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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'.
Nurses are majority female, and there's no talk at all about encouraging more men to join that high paying profession.
Paramedics are majority male (slim majority, not nearly the imbalance of nurses) and there's constant pressure to "fix" the situation.
There's never pressure to get more women in to menial or low paying jobs, and there's never pressure to get more men in to any job. There's also no pressure to get more men to win custody battles, or to believe men who have been victims of domestic violence or sexual assault. There's also a gigantic funding difference in research to cure diseases that hit mainly women (i.e. breast cancer) vs those that hit mainly men (i.e. prostate cancer).
All it proves to me is that stories like this sell. Think we'd be discussing this if it was actually a story about women in IT?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There are plenty of programs to try to get more men in nursing (and teaching). Here is just the first Google result I found, but you can find plenty more: https://dailynurse.com/recruit...
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.
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).
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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
> 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.
"White fragility" == reacting appropriately to being told you are a racist when you know you are not.