This is something that I just cannot reconcile with the notion that all these measures are meant to make things more inclusive. All I see are groups of rich and powerful people telling people "below them" how to behave, and makings tons of money doing it. D&I is a grift.

So you know, it doesn't fucking work.

Having been on more than a couple DEI boards, I'm really curious where the notion that everyone must be "completely free of biases" comes from in your mind? I've never understood, and never saw any DEI effort describing bias to be something to be completely, utterly and totally eradicated, but instead something to recognize as a source of potentially--but not always--folly-filled actions ("what happens when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me", etc).

Everyone has biases about something or another. Every last one of us.

That's why such things as "implicit" vs "explicit" bias exists, and any DEI effort worth its salt should really be making it known that there's a difference between the two.

'Buddies with the execs' - that's easy to believe. But 'because white' ... much harder to convince me there.

The amount of easy and assumptive bigotry going on around these things makes me dismissive of all of it unless there's evidence otherwise.

Paradoxically, you may have highlighted one of the issues with DEI policies, in that people may be encouraged to perceive their lack of progress up the ladder as somehow 'racially oriented'.

This is pernicious, because it's a pyramid and it gets narrow quickly.

Everyone has a beef, everyone has a 'reason' for why they aren't at some stage higher than they are, it's the perennial social issue of middle management.

So that makes it hard to sort out the legitimate cases where DEI would be relevant, to just the standard 'beefs' that lie just below surface level in every office environment.

At about the Director level and above, it's very political and 'talent' is not only just a small part of the equation, but it also means something else at that level.

DEI is a really complicated subject, and I suggest 1990's progressives, with a focus on 'treating people equally' or 'equal opportunity' (ideals which are dismissed these days as actually being systematically racist) ... should be the rule.

A dude 'failing up' if that's the case, is just unfair all around and that's it.

It's 10x more complicated if you step into another cultural context i.e. outside of the US.

To the point where I think Google should actively trying to avoid having too much of a posture on anything really. Aside from 'genocide' etc.

Also, higher up execs at literally every top tech company(google, Fb, Apple) are aggressively pushing DEI and hiring of minorities. They literally have goals to hire x% of some minority for management positions.

Idiots are useful in the sense that you can always get rid of then. The actual mission is secondary.

I think the original point was there is no way for Google not to do this. Sometimes cultures have opposing viewpoints which makes a neutral decision impossible. One obvious example is with displaying disputed borders in Google Maps. Any decision there is going to be political. Lots of people are going to be upset with Google for making the wrong decision regardless of which decisions they make, but I think that anger is misplaced. The real problem is Google has the power to make this decision for too many people. Companies like Google are simply too powerful and need to be broken up.

There are second order and third order consequences of having this kind of features.

Google should not push their politics and agenda on other countries and cultures. It affects every other country in different ways.

In future this kind of feature can be used in many ways we dont know.

So what would have been achieved?

so, i guess democracy would have been achieved. or at least a relative increase in democratic control

Being German I'm kind of tired of the fact that American social media sites have for some reason exported QAnon protests to our cities while women get banned for showing a nipple.

But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise? Proprietor works better for describing a pub landlord, for example, as many pubs are being managed by people who rent the building, landlord could confusingly either refer to the person running the business or to the company owning the building, though I guess to some extent proprietor has that problem too. If you’re talking about a rental property instead, landlord is probably more precise because eg your landlord might own a lease and be subletting rather than owning the property itself.

I didn't know the distinction until you pointed it out, and didn't know very well the range of meanings proprietor had until now. Which I suppose highlights an important problem with such suggestions: if they suggest replacing a term A with a more precise term B that does not signify what was intended to be conveyed by A, based on concerns that both author and audience do not care about, and the author blindly accepts the suggestion, then such suggestions are creating miscommunication.

Ask your hetrosexual male friends how many guys they have slept with. I would imagine response will illustrate "guys" is less gender neutral than might think.

Some locations they use "y'all", some use "you guys". It's gender neutral in that sense.

In the sentence you gave, the context wouldn't be gender neutral because you said "slept with".

If you enter a room and say hey guys, it's neutral. If it's all girls you could say hey gals, which would be fine, either works.

I can't imagine anyone other than liberals that would be offended by a blanket statement of "hey guys".

It's really a stupid thing to get hung up on. It's like searching for something to offend you.

It doesn't make sense until you realize the goal. What you're doing is creating arbitrary rules to form a kind of censorship via social pressure because you can't censor speech legally.

I meant words like mailman and such. Of course a mailman could also be a woman. I think calling someone a mailwoman is fine, but the word does not carry intrinsic offense.

Funny side note, the German language has some interesting edge cases. E.g. the rank of Hauptmann (Captain in the army and air force) usually isn't gendered, the other ranks aren't neither. So usually female soldiers of that rank are addressed as Frau Hauptmann. The funny thing is Hauptmann is also last name... The plural of the rank Hauptmann is gender neutral again, it's Hauptleute...

Granted, apathy would be my solution too, but here I am expected to align the way I express myself.

I do believe that the desire to frame anything gender neutral is not something I want to put too much thought into but I don't mind conflict if someone requests to accommodate what is basically a faith.

Could be the political term 'cancel culture' you brought up. That really only gets used in one direction.

>"Cancel culture isn't random individuals telling you to shut up, or drowning out inanity. That's just free speech."

As a point of order, it's not profound to say that no examples of "thing" exist when you apply your own definition that frames all instances of "thing" as something entirely different.

Don't get me wrong, I profoundly disagree with Brendan Eich's political views, I am for same-sex marriage and I'm very much a liberal when it comes to any moral leanings. That doesn't stop the fact that Brendan Eich being ousted of Mozilla for his intolerant political views is a shame and set back Mozilla considerably.

> Though abortion is conduct, it does not follow that the State is entitled to proscribe it in all instances. That is because the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law. The mother who carries a child to full term is subject to anxieties, to physical constraints, to pain that only she must bear. That these sacrifices have from the beginning of the human race been endured by woman with a pride that ennobles her in the eyes of others and gives to the infant a bond of love cannot alone be grounds for the State to insist she make the sacrifice. Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman's role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture. The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society.

For the overwhelming majority of women in the world, feminism is still inexplicably intertwined with issues unique to women because they involve pregnancy, birth, raising children, and the vulnerability that comes from differences in physical strength compared to men, etc.

Raising children relates to every one who identifies as a woman. Same with physical strength for any one who transitions which includes estrogen et al. more so vulnerability in general specifically is an issue more for people not born female.

Your question is also answered rather more eloquently by rayiner in the sibling comment.

If all biological females who got Covid (including the asymptomatic ones who never officially tested) became infertile. Or let’s just say 30-40% of biological females became infertile. Does this make “traditional feminism” moot? The primary differences that are exclusive to biological females would not be true for so many of them then.

If so, that’s cool. Sometimes these talking points are obfuscation to gatekeep and discriminate. However if traditional feminism really would segment out infertile women to some degree like women who transitioned, then that’s cool :)

1. the potential to become pregnant and give birth

2. a statistical expectation to have weaker body strength than the average man

3. the potential to be abused by men due to a combination of their statistically greater physical strength and sexual desires

4. etc

Feminism concerns the fact that biology produces such human beings on 50% of all births -- production of female children is a pretty important phenomenon.

Feminism is in no way invalidated by a thought experiment whereby some proportion of women lose one or more of those distinguishing attributes. It remains a fact of biology that 50% of births produce female children. Your thought experiment does not describe the real world. You might as well say "what if humans had 3 sexes, then where would feminism be?" or "what if women were stronger than men, then where would feminism be?".

It sounds very much like you, or whoever you got that thought-experiment from, are starting from a premise that

> we do not like the fact that the vast majority of women in the world define "woman" to exclude transwomen, and define "feminism" to be concerned with the traditional definition of "woman"

and then you are trying to think up reasons to invalidate the concept of feminism. That sort of "desired conclusion first, argument second" approach has a history of not being terribly successful at aligning with how reality actually is.

Most of those instances now have first world societies with a majority of people agreeing those people deserve [near] equality and basic human respect besides. For the instances where a majority has not been reached yet across the first world (racism, religious intolerance, sexism) the trend is getting there.

That’s not how things were before. How is what you are saying any different? For all the above, people had their reasons they believed to their core and were sure the detractors like myself were wrong. As you have noted in the moment, you could use the status quo and human tendency to be conservative (not in the political right/left sense but in the general definition) and having a hard time with change to show society does not want this progress/change.

I understand you believe this time is different. But isn’t that what all the people before believed too?

Physical strength, menstruation, and others can all happen for a transitioned person as well.

To my bigger point I sent to the other commenter, the status quo and how things have historically been for issues like identity, gender, sexuality, end up not being looked upon favorably and first world societies have consistently albeit slowly progressed on them.

I realize I am committing some fallacies by not sticking to the exact comment/topic. However I saw you edited your comment from being aggressive to respectful/kind so I thought I’d go for it.

Your country has a literal caste system, go ahead and pull the other one.

"Guys" is mostly male oriented, but wouldn't be unheard of for a mixed gender group, and similarly "Lads" here is often gender neutral despite it being the most male of working class male stereotypes in the country that is our nearest neighbour.

Years ago I had an American friend tell me “guys” was sexist. I’ve been thinking about it for years since her comment. I think in an Australian context she’s wrong. And I think we move in the direction of gender equality by making words less gendered. Not by inserting gender bias where there was none.

You make “landlord” a gendered term by policing it as such. What a waste of a good word.

"Ok guys, lets go to lunch" is probably gender neutral.

"Guys line up on the right, gals on the left" is not.

"Do you sleep with guys?" is not gender neutral.

I wish the Americans can keep their weird culture war within their own borders.

How odd.

Did you ask why they are so sensitive? Most of us elsewhere on the planet would laugh at such a ridiculously petty statement.

This is a lazy argument

If the starting position was "America's diversity concerns are not [e.g.] Ireland's concerns" I'm more sympathetic! In fact I think having software that tries to do this is fundamentally broken! But the starting position is always "we don't have any problems here" which is an even lazier, and wrong, argument.

Nowhere did I say that Ireland has no issues with inclusivity.

Inclusivity is fine, as long as you're not encouraged to be inclusive? Are you sure you think it's fine?

It's certainly fair to say that you feel that inclusivity has gotten out of hand and that it shouldn't change the way we talk. But it seems disingenuous so say that it's "fine", but think it's scary when it's suggested to you.