What's Wrong With antirez's Post on Sexism in IT

I know women who do use their gender to get respect. I never heard them explicitly demanding it, but they expect it and often get it. There are not many of them, but they do exist.

Maybe you don't know any such women, maybe you live in a culture where you don't get respect even when you deserve it, but that is no reason to write such an aggressive article.

I am concerned that nowadays, when a guy points that we are not going towards gender equality, but overshooting it, he is labeled to be chauvinistic and buried under a mountain of hate. The original article was polite and had a point, he didn't deserve this.

Really put off by the hateful and obnoxious tone. Can't take you seriously with all the foul language. You really lack emotional control. I'd be embarrassed if I published something like this.

I don't care what the argument is about: this is not the way to get people to take your "side" seriously or to consider the points you're attempting to make.

Couldn't stomach reading all the way through this.

And I'm almost too afraid to add my comment lest it finds its way to your blog styled in bold followed by a "FUCK YOU" response. Keep it classy.

well, I did manage to get through the post, and this is obviously someone deeply offended, so I made myself get through it. Then I went on to read antirez's and comments. Here's my thoughts.

According to one of antirez's comment responses: "the root of the problem is equal dignity of individuals". and the only way to change this is by "(showing) our children that we don't have any sexual bias, they'll observe us, and will act accordingly (even in this case talking will help marginally if they can't see we act well)".

And generally if you read his article you get the overal impression (at least I did) that he is against protection of minorites when the language is formulated in specific terms (ie. such and such policy for women, or for irish men or whatever). He advocates always formulating the language in general terms such as "Why is A not payed like B even if they have similar responsibilities and tasks." and going from there.

As pointed out by author at prettylittlemachine, many of his formulations are not well put, for example, when antirez writes "Talking with my female coworkers I discovered they were deeply upset and offended by other women that were too easy to ask for respect using sexism as a flag." she responds by saying "Ah, right. The problem is actually THE WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE!!!"

Again she quotes antirez saying "Similarly, I will not care who you are if you do something silly at work. Nothing is more offensive for you than me being too easy with you because you are part of some minority. ", and responds by saying "Here again, the theme that women are going to get off too easily when they fuck up in the workplace because they are women."

in summary, for me I'll have to think about this subject a little while to formulate a solid opinion on it, but initially, I tend to agree with what I think is antirez's view that the idea we should espouse is mutual respect and equal rights for all individuals. There's no need to add adjectives or specify types of individuals men,women, caucasians, etc, I think if we have that mindset our children will have it too and maybe the issues will fall away, they are cultural after all.

EDIT: here's antirez's twitter where he clarifies and you can see others reactions as well: https://twitter.com/antirez

I wonder how many of the men commenting with sympathy for antirez have spoken up consistently (or at all) when women in their field are the targets of obvious and horrible misogyny. If they educate themselves about what we're talking about, and how pervasive it is, maybe they would understand the level of anger -- and why women leave (or never enter) the field.

This is an emotional article full of personal attacks and not worthy of reading.

To be quite honest the most shocking thing I found about antirez's post was not the post itself, but the boiling hate surrounding it.

2 unclear articles.

Antirez's philosophy seems to be: In general if there is a problem at the work place between individual A and B, I think it is always an error to talk about sexism, even when the root cause is some asshole not respecting you because you are a woman. Instead the problem should be addressed in a sexual agnostic way.

Shanley's rebuttal to this is: Oh, OK, Salvatore. Let’s definitely not talk about sexism in the workplace, even if THAT’S THE fing ROOT CAUSE OF A PROBLEM. * ... * even though sexism is BY ITS fing NATURE a systemic force, especially in the workplace where issues around gender inequality are created and enforced on a cultural and institutional level. And goes on to say What you are proposing is not a viable solution in any way (apologies if censoring swearwords offends.)

Shanley's point seems to be that that sexism isn't just/merely an interaction between individuals and any simplistic solution that tells person A to act identically to person B regardless of any attribute of B except for skill in performing their job is naive.

If my summary is correct then I agree with S that this is not a problem that can be solved simply. And I think that A has not looked at all aspects of sexism in the workplace in his original article.

I'd be interested to know if the 'tech has a sexism problem' industry has increased or decreased sexism in tech.

I've got a theory on that...

I bailed out after two paragraphs - couldn't stomach the screaming. But it was clear that the outrage was due to a gross misreading of the original piece. antirez was not writing about women attempting to claim respect that they did not deserve.

Thank you for the detailed writeup, taking down antirez's post point by point. Thank you also for your just and well expressed anger.

I. Hate. Period. Delimited. Sentences.

Lol u mad

There's nothing more nauseating than listening to a member of the most privileged, pampered, self-deluded group to ever exist--i.e., a white, middle-class woman--spew vitriol over imagined oppression.

The article's reuse of antirez tweets at the end would've been better had they also included the surrounding context--without that, it's harder to formulate useful opinions.

Also the Ebola analogy was poor; something along the lines of "In general if there is a health problem caused by disease A to victim B, it is always shortsighted to talk about treating only the symptoms of A (and ignoring environmental factors such as sanitation, etc.)".

I don't mind the rage and anger, but tighter rhetoric would be more effective here.