Except that's not what's happening. The war is between the ideology that genders are equal and the ideology that genders are not equal.

Framing it the way you have is a standard tactic employed by people who are entirely aware they are at war and have set up feminists as enemy combatants already.

I think a better summary would be this:

The war is between the ideology that genders should have equal opportunities and the ideology that genders should not.

A better statement: The war is between the ideology that individual humans should have equal opportunities, and the ideology that certain groups should be statistically equally represented in all fields.

(Or sometimes it's all fields that result in "power", a poorly defined term.)

[1] Interestingly, those religions usually have more women than computing. I've never been to a church where women didn't outnumber men.

https://inclusiveactioneverydaylives.files.wordpress.com/201...

Is it equal opportunity to see the baseball game, or equal opportunity to pick up a crate?

There are certainly people who state opposition to each of these forms, although they each tend to say they support "equal opportunity," meaning the other.

One major obfuscation made by various activists in this discussion is that lack of EQUITY can only be caused by a lack of SAMENESS. As illustrated nicely by the cartoon, some folks are short. If shortness is distributed unevenly, then SAMENESS will result in some groups being underrepresented.

So, if shortness is distributed unequally, and there's a big wooden fence in front of the game, you could respond by saying that tall people are naturally more suited for game-watching, and argue based on tall people having historically been more successful at it. But that claim isn't likely to stand up to a deep examination of causality and reality.

There are two significantly more defensible responses: give short people enough crates to see over the fence, or tear down the fence (preferably by figuring out what purpose it serves, and building something else to serve its purpose without the side effects, like a Plexiglas fence).

Then your ability to watch the game will be determined only by your natural talent at game-watching, not by your natural talent at being tall.

Interesting observation. The questions that follow next are:

(1) What are the "fences" in Silicon Valley that lead to the issues described in the article (a single fence is interesting for illustration, but in practice there are probably multiple fences)

(2) Of those additional "fences" how many are the fault of culture (the article cites several such as viewing women entrepreneurs as potential mates first and funding opportunities second) and how many are circumstances beyond the control of anyone in Silicon Valley (like the last of STEM support during formative years (childhood/adolescence/higher education) or the fact that greater testosterone levels correlate with greater aggression and risk taking that VCs tend to look for (several times in the article there are examples of women not being forward and actually asking for money or not asking for enough). The self selection of female entrepreneurs only seeking out VCs that have funded women and or have women involved is yet another fence that no one can solve but the women (this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. what if several VC funds out there haven't funded a women because many women they may have wanted to fund never approached them to ask for money).

The former "fences" (like viewing female entrepreneurs as mates, we should drive out of the industry. But some of the latter issues are the responsibility of women (and the men whose exhibit the same traits) to solve. I know a ton of shy nerdy guys that would never get funding because they don't know how to pitch and get someone to cut them a check (close the deal). They either have to learn those skills or they have to pair up with another person who has skills in selling. Being tenacious and aggressive matters.

Of all the men working in Silicon Valley, a tiny fraction of them are actually fundable because they have the skills to be funded (technically brilliant and/or tenacious/alphas). The overwhelming majority do not get funded because they either don't have the technical skills or they are betas or omegas.

For startup ideas not reliant on some major, defensible technological advantage, the VC industry has a strong preference for founding teams teams that have at least one alpha among them regardless of gender.

One question I'd love to see studied is testosterone levels of people (relative to their own gender) pitching VCs and whether they get funded, and if so by how much.

Assuming there is a preference for investing in people with high testosterone levels, the second question which I'd like to see investigated (but I don't know how you'd design an experiment for this.) is whether or not investing in greater testosterone levels is a good investment thesis/strategy.

Some (fairly major) golf clubs don't let women play on their courses[1]. Plenty of people think women should not be allowed in combat roles in the armed forces[2]. I could continue...

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/10186258/Go...

[2] http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/should-women-be-allowed-to...

It would be pretty easy to cite circumstances when women are excluded and men are excluded. For example, there are men's only colleges and women's only colleges, and the number of women's only institutions of higher education greatly outnumber the number of men's only institutions (The only one I can think of is Hampden Sydney in Virginia).

Personally, I'm very anti-gender binary, so my purpose of commenting here is that it is intellectually dishonest to cite examples where women are excluded and conveniently omit examples where men are excluded.

Actually those clubs don't let women become members of the club, but they do let them play on the course. (Specifically, Muirfield does.) Or in some cases (I'm not sure if it's a nonzero number now that the R&A golf club has had its vote) they don't own the course.

I would also swap out "opportunities" for "autonomies", but that's being pedantic and obscure.

In short, the enemy is the patriarchy, and if you think for a minute that that only negatively affects girls and women, well, then you've never been a shy nerd asking out that cute girl from your math class who's also a cheerleader. Spoiler alert, P(that goes well) < 0.01.

Certainly those ideals are rooted in sexism and are in many ways sexist, but the sexism isn't what caused the problem in my example. The gender norms by themselves (ie doesn't matter whether they're the way they are due to sexism) caused the problem, because they basically say that a guy is worthless if he isn't a nearly perfect example of the masculine gender.

She's rejecting him because he doesn't have enough of the traits that society says a man should have (and maybe has too many of the traits that society says women should have): He's not strong, he's not assertive, he's not domineering, he's not good at arbitrary athletic competitions, etc. etc. etc.

This has everything to do with his sex. He is being rejected (hypothetically - within our thought experiment here) because he is considered to be an insufficient exemplar of the male sex. To phrase it a different way - he is insufficiently masculine for this cheerleader (i.e. a very high-status female) to have an interest in him.

You correctly point this out later on - She's rejecting him because he doesn't have enough of the traits that society says a man should have (and maybe has too many of the traits that society says women should have): He's not strong, he's not assertive, he's not domineering, he's not good at arbitrary athletic competitions, etc. etc. etc.

Sex is purely genitalia. The two extremes are male and female, but this is a spectrum and not a binary.

Gender is all the other shit that society piles on top of that. The two extremes in western culture are masculine and feminine, but this is a spectrum and not a binary. That this mostly lines up with the sexual spectrum is an arbitrary decision by society; society could define gender in such a way that it is orthogonal to sex. Examples of where gender doesn't line up with sex in western society include butch within the lgbtq community: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butch_and_femme. Other societies have in fact defined gender in a way that doesn't line up with sex, so this isn't just theoretical: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity#Non-Western_gen....

In the thought experiment he is not being rejected because of his sex. He is being rejected because of the gender he presents is not sufficiently masculine enough.

That's sexism.

"The first important thing to understand about sexism is that it is systemic. Gender-based prejudice, on the other hand, is individual, although it exists in the context of a sexist system."

"But men who experience oppression based on the way they express their gender are still not oppressed on the basis of their gender itself. That is to say, they’re not experiencing that oppression because they’re men. Non-men, on the other hand, experience gender-based oppression because they aren’t men."

[1]: http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/01/sexism-vs-prejudice/

What does this is gender roles and their consequent beauty norms. People decide that women are best off looking fit and have big boobs and are outgoing and have a certain personality. These norms are communicated to them all throughout their childhood through media and peer pressure. In exactly the same way, ideals create the jock as well.

When you actually look at the people embodying these stereotypes, there's nothing all that much different about them, they're just people who've managed to adopt these norms. They might even be meaner than normal, enforcing these roles themselves.

Gender roles, beauty norms are part of the culture that feminists call patriarchy. Patriarchy is just sexism at the social / cultural scale. They wouldn't exist without these broader cultural dynamics, people would just be people and you could ask out whoever you want and she wouldn't shut you down because she has a place to maintain in the hierarchy, a hierarchy created and maintained by sexism.

Once you realize that women perpetuate patriarchy too and how, that's when you start to really understand just what it is.

If you need an analogy, think about how the general lack of respect for privacy at both the individual and the legislative levels negatively affects all of us, even those who 'have nothing to hide'.

I'm not really clear on how such divisions emerges from sexism. At its root, it seems to come from primate status competition, within separate groups that happen to be divided out by sex.

Among the boys, the jocks are those who prioritize sports and physical achievement, while the nerds are those who prioritize academics and mental achievement. This divide persists even in the absence of females - for example, all-boys schools still have aggressive athletes and quiet, bookish introverts, regardless of the presence or absence of the opposite sex.

If anything, the thing you're describing as patriarchy and/or sexism is the effect, rather than the cause.

you've never been a shy nerd asking out that cute girl from your math class who's also a cheerleader.

Feminism is designed to make sure it's illegal for the shy nerd to ask out the prom queen. Spoiler alert: feminists are not the friends you may think they are.

False accusations of any crime are horrible, but they are in no way common: The United States Justice Department agrees [with the rough percentage of false rape claims], saying false accusations "are estimated to occur at the low rate of two percent -- similar to the rate of false accusations for other violent crimes."

Coincidentally, 2% is the number of rape accusations that ever result in a conviction: https://rainn.org/get-information/statistics/reporting-rates (this sources back to the DoJ as well. RAINN just has a nifty infographic.