An open letter on feminism in tech

In U.S. medical and feminist academics (and elsewhere,) "male/female" refers to sex: XX/XY chromosomes and the resulting organs, body type, etc, resulting in human sexual dimorphism, to which there are rare, exceptional cases, where the person is called intersex.

"man/woman" are common terms colloquially referring to male/female people (you probably know this). In the context of certain feminisms, the words refer to people born male or female, and then raised into the gender roles defined by society as appropriate for male and female people. These gender roles are what are invoked by words like "manly", "womanly", "sissy", and other "gendered" words and insults.

In other feminisms, the words refer to people who "identify" as one or the other, where this identity is either "innate" or otherwise fluid or something. Full disclosure, I sympathize with the former sort of feminism, so I'm not exactly the best person to give a comprehensive synopsis here.

Judith Lorber's "Gender Inequality" is a book that goes over individual feminist movements and waves, without necessarily pushing any of them on the reader. It's not too long, I recommend it.

If you read the wiki article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender

You can see the following quote: _Depending on the context, the term may refer to biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or intersex), ..._

LGBT has a tendency to use the term gender to mean gender roles, where the lines are a bit more obscure. I believe psychologists do as well.

But in every day vernacular, gender refers to sex for most people, and as the wiki article suggests, it's completely acceptable to use it in that manner.

I'll repeat what I said before, the poster was just looking for something to attack.

Some of it, maybe. A lowered standard of functional adulthood for such people doesn't seem like it would do them any favors; instead, it'd deny them the very feedback they need to learn better.

Immaturity doesn't strike me as the major problem here, though, unless you want to argue that the average degree of social maturity in our industry resembles that more commonly expected on a grade-school playground.

Even if that were true, then the maltreatment under discussion would be a lot more evident than it is to those of us who aren't its targets, because those who engage in it would lack the necessary cunning to choose their target and their context so that a complaint can be dismissed as he-said-she-said. Such cunning requires at least some capacity, whether cognitive or intuitive, for social analysis -- enough so, in fact, to exceed the minimum threshold for "I didn't understand what I was doing was wrong".

This being true, your choices are either to assume the existence of a feminist conspiracy aimed at the overthrow of the existing industry, or to assume that those men who are most responsible for the problem under discussion know very well that most of us would utterly refuse to put up with their shit if we saw it going on, and that's why they make sure that we don't.

I really agree with this, there's going to be assholes everywhere, especially on the internet. I don't know if women are targeted by them more often than me, but if the plan is the eliminate them I wish you good luck, but I'm not going to waste my time.

The majority of people really do not care about your gender, race or religion, but a few are going to use it against you, or just resort to to offend you in some generic term.

There will be jerks everywhere, accept it. I really wish there where more women in technology, but I'm not going to treat you any different than my male colleague and I don't appreciate the hostile attitude that many ( fare for all ) women projects.

I get that women don't want to deal the sexual harassment, jerks, assholes, but you encounter that everywhere. I'm not saying that it makes it okay, but just maybe it's not a "women in technology", it might just be a generic problem that needs to be tackled in a broader arena.

The whole debate is really of track and I really don't care anymore, I just get increasing pissed when the topic comes up. It seems that "the men" can't do anything right and guess what, many of us are tried of it and have just checked out. It not our problem anymore. Awesome way of enlisting help for the people who just view women as equal colleagues.