A quote: "Let this serve as a message to everyone, our actions and words, big or small, can have a serious impact," he wrote, adding he was the father of three

A quote: "Let this serve as a message to everyone, our actions and words, big or small, can have a serious impact," he wrote, adding he was the father of three children. "I will be at pycon 2014, and I will joke and socialize with everyone but I will also be mindful of my audience, accidental or otherwise." Okay, let's examine this. Isn't the immediate goal to get more women into science and technology, with the larger goal of assuring and defending gender equality in all respects? Can we agree on that? What does gender equality mean, exactly? Doesn't it mean treating all people in a "gender-blind" way, just as avoiding racism means treating all people in "color-blind" way? On payday, women complain that they're not treated equally, and they're right -- they should be treated equally. On election day, women have been given -- and deserve -- the right to be treated equally -- to do otherwise would undermine democracy. But the rest of the time, away from the pay window and the voting booth, women militantly demand to be treated unequally. The PyCon incident is just one example of an established pattern in which, before speaking to a friend, you had better check your surroundings to make sure no theoretically equal individuals can overhear what you're saying. Any number of feminists have correctly pointed out that the first step in oppressing and disenfranchising women is to argue that they're too delicate for everyday reality and should be placed on a pedestal. Now it's women who make that argument -- women who are actively participating in their own oppression. Women have every right to equal treatment -- in employment, in pay, in civil rights. But for this to happen, women need to stop demanding unequal treatment. The present problem is not men, many of whom see women as equals, it's those women who don't want equality, and who yell it from the rooftops. True gender equality will arrive, not when women are given the rights they deserve (that's already happened), but when women accept and embrace those rights.