Comment by mkal_tsr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkal_tsr | Hacker News Reader

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Upper management look at code, ha!

Every team I've been on has criticized each other's code equally harsh. If coding standards weren't followed (whoops, you missed a space between parenths, try again!) they'd be called out, if someone had a better idea for an implementation / approach, they were free to speak up and heard out. When I started out on one team I thought I was being unfairly criticized, until I saw others make the same mistakes I was and boom, they received the same feedback. As time went on and I was able to better follow agreed upon standards, and my implementations (and test cases) improved in quality, I was called out less and less, unless I made a mistake again. The focus in the reviews was always about the code and never who wrote the code - this is great because it helps break down the idea that the criticism is about the person rather than (correctly) the inert code.

The point I'm alluding to in my OP is to is similar the debate/discussion about AI and spirituality [Jaron Lanier's essay here - http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai]. When people frame this tech / gender discussion, it's always "gender issues in tech" and I think that is (pedantically) wrong. The technology (source code, compiler, CPU) have no native understanding of a user nor their identity. They treat the input exactly the same. A node interacting with another node. So it's not really "gender issues in tech" but rather, "gender issues in society, but with a focus on the technology industry / market" It's a pedantic point, but by not being explicitly clear in definitions and discussion framing, there tends to be a leakage of irrelevant facts/statistics/feelings that contaminates discussions and derails productive conversations. When that happens, discussions fall back into their usual talking points and counter-points rather than focusing on producing solutions.

You acknowledge that you have a pedantic hangup over the semantics of the phrase "gender issues in tech", and then you construct this elaborate straw man about how the technology itself is gender agnostic (which is not a revelation, it is true of literally all inanimate objects) and that the gender issues are in society as a whole.

But what you haven't done is acknowledge that the tech industry has its own manifestation of sexism that is distinct from that of wider society, in some ways more pernicious, and in fact we've regressed in the last 20 years.

I also have to say, the way that you constructed this whole argument perfectly illustrates why sexism is tech is a difficult problem: tech people tend to be smart and well-reasoned, and often have a liberal and egalitarian self-image, so it's very easy for them to construct a solid case for why they themselves could never be racist or sexist. All the while blissfully ignorant of the reality other people are experiencing. I'm deliberately not using the hot-button label for white males in this context because I think it's counter productive, but just stop for a minute a consider that your experience might not apply to everyone.

It's not an elaborate strawman to want clearer definitions and a cleaner scope for discussion. Further you have not proven,

> then you construct this elaborate straw man about how the technology itself is gender agnostic [...] and that the gender issues are in society as a whole

is factually wrong. You admit that technology as a whole is gender agnostic, so you actually agree with my premise.

And actually I have acknowledged that there is sexism in tech because it is progressed by individuals (read: people) that come from a society. That society provides the context to their actions and motivations, regardless of which industry they are employed in (though each industry will vary in specifics). When one limits the discussion to only the tech industry they prevent any comparisons to other industries, both at a specific point in time as well as long-term / trends, which limits the ability to judge and measure progress. Limiting the judging to merely internal progress means that one will be unsure if that industry is progressing faster or slower than other industries wrt whatever we're discussing (in this case, gender issues in tech). In addition, it prevents people from discussing where industry A has made progress that industry B can look to, or learn from the mistakes of industry C. That is not possible if the discussion is silo-ed within only a single industry.

Also, what do Caucasians have to do with gender? That came out of no where, how is that relevant to this? You also seem to imply that I don't believe I could ever make a sexist comment or action, yet I never stated that, so why would you imply that? You're projecting yourself onto my words, please stop, it's disingenuous.

Welp, here's a thesis that concludes that men who treat women equally are seen as treating women as inferiors - https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/6958/Yeu...

So if that thesis can be reproduced, then all gender issues need to be reexamined as they'd be tainted by bias of treating men who treat women equally as men who are sexist.

You haven't actually proven anything I've said to be incorrect, you've just tried to take it out of context and ignore some points here and there as a means to discredit my words and intentions. I'm sorry I treat people equally (we're all individual nodes in this big cog of society) and other people do not, but the fact remains, the framing of the discussion is inherently limiting to making progress by limiting the scope and depth of such a discussion.

It's telling that you're so quick to support your argument with the same misleading and over-generalized summary which has been circulating heavily in the Men's Rights community recently.

I would strongly suggest actually reading the study rather relying on someone else's summary. In particular, pay attention to the reason why she ran the second study and what was actually being measured, namely reactions to this paragraph:

“I disagree with the many people who think that women should be cherished and protected by men. You know I’m strongly against that whole idea that in a disaster women should always be rescued before men. And I really don’t agree with those who say that men should put women on a pedestal or that men are incomplete without women in their lives. There seems to be this popular attitude that women are more pure and moral than men and that women should therefore be treated with greater respect than men, but I think that’s a lot of nonsense.”

The second study found that simply prefixing that paragraph with “I’m a firm believer in equality between men and women. And because of that” removed much of the ambiguity which lead many people to conclude that the author was probably a misogynist.

Beyond that, simply looking at the test is already telling you that this isn't the sweeping result certain defensive men are claiming – it's a single study measuring reactions to a single, somewhat stilted paragraph over the internet in isolation (they used Mechanical Turk to get participants). That doesn't mean that it's not a decent study but it would immediately tell you not to believe the results apply generally to complex real-world interactions where few normal people randomly state manifestos like that and almost everything happens in a context with a history of past interactions which guide the listener's interpretation.

> It's telling that you're so quick to support your argument with the same misleading and over-generalized summary which has been circulating heavily in the Men's Rights community recently.

Never heard of that, this was posted and upvoted on a Reddit thread a few times. What's the Men's Right's community? Does the idea-association with this "Men's Right's Community" mean that any idea is thus tainted and rendered \0? EDIT: What's actually telling and scary is the attempt? to discredit an idea or study simply because someone else or some other community referenced it. That's a nice easy way to censor ideas one does not agree with, "X agrees with Y, and X are bad, so don't believe Y" /EDIT

The only reason I brought this study up is to point out that definitions can be skewed and treating people equally can be seen as not treating people equally. If that is true, than any conclusion reached with a faulty premise and definition would need a re-examination, no? It's weird people are hesitant to re-examine their beliefs, why is that? It's not a personal attack on people, it's a desire for everyone to get along more peacefully through more factual information. Surely that's not a bad thing?

> The second study found that simply prefixing that paragraph with “I’m a firm believer in equality between men and women. And because of that” removed much of the ambiguity which lead many people to conclude that the author was probably a misogynist.

But that IMO is huge. If you have to prefix action A with a clause yet that same action A without the prefix is seen as manifestation of the irrational hatred of 50% of the population, then what does that say about the ability of people to look at an action with an unbiased perspective?

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