 10 of 30 (about 33%) applicants are female. The team decides to select 10 people for interviews (yes there are places that do not interview based on fit alone but fit + headcount). Since there are only 10 females, if we only select females, there are a few problems. 1) We lose out on any male candidates that may be a better fit (which also comes from a pool of 20/30). 2) We're forced to spend money and resources on candidates that essentially have a 0% chance of being hired because they would not have passed the screening if sexism were not in play.
Oddly enough, the manager(s) at your current job are using sexist rhetoric about women being creative and social to create a policy where women who are hired have to meet a standard of behavior/performance that is higher than would be for any other candidate. While it may be that women are getting hired more often under this state of things, it really is quite sexist.
When you are underrepresented with a certain group of people, who don't start magically attributing sexist or racist attributes to them and demand they meet those stereotypes. Your job has way more problems then just hiring if that is how they approach things.
I agree that the sexist rhetoric is wrong or misplaced. However, if they have a need for people who are especially creative and social, it's fine for that to be part of the hiring bar. I see absolutely no reason to tie it to any stereotype, though.
"We have discovered that employees who are especially creative and social are more successful in our environment. Therefore, when we evaluate a candidate we are much more likely to consider people who are especially creative or social."
Set the bar that you need for your environment. Evaluate people against that bar.
Sexism is socially systemic sexual discrimination.
Racism is socially systemic racial discrimination.
Classism is socially systemic class-based discrimination.
This is why you'll find people who say "You can't be sexist against men." You can obviously discriminate against a man based on sex, but that's not part of a larger, overarching societal norm. When the discrimination becomes routine, ingrained, and pervasive, that turns it into an 'ism.'
Incidentally, this is exhibit A in Orwellian political redefinition. Instead of using the plain meaning of a word, you load it with political assumptions based on your manichean worldview so any word with a bad connotation cannot be applied to your side.
"You can't be sexist against men" is a classic Orwellian contradiction in that (by the plain meaning of the term) it itself is a sexist statement while simultaneously reinforcing this redefinition. It is so blatantly self-refuting that I'd long assumed it to be some kind of straw man, not something feminists actually said.
That you are unable to distinguish between an instance of sexual discrimination (called sexual discrimination) and systemic sexual discrimination (called sexism) does not mean anything political or Orwellian is afoot. Words have meanings. Ignorance of the meanings of words is easily solved. Stubborn refusal to recognize your own errors is rather less so.
I don't accept redefinitions of words that pack in political assumptions. Lots of people use "socialist" to mean "anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan" but we have no problem dismissing that as biased hyperbole.
What you're essentially doing is trying to pack into the word "sexism" the notion that everything in society is systemically biased in favor of men, at the expense of women. But rather than establishing and defending that notion, you pack it in as an unquestioned assumption so that you don't have to defend it explicitly.
As a result, you deliberately minimize any injustices suffered by men to the benefit of women, implicitly saying that it doesn't matter as much when a man faces sexual discrimination. Again, you could simply argue this point explicitly, but for some reason you're trying to pack it into your language.
Steve Klabnik's point, stated explicitly, would be something like this: "that instance of sexual discrimination against men, in favor of women, doesn't really count for much, because on aggregate, society still discriminates against women in favor of men." As far as I can tell that's what he meant, and it's even a defensible argument from a feminist perspective, but it also lays bare a lot of assumptions that not everyone might agree with, so it's couched in the superficial form of a semantic argument. This not only makes the controversial premises of the argument easier to swallow, but renders them in a form of a simple factual claim giving the illusion of certitude.
As far as the scope of this discussion is concerned, I don't have a problem with Mr. Klabnik's point, but simply the dishonest way he expresses it.
"Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex" (Google)
"prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially : discrimination against women" (Merriam-Webster)
"prejudice or discrimination based on sex; behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex" (Wikipedia)
I think these are all perfectly acceptable "plain English" definitions of "sexism".
Definitions are nothing but arbitrary convention anyway--my point is that when you explicitly unpack the feminist definition of "sexism", seemingly semantic arguments like Mr. Klabnik's are packing in a lot of assumptions that deserve to be unpacked. Generally, I don't favor definitions that pack in tendentious assumptions for political purposes.
As you noted, those definitions are all arbitrary, but needless to say they leave out the entire history of the origin of the word, an origin which seeks to critically describe both individual instances of sexism as well as the systemic, social factors of sexism. It should be noted though that the Wikipedia definition does include something about more than just individual instances of sexism.
I disagree that there are extra meanings being packed into the word sexism beyond the meanings you cited. That you are unaware of the origins and issues that go into sexism doesn't remove the meanings of the word. To be fair, no mainstream outlet or publication tends to talk about things at that length and level for a variety of reasons, many of which are due to systemic sexism, but don't confuse common understanding for the only understanding. Common understandings that lack depth or more rigorous information are what contribute to a common understanding that promotes racism, sexism, and other issues.
That post seems to unpack more or less the same assumptions I'm unpacking:
"A running theme in a lot of feminist theory is that of institutional power: men as a class have it, women as a class don’t"
"What this imbalance of power translates to on an individual level is a difference in the impact of a man being prejudiced towards a woman and a woman being prejudiced towards a man"
Or as I called it: "the notion that everything in society is systemically biased in favor of men, at the expense of women", leading to the conclusion that "it doesn't matter as much when a man faces sexual discrimination".
Fine. We agree that the same assumptions are being packed into the feminist usage of the word "sexism". My argument is that these assumptions need to be called out and defended in this forum. If this were a feminist forum where everyone could be reasonably assumed to have already accepted those assumptions already, perhaps the implicit jargon would be more appropriate. Furthermore, the act of imposing this jargon is a backhanded way of imposing the assumptions behind that jargon.
I totally agree about the inaccessibility of a lot of feminist literature, including things on sexism. Talking about the meaning and reasons behind sexist incidents and sexism, as steveklabnik did, is important and esp. so in places where basic, fundamental info is not known.
There's nothing Orwellian about that, though, because we are talking about information that hasn't been made available or accessible for others rather than taking terminology and changing its meaning to suit a political agenda diametrically opposed to what the original term stood for. In fact, that mass media has perpetuated sexism and feminism as things that do not have a systemic basis or ignoring that they do is the more Orwellian thing going on in US society.
As for imposing assumptions, the notion that using terminology correctly and explaining and examining that terminology is somehow backhanded in a discussion or argument is silly. How else are we going to get better understanding without using actual terms and the ideas behind them?
Your argument seems to be that since feminists invented the word, it's pretty much up to them what it means. Fine. My response: that definition still packs in assumptions unfairly and it would be better to abandon the word entirely, at least in forums where the assumptions packed into that word's definition are not universally held premises.
Incidentally, this is Hitlerian argumentation style. Instead of making a straightforward argument, you load it with emotional baggage to support your Stalinesque worldview.
Admittedly, if you haven't read 1984 the Orwell reference probably went over your head. "Manichean" is a word you should just look up, as it is quite useful.
> Admittedly, if you haven't read 1984 the Orwell reference probably went over your head.
Thanks for pointing this out. I did go through high school, so I'm hip to your extremely erudite reference.
> "Manichean" is a word you should just look up, as it is quite useful.
Really. I don't find much use for it. Maybe if I just spent more time virtuously casting my opponents as evil users of "Orwellian" tactics, I could also point out that _their_ worldview is manichean.
Cool story bro. (I've seen you comment on these stories before, and I know I'm not going to get anywhere with you, so know that I'm just choosing not to respond to you.)
It's fine if you don't respond--the strange thing about ideologies is that any two followers of them are largely interchangeable due to the lack of original thought involved.
Given recent events though, I'm surprised you're still going around setting yourself up as some type of moral authority. Someone who bullies women programmers doesn't really have much credibility on this issue, does he?
Steve explained that his tweet about @harthur's replace utility was not meant to disparage its author, or its code, but was meant to express his feelings about Node (i.e. the ecosystem for which replace was written). And, he apologized, "unequivocably", for the fact that his tweet had caused pain to @harthur:
My last blog post was quite a downer, so I want to do a short follow up for posterity.
First of all, there were some nice responses to it from Steve Klabnik and especially Corey Haines, who gave a very sincere straight-up apology. Several people have told me they are usually very nice, so keep that in mind.
So, your characterization appears to be incorrect and unfair.
I'm sorry, this is ridiculous. So if a Japanese person discriminates against me on the basis of race in Japan, it is racist, but do it in the US and it is "racial discrimination"?
How do I explain this... it is quite odd talking to someone who thinks your way. I know you exist but I struggle even to wrap my head around it.
Racism/sexism/whatever... a wrong is a wrong. Fight it wherever you find it. My example was an interaction between two people, two individuals, and now you're talking about "discussing social groups". Racism and sexism is caused by considering people as "groups" and not individuals, and your solution is to... do more of the same. Recursively. All I have seen the left do in the last 40 years is carve up society into ever smaller and more specific groups with associated victim-hood points and it doesn't get us anywhere. All you are doing is entrenching division.
> My example was an interaction between two people, two individuals, and now you're talking about "discussing social groups".
Two people aren't a group?
> Racism and sexism is caused by considering people as "groups" and not individuals, and your solution is to... do more of the same.
You might actually really like Latour, who's a sociologist who argues that his entire field is wrong because of too much abstraction. I've been reading 'Reassembling the Social' lately, and it's fascinating.
That said, I actually disagree that the cause is 'thinking of people as groups,' but you of course are entitled to your opinion.
> All you are doing is entrenching division.
I'm not sure how advocating that we have more women in computer science is 'entrenching division.'
Talking about experiences and pointing out issues that are driven by more than just individual encounters is very important for groups of people. to gain control over their lives and to break free from the kinds of violence and oppression they face. By definition, racism and sexism is discriminatory to whole groups of people, talking about the collective experience of that doesn't make those oppressions stronger.
> You can obviously discriminate against a man based on sex, but that's not part of a larger, overarching societal norm.
I would argue that many of the pressures men face, such as those to "man up" in difficult situations rather than freely express their feelings, counts as a routine, ingrained, and pervasive form of sexual discrimination. Even if I fully agree with your definition of sexism, that doesn't mean that sexism against men is nonexistent.
According to this line of argumentation, anyone doing OOP is calling it the wrong thing.
(This particular dictionary has a reference to a 'computing dictionary' waaaaay down at the bottom. But if you picked up an actual dictionary, or went to a different one, it wouldn't be there. Dictionaries have different things for the same words!)
Yes, we understand that you wish to redefine words to make them more suitable to you. It is not ignorance of your dialect, it is a rejection of it. Those words already have meanings in English, and people are not wrong for continuing to use those meanings. You are welcome to use whatever meaning you wish, but saying "my clique uses a totally different meaning for those words, so you are wrong now" is not a constructive activity.
You are aware that disciplines exist, right? And that within those disciplines, words often are used as technical terms, with meanings that do not exactly map on to colloquial usage? For example, when physicists talk about 'energy', they are not talking about a state of mind that people can have (eg "I'm really full of energy today"). That doesn't mean that physics is wrong or orwellian, it just means that you need to get an education before making pronouncements about it. In the case of "sexism", when we are talking about it here we are usually talking about it from within the disciplines that actually deal with it (either sociology, gender studies, modern history, philosophy or etc). Within all of these fields, sexism is a technical term that means (with slight variations between fields) exactly what steveklabnik above summarised it as.
>In the case of "sexism", when we are talking about it here we are usually talking about it from within the disciplines that actually deal with it
No, we are not. That is the entire point. We are not in a women's studies department. We are not women's studies majors. We are not talking about women's studies. So the terminology of women's studies is not relevant.
>Within all of these fields, sexism is a technical term that means (with slight variations between fields) exactly what steveklabnik above summarised it as.
No, it is not. History and philosophy do not use sexism that way. Only a minority of sociologists do. The only example you listed that is actually correct is women's studies.
As I have said elsewhere, the terminology is relevant because it is the terminology of the disciplines that deal with this stuff. I can accept that people will want to talk about this stuff without knowing anything about it at first - that makes sense, and without already knowing that it has already been studied how would they know? When people learn that there is actually a prior literature and well developed disciplines that deal with this stuff however, then deliberately turning their back on even the most basic part of the literature and the discipline when there are people who are literally explaining it in front of them is rank anti-intellectualism worthy only of contempt and scorn.
When looking at issues of gender in history, modern history does use the language of privilege - ie sexism might be talked about as manifest in terms of what records or history is recorded and treated as important by the people who are being studied. When discussing issues of gender, modern Philosophy has to deal with system level analysis - hence the use of ideas of systemic sexual discrimination as sexism. Recent sociologists seem to non-controversially use this terminology also.
There is no branch of science which defines the words that way. And even if there were, rejecting a redefinition of a common word is not rejecting an entire branch of science. If everyone involved in astronomy suddenly decided the word large only applies to things greater in size than the sun, people continuing to use large to refer to their soda would not be rejecting astronomy as a consequence.
Also, you appear to be deliberately misrepresenting a small subset of sociologists as being representative of the entire field. That redefinition of sexism isn't even universally accepted in women's studies and feminism, much less sociology. It is in fact a clique that uses those terms that way, not a branch of science.
You are wrong. These terms (and the definitions steveklabnik gave) are very important in sociology, and were coined in large part by sociologists looking for a way to describe social phenomenon that they'd observed.
We've used them in the vernacular (which is the dictionary definition) to describe individual offenses, but when sociologists and academics use them (the field the terms came out of), it is very useful to describe a power structure and things that happen within that power structure.
I'm sad to see that steveklabnik has been downvoted so much on this board for saying something that is so very correct.
No, they are very important to sociologists who also happen to be into women's studies. Pretending all sociologists go along with that is dishonest.
>and were coined in large part by sociologists looking for a way to describe social phenomenon that they'd observed.
No they were not, see the rest of the thread.
>but when sociologists and academics use them
Which is relevant to lay-persons using them here on this forum and then being told they are wrong when they are not wrong?
>I'm sad to see that steveklabnik has been downvoted so much on this board for saying something that is so very correct.
I suspect the downvotes were more due to the way he told people their correct use of a term is incorrect, simply because there is a second correct use of that term.
If we were talking about astronomical phenomena, and we said that these formations were not very large (because they were smaller than the Sun), and you said that they were super large (because they were bigger than a breadbox), you would be obviously trolling. It is similar here; when discussing this stuff, we do it with the vernacular of the fields that study it, and objecting that it doesn't match up to colloquial usage is just trolling. Please stop being a troll.
If we were astronomers, you would have a point. This is not a women's studies department, we're not discussing women's studies. We're non-experts, discussing ordinary daily life. The field specific meanings are not appropriate, and telling people who use the general definition they are wrong is not constructive. Please stop accusing people of being a troll for no reason. It is also not constructive.
I'm not calling people trolls for no reason, though I take your point that in some cases (such as perhaps this one) it is not the correct response. So, my apologies.
However, we are still discussing the subject matter that things like Women's Studies and Sociology deal with, so using the terminology makes more sense than not using the terminology, especially when people who are going to actually be able to say anything useful about this will mostly either already know the terminology or quickly learn. Getting exasperated at people who will not use the correct terminology even after it is explained to them seems justified to me, in the same way that if some people kept saying that a "page" obviously only refers to either a piece of paper or a trainee knight or a trainee legislator, "because common English usage and anything else is Orwellian psyops" (quote marks indicating aggregate ranting of the hypothetical other), when we were talking about single page applications in the context of webapps, and they resisted correction, exasperation would be justified, and accusations of trolling would not be remiss.
So, I think that insisting on using the correct terminology from the disciplines that deals with something makes sense where we can, whenever we want to actually talk about something in a useful way, and people who insist that using the correct terminology is somehow a conspiracy or evil or whatever (to be clear, you have not suggested that, but others in this thread have) are totally trolls.
>However, we are still discussing the subject matter that things like Women's Studies and Sociology deal with, so using the terminology makes more sense than not using the terminology
No, it doesn't. The vast majority of people do not recognize the other meaning of the word. So in a discussion among ordinary people, like the one here, using the ordinary word's ordinary meaning is appropriate. The response from SJWs that everyone is wrong for using the word correctly is not reasonable.
There is a discipline which deals with this stuff. Being initially ignorant of that is fine - no one knows everything - but when people say "Look, there is a discipline that deals with this stuff, and here is how the terminology works and here is why" then replying (as you have done) "No, ignore that and use the colloquial usage when talking about this stuff" without watertight explicit reasoning as to why either that discipline does not apply, or some other discipline is a better fit, or the discipline is somehow flawed in a way that makes this terminology wrong, is stupid and also both morally and practically bad.
Do you understand this now, or do you think that the word 'page' should only be used to mean either 'paper' or 'position analogous to squire, but for either knightly or political office' even when we discuss webapps?
Did you even read that post? Not two sentences after the one you cite does Caroline Bird say:
> [Sexism and racism] have used to keep the powers that be in power.
A direct statement about the systemic, power imbalance nature of sexism. Sexism is both those individual instances of discrimination and the overall systemic and social issues that allow it to perpetuate.
Yes. I even understood it, which appears to be what's bothering you. The quotes you refer to, once again, does not support the claim. The statement "sexism has been used to do X" does not mean "the definition of sexism is X". Paint has been used to cover walls. That does not mean the definition of paint is "stuff that covers walls".
I think it's worth pointing out that the definitions you're using are relatively uncommon. That doesn't make them wrong, but it does mean that they're probably not the definitions that any of us learned in school, or the definitions that are mostly widely known and used. I'm all in favour of the idea that the meaning of words can change, but that normally goes alongside the idea that the meaning of a word is determined by its popular usage.
Personally, I think your usage is fine, and I think it represents a more precise concept, but I'm not surprised that it causes confusion and I'm not sure it's fair to blame everyone else for that.
Right! That's why I wrote the comment: people who haven't needed to care about this (coughmencough) generally... haven't needed to care. Dictionaries are really bad at terms of art:
etc. Both of these terms (and many more) have special meanings within computing that aren't in the dictionary. (This one has a reference to the 'computing dictionary' at the bottom.) Likewise, social scientists have terms of art.
> I'm not sure it's fair to blame everyone else for that.
Who am I blaming? I just mentioned that a term was being mis-used. No blame here. I expect people who've never been forced to confront their privilege to not have any understanding of the topic, by definition.
Well, yes, but terms of art are generally reserved for discussions among specialists. If I started using words like 'class' or 'object', I can be reasonably expected to be talking about OOP. Unless, that is, I'm attending a conference on Marxism, in which case nobody will assume that; they'll assume that I'm talking about sociological class and objectification. If I talk about 'master-slave hierarchies' on HN, I'm probably talking about database replication. In a race studies class, I'm talking about something entirely different.
I don't think it's entirely reasonable to say that people are 'mis-using' a word by adopting its most popular usage in a discussion between non-specialists, and I think it's doubly unreasonable to complain about the confusion being caused when you try to use the specialist definition.
If you're as aware of social science as you sound, then you'll be well-aware of the power of words, and the power of defining what a word means. By seeking to define a word, and implying that those who don't accept your definition as ignorant ("people who've never been forced to confront their privilege") and by insisting that it is they who need to change their vocabulary and not you who need to be more precise, you're behaving quite arrogantly; in the manner, if I might mischievously suggest, of a person who believes in the privileged position of their knowledge on the subject and their right to tell others how to speak.
When we're discussing the social implications of women in technology, it doesn't seem un-reasonable to me to use terms of art from social science. Maybe it does to you?
> implying that those who don't accept your definition as ignorant ("people who've never been forced to confront their privilege")
The point of privilege is that you don't notice it. I think the disconnect here is that you assume that I'm making some kind of judgement about ignorance. I don't think people who are ignorant are 'bad.' Everyone needs to learn these things sometime.
> in the manner, if I might mischievously suggest, of a person who believes in the privileged position of their knowledge on the subject and their right to tell others how to speak.
The thing is that in this case, it's (to switch back to CS ;) ) a leaky abstraction. If someone thinks "I get discriminated against too, as a man, so I've experienced sexism" they're totally talking past people who are discussing what it is for women to experience sexism, since they (the man) are only experiencing sexual discrimination. The 'pervasive' part is significant. It's not about policing words: it's about getting men to understand that they have not and will not be able to experience sexism in the way a woman does, even if they are, at times, discriminated against based on their gender. You're absolutely right that words have power: that's why we shouldn't let people use the wrong ones.
The problem is, at least superficially, you didn't have anything to say except for trying to shift the conversation from plain English to feminist jargon. (Of course, highlighting the specific shift you chose translated to rather substantial contribution, which I've unpacked elsewhere. I wonder why you had to be so oblique about it.)
> The point of privilege is that you don't notice it. I think the disconnect here is that you assume that I'm making some kind of judgement about ignorance. I don't think people who are ignorant are 'bad.' Everyone needs to learn these things sometime.
The question of whether one acknowledges one's own privilege is orthogonal to the question of word usage. I believe that I acknowledge my own privilege, but I do not see the benefit in trying to impose word usages on people, particularly in a threaded comment on a technology discussion forum. I don't believe that it's a good strategy for persuading people of anything, which is a shame as there is much persuading to do.
My interpretation is that these kinds of word usage distinctions serve as signals; you want to signal enlightenment through the "correct" usage of a word, but what you're not understanding is that this is going to piss off people who don't understand what you're trying to say. Insisting that the onus is on them to learn the "correct" meaning just pisses them off more, especially when they go off to read a dictionary or encyclopedia and it tells them that, in fact, they were right all along. This just creates an "us and them" scenario in which the two sides identify themselves by linguistic characteristics. We're doing this to each other right now even though I bet we agree a lot on the actual issues.
> If someone thinks "I get discriminated against too, as a man, so I've experienced sexism" they're totally talking past people who are discussing what it is for women to experience sexism, since they (the man) are only experiencing sexual discrimination.
Nope. It depends entirely on what you think the word means. What does the keyword "sexism" in the above statement represent? If you think "sexism" means "discrimination on the grounds of sex" then "I get discriminated against too, as a man, so I've experienced sexism" is a true statement (assuming said discrimination occurs). Nowhere does this imply that the experience for men is the same as the experience for women - sexism (defined as sexual discrimination) can differ by degree and by frequency, and we'd all acknowledge that it is of far greater degree and far more frequently experienced by women. It is not obvious that this presents any difficulty in discussing the matter accurately. You could easily say "pervasive sexism" or "systemic sexism" or "institutional sexism" when you want to make a further qualifying point about the nature of the discrimination taking place.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree, as neither of us is going to be proved right here. I'll conclude by saying that I think people often say quite reprehensible things about sexism on HN and elsewhere and I don't wish to encourage them by disagreeing with people who are obviously trying to do the right thing. That said, I am not sure the battle over semantics is the one we need to win and fighting it may well be counter-productive.
You've clearly missed the point. In an ideal world there would be no discrimination. My post was not even about how the system is biased against men, it was about how bias against men also exists.
It is extremely difficult to achieve a perfect balance of a 50/50 gender split in the industry. There isn't a 50/50 ratio in Computer Science/Engineering to begin with. If a company or manager tries to bring the ratio to 50/50 (like in my post), you are bound to hire people who are not a good fit simply because you eliminated a portion of the pool for no valid reason. Of course bad hires occur all the time, but trying to force a 50/50 split or a female majority when the supply is not there will only increase that chance.
Sexism against females in the industry is nothing to be laughed at. And the skewed gender ratio within the industry is also real. However, we cannot fix that ratio unless we increase the amount of female students in Computer Science/Engineering.
(Often in feminist spaces, when people talk about removing systematic disadvantages against women, someone'll suggest how it's really men that are disadvantaged now. This has morphed into a meme-like joke of "WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ!")
My son's elementary school appears to be hugely discriminatory towards men. Less than 10% of the teachers are male, all of the leadership at the school is female. Yet I don't see any gender equality organizations complaining about this very widespread reality.
Gloria Steinem always argued that gender equality would only be achieved when society believed women could do what men could do, and men could do what women could. The latter half of that statement offers zero political advantages for the women's studies faculty members which make up the cornerstone of the gender equality movement of this country, and therefore Gloria's full vision is ignored.
Girls have lower scores on math than boys. Explanation: There is something wrong wtih the way math is being taught.
Boys have lower scores on writing than girls. Explanation: Boys are naturally biologically inferior when it comes to processing language.
Boys have lower grades overall than girls. Explanation: Boys aren't as well behaved or attentive as girls.
If the situation were reversed, there would be conversations about how to redesign the school day to erase the overall grade gap between female and male students. But because the group in question isn't a classically oppressed category, the cause of failure is immediately considered to be an internal factor.
See my point? Within some of the social sciences, there is a very potent politically motivated push to search for only external, rather than internal, causes for issues within any group which is considered socially disadvantaged. Nobody has any doubt that Saudi Arabia's Wahabi influenced culture has major internal influences on undermining their economy, but if the same analysis is conducted on any disadvantaged cultural groups within a Western nation, the group conducting said analysis is shamed as being bigoted.
Except, well, often times equality / anti-sex-discrimination law does benefit men. It's now illegal for driving insurance companies to charge men more than women (even though they are statistically worse drivers) (in EU).
Additionally there are attempted to get more men into professions where they were traditionally underrepreseted.
So yes, equality and governmental agencies are complaining about the lack of men in some professions and trying to increase it. The photo on the NHS's "Nursing" career page ( http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/explore-by-career/nursing/ ) is a man. (The NHS is the UK's public sector health system and is one of the largest employers in the world.)
You do not appear to have done any research and are claiming that "no-one tackling the lack of men in some cases", when in fact, they are.
With your specific examples, you don't give any citations, so I wonder if you're cherry picking? Humanity is big and people will have lots of opinions. You're telling me that the most common response to lower grades for boys as opposed to boys is an appeal to biology? Got any citations?
I don't know about this VAW Act (seems to be US thing), the US isn't so great on the equality law anyway (since there is no legal maternity leave, marital status or sexuality isn't a protected ground etc.) If I were to talk about how China does voting, would that be a fair cop against democracy?
Incidentally this is why it's so important to point out instances of discrimination against men. There's alot of hostility to the idea and interests that want to perpetuate such sentiment.
Although there are cases where men are disadvantaged and victim of gender roles, often the "WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ" is exclaimed when ever anyone says anything about women being disadvantaged, comparing a molehill to a mountain.
That ~40,000 men kill themselves in U.S is not a molehill. That men are statistically more likely to get a much harsher prison sentence and are filling up the prison-industrial complex in record numbers is not a molehill. That men are on-course to be outpaced in college degrees 2:1 is not a molehill. As users of ycombinator we're most likely privileged men that have never experienced any of this. But don't be so self-absorbed to assume that your cushy life is representative of the average man.
Thats because it's true but it's also true of all positive discrimination. Sex, Age or Race should never really be a deciding factor when you're attempting to decide who to hire, but we live in a world where people are trying to right wrongs that potentially aren't wrong anymore, but definitely have been in the past and occasionally probably still are.
I read somewhere (I'm pretty sure it was the WSJ) that Woman doing the same job with the same experience level are paid, on average, 8% more than their male counterparts. This is while militant feminists are still screaming about the average or median wage gap of around 20% without taking into considering that woman don't typically do the same jobs as men nor work as many years.
If you really want an effort to balance the demographic, do it at school level. Open a few female only CS schools / degrees, let them have it and lets see if they really compete with men both in numbers and in skill. It may be they just need a better environment to learn, but I also wouldn't be surprised if in general woman simply aren't interested in the subject for the same reasons boys play with cars and girls play with dolls.
In reality woman often have better life choices than men. Many of them have life plans which consist of landing a man and choosing not to work. Others can choose to work in a male dominated field and will likely get preferential treatment with regards to education, recruitment and renumeration. There is no such efforts to even out historically woman centric jobs that I know of, so they likely win there too. That however doesn't mean there aren't problems with sexism in sausage factories and that it should be allowed but I know if I was running a company, my ethos on hiring would be to get the best person I can for the role and the rest of it hopefully wouldn't factor in.
I think most people have this figured out though and most people are reasonable enough not to listen to the nut cases on either side. For those who do, I'd rather not work with them anyway.
I read somewhere (I'm pretty sure it was the WSJ) that Woman doing the same job with the same experience level are paid, on average, 8% more than their male counterparts.
Interesting. Got a citation? That would of course be illegal. Equality law doesn't say "You can't pay women less than men", it says "You cannot pay people less based on their gender".
Similar laws have been used to require (in EU) that you cannot charge men more for driving insurance than women.
"Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's."
I'm not sure on the original source, but thats the WSJ sorta citing it. If it is true, I'm not sure it'd strictly be illegal but it does suggests that feminists who don't understand equality is about fairness rather then sameness may be pushing further than they should.
It's simple supply and demand. If a minority of the engineers graduating from college have a particular trait (e.g. blue eyes), then if Silicon Valley companies compete to have a 50/50 split of blue eyed engineers vs non-blue eyed engineers, they'll end up paying blue eyed engineers more for the same skill level. (Unless the skill distribution of blue eyed engineers is somehow skewed higher than non-blue eyed engineers.)
However, if you are too focused on hiring female engineers, you can bring the overall quality of the team down. Now I do not mean female engineers are any less competent compared to male engineers, but I will give an example from personal experience.
The manager at my current day job has (in a team meeting) expressed that "females are better". The reasoning was that females are more creative and in general, more social. This idea of "females > males" was expressed multiple times over my time here, and it has really begun to take off. In our last round of hiring a co-op, our team lead said "the new co-op has to be a girl". In the screening phase, the team lead decided we would not interview a few of the male applicants, for no specific reason. We then picked 2 people (1 male, 1 female) for interviews. The female candidate was interviewed by myself, a co-worker, and the team lead. This candidate was not exceptional in any way and was not more skilled than the other candidate. She was hired the second the interview ended.
A year prior, we had a female co-op student who was on a 8 month term. 3 months into the term, she was given an offer by the manager for a full-time position. This offer was in secret, and other teams were not to hear about it until her last month. As she was still in school, she expressed that she wanted the job but wanted to finish her last year and graduate. And so the position (and budget), was saved for her for the year, regardless of whether or not she was able to graduate.
I have no problem against hiring female engineers. However, hiring female candidates over male candidates simply because of gender is discrimination, and that's not something I agree with. This kind of discrimination can also be detrimental to the success of the team/company.
Simple example: Let's assume 10 of 30 (about 33%) applicants are female. The team decides to select 10 people for interviews (yes there are places that do not interview based on fit alone but fit + headcount). Since there are only 10 females, if we only select females, there are a few problems. 1) We lose out on any male candidates that may be a better fit (which also comes from a pool of 20/30). 2) We're forced to spend money and resources on candidates that essentially have a 0% chance of being hired because they would not have passed the screening if sexism were not in play.