101–110 of 116 posts
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The internet is the largest record of human history in existence. If you don't see the problem with it being created and curated by white and asian males the issue lies with you.
I'll offer this. At what time was any recorded account of history not skewed by some prevailing perspective?
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You're missing the point. The issue is not the raw numbers, but the pychological problem - that people like you are not in power, or not as equally holding power. That you are not of the type of people who have power. And yes, there are other privileges, like White privilege, middle/upper-class privilege, straight privilege, cis privilege, not-abused privilege, and so on. These intersect to cause more issues again.
The assertion that people in privileged positions can never see their own privilege is refutation-proof; but when you start creating negative categories like "not-abused" to privilege, it's hard to claim with a straight face that anybody except the people actually in power are all that privileged. Unless, of course, you're privileging gender privilege far above other types of privilege. ...and I just hit semantic sat…
I am privileged in some ways, and not in others. Generally privileges are treated as being different and hard to compare, because "oppression olympics" (arguing some are more harmful than others) never actually helps the discussion, and generally leads to people forgetting to check their privileges - who am I to speak for the experiences of other minorities?
The fact that you act amused at "not-abused" as a privilege is part of the whole problem, especially when you consider how this intersects with with privilege (or lack thereof) issues.
The concept of intersections between privileges (or the lack thereof) is important - that some combinations of the effects of a privileged society are worse than others.
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The assertion that people in privileged positions can never see their own privilege is refutation-proof; but when you start creating negative categories like "not-abused" to privilege, it's hard to claim with a straight face that anybody except the people actually in power are all that privileged. Unless, of course, you're privileging gender privilege far above other types of privilege. ...and I just hit semantic sat…
"The assertion that people in privileged positions can never see their own privilege is refutation-proof" Actually, I never said this, and I wouldn't. Most people who are privileged don't directly realise this, but it is common for concerned parties to learn about privilege to begin to "check their privilege" - to question how their privileges affects their interpretation of something. I am privileged in some ways, a…
I currently enjoy not-superstitious privilege, not-being-kidnapped privilege, not-being-forcefed-arsenic privilege, and many others that help me maintain my status and position in ways I may never have thought of. But calling them "privileges" is silly; it leads, as I said, to semantic satiation; and that's part of the whole problem.
Many people here do not enjoy neurotypical privilege, but they don't use that language, they try to describe the actual problems they face and the ways to surmount them as efficiently as possible.
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I admit, I haven't read the entire checklist. When the first item on it is blatantly wrong, I kind of got turned off. Go read about the advantages women have in hiring in the sciences: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12062&page=R1 Anecdotally, women are also given advantages in big corporate IT, but I'm not aware of any studies. Corporations are generally loath to give away data on stuff like this, who know…
Seems dated? Personally I call into question the masculinity of any guy that won't support his children, to the point of shunning one particular jerk for 10 years now. Women get hired, promoted and paid better than men in certain jobs (enlisted military service, govt jobs) that they strangely don't want! So some of it is self-inflicted.
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When people ask me how it is to work in a male-dominated workplace, I always point out "no drama". I've gotten away with it so far. To contrast, my wife works in a female-dominated kindergarden. There's so much "did you see the way X Looked at me", "Y ran crying from the meeting", "Z said Good Morning to W, but did you hear the tone of her voice?" going on it's making my head spin. I also used to work in a logistic f…
Man and women both have dominance politics. Men do things like shake hands too firmly, stare at each other's eyes, stand while the other person is sitting, play basketball aggressively after work, wear elevator shoes, etc. Women do it in different ways: drama. It's really the same thing.
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Just to be a contrary example, both my wife and I shave less now that we're married (ie, never). Our skin is much happier, shorter showers, far fewer razors going dull, and no more cactus in bed. She's also discovering she prefers it in other women - as a massage therapist, regardless of how recently they've shaved she'll encounter it all, and it's pretty amazingly irritating stuff.
as a massage therapist, regardless of how recently they've shaved she'll encounter it all As a guy who enjoys massages and has hairy extremities: no matter how much oil is used, the hair gets pulled. One of the primary reasons cyclists shave their legs is for better massages.
"You also get the added bonus of seeing people's confused reactions when they ask you if you're in marketing, and you tell them that you are a developer." This sentence really surprised me. How often does this happen? Female engineers are a minority, but I wouldn't have imagined it would be that big a deal to run into a female engineer.
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That's a nice thought, but the real promotions often happen on the grounds of "leadership", "management" and "communication skills", which women are often perceived to lack. Or maybe you work in a more egalitarian place than me.
If anything, I think women generally have _better_ communication skills than men. You do realize that we're talking in vast generalizations here. Engineers run the gamut; there will be sexist, racist and bigoted engineers too. But my experience in nearly 20 years of being in the field has been that engineers, _in general_, are more egalitarian. If someone comes up with cool shit, no one cares whether that person is a…
"You also get the added bonus of seeing people's confused reactions when they ask you if you're in marketing, and you tell them that you are a developer." This sentence really surprised me. How often does this happen? Female engineers are a minority, but I wouldn't have imagined it would be that big a deal to run into a female engineer.
I recently wrote an autobiographical paper from the perspective of women in technology for class. I found that women represent under 9% of the developers/designers at the company I work for, under 5% of the core developers on open source projects I contribute to, and under 3% of the contributors to those projects. So while I personally wouldn't make that assumption, it's probably not a bad one, statically speaking, f…