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Why are people so outraged at this guy? I read what he wrote and it honestly sounds like he's trying to be helpful. It's at least polite. The knee-jerk "SEXIST!

Why are people so outraged at this guy? I read what he wrote and it honestly sounds like he's trying to be helpful. It's at least polite. The knee-jerk "SEXIST!" reactions to him come off extremely self-righteous and immature. There are a hundred other male-dominated careers and I never, ever hear women complain about not being equally represented in them. Why? Because they're not attractive careers.

dudul 9y ago
In addition to career attractiveness, the thing is tech is an easy target for the modus operandi. Companies in tech deeply need to have a good image and reputation. When your business model is B2C and you're targeting growth at all cost you can't afford a boycott campaign on Twitter, or a few blog posts on medium about sexual harassment, etc. Other mostly male-dominated industries do not have this characteristic. Do construction companies care about PR? Do financial companies care? Do oil exploitation companies care?
- cm2187 9y ago
  I am not sure Uber users really care about sexism at Uber when it's 2am, they are outside of a bar and need to find a cab. I don't think users will switch away from gmail or google.com en masse because of the male/female ratio in this company. In fact outside of the microcosm of the Silicon Valley and its satellites, I don't think these issues are drawing that much attention.
deleted 9y ago
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cm2187 9y ago
And hundreds of female dominated careers that no one seems to find problematic. In France, judges or doctors are predominantly female. These are high skills/high responsibility jobs. I don't see anyone claiming this is a discrimination.
kristianc 9y ago
It seems that the focus is always on the reaction to these pieces, and I wonder why. It's obvious why people are angry - he's trying to find a biological justification to exclude a class of people from a high-status career. That's something that has mostly been dismissed as quackery, and has been shown to have some pretty negative consequences throughout history. The onus of people who want to stick up for this guy is surely to find evidence to support his proposition, rather than go after people mad at the content of the post itself?
- artursapek 9y ago
  > biological justification to exclude a class of people from a high-status career No. He's proposing a biological explanation for why the career is not split 50/50 between men and women. An explanation which frankly sounds plausible.
- TallGuyShort 9y ago
  No, he's using a biological justification to openly discuss different ways to foster diversity. This is one of his points: the most common argument against him is just that you think he's a sexist, not because you don't think his ideas will actually foster any kind of diversity. And I don't understand that. The reaction here is the opposite of tolerance and diversity. edit: I'm going to give a personal example: I strongly supported legalizing gay marriage, but I also support the right of anyone to refuse to bake a gay wedding cake or to run a church and not perform gay marriages. And I've had numerous former friends chew me out and shun me for being "intolerant". It's that attitude that makes reasonable political discussions harder and harder (at least in the US right now) because it makes everyone fear to give up anything to reach a compromise or to even understand each other.
  - kristianc 9y ago
    But we're back to discussing the reaction again. Which is a neat way of avoiding the content of the article itself. I have no particular need to apply the label of "sexist" to this guy. I have no opinion, nor enough information, to say whether he should be fired or not. I do think he's profoundly wrong though, and think his arguments about biological differences bear at least a passing resemblance to some wholly discredited arguments.
turc1656 9y ago
Exactly! I came here to essentially post the same thing. I can't remember ever, even once, anyone talking about how to get more women into construction, forestry, fishing, sanitation, etc. Curious, isn't it? Likewise, I never hear anyone asking how we can get more men to be pre-school or early education teachers, home health aides, social workers, etc. In fact, I genuinely don't think I've ever once in my entire life heard anyone say that there is a shortfall of males in any job/industry. Despite the fact that there are numerous jobs for which women hold 75% or more of the positions. The argument simply doesn't add up given this information. It's clear they just want to get more women in high paying jobs only, not to even out the alleged imbalance across the board. If they were actually interested in that, we'd hear them talking about much more and it would be for both genders. Funny how they never talk about getting more women into logging, which only pays ~38k a year and has a fatality rate of 0.1%, isn't it?
- artursapek 9y ago
  Exactly. They're really just using feminism (which is immune to criticism because that would be taboo) as an excuse to manipulate an otherwise merit-based system of hiring because software jobs are comfy and pay really well. It's pretty disgusting. I walk around Manhattan and have never seen a woman driving a cab. Why is nobody complaining?
deleted 9y ago
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mc32 9y ago
Another thing is people are outraged that the engineer seems to denigrate a whole group of people as not as good engineers, and the eng is doing groups a disservice but when people bash "whitemaleness" you don't see the same reaction of, well, please don't lump all while males into one group, don't denigrate a whole group. A noticeable issue is in google and other tech cos it's totally okay for people to virtue signal against white males, even Asian males. Any other group and you're treading on very thin ice. You're likely to get summoned to see an HR rep.
- artursapek 9y ago
  Yeah, "white males" seem to be fair game for discrimination and blanket statements. I guess it's because we have it so good? It's all so tiresome.
InclinedPlane 9y ago
Right, he's just asking questions, what's so harmful about that? He's "asking" whether or not an entire category of people deserve to be in his field. Which means he is actually questioning whether an entire gender deserves to be allowed to be engineers. That is on its face extremely offensive and damaging. Imagine showing up to work today in silicon valley as a female engineer. Imagine having spent years, decades, busting your ass to get a job in a field you've been passionate about since you were a child and here some asshat out of left field can dangle your entire career out over a precipice in front of the world like some circus act. That's the real problem here, the problem of entrenched misogyny and tribalism in the industry so deep that it means everyone who isn't a white skinned techbro has to constantly validate and re-validate (and re-re-validate) their own existence on an ongoing basis. White dudes have the luxury to call into question the validity of the careers of hundreds of thousands of other people with just a few words, but they never seem to have to prove their own worth. That's the problem here. The industry, the world, is on an un-level playing field, with those who are at a disadvantage at the edge of a cliff facing a steep slope to get further from the cliff. Those higher up sometimes ask "but do they really deserve to be here? what if we just push them off, look how close they are to the edge, it would be so easy". This is not ok.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  > Which means he is actually questioning whether an entire gender deserves to be allowed to be engineers. No, he is not, and your choice of words like 'deserve' and 'allowed' to add intent that wasn't present in the original is unfortunate. It's NOT a question of 'permission', so it's not about who is allowed to be an engineer and who isn't. He is specifically questioning whether positive discrimination to ensure there are equal numbers of men and women engineers at Google makes sense, if there are innate differences in the degree to which men and women DESIRE to be engineers.

dudul 9y ago

In addition to career attractiveness, the thing is tech is an easy target for the modus operandi. Companies in tech deeply need to have a good image and reputation. When your business model is B2C and you're targeting growth at all cost you can't afford a boycott campaign on Twitter, or a few blog posts on medium about sexual harassment, etc. Other mostly male-dominated industries do not have this characteristic. Do construction companies care about PR? Do financial companies care? Do oil exploitation companies care?

cm2187 9y ago
I am not sure Uber users really care about sexism at Uber when it's 2am, they are outside of a bar and need to find a cab. I don't think users will switch away from gmail or google.com en masse because of the male/female ratio in this company. In fact outside of the microcosm of the Silicon Valley and its satellites, I don't think these issues are drawing that much attention.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

cm2187 9y ago

And hundreds of female dominated careers that no one seems to find problematic. In France, judges or doctors are predominantly female. These are high skills/high responsibility jobs. I don't see anyone claiming this is a discrimination.

kristianc 9y ago

It seems that the focus is always on the reaction to these pieces, and I wonder why. It's obvious why people are angry - he's trying to find a biological justification to exclude a class of people from a high-status career. That's something that has mostly been dismissed as quackery, and has been shown to have some pretty negative consequences throughout history. The onus of people who want to stick up for this guy is surely to find evidence to support his proposition, rather than go after people mad at the content of the post itself?

artursapek 9y ago
> biological justification to exclude a class of people from a high-status career No. He's proposing a biological explanation for why the career is not split 50/50 between men and women. An explanation which frankly sounds plausible.
TallGuyShort 9y ago
No, he's using a biological justification to openly discuss different ways to foster diversity. This is one of his points: the most common argument against him is just that you think he's a sexist, not because you don't think his ideas will actually foster any kind of diversity. And I don't understand that. The reaction here is the opposite of tolerance and diversity. edit: I'm going to give a personal example: I strongly supported legalizing gay marriage, but I also support the right of anyone to refuse to bake a gay wedding cake or to run a church and not perform gay marriages. And I've had numerous former friends chew me out and shun me for being "intolerant". It's that attitude that makes reasonable political discussions harder and harder (at least in the US right now) because it makes everyone fear to give up anything to reach a compromise or to even understand each other.
- kristianc 9y ago
  But we're back to discussing the reaction again. Which is a neat way of avoiding the content of the article itself. I have no particular need to apply the label of "sexist" to this guy. I have no opinion, nor enough information, to say whether he should be fired or not. I do think he's profoundly wrong though, and think his arguments about biological differences bear at least a passing resemblance to some wholly discredited arguments.

turc1656 9y ago

Exactly! I came here to essentially post the same thing. I can't remember ever, even once, anyone talking about how to get more women into construction, forestry, fishing, sanitation, etc. Curious, isn't it? Likewise, I never hear anyone asking how we can get more men to be pre-school or early education teachers, home health aides, social workers, etc. In fact, I genuinely don't think I've ever once in my entire life heard anyone say that there is a shortfall of males in any job/industry. Despite the fact that there are numerous jobs for which women hold 75% or more of the positions. The argument simply doesn't add up given this information. It's clear they just want to get more women in high paying jobs only, not to even out the alleged imbalance across the board. If they were actually interested in that, we'd hear them talking about much more and it would be for both genders. Funny how they never talk about getting more women into logging, which only pays ~38k a year and has a fatality rate of 0.1%, isn't it?

artursapek 9y ago
Exactly. They're really just using feminism (which is immune to criticism because that would be taboo) as an excuse to manipulate an otherwise merit-based system of hiring because software jobs are comfy and pay really well. It's pretty disgusting. I walk around Manhattan and have never seen a woman driving a cab. Why is nobody complaining?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mc32 9y ago

Another thing is people are outraged that the engineer seems to denigrate a whole group of people as not as good engineers, and the eng is doing groups a disservice but when people bash "whitemaleness" you don't see the same reaction of, well, please don't lump all while males into one group, don't denigrate a whole group. A noticeable issue is in google and other tech cos it's totally okay for people to virtue signal against white males, even Asian males. Any other group and you're treading on very thin ice. You're likely to get summoned to see an HR rep.

artursapek 9y ago
Yeah, "white males" seem to be fair game for discrimination and blanket statements. I guess it's because we have it so good? It's all so tiresome.

InclinedPlane 9y ago

Right, he's just asking questions, what's so harmful about that? He's "asking" whether or not an entire category of people deserve to be in his field. Which means he is actually questioning whether an entire gender deserves to be allowed to be engineers. That is on its face extremely offensive and damaging. Imagine showing up to work today in silicon valley as a female engineer. Imagine having spent years, decades, busting your ass to get a job in a field you've been passionate about since you were a child and here some asshat out of left field can dangle your entire career out over a precipice in front of the world like some circus act. That's the real problem here, the problem of entrenched misogyny and tribalism in the industry so deep that it means everyone who isn't a white skinned techbro has to constantly validate and re-validate (and re-re-validate) their own existence on an ongoing basis. White dudes have the luxury to call into question the validity of the careers of hundreds of thousands of other people with just a few words, but they never seem to have to prove their own worth. That's the problem here. The industry, the world, is on an un-level playing field, with those who are at a disadvantage at the edge of a cliff facing a steep slope to get further from the cliff. Those higher up sometimes ask "but do they really deserve to be here? what if we just push them off, look how close they are to the edge, it would be so easy". This is not ok.

kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
> Which means he is actually questioning whether an entire gender deserves to be allowed to be engineers. No, he is not, and your choice of words like 'deserve' and 'allowed' to add intent that wasn't present in the original is unfortunate. It's NOT a question of 'permission', so it's not about who is allowed to be an engineer and who isn't. He is specifically questioning whether positive discrimination to ensure there are equal numbers of men and women engineers at Google makes sense, if there are innate differences in the degree to which men and women DESIRE to be engineers.