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> Once you've taken on the role of a victim, any number of injustices that are just part of human nature can be attributed to whatever you perceive as the sourc

> Once you've taken on the role of a victim, any number of injustices that are just part of human nature can be attributed to whatever you perceive as the source. Why do you think this is happening? When a woman is ignored in a meeting, she doesn't think "it's because I'm a woman". She thinks "every single day people make jokes about me sleeping my way to the top, they try to hit on me while I'm doing my job, they criticize my outfit even though they've worn the same suit every day for five years straight, they refuse to meet with me alone, why would this meeting be any different?" Next time something bad happens to you, don't just imagine being female or black in that moment. Imagine if you've been female or black for your whole life, and have direct daily evidence of people not respecting you.

daenz 9y ago
Except people can be generally shitty to you for most of your life regardless of your race or gender or any other label, so one more experience of a person being shitty isn't evidence of any of those things. It's what the parent post meant about "control experiences." There's no accurate baseline to judge true prejudice vs general terribleness, because it's all being viewed through the lens of oppression. From people who play the race or gender card, I cannot recall ever reading about them ever blaming any experience on people just being baseline terrible, even though "privileged" people experience that baseline terribleness every day, but have nothing politically correct to blame it on (speaking for myself, nor would I want to blame it on anything besides human nature).
- burkaman 9y ago
  > I cannot recall ever reading about them ever blaming any experience on people just being baseline terrible I mean, that's not really newsworthy. "I experience a lot of racism, but today someone was a dick to me for a racially neutral reason." It's hard to imagine someone being motivated to write this story, since it's such an obvious fact of life. I hope you don't think that people who talk about racism believe that every negative event in their life was solely caused by racism. Have you discussed this stuff with any women or non-white people? I find it's a lot easier to understand when you're having a friendly conversation rather than reading an angry blog post.
- qb45 9y ago
  > Except people can be generally shitty to you for most of your life regardless of your race or gender or any other label There is even more to it: people can be just randomly shitty to you and use your gender to carry out the shittiness simply because you react to it. Female programmer: you'll never be a real programmer, male programmer: you'll never be a real man. The thing that matters is your personal insecurity, not the attacker's bias against any gender. Add the fact that some people are really allergic to others complaining about being oppressed for no discernible reason and you are on a straight way to some very unpleasant life experience.
ralusek 9y ago
I work as a consultant software engineer, so my anecdotal evidence here has to be taken with more than a grain of salt as it approaches a reasonable sample size. I have worked in a LOT of different environments. On the frequent occasions that I do work with female engineers, I have noticed that things mostly go one of two ways: 1.) she is acutely aware that she's an engineer in a "male" profession, and will either act with extreme imposter syndrome constant self doubt, or go to the other extreme to the point that it becomes noticeable and odd 2.) just be an engineer, seemingly unaware of her gender What is strange is that I have met some absolutely fantastic female engineers who fall squarely into camp #2, and if you were to ask them how many grievances they've faced because of their gender, they would probably be nuisanced that you're even asking about it. They act like engineers and they get treated like engineers. If you were to ask the female engineers who fall into camp #1, they would have a completely different story. They'd be likely to say that they can never get a word in, or people walk right over them, people review their code more harshly. In my observations, the biggest hurdle is an internal struggle for a female engineer to see herself as an engineer, because people will see treat you like an imposter if it's clear that you see yourself as one. The more female engineers there are, the less they will feel like imposters, and the less they will be treated like them. In other fields, I imagine things aren't exactly comparable, but I do think it's absolutely ludicrous for you to say that "every single day people make jokes about you sleeping your way to the top." This is not reality. If someone said that once, or that is some guy's "go to joke," it's obviously in poor taste and not funny, but this is not something that women experience every single day in the workplace. At this point, I've worked with more women than men (engineers excluded), under more women CEOs than male. I'm in the offices...these conversations are not happening "every day." For the most part, I would say that most of the places I've worked at largely feel like the women run the show, to be honest. That kind of shit does not fly anywhere outside of some very odd working environment unlike anything I've ever encountered.
- burkaman 9y ago
  > if you were to ask them how many grievances they've faced because of their gender, they would probably be nuisanced that you're even asking about it. The next time you talk to one of these awesome engineers, please actually ask them this question. Maybe I'm misreading your comments, but at no point have you talked about discussing this with someone besides yourself. Don't just rely on your own observations and experiences, talk to people with different ones. I've never encountered a work environment like the one I'm describing either, but I've encountered plenty of women who have. Obviously this can't be true for literally every woman in every office, but we're both generalizing here. This is true for quite a few people in the US and probably the world. When you read these blog posts where people are talking about actual incidents that are blatantly related to race or gender, do you think they're all lying or something? It's not really debatable that this stuff is incredibly common. And you don't need to rely on the huge number of anecdotal blog posts, there's plenty of statistics too if that's what you prefer. For example: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract Finally, if none of this convinces you, consider the idea that the appearance of corruption is just as harmful as actual corruption. Even if we pretend that discrimination no longer exists in America, there's clearly still a problem if so many people think discrimination exists and act accordingly. So what do we do about it? Ignoring the problem and telling everyone else to ignore it doesn't seem like it'll work.

daenz 9y ago

Except people can be generally shitty to you for most of your life regardless of your race or gender or any other label, so one more experience of a person being shitty isn't evidence of any of those things. It's what the parent post meant about "control experiences." There's no accurate baseline to judge true prejudice vs general terribleness, because it's all being viewed through the lens of oppression. From people who play the race or gender card, I cannot recall ever reading about them ever blaming any experience on people just being baseline terrible, even though "privileged" people experience that baseline terribleness every day, but have nothing politically correct to blame it on (speaking for myself, nor would I want to blame it on anything besides human nature).

burkaman 9y ago
> I cannot recall ever reading about them ever blaming any experience on people just being baseline terrible I mean, that's not really newsworthy. "I experience a lot of racism, but today someone was a dick to me for a racially neutral reason." It's hard to imagine someone being motivated to write this story, since it's such an obvious fact of life. I hope you don't think that people who talk about racism believe that every negative event in their life was solely caused by racism. Have you discussed this stuff with any women or non-white people? I find it's a lot easier to understand when you're having a friendly conversation rather than reading an angry blog post.
qb45 9y ago
> Except people can be generally shitty to you for most of your life regardless of your race or gender or any other label There is even more to it: people can be just randomly shitty to you and use your gender to carry out the shittiness simply because you react to it. Female programmer: you'll never be a real programmer, male programmer: you'll never be a real man. The thing that matters is your personal insecurity, not the attacker's bias against any gender. Add the fact that some people are really allergic to others complaining about being oppressed for no discernible reason and you are on a straight way to some very unpleasant life experience.

ralusek 9y ago

I work as a consultant software engineer, so my anecdotal evidence here has to be taken with more than a grain of salt as it approaches a reasonable sample size. I have worked in a LOT of different environments. On the frequent occasions that I do work with female engineers, I have noticed that things mostly go one of two ways: 1.) she is acutely aware that she's an engineer in a "male" profession, and will either act with extreme imposter syndrome constant self doubt, or go to the other extreme to the point that it becomes noticeable and odd 2.) just be an engineer, seemingly unaware of her gender What is strange is that I have met some absolutely fantastic female engineers who fall squarely into camp #2, and if you were to ask them how many grievances they've faced because of their gender, they would probably be nuisanced that you're even asking about it. They act like engineers and they get treated like engineers. If you were to ask the female engineers who fall into camp #1, they would have a completely different story. They'd be likely to say that they can never get a word in, or people walk right over them, people review their code more harshly. In my observations, the biggest hurdle is an internal struggle for a female engineer to see herself as an engineer, because people will see treat you like an imposter if it's clear that you see yourself as one. The more female engineers there are, the less they will feel like imposters, and the less they will be treated like them. In other fields, I imagine things aren't exactly comparable, but I do think it's absolutely ludicrous for you to say that "every single day people make jokes about you sleeping your way to the top." This is not reality. If someone said that once, or that is some guy's "go to joke," it's obviously in poor taste and not funny, but this is not something that women experience every single day in the workplace. At this point, I've worked with more women than men (engineers excluded), under more women CEOs than male. I'm in the offices...these conversations are not happening "every day." For the most part, I would say that most of the places I've worked at largely feel like the women run the show, to be honest. That kind of shit does not fly anywhere outside of some very odd working environment unlike anything I've ever encountered.

burkaman 9y ago
> if you were to ask them how many grievances they've faced because of their gender, they would probably be nuisanced that you're even asking about it. The next time you talk to one of these awesome engineers, please actually ask them this question. Maybe I'm misreading your comments, but at no point have you talked about discussing this with someone besides yourself. Don't just rely on your own observations and experiences, talk to people with different ones. I've never encountered a work environment like the one I'm describing either, but I've encountered plenty of women who have. Obviously this can't be true for literally every woman in every office, but we're both generalizing here. This is true for quite a few people in the US and probably the world. When you read these blog posts where people are talking about actual incidents that are blatantly related to race or gender, do you think they're all lying or something? It's not really debatable that this stuff is incredibly common. And you don't need to rely on the huge number of anecdotal blog posts, there's plenty of statistics too if that's what you prefer. For example: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract Finally, if none of this convinces you, consider the idea that the appearance of corruption is just as harmful as actual corruption. Even if we pretend that discrimination no longer exists in America, there's clearly still a problem if so many people think discrimination exists and act accordingly. So what do we do about it? Ignoring the problem and telling everyone else to ignore it doesn't seem like it'll work.