Unlike reasonable discussions, where you make a point and the other person points out the flaws in your reasoning, or presents evidence for a counterpoint, or something like that, arguing with feminists always ends up with the feminists expressing their emotions and trying to rule certain arguments "out of bounds", not because the arguments are flawed or invalid, but because they make feminists feel "heartbroken".
And how can you talk about why there aren't more women or other minorities in tech when you're just going to paint it as vague or emotional and ignore what they say?
We call that "assuming what you're supposed to be proving", or for people who still remember the traditional meanings of idioms, "begging the question".
edit - some meat to my point:
One case that I'm thinking of involved a woman making a fairly reasonable technical point (something involving Apache, I think - it was a while ago) in the hallway at a conference, but then got lectured for ten minutes by a guy who took exception to some minor pedantic point. Totally condescending, rude and thoughtless - he didn't do the same to the other male developers in the discussion.
There was another incident at a Developer conference here in Australia a while ago, where a developer put up pictures of hot chicks in his Perl presentation. Again, unnecessary and stupid.
Do you still think that I'm assuming things?
But erikpukinskis didn't say, "here is some evidence, therefore women in software are oppressed". He seemingly implied that the "why are there few women in software" discussion was inherently a "conversation about women's oppression". He took the "conclusion" and implicitly put it in the "premises" column, which is exactly what I was criticizing.
It's not a conversation about women being oppressed--it's a conversation about why there are few women in software. "Women are oppressed" is an answer, erik was characterizing it as the question.
> OK, that's an argument. You're doing it right...
Yeah, that's exactly the sort of stupid, patronising attitude that causes the problem in the first place. I'll just point out that neither you or Kiba have introduced any evidence in your arguments, that you don't even know what begging the question is, and that someone arguing rationally would have instead pointed out all of the areas in IT where women are treated fairly or overrepresented, and leave it at that.
I haven't made any arguments. I've criticized some statements for using outbursts of emotion and assertion in place of arguments, and I've criticized other statements for implicitly treating "women are underrepresented in IT" as synonymous to "women are oppressed" rather than actually going through the trouble of arguing the point. But I haven't advanced an argument of my own yet. I have my own tentative answer to "why are women underrepresented in IT"--can you guess what it is? (Probably not.)
"...that you don't even know what begging the question is..."
Care to enlighten me?
Wikipedia: "Begging the question (or petitio principii, "assuming the initial point") is a type of logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in the premise."
Implicitly treating "women are underrepresented in IT" as synonymous with "women are oppressed" begs the question, because "women are oppressed" (or the more complete, "women are underrepresented in IT because women are oppressed") is the proposition to be proven.
"... and that someone arguing rationally would have instead pointed out all of the areas in IT where women are treated fairly or overrepresented, and leave it at that."
Criticizing the form of someone's argument is perfectly rational--more so than criticizing their "stupid, patronizing attitude" or making personal attacks.
Right - so you haven't read the article then? It presents a lot of arguments, not-very-implicitly-at-all. Maybe that's the first place to start.
Bravo.
Men's role as expendable defender is not a role hoisted by women, but rather through evolution. The oppressor, if any, is nature for making us that way. In that sense, men cannot blame women.
It also work in the opposite direction, there are things that women probably should not do when she is having a baby.
Men. Are. Victims. Too. But a conversation about women's oppression is not an appropriate context to explore it. It makes us feel like you don't believe women's oppression is a problem.