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Should women be able to "play the female card" to get something they otherwise wouldn't have? Should men be able to "play the male card" to get something they

Should women be able to "play the female card" to get something they otherwise wouldn't have? Should men be able to "play the male card" to get something they otherwise wouldn't have? You either say yes to both, or no to both. If corporate politics has cultured an environment where there is even such a thing as a "female card" or a "male card", then that's a failing.

AlexandrB 8y ago
> Should men be able to "play the male card" to get something they otherwise wouldn't have? In most organizations the male card is automatically in play and must be explicitly un-played. That's what is usually meant by "patriarchy".
- coryfklein 8y ago
  How does one explicitly "un-play" their male card then? I'm male, and if I have implicitly played mine I'd love to reverse that to do my fair share to give women equality on the workplace. I suspect when you say that the male card is automatically in play, you aren't referring to something that men are automatically doing, but rather some facet of the system that favors men. In which case, changing the system is the correct approach, not introducing unbalanced social norms approving of women "playing the female card". I also suspect that even I am taking this "play the card" analogy far beyond its usefulness haha. I'd much rather talk about actual systems or behaviors in concrete terms that broker little room for misunderstanding.
  - aplummer 8y ago
    > How does one explicitly "un-play" their male card then? I'm male, and if I have implicitly played mine I'd love to reverse that to do my fair share to give women equality on the workplace. It can come up like, turn down a game of golf when women aren’t invited, or invite them. Suggesting people who aren’t like you for teams as well.
- lawnchair_larry 8y ago
  God, what a load of entitled bullshit this is. Please take your identity politics somewhere else.
  - AlexandrB 8y ago
    It's really funny how the claim of "identity politics" gets applied to pointing out inequality, but never to inequality itself. Was red-lining not identity politics? What about white flight? How about the gender pay gap (say in it's historical form if you choose to believe that it doesn't exist anymore), that's straight up identity politics, no? Oh! How about Japanese internment during WWII. That's obviously identity politics! The US government has engaged in identity politics for pretty much all of its history (consider the rhetoric about the "migrant caravan" today, or the way that every elected official has to at least pretend to be Christian). You don't get to rail against identity politics as if it's something SJWs came up with in the last decade.
    - lawnchair_larry 8y ago
      That is nonsense. Go ahead and advocate for redlining or internment and watch how quickly I’ll call bullshit on those as well.
- belorn 8y ago
  With that male card we see companies where every male employee is automatically CEO and play golf and sit at the beach and all the lower level employees are female and forced to do all the work, like a scene from a slave plantation. I can honestly say I have never seen this mythical company, and if it existed then the wast majority of the bottom 10% of the population would no longer be male.
  - AlexandrB 8y ago
    You're building a strawman. An example of the male card is having every resume with a female-sounding name get extra scrutiny to make sure they're qualified. This is backed up in artistic fields by what happens when they move to blind auditions[1]: > Blind performance auditions, much research has proven, often results in the hiring of more women and minorities because it eliminates the opportunities for bias to influence who makes the cut. The point is not that there's a cabal of evil dudes scheming to exclude women. The point is that on a subconscious level many people stereotype each gender as having a specific set of roles. This biases their evaluation of the individual's performance. An analogy: I have an alt account on youtube (to try to dodge Google's tracking) that has the gender set to female. When I'm logged into this account I get endless advertising for cleaning/laundry products, air fresheners, and diet solutions. This is despite the fact that my viewing habits are still those of a 30+ year old male developers and video game fan: coding talks, gaming stuff, and lets plays. Google's algorithms decided - based entirely on my set gender, and despite ample evidence to the contrary - that it should advertise stuff I obviously don't care about at me. All I'd like you to consider that it's at least possible that the average hiring manager in a tech company carries the same kind of biased assumptions about what a female should be interested in and good at. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_audition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_audition
    - belorn 8y ago
      Such studies that show society treating women and men different based on expected gender roles has been done multiple times in many fields, and if we call that male and female cards then we must accept that for every place where a person can make a stereotypical assumption based on gender role then that is a place where one gender is favored and an other is disfavored. One prime example of those is with the justice system, where a male-sound name get found guilty more often and get harsher punishment because they don't get to automatic play the female card, as backup by blind testing at the subconscious level. The average hiring manager has indeed some gender expectation. Based on some fascinating recent study done on judges, I would expect to see a major difference in how rational judgement a hiring manager do based on how long time it has been since last time they ate. The lower their blood sugar level are the more likely a person are to use shortcuts in their thinking. Note that this has nothing to do with the belief of a "patriarchy", nor can it be translated into power cards that get played in some zero sum game.

AlexandrB 8y ago

> Should men be able to "play the male card" to get something they otherwise wouldn't have? In most organizations the male card is automatically in play and must be explicitly un-played. That's what is usually meant by "patriarchy".

coryfklein 8y ago
How does one explicitly "un-play" their male card then? I'm male, and if I have implicitly played mine I'd love to reverse that to do my fair share to give women equality on the workplace. I suspect when you say that the male card is automatically in play, you aren't referring to something that men are automatically doing, but rather some facet of the system that favors men. In which case, changing the system is the correct approach, not introducing unbalanced social norms approving of women "playing the female card". I also suspect that even I am taking this "play the card" analogy far beyond its usefulness haha. I'd much rather talk about actual systems or behaviors in concrete terms that broker little room for misunderstanding.
- aplummer 8y ago
  > How does one explicitly "un-play" their male card then? I'm male, and if I have implicitly played mine I'd love to reverse that to do my fair share to give women equality on the workplace. It can come up like, turn down a game of golf when women aren’t invited, or invite them. Suggesting people who aren’t like you for teams as well.
lawnchair_larry 8y ago
God, what a load of entitled bullshit this is. Please take your identity politics somewhere else.
- AlexandrB 8y ago
  It's really funny how the claim of "identity politics" gets applied to pointing out inequality, but never to inequality itself. Was red-lining not identity politics? What about white flight? How about the gender pay gap (say in it's historical form if you choose to believe that it doesn't exist anymore), that's straight up identity politics, no? Oh! How about Japanese internment during WWII. That's obviously identity politics! The US government has engaged in identity politics for pretty much all of its history (consider the rhetoric about the "migrant caravan" today, or the way that every elected official has to at least pretend to be Christian). You don't get to rail against identity politics as if it's something SJWs came up with in the last decade.
  - lawnchair_larry 8y ago
    That is nonsense. Go ahead and advocate for redlining or internment and watch how quickly I’ll call bullshit on those as well.
belorn 8y ago
With that male card we see companies where every male employee is automatically CEO and play golf and sit at the beach and all the lower level employees are female and forced to do all the work, like a scene from a slave plantation. I can honestly say I have never seen this mythical company, and if it existed then the wast majority of the bottom 10% of the population would no longer be male.
- AlexandrB 8y ago
  You're building a strawman. An example of the male card is having every resume with a female-sounding name get extra scrutiny to make sure they're qualified. This is backed up in artistic fields by what happens when they move to blind auditions[1]: > Blind performance auditions, much research has proven, often results in the hiring of more women and minorities because it eliminates the opportunities for bias to influence who makes the cut. The point is not that there's a cabal of evil dudes scheming to exclude women. The point is that on a subconscious level many people stereotype each gender as having a specific set of roles. This biases their evaluation of the individual's performance. An analogy: I have an alt account on youtube (to try to dodge Google's tracking) that has the gender set to female. When I'm logged into this account I get endless advertising for cleaning/laundry products, air fresheners, and diet solutions. This is despite the fact that my viewing habits are still those of a 30+ year old male developers and video game fan: coding talks, gaming stuff, and lets plays. Google's algorithms decided - based entirely on my set gender, and despite ample evidence to the contrary - that it should advertise stuff I obviously don't care about at me. All I'd like you to consider that it's at least possible that the average hiring manager in a tech company carries the same kind of biased assumptions about what a female should be interested in and good at. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_audition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_audition
  - belorn 8y ago
    Such studies that show society treating women and men different based on expected gender roles has been done multiple times in many fields, and if we call that male and female cards then we must accept that for every place where a person can make a stereotypical assumption based on gender role then that is a place where one gender is favored and an other is disfavored. One prime example of those is with the justice system, where a male-sound name get found guilty more often and get harsher punishment because they don't get to automatic play the female card, as backup by blind testing at the subconscious level. The average hiring manager has indeed some gender expectation. Based on some fascinating recent study done on judges, I would expect to see a major difference in how rational judgement a hiring manager do based on how long time it has been since last time they ate. The lower their blood sugar level are the more likely a person are to use shortcuts in their thinking. Note that this has nothing to do with the belief of a "patriarchy", nor can it be translated into power cards that get played in some zero sum game.