We were still in Web 1.0 , with email, usenet, IRC, and other then-essential services. Dial-up was the way online. And when people talked with each other, we were told to not release who we are. Be guarded in your real-identity.
And that lead to user1 talks with user2. I didn't know if user2 was white, black, asian, hispanic, native, male, female, transgender, gay, asexual, or what. I only knew from the content of the text we traded in communication. There was enough bandwidth for pictures, but didnt. Webcams were bad and expensive. Scanners were hard to come by. And there was no impetus to link a pic to a person's text.
Now, it's "Real Name Policy". Facebook will encourage friends to rat your lying profile to catch you. Google will do similar, or datamine your real content. Everyone wants a picture for your profile.
What used to be "person talks to person", is now "Person with forced specific identity talks to person with forced specific identity". And it certainly doesn't feel better than before. It feels strictly worse, bringing identity politics in with it.
I want the old days back.
Were you black? It didn't matter. White? So what. Male? Female? It didn't matter.
The words on the screen, and the thoughts behind the superficial bodily stuff was what mattered. How did they think? How did they communicate their ideas? How did they collaborate? What were their ethics and values? -- Those were what mattered, not that someone had a blue mohawk and were bisexual. Those things didn't matter.
Better yet, this method also transcended poor and rich... Yes, you had to have a certain amount to access a computer and the internet. Or you hacked the local university's access. Or used it at the library. Or had a cool friend. Except, now it's what you think, not what stylish clothes you wore, or the jewelry you had.
And this blurring of gender, sexual preference, race, weight, height,.. you name it was distilled down to "what's in that skull". And someone whom you might never walk up to and talk with, you could strike conversations with them, and they you. It also was the first steps of breaking down national borders - I could talk with people who say they live in Europe, or Asia, or Africa, or wherever...
At that time, for a small window, "We" were one peoples of this world. As the Hacker's Manifesto put it;
"We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals."
I await this day to come again. Hopefully the next time, we can meet face to face, and celebrate our differences and come together as one peoples of this world.. But a few of us saw it the first time, for a bit.
If you want to overcome the stereotype, work with other people. Get to know them. Learn the rules of the game and play by the same rules as everyone in society does.
If you want to identify as that subgroup based on (gender/race/etc) for social and communal support. No one will fault you on that. (That's culture) However, you will be judged on being hostile/exclusive if non-members of that group are harshly penalized for attempting to integrate with the culture.
The rest... it strikes me as incredibly hypocritical - you blame these people for creating groups for support and social which you think stop integration of culture, but these groups are created precisely because that integration isn't happening. If you are a young girl who has an interest in computing, but is dissuaded from joining the computing club at school because "only boys like computers" and the club members make fun of her, how are you meant to get into that general community?
Now, if there is a girl's computing club and she can join that with no stigma, learn about the hobby and then integrate with that interest already there, it helps make that happen. You can't integrate if you never gain that interest or skill because you are rejected at the beginning.
It's like expecting slavery to end by saying black people can be slave owners or own themselves. If you don't recongnise the barrier to entry and integration, then sure, you can paint these groups as negative, but that's just missing the point.
When they're self-isolating groups, they stop integration.
> "only boys like computers"
That's a self-limiting belief that can only be fixed by the person who believes it. Telling the person who believes it is not going to work. They'll always have doubt.
If it's done by members of that group then the leadership should be made aware of that and fix it.
Not sure how you jumped to this extreme:
> It's like expecting slavery to end by saying black people can be slave owners or own themselves. If you don't recongnise the barrier to entry and integration, then sure, you can paint these groups as negative, but that's just missing the point.
My point was, the individual has to address their own beliefs and figure out how to achieve the goal they want. Do it in a dishonest way, society won't stand for that (In the long term, it's effective in the short term) Do it in an honest way, people will reward you for that. (Eventually)
100% agree. The reality is that person's belief (and in general, the cultural expectation) won't change until that behavior is normalised. People stop being racist when they interact with people of other races and get used to it. The same is true of everything else. If more women are programmers, people stop thinking of it as a male-only thing.
It's a chicken and egg problem - the girl's computing groups are a man-made egg to kick-start that cycle. Those girls will grow up an integrate, and that creates a normality of it which will eventually make those groups redundant.
There are existing barriers to entry from cultural expectation and pressure from peers. If you create an artificially isolated environment so these minorities can pursue their interests without that pressure, it bypasses those barriers, and those people will, in future, tear them down just because they exist.
The obvious counterpoint is that, by working together as an identified sub-group, you have greater power than you would otherwise. Dedicated venues for those sub-groups offer a place to organize, provide communal support, etc.
Frankly, I think it's sadly naive to believe that we can simply "Lose all the labels" and that'll magically fix things.
"Identity politics" is what led to women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, etc. And while I'm not one to claim that "women in tech" is of the same significance as those movements, I think history teaches us that sub-groups, bound together with a common goal, are infinitely more effective at instituting change than a bunch of individuals who choose not to organize.