Do Women Only Initiatives Really Help Women?
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Do Women Only Initiatives Really Help Women?
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Re: Do Women Only Initiatives Really Help Women?
#2Great post. I have been trying to make this point here on HN this past week or so, only to be downvoted into oblivion. Thank you for putting it so eloquently.
Re: Do Women Only Initiatives Really Help Women?
#3b-but the patriarchy!
Re: Do Women Only Initiatives Really Help Women?
#4If this is true, why are only 20% of Computer Science grads women? And the ratio has been falling since 2001.
Re: Do Women Only Initiatives Really Help Women?
#5On a side note, in traditional designation of gender roles in many cultures the women handle the family money, or do the sales (for example the man does the harvest and the women does the sale at the market). Which I think could be leveraged when it's time to break the mold.
Traditional gender roles has been exploited in education in some part of the world for example. They decided to focus on little girls going to school, since they will be the ones caring for the family later in life, they will be the one spreading the knowledge to the kids, so if there is a choice is to be made, it's more efficient to send a girl than a boy to school.
Re: Do Women Only Initiatives Really Help Women?
#6It seems doubtful that the answer to social inequalities is to make special privileges for each group to match the special privileges already enjoyed by others, as opposed to working more towards an ideal of equal treatment for everyone. I kind of cringe every time I see some study or argument saying something to the effect of, "Women are, in fact, better suited for this type of work than men are." The healthy thing to do would be to judge each individual on their own merits, regardless of what group they belong to. Women-only type things seem a bit regressive in that respect, in that they fight fire with more fire rather than fixing the underlying issue of automatic special treatment based on which group you belong to. Not that I'm actively against such programs, anymore than I would be against a bachelor's party or a girls-night-out. People have the right to organize and I know such programs were instrumental in helping to decrease the amount of sexism in society. The point is just that the more you isolate people into special groups and make them stand out, the more you encourage inequality in society as a whole. So yes I think this was a good post.
Re: Do Women Only Initiatives Really Help Women?
#7When Nixon went to China people said it took Nixon to go to China, implying only someone obviously anti-communist could go there without being labeled a communist.
Likewise, no man could say "Women in 21st century American cities are the privileged of the privileged," as the woman who wrote that article wrote, without being lambasted.
I don't know if I would say it so strongly, but the once-standard view that men succeed at women's expense seems to be crumbling as people recognize the glass cellar as powerful as the glass ceiling; that as much as men occupy the top echelons of business and politics, so do they occupy the bottom of homelessness; that as they dominate lucrative fields like engineering, so do they dominate fields that dominate workplace deaths like mining, construction, trash disposal, long-haul trucking, soldiers, etc; that as much as women have trouble entering STEM fields, so do men have trouble entering teaching, nursing, etc. Women are successful in the West -- more of them get college degrees, they live longer, no law forces them to register for the military (in the U.S. at least), the law doesn't imprison them nearly as much, the government has many programs to help them, and so on.
It seems that decades ago both men and women had to follow gender roles. Women's roles have since opened up, giving them more options. Men's roles have opened somewhat, but less so. I know a lot of fathers and I've never met one who didn't want to spend more time with his children, but they tend to have fewer options to.
Many of the initiatives the author of the article questioned could probably help more if they defined need around issues other than sex.
(EDIT: I hope people posting realize that HN weighting sinks stories with more posts than upvotes. If you want a discussion with many people participating, keep the number of posts below the number of upvotes the story gets. Otherwise it drops off the front page.)
Re: Do Women Only Initiatives Really Help Women?
#8If this is true, why are only 20% of Computer Science grads women? And the ratio has been falling since 2001.
Maybe its because women down't want to take Computer Science?
Re: Do Women Only Initiatives Really Help Women?
#9If this is true, why are only 20% of Computer Science grads women? And the ratio has been falling since 2001.
You're assuming that given free choice, more women would choose computer science. But there are lots of other higher status degrees to choose, so I wouldn't take that as a given.
Re: Do Women Only Initiatives Really Help Women?
#10> I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s true for everywhere else now, too. Are there sexist and biased individuals out there? Of course. Are there systems still in place from a sexist past that need to be revamped? Sure, and the flood of educated, successful women will eventually take care of that.
I can't speak for the women groups, but I think the last sentence in the above statement has not, to their opinion, borne itself out. Thus, the need for groups that specifically advocate for them.
I'll say this as a member of an "empowered" minority group... I'm Asian, I've grown up in nearly-all-white communities in the Midwest, my family was technically low-income but otherwise, I never felt disenfranchised. And I did follow in the "model minority" path of working hard and doing well for myself, and Asians, overall, perform highly on tests of academic measure and personal wealth in America.
But let's ignore the thing of not all Asian immigrants being on equal footing (that is Chinese/Korean/Japanese is not the same as, say, Cambodian)...Asians, despite their empowerment, get roundly screwed in media portrayal and perception. In news coverage and in popular media. The only reason why I watch WAlking Dead from time to time is because it is so utterly astonishing to me to see a popular lead Asian character who is not at all exotic, not valued for his math skills, and doesn't appear to know martial arts. (there's also BD Wong in Law and Order SVU, but he's not as much in the spotlight as Steven Yeun's character).
A friend of my works in an Asian American advocacy group...we both ponder on how Asians are indeed a privileged group, yet at the same time, because collectively we do so little to be the greasy wheel, there are ways we get stepped on. But because the meritocracy seems to be working for us (as a group), there seems to be little desire to get involved in advocacy.