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Comment by lsiebert | Hacker News Reader

It's better to see this as a conscious attempt to correct sexism than as sexism itself. It's a blunt instrument, to address a blunt injustice that occurs at all levels of society. Just because you aren't all men, doesn't mean you haven't had advantages that women are denied.

It's just that these advantages are normalized in the system, so they aren't as apparent as the corrective measures. It's really easy to miss them, just like, for example if you play a shooter on an easy mode first, you don't necessarily know how it would be harder.

That said, you want to talk to your director or learn about your career? Email them and ask them about it.

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The problem I have with this, is the examples I gave of sexism are institutional, explicit, codified programs. "We will reward hiring and promoting women." "Women get an advantage in the hiring and interview process." "This career development process is explicitly for women." I could go on.

Girls aren't obviously disadvantaged in school. Girls outperform boys in every subject, science and math included, and have for decades[1]. Women are admitted more to colleges and graduate more[2]. Then there are structural programs at major companies to advantage women in hiring and career growth, as I mentioned.

It is true that women face the subtle kinds of discrimination referenced elsewhere. I'm not denying that. I'm saying that instituting programs which relatively disadvantage my career and opportunities due to my gender strikes me as unfair. I don't get a benefit because the executive leadership team is mostly men. They don't share the money and power with me because we are all men - so why am I disadvantaged because other men have achieved success?

1 - https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/04/girls-grades

2 - https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-me...

Ah that's because the bias against women isn't codified or a program, it's systemic, and therefore can be found mainly from it's effects. They aren't obvious because bias isn't necessarily obvious.

For example, here's a study where candidates with the same cv differ only by name.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/06/07/new-study-fin...

I gotta run, so I don't have time to cite it, but women, controlling for job qualifications and profession, earn 98% for every dollar a man earns. That may not seem like much, but the effect is enhanced by hiring and promotion differences and other effects of bias.

As to your question of not getting the benefit, how do you know that gender bias didn't help you get hired or affect your pay? Are you so sure that if you were a woman, you would have been hired, paid, and promoted just like you were now?

Regardless, policies are based on affecting the most good for the most people, not on helping you.

I disagree with the characterization of sexism against women as "systemic". That seems like exactly the wrong word to use. Systemic sexism would imply there is an organized system to disadvantage women. I think the organized system - going from the public education system (largely administrated by women) which favors girls (better grades, less punishment, better graduation rate for girls), to college (where girls are a majority of students and graduates) to employment (where there are organized systems to benefit women in terms of hiring and promotion) exhibits a preference based on gender for women rather than against women.

The kind of sexism that women encounter is not an organized system of oppression (e.g. being directed to hire fewer women) but rather it is the latent sexism of individuals not acting in an organized fashion. Individuals not taking a woman seriously, or being harassing, or not wanting to hire women etc. "Systemic" does not seem like an apt word for this kind of sexism.

Regarding your question over how I know I don't benefit from gender bias - clearly I can't know. Just like my female colleagues can't know if they benefit from gender bias. Maybe if I were a woman I would've got better grades in school, gone to a better college, retained my interest in programming, and been preferentially hired in an even better role. It's impossible to know.

> Systemic sexism would imply there is an organized system to disadvantage women.

1. Women couldn't vote until the 1920s in the U.S. The 1940's in France.

2. In the U.S., the Equal Rights constitutional amendment, guaranteeing legal equality between men and women, still hasn't been fully ratified/passed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment

That's the tip of the legal iceberg.

If those aren't examples of a system, i.e., the U.S. government, granting less legal rights to women than to men, i.e., systemic sexism, then what is?

1. A legal inequality from 100 years ago. My comments are about the US specifically, no doubt systemic sexism exists in other countries.

2. From your wikipedia link, one of the key arguments against the amendment was that it would imply women could be drafted - "Political scientist Jane Mansbridge in her history of the ERA argues that the draft issue was the single most powerful argument used by Schlafly and the other opponents to defeat ERA".

If you want to show a persuasive (to me) example of systemic sexism, I think you should provide an example that is current and that systemically disadvantages women. If the lack of an ERA does disadvantage women, please explain how.

Look. Culture doesn't change overnight.

If you are unwilling to understand the significance of it taking until 1920 for women to receive the right to vote, and the variety of reasons for resistance to the ERA, then, I don't know what to say.

If you haven't, talk with the women in your life you are friends with about sexism and discrimination in the work place.

I think it's a pretty low bar to ask for an example of a current systemic disadvantage that women have. I can point to multiple systemic disadvantages that men have right now - but your examples are from 100 years ago or are very vague. If the systemic oppression of women in the US is so vast as to necessitate laws that advantage or disadvantage individuals based on their sex, then I think it should also be pretty easy to point to.

As far as talking with women about the sexism they've experienced - I've never denied women experience sexism. I've explicitly acknowledged that multiple times. My point is that the sexism they experience is not an organized system of oppression (i.e. it is not "systemic"). There are multiple, explicit, and codified systems that disadvantage men and I have pointed to several of them.

If the effects are systemic it doesn’t matter if there is an “organized system”.

In fact we have a word for that and that word is “culture”. No one explicitly organizes it.

You use knowledge and reason, not to seek truth, but to occlude it for your own ends, driven by your own insecurities and fear.

It might be worth reading Susan Fowler's rather notable reflection on her time at Uber if you think discrimination is only subtle or at the edges

No, it’s better to see this as what it literally is, and to recognize that it causes the same kinds of problems as what you’re trying to fix, as well as new ones.

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