So yes, let's be sympathetic to each others' problems and avoid demonizing each other...you never know, it could end up being your problem.
[1] http://www.refinery29.com/2017/04/148488/millennial-women-ar...
There's this documentary that I just love on this topic. This lady decides she wants to see what the world of men is like, and goes undercover and lives as one for eighteen months. And at the end of it, she emerges with such a tangible sense of compassion for men and their problems. They have all these difficulties that they don't talk about!, she says. It's so sweet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip7kP_dd6LU
We're playing with powerful forces, here, what with women entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers, and encountering unprecedented success. Historical, cultural forces. Biological forces. Psychological forces. I think we're making the world a better place, but this tale that it's a simple struggle between good and evil, and women and men . . . the world is more complicated than that. We don't need to take out our frustrations on each other. We need all our combined strength and wisdom. We should proceed with empathy and understanding and compassion.
For what it's worth, I think you guys are awesome. Hugs from an internet stranger. :)
You're pretty alright :) Have a good evening!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip7kP_dd6LU
is not actually a "documentary." norah vincent wrote a book about her 18 months living as a man, and this is a news report about that experience.
i read the book, many years ago. really good. well worth the time investment.
Men Have Problems Too: http://theredpillmovie.com/
Everyone's A Mess And Also Awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr9bVe68OZM
However, I'm saying there's a problem in terms of how women are treated in tech at a group level that create obstacles specific to them. That men, as a group, do not face these obstacles.
When it comes to hard numbers, even when other factors are taken into account, women as a group do indeed have it worse in tech. When it happens at a group level like this, it means there's group-level barriers that can be addressed to make the playing field less biased and closer to a meritocracy. Some of the solutions are simple - like removing names from resumes when initially reviewing them for new employees.
We've all got problems. Being a woman doesn't mean you automatically have it worse than a particular dude. But I'm not talking about individual circumstances, I'm looking at aggregate data, and there's data there that can't be ignored.
I'll add that the best way to oppose something is to promote its opposite. Only because "opposing" has a tendency to backfire. We should therefore promote, for example, sexismlessness. Yes I made up a word.
If you promote reason and common sense, you (are working in order to) get rid off all these problems plus many more. I'm emotionally refreshed to read the post you reply to, and the OP's writing. More sexism doesn't help in trying to remove sexism, and revenge and positive discrimination bring lots of tension among the sides.
Other times they overcome them because someone did research and found out that putting up a curtain between the musician and the judges removed a visual gender bias from the orchestra's hiring process.
The correction for bad gender-equality policy isn't for everyone to take a ride on a sine wave of understanding through equally unsupported opposing viewpoints. It's to do the difficult and probably boring work of researching and implementing a more effective policy.
Edit: changed last word from "system" to "policy" for clarity
(Source: I'm her husband.)
EDIT: the issue isn't the Hacker News audience; the issue is that you were wrong in your assumption that Dove was male, and your entire comment depended on that assumption. There is no audience for which you could write that comment where it would have been correct (though some audiences might have cheered it, that would be a fault, not a virtue, of theirs.)
One of the beautiful things about the HN community is that we expect and welcome disagreement -- but we hold it to high standards. We expect people to read whole comments and engage in the actual ideas expressed, not to skim and then rail at straw men. You are welcome here, and you are welcome to disagree with the ideas expressed in Dove's comment -- but we will not demean you by excusing low-quality, low-content, personally-targeted rants as the best you can do.
don't think this is really true ... in any online community.
My comment would have been the same regardless of gender. Since apparently I can't articulate what I meant, let me direct to a blog post written by better writers than me : https://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/phmt-arg...
Stick around and give us the opportunity to surprise you ;)
> "My comment would have been the same regardless of gender."
You might have intended the same point, but I suspect you would have articulated it differently. There were a few lines like "We probably are under more pressure than you" or "Everything is about you all the time anyway" that don't make sense directed toward a woman, for example.
> "direct to a blog post"
Thanks. I think that helps me articulate my own disagreement better (and also some agreement, though I won't focus much on that.)
In essence, you're approaching the issue from the perspective that talking about men's issues "silence" women's perspectives, and you believed Dove's comment was an uninvited insertion of men's issues. It wasn't. Instead, it was the same type of meta-commentary as the blog post -- it was about how to have the discussion effectively without silencing the relevant perspectives, specifically, why trying to "keep score" is an ineffective approach (as a direct response to a scorekeeping comment) and why that approach inherently silences key perspectives. The approach that says "group X has it worse than group Y" invites competition and pushback rather than understanding and collaboration. The natural consequence of a comparison is for people to argue the comparison, which takes the focus away from the actually-relevant issues, and thereby silences actually-relevant perspectives in favor of tangential perspectives and pointless noise-making.
In a broader sense: every "civil right" or "human right" happens at the intersection between people, groups, and/or institutions. Whenever we're talking about rights, we're talking about the boundary between what we are entitled to (both "to do" and "to be"), and what we are restricted from because it interferes with another. Whether we're talking women's rights, men's rights, LGBT rights, economic rights, religious rights, immigrant's rights, parental rights, children's rights, or any other type of rights, it's always about how we as a whole interact with each other. There are two conceptually different approaches to how we approach the discussion, and IMO one of them is far more effective than the other.
One approach is to treat rights as group-specific, and to create a hierarchy of rights violations. To say, this is a women's issue and it's worse than what men face, and talking about men experiencing literally the exact same thing is a distraction. This hierarchical approach (which the blog post criticizes in its quoted point #5) invites competition and one-upmanship and tribalism among "insiders" and "outsiders". It invites "patriarchy hurts men too" comments as a way for men to attempt to improve their position on the scoreboard.
The other, IMO better, approach is to treat rights as universal, and then to apply the universal to the specific. For example, all humans have the right to life, and we recognize that right is threatened by domestic violence, particularly for women. So we highlight that issue as a women's rights issue, but not exclusively so -- and we also recognize that solutions are not explicitly women's solutions. This approach invites us to hear women's perspectives and to elevate those perspectives because they represent a large part of the whole (and allows for women-only discussions to particularly highlight those perspectives, but does not treat that as the default expectation.) It also invites the broader community to participate in holistic understanding and unified, compassionate support. It invites us to treat each others' civil rights as participatory, to transform our own actions for the sake of one another, and to treat our underlying humanity as a uniting force that allows us to respect our differences and hold one another in high esteem.
Do you write anywhere else? I'd be happy to read more of your writing.
Yes, absolutely! That's why I used the term "universal". They apply to everyone, not just favored groups.
> "hundreds of messages on this page which sum to "nothing is wrong""
A few. Most, you're reading uncharitably. I'd summarize the most common theme as more like "we've misidentified the precise problem, and as a result our solutions are ineffective or worse."
> "There's no avoiding a conflict."
Some types of conflict are essential and inevitable. Others are optional and unnecessary.
When you apply universal rights to a group that has been dehumanized, there is necessary conflict between those who wish to continue dehumanization and those who wish to end it.
But when you treat rights like a contest, you introduce unnecessary conflict, by creating incentives for various groups to try to knock one another down in order to compete for a more favorable spot in the hierarchy.
Focus on resolving necessary conflict, not artificially generating unnecessary conflict.
Confirmed, robots are replacing men
By far the best thing about this thread is how many women have been posting their thoughts. That's excellent for the same reason that a systems programming thread with lots of systems programmers would be.
I'm not sure you can really say that. It's true, women as a group encounter problems with being treated as sex objects, and there are cultural reasons for that, blah blah blah. So women have a unique experience. BUT! Men experience a pressure to succeed that we as women can hardly fathom. Consequently, they wind up in jobs they need, in a way we never will, which opens them up for a different kind of abuse in the workplace. Men experience such pressure to succeed that they sacrifice their health and well-being, sometimes their life, in the effort to succeed, and that seems pretty terrible. And there are cultural reasons for that and blah blah blah.
I really don't think it's useful to try to calculate who has it worse. Workplace abuse is bad. Let's oppose it. Sexual harassment is bad. Let's oppose it. Which is worse? Who cares? They're kind of incomparable anyway. Let's not waste time on that. Let's all agree to oppose these things and help those who suffer!
I'm not saying opposing sexual harassment is a waste of time. That's absolutely a good thing to do. And I'm not saying women as a group don't have a specific set of issues and problems it makes sense to address as a set. I think sometimes they do. But I am saying focusing on that and saying, "and therefore WOMEN HAVE PROBLEMS AND MEN DON'T" is a bit myopic, and I don't really think it helps either of us.
We've all got problems, some of our own making, some due to family or history, or . . . sometimes we just randomly walk into someone else's problems. People have genetic diseases. People have deformities. People have nutritional problems and religious obligations and sick relatives. And people overcome these things because they're AMAZING! Let us not bother keeping score. Let us be compassionate and kind and support those we see in trouble. Let us expect, without exception, that everyone will be treated well.