Discrimination like this should be illegal.
“One member, Erica Stanley, had a Masters in Computer Science but felt held back because she wasn’t confident in her skills as a public speaker. WWCode presented her with the opportunity to step up and lead WWCode Atlanta’s programs, including technical events and hackathons.”
I know this sounds a bit glib – but I'm aware of several men (including myself, an Asian person of color) with higher degrees who feel held back because of a lack of confidence as a public speaker. Where are our support groups and opportunities? (Seriously, if you have any, my email is in my profile).
If there's a technology you really like working with, then you might want to look on meetup.com to see if you can find some like minded people and look for an opportunity to present something. Some of the meetup.com groups discriminate based on gender or race, but the vast majority do not and are very welcoming :)
If you're interested in learning more, researching "pink ghetto" will get you started.
* Clinical psychology
* Veterinary medicine
* Biology
All of which are important, fulfilling, well-paying fields. In all of them it's hard to say women were "pushed" there, rather women were very interested in them, and arrived in larger numbers than men.
But if you'd like to claim those as important exceptions, you'd have to show that those fields are important and well-paying relative to other options available to those women.
1. Women prefer to marry a guy who makes more money than her. So there is significant sexual pressure to become a high status ($) man.
2. Men (statistically) can't marry up large income gaps. So they know that what ever lifestyle they want, they have to be solely responsible for it.
Women on the other hand have more freedom to do what they desire since men care far less about their partners income, and women have the economic security of being able to marry a higher income partner.
Citation?
Which you presumably know as well, which is why you created a new, anonymous account rather than owning your words.
I am not denying that, but I'm not seeing how it's connected to me telling the "OMG helping women is sexism" guy that there's a history here that he should pay attention to.
In particular, the historical comparator to nurses isn't software engineers, it's doctors. Take a look at the gender distribution of medical school graduates:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/SwyK7qFvLaI/AAAAAAAAL_...
You can see it take off with Title IX, which banned outright institutional discrimination by gender.
A lot of women with interest in and talent for medicine who wanted to become doctors instead became nurses, which fed that historical imbalance. We've fixed the schooling, but we're still working on the outcome; the gender distribution of doctors is still not great: 66% male in the US.
So when this guy whines that there are no organizations helping men become nurses, my reply is that the reason women have historically dominated that field is not anti-male barriers to dudes who really want to be nurses, but previous anti-female barriers in the higher-status profession of doctors (and other things they could have done).
My friends who are nurses wanted to be nurses, they didn't want to go medical school. They didn't want to wait to make money until their 30's, they considered career paths in relation to having a family. As long as they had the option, I don't see why forcing outcome is important here.
As for helping men into nursing, if diversity is good in one field its probably helpful in another. Men might want a male nurse who can emphasize with male concerns. Being a woman, I'm just taking guesses here, like prostate issues, balding, infertility, and whatever else.
Maybe we should help men get into fields like nursing and teaching. So boys and girls both have role models in lots of fields.
I get the historical context, but I don't think forcing an over reaction in the other direction is better. I think we all benefit from choices and freedom.
I'm all for men going into nursing. You can work on shifting that ratio if you like. But I'm not personally going to work on that because I don't think it is a result of oppression in the same way that keeping women out of medicine was.
I'm also fine with a little bit of what looks like overreaction in the moment, because that's how we find out where the balance is. People thought Title IX was an overreaction at the time, too.
The real issue isn't color, or gender. Its Class.
but why do you think the over reaction is ok, which punishes innocent people not the people who created the system.
again two wrongs don't make a right, all it does is continue a negative cycle.
Loss of privilege feels is definitely experienced as loss, so I can see why people would see it as punishment. Note all the rich people who cry rivers over having to pay their fair share or taxes. But reducing injustice is not punishment.
Two wrongs don't make a right. But allowing a harmful system to persevere is what continues the negative cycle.
If you decline to have sympathy for other downtrodden people, I believe that's your problem, and I don't think blaming me will help.
But, you know, the context and implications are so completely different. What's your point?
Affirmative action does not help the groups it is directed towards, it simply handicaps them further by preventing them from being properly matched to their level or ability.
Clarence Thomas recently wrote about this in detail... Slaveholders argued that slavery was a ‘positive good’ that civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life. A century later, segregationists similarly asserted that segregation was not only benign, but good for black students. Although cloaked in good intentions, the University’s racial tinkering harms the very people it claims to be helping
If you'd like to learn about the unfortunate real outcomes of affirmative action then I strongly recommend researching Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell.
Clarence Thomas is a pretty shitty Justice tbh. Recommendation rejected.
I hope your dislike of Justice Thomas is just because you don't agree with his politics. I think your use of profanity is inappropriate regardless of your reasoning.
Perhaps you would like economist Thomas Sowell better. Or perhaps you're unwilling to give honest consideration to other views.
> What if the "privilege" you think you see is actually a difference in average ability or preferences between groups of people that are in fact different from each other?
...is the textbook definition of racism (and sexism). Moreover it criticizes affirmative action precisely on the basis that there are inherent differences of ability among different groups, by race or gender, etc.
Initially I gave you the benefit of the doubt, assuming for the sake of argument and also in the interest of fair discussion that you probably didn't mean what you said, exactly. It is clear now I overestimated you.
the belief that "ALL" members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.
The belief that races may be different in average ability with respect to certain characteristics or that members of certain races have their own preferences is not racist. Some people like to use the term racist as some sort of a perverted trump card to silence an opposing view rather than engaging in an actual debate. Good luck trying to have a civil conversation with someone like that.
> The belief that races may be different in average ability with respect to certain characteristics or that members of certain races have their own preferences is not racist.
Quoting this for posterity in case you try to edit it out later. Sorry for you, I think you'll find the belief that black people are just not "on average" intelligent enough to be enrolled at university in the same proportion as white people, or that women are just too emotional to be in tech, or whatever, are rather unpopular opinions and likely to get you labeled (indeed, correctly) a racist and a sexist. Good luck with that.
You're probably right about the labels but certainly wrong about the accuracy (thanks for the tip).
I'm not sure why some races perform better at some tasks, on average. I think that Blacks are faster sprinters than Asians, on average. I think that Asians have a higher preference for education than Blacks, on average. I think that the physical characteristics that we describe as races are shaped by evolutionary pressures. Darker skin is likely an adaptation for living closer to the equator. Blacks can probably withstand more direct sun exposure than Whites before developing skin cancer. None of this makes one race superior to another outside the narrow scope of the adaptive characteristic, and even then you only see the differences on average.
I suspect that the lower turnout of women in tech has more to do with preferences around work/life balance and family. But I wouldn't rule out other possible explanations. I've witnessed a few emotional breakdowns at work, but never from men. Which is fortunate because it seems that when men snap they go postal, on average.
> I disagree with a SCOTUS Justice who happens to be black
I like how you phrased that. Much more civil. Do you like George Carlin :D? -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRoOOm0-3_8
It's instructive how you managed to leap from gender to race without skipping a beat. That's an example of what I mean by generic. This is a marker—maybe the primary marker—of low quality discussion. It's always about pre-existing views, held for extraneous reasons, pretending to be a rational response to the story under discussion but reflexively heading straight for one of the same two or three places. A few people insist on taking every discussion there; the rest of us have visited countless times and wish not to return. This community exists for interesting things, of which these ideological back-and-forths are the antithesis.
"affirmative action" is short for "affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin".
Please explain how belief that some races are inferior is necessary to the belief that affirmative action is necessary. (Affirmative action often includes action directed specifically at addressing ways in which processes which might superficially seem neutral are, in effect, taking race indirectly into account because of circumstances resulting from the material effects of past discrimination and segregation, but that's a disadvantage of circumstance, not inherent inferiority.)
> without regard to their race, creed, color...
Affirmative action does the very thing it purports to ensure against, by discriminating on the bases of race.
If you believe that one race is inferior in some way and cannot compete on a level playing field then you may feel that affirmative action is necessary to give them a greater advantage. You mentioned circumstances which basically form an inferiority from past accrued disadvantage (I know you called it disadvantage of circumstance, but try to follow me for a moment). This doesn't seem to be the case with affirmative action admissions programs because they lower the bar for Blacks and raise the bar for Asians. Sure Blacks, were treated worst than Asians throughout most of American history, but Whites were not treated better than Asians.
Often the greatest beneficiaries of these programs are not native born African Americans, but recent African immigrants whose ancestors were not enslaved in the US, and not subject to past discrimination and segregation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/nyregion/long-island-high-...
http://nypost.com/2015/04/05/meet-the-student-accepted-into-...
Incidentally, the two cases above would make good counterpoints to the idea of racial intellectual inferiority regardless of affirmative action and would likely have been able to gain admissions to a top university without it. But the unfortunate consequence of affirmative action is that many people will assume it is all because of their special treatment. Clarence Thomas had much more difficult obstacles to overcome, and he was subjected to this unfortunate assumption after graduating from law school.
I think the real intention of affirmative action is to achieve more equal outcomes across racial divides. I think that's a good objective. But I also think this is a policy that sounds much better than it actually works. If we're to have more equal outcomes, then we need more equal opportunities and we need an end to all forms of discrimination.
http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1...
The side arguing against affirmative action basically claimed they're for the idea of fixing the inequalities but that affirmative action with colleges is actually a net negative. In other words it's not making things more equal it's making them worse.
Their argument was basically that most kids inserted into top schools by affirmative action fail because they aren't at the level of the other students. Because they fail they don't become the things we want them to be come (doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc) and so the circle of inequality continues.
Where as if instead they went to a school with more students at the same level they'd more likely graduate, get the good jobs, and their kids would then make it to the high end schools. A win-win.
I don't know if it's true or not. They claimed to have lots of studies to back them up. But regardless it was interesting food for thought.
I'd love to have a more diverse workplace both in race and sex. I don't know the best way to get there.