I disagree. The statement “very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively” is factually true, but implicitly sexist (very few men are capable either).
By banning those sorts of statements you’re not banning the truth, you’re just quieting assholes.
"It's x-ist" is an assertion, as well as an accusations, and not an argument. It's usually much better replaced with "I think this will be bad for group x, because reason y". It has the same effect, and is actually constructive.
The average age of a Fortune 500 CEI is 58. Talk to any female executive of that age and they’ll have many examples of opportunities they missed out on because of their gender.
My mum was told explicitly that she wouldn’t have got the job she was in if they had known she had a baby at home, because it was a “high-pressure job”. They offered to reassign her, she refused, and she didn’t tell her colleagues about her husband or kids for another year, for fear of having similar opportunities denied.
What about "Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true, when the statement is clear in its intentions and not misleading?". Would you agree with that?
Edit: Note that my post implies that racial hatred/propaganda is a subset of racism, which you may or may not agree with semantically.
"13/52" is, I think, one of the most outstanding examples of this fallacy ("13% of American are black but they commit 52% of murders [or violent crime? I forget]"). Assuming the numbers are true, it can be stated primarily for the purpose of information, as in an unbiased demographic analysis of crime; or it can be stated primarily for the purpose of expressing racial hatred, as in 99% (99.9%? 99.999%?) of cases on social media. The belief that something being true means it can not be used for evil (or even just in an unnecessarily provocative context) is categorically not rational.
Even propaganda, which many people correlate with "lies", is actually often factually true, or at least subjectively true by argument. Cherry-picked truth is perhaps the most effective propaganda, because it invites people to feel justified in ignoring the big picture and embracing their negative emotions that are tangential to that "truth".
For the record, the commenter above who casually states that "most women can't run Fortune 500 companies because most men can't either" <---THAT is sexist
Unrelated: I don't understand what you mean by a "neutral" hypothesis. The hypothesis can be made for neutral or non-neutral goals, by a neutral or non-neutral person, but that's all true of any hypothesis.
I think you read your biases into that, too:
> The statement “very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively” is factually true, but implicitly sexist (very few men are capable either).
I read the "very few men are capable either" as "the problem is that running a F500 is hard, not being a women". There's also no "because" in there - they don't imply that women can't because men are mostly unable, they just say that it's similarly hard for men.
When someone chooses to say a particular sentence is as much a part of communication as what that sentence says.
So when someone says "very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively," they aren't merely blurting out a fact at random, they are trying to say something.
And depending on the context, and who they are, and who they are speaking to, the thing they are trying to say can be different.
In many cases, if someone brings up that particular fact in conversation, you would reasonably conclude that they are submitting it in support of the idea that it is unsurprising that few women are CEOs of F500 companies; that they believe that is natural and reasonable.
But in other circumstances, say in a profile of a successful female F500 CEO, that same assertion could be being offered in support of the thesis that the subject of the profile is an exceptional individual, deserving of success.
Or, as in muglug's comment to which you're replying, it could be being used to illustrate a point about the fact that very few people are capable of running a fortune 500.
So this is the thing: a fact is neutral. But the facts that you introduce into a conversation are always selected to support a position. And a position can certainly be sexist.
Exactly. Graham gives the impression that he thinks conversations are a set of automata exchanging logical propositions. Rather makes me wonder if he's ever met a human.
Yay.
But also ... there's a sort of idiot's veto over language. If people who are racist say "X", and I also say "X", does that make me racist? Well, no. But as a participant in a society, as a participant in a conversation, I need to be aware of the context. If racist people are saying "X", I should probably take advantage of the insane level of linguistic flexibility in most human languages and find a different way to make the point I was trying to make.
Some will protest that this "capitulation" ("I refuse to stop saying X just some bad people are saying it too") allows the bad people to control our language. I say that if you're not a bad person (whatever that might mean), you can almost certainly find alternative ways of speaking that avoid us wasting time debating whether you're a bad person.
Your own comment literally provides multiple interpretations of that statement and you chose the "sexist" one to be the default!?
I highly disagree. Imagine this statement in an example context:
A: Most fortune 500 companies are lead by men, we need more women at the top.
B: Very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively.
B could either be sexist and imply that fewer women than men are capable, or they could simply state that selecting a random women to promote just because she's a women won't help the situation. The reading you have depends a lot on your biases, given that you have no information about B at all.
If you need another example, you can replace "women" with any other subject in this sentence - even fortune 500 CEO's:
> Very few Fortune 500 CEOs are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively.
I bet you can still find people agreeing with that, but it reads a lot less like it implies that a random person not included in the subject group is more capable.
It depends on context. You and I are not robots, so we see an individual sentence by itself and add context. But this isn't good.
What if the follow is "And that needs to change. Which is why I'm proud to announce our first scholarship program for female entrepreneurs!" Do you still think the statement is sexist? Do you think the person making the statement is sexist?