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This closely aligns with my thoughts on the issue. While I understand the good intentions behind girl only events, women in CS meetups and girl geek dinners/me

This closely aligns with my thoughts on the issue. While I understand the good intentions behind girl only events, women in CS meetups and girl geek dinners/mentors something about it feels wrong to me. It's like fighting an exclusion problem with just a different type of exclusion and simultaneously reinforcing the divisions they're rallying against.

mitchty 14y ago
I guess i disagree to a bit. I understand where you're coming from there, but I think "girl only" cs meetups help eliminate a possible burden to get into the computer world. I think for that reason alone they're a good thing. Could it be taken too far? Sure but I don't see that happening right now, and at the moment given how few women are in our field I think more such things are needed to at least reduce the sharp edges people view from our world.
- minamea 14y ago
  > Could it be taken too far? But I'm under the impression that today we offer women-only CS courses and the norm has become women get hired over equally or more qualified men in the name of eradicating sexism. I humbly suggest this is taking it too far. I don't want to automatically get turned down for a job because a woman applied. I don't want to automatically get turned down for CS help because I am the wrong gender. Every time I hear about a company spending money on CS help for women or "prioritizing hiring women" I cringe, but the HN community seems to readily accept and celebrate those posts.
  - dreamfactory 14y ago
    > I don't want to automatically get turned down for a job because a woman applied. If that were a real policy (which I don't think it is), I suppose the point is that even then the odds would be against it impacting you as there are so few women applicants.
    - minamea 14y ago
      But still morally wrong.
  - mitchty 14y ago
    So I understand what you're saying about the "women only or prioritization". But, and note I'm obviously a guy, you're assuming the worst possible reasoning for this. Lets say the whole thing is trying to reverse the course direction of CS to help get more women in the field. We know that having equal amounts of both genders helps and strengthens teams. So while the preferential hiring of women might at first glance appear to be discriminatory, and it may very well be that. The intent might be completely different and the goal of the exercise is to improve the company or teams performance. Speaking from experience, I prefer more balanced teams. I absolutely hate men only teams because what eventually always seems to happen is alpha/beta male monkey behavior. It is unproductive and I notice a distinct lack of it when there are women around. Basically I think this is a non-issue to worry about until we get close to 50% of women in CS in general. Given how far behind we are, I'm not even concerned right now. In fact I'd love to join things like rails bridge or whatever just to get things moving forward. Also note "the HN community" doesn't exist, we're all individuals. This is my own viewpoint and biases. "we" celebrate these things because CS is far too white male centric and that needs to change. We need more viewpoints.
    - minamea 14y ago
      I believe what's morally wrong is morally wrong and should not be done. Someone could speculate that the US would be better off with the cheap labour of slaves but that's morally wrong so we'll stop doing it period. I don't care why you're hiring a gender over another. In my humble opinion it's wrong and should stop.
      - mitchty 14y ago
        That is a bit too one sided for my tastes. Concerte example time: If you're a hiring manager and have 4 white males on a team, do you really need another white male? Probably not, is it morally wrong to want a female on the team or say a non white male? I cannot see why it would be. Especially when we now know based on current research that even if the candidate is technically worse than another, the overall team benefits from the different viewpoints more than a "star" developer. Again, I am not in agreement this is at all a moral decision from a hiring point of view or overall as a community/CS viewpoint. Why is it wrong to hire for better performance? Why is it wrong to want more females in CS? Most importantly, how does that conflate to being a morality tale? The latter question would be aided here in you explaining your philosophical underpinnings of why a single gender meetup to get more of that underrepresented gender in the community as being morally wrong. The slave analogy is off base for this particular situation.
  - Steuard 14y ago
    > I don't want to automatically get turned down for a job because a woman applied. I don't want to automatically get turned down for CS help because I am the wrong gender. Certainly! Nobody's goal is to reverse the historical situation so that men are systematically shut out of the field in some sort of vengeance for women being shut out for so long. A level playing field is absolutely the goal. But despite all the progress we've made, there are still many, many places where women have to deal with negative biases as students, as job applicants, and as employees. Women still routinely face exactly the sort of bias that you're concerned about, except that it's no longer socially acceptable for people to admit (even to themselves) that they're doing it. (Different industry, but there was a study not long ago that conclusively demonstrated subtle but meaningful bias against women when hiring science lab techs: fake applications with female names were rated lower than identical applications with male names, by men and women alike.) So my understanding is that when a company or college explicitly states a policy prioritizing women for help or hiring, they usually hope that this overt boost to female applicants will just cancel out the invisible but just as real biases against them.
    - minamea 14y ago
      Your tone suggests to inform rather than speculate and I would like to respectfully point out you might not be right: my fears are really happening, and we have actually got to the reverse of the historical situation. Here is an article that was posted on hacker news saying just that, and notice the very positive reaction it got from the community here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730673 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730673 EDIT: I know this is anecdotal evidence, and it's from Europe not the US. But notice what a positive reaction this had from HN. To me it shows that we don't mind this reverse historical situation.
  - RougeFemme 14y ago
    I don't think that hiring women over equally or more qualified men is truly the norm, though it did certainly occur in some companies and with some individuals - and I'm sure it still does, to some degree. But I think it's a real stretch to call it the norm. And even if you accept the argument that it's the norm, the practice is certainly failing, isn't it, since men still dominate the ranks of programmers. They are no longer 100%, but they still are a huge majority.
    - minamea 14y ago
      Men dominating the ranks of programmers, I believe, is due to women being less interested in programming. You could easily see this if you look at CS class. There is no discriminating employer there, and yet still the classes are men dominated. I believe in getting women interested in CS, not discriminating against men in hiring and access to learning resources. As for whether it's the norm or not, here is the article that gave me that impression: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730673 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730673
  - eaurouge 14y ago
    There are already other responses to your assertion that prioritizing for female employees is morally wrong. But how often do you hear startups talking about "culture fit" playing a role in hiring decisions? Is it morally wrong to prioritize culture fit over competency? If your answer is "no", it may surprise you to find that this is considered acceptable practice in many companies.
Scaevolus 14y ago
Is it worse than nothing? The logic seems to be: have imbalance partially caused by stereotypes -> encourage minority to lessen imbalance -> hope stereotypes change and balance becomes self-sustaining. Shifting cultures is hard. Lacking perfect solutions, maybe plausible ones will suffice?
- fossuser 14y ago
  It's a difficult problem and I don't pretend to know the answer. I do think that these kind of separate events may do more harm than good.
  - edmccard 14y ago
    Do you think they will result in fewer women in CS? Or is it some other kind of harm?
    - fossuser 14y ago
      I think it's a little more insidious than that. It refocuses the issue to gender and suggests you're special in tech not because of what you've done or want to do, but simply because of what you are. I think this devalues the accomplishments by focusing on an unimportant aspect. It subtly suggests (unintentionally) that girls can't make it on their own and require this extra help - which I think reinforces the sexist stereotypes that are the core problem. Intimidation, feelings of inferiority and difficulty with work are universal issues, I don't think excluding people by sex is necessary. There's also the very non-zero chance that I'm underestimating the value women get out of these events, but exclusion based on gender just does seem like the best way to go about it. Maybe it's just that nobody likes to feel left out.
      - edmccard 14y ago
        >It refocuses the issue to gender and suggests you're special in tech... I think one of the purposes of these kinds of separate events is to make it so that women in tech are not "special". >I think this devalues the accomplishments by focusing on an unimportant aspect. Unimportant to you, maybe, but not to the people who face barriers because of their gender. To make an analogy, is the success of some African-Americans today "devalued" because they didn't have to work as hard for it as the "exceptional blacks" of previous generations? >It subtly suggests (unintentionally) that girls can't make it on their own and require this extra help... One of the benefits of living in society instead of striking out for the frontier is that, when the deck is stacked against you, you can band together to solve problems that might be too hard to face on your own. Yes, there are always "exceptional" people who can go it alone, but the fact that _somebody_ didn't need extra help doesn't mean that _nobody_ needs extra help. >I don't think excluding people by sex is necessary. Necessary for what? In an ideal world, you wouldn't have to take gender into account, but (imperfect as it may be), I think women-only events are a way to create environments where gender issues don't come into play.
aln 14y ago
There are good and bad qualities to the CS events catered towards women. I think they are good for women of certain age groups (maybe 18 and older?) who might have been discouraged from or misinformed about the field. For young girls, these events are probably unnecessary and reinforce the stereotypes. The events and boot camps made specifically for women to learn to code/learn about various opportunities are great, but I would hate for young girls to attend these events and learn about the gender inequality in case they weren't even aware of it.
- astrieanna 14y ago
  I'm not sure that going to a programming workshop for girls as a kid would have made me think what programming wasn't for girls. Coming to a "not for girls" signal involves realizing that they're having the event to increase female participation, rather than just because they want an all-girls event -- like girls scouts being just for girls. The "for girls" labeling is also for the parents at that age. If you want to have girls signed up, you need their parents to think it's a good idea. Their parents are more likely (I'd think) to be biased that girls probably won't like programming/tech. So they wouldn't think about it as something their daughter would like, except that it's especially for girls. I'm not saying it's great logic, but it seems like it might be a benefit to "for girls" labeling on programming events for kids.
  - aln 14y ago
    There is a male equivalent to girl scouts- boy scouts/eagle scouts. There isn't a male equivalent to these events, and middle-school aged kids and above could definitely figure this out.
vacri 14y ago
If the balance were more even, sure, I'd agree with you. But until there's a head of steam for things to progress naturally, it does need an artificial poke. The problem wasn't solving itself before these kind of events.
colmvp 14y ago
"It's like fighting an exclusion problem with just a different type of exclusion and simultaneously reinforcing the divisions they're rallying against." In numerous tech offices/companies I've visited in the Bay Area and New York, I've met more foreign born white male programmers than African American male and Hispanic American male programmers put together. And despite the so-called high number of Asian males in CS in the US, I rarely see them in C-level positions in tech companies (say as CTOs) even compared to females. Yet I don't see or read nearly as many articles about initiatives in the tech industry to help any of those minorities increase their participation or break glass ceilings. And so as a minority, it kind of annoys me that I just get grouped with the so-called dominant segment of 'men' when I feel my and other races are under-represented in different ways. This especially comes out whenever there are tech meetups that are exclusive to women.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Start an Asian outreach effort. Get in touch with some Asian CxOs. (I worked for an Asian CxO once. So did everyone at Zappos.)
  - hack_edu 14y ago
    "Binders full of asians"
- bogger 14y ago
  "And despite the so-called high number of Asian males in CS in the US, I rarely see them in C-level positions in tech companies (say as CTOs) even compared to females." Seeing as Asian-Americans are about 5% of the population while women are roughly 50%, all things being equal you would expect to see far more women than Asian men in any given position. But I agree with the sentiment that these events are fighting exclusion with more exclusion. I would even go so far as to say that some companies seem to have a policy of positive discrimination in favour of women when it comes to hiring. And that is just unfair.
- andrewflnr 14y ago
  Anecdote alert: at the first place to give me an internship, about half the engineering staff were "Asian", especially if you count the Indian guy (Indians are Asians too, by any rational definition ;)). The CTO was Chinese and at least one of the major founders. The company was a spinoff of research at CaltTech, FWIW. Maybe it's different down here.
calibraxis 14y ago
As I'm told, female-only events can work well, because males tend to actively reinforce patriarchy. We are trained to, and often need to be deprogrammed to simply be aware of it. (Just consider our gendered dress codes. Many men would actually consider suicide rather than publicly wear "female" clothes. Most would be kicked out of their workplaces if they showed up in such dress.) So, it is only logical to consider voluntarily meeting in a space free of such disruptive people. (I'm not talking about the over-the-top Ruby brogrammers I know, whose talks feature sexual images of females who fit a narrow range of appearance. It's more mundane and everyday than that.) It's obviously not a perfect solution, but males are free to educate themselves and undermine their gender roles. Then we wouldn't need to resort to such measures.
- applecore 14y ago
  I can't tell if you're joking or not. Or maybe I'm just reinforcing the patriarchy.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - calibraxis 14y ago
    If you think that's strange, I personally consider CoffeeScript preferable to JavaScript, and some Lisps easier to think in than all the other programming languages. No stranger to ridicule and disbelief. :) (Which reminds me a bit about how the author is alienated from fellow females. How many of us feel alienated from our fellow programmers? Or fellow males, if you're male? Ever look at world events, and see humanity as a bit... strange? Realizing that, statistically speaking, you yourself almost certainly have many strange beliefs too, for being a member of such groups?)
RougeFemme 14y ago
I understand and even agree. The problem is that while you continue to not fight exclusion with exclusion, the original exclusion tends to strengthen and grow - not always deliberately, but the lack of intent doesn't change the net result. The original exclusion continues.

mitchty 14y ago

I guess i disagree to a bit. I understand where you're coming from there, but I think "girl only" cs meetups help eliminate a possible burden to get into the computer world. I think for that reason alone they're a good thing. Could it be taken too far? Sure but I don't see that happening right now, and at the moment given how few women are in our field I think more such things are needed to at least reduce the sharp edges people view from our world.

minamea 14y ago
> Could it be taken too far? But I'm under the impression that today we offer women-only CS courses and the norm has become women get hired over equally or more qualified men in the name of eradicating sexism. I humbly suggest this is taking it too far. I don't want to automatically get turned down for a job because a woman applied. I don't want to automatically get turned down for CS help because I am the wrong gender. Every time I hear about a company spending money on CS help for women or "prioritizing hiring women" I cringe, but the HN community seems to readily accept and celebrate those posts.
- dreamfactory 14y ago
  > I don't want to automatically get turned down for a job because a woman applied. If that were a real policy (which I don't think it is), I suppose the point is that even then the odds would be against it impacting you as there are so few women applicants.
  - minamea 14y ago
    But still morally wrong.
- mitchty 14y ago
  So I understand what you're saying about the "women only or prioritization". But, and note I'm obviously a guy, you're assuming the worst possible reasoning for this. Lets say the whole thing is trying to reverse the course direction of CS to help get more women in the field. We know that having equal amounts of both genders helps and strengthens teams. So while the preferential hiring of women might at first glance appear to be discriminatory, and it may very well be that. The intent might be completely different and the goal of the exercise is to improve the company or teams performance. Speaking from experience, I prefer more balanced teams. I absolutely hate men only teams because what eventually always seems to happen is alpha/beta male monkey behavior. It is unproductive and I notice a distinct lack of it when there are women around. Basically I think this is a non-issue to worry about until we get close to 50% of women in CS in general. Given how far behind we are, I'm not even concerned right now. In fact I'd love to join things like rails bridge or whatever just to get things moving forward. Also note "the HN community" doesn't exist, we're all individuals. This is my own viewpoint and biases. "we" celebrate these things because CS is far too white male centric and that needs to change. We need more viewpoints.
  - minamea 14y ago
    I believe what's morally wrong is morally wrong and should not be done. Someone could speculate that the US would be better off with the cheap labour of slaves but that's morally wrong so we'll stop doing it period. I don't care why you're hiring a gender over another. In my humble opinion it's wrong and should stop.
    - mitchty 14y ago
      That is a bit too one sided for my tastes. Concerte example time: If you're a hiring manager and have 4 white males on a team, do you really need another white male? Probably not, is it morally wrong to want a female on the team or say a non white male? I cannot see why it would be. Especially when we now know based on current research that even if the candidate is technically worse than another, the overall team benefits from the different viewpoints more than a "star" developer. Again, I am not in agreement this is at all a moral decision from a hiring point of view or overall as a community/CS viewpoint. Why is it wrong to hire for better performance? Why is it wrong to want more females in CS? Most importantly, how does that conflate to being a morality tale? The latter question would be aided here in you explaining your philosophical underpinnings of why a single gender meetup to get more of that underrepresented gender in the community as being morally wrong. The slave analogy is off base for this particular situation.
- Steuard 14y ago
  > I don't want to automatically get turned down for a job because a woman applied. I don't want to automatically get turned down for CS help because I am the wrong gender. Certainly! Nobody's goal is to reverse the historical situation so that men are systematically shut out of the field in some sort of vengeance for women being shut out for so long. A level playing field is absolutely the goal. But despite all the progress we've made, there are still many, many places where women have to deal with negative biases as students, as job applicants, and as employees. Women still routinely face exactly the sort of bias that you're concerned about, except that it's no longer socially acceptable for people to admit (even to themselves) that they're doing it. (Different industry, but there was a study not long ago that conclusively demonstrated subtle but meaningful bias against women when hiring science lab techs: fake applications with female names were rated lower than identical applications with male names, by men and women alike.) So my understanding is that when a company or college explicitly states a policy prioritizing women for help or hiring, they usually hope that this overt boost to female applicants will just cancel out the invisible but just as real biases against them.
  - minamea 14y ago
    Your tone suggests to inform rather than speculate and I would like to respectfully point out you might not be right: my fears are really happening, and we have actually got to the reverse of the historical situation. Here is an article that was posted on hacker news saying just that, and notice the very positive reaction it got from the community here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730673 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730673 EDIT: I know this is anecdotal evidence, and it's from Europe not the US. But notice what a positive reaction this had from HN. To me it shows that we don't mind this reverse historical situation.
- RougeFemme 14y ago
  I don't think that hiring women over equally or more qualified men is truly the norm, though it did certainly occur in some companies and with some individuals - and I'm sure it still does, to some degree. But I think it's a real stretch to call it the norm. And even if you accept the argument that it's the norm, the practice is certainly failing, isn't it, since men still dominate the ranks of programmers. They are no longer 100%, but they still are a huge majority.
  - minamea 14y ago
    Men dominating the ranks of programmers, I believe, is due to women being less interested in programming. You could easily see this if you look at CS class. There is no discriminating employer there, and yet still the classes are men dominated. I believe in getting women interested in CS, not discriminating against men in hiring and access to learning resources. As for whether it's the norm or not, here is the article that gave me that impression: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730673 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730673
- eaurouge 14y ago
  There are already other responses to your assertion that prioritizing for female employees is morally wrong. But how often do you hear startups talking about "culture fit" playing a role in hiring decisions? Is it morally wrong to prioritize culture fit over competency? If your answer is "no", it may surprise you to find that this is considered acceptable practice in many companies.

Scaevolus 14y ago

Is it worse than nothing? The logic seems to be: have imbalance partially caused by stereotypes -> encourage minority to lessen imbalance -> hope stereotypes change and balance becomes self-sustaining. Shifting cultures is hard. Lacking perfect solutions, maybe plausible ones will suffice?

fossuser 14y ago
It's a difficult problem and I don't pretend to know the answer. I do think that these kind of separate events may do more harm than good.
- edmccard 14y ago
  Do you think they will result in fewer women in CS? Or is it some other kind of harm?
  - fossuser 14y ago
    I think it's a little more insidious than that. It refocuses the issue to gender and suggests you're special in tech not because of what you've done or want to do, but simply because of what you are. I think this devalues the accomplishments by focusing on an unimportant aspect. It subtly suggests (unintentionally) that girls can't make it on their own and require this extra help - which I think reinforces the sexist stereotypes that are the core problem. Intimidation, feelings of inferiority and difficulty with work are universal issues, I don't think excluding people by sex is necessary. There's also the very non-zero chance that I'm underestimating the value women get out of these events, but exclusion based on gender just does seem like the best way to go about it. Maybe it's just that nobody likes to feel left out.
    - edmccard 14y ago
      >It refocuses the issue to gender and suggests you're special in tech... I think one of the purposes of these kinds of separate events is to make it so that women in tech are not "special". >I think this devalues the accomplishments by focusing on an unimportant aspect. Unimportant to you, maybe, but not to the people who face barriers because of their gender. To make an analogy, is the success of some African-Americans today "devalued" because they didn't have to work as hard for it as the "exceptional blacks" of previous generations? >It subtly suggests (unintentionally) that girls can't make it on their own and require this extra help... One of the benefits of living in society instead of striking out for the frontier is that, when the deck is stacked against you, you can band together to solve problems that might be too hard to face on your own. Yes, there are always "exceptional" people who can go it alone, but the fact that _somebody_ didn't need extra help doesn't mean that _nobody_ needs extra help. >I don't think excluding people by sex is necessary. Necessary for what? In an ideal world, you wouldn't have to take gender into account, but (imperfect as it may be), I think women-only events are a way to create environments where gender issues don't come into play.

aln 14y ago

There are good and bad qualities to the CS events catered towards women. I think they are good for women of certain age groups (maybe 18 and older?) who might have been discouraged from or misinformed about the field. For young girls, these events are probably unnecessary and reinforce the stereotypes. The events and boot camps made specifically for women to learn to code/learn about various opportunities are great, but I would hate for young girls to attend these events and learn about the gender inequality in case they weren't even aware of it.

astrieanna 14y ago
I'm not sure that going to a programming workshop for girls as a kid would have made me think what programming wasn't for girls. Coming to a "not for girls" signal involves realizing that they're having the event to increase female participation, rather than just because they want an all-girls event -- like girls scouts being just for girls. The "for girls" labeling is also for the parents at that age. If you want to have girls signed up, you need their parents to think it's a good idea. Their parents are more likely (I'd think) to be biased that girls probably won't like programming/tech. So they wouldn't think about it as something their daughter would like, except that it's especially for girls. I'm not saying it's great logic, but it seems like it might be a benefit to "for girls" labeling on programming events for kids.
- aln 14y ago
  There is a male equivalent to girl scouts- boy scouts/eagle scouts. There isn't a male equivalent to these events, and middle-school aged kids and above could definitely figure this out.

vacri 14y ago

If the balance were more even, sure, I'd agree with you. But until there's a head of steam for things to progress naturally, it does need an artificial poke. The problem wasn't solving itself before these kind of events.

colmvp 14y ago

"It's like fighting an exclusion problem with just a different type of exclusion and simultaneously reinforcing the divisions they're rallying against." In numerous tech offices/companies I've visited in the Bay Area and New York, I've met more foreign born white male programmers than African American male and Hispanic American male programmers put together. And despite the so-called high number of Asian males in CS in the US, I rarely see them in C-level positions in tech companies (say as CTOs) even compared to females. Yet I don't see or read nearly as many articles about initiatives in the tech industry to help any of those minorities increase their participation or break glass ceilings. And so as a minority, it kind of annoys me that I just get grouped with the so-called dominant segment of 'men' when I feel my and other races are under-represented in different ways. This especially comes out whenever there are tech meetups that are exclusive to women.

Evbn 14y ago
Start an Asian outreach effort. Get in touch with some Asian CxOs. (I worked for an Asian CxO once. So did everyone at Zappos.)
- hack_edu 14y ago
  "Binders full of asians"
bogger 14y ago
"And despite the so-called high number of Asian males in CS in the US, I rarely see them in C-level positions in tech companies (say as CTOs) even compared to females." Seeing as Asian-Americans are about 5% of the population while women are roughly 50%, all things being equal you would expect to see far more women than Asian men in any given position. But I agree with the sentiment that these events are fighting exclusion with more exclusion. I would even go so far as to say that some companies seem to have a policy of positive discrimination in favour of women when it comes to hiring. And that is just unfair.
andrewflnr 14y ago
Anecdote alert: at the first place to give me an internship, about half the engineering staff were "Asian", especially if you count the Indian guy (Indians are Asians too, by any rational definition ;)). The CTO was Chinese and at least one of the major founders. The company was a spinoff of research at CaltTech, FWIW. Maybe it's different down here.

calibraxis 14y ago

As I'm told, female-only events can work well, because males tend to actively reinforce patriarchy. We are trained to, and often need to be deprogrammed to simply be aware of it. (Just consider our gendered dress codes. Many men would actually consider suicide rather than publicly wear "female" clothes. Most would be kicked out of their workplaces if they showed up in such dress.) So, it is only logical to consider voluntarily meeting in a space free of such disruptive people. (I'm not talking about the over-the-top Ruby brogrammers I know, whose talks feature sexual images of females who fit a narrow range of appearance. It's more mundane and everyday than that.) It's obviously not a perfect solution, but males are free to educate themselves and undermine their gender roles. Then we wouldn't need to resort to such measures.

applecore 14y ago
I can't tell if you're joking or not. Or maybe I'm just reinforcing the patriarchy.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- calibraxis 14y ago
  If you think that's strange, I personally consider CoffeeScript preferable to JavaScript, and some Lisps easier to think in than all the other programming languages. No stranger to ridicule and disbelief. :) (Which reminds me a bit about how the author is alienated from fellow females. How many of us feel alienated from our fellow programmers? Or fellow males, if you're male? Ever look at world events, and see humanity as a bit... strange? Realizing that, statistically speaking, you yourself almost certainly have many strange beliefs too, for being a member of such groups?)

RougeFemme 14y ago

I understand and even agree. The problem is that while you continue to not fight exclusion with exclusion, the original exclusion tends to strengthen and grow - not always deliberately, but the lack of intent doesn't change the net result. The original exclusion continues.