6 ms·

Well, that was probably predictable. If the news coverage of her being the "first female ship's captain" happened near the same time as the Suez Canal incident,

by hnbad 6y ago

Well, that was probably predictable. If the news coverage of her being the "first female ship's captain" happened near the same time as the Suez Canal incident, those two stories can easily be conflated into a "told you so" narrative to justify condescension towards women aspiring to be ship's captains. It doesn't matter whether the correlation is real because the narrative feeds into existing stereotypes and anyone peddling it confronted with evidence to the contrary will just say that while it may be factually untrue, it still carries some underlying truth and that's what matters. This is just a microcosm of why "fake news" has become so widespread on social media.

capableweb 6y ago
Or, is just a "fun" joke that ties into stereotypes. "Haha, told you women couldn't drive, look at this one stopping global trade" and then it spirals out of control. Not sure we can or should read too much into it.
- supergirl 6y ago
  it would be funny if it wasn't sad that women are so far behind that a woman ship captain is news.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    Personally don't think it's "funny" either way, as joking about stereotypes is generally not very clever humor. But to each his own.
  - yostrovs 6y ago
    If lack of female ship captains is a sign that women are far behind, is lack of male school teachers, nurses, and HR professionals a sign that men are far behind?
    - creata 6y ago
      At least in your first example, yes, it is a sign that men are far behind when it comes to being trusted with children. But that's not really relevant to the ship story.
      - allendoerfer 6y ago
        They might be, but that‘s not the reason why there are less male teachers. It is not harder to become a teacher, when you are male. They are just less interested in becoming one (on average). As are women to drive container ships. Although I don’t think that there is just one woman, who wants to do it.
        em-bee 6y ago
        it is the reason in new zealand. there it is practically impossible for men to become teachers at least in kindergarten and primary school because parents don't trust them. sad really because kids need rolemodels from both genders
        ithkuil 6y ago
        The "solution" to this problem is to not allow people to choose. In the country where I live the vast majority of schools are funded from the very high taxes you pay. You'd still have to pay those taxes if you choose to enroll your kid in a private school just so you could avoid a male teacher. Male teachers are nevertheless underrepresented, due to other biases.
      - em-bee 6y ago
        actually i think it is relevant because the attitude towards gender in different professions is very much the topic of this post
    - kristianc 6y ago
      No, because a cargo ship captain typically makes between $150k-$200k a year.
  - hnbad 6y ago
    The news story is literally that she's the _first_ female captain, so it's safe to say that there are probably a lot of deeply entrenched prejudices against women in those roles. Jokes are (almost?) always political because it only works if you share similar views about what the world is like and how it should be. In this case the joke is that women are unfit to be captain, the setup is that "they" eventually "let" a woman be captain and the punchline is that she went on to cause one of the most economically disastrous incidents in recent history (ba-dum-tiss). If you don't think women are unfit to be captain (or at least "intrinsically less fit" or whatever) the punchline doesn't work.
    - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
      Or maybe instead of everyone in all of the past being biased unfairly against women in strenuous, rough, deadly roles, we are the biased ones who believe that women and men are so similar that they should all be able to fight in armies, operate dangerous machinery and equipment, etc. Etc. in equal proportions.
    - djrogers 6y ago
      > If you don't think women are unfit to be captain (or at least "intrinsically less fit" or whatever) the punchline doesn't work. You seem to have a rather linear view of humor. People laugh at (and enjoy) comedians they disagree with all the time - a well crafted joke can be considered well crafted and funny by many people, regardless of the target or the listener’s personal beliefs.
      - hnbad 6y ago
        A joke can be funny and disagree with your beliefs if the fact that it disagrees with them is the basis of the joke. Most shock humor is meant to work this way: it's funny because it's completely inappropriate and violating social norms. The problem with shock humor is that it can still be funny to people who agree with it and can help normalizing the views it's meant to make fun of. You can see this play out in real time on websites like 4chan that always shift from "transgressive humor" to genuine far-right talking points. If the joke is "women are bad drivers", you either have to agree with the premise (so the joke is likely about the humorously exaggerated extent to which this is confirmed by an anecdote), or the joke is that someone holds this view while presenting evidence to the contrary (so the joke is that the character doesn't understand he's wrong), or the joke is that the view is extremely inappropriate and doesn't follow at all from what is laid out before (so the joke is that the character is so absurdly bigoted they just bring up their prejudices all the time). Examples for the three structures would be: 1. <statement that Egypt now has a female captain> <statement that the Suez Canal was blocked by a massive ship> 2. <statement about female drivers presenting them positively> (optional: <statement about one minor data point that could be construed negatively>) <assertion that women are bad drivers> 3. <statement about some scenario involving a woman that could be a strained analogy for driving a vehicle> <assertion that women are bad drivers> There are probably a few more of these patterns, but they still work by presenting a position that either agrees with your views, follows logically from them or intentionally contradicts them.
  - why_Mr_Anderson 6y ago
    Do you really extrapolate that women are 'far behind' from the fact there are few female ship captains? What about coal miners or steel workers or construction crews then?
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    I don't understand the 'behind' bit. What's 'behind' about not being a cargo ship captain? Do you have to force people into roles they don't want just to create a statistic to suggest equality?
    - kristianc 6y ago
      Do you believe that there’s a perfect mapping between ‘jobs that people want’ and ‘representation in those jobs’? And if so, how do you account for the fact that a) people working in the industries themselves cite that there is work to do on gender diversity and b) that the disparity remains even when you control for manual/heavy physical work (i.e you account only for people working in desk / design based AEC roles)?
      - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
        I'd imagine barely anyone has the job they'd choose; maybe I'm an outlier. Suppose I'm a doctor/refuse collector, but really wanted to be a ship's captain, am I 'behind'. I guess it's that there's an implicit hierarchy of roles implied .. if I'm ship's engineer, but really want to be engineer, am I 'behind' the captain? I just don't know what's really meant by this: is it about competitive roles, is it about access, is it about status. I'm not trying to be argumentative, I don't know that the parent means by 'behind'. It seems all the responses have assumed I did know what they meant and had taken a particular view on it. FWIW I'm not in the slightest denying that in some countries women/men are excluded from (or find it more difficult to get) some roles for sexist reasons. I'm aware there are disparities in all areas (in UK), one of the biggest is teaching - very few men are able to get roles in primary (5-11yo) teaching. In other areas it seems you're more likely to get a job if qualified. Where I work women are being offered jobs at about equal rates to men (higher rates of women, actually), but the pool of qualified people is heavily male as women don't choose to take the degrees that feed into that pool. None of this proves anything, except that I know senior management were lauding the offering of more jobs to women, as opposed to just to qualified people regardless of sex [I can't cite this, internal stats, sorry]. I'm interested in your (b) do you have stats to cite on that?
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    Not that it's okay but note that it is "first in Egypt" which is a lot less surprising. Outside Egypt it is a lot more common. I know a few female captains in places like in the Danish shipping company Mærsk (like this ships captain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_M%C3%A6rsk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_M%C3%A6rsk).
- moron4hire 6y ago
  She wasn't even on the Ever Given when it grounded. She was commanding a different ship.
  - qrbLPHiKpiux 6y ago
    Can we agree the media is a problem wedging us further apart? Race. Gender.
    - hef19898 6y ago
      More like the drive for eye balls, klicks and ad revenue. But overall, at least part of
    - moron4hire 6y ago
      An alternative interpretation is that the media is a reflection of society. If people weren't looking for bullshit articles to click on (actually, not even click on, they usually end up just resharing the article on social media for the headline) to artificially confirm their biases, then the media wouldn't be making bank on this strategy. Also, the media does not exist outside of society. The media sucks because our culture in general sucks. Same thing with politicians. We don't get shitty politicians out of nowhere. They come from the people, they optimize for what people want, and people vote for them. It can be tempting for others to try to call this an example of the Prisoner's Dillema, but the Prisoner's Dillema doesn't apply because there isn't even a marginal upside to "defecting" when your counterpart "defects". We're personally better off when we choose to not participate in this stuff, regardless of what other people do, and we're all more better off as more people choose to not participate.
    - Pyramus 6y ago
      What/who is "the media"? I see this pattern where you define a class so broad any proposition becomes a truism, and productive discussion becomes impossible.
      - ipaddr 6y ago
        The media are a trusted class of society who are afforded a blanket level of respect based on their role in society. The media have started to act in the best interest of their clan vs society as a whole. The Media has fragmented and serves their niches but not society as a whole. So talking about the media as a whole is possible without having to identify tribes within.
- sanj 6y ago
  HN is a place for data: https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/27/1/71.abstract https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/27/1/71.abstract Men pose higher per-km risk to others than women for all modes except buses, as well as being over-represented among users of the most dangerous vehicles. (From abstract)
  - rickyci 6y ago
    I assume that might be because data collected historically shows men to be overwhemingly the one driving. So this correlation is dumb
    - kazinator 6y ago
      Men cannot be the ones overhelmingly driving per km. That normalizes it.
    - midasuni 6y ago
      Your inability to understand “per-km” is the only thing that’s “dumb”
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    Intuitively, it seems correct that in aggregate, women kill less people on the road. From personal experience, most people can drive well enough regardless of who or what they are, but if someone's driving extremely riskily then it's almost always youngish males. But also, if someone's exceptionally incompetent then it's usually old people or women. The distribution skews at the extremes and that's where the common perception that women can't drive comes from (and probably also the fact that men kill more people in aggregate). Actual data is not going to dissolve this perception because you see it every time you get outside.
    - sanj 6y ago
      I work hard to discount “personal experience,” even mine, when actual data is available.
- snthd 6y ago
  As in "Schrödinger’s douchebag"? I too am only joking...
- tanyatik 6y ago
  Who are “we”? Sure, for an average internet user the joke is nothing, but for people who are the butt of the joke this has series consequences
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  In the Arab world, they are not joking around about looking at women as second class.
  - midasuni 6y ago
    Same in the west, although not to the same extent
    - criley2 6y ago
      Men in China have less rights than women in America. At some point, it becomes shortsighted to lose sight of where we are.
      - hashkb 6y ago
        So let's give up on fixing anything because it's always worse somewhere else?
        criley2 6y ago
        What an outrageous example of a straw man, I never suggested anything of the sort. Women here can run for president, own newspapers, vote and own guns and property. That's more free than most people these days. We should celebrate that best of all time freedom for women. Never in history have women been as equal and empowered as right now and right here. We should care more about our chinese and other brothers and sisters who live an oppressed life of authoritarian rule. All people deserve what american women have, and all Americans deserve more than we've achieved, and american women deserve more. All of these can be true.
        hashkb 6y ago
        I'm not trying to leave the USA, but suggesting it's not fubar is a willful denial of reality. 'It could always be worse' is an agent of the status-quo. This place maybe the least-worst, but we can still strive for actually good. Edit: you're completely right that we should balance our efforts domestically with our efforts universally. The latter is unfortunately a much more intricate web to unweave than the relatively simple issues we've got here. It sucks.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
spuz 6y ago
Are you claiming the fake Arab News story was created by accident? No, it was deliberate misinformation intended to generate views and attention. There is nothing predictable about it beyond the fact it is shitty behaviour.
- smitty1e 6y ago
  Absolutely. And now we can distract from an Admiralty court invesitgating the facts of the incident, and: - empathize with a victim of misogyny - attack sexism as an eternal bugaboo - virtue signal our personal swellness for fighting sexism The real power of Woke propaganda is that we can transmute anyone into saint- or hitler-hood at will.

by hnbad 6y ago

capableweb 6y ago

Or, is just a "fun" joke that ties into stereotypes. "Haha, told you women couldn't drive, look at this one stopping global trade" and then it spirals out of control. Not sure we can or should read too much into it.

supergirl 6y ago
it would be funny if it wasn't sad that women are so far behind that a woman ship captain is news.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Personally don't think it's "funny" either way, as joking about stereotypes is generally not very clever humor. But to each his own.
- yostrovs 6y ago
  If lack of female ship captains is a sign that women are far behind, is lack of male school teachers, nurses, and HR professionals a sign that men are far behind?
  - creata 6y ago
    At least in your first example, yes, it is a sign that men are far behind when it comes to being trusted with children. But that's not really relevant to the ship story.
    - allendoerfer 6y ago
      They might be, but that‘s not the reason why there are less male teachers. It is not harder to become a teacher, when you are male. They are just less interested in becoming one (on average). As are women to drive container ships. Although I don’t think that there is just one woman, who wants to do it.
      - em-bee 6y ago
        it is the reason in new zealand. there it is practically impossible for men to become teachers at least in kindergarten and primary school because parents don't trust them. sad really because kids need rolemodels from both genders
        ithkuil 6y ago
        The "solution" to this problem is to not allow people to choose. In the country where I live the vast majority of schools are funded from the very high taxes you pay. You'd still have to pay those taxes if you choose to enroll your kid in a private school just so you could avoid a male teacher. Male teachers are nevertheless underrepresented, due to other biases.
    - em-bee 6y ago
      actually i think it is relevant because the attitude towards gender in different professions is very much the topic of this post
  - kristianc 6y ago
    No, because a cargo ship captain typically makes between $150k-$200k a year.
- hnbad 6y ago
  The news story is literally that she's the _first_ female captain, so it's safe to say that there are probably a lot of deeply entrenched prejudices against women in those roles. Jokes are (almost?) always political because it only works if you share similar views about what the world is like and how it should be. In this case the joke is that women are unfit to be captain, the setup is that "they" eventually "let" a woman be captain and the punchline is that she went on to cause one of the most economically disastrous incidents in recent history (ba-dum-tiss). If you don't think women are unfit to be captain (or at least "intrinsically less fit" or whatever) the punchline doesn't work.
  - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
    Or maybe instead of everyone in all of the past being biased unfairly against women in strenuous, rough, deadly roles, we are the biased ones who believe that women and men are so similar that they should all be able to fight in armies, operate dangerous machinery and equipment, etc. Etc. in equal proportions.
  - djrogers 6y ago
    > If you don't think women are unfit to be captain (or at least "intrinsically less fit" or whatever) the punchline doesn't work. You seem to have a rather linear view of humor. People laugh at (and enjoy) comedians they disagree with all the time - a well crafted joke can be considered well crafted and funny by many people, regardless of the target or the listener’s personal beliefs.
    - hnbad 6y ago
      A joke can be funny and disagree with your beliefs if the fact that it disagrees with them is the basis of the joke. Most shock humor is meant to work this way: it's funny because it's completely inappropriate and violating social norms. The problem with shock humor is that it can still be funny to people who agree with it and can help normalizing the views it's meant to make fun of. You can see this play out in real time on websites like 4chan that always shift from "transgressive humor" to genuine far-right talking points. If the joke is "women are bad drivers", you either have to agree with the premise (so the joke is likely about the humorously exaggerated extent to which this is confirmed by an anecdote), or the joke is that someone holds this view while presenting evidence to the contrary (so the joke is that the character doesn't understand he's wrong), or the joke is that the view is extremely inappropriate and doesn't follow at all from what is laid out before (so the joke is that the character is so absurdly bigoted they just bring up their prejudices all the time). Examples for the three structures would be: 1. <statement that Egypt now has a female captain> <statement that the Suez Canal was blocked by a massive ship> 2. <statement about female drivers presenting them positively> (optional: <statement about one minor data point that could be construed negatively>) <assertion that women are bad drivers> 3. <statement about some scenario involving a woman that could be a strained analogy for driving a vehicle> <assertion that women are bad drivers> There are probably a few more of these patterns, but they still work by presenting a position that either agrees with your views, follows logically from them or intentionally contradicts them.
- why_Mr_Anderson 6y ago
  Do you really extrapolate that women are 'far behind' from the fact there are few female ship captains? What about coal miners or steel workers or construction crews then?
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  I don't understand the 'behind' bit. What's 'behind' about not being a cargo ship captain? Do you have to force people into roles they don't want just to create a statistic to suggest equality?
  - kristianc 6y ago
    Do you believe that there’s a perfect mapping between ‘jobs that people want’ and ‘representation in those jobs’? And if so, how do you account for the fact that a) people working in the industries themselves cite that there is work to do on gender diversity and b) that the disparity remains even when you control for manual/heavy physical work (i.e you account only for people working in desk / design based AEC roles)?
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      I'd imagine barely anyone has the job they'd choose; maybe I'm an outlier. Suppose I'm a doctor/refuse collector, but really wanted to be a ship's captain, am I 'behind'. I guess it's that there's an implicit hierarchy of roles implied .. if I'm ship's engineer, but really want to be engineer, am I 'behind' the captain? I just don't know what's really meant by this: is it about competitive roles, is it about access, is it about status. I'm not trying to be argumentative, I don't know that the parent means by 'behind'. It seems all the responses have assumed I did know what they meant and had taken a particular view on it. FWIW I'm not in the slightest denying that in some countries women/men are excluded from (or find it more difficult to get) some roles for sexist reasons. I'm aware there are disparities in all areas (in UK), one of the biggest is teaching - very few men are able to get roles in primary (5-11yo) teaching. In other areas it seems you're more likely to get a job if qualified. Where I work women are being offered jobs at about equal rates to men (higher rates of women, actually), but the pool of qualified people is heavily male as women don't choose to take the degrees that feed into that pool. None of this proves anything, except that I know senior management were lauding the offering of more jobs to women, as opposed to just to qualified people regardless of sex [I can't cite this, internal stats, sorry]. I'm interested in your (b) do you have stats to cite on that?
- Daho0n 6y ago
  Not that it's okay but note that it is "first in Egypt" which is a lot less surprising. Outside Egypt it is a lot more common. I know a few female captains in places like in the Danish shipping company Mærsk (like this ships captain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_M%C3%A6rsk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_M%C3%A6rsk).
moron4hire 6y ago
She wasn't even on the Ever Given when it grounded. She was commanding a different ship.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 6y ago
  Can we agree the media is a problem wedging us further apart? Race. Gender.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    More like the drive for eye balls, klicks and ad revenue. But overall, at least part of
  - moron4hire 6y ago
    An alternative interpretation is that the media is a reflection of society. If people weren't looking for bullshit articles to click on (actually, not even click on, they usually end up just resharing the article on social media for the headline) to artificially confirm their biases, then the media wouldn't be making bank on this strategy. Also, the media does not exist outside of society. The media sucks because our culture in general sucks. Same thing with politicians. We don't get shitty politicians out of nowhere. They come from the people, they optimize for what people want, and people vote for them. It can be tempting for others to try to call this an example of the Prisoner's Dillema, but the Prisoner's Dillema doesn't apply because there isn't even a marginal upside to "defecting" when your counterpart "defects". We're personally better off when we choose to not participate in this stuff, regardless of what other people do, and we're all more better off as more people choose to not participate.
  - Pyramus 6y ago
    What/who is "the media"? I see this pattern where you define a class so broad any proposition becomes a truism, and productive discussion becomes impossible.
    - ipaddr 6y ago
      The media are a trusted class of society who are afforded a blanket level of respect based on their role in society. The media have started to act in the best interest of their clan vs society as a whole. The Media has fragmented and serves their niches but not society as a whole. So talking about the media as a whole is possible without having to identify tribes within.
sanj 6y ago
HN is a place for data: https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/27/1/71.abstract https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/27/1/71.abstract Men pose higher per-km risk to others than women for all modes except buses, as well as being over-represented among users of the most dangerous vehicles. (From abstract)
- rickyci 6y ago
  I assume that might be because data collected historically shows men to be overwhemingly the one driving. So this correlation is dumb
  - kazinator 6y ago
    Men cannot be the ones overhelmingly driving per km. That normalizes it.
  - midasuni 6y ago
    Your inability to understand “per-km” is the only thing that’s “dumb”
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  Intuitively, it seems correct that in aggregate, women kill less people on the road. From personal experience, most people can drive well enough regardless of who or what they are, but if someone's driving extremely riskily then it's almost always youngish males. But also, if someone's exceptionally incompetent then it's usually old people or women. The distribution skews at the extremes and that's where the common perception that women can't drive comes from (and probably also the fact that men kill more people in aggregate). Actual data is not going to dissolve this perception because you see it every time you get outside.
  - sanj 6y ago
    I work hard to discount “personal experience,” even mine, when actual data is available.
snthd 6y ago
As in "Schrödinger’s douchebag"? I too am only joking...
tanyatik 6y ago
Who are “we”? Sure, for an average internet user the joke is nothing, but for people who are the butt of the joke this has series consequences
runawaybottle 6y ago
In the Arab world, they are not joking around about looking at women as second class.
- midasuni 6y ago
  Same in the west, although not to the same extent
  - criley2 6y ago
    Men in China have less rights than women in America. At some point, it becomes shortsighted to lose sight of where we are.
    - hashkb 6y ago
      So let's give up on fixing anything because it's always worse somewhere else?
      - criley2 6y ago
        What an outrageous example of a straw man, I never suggested anything of the sort. Women here can run for president, own newspapers, vote and own guns and property. That's more free than most people these days. We should celebrate that best of all time freedom for women. Never in history have women been as equal and empowered as right now and right here. We should care more about our chinese and other brothers and sisters who live an oppressed life of authoritarian rule. All people deserve what american women have, and all Americans deserve more than we've achieved, and american women deserve more. All of these can be true.
        hashkb 6y ago
        I'm not trying to leave the USA, but suggesting it's not fubar is a willful denial of reality. 'It could always be worse' is an agent of the status-quo. This place maybe the least-worst, but we can still strive for actually good. Edit: you're completely right that we should balance our efforts domestically with our efforts universally. The latter is unfortunately a much more intricate web to unweave than the relatively simple issues we've got here. It sucks.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

spuz 6y ago

Are you claiming the fake Arab News story was created by accident? No, it was deliberate misinformation intended to generate views and attention. There is nothing predictable about it beyond the fact it is shitty behaviour.

smitty1e 6y ago
Absolutely. And now we can distract from an Admiralty court invesitgating the facts of the incident, and: - empathize with a victim of misogyny - attack sexism as an eternal bugaboo - virtue signal our personal swellness for fighting sexism The real power of Woke propaganda is that we can transmute anyone into saint- or hitler-hood at will.