Sexism

A mild tangent: When the Internet was being rolled out beyond the initial research labs it ended up being part of the library's remit. Thus there are a bunch of women of a certain age who were there at the early days of the Internet who know a lot about protocols and netiquette etc.

Why are those free speech cheerleaders always to opposed to people freely talking to each other, telling each other why they think something is or isn’t a bad idea?

A couple of startup could have used people with better PC filters to keep them out of hot water and keep them out of the news with bad PR.

To mangle a famous quote, "The greatest trick privilege ever pulled was to convince the privileged it didn't exist."

One of the toughest problems with structural inequalities is that they hide themselves from those who are benefited, largely because they are not directly and adversely affected by the inequality. This is exacerbated by the fact that on the whole, privileged people are not bad people, and coming to grips with how much the system favors you by virtue of being born into the right family can certainly make you feel like an undeserving wretch, profiting off of the misery of countless others. It is vastly more comfortable not to think about these things, particularly when thinking about them often makes you feel even worse when you realize there's no easy way to correct them.

But that discomfort is one price we, as privileged people, should pay. We should live in a shameful awareness of how we benefit from a system that undervalues and exploits people to greater and lesser degrees. We should recognize that denigration of things through sexist, ablist, racist or heteronormative language is an expression of indifference to the suffering of people. We should live our shame because it cannot match what we collectively allow to happen to other people, because otherwise we are passive participants in the continued oppression of other people, and because maybe being painfully aware of what we are doing to them will also make us aware of steps we can take to end the structural oppression.

I really have to say I strongly disagree with Kenneth Ballenegger's characterization at the beginning of the second paragraph of the developer who was "forced to rename his open source project." Clicking on the link provided, that's clearly not what happened, unless you call him having a chat over Twitter with a friend of his "being forced." Reading over the guy's account, he was glad to do it, and felt like it was a great step to take. Talking as though it was some sort of situation where people ganged up on him to force him to take down something he worked hard on is more than a little misleading. Here, read it yourself and let me know if you think it sounds like he was "forced":

https://github.com/whit537/assertEquals/blob/master/ANNOUNCE...

That mischaracterization aside, though:

I disagree with almost everything in this article, although I think I see where he's coming from. Yes, for us guys in tech, it can sometimes seem a bit scary watching how much damage it can do when a company gets hammered for sexism on Twitter. I think a lot of us get a sort of fear of that happening to us, and can get a bit defensive when we're told that we've done or said something sexist, racist, or otherwise bigoted. And because we are generally blind to the ways our privilege assists us every day, we tend to feel as though we're the ones being attacked, completely missing the fact that sexism still hurts women and holds them back.

>>We cannot beat sexism until gender is no longer an issue.

This point doesn't make much sense to me at all. I think this is supposed to mean that sexism is a problem when and only when people 'make gender an issue' - and to imply that discussing sexism makes everything worse because it naturally 'makes gender an issue.' The question here is natural - an 'issue' to whom? The whole point is supposed to be that sexism is an issue women in tech have to face even if we men have the privilege of completely ignoring it if we want. It wasn't an 'issue' in 1950 that women were forbidden from holding any authority in the office; it was just a fact of life.

What really bothers me about this standard of victory over sexism - 'when gender is no longer an issue' - is that it sounds distinctly like a request that people please shut up about it already. Particularly when coupled with the next sentence...

>>Keeping up the current level of discourse is making things worse.

... which, by the way, seems demonstrably wrong to me. Does anybody care to cite any statistics about women in tech right now? Women in business? I wonder if there's any metric by which the current discourse is actually making things worse. Sure, it's not fun to have to confront privilege and deal with inequality; but it makes us all better human beings, and that's the point.