Ambient Un-Belonging: Women and Tech Startups

Post by tomjen3 » Tue, Sep 07, 2010, 5:48 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #12

erikpukinskis wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most heartbreaking things smart men do in response to accusations of sexism is to focus on the rare exceptions to women's oppression while failing to even acknowledge the rampant examples of it. Men. Are. Victims. Too. But a conversation about women's oppression is not an appropriate context to explore it. It makes us feel like you don't believe women's oppression is a problem.

And now I finally remember why I stopped arguing with feminists. Unlike reasonable discussions, where you make a point and the other person points out the flaws in your reasoning, or presents evidence for a counterpoint, or something like that, arguing with feminists always ends up with the feminists expressing their emotions and trying to rule certain arguments "out of bounds", not because the arguments are flawed o…

Post by anthonyb » Tue, Sep 07, 2010, 6:59 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #20

anthonyb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much pointing out flaws in the reasoning, as Kiba taking the argument completely off the rails. "Boo hoo, we have it tough in some very specific edge cases" while ignoring the general everyday case doesn't do much for the argument either. And how can you talk about why there aren't more women or other minorities in tech when you're just going to paint it as vague or emotional and ignore what they say?

It takes the conversation equally off the rails to flippantly characterize the issue as "oppression".

Post by patio11 » Tue, Sep 07, 2010, 8:22 AM UTC

earl wrote: post #15

gukjoon wrote: post #11

Why is it un-PC to acknowledge that there are fundamental differences between men and women in terms of both innate talents and, more importantly, motivations? Differences that would lead to huge demographic disparities in incredibly niche fields like software engineering and starting technology companies? Mike Arrington says flat out that the reason why there aren't enough women in tech is because "not enough women…

Except I keep meeting female engineers (including several coworkers) who are all foreign -- chinese, indian, british, E European. So it's not unreasonable to infer that culture - specifically American domestic culture - is a big piece of the puzzle.

Post by anthonyb » Tue, Sep 07, 2010, 12:09 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #24

anthonyb wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. Oppression is a pretty accurate word for what happens to women in IT. Somebody presenting their opinion about how they're being unfairly treated is hardly flippant.

"Oppression is a pretty accurate word for what happens to women in IT." We call that "assuming what you're supposed to be proving", or for people who still remember the traditional meanings of idioms, "begging the question".

Post by kiba » Tue, Sep 07, 2010, 1:18 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #22

kiba wrote: post #2

We cannot and will not eliminate all gender inequality, and some inequality does not alway favors men. (A good example of this is that no matter how accomplished or rich a man is, he will probably be asked to laid down his life for children and women. That's not discrimination, but grim pragmatism.) Some disparity will alway boil down to choices. If women take maternity needs, than she will expect to be behind her pe…

>A good example of this is that no matter how accomplished or rich a man is, he will probably be asked to laid down his life for children and women. That's not discrimination, but grim pragmatism Once upon a time that was true - but since everybody is supposed to be equal now, you can bet that I am not going to do that. And I don't think that many men are doing that either.