And I'm not in a position to say it doesn't exist- (being a white guy and full of privilege), however it does seem that a lot of girls in tech are making a career of painting all other engineers as being inherently misogynistic, vacuous or malicious.
I mean, I don't believe we should put barriers up for women who want to be in tech, I have a few female colleagues who work in this field and they're brilliant.. but making an entire career out of getting more diversity into the technology is strange to me. If I saw people being exclusionary then this would have merit.. but the females I know are embraced (not especially more than men, admittedly, usually the same).
We're at a strange time where 90% of occasions I find a new engineer/hacker/programmer to follow on twitter, I have to check that they're not total social justice people, and it's overwhelmingly female techs that simply stop posting anything interesting technologically and start posting news articles about how we're all women hating or suppressing feminist views for not turning all characters in games into women immune from taking damage. (shitty example, I'm ranting, sorry)
I think it's very popular to be a social justice kind of person, who can say no to equality! but maybe people are using it to identify themselves too much.
--- in regards to the author of this piece, I would surmise that India is inherently more sexist than the US (given what my Indian friend says about the crime rate against women in India), therefore the expectations to be treated better than men in STEM fields doesn't exist? Not sure. And I don't really have enough knowledge to explain any disparity between the two.
India is complicated and not as individualistic as the West is. It is also corrupted and racist. The thing is, even the victim doesn't realise s/he is a victim of racism or sexism and so on. Ignorance is bliss...
Like the author said... You're reading viewpoint of exactly one woman in tech in India.
Why is America representative of the west? It's a sample point. I have many European colleagues who have similar values as Indians. Collective mentality is prevalent in many western societies too. Reason Americans are individualistic is because of foundations of American democracy which glorifies individualism. It's not necessarily bad.
>It is also corrupted and racist. The thing is, even the victim doesn't realise s/he is a victim of racism or sexism and so on.
This is rather a naive statement. Victims definitely would realize if something is sexist/racist. They might not be in a position to fix it. India has pretty significant legislation (Prevention of Atrocities Act) protecting minorities. Problem is enforcement.
>Like the author said... You're reading viewpoint of exactly one woman in tech in India.
I could argue the same about the opposite viewpoint derived on a society by reading isolated rape cases or corruption cases in India. I don't want to trivialize the problem of rape or corruption but I think it is unreasonable to think that every woman will be raped if she walks alone in India which is what the western media mostly portrays. My undergraduate class in India where I studied engineering had 40% women students. Most laboratory work was in mixed groups. My advisor was a woman. There were 40% woman lecturers. So I am definitely used to seeing women in Engineering. My mother is one too. If you will, this is an observation of society I grew up in.
Be very wary of hyperbole on topics like this. It's deeply divisive. If you can't make your point without exaggerating then maybe rethink?
> I think it's very popular to be a social justice kind of person...
So you're saying that people are promoting an equitable tech industry because they think it's cool?
> So you're saying that people are promoting an equitable
> tech industry because they think it's cool?
It is not cool, it is just easy. No effort to understand a problem even less
effort to understand is there really a problem...
I'm currently working in an organisation that specialises in behavioural science, we have the actual data on this. If you look at the studies there's overwhelming evidence to support an opinion that these problems are real. Women and different ethnic groups are treated in different ways with regard to things like hiring, performance reviews, etc. and there's a significant enough difference that the system could be defined as racist and sexist, even though no individual feels that they themselves are racist or sexist.
If you want citations... here are some just relating to the field of gender and employment...
Female job applicants with children considered less warm, likeable and committed than male applicants with children. Successful mothers penalized for promotion, hire, and salary (Benard and Correll, 2010). Women expressing anger more penalised than men (Brescoll & Uhlmann, 2008). People in gender-incongruent roles penalised more heavily for mistakes (Brescoll, Dawson, & Uhlmann, 2010). Voluble women perceived as less competent and less suitable leaders, inverse true for men (Brescoll, 2011). Men who work for women in stereotypically male dominated fields accorded less status and lower salaries (Brescoll et al, 2012). Women who succeed in male-dominated fields percieved as not likeable (Heilman et al, 2004). Students question the competence of female teachers who evaluate them negatively, less so than male teachers (Sinclair & Kunda 2000). Female students seen as less competent than identical male students, offered lower starting salaries (Moss-Racusin et al, 2012)
... even some words are taboo the concepts behind them are inaccessible
so people are not able to think about them. This results in people not
really understanding what racism is...
Using 'social justice warrior' as a snarl-word is a sign that you feel defensive and uncomfortable. But that discomfort doesn't mean the 'SJWs' are wrong, it just means we as a species don't have a good set of verbal tools to communicate with each other about what's happening.
I'd recommend reading this, it's long but worth it if you actually care about this topic: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/good-men-project/why-its-so-ha...
I think the issue here is that the difference in treatment is only an issue for a subset of races and genders in certain industries.
Firstly there isn't one issue, there are many. Discussing them in aggregate isn't useful other than to highlight the extent of the problem.
Secondly, only some of the citations I gave in my previous post relate to fields percieved as male-dominated, the others are general.
What basis do you have for holding that opinion?
Anecdotally, this seems insane to me. In 2 years in India I observed more violent eve teasing than in 30 years in the US. Just talking to women, you get wildly different stories in both places - in the US it's "someone unattractive asked me out and I felt uncomfortable, almost like a rape", whereas in India it's "meh, he just grabbed my ass and walked off, no biggie".
Now it could be the case that upper class Indians (the main folks I dealt with) are just far more violent than middle class Americans, and that the masses of poor Indians are vastly more peaceful than their upper class compatriots. But that does seem a bit unlikely to me.
Further anecdote: in the US, reporters have a hard time finding rape poster girls who aren't blatantly making stuff up (e.g. mattress girl, duke stripper or rolling stone girl). In India, most of the rape poster girls are dead or badly injured.
Most of the big city cases that I've read about (e.g., Uber rape case, 2012 gang rape) do fit that perception. So it would surprise me if things were somehow better in Bihar than in Delhi.
jsudhams wrote "Any of my know circles will surely slap the guy in the same place." But you know, this is true across all sectors of Indian society. Indians are generally rather prone to violence.
I come from a city in Britain which has a very strong crime culture, but it's never reported. I imagine if you get raped by your uncle, and so does your friend, and your friend has reported it before and nothing happened- you'd be dissuaded from reporting it too.
but I digress.
I don't have a particularly objective opinion on India honestly, I have a sum total of 3 friends who openly talk about culture their (and only 1 who still lives there), while on the other hand I'm bathed in American culture- I read their books, stories, blogs, consume their movies. Not to mention the countless friends I have who still live there and openly talk about society.
I can only talk about the US, I'm not qualified to understand everything about India unfortunately. Please take everything I said on the last line with a pinch of salt.
Britain uses two types of crime statistics. There are officially reported crime statistics and there is the "crime survey" which polls people to find out whether they've been a victim of crime.
Now it's very crime-addled. However almost all of it goes unreported.
it's only after leaving a culture like that you realise it's so strange.
Edit: Hm, I got downvoted. Lets see if I can break down a summary of my life for people who don't think Coventry is bad (news articles in google seem to say it's not bad anymore).
but, stats: I've been mugged 17 times in 20 years, my home has been burgularised 4 times. 26 bikes have been stolen (locked and chained), I've been stabbed, I've been beaten in the streets by gangs of men. I've been threatened with peeling (by asian boys in school).
Coventry is not safe, the city center is made safe by excessive policing, but "Hillfields" (drug and prostitute capital of the midlands at least) and "Wood End" (which isn't even POLICED anymore because it's so dangerous) make coventry an unsafe place to be if not just visiting.
most people mind their own business, but if you look like you have money, those people are pirahna.
Also, we hold the world record for fastest time to strip a car of it's interior if left unlocked. (or we did when I last checked).
I'm not saying there isn't worse places in the world.. the government has done a _lot_ to reinvest in coventry. But it's a very dangerous place to live.
Assuming for the moment that the police stats are wrong we'd still see increased insurance costs for people living in Coventry, and we don't.
Support your claims with more than anecdote.
the problem is that this data is completely off-radar. The Coventry people are incredibly insular and untrusting. The idea is that you are either alone, or with your community- if you're community rejects you because you don't like their kids putting rotting fish in your letter box (for example) then you're on your own.
People don't get insurance because they think that by declaring their assets they invite people who work in the insurance firms to sell that information to burglars. (which does happen occasionally).
Crime goes mostly unreported because the police are untrusted, even if they had extremely noble intentions the people in coventry are a black box in terms of information- nobody will "snitch" on anybody else.
if someone was caught snitching then that person becomes one of the "rare" cases of a stabbing or extreme coersion to leave the city. (punctured tires, cutting brake lines, random people coming to kick your door in late at night and leaving without coming in, etc)
Your statistics lie about coventry, which is my point entirely.. the problem can't be fixed because there is no statistics on the problem to begin with. Although those in the West Midlands tend to avoid Coventry except for a shopping visit.
As much as it's anecdotal, I can think of a LOT of people I know who had to leave Coventry, I should show you a cross section of the people I went to school with- Crime is a way of life there, it's not even seen as "Crime" it's just.. it just is, you know it's a crime and the police become your enemies, but they were never your friends to begin with.
Anyway, I've been on the wrong side of the law, but as soon as my environment changed I was -able- to become an upstanding person.
Your stats are lying, and I'm not trying to upset or offend you but there are places like Coventry all over the world.. unquantifiable by normal statistics.
It's not persuasive, especially in the face of reported police stats; of the British Crime Survey; of insirance prices; of house prices; of murder rates; there's nothing anywhere that supports your outlandish claim.
"Unreported crime" is "no crime" to you, the government or anyone else.
I -KNOW- this is reality, it's plainer to me than that water is wet and the fact that evidence doesn't exist for it is _precisely_ what I'm saying.
(and actually house prices are cheaper in Coventry than anywhere else in the west midlands)
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices/detail.html?country=... [Coventry, terraced, sold in the last year]
vs
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices/detail.html?country=... [Kenilworth, terraced, sold in last year]
lets add some "OPed" articles because stats aren't really worthy in this situation: http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/all-about/wood-end
The "isolation" of crime: (it's really not isolated, but more.. concentrated): http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/third-co...
Your last link makes you case much weaker, not stronger. Do you understand that? There's probably not much point carrying on if you don't.
But not only that. There are other statistics - the british crime survey - (and these are robust statistics) that do not rely on crime reported to police. And OP is again claiming that Coventry is unique in reporting very low rates of crime while everywhere else reports accurate rates of crime.
But even if we assume that's true - that Coventry is unique in reporting and surveying low rates of crime while everywhere else is accurate - there are other indicators of crime. We'd expect to see higher rates for car insurace, and we don't. We'd expect to see higher rates of home contents insurance, and we don't.
OP is subject to a pretty obvious confirmation bias. "I had my bicycles stolen, and this i know Coventry is high in crime", and now they reject anything that points the other way. When you ask OP about the evidence they just come back with anecdote, when you show OP anything that contradicts that they say it's wrong (not just wrong, but wrong in very particular ways).
Britain has a higher rate than the US. My argument still holds.
Actually, my experience with crime rates is that where crime is common it goes unreported.
Given nominal reporting rates of 50% for D.C (which is being far too kind), and 10% (which is far too harsh) for Delhi, still leaves it twice as safe (and thrice as safe as London). It takes an hour to dig up the data online.
> I can only talk about the US, I'm not qualified to understand everything about India unfortunately. Please take everything I said on the last line with a pinch of salt.
... precisely my point. The propaganda has worked very well I can see. Again, don't trust the self-hating hindu unless they give you numbers.
Please would you consider stopping that?
You might want to re-read the guidelines.
Parent post has at least posted a link to support their argument; where's yours? I know that you're wrong, and when you tell me what data you're using I'll be able to tell you why you're wrong. (The UK has extensive and robust crime statistics from police reports but also a crime survey. India doesn't.)
> India infact has a lower crime rate against women than the
> US (even after accounting for differences in reporting
> rates).
At some point a society has to pass a bunch of law to drive change, to signal that some things are no longer considered to be acceptable. They tried persuassion and it didn't work.
I have written on HN several times about corruption in India, but this is one of the kinds of corruption I have never seen. I have several friends who have children, and come from families who would never abort a fetus based on its sex. But still, their family doctors, who have known them all their lives would not divulge this bit of information.
The article that you linked to reports instances, and I believe the personal stories to be true. However, when I reconcile my own experience with the stories in the article, I must conclude that it happens very rarely. So rarely that it cannot account for the large trends in the sex ratios. Getting a doctor to perform the abortion is easy though.
> They tried persuassion and it didn't work.
Indians are already getting choked with well-meaning but counterproductive laws. IMO, adding more laws wont help. They haven't tried general education. Among the poorer sectors of society, education seems to be as bad as it ever was. Don't go by India's published literacy figures; they are meaningless [1].
[1] http://gbytes.gsood.com/2006/07/03/literacy-in-india-can-ind...
That would be your crimes against women. Not the abortions themselves.
>doctors are bribed to break laws about giving information about the sex of an unborn child
Doctors should give the patient full information to make an informed medical choice, including for an abortion. In this case, the law is the problem.
>At some point a society has to pass a bunch of law to drive change, to signal that some things are no longer considered to be acceptable. They tried persuassion and it didn't work.
Yet sex selective abortions aren't a problem in much of the world. In China's case, sex selective abortions are a result of the laws.
Change the culture so that people don't feel pressured into a choice. Change the laws so that forcing people to make a choice is illegal. But don't remove that choice.