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A Plan On How To Stop Sexism In Science
StartsWithABang writes: If there's nothing else that science has to offer, it's this elegant notion: that anyone, anywhere, at anytime, can investigate and uncover the mysteries and workings of the Universe simply by asking it the right questions in the right ways, listening to its answers, and putting the pieces together for themselves. Anyone can do it. Only, for various and sundry reasons, not everyone gets to do it. Some people don't have the economic ability, some don't have the sustained drive or interest, and some simply can't cut the mustard. But some people — some really, really good people — are driven from their passions for a sad, simple and completely unnecessary fact: that they were treated in unacceptable ways that they refused to just accept. And in a great many cases, that unacceptable treatment came simply because of their gender. Sexism sometimes looks like what you expect, and sometimes not. Here's one opinion on what we can all do about it to create the world we really want: where science really is for everyone.
TSIA. It's meaningless pap.
"I am saying that you have a responsibility to treat every person that comes throughâSâ"âSnot only your work life but your life in generalâSâ"âSwith kindness and respect."
No, REALLY?
A PLAN would be something like: ....because until you extract one of the fundamental drives from our cells (in fact, one might say it is THE drive, as reproduction is the sole reason that there exists a male gender in the first place), men are not going to stop noticing - and reacting - to women.
1) "De-program the mating instinct from humanity"
2) Now watch men treat women more like each other.*
*personally, I believe what women are objecting to is, in a way, men treating them like each other. Obviously, not superficially; but men are competitive as hell, I daresay it's almost instinctive. And the guy who would actively demean or denigrate a woman because of her gender is the same sort of personality that would do the same thing to another man if he's brown, or from Minnesota, or had anything that could be used as such leverage.
Simultaneously, we all can easily trot out examples of women getting special treatment because they're female. Wearing a little lower-cut shirt than they needed to in that tough interview? A little eye contact gets her a free drink? Men will generally stop treating women as sex objects when they - throughout their lives - stop encountering women acting like that.
-Styopa
Apologies for length but this issue is sorely getting on my nerves.
I realize that the goal of a lot of these campaigns and whatnot is so that we develop gender-blindness so that women can succeed, yada-yada, but when was the last time that the submitters actually asked any women who frequent this site how they feel.
The alarming frequency of how much I hear about how women in tech need to be helped because OMG sexism!!! is really standing on my very last nerve (and this isn't just in tech, it's in a lot of areas...in the past two weeks, on my Facebook feed alone, I saw a semi-famous internet guy shilling the "poverty is sexist" hashtag and coordinating charity because "women are affected more by poverty than men", the church I just quit put out a fact sheet that men were 95% of perpetrators of domestic abuse, and in addition to Hack Reactor's generous need-blind deferment of tuition, they're now offering scholarships to women...all of which I find to be dubious, or at best moderately short-sighted, to say nothing of the fact that anyone who would question the goodness and purity of the intentions behind any of these MUST be an MRA, which is a group I find to be wildly misunderstood anyway). Never mind all the pro-woman people I know who aren't even in tech pushing the wage gap myth.
It's almost like there's a concerted campaign out there to get people tilting at windmills or something.
Okay, I'm not a typical woman, bear in mind - a number of my "guy friends" like to point out I come across as more male than female, sometimes even more they themselves do. But hear me out for a little bit.
The issue as I see it is not that there isn't sexism - there most certainly is, and yes, I've experienced it. The issue is that all of this fear-mongering is wildly and substantially overblown.
I will say it again. YES, there are sexist men out there. YES, not enough people call it out. YES, there is real injustice out there.
BUT:
YES, women can be sexist too, and I find all of these alarmist cries of sexism to be making it all worse, not better. Women become suspicious of men, and start to believe that 10% of M&Ms are poisonous garbage. Suddenly all men are suspect, and what's that called? SEXISM. But either way, there isn't nearly as much sexism or even as many bad-actors as you might think out there, and if you think so, stop watching so much television.
YES, not enough people call it out, but what do you really think people are supposed to do about it? Most people don't want to get caught up in other people's drama, because if they do, they don't know how to handle it. If we all knew how to tackle all the world's problems, we wouldn't HAVE problems.
YES, there is plenty of injustice in the world, but if we keep drawing arbitrary lines, like male vs. female, then what's going to happen is we're always going to look for those dividing lines everywhere. If all you're looking for is faults, eventually that's all you're EVER going to see. More than that, it doesn't help with equality or gender-blindness. It fact, it's counter-productive. It makes one side suspicious of the other. It creates warring factions.
You can have equality - a notion that assumes women are capable of all the things that men are, including handling their own problems - or you can have the notion that women are somehow handicapped and need gentler handling. Pick one. Pick only one. You can't have both. Not yours.
Women, if you want to be respected in tech, show up, do good work, be reliable and dependable, and for the love of Christ, stop pointing out that you're a woman. Far fewer people care that you're a woman than you think, they just want to make sure deadlines are met and profits are made. Making it about sexism doesn't make a conducive working environment and you're not helping ANY other women at all. And if sexism is so pervasive that you can't succeed, leave. Sometimes the best thing you can do is admit that the problem is much bigger than you. There ar
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
http://www.ashedryden.com/blog...
Meritocracy is the belief that those with merit float to the top - that they should be given more opportunities and be paid higher.
We prize the idea of meritocracy and weigh merit on contribution to OSS. Those who contribute the most, goes the general belief, have the most merit and are deemed the most deserving. Those who contribute less or who don't at all contribute to OSS are judged to be without merit, regardless of the fact that they have less access to opportunity, time, and money to allow them to freely contribute.
As the people who exist within this supposed meritocracy don't exist within a vacuum, we also have to realize how our actions affect others. Meritocracy creates a hierarchy amongst the people within it. Some of those at the top or striving to at least be above other people have been guilty of using their power for bullying, harassment, and sexist/racist/*ist language that they use against others directly and indirectly. This creates an atmosphere where people who would otherwise be deemed meritorious within this system choose not to participate because of a hostile, unrewarding environment.
Yes if you contribute to OSS projects don't you dare think that's merit.
Thank you for your comment. I've been saying much the same thing for - it seems like - forever. But it's one thing coming from a guy (even though my wife is in tech, and agrees with all of this), and entirely another coming from a woman.
"there are sexist men out there"
I would put it even more generally: There are jerks out there. Men and women both. That is, unfortunately, just the way life is...
"You can have equality - a notion that assumes women are capable of all the things that men are, including handling their own problems - or you can have the notion that women are somehow handicapped and need gentler handling. Pick one."
This. Exactly this.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Maybe it depends on the country you're in. From the admittedly small number of Australian based laboratories I've worked in gender has not ever been an issue. The issue in every department/laboratory has been funding (e.g.: NHMRC grants) and that generally comes down to politics and what research areas are popular at the time.
Indeed, with statements like:
Most authority figures in my field aren’t sexist, aren’t sexually harassing anybody, and treat everyone based on their own merits as people.
How do we get "institutionalized sexism" from this?
I am willing to bet that the level of Sexism for Male Elementary School teachers, Male Nurses, and other Historically Female dominated positions, is much worse than when a Woman goes into a Male dominated position.
Ok, you get a job and you are the only Female worker there, you feel uncomfortable, I get that, but the same thing will happen if you are the only person of your particular Race, or Ethnicity.
When you are the minority you feel more threatened than what is actually happening. The problem of why it is hard to fix, is because for the larger part it isn't an external issue, but an internal issue.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think a lot of the SJW (prevalent on reddit and of course tumblr) has more to do with youth and inexperience. These are basically Millennial's who've been coddled their whole lives, or social-science academics, (and of course the internet) and seldom encounter a viewpoint that challenges their world-view. When they're in college and meet like-minded people, they become militant ideologues shouting down people with differing opinions that make them 'uncomfortable'.
You can see this every time college kids protest a speaker who ever said anything offensive or politically non-comforming.
But this is hardly ever encountered in the real-world unless there's a street demonstration that includes young white kids.
This Sig does not Exist.
Except that every empirical experiment proves you are wrong about that.
Vet schools on average admit 4 males for ever female student admitted. But when the personal details on applications are obscured, so that the selection committees do not know the gender of applicants - it switches to 60/40 female selection !
What this means is that every woman who does become a vet had to work 4 times as hard and be 4 times as talented as the men who became vets. No amount of bullshit will make that NOT sexism or something the students can control.
3 quarters of the women who would be great vets are excluded to allowed in twice as many men who will at best be mediocre vets.
That's sexism in action.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I gave one as an example.
More like "mentioned". I didn't get to read it.
They all confirmed what I said, there hasn't yet BEEN one that found the opposite.
I'm skeptical. I'm cursorily familiar with research which actually does call into question some of these gender pay gap studies, for example.
So I could say that I know EVERYTHING about the studies that questioned my beliefs - they all ended up confirming them when tested.
You could say that, but it would sound kind of kooky.
I'm speaking specifically to transsexualism, which is a small subset of transgenderism. Transsexualism itself is no longer considered to be a psychological issue, and it has both elements of gene expression and physical brain development.
Of course it has psychological implications - but where did this "equating sexual attraction to a specific gender with the desire to become another gender" enter into the discussion? I think the post I was replying to was referring to favourable bias towards female candidates for jobs, not sex.
That being said, I agree with you that equating the two is a disreputed theory called (in m2f cases) autogynephilia, pushed by Ray Blanchard, J. Michael Bailey, and Anne Lawrence, which interpreted transsexualism in a sexual, rather than gender, context.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.