6 ms·

Why feminists are so annoying

46 points by Mojah 11y ago

richmarr 11y ago
the country that first legalized gay marriage Out of curiousity I started reading... depending on the interpretation this is either Canada, Denmark, or Mesopotamia. I'm guessing she means Canada. Good post though, spot on.
- programLyrique 11y ago
  Well, she seems to live in the Netherlands ( see http://www.felienne.com/about-3 http://www.felienne.com/about-3 )...
- dghf 11y ago
  Netherlands 2001, Canada 2005, Denmark 2012 (though recognised same-sex "registered partnerships" from 1989). Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage#Contemporary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage#Contemporary
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  I lived in Truro, Nova Scotia when two mounties, both men, were wed in Yarmouth, both wearing their red serge dress uniforms. Most of the wedding guests were also mounties, also in red serge. They made headlines all over the country for weeks; there was an outpouring of support. My maternal grandfather was a surgeon in the US Army Air Force Medical Corps during World War II. He committed suicide in a spectacular way in July 1948, after he was arrested for what at the time was the felony of sodomy. Being quite wealthy, he posted $10,000.00 bail withing the hour - 1948 dollars - then later that day was found dead in a rented rowboat in a lake outside Spokane, Washington. He made headlines all over the pacific northwest because he totally stymied the medical examiner with the cause of his death. Eventually they somehow figured out that he overdosed with insulin. My grandmother initiated a legal action to have my grandfather's death ruled a suicide. I don't know how that turned out because my mother refuses to discuss it, she was told he had a heart attack. I at time puzzle over whether I should initiate a legal action to have it declared a murder.
minot 11y ago
OK, I'll bite. > women ‘nagging’ about equal rights are so annoying Now, let's talk about the three concepts OP introduced. 1. Simply said: people want the world to be fair and they happily refute evidence of the contradiction. 2. People want to believe they are reasonable creatures themselves. 3. Accepting that there is a bias against women, means you must accept there is a bias in favor of men. The problem here is not that women want equal rights. No rational actor wants equal rights, only increased rights. It is very disingenuous to talk about a "white privilege" or a "male privilege" without acknowledging there are privileges that come from being $input_race and $input_gender. Of course, people of $input_race and $input_gender will usually not complain about the privileges they get. It is absolutely OK to seek parity in terms of rights. It is understandable that people seek greater rewards for themselves. Lets just not delude ourselves into thinking that what we want is equality when what we really want is better rights and greater rewards for ourselves. If feminism is about equality in rights and responsibility regardless of gender or sexual identity, there are a lot of people around who go by the wrong name. Downvoters: please leave a note.
- bayesianhorse 11y ago
  Long story short: You believe that feminism has already gone so far that women have more rights than men, right?
  - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
    Ever gone through a divorce?
    - bayesianhorse 11y ago
      So you promised to take care of your wife and children, and now you are held accountable to that promise? Buhu.
      - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
        I know a woman whose husband divorced her because she had a totally senseless affair with her best friend's husband.
bayesianhorse 11y ago
You don't need to be a feminist to want to make a programming community more "diverse". Often the lack of diversity is a sign that there is toxicity in the culture. Trying to attract more women, or people of color, or LGBTs rather than chasing them off can only make a community more healthy, in my opinion. Also, once you really take a look at "feminist" issues, they are a bit deeper and more complicated than people who say they don't believe in feminism seem to think.
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  In the united states, it is unlawful for employers to discriminate for reasons of age against people over forty. Even so, software engineers become unemployable in their late thirties. I am fifty-one. Also in the united states, it is illegal for employers to discriminate against the mentally ill, as well as those who are simply perceived as mentally ill. I have quite sever bipolar-type schizoaffective disorder. I link to my essays "Living with Schizoaffective Disorder" and "My Deepest Fear" at the top of every single page of my website, including my resume: http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/ http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/ http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/vancouver-diaries/thought-police.html http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/vancouver-diaries/thought-... "My Deepest Fear" concerns my vividly paranoid visual hallucinations. The specific reason I work as a coder rather than as a physicist is that I still write good code when I am hallucinating. I first realized that to be the case in 1988, I wrote LwSD in 2003 and now I can't get a job. How often do discussions of diversity include the mentally ill or the middle-aged? Among my deepest concerns is that I see many younger engineers - startup founders are the worst, as well as the people who they employ - making many of the same stupid mistake I did when I was their age, or the mistakes of my young colleagues. My aim these days is to find a job where I can teach the children not to fuck up. Unfortunately I cannot get a job because all the young people think I am incapable of writing code. I did the storage and firewire for a wireless audio recorder that won a technical academy award.
  - gaius 11y ago
    One day all the 20-something brogrammers are going to hit their 40s and thing damn, the time to tackle ageism was 20 years ago.
lclarkmichalek 11y ago
Part of it, to me, has always seemed to be due to the institutional/personal divide. I enjoy watching people playing video games professionally, and yet as a feminist, I can say that it is ridiculously sexist scene. I can condemn the institution without condemning its members, and my saying it is a sexist institution is not my apportion blame; I simply would like to see the system improved. See also: gamegate
- tshadwell 11y ago
  Where's the sexism in e-sports? I don't really have a position here, I just wanted to know. My gut feeling is that there will be a very high percentage of e-sports players who are men because the majority of competitive video game players are men.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
danso 11y ago
> 1 They remind us that the world is not a fair place, which contradict the Just World hypothesis. Simply said: people want the world to be fair and they happily refute evidence of the contradiction. So if girls in tech say they have less opportunity, we all love to believe they are wrong. The world cannot be unfair, could it? So: they must be wrong. This is, of course, untrue. There are many studies done proving that there is some subtle bias, like the one where resumes with a male name were rated as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. I've often wondered how much being Asian-American has contributed to my current life of being a programmer. Throughout school and college, I've never shown any particular passion or innate skill. But I got a lot of subtle encouragement, such as from my immigrant parents who thought majoring in computer engineering would be practical even though I was much more into journalism. After college I didn't even bother looking for programming jobs, but I gradually got moved more and more into programming roles...the engineering degree helped, but I have to guess that some of it was a lot of benefit of the doubt given to me, based on me looking like a computer nerd or having the stereotypical math aptitude attributed to Asians (I'm also pretty average at math). After enough years of this, I'm not a pretty competent and passionate programming...but it seems hardly by active choice. I believe the average young woman probably doesn't get as many chances or benefits of the doubt that I have.
mike_hearn 11y ago
The article seems to say: "Feminists annoy me because they are right". This is not why feminists annoy me, though. I don't think they are right at all. So the title of the blog post seems to extrapolate her own views out into a universal truth. This sort of thinking is especially dangerous: > With the same high school grades a white person has a 78% higher chance of being admitted to a university than a person of color I do not know where this stat comes from as she provides a cartoon instead of a reference, but assuming it's not a trivially bogus stat (e.g. because of differences in application rates), it sounds a lot like it could be a Simpson's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox The very same argument was made to suggest a gender bias in admissions at an American university (Berkeley): when you selected just people with the same grades, more men were accepted than women. Sexual discrimination!!! The problem is, when they tried to figure out which department was discriminating, the bias disappeared (actually became slightly in favour of women). It turned out to be a statistical anomaly caused by the fact that women tended to apply for much more competitive courses than men, like English Lit, so they were rejected more often due to overcapacity - not due to their gender. When you select only application rates and gender, this type of data abuse causes misleading conclusions. I don't know that the race stat is another example of this, but I find it hard to believe that such a dramatic case of racism across so many institutions could persist for so long without severe legal problems, if it was as open and shut as Felienne suggests. Final issue I have with this blog post: > You believe God put dinosaur bones in the earth to test your faith, you think vaccines cause autism? Yes, that’s crazy but also funny haha who cares? The first is harmless belief that doesn't normally impact other people, the second triggers preventable outbreaks of exceptionally serious diseases. So lots of people care and parents opting out of vaccinations is a very controversial issue right now! It seems very strange to use this as an example!
- iopq 11y ago
  It could be that white people with the same grades as people of color have higher SAT scores or any other factor that is not being stated. Or it COULD BE that people of color includes East Asians that actually get discriminated against BECAUSE they're so successful in college. I'd like to see the actual sources on the claim because it's too vague for me to comment on.
kungfooman 11y ago
Imposter syndrome.
scrollaway 11y ago
This post is weird. There are a lot of reasons to be annoyed and most of those have nothing to do with the cause, but the means employed. Riddle me this: Let's say some tech company has to match a man/woman quota of at least 40% on a CS position. (This is a pretty common theme in various places) Going by the numbers in this post, there's a 1.6% ratio in the author's class. Let's be extremely generous and say there's a 9:1 male/female ratio in CS. With those numbers, there's a 30% skew in favour of female employees. In a sector with a 9:1 male ratio, that means one in three male employee is rejected because of numbers. The real ratio is actually MUCH higher, remember. And on the other side of the equation, female employees would be very aggressively sought after because positions are not actually easy to fill and just because you can find the bodies doesn't mean the employees are good. Is this where we want to end up? End sidetrack. There's a lot of causes out there. Discrimination, everything. But feminism, I think, annoys more than others because it promotes unhealthy "fixes" such as this one above. You don't want to force people into a new belief system, you want to change their belief system. The former is super awkward for places where discrimination doesn't happen, and imho just perpetuates the issue. You want more women in CS? Make technology look like less of a boy's club at an early age (and leading into tech education) and wait 15 years for the results. I think the Minecraft kids generation will yield some pretty fantastic surprises on that level.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Re: forcing people. One of the great victories of our time was the federal government beating people over the head with racial equality. Broadly interpreting the 14th amendment and commerce clause to make not just de jure discrimination illegal, but trampling on peoples' core rights of association to tell them they had to invite blacks into their restaurants and hotels. It was ugly and a gross overstepping of the government's bounds, but necessary because the people needed to be civilized and they weren't going to civilize themselves in any reasonable timescale. If the government hadn't brought down the hammer we might still have a segregated south today. It's ugly and not always the right answer, but sometimes you need to beat civilization into people. I'm not suggesting we need the government to be involved. But sometimes you need top down intervention to fix a problem, and the fix isn't necessarily fair while its in progress. Sometimes top-down intervention is the only way to fix a problem in the long run, because he actors with power have no incentive to self-improve.
etherael 11y ago
Actually, no, it turns out this is in fact false. http://douglasernstblog.com/2014/01/17/white-privilege-artist-does-it-exist-or-do-i-simply-lack-critical-thinking-skills/ http://douglasernstblog.com/2014/01/17/white-privilege-artis... TLDR; a 4.0 GPA is not equal everywhere. Also, affirmative action means that you actually get a bonus for being a PoC, and if you are Caucasian or Asian, you are discriminated against as a matter of admitted policy. But hey, just world hypothesis makes people ignore that little tidbit too. Quelle surprise.
- colomon 11y ago
  Huh? I mean, I think the stats as presented in that cartoon are complete BS [1] too, but that link is in no way a meaningful refutation of it. [1] First hint: note that both pairs of stats presented add up to 100%, yet are described as relative odds of getting in. The second pair is even explicitly labeled "percentage of bachelor's degrees." Second hint: There have been multiple major lawsuits against affirmative action where both sides agreed that (some) minorities were being favored in college admission processes; the debate is over whether that is just. Third hint: Those lawsuits have stated that some PoC get boosts from the admissions process and other PoC get docked points. Yet this cartoon treats all PoC as a single homogenous group.
sputnikus 11y ago
I watched https://youtu.be/pPcMZX8OCP8 https://youtu.be/pPcMZX8OCP8 before reading the article and I find the video to be a very appropriate response.
wanderer2323 11y ago
That's one classic "pro-social justice" blogpost written in a didactic tone, touting some anecdotes, making a point of a statistic without any references and conflating all sort of social issues (women in IT? college admissions? bachelor degrees?). Funny thing is, the post itself if a perfect answer for why feminists are so annoying.
benaston 11y ago
No, feminists are annoying because the most vocal ones take a simplistic rather literal view of equality, which is a distortion of the more nuanced truth behind the ideology. Men and women have clear differences which should be celebrated. This means men and women can never be literally equal. It so happens that women are significantly over represented in nursing. It is not obvious that fighting this imbalance is worth the effort.
- joepie91_ 11y ago
  In the Netherlands, this difference is actually part of the typical school curriculum, in what I guess is called 'civics' in English. 'Gelijk' vs. 'gelijkwaardig', which translates roughly to 'identical' vs. 'equal'.
hal9000xp 11y ago
I'm from Moscow. I found feminists a bit annoying too. I worked for the second largest tech company in Russia. Everybody complain about Russia. But I have to say, that in my unit, there was many girls who works as developers. These girls are good software developers and I didn't see any issues working with them. Our HR and my team lead had no bias at all against women. It's ridiculous to think that there are bias against women. If she is a good candidate, she will be hired even in Russia. It's just a business, only skills are important, nobody give a .... about your gender. Shareholders interested in net profit, that's all. By the way, I see curious little correlation between leftists and feminists (hello to USA). I'm not leftist. Girls usually care much less about career (at lest in Russia) that's why they earn less in average. But those who care, do well (not only in tech). P.S. I love this video about feminists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oqyrflOQFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oqyrflOQFc And this right-wing channel too.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
auganov 11y ago
I hope a day comes when the mainstream figures out there's no generic "feminism" and "feminists". Whenever I hear people say "feminists bla bla bla", it's like - ummmm who exactly? It's pretty much like ranting about some imaginary "leftists".
jpgvm 11y ago
At the end of the day the issues with apparent female/male biases are mostly (but not purely I don't think) a matter of culture. If you don't perpetuate an image that a man should be a certain thing and a woman something else you won't have these problems. Fix TV, fix magazines etc, fix other women telling women they can't be programmers/engineers/other male dominated jobs. Fix other men telling men they shouldn't be manicurists/nurses/other female dominated jobs. It's not men telling women they can't be programmers usually. Just like like it's not women telling men they don't want men doing their nails. The fact it's always framed as men vs women is just dumb. There are still some bias issues left over once that is resolved but it's not clear if they wouldn't just resolve themselves once the above is corrected (salary gap for one).
jbssm 11y ago
Well, because they usually lack coherence in their reasoning. It's not fun to argue with someone that shouts equality when it suits them, and then are willing to accept an all world of specially tailored laws that specifically benefit them.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  That's zero-th level thinking on the topic. Read some, get some perspective on the problem and its possible correction.
sergioz 11y ago
Well, if women are underpaid (all else being equal), why companies doesn't prefer their labor as low-cost substitute?

46 points by Mojah 11y ago

the country that first legalized gay marriage Out of curiousity I started reading... depending on the interpretation this is either Canada, Denmark, or Mesopotamia. I'm guessing she means Canada. Good post though, spot on.

programLyrique 11y ago
Well, she seems to live in the Netherlands ( see http://www.felienne.com/about-3 http://www.felienne.com/about-3 )...
dghf 11y ago
Netherlands 2001, Canada 2005, Denmark 2012 (though recognised same-sex "registered partnerships" from 1989). Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage#Contemporary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage#Contemporary
MichaelCrawford 11y ago
I lived in Truro, Nova Scotia when two mounties, both men, were wed in Yarmouth, both wearing their red serge dress uniforms. Most of the wedding guests were also mounties, also in red serge. They made headlines all over the country for weeks; there was an outpouring of support. My maternal grandfather was a surgeon in the US Army Air Force Medical Corps during World War II. He committed suicide in a spectacular way in July 1948, after he was arrested for what at the time was the felony of sodomy. Being quite wealthy, he posted $10,000.00 bail withing the hour - 1948 dollars - then later that day was found dead in a rented rowboat in a lake outside Spokane, Washington. He made headlines all over the pacific northwest because he totally stymied the medical examiner with the cause of his death. Eventually they somehow figured out that he overdosed with insulin. My grandmother initiated a legal action to have my grandfather's death ruled a suicide. I don't know how that turned out because my mother refuses to discuss it, she was told he had a heart attack. I at time puzzle over whether I should initiate a legal action to have it declared a murder.

minot 11y ago

OK, I'll bite. > women ‘nagging’ about equal rights are so annoying Now, let's talk about the three concepts OP introduced. 1. Simply said: people want the world to be fair and they happily refute evidence of the contradiction. 2. People want to believe they are reasonable creatures themselves. 3. Accepting that there is a bias against women, means you must accept there is a bias in favor of men. The problem here is not that women want equal rights. No rational actor wants equal rights, only increased rights. It is very disingenuous to talk about a "white privilege" or a "male privilege" without acknowledging there are privileges that come from being $input_race and $input_gender. Of course, people of $input_race and $input_gender will usually not complain about the privileges they get. It is absolutely OK to seek parity in terms of rights. It is understandable that people seek greater rewards for themselves. Lets just not delude ourselves into thinking that what we want is equality when what we really want is better rights and greater rewards for ourselves. If feminism is about equality in rights and responsibility regardless of gender or sexual identity, there are a lot of people around who go by the wrong name. Downvoters: please leave a note.

bayesianhorse 11y ago
Long story short: You believe that feminism has already gone so far that women have more rights than men, right?
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  Ever gone through a divorce?
  - bayesianhorse 11y ago
    So you promised to take care of your wife and children, and now you are held accountable to that promise? Buhu.
    - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
      I know a woman whose husband divorced her because she had a totally senseless affair with her best friend's husband.

bayesianhorse 11y ago

You don't need to be a feminist to want to make a programming community more "diverse". Often the lack of diversity is a sign that there is toxicity in the culture. Trying to attract more women, or people of color, or LGBTs rather than chasing them off can only make a community more healthy, in my opinion. Also, once you really take a look at "feminist" issues, they are a bit deeper and more complicated than people who say they don't believe in feminism seem to think.

MichaelCrawford 11y ago
In the united states, it is unlawful for employers to discriminate for reasons of age against people over forty. Even so, software engineers become unemployable in their late thirties. I am fifty-one. Also in the united states, it is illegal for employers to discriminate against the mentally ill, as well as those who are simply perceived as mentally ill. I have quite sever bipolar-type schizoaffective disorder. I link to my essays "Living with Schizoaffective Disorder" and "My Deepest Fear" at the top of every single page of my website, including my resume: http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/ http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/ http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/vancouver-diaries/thought-police.html http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/vancouver-diaries/thought-... "My Deepest Fear" concerns my vividly paranoid visual hallucinations. The specific reason I work as a coder rather than as a physicist is that I still write good code when I am hallucinating. I first realized that to be the case in 1988, I wrote LwSD in 2003 and now I can't get a job. How often do discussions of diversity include the mentally ill or the middle-aged? Among my deepest concerns is that I see many younger engineers - startup founders are the worst, as well as the people who they employ - making many of the same stupid mistake I did when I was their age, or the mistakes of my young colleagues. My aim these days is to find a job where I can teach the children not to fuck up. Unfortunately I cannot get a job because all the young people think I am incapable of writing code. I did the storage and firewire for a wireless audio recorder that won a technical academy award.
- gaius 11y ago
  One day all the 20-something brogrammers are going to hit their 40s and thing damn, the time to tackle ageism was 20 years ago.

lclarkmichalek 11y ago

Part of it, to me, has always seemed to be due to the institutional/personal divide. I enjoy watching people playing video games professionally, and yet as a feminist, I can say that it is ridiculously sexist scene. I can condemn the institution without condemning its members, and my saying it is a sexist institution is not my apportion blame; I simply would like to see the system improved. See also: gamegate

tshadwell 11y ago
Where's the sexism in e-sports? I don't really have a position here, I just wanted to know. My gut feeling is that there will be a very high percentage of e-sports players who are men because the majority of competitive video game players are men.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

danso 11y ago

> 1 They remind us that the world is not a fair place, which contradict the Just World hypothesis. Simply said: people want the world to be fair and they happily refute evidence of the contradiction. So if girls in tech say they have less opportunity, we all love to believe they are wrong. The world cannot be unfair, could it? So: they must be wrong. This is, of course, untrue. There are many studies done proving that there is some subtle bias, like the one where resumes with a male name were rated as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. I've often wondered how much being Asian-American has contributed to my current life of being a programmer. Throughout school and college, I've never shown any particular passion or innate skill. But I got a lot of subtle encouragement, such as from my immigrant parents who thought majoring in computer engineering would be practical even though I was much more into journalism. After college I didn't even bother looking for programming jobs, but I gradually got moved more and more into programming roles...the engineering degree helped, but I have to guess that some of it was a lot of benefit of the doubt given to me, based on me looking like a computer nerd or having the stereotypical math aptitude attributed to Asians (I'm also pretty average at math). After enough years of this, I'm not a pretty competent and passionate programming...but it seems hardly by active choice. I believe the average young woman probably doesn't get as many chances or benefits of the doubt that I have.

mike_hearn 11y ago

The article seems to say: "Feminists annoy me because they are right". This is not why feminists annoy me, though. I don't think they are right at all. So the title of the blog post seems to extrapolate her own views out into a universal truth. This sort of thinking is especially dangerous: > With the same high school grades a white person has a 78% higher chance of being admitted to a university than a person of color I do not know where this stat comes from as she provides a cartoon instead of a reference, but assuming it's not a trivially bogus stat (e.g. because of differences in application rates), it sounds a lot like it could be a Simpson's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox The very same argument was made to suggest a gender bias in admissions at an American university (Berkeley): when you selected just people with the same grades, more men were accepted than women. Sexual discrimination!!! The problem is, when they tried to figure out which department was discriminating, the bias disappeared (actually became slightly in favour of women). It turned out to be a statistical anomaly caused by the fact that women tended to apply for much more competitive courses than men, like English Lit, so they were rejected more often due to overcapacity - not due to their gender. When you select only application rates and gender, this type of data abuse causes misleading conclusions. I don't know that the race stat is another example of this, but I find it hard to believe that such a dramatic case of racism across so many institutions could persist for so long without severe legal problems, if it was as open and shut as Felienne suggests. Final issue I have with this blog post: > You believe God put dinosaur bones in the earth to test your faith, you think vaccines cause autism? Yes, that’s crazy but also funny haha who cares? The first is harmless belief that doesn't normally impact other people, the second triggers preventable outbreaks of exceptionally serious diseases. So lots of people care and parents opting out of vaccinations is a very controversial issue right now! It seems very strange to use this as an example!

iopq 11y ago
It could be that white people with the same grades as people of color have higher SAT scores or any other factor that is not being stated. Or it COULD BE that people of color includes East Asians that actually get discriminated against BECAUSE they're so successful in college. I'd like to see the actual sources on the claim because it's too vague for me to comment on.

kungfooman 11y ago

Imposter syndrome.

scrollaway 11y ago

This post is weird. There are a lot of reasons to be annoyed and most of those have nothing to do with the cause, but the means employed. Riddle me this: Let's say some tech company has to match a man/woman quota of at least 40% on a CS position. (This is a pretty common theme in various places) Going by the numbers in this post, there's a 1.6% ratio in the author's class. Let's be extremely generous and say there's a 9:1 male/female ratio in CS. With those numbers, there's a 30% skew in favour of female employees. In a sector with a 9:1 male ratio, that means one in three male employee is rejected because of numbers. The real ratio is actually MUCH higher, remember. And on the other side of the equation, female employees would be very aggressively sought after because positions are not actually easy to fill and just because you can find the bodies doesn't mean the employees are good. Is this where we want to end up? End sidetrack. There's a lot of causes out there. Discrimination, everything. But feminism, I think, annoys more than others because it promotes unhealthy "fixes" such as this one above. You don't want to force people into a new belief system, you want to change their belief system. The former is super awkward for places where discrimination doesn't happen, and imho just perpetuates the issue. You want more women in CS? Make technology look like less of a boy's club at an early age (and leading into tech education) and wait 15 years for the results. I think the Minecraft kids generation will yield some pretty fantastic surprises on that level.

rayiner 11y ago
Re: forcing people. One of the great victories of our time was the federal government beating people over the head with racial equality. Broadly interpreting the 14th amendment and commerce clause to make not just de jure discrimination illegal, but trampling on peoples' core rights of association to tell them they had to invite blacks into their restaurants and hotels. It was ugly and a gross overstepping of the government's bounds, but necessary because the people needed to be civilized and they weren't going to civilize themselves in any reasonable timescale. If the government hadn't brought down the hammer we might still have a segregated south today. It's ugly and not always the right answer, but sometimes you need to beat civilization into people. I'm not suggesting we need the government to be involved. But sometimes you need top down intervention to fix a problem, and the fix isn't necessarily fair while its in progress. Sometimes top-down intervention is the only way to fix a problem in the long run, because he actors with power have no incentive to self-improve.

etherael 11y ago

Actually, no, it turns out this is in fact false. http://douglasernstblog.com/2014/01/17/white-privilege-artist-does-it-exist-or-do-i-simply-lack-critical-thinking-skills/ http://douglasernstblog.com/2014/01/17/white-privilege-artis... TLDR; a 4.0 GPA is not equal everywhere. Also, affirmative action means that you actually get a bonus for being a PoC, and if you are Caucasian or Asian, you are discriminated against as a matter of admitted policy. But hey, just world hypothesis makes people ignore that little tidbit too. Quelle surprise.

colomon 11y ago
Huh? I mean, I think the stats as presented in that cartoon are complete BS [1] too, but that link is in no way a meaningful refutation of it. [1] First hint: note that both pairs of stats presented add up to 100%, yet are described as relative odds of getting in. The second pair is even explicitly labeled "percentage of bachelor's degrees." Second hint: There have been multiple major lawsuits against affirmative action where both sides agreed that (some) minorities were being favored in college admission processes; the debate is over whether that is just. Third hint: Those lawsuits have stated that some PoC get boosts from the admissions process and other PoC get docked points. Yet this cartoon treats all PoC as a single homogenous group.

sputnikus 11y ago

I watched https://youtu.be/pPcMZX8OCP8 https://youtu.be/pPcMZX8OCP8 before reading the article and I find the video to be a very appropriate response.

wanderer2323 11y ago

That's one classic "pro-social justice" blogpost written in a didactic tone, touting some anecdotes, making a point of a statistic without any references and conflating all sort of social issues (women in IT? college admissions? bachelor degrees?). Funny thing is, the post itself if a perfect answer for why feminists are so annoying.

benaston 11y ago

No, feminists are annoying because the most vocal ones take a simplistic rather literal view of equality, which is a distortion of the more nuanced truth behind the ideology. Men and women have clear differences which should be celebrated. This means men and women can never be literally equal. It so happens that women are significantly over represented in nursing. It is not obvious that fighting this imbalance is worth the effort.

joepie91_ 11y ago
In the Netherlands, this difference is actually part of the typical school curriculum, in what I guess is called 'civics' in English. 'Gelijk' vs. 'gelijkwaardig', which translates roughly to 'identical' vs. 'equal'.

hal9000xp 11y ago

I'm from Moscow. I found feminists a bit annoying too. I worked for the second largest tech company in Russia. Everybody complain about Russia. But I have to say, that in my unit, there was many girls who works as developers. These girls are good software developers and I didn't see any issues working with them. Our HR and my team lead had no bias at all against women. It's ridiculous to think that there are bias against women. If she is a good candidate, she will be hired even in Russia. It's just a business, only skills are important, nobody give a .... about your gender. Shareholders interested in net profit, that's all. By the way, I see curious little correlation between leftists and feminists (hello to USA). I'm not leftist. Girls usually care much less about career (at lest in Russia) that's why they earn less in average. But those who care, do well (not only in tech). P.S. I love this video about feminists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oqyrflOQFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oqyrflOQFc And this right-wing channel too.

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auganov 11y ago

I hope a day comes when the mainstream figures out there's no generic "feminism" and "feminists". Whenever I hear people say "feminists bla bla bla", it's like - ummmm who exactly? It's pretty much like ranting about some imaginary "leftists".

jpgvm 11y ago

At the end of the day the issues with apparent female/male biases are mostly (but not purely I don't think) a matter of culture. If you don't perpetuate an image that a man should be a certain thing and a woman something else you won't have these problems. Fix TV, fix magazines etc, fix other women telling women they can't be programmers/engineers/other male dominated jobs. Fix other men telling men they shouldn't be manicurists/nurses/other female dominated jobs. It's not men telling women they can't be programmers usually. Just like like it's not women telling men they don't want men doing their nails. The fact it's always framed as men vs women is just dumb. There are still some bias issues left over once that is resolved but it's not clear if they wouldn't just resolve themselves once the above is corrected (salary gap for one).

jbssm 11y ago

Well, because they usually lack coherence in their reasoning. It's not fun to argue with someone that shouts equality when it suits them, and then are willing to accept an all world of specially tailored laws that specifically benefit them.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
That's zero-th level thinking on the topic. Read some, get some perspective on the problem and its possible correction.

sergioz 11y ago

Well, if women are underpaid (all else being equal), why companies doesn't prefer their labor as low-cost substitute?