Nevertheless, She Coded

I've seen sexism once, it was some guy talking down to the team lead of the help desk, this guy was _shredded_ by every person in the office, before being told to come to HR, someone came to clear his desk that day.

This was in the UK where it is rather hard to fire people, so I find it hard to believe to be quite honest that the situation is anywhere near as dire as it's painted. Of course, I wouldn't see it, I'm a big ugly bearded bloke.

But we need stats, stories, we need to hold people accountable if it's not the way it should be. Not tell everyone it's bad and then go on about feminism. The kinds of people who are causing these issues do not give a solitary fuck about how your girls have your back, especially if you're not going to hold the guy to account in the first place.

https://research-content.glassdoor.com/app/uploads/sites/2/2...

And it, like most of the statistical papers surrounding the pay gap suffer from what I personally affectionately refer to as the "peanut butter spread" problem.

The implicit assumption of pay gap studies is that if you group all jobs into a category and then segment them by gender both groups should have equal distribution of some set of attributes X, Y, and Z. I can't help but feel as if looking at genders (or really any segment of society) and assuming they have "independent and identically distributed"[1] random variables is flawed.

For example, UC enrollment of undergraduate students for Engineering/CS has hovered around 14.5% for the last several years[2]. My fraternity, however, was more than half Engineering/CS majors at one point in time during my time as an undergrad at UC Davis.

One way to look at this is:

* My fraternity favored Engineering/CS majors

another way would be:

* My fraternity discriminated against non-Engineering/CS majors

But neither is actually true. The fact my fraternity had a higher percentage of Engineering/CS majors than the overall student body distribution does not imply any sort of causal influence insidious or otherwise; correlation is not causation.

Moreover, all things being equal, should my fraternity have the same distribution of majors as the overall student body?

I would argue no. Membership of a fraternity, or any other student organization for that matter, should be a personal choice. Whether it is a collection of like-minded individuals, similar majors, or similar interests that motivates you to join the choice should be yours to freely make. If that means that individual fraternities all have non-identical distributions of majors, then so be it!

Make no mistake, I am all about freedom of choice. I also am steadfastly libertarian and individual freedoms (and this applies equally when it comes to gender considerations). But I don't necessarily believe that in a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice that there would also be perfectly equal distributions of any sort.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_di...

[2] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrol...

There's one particularly dishonest method that people who defend the status quo use (usually out of sweaty desperation for privileges handed out based on gender, race, or financial class), which is the way they frame incidents of abuse or oppression as completely isolated from society or culture.

If you look at the Uber or Tor cases you have to realize that there is a culture in hacker / geek / IT that enabled it. Hell, if you post on HN must you realize there's values that the majority of us share. And those values that enabled the horrors at Tor and Uber are likely also present in other situations that are based on or include the same culture.

If you think I'm implying all men in SV or on HN are misogynists then you're willfully misinterpreting me, I'm just saying these are systematic / cultural issues and should be addressed as such. Also, it'd be great if you'd step out of the way.

My advice for you is to think clearly and objectively about what your thoughts are and how they are misaligned with mine.

I understand what you have been claiming but you have also been decrying other people for doing the same things you are doing. I am not here for a fight. I don't want you getting swelly eyed and emotional because then all logic and reasoning will shut down.

Men in this thread are mostly doing what I have done. And that's denounce the victim complex, to denounce the notion that women need to be handled with kid gloves, to denounce that anyone believes that it's fair for women to be unequal.

It's not about maintaining a status quo, that will never be the case- it's about shutting down this kind of rhetoric which does nothing to help women. It just makes them feel validated if they feel like victims or, worse, makes them feel like they're going to be systematically oppressed when it may be perfectly false to assert that.

I have worked for a long time, if someone told me I couldn't do something I would have that bias deeply ingrained in my head, if I were told people are likely to think less of me, I would assume them being critical of me or my ideas was them attacking me or oppressing me based on those things.

Where I have worked, where my friends have worked this is patently false, but of course maybe that's because I've only worked in a few companies across Northern Europe.