As an outsider in another country, my impression seems to be that the quest for diversity seems to have turned into something of a religion in several cultures. In principle, as a solution to the problem I am principally all in favor of anonymous, faceless, no alma mater preference etc. interviews and application processes, and/or whatever other measures are suggested to remove the possibility of bias or unconscious bias or anything else that is theorized/proven to exist and affect outcomes.
I am also all in favor of organizations taking steps to address the various negative experiences that are somewhat typically encountered in various demographics, e.g. harassment, etc. as well as affirmative action as a way to attempt to correct this. Based on the fervor with which it is pursued (which is admirable in many ways), I seem to be convinced that if these measures have a negligible effect on outcomes, the crusade for diversity will still continue, as if to suggest that equality of outcome is a worthy goal, as opposed to equality of opportunity. The latter is definitely an unjust status quo worthy of fighting, but the former seems to completely throw away the notion of free will.
It's almost akin to a scientist who so adamantly wants to prove their theory that they will do anything to ensure the result is consistent with the hypothesis.
Then again I could be wrong and people will actually stop pushing for it after these practices are instituted.
I think perhaps you aren't looking at this through a long enough lens.
You can tell America's history in terms of decreasing inequality of opportunity. We started with only well-off white men having the vote; black people were chattel and women were pretty close. We have sporadically worked ever since to repair that. One civil war, assorted constitutional amendments, and 8 civil rights acts so far. We try something, see if that's enough, and then try again when it isn't.
Each time people hope that we've done the last thing. The post-Civil War period, the Reconstruction, was supposed to fix things. But then we had the Lilly White Movement. And Jim Crow. And the Nadir, which involved violent ethnic cleansing across the US (mostly but not entirely anti-black).
We certainly aren't there yet. Marital rape wasn't fully outlawed in the US until 1992. Redlining wasn't illegal until the 70s, and the effects on wealth distribution persist to this day. Men and women reached parity in law and medicine degrees a decade ago, but as far as people practicing it's still 2:1. Employment discrimination, as documented by a number of studies, still persists.
So yeah, if some particular solution doesn't fix the problem, then people will definitely keep pushing. Because that's our 200-year history of fighting discrimination: it keeps not getting fixed.
That's itself a very biased telling of how things are.
The USA along with many other western nations now discriminates against men in favour of women, in many concrete and very specific ways:
- Family courts
- Rape shield laws
- In the private sector, tech sector programmes handing out money but only to women
- Laws that mandate gender ratios in certain situations, like bidding on government contracts
Society has bent over backwards to try and create equality of outcome for women, thereby simultaneously eliminating equality of opportunity for men. This is not actually progress. Progress would be equal opportunity for all.
> Society has bent over backwards to try and create equality of outcome for women, thereby simultaneously eliminating equality of opportunity for men
No, it's bent over backwards to address a pre-existing inequality of opportunity that disfavors women.
But what both sides find uncomfortable and avoid is the inconvenient fact that in a continued series of interactions over time (like life in the real world) rather than an isolated event disconnected from past and future, every opportunity is a product of outcomes at an earlier time, and every outcome effects opportunities at a later time.
Equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes are different concerns, but not at all orthogonal concerns. Any attempt to durably effect changes to inequality of opportunity will necessarily effect inequality of outcomes not only as an effect of opportunity, but as a key mechanism.
And, conversely, every attempt to safeguard existing inequality of outcome safeguards (whether it is the conscious intent or not) durable inequalities of opportunity.
Loss of privilege feels like a loss. If you have no historical perspective and are currently favored by discrimination, programs attempting to undo historical discrimination seem like they're biased against you. They aren't.
As an example, consider the common practice of scholarships that are awarded based on both merit and economic need. A rich dude could be mad that he is being discriminated against. After all, they won't even consider giving him those scholarships! What jerks people are! He worked hard, and should be eligible for everything!
He's wrong, of course. His feelings are real, but his perspective is severely limited. If you're used to things being tilted in your favor, a level playing field is going to seem unfair.
Modern men are not "privileged". This is corruption-of-blood level stuff. Men alive today unless perhaps very old have not benefited from discrimination against women and have no reason to accept being discriminated against as a result.
Trying to blame bad things done by historical figures for bad actions taken today is the result of much wrongness in the world. Please don't try to justify it.
Oh, and your analogy to the rich dude is deeply flawed. Rich people can become poor and poor can become rich; it happens all the time. Putting gender re-assignment surgery to one side, gender is generally fixed. If you get discriminated against because you're a man, you aren't going to be mollified by an argument of the form "one day you might be a woman and it may work in your favour". Whereas "one day you may be rich" or "one day you may be poor" is used as a reasonable justification for all sorts of things, like progressive taxation and a social safety net.
> Men alive today unless perhaps very old have not benefited from discrimination against women
Yes, they have, because discrimination against women is still widely practiced. It's true that the scope and extent of discrimination in law has been almost entirely eliminated (one of the last major elements to fall being the military combat exclusion policy, lifting of which was fully implemented less than two years ago; given the significance of combat assignments in military career progression and the practical impacts of military careers on both elected and certain other high-level government positions, there are a lot of men in the military and government office today that are, now, benefitting from the effects of that direct, legally-mandated discrimination.)
For real? Women were excluded from combat because they are physically weaker than men and weak soldiers tend to get each other killed. That rule had a very concrete physical, medical and military justification.
I think if that's the best example you can find, it says a lot about my point. There are dozens of ways men are discriminated against in law. As you yourself admit, discrimination against women in law has been eliminated. This is not progress!
That article doesn't list one concrete example of how being a straight white male actually made life easier for him. I can and have listed several major, specific ways in which it's the opposite.
I hate to use the T-word but this sort of non-argument you've just presented is exactly why Trump won. It's just racist, sexist self-loathing based on nothing whatsoever. If there was something, that guy would have listed a variety of specific grievances, as would every feminist article in every newspaper (of which there are huge quantity every single day).
You know what the last specific complaint in a feminist opinion piece I read was? An article a few days ago that was upset because the only female shoes in emoji are high heels.
Don't tell people white male privilege exists when you can't back it up.
It's not my job to argue you into understanding something. It is not every writer's job to prove everything to the satisfaction of somebody deeply invested in the opposite being true.
This stuff is pretty easy to look up. There are books, blogs, studies, and memoirs that I found very useful. If you actually care, you could find things, too. That's how I went from ignorant to having basic knowledge. Maybe you could try that.
No. Trump won through the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, rampant GOP gerrymandering, a terrifyingly complicit and supine media, an institutionally racist and sexist country backlashing to Obama, and an electoral system that vastly overpowers the majority white (and racist) Southern states.
The supine and complicit media came out near 100% in support of Hillary, perhaps due to her massive campaign spending.
Regardless, I think when your explanation is "the entire USA is racist and sexist" you are - again - making my point for me. I know lots of Americans and I've never seen a shred of racism or sexism in any of them. But if you constantly tell ordinary, hard working and honest people that their whole life is a fraud, that their success isn't really success, it's just "white male privilege", and you can't point out a single reason why ... guess what? They're going to get mad and start quietly voting for someone who fights back against that culture. That's what I meant and I'm sure you know it.
> The supine and complicit media came out near 100% in support of Hillary
Yes, that explains the overwhelming concentration on the email "scandal" whilst ignoring literally everything that Trump said.
> I know lots of Americans and I've never seen a shred of racism or sexism in any of them.
That's ... not how it works.
> and you can't point out a single reason why ... guess what?
But the reasons are pointed out. They just get ignored because the kind of people who refuse to believe that "white male privilege" exists aren't the kind of people who listen to rational arguments.
> Yes, that explains the overwhelming concentration on the email "scandal" whilst ignoring literally everything that Trump said.
It was not entirely undeserved though - the scandal was certainly newsworthy and had many unprecedented events. The Bill Clinton-Loretta Lynch tarmac meeting was highly inappropriate, leading to the eventual decision falling to James Comey. James Comey had earlier, much to the dismay of Republicans, chosen not to pursue Bill Clinton's incredibly dubious pardon of Marc Rich. When he announced that they would not seek prosecution, his reasoning was that there was plenty of negligence but no intent - an interpretation of the statute that had not been used in previous cases for which many have been convicted.
To make matters worse, Secretary Clinton fainted on September 11 at a memorial service for 9/11 and the press was nowhere to be found when it happened. A random bystander managed to get footage of her security detail awkwardly putting her into a van. This is less than 2 months before the election. The campaign response started with "overheating" and then went to pneumonia.
Over the weeks prior to this, there was an all-out media blitzkrieg dismissing rumors of her ill health as a conspiracy theory. She herself lied straight into the camera about her health, to the extent that she went on the Jimmy Kimmel show and opened a pickle jar as a gag. This was a mere 2 weeks before she passed out. Around the same time, John Podesta's leaked emails had revealed the tremendous influence the campaign seemed to have with the press, and the media in general. One could argue that this is simply "how the sausage is made" when it comes to political campaigns, but to much of the general public, this sort of insight was unprecedented. This kind of story is severely damaging to any candidate.
When the footage of her collapsing came out, it served to validate what the right leaning media had been saying all along, plus reinforced fears of mainstream media collusion revealed in the emails were not unfounded, since the left leaning media had gone to bat for her when the health stories came out, and had no cameras present during a major development in the campaign which would have hurt her perception with the voting public. This significantly undermined the perception of integrity in the media. As damage control, the media did more negative stories in the months leading up to the election.
> They just get ignored because the kind of people who refuse to believe that "white male privilege" exists aren't the kind of people who listen to rational arguments.
There is no evidence to suggest that they are being willfully ignored, nor that people are being irrational in their refusal to believe, nor does it flow logically. This privilege certainly exists in several contexts, but to generalize across an entire demographic of people is easily defeated with a large number of counter-examples. The point that the comment you replied to was trying to make, is that people like me (i.e. who have white friends who have struggled against tremendous odds to make it to where they are in life, such as people from Kosovo who escaped a warzone, as one relevant personal example of many) do not appreciate it when the success and hard work of many of the white folks whom we know in our lives, are reduced to mere privilege, when their individual stories and struggles are often unique and heartbreaking. While there may certainly be a significant proportion of cases where "white privilege" plays a huge role, to condemn an entire demographic of people by dismissing their success to be a consequence of privilege, is an insult to their individual struggles, which in many cases, are anything but privileged. There are plenty of people who are quick to dismiss someone because of the color of their skin, than listen to their individual story.
> Wow, you really bought into the Trump campaign, huh.
Secretary Clinton fainted on 9/11 after a long and coordinated media campaign effort to suggest she was in perfect health.
The Wikileaks emails of John Podesta (I have read them individually) show clear evidence of the relationship between the campaign and the press, and that the press routinely sought vetos and approvals on stories they were going to run. I'll be happy to share links to the individual emails.
The Trump campaign has very little access to reach me - I don't get to watch their ads on TV or receive any of their messaging because I live in Mumbai. My knowledge of the details of the election is from the data I have been motivated to find on the basis of my own interest in this subject during 2016.
Me:
> This privilege certainly exists in several contexts,
You:
> You seem to be suggesting that because some white people have struggles, there must be no white privilege. Which is bollocks as you well know.
I think we should re-evaluate what I am suggesting because perhaps I have not articulated other parts of my comment properly, but I am confident in the part quoted above which is fairly explicit.
> Check any analysis of the coverage - Trump's was overwhelmingly "oh, this guy!" whilst ignoring his racism, sexism, misogyny, etc.
This is 100% true of the Republican Primary, but not true of the General Election campaign that followed thereafter. During the Republican Primary - in early 2015, Marissa Astor (Hillary for America) emailed the DNC with the following quote:
"We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to take them seriously"
The Clinton Campaign and the DNC believed the best way to strategize was to legitimize these candidates, as indicated below:
"The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more 'Pied Piper' candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party."
During the final stages general election, coverage of both candidates was overwhelmingly negative as per an analysis conducted by the Harvard Kennedy Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy.
The biggest victim of the media was Senator Bernie Sanders, who received virtually no coverage during the Primary season, which was largely the result of an orchestrated effort on the part of the DNC under Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, to favour coverage of Secretary Clinton over Senator Sanders. This is a view shared by former senate minority leader Harry Reid, as well as Senator Sanders himself. This view was further the subject of a court proceeding wherein the court dismissed the matter as the question of its legality did not arise since the DNC was entitled to name its own candidate if it wanted to.
Aside from the Harvard Kennedy research, there is ample evidence to disprove the claim that media "ignored" candidate Trump's racism, misogyny, sexism, etc. Here are a few:
- Online outlets like Vox had articles that outright declared in the first sentence "Donald Trump is a bigot".
- A CNN headline from August 2016: "We're Shocked, Donald Trump is a sexist"
- Another CNN headline from August 2016: "Paul Ryan rips Donald Trump remarks as 'textbook definition of a racist comment'". Note that this includes the speaker of the house attacking his own party candidate - at this point the media, the DNC and the speaker of the house are condemning him for racism.
- MSNBC June 2016: "Donald Trump’s overt racism takes 2016 race in a new direction"
- Fox News' Shepard Smith in August 2016: "Donald Trump ‘Trades in Racism’"
To suggest that this was downplayed in any way would also be a bit misleading, since the language here is fairly strong and explicit. There are no subtle allusions to racism, bigotry or sexism of any kind. The media is not using soft language or tip-toeing around these claims in the slightest.
Even if one were to concede that the media was ruthless in its persecution of Hillary Clinton over the private email server, it would simply even up their existing persecution of Candidate Trump as a liar, which was a regular feature of media coverage, particularly surrounding the debates. To the public, the choice would then be two liar candidates, of which one is a sexist, racist, misogynist - as per the media's coverage.
While I would have thought that these would weigh in favor of women, in my experience I have actually seen the opposite. There are many family judges and lawyers that are incredibly sexist and will screw over women in favor of men. And in fact, that is mostly what I have seen in my county.
> ...try and create equality of outcome for women, thereby simultaneously eliminating equality of opportunity for men.
I understand the emotional argument here but I don't think it's valid. Opportunity isn't zero-sum.
I wonder where you live. I have heard many reported family courts cases over the years and they have always been resolved in favour of the woman, sometimes grossly so.
For instance, I have one friend whose wife went literally mad (post-partum psychosis). Total psycho breakdown level mad when she was off her meds, which happened a lot. Fortunately the courts awarded him custody of the kids. Unfortunately they are still, years later, dragging their heels over the divorce and he his still not yet divorced. There is no reason for this beyond the fact that family law in his (western) country is designed to benefit the woman to the cost of the man, to a nearly absurd degree.
Re: opportunity. Yes, opportunity is very often zero sum. Most obviously hiring and firing at the company level are zero sum games - if a woman got the job because she's a woman, it means you didn't. Whilst the economy in general may not be zero sum over the long run, it sure is at the moment you're applying for a job. Likewise for cases like this:
where tickets to a very expensive conference were reserved only for women. Limited number of places at the conference = zero sum game and therefore, very much unequal opportunity. Note that there's a female only version of Code Jam because women couldn't compete with the men in the mixed gender version.
I wasn't talking about the competition. Success in the female only codejam led to tickets to Google I/O. It's a conference and a very popular one at that - the sort of conference where the organisers routinely give attendees free phones. Do you really think in previous years there were hundreds of seats sitting empty, hundreds of tickets that could have been sold sitting around unsold?
I can tell you what happened. Conference seats that were previously gender neutral got reserved for women, by the creation of another mechanism that was also reserved for women. Zero sum games.
Well written, thanks for that. I'm usually on the more conservative end of things but this has definitely helped me think of the issue differently, I love having my opinion changed or at least nudged in a different direction, confirms that I'm not sitting in an echo chamber all day.
What would be in your opinion a reasonable way to support the opinion of the poster you replied to? Could you steel man his position? Curious what the counter-arguments would be.
Thanks. I'm dispositionally conservative. In another era would have ended up a Rockefeller Republican; in another timeline, a libertarian. But when I honestly look at America's history in this timeline and the lived experience of a lot of people, I don't think we are yet living up to America's promise. That has made me pretty energetic in pushing against racism and sexism.
If you get interested, I'd strongly recommend "Sundown Towns", which looks at a conveniently unexamined phenomenon that a) did a lot to shape America's racial history, and b) helped me to see forces in play today. It's been a giant eye-opener for me.
Sorry, but I didn't quite follow your last paragraph. Which particular opinion of the poster were you thinking of?
The underlying assumption is that, if you average over a large enough population, there should be no underlying consistent difference between subsets selected on gender, race, or class, so a difference of outcome is presumed to be a result of difference of opportunity.
The underlying assumption is definitely an assumption, but it seems like a good zeroth-order assumption to me.
Right - like I said, fighting equality of opportunity is worthy and must be pursued relentlessly.
What seems to be happening (the impression I get) is something analogous to this:
I have a game released on two mobile platforms - android and iOS. The iOS players are disproportionately scoring better than the android players.
Some are suggesting that the server is bugged/programmed to give iOS players better scores. I reject this.
Some are saying that the android user experience has conditioned those players to be satisfied with a low score. I reject this.
Some are saying iOS players are superior because they bought an apple product. I reject this.
My opinion that it is likely that the android release has a lot of performance issues which impede the player's ability to get a high score on that platform. I test this out by doing things like getting an android player to play on an iOS device, and checking if their performance improves. I do the reverse and check accordingly too. I do various tests on fps, input lag, etc.
If my experiment fails to show anything conclusive, I should be open to re-evaluating some of the things I rejected, but I refuse to do it out of zealous belief in my hypothesis. The answer must be optimization, I insist.
If my experiment succeeds, I should tweak the android code till the disparity goes away. Instead, I just hardcode +500 to the android scores and pat myself on the back.
There seem to be cases where the diversity disparity is "solved by hardcoding", and other cases where the data doesn't support the hypothesis, but there is an ardent refusal to accept it, as if it would be blasphemous to suggest otherwise. These are pretty much the only things I take issue with.
And now assume that your app is competing with another app and has an issue of Android users frustrated about the low scores.
So while you are figuring out heads down in a profiler why your Android users could be more challenged, your competitor simply hardcodes the +500 to the score and makes a big PR announcement how they restored the justice to the previously discriminated users.
Guess who's getting more sales next quarter. Unfortunately that's how politics works.
If my experiment fails to show anything conclusive, I should be open to re-evaluating some of the things I rejected, but I refuse to do it out of zealous belief in my hypothesis.
You are arguing a straw man. The "experiments" in this case are showing ample evidence of biases, so as long as those biases exist the underlying hypothesis can by definition not be falsified.
Perhaps I am not very well read on the subject. My argument was rooted in the attitude I came across when this story was trending (linked at the end of this comment). This research might have been disproved later on, I never followed up on the story. What I was referring to was the readiness with which some were willing to stop pursuing this sort of trial.
My intent wasn't to strawman - if this is in fact non-existent then I concede that point.
Which experiments? I'm not aware of much in the gender diversity 'sciences' that would rise to the level of being called an experiment, except for the sort of neuro-psychology that Damore cited and which he got slated for (because they show biological reasons for differences in subject interest)
An especially good assumption given that assuming otherwise has been proven wrong time and time again. Pretty much every advance for women was argued against on the basis that women were somehow not biologically capable.
That argument has been consistently wrong since women's suffrage, but that doesn't stop chowderheads from hauling it out anew, apparently unaware of its rich history of failure.
Except this isn't true; there are many cases where inequality of outcome is not a cause of inequality of opportunity - unless you're telling me the system actively encourages men to die on the job - so much so that 93% of all occupational deaths are male.[0]
CollegeBoard testing statistics demonstrate that in high school, 2-3 times as many boys take the AP Calculus BC, AP Physics, AP Computer Science exam than girls.[1][2]
And as you probably know, AP exams don't discriminate against gender or race - they just need you to pay the testing fee (or the reduced fee if you qualify).
UC Berkeley's EECS major has a department ratio of 4:1 M/F across all 4 class years (CalAnswers - any alumni can check this if they don't believe me), and because of California law the UC system is not allowed to consider gender as part of admissions.[3]
Differences in gender makeup of engineering and computer science come down to fewer girls choosing to pursue the field, and not because the system is inherently biased.
Given these factors, if we are seeing 50/50 gender outcomes in tech at this moment in time, it is the result of a system that undermines the meritocracy by discriminating against males.
Oh, gosh! Of course it's an anonymous dude showing up to try to preserve the argument that women are biologically inferior. With an account that's doesn't appear to care about much besides arguing against diversity. What a surprise.
We aren't of course seeing 50/50 outcomes in tech. As I said elsewhere in this thread, we are steadily approaching them in law and medicine. This is despite that fact that goofs like you made effectively identical arguments for decades about it just not being in women's nature to study those topics, to do that work.
That ended up not being true. When the barriers in law and medicine were diminished, representation ended up pretty quickly moving toward 50/50. If you talk to women in tech you'll quickly discover that they face similar barriers. Prof. Ellen Spertus wrote this in 1991:
Talking with her recently, she mentioned that she believes the problems are the same or worse.
We have seen this pattern over and over for many topics for the last 100 years. Dudes say women can't or intrinsically don't want to. When we reduce the discrimination, they can and do want to. It turns out what women don't want is to deal with discrimination. Like, I'm sure, yours.
>> to try to preserve the argument that women are biologically inferior
You clearly didn't read, because I made the argument that women are less INTERESTED, not that they are biologically inferior. Get rid of that chip on your shoulder.
This is why conservatives aren't willing to discuss these issues. Because the moment I call you out on using bullshit arguments you call me a sexist despite not having once made a single comment on the abilities of females.
I used evidence proving that even at the high school level (where there are practically 0 bars for entry), girls constitute a significantly smaller part of the classroom than boys in CS/Physics/Calc 2, and then gave an example of a university system that legally was not allowed to consider gender as part of admissions having similar gender representation - because as it turns out most universities practice gender based affirmative action in STEM, and thus girls are overrepresented at schools like MIT and Stanford.
It turns out that the 3:1, 4:1 ratios of the AP exams and Berkeley EECS department happen to be consistent with the hiring makeup of tech companies.
>> we are steadily approaching them in law and medicine.
The same stats I listed earlier show near equal representation in AP tests for AP History (World, European, and US), Government, Chemistry, and Biology. Some of these even skew towards majority female. So 50/50 representation is to be expected.
Again, at this point in time, equal representation in tech would only be a product of discrimination against males.
Perhaps it won't be the case in the future as there are more outreach efforts now than ever to get girls to pursue science.
But I specifically worded my response the way I did for a reason.
I made the argument that women are less INTERESTED
But interest is an outcome, influenced for example by the presence or absence of role models or the impression of certain fields as not welcoming to women.
If I remember the state of things correctly, the gender imbalance of interest in science is not present at early ages but develops around junior high ages when kids start picking up on which jobs or fields are "appropriate" for males vs females.
I don't think anyone is saying the gender imbalance is purely a result of hiring discrimination (although it likely plays a role), but there are clearly other biases in force that directly arise from the gender imbalance. How do you propose getting rid of those biases except by trying to "prime the pump"?
>> influenced for example by the presence or absence of role models or the impression of certain fields as not welcoming to women.
Sure it can play a part in the outcome, but that in no way limits anyone from still pursuing the field, and hence there is still equality of opportunity. The latter is what (hopefully) any rational human being wants.
I'm not against more outreach efforts or helping encourage more girls to pursue STEM. I personally volunteer at a science museum and have in the past been a TA for high school STEM MOOCs.
What I am against is accusing the existing system for discriminating against females (unless you provide direct evidence that gender is the sole cause of the outcome inequality, which I will be happy to agree if the evidence is convincing) and then continuously lowering the bar for entry for females (thus achieving diversity but undermining meritocracy) - which is what I see happening right now.
Influenced has two sides, negative and positive. You have to account for both when establishing a cause for an outcome.
Just the other day I heard two kids around the age 10, a boy and a girl, talk about a life as a programmer. The boy wanted to make a AI so he could become rich and the girl wanted to make a AI to help make her social life better. The answers could not be more stereotypical gender defined. Men are valued and gain social rank through the pursuit of money so thats what is being imprinted onto the boy, women for their social skills.
A world where both women and men is valued based on the same ability, that is the ability to get money, would be a world where you would have 50/50 in all professions.
Feel free to link it up with your real-world identity; I just find more generic profiles with the same user id.
> women are less INTERESTED
Yes, this is an example of your lack of historical grounding. That is the same sort of sexist nonsense that we've been seeing for generations. The argument goes: women aren't technically inferior, it's just that they're naturally not interested in bothering their pretty little heads with high-status jobs like law, medicine, and engineering. Their biology just drives them toward naturally nurturing jobs, like homemaker, paralegal, nurse, and secretary. Sure those jobs happen to be all low status, lower paying, and lacking in ability to advance to positions of authority. But it's just a coincidence that women's biological lack of interest happens to keep them subsidiary to men, just like they always have been.
It's just "women are inferior" dressed up in a dinner jacket so it fits in with polite company.
> where there are practically 0 bars for entry
This is just shockingly ignorant. Please actually read about the topic. Plenty of women in tech have stories that bely this. Plenty of research refutes it. In America, gender socialization starts early and runs deep.
> So 50/50 representation is to be expected
Sure, now. 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, it wouldn't have been. And somebody just like you would have been posting impassioned screeds about how women just don't want to be doctors and lawyers. How the data clearly shows that they aren't interested. How any advancement past the current status quo would have been only due to shocking discrimination against men.
As subsequent events prove, those dudes were making a self-serving, willfully ignorant argument. They were wrong. At least do yourself the service of understanding why before you post the same tired and discredited arguments in opposition to this generation's increment of progress in tearing down societal sexism.
>> "women are inferior" dressed up in a dinner jacket so it fits in with polite company
No, it's not even close to the same.
That an individual is less likely to choose a career doesn't mean that individual inherently is bad at it.
You keep trying to imply that I think less of women. I don't. I'm happy to acknowledge there are plenty of women who are much better than me at tech and plenty that have helped me out. Just because there happen to be less doesn't mean they are inherently worse.
And you could do well leaving out ad hominems. I have been respectful throughout this discussion, while you accuse me of sexism every other line. Most people aren't as impatient as I am when called a sexist as many times as you have. Do you see why conservatives avoid these discussions now?
Odds are I've done more to bridge the gap than you have - I have been a TA for a high school AP Physics MOOC and I am a volunteer at the Lawrence Hall of Science. Do you spend your weekends tutoring young girls and getting them to pursue science?
>> This is just shockingly ignorant.
As someone who had at least 15 girls in my AP Computer Science class in high school, no, it's not. In fact, you can google the requirements needed for taking an AP exam: find a high school willing to let you take it (usually the high school you attend), and pay the $100 fee. That's it.
>> Plenty of women in tech have stories that bely this.
Sure there are plenty of successful women in tech. No one's making the claim that all women aren't interested, and it's never even been mentioned that women are worse at tech.
They just happen in smaller numbers compared to men.
>> Plenty of research refutes it.
93% of occupational deaths are men, as I have mentioned 2 posts ago.
Why can't more women be truck drivers, police detectives, nuclear reactor facilitators, logistics workers, mechanics, or electricians? These jobs all happen to be high 5 figures and many are 6 figures.
It turns out, it has nothing to do with tech being sexist, and all to do with women on average being less likely to chase riskier careers in favor of more stable careers at the expense of a lower salary.[1]
>> At least do yourself the service of understanding why before you post the same tired and discredited arguments in opposition to this generation's increment of progress in tearing down societal sexism.
All this theorizing, and you still don't explain to me why we see the distribution of the AP testing that we do, why at gender-blind universities the rate of females is lower than those that practice affirmative action bar-lowering, and why you think discriminating against qualified men is an appropriate solution.
Until you provide feasible arguments to each of these, no amount of implicitly calling me a sexist is going to change my mind.
> They just happen in smaller numbers compared to men.
Black people just happened to perfect slaves, unsuited to life as free people. [1] Women just happened not to want the vote. [2] Those were dumb arguments then, and it's a dumb argument now. Things don't just happen; they happen for reasons. And given our multi-millennial history of male dominance over women, these reasons are often historical.
You can dress it up however you like, but your vigorous defense of the historically biased status quo is inevitably sexist in result. Any woman seeing this is going to immediately have to prepare to be treated like this: https://xkcd.com/385/
If you really care about helping women into STEM careers, you'll learn some history and stop talking like this. Given the number of anonymous dudes who spend their time arguing against fixing historical sexism who also claim to be super-dedicated to helping women, you can probably work out what I think you'll actually do.
You keep saying the same thing, and I keep telling you why you're wrong, and for some reason you keep saying the same thing, as if somehow rewording them changes anything.
I'll repeat myself for a change, since you don't seem to get it:
"All this theorizing, and you still don't explain to me why we see the distribution of the AP testing that we do, why at gender-blind universities the rate of females in STEM is lower than that of those practicing affirmative action (which essentially amounts to bar-lowering), and why you think discriminating against qualified men is an appropriate solution.
Until you provide feasible arguments to each of these, no amount of implicitly calling me a sexist is going to change my mind."
>> Those were dumb arguments then, and it's a dumb argument now.
Back then, there were laws that actively prohibited African-Americans from attaining freedom and women from voting, and government backed frameworks in place to enforce these laws.
Name a SINGLE law today that actively restricts women but not men from choosing any career path.
>> you can probably work out what I think you'll actually do.
Can you tell me some of YOUR efforts in helping educate and tutor young kids in STEM?
Quit stroking yourself by claiming to be morally righteous, get your ass off the internet once in your life, and go tutor a young girl in trigonometry this weekend.
Buddy, based on your behavior here I'm explicitly calling you an active supporter of systemic sexism. You may or may not be personally biased, and I certainly have a guess, but that's irrelevant to my point here.
Your insistence that the only way that sexism and racism work is through the law is ignorant and ahistorical. They preceded the laws that expressed them; they also survived the demise of those laws. I've told you repeatedly that you are harming people through your ignorance. You don't care, and have never cared enough about this topic to actually learn about it. There is no point to arguing the minutiae of your weird little self-constructed justifications. My extensive experience with MRAs, etc, is that when proven wrong on point A will just drag out points B-Z. Or they'll go quiet. Or start introducing irrelevancies, like exactly how many young kids I've tutored in STEM this week. I've got better things to do.
If you're serious about helping women, you'll go take a women's studies class and learn something about this. Either way, I'm done.
I'd written a paragraph explaining why your arguments are wrong and asking you to reevaluate your viewpoint. But forget that.
I'll ask you this: UC Berkeley, a school that does not consider gender in applications per California law, has a EECS department makeup of 4:1 M/F.
UC Berkeley is required by law to not consider gender when evaluating applicants, is extremely liberal/left, and has an overall population of 52% female.
Explain to me what UC Berkeley is doing wrong, and how we should change it.
If you think UC Berkeley should lower the bar for female applicants to achieve parity, then our conversation is over, because we have fundamentally different ideals. I want meritocracy. You want to parasitically feed off of someone else's merits - I guess they call it "socialism" but that word has become so mainstreamed it doesn't do justice to how despicable your utopia is.
If you think increasing outreach efforts to get more children interested in science so (and therefore, there will naturally be more female applicants as a consequence) , you'd stop dismissing me as a "sexist" and think critically about why it is that I'm doing what I'm doing.
>> My extensive experience with MRAs, etc,
I'm not a mens right activist, nor have I once suggested that the system is designed against men, so you can throw aside your straw mans now.
>> I've got better things to do. If you're serious about helping women
Sounds like to me you don't actually want equality, you just pretend you do so you can "feel" like you're part of a new Civil Rights movement while actually doing nothing about it. Except occasionally tapping away at your keyboard calling others sexist.
And what most call diversity is only about skin color and gender. The exact definition of racism and sexism.
You have more diversity of thought and behavior across social classes or countries: a person coming from Chile to work in the USA will add more perspective than most kind of American born person. A person raised in a rural area will add more to a company comprised of city dwellers than most other city person.
I am also all in favor of organizations taking steps to address the various negative experiences that are somewhat typically encountered in various demographics, e.g. harassment, etc. as well as affirmative action as a way to attempt to correct this. Based on the fervor with which it is pursued (which is admirable in many ways), I seem to be convinced that if these measures have a negligible effect on outcomes, the crusade for diversity will still continue, as if to suggest that equality of outcome is a worthy goal, as opposed to equality of opportunity. The latter is definitely an unjust status quo worthy of fighting, but the former seems to completely throw away the notion of free will.
It's almost akin to a scientist who so adamantly wants to prove their theory that they will do anything to ensure the result is consistent with the hypothesis.
Then again I could be wrong and people will actually stop pushing for it after these practices are instituted.