sexist [LWN.net]

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 1:31 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141)
In reply to: sexist by joey
Parent article: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Oh yeah, big scary taboo issue up, gender inequality!

Seriously though, I wanted to explain why I felt the need to mention this issue at all.

Whatever I personally believe about male and female IQ distribution and whether it's correct, well, whatever. I'm not really in much mood for arguing about that. It wasn't central to what I set out to convey, but it was part of how I experienced the whole thing. I regularly meet men intelligent in the way I understand intelligence, but rarely meet women who are intelligent in the same way. So she made a big impression to me, alright? When I saw that she was really a man, then it of course made perfect sense.

to post comments

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 3:36 UTC (Sat) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (2 responses)

Sounds like you don't meet very many women. Wonder what could cause *that*.

*rolls eyes*.

(Here, I'll write your reply for you: "Nuh-uh! I know lots of women! Some of my best friends are women! One time, I almost kissed one!")

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 11:02 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, I don't meet many women.

Let's take a look at it. My personal interests are musically related in some emulation projects like UADE and sidplay2. Hey, music! Oh no, it's the beep-beep chips from 80s computers. I've heard a rumour that there's maybe one female person that listens to kohina.com feed.

Perl. Should be a no-brainer? Well, nothing prevents women to join ircnet #Perl and indeed there have been a couple who have actually been perl programmers. But they are usually beginner-intermediate level and don't stick around. Maybe because they try to strike up social chatter and it just drives all the introverted guys nuts, and there usually aren't other women to talk to, so it just doesn't work out, see? I realize I'm strongly simplifying this but clearly, #Perl isn't one of the hottest places of the universe to go find women.

At work. More Perl. We are something like 15 guys and there's one female project manager. When we are hiring, not a single woman even send us her resume. It's common for project managers and HR people to be women, but for technical positions, they don't even apply. I guess that pool is quite dry as well. In fact, historically we once got a female's resume but her perl skills were not very good based on the coding sample she sent, so we didn't end up hiring her. Maybe that was a bad decision. Had I known the rarity of women at that time, I perhaps ought to have even interviewed her.

So let's see: my interest fields happen to be quite noninteresting for women, and my work looks like the same, so clearly I don't meet many women. Bravo, sir, you somehow deduced all that.

When I talk about this to my girlfriend ("oh my god, he has got a girlfriend!!!"), she usually says something like this:

* it's "unfair" that technical positions require you to invest your whole life in tech. She doesn't personally care about tech in that way, and doesn't want to. Me, I am most definitely a techie to heart.

* she would want to be very competent from the outset, like learn the subject matter on school first. I say, there aren't schools for most of the stuff, you just have to pick it up as you go, but it is uncomfortable an idea to her.

Well, that isn't very helpful, but it does illuminate how different are the worlds that we live in.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 15:16 UTC (Sat) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

Where I work, I have personally and individually run into women who are as hardcore techie as anybody else you could imagine. They speak the language, they know their salts, and they have the "intelligence" (insofar as high skill with Perl and high knowledge of Unix hackery is a measure of intelligence) of anybody else, if not more so. And it's not one-- it's multiple.

The fact that you don't think that there are many women out there with the "intelligence" of computer hacker men says far more about the culture of computer geekdom than it does about women!

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 3:36 UTC (Sat) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link] (15 responses)

You describe her as "really" a man. I suspect she, and indeed other people, would find that offensive. If you persist in being offensive, I think it is reasonable to want a killfile feature.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 10:12 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (14 responses)

Please enlighten me how you would say completely unoffensively that her genetic makeup is not, you know, XX but XY.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 10:42 UTC (Sat) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link] (13 responses)

Easy. You could just describe her as "genetically male". Note that it's perfectly valid (and polite!) to use the pronoun for the gender that people identify as, irrespective of their biology or genetics.

Hope that helps.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 11:11 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (2 responses)

All right. So imagine that I said "genetically male" instead of "really a man". It is precisely what I meant, no insult whatsoever was intended. I did not realize that people would be so hypersensitive about this sort of thing.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 11:39 UTC (Sat) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

Sometimes when we think someone is being hypersensitive, it is in fact we who are insensitive.

sexist

Posted Oct 1, 2007 11:43 UTC (Mon) by gravious (guest, #7662) [Link]

It's possible (and I'm not defending the guy outright here) that what he meant by 'really a man' was 'born genetically male' or 'used to be seen as a man' and just used a sloppy ambiguous short-hand. In fairness this whole area is a minefield even for the well-intentioned because of the nuances in gender. I appreciate your comments though, they are invariable well-thought out and interesting.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 18:30 UTC (Sat) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] (9 responses)

I self-identify as African American, though genetically I'm caucasian. I'd prefer you to call me by my identified ethnicity, and I'd like access to all the entitlement programs those of African descent are eligible for. Please don't be offensive by calling me 'white', because I don't identify that way.

Thanks

sexist

Posted Sep 30, 2007 1:11 UTC (Sun) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link] (2 responses)

Yeah, because we all know that ethnicity and gender are exactly the same thing. Nice try, troll.

sexist

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:44 UTC (Sun) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] (1 responses)

In the sense that they're both empirical truths with a genetic basis, yes. You are either [white/black/male/female] or you aren't, regardless of how you might wish to identify.

sexist

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:52 UTC (Sun) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link]

I'm sorry you live in such an Aristotelian world. Come and join the modern world of infinite complexity and grey areas some day; you'll find that very few things are actually sharply defined once you look at them closely.

More specifically, whether people are "white" or "black" is even less of an empirical truth than their gender. Not only that, but declaring that only genetics matters is bigoted, racist, sexist, and downright rude.

self-identification

Posted Sep 30, 2007 19:04 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (4 responses)

You're entitled to identify as African-American, I couldn't care less and the only context in which I could imagine collecting that information would be as part of the diversity survey process if (someone else from) my company had hired you.

So far as I know in my country there are no "entitlement programs" for being of African descent, but you would not be elligible for such unless you actually proved you were immediately descended from African immigrants rather than simply identifying as African-American.

We actually measure lots of cultural artefacts by self-identification, sex and sexual preference, ethnicity, and first language are among them. If someone fills out the census to say they're Female, Native American and Homosexual and speak Welsh at home then the results will reflect that without anyone coming back to peak through their bedroom window and check if it's true. Of course it's a criminal offense to lie, not to mention a silly thing to do.

In theory we could measure all these things directly, we could take a blood sample to identify biological gender, and use genetic markers to find a blood line (each such line is loosely associated with what we call "race" traced back through our ancient ancestors) and we could insist on observing people without their knowledge to determine which language they use, and use an old psychology trick to measure their interest in attractive male vs female bodies in various states of undress. But all these things would be unnecessarily intrusive, which is to say rude, not to mention they might not really measure what we're interested in.

self-identification

Posted Sep 30, 2007 22:07 UTC (Sun) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] (3 responses)

I could also self-identify as a hyper-intelligent, immortal Martian and I doubt the majority of other people would care too much. However it would be just as false as self-identifying in opposition to any other observable, demonstrable characteristic.

In other words, an individual's psychology (or, perhaps, damage to it) may influence them to adopt such self-loathing that they completely refuse to accept an aspect of who they are. It's unfortunate that politically correct culture makes it taboo to question such behavior.

self-identification

Posted Oct 1, 2007 0:44 UTC (Mon) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link] (1 responses)

Please don't troll on LWN. And if you're actually serious, please learn why so-called "political correctness" is mostly about accepting people and being polite.

self-identification

Posted Oct 1, 2007 13:49 UTC (Mon) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]

Nah, "poltical correctness" is about hiding under the surface the tensions
that should not exist to begin with.

self-identification

Posted Oct 1, 2007 2:25 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Why do you think that you are better informed about issues of biological gender and gender identity than the psychiatrists in this arena who generally agree that such a distinction exists? The experts in the field believe it is real, the people who are affected believe it is real. Just because your gender identity and biological gender and gender phenotype all line up doesn't mean these aren't real things.

sexist

Posted Oct 3, 2007 3:01 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Regarding your racism "equivalence" troll, there are people who are recognized as caucasian by skin-tone, but yet who self-identify as african-american because their entire family is african-american, but via the fun of recessive or unusual genetics are light-skinned.

They are socialized, as much as such a term can apply, as african-american and their self-identity derives from this.

As for genetics, the border of the so-called races is so broad and the variation within supposedly clear groups is so great that from a statistical perspective races mostly do not exist genetically.

We cannot therefore determine that a person is "black" reliably from either DNA sequencing nor from their skintone. Therefore what system of classification (should we need one!) would you propose other than asking them and believing the answer?