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A 60 Minutes Story on Gender Equality Accidentally Proved the Persistence of Patriarchy (qz.com)
Over at Quartz, Ephrat Livni reports that a 60 Minutes story about gender equality accidentally proved the persistence of patriarchy. Reader theodp shares the report: Good intentions are nice, but they aren't enough, the TV news show 60 Minutes recently proved. The show's producers apparently meant well when they decided to do a segment on women in technology and the gender gap, which aired on March 4. But they ended up punching women in the gut, as the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, Reshma Saujani, puts it in her response to the segment. Ultimately, 60 Minutes featured a man, Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi. His [tech-backed] organization's mission is to expand access to computer science education in schools.
Women technologists like Saujani who were tapped to appear on the show about a year ago and worked with producers to provide research and interviews, ended up on the cutting room floor while Partovi spoke on their behalf. Here is the cruel irony: As a result, 60 Minutes' segment was accidentally exceptionally effective-it proved that women in tech really can't catch a break. [...] Ayah Bdeir, the founder of STEM learning toy company littleBits, also responded to the episode in a Medium post. She noted that she worked with 60 Minutes for a year, planning interviews, providing research, talking to the producers and reporters, telling her story and that of her organization, which is focused on closing the gender gap in technology. Yet producers wrote to her last August to say that the focus of the segment had shifted and that littleBits would no longer be central in the story. In an email, a producer explained to her, 'It's not that the important points you made in your interview are ignored in the story, or that you didn't make them very effectively, they're just made by others'.
Women technologists like Saujani who were tapped to appear on the show about a year ago and worked with producers to provide research and interviews, ended up on the cutting room floor while Partovi spoke on their behalf. Here is the cruel irony: As a result, 60 Minutes' segment was accidentally exceptionally effective-it proved that women in tech really can't catch a break. [...] Ayah Bdeir, the founder of STEM learning toy company littleBits, also responded to the episode in a Medium post. She noted that she worked with 60 Minutes for a year, planning interviews, providing research, talking to the producers and reporters, telling her story and that of her organization, which is focused on closing the gender gap in technology. Yet producers wrote to her last August to say that the focus of the segment had shifted and that littleBits would no longer be central in the story. In an email, a producer explained to her, 'It's not that the important points you made in your interview are ignored in the story, or that you didn't make them very effectively, they're just made by others'.
Just wondering, wouldn't closing the gender gap on trashmen be as valuable? Or teachers, which at least on my country are almost all women (and reasonably well paid). Oh, is that just chauvinism?
Let's be honest, this is about marketing. The interviewed people get named with their companies and their products, correct? How much do you want to bet someone just wanted to have their name front and center and paid a pretty penny for it?
How does this prove "the patriarchy"? Doesn't it really prove that media organizations don't practice what they preach?
What is this doing on Slashdot? Is it literally because "Women technologists like Saujani who were tapped to appear on the show-"? I don't not care about issues like this.... It's just stupid that it's on "News for Nerds that Matters." (yes I'm aware more and more often we're getting stuff that doesn't really relate to that.... but FFS) How many people on Slashdot even watch 60 Minutes?
Quite frankly this sounds as if the producer was too polite to say "you're bad at bringing points across".
She's the CEO of an activist organization that focuses primarily on gender. What are the odds she's a rabid feminist who's just going to put people off and knows little about technology? Their website makes that pretty clear: gender activism first, coding maybe 3rd if we've got some stock photos left over.
Sad, there was a time decades ago where some of them at least tried to be professional reporters.
Not true. 60 Minutes has never been professional journalism. From the beginning they relied on sensationalism, biased reporting, ambush interviews, editing of interviews to swap in different questions that what the interviewee actually answered, and fabricated evidence. They were doing fake news long ago.
Plenty of examples here.
Diversity is Everyone, but to be accepting of diversity also means realizing people who are not in your classification are just as human as you are, with a same sets of problems and needs that you have. But realizing that there are often old laws and cultural norms, that makes it harder for such people to function, as well as you do.
In America Catholics tend to be looked down on compared to the Protestant majority, however there are so many sects of Protestantism that makes Catholics the largest single sect of Christianity. Which explains how the problem with diversity, it is normally how we classify what group we are in at the current time.
Back in elementary school we had K-4 in individual local schools, and 5-8 were in a unified (across the district schools).
In K-4 there was this kid we weren't friends, (we weren't enemies either, we just didn't have any similarities) However when we moved to the fifth grade to a different school, where most of the classmates we never met before, for the first few weeks, we were friends because we were groups as the kids from that elementary school, because that was the biggest form of classification of the time. Later on other factors of our self classification kicked in and we have once again moved apart, as we were just too different.
We also see a lot of this in the military and during war. In a middle of a war you are classified as a solder for your country as is the other people you are fighting along with. The fact that the other guy may have a different race, religion, sex, political stance... then you really doesn't matter, because during this time, you need each other.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Problems with gender equality? You mean like how Google found it was underpaying men? Seems these days that the media is purposefully gas lighting us...
No, it doesn't prove anything
The story only proves that the writers used strong, loaded language. Even the headline "accidentally" is loaded meaning ignorance, "proved" is loaded as an absolute.
The article is filled with loaded, emotional, and biased terms: "punching women in the gut", "the cruel irony", "proved that women in tech can't catch a break", "tried to rationalize", "accidentally exceptionally effective", and more.
This bit of writing in the story is a real gem: But ultimately Bdeir felt that she could not explain away the show’s mistake, or blame herself, or her organization’s size, or the fact that English isn’t her first language. She could not ... wait, what? How do you parse that thing? She could not blame herself? She could not explain away how she blames herself? She couldn't explain that English isn't her first language? Everything after the first "or" turns the writing into nonsense.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Not 60 Minutes, but I've done extensive work with NPR producing programs. Generally the reason someone ends up on cutting room floors (at least on radio) is that they sound bad. The tone or timber of their voice is grating, the pacing of their speech is off, their speech is loaded with ums and uhs, something like that. Not that I've worked in television, but I suspect the methodology is the same - an interviewee doesn't look photogenic, doesn't maintain eye contact with the camera or maintains a kind of psychopathic stare. At NPR we would often interview three or four people who said essentially the same thing, and picked the best one or two to air. The rest is dropped.
And others have said this as well, but I suspect the real reason the CEO of Littlebits is upset is because she missed out on 3 or 4 minutes of free advertising (albeit with the 60 Minutes demographic, which I think is people over 60, so probably not her target audience anyway).
Note that the issue here is not diversity, it's that they were making a TV programme about women in tech and the issues they face, asked women to collaborate and help make the show, and it somehow ended as mostly one guy talking about it.
The issue is not his gender or race or anything like that, it's not even the guy himself - it's that women made something about women, but instead of letting women talk about issues that directly affect them and that they are directly involved in resolving, they went with this guy. Why can't women speak for themselves about things they have first hand experience of?
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The mere act of reducing people into their races and genders end up hurting a lot of people, and that's what those reports, and the political actions created by them end doing.
You should ALWAYS judge people by their individual lives, even if its more expensive.
It's exactly why I hate Identity Politics. It raises an "us v them" mentality, mandates that any slight, or any perceived wrong (such as being passed over for promotion) has to be because you're a member of group (x). It couldn't be anything other than that.
Once you start looking through the world from that perspective, everything becomes about that. Despite the extremely high likelihood that you're wrong (occam's razor; the fewer assumptions you make, the more likely you are to have a correct assessment). Assuming (x)ism is one hell of an assumption to make.
Um, in a program about women in tech, spending a year interviewing women for the program but then deciding "we don't need to put any of the women we interviewed on screen, we are only going to feature men saying that women are underrepresented" is, in fact, a solid statement in favor of the point "women are being ignored".
If the program were about Catholic males, and they spent a year interviewing Catholic males but then only used footage of a Muslim woman explaining Catholic culture, you might object, too.
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There's a massive SJW backlash on the Internet right now. It's generating a ton of advert revenue. This is just more false controversy drummed up for clicks. Like the Captain Marvel/Rotten Tomatoes story. They're winding us up and sending us off to make money off our eyeballs.
The same thing's been going on with the YouTube skeptic community. A bunch of skeptic channels I rather liked became 24/7 rants about SJWs and feminism because the anti-Homeopath and pro-vaccine stuff they were running wasn't paying the bills...
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> It is too bad, you see reports of inequality with different groups as an attack on the white male.
These reports blame men, claiming, like this article, that certain differences are proof of a patriarchy. These reports don't usually talk about male vs. female suicide rates, or imprisonment rates, or the lack of male nurses or teachers, or the lack of female bricklayers or coal miners, or about men falling behind in higher education. That's why these reports are an attack on men - they are not about creating a better society, they just complain that women are behind men in a few cherry picked areas, and they blame men for this.
I'm all for helping disadvantaged people, regardless of gender. Maybe that could be based on socioeconomic status?
> For some reason people find it difficult to see people who look differently them them as equals and be able to treat them as such.
That's exactly what articles like this are doing - feminists wanting women to be treated preferentially. All people should be treated as individuals. Group identity should be immaterial.
It's a solid statement about them being ignored by THE NEWS MEDIA. It's a pretty blatant example of the media lying to you. Whatever agenda you wand to support beyond that is dubious.
This is a great example of media bias, not a confirmation of the victim hood narrative.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"Oppressors". Because of their race and skin color. Yeah okay.
"White fragility" == reacting appropriately to being told you are a racist when you know you are not.
Can you give examples of "systemic oppression" in recent decades? Didn't think so.
Well, as a gay man, I find that my "oppressors" these days are found in the progressive movement, the social justice movement, and the Democratic party.
Indeed people today in western majority-white countries are far less racist than other countries, it just happens to be more widely publicised because the media and/or authorities might actually do something about it.
In many non white countries, racism simply happens and is part of daily life and you have no recourse against it whatsoever.
It's also mostly white countries that have allowed mass immigration, and mostly white countries where immigrants can gain the same citizenship rights as those born locally.
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Businesses are out to make profit...
If it were possible to pay women less than men but otherwise achieve the same standard of work, don't you think that all companies would be exclusively hiring women?
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It's only an "obvious problem with optics" if you assume that his gender matters. An inherently discriminatory assumption.