351–357 of 357 posts
Is this just an issue in the USA, or perhaps just radical San Francisco? In other countries men and women tend to work together quite happily in SW development jobs without all of this nonsense.
Obviously it's going to be different in different places, but gender issues definitely come up here in Australia.
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The assumption that racism and sexism result in elastic deformation of society that will go away as soon as you remove whatever force is warping it. Yes, this is the economic assumption - folks are greedy and will exploit undervalued resources. I don't think history bears that out. Society is a soft ductile metal. If you bend it, it'll stay bent. This ignores the history of various oppressed groups who unbent themsel…
> This ignores the history of various oppressed groups who unbent themselves (east Asians, south Asians, Jews, Irish). It also ignores the fact that women have unbent themselves in most fields, just not math heavy STEM fields. I almost had a crazy theory about what determines if a group can overcome their oppression and become mainstream, but the Irish provided a counterexample that shot it down. The theory was that…
it's an interesting theory, and as HCIdivision said, there's indeed Irish pubs, and (mainly in the US) also that whole St. Patrick's Day thing that does indeed put Irish in a good light.
but realistically, for women in tech, I don't think baking cookies is going to do the trick. however going with the Irish example, some general celebratory thing could be nice. even if it doesn't work, at worst, you'd have a great time? I've always been of the opinion that pretty much whatever you do with a group of people (be it a convention, a party, study, or work) just steadily gets better in many ways the more the gender ratio approaches 50/50.
out of curiosity, what is popular Jewish mainstream food? (I can't think of any, perhaps it's something that I forgot was originally Jewish)
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How would someone who says something like that in a joking way not be immediately ostracized?
I really hope that this doesn't becomes something that's NEVER OK to joke about. When in a situation where someone might say something terrible, I'll sometimes go ahead and say it jokingly. The way I see it, getting everyone to laugh at how ridiculous it sounds is way to reinforce that it was unacceptable. And sometimes I think it was there anyway - somebody was thinking it but not saying it or it was implicit in the…
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The assumption that racism and sexism result in elastic deformation of society that will go away as soon as you remove whatever force is warping it. Yes, this is the economic assumption - folks are greedy and will exploit undervalued resources. I don't think history bears that out. Society is a soft ductile metal. If you bend it, it'll stay bent. This ignores the history of various oppressed groups who unbent themsel…
> This ignores the history of various oppressed groups who unbent themselves (east Asians, south Asians, Jews, Irish). It also ignores the fact that women have unbent themselves in most fields, just not math heavy STEM fields. I almost had a crazy theory about what determines if a group can overcome their oppression and become mainstream, but the Irish provided a counterexample that shot it down. The theory was that…
They might be better off than blacks, but I think they're at least as big a hole in your theory as the Irish.
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I really hope that this doesn't becomes something that's NEVER OK to joke about. When in a situation where someone might say something terrible, I'll sometimes go ahead and say it jokingly. The way I see it, getting everyone to laugh at how ridiculous it sounds is way to reinforce that it was unacceptable. And sometimes I think it was there anyway - somebody was thinking it but not saying it or it was implicit in the…
I get what you're saying, but there seems to be a bit a subjective decision being made there. Would you make a similar joke with a racial (instead of gender-based) slant in that situation? I doubt it. Or would you work the Holocaust (sorry, used for shock effect) into the joke? This is just to say that there are obviously some things you would never joke about. So who decides what's acceptable and what's not? The per…
And nobody gets to "decide" what everyone else should feel. What I have a problem with is the idea that it's not the meaning of your utterance that makes it offensive, but merely the topic. The idea that tome expressed in the parent comment that there was literally no circumstance under which you could joke about women being treated unfairly (even if it was to call attention to the problem).
I find the idea of someone declaring what's "not okay" for everyone else to be as upsetting as a boor telling a mean-spirited joke and insisting that nobody should be offended because it's just a joke.
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I feel like other people have said what I want to say about your other points, but... > If you go to a college campus and attempt to set up a "mens center" in the same vein as the womens centers that are increasingly common, you will most likely be 1) called a misogynist, 2) not taken seriously, 3) not succeed. Interestingly, one of the longest running institutions at universities are fraternities.
Sororities are "women's centers"?
> Men also can and do suffer terrible experiences as the hands of women, and can be dominated by them. If a woman gets "safe spaces", so, too, should men.
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If you stock a team of people attacking a problem with people who fit one precise mold, you'll miss out on the breadth of problems that people from other backgrounds face. If I'm building an algorithm for packing bytes into an array, inverting matrices, or some similarly technological issue, why would insights into police profiling or sexual harassment be useful? Seriously in the most crass cynical context imaginable…
If I'm building an algorithm for packing bytes into an array, inverting matrices, or some similarly technological issue, why would insights into police profiling or sexual harassment be useful? Because most software that actually gets used on a day-to-day basis doesn't purely work on theoretical constructs, for one: even if your application just needs really basic things like names [1] or addresses [2], it will impli…
And I think the parallels between a solid understanding of police "kettling" as they would apply to distributed systems and/or queueing are fairly clear. But I wouldn't expect someone who thinks inverting a matrix is tricky to appreciate either.