7 ms·

> but as a group, it's undeniable that there's extra obstacles I'm not sure you can really say that. It's true, women as a group encounter problems with being

by Dove 9y ago

> but as a group, it's undeniable that there's extra obstacles 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.

rdiddly 9y ago
I like how you think - let's just keep it simple and oppose all the things that suck then shall we? 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.
- gkya 9y ago
  > sexismlessness 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.
shados 9y ago
:slow clap:
RonanTheGrey 9y ago
I like how you think.
ltorresv 9y ago
Really appreciate this comment.
peter94104 9y ago
You are awesome. I couldn't have said it better.
spyhi 9y ago
Thanks for saying this--too often people hand-wave away others' problems though, ironically, they may end up inheriting them. Your comment reminded me about an article on how Millennial women are conflicted about being breadwinners. [1] Between chuckling about how I (a Millennial guy) have said many of the quotes nearly verbatim, it dawned on me that as we approach equality in the workplace these women are being now being exposed to what were classically "man problems." I think guys are mostly familiar with those, but I think we also mostly conditioned or compelled endure it in silence, which may lend to the idea that there are "no extra obstacles" for us. 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-are-conflicted-about-being-breadwinners http://www.refinery29.com/2017/04/148488/millennial-women-ar...
- OJFord 9y ago
  Is Millennial Guy the (relatively mundane) sequel to Bicentennial Man?
  - spyhi 9y ago
    "In Millennial Guy, the highly-anticipated sequel to Bicentennial Man, a blogger living in a world where robots seek humanity seeks to become a robot, but spends his time arguing about it on the internet instead, ultimately never achieving his goal. Instead, he waits for his break as an internet "thought leader" while living with his disappointed parents, then he dies."
- Dove 9y ago
  Haha! On point. I can identify with that article. Man, there's this wonderful quote about this I wish I could find, about how women were somehow sold the idea that the working world, the land of heart attacks and ulcers, was where the real awesomeness in life was happening, and where they wanted to be. 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 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. :)
Dove 9y ago
Addendum - these ideas are not original to me. If this way of thinking resonates with you, here are a couple of the things I've been watching and listening to that taught me to think this way. They're worth your time. Men Have Problems Too: http://theredpillmovie.com/ http://theredpillmovie.com/ Everyone's A Mess And Also Awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr9bVe68OZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr9bVe68OZM
koaladevops 9y ago
edit : clearly hackernews is not my audience.
- lotharbot 9y ago
  Dove is a woman. (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.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Mithorium 9y ago
    >lotharbot Confirmed, robots are replacing men
  - koaladevops 9y ago
    > One of the beautiful things about the HN community is that we expect and welcome disagreement 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-argument/ https://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/phmt-arg...
    - lotharbot 9y ago
      > "don't think this is really true ... in any online community." 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.
phlakaton 9y ago
Not sure I agree that men have a pressure to succeed that women don't. My wife faced plenty of this pressure in her software career: as a point of professional pride, as a prerequisite to career advancement, and because her family raised her to be financially independent. Stuff you cite was all stuff my wife went through as much as I.
- cc81 9y ago
  He is talking about a generalization. Just like men can be victims of sexual harassment as well but it is most likely more common that women are.
  - phlakaton 9y ago
    And I question the generalization prima facie, as it does not reflect the experience of me or the women I'm close to. Unless there's data to support it?
jancsika 9y ago
> And people overcome these things because they're AMAZING! 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
fruzz 9y ago
Sexism hurts men too. Nor am I saying men don't have problems specific to them - they do. 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.
fruzz 9y ago
Sexism hurts men too. Nor am I saying men don't have problems specific to them - they do. 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.

by Dove 9y ago

rdiddly 9y ago

I like how you think - let's just keep it simple and oppose all the things that suck then shall we? 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.

gkya 9y ago
> sexismlessness 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.

shados 9y ago

:slow clap:

RonanTheGrey 9y ago

I like how you think.

ltorresv 9y ago

Really appreciate this comment.

peter94104 9y ago

You are awesome. I couldn't have said it better.

spyhi 9y ago

Thanks for saying this--too often people hand-wave away others' problems though, ironically, they may end up inheriting them. Your comment reminded me about an article on how Millennial women are conflicted about being breadwinners. [1] Between chuckling about how I (a Millennial guy) have said many of the quotes nearly verbatim, it dawned on me that as we approach equality in the workplace these women are being now being exposed to what were classically "man problems." I think guys are mostly familiar with those, but I think we also mostly conditioned or compelled endure it in silence, which may lend to the idea that there are "no extra obstacles" for us. 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-are-conflicted-about-being-breadwinners http://www.refinery29.com/2017/04/148488/millennial-women-ar...

OJFord 9y ago
Is Millennial Guy the (relatively mundane) sequel to Bicentennial Man?
- spyhi 9y ago
  "In Millennial Guy, the highly-anticipated sequel to Bicentennial Man, a blogger living in a world where robots seek humanity seeks to become a robot, but spends his time arguing about it on the internet instead, ultimately never achieving his goal. Instead, he waits for his break as an internet "thought leader" while living with his disappointed parents, then he dies."
Dove 9y ago
Haha! On point. I can identify with that article. Man, there's this wonderful quote about this I wish I could find, about how women were somehow sold the idea that the working world, the land of heart attacks and ulcers, was where the real awesomeness in life was happening, and where they wanted to be. 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 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. :)

Dove 9y ago

Addendum - these ideas are not original to me. If this way of thinking resonates with you, here are a couple of the things I've been watching and listening to that taught me to think this way. They're worth your time. Men Have Problems Too: http://theredpillmovie.com/ http://theredpillmovie.com/ Everyone's A Mess And Also Awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr9bVe68OZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr9bVe68OZM

koaladevops 9y ago

edit : clearly hackernews is not my audience.

lotharbot 9y ago
Dove is a woman. (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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Mithorium 9y ago
  >lotharbot Confirmed, robots are replacing men
- koaladevops 9y ago
  > One of the beautiful things about the HN community is that we expect and welcome disagreement 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-argument/ https://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/phmt-arg...
  - lotharbot 9y ago
    > "don't think this is really true ... in any online community." 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.

phlakaton 9y ago

Not sure I agree that men have a pressure to succeed that women don't. My wife faced plenty of this pressure in her software career: as a point of professional pride, as a prerequisite to career advancement, and because her family raised her to be financially independent. Stuff you cite was all stuff my wife went through as much as I.

cc81 9y ago
He is talking about a generalization. Just like men can be victims of sexual harassment as well but it is most likely more common that women are.
- phlakaton 9y ago
  And I question the generalization prima facie, as it does not reflect the experience of me or the women I'm close to. Unless there's data to support it?

jancsika 9y ago

> And people overcome these things because they're AMAZING! 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

fruzz 9y ago

Sexism hurts men too. Nor am I saying men don't have problems specific to them - they do. 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.

fruzz 9y ago