Well, because the comments being made are laced with gender, so the gender of the comments is surely relevant, no? I mean, I understand where you are coming from - the title can be interpreted to apply to all men, when it only applies to some men. So adding "some" to the title might be a good adjustment. Removing "men" from the title however is not warranted.
Sure, if every person quoted is a male, the title, "What some men have actually said...", would be accurate. As the title was posted, it did claim to apply to all men (even if that wasn't the intent).
Having said all of that, I still don't see the real value in calling out the gender of the people who made those comments. The comments are bad and they should be exposed for what they are. But, would they really be acceptable if a woman said them? Of what import is the gender of the people making the comments?
`define sexism`:
sex·ism
ˈsekˌsizəm
noun: sexism
prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.
> it did claim to apply to all men
No, it was just vague in its scope. It can only be interpreted that way, if you deliberately ignore the first sentence of the article "In my experience, 99% of men and women in the tech industry are decent and genuinely well-meaning people.".
+! for the argument for pushing "people shouldn't treat people that way" over "men shouldn't treat women that way" style messaging.
That is fair, but most people will only read the title. If people never get to the qualifying statements, then they will never understand what was actually meant.
Discrimination on the basis of group (gender, religion, ethnicity, etc) is always more pronounced when it's performed by a member of one group towards a member of another. It's especially pronounced when the group the perpetrator belongs to is traditionally the more privileged or powerful one.
The reason I believe you were down-voted is because you were originally trying to steer attention towards "binary gender roles" instead of "sexism in tech". You may not have intended that, but it comes off as derailing.
The constant attempts to keep the harassment conversation "on-message" as regards sexism is intellectually bankrupt. Detailing the problem as it really exists is the first step to actually fixing it, not an attempt at "derailing," because, and this is really important, the rails are immaterial.
How was my comment not on-topic? The first article started with a sexist title, all while declaiming sexism. It made statements about people with a perceived gender.
The first article started with a sexist title because (IIUC) it was specifically men who were making these comments to her at the trade show.
And your attempt to make that observation "sexism" seems to be ignoring a big part of the point. This isn't stuff that "people" say to her. It isn't stuff that might be said by transgender people. It's stuff that's said specifically by men.
Could it be said by women? Sure. It probably is, sometimes. Could it be said by a transgender person? Sure. But Leah perceives this stuff as being coming from men, not coming from people.
It's not sexism when it's an actual observation of specific actual events that are actually happening to someone...
And the topic is still sexism in what men say to women at trade shows, not the latent sexism inherent in the binary concept of gender.
I mostly agree with what you're saying. I'm only calling the title of the first post sexist (because it is on its face). I realize that Leah may not actually be a sexist (I only know what has been written in the two posts), and I don't really believe that she is.
My point is that the responses that were generated, both hate and faux support, are almost entirely predictable from the title of the article alone. We know that people tie their identities closely to a gender and like to group together along those identities. So, when you make a statement like "Things men have actually said...", you have set the stage for people to come down on the side of whatever group they identify with.
I think that is counter-productive. It seems to only be propagating the real (at least, what I perceive to be) problem, which is that people will find characteristics in specific instances and then begin projecting feelings on to people that they think have similar characteristics, even when those feelings are unwarranted. I'm not saying that Leah has done this, I'm saying that others will begin to do this when they come across an appropriate trigger.
>Well, because the comments being made are laced with gender
Can you please clarify this? I just went over the words in the highlighted quotes from the first article. 1 of the 8 statements had any reference to gender.
Maybe I'm being obtuse, but wouldn't that be an argument for prohibition? As in, drugs that aren't prohibited cause much more harm than those that are?
I'm a regular Autolib user in Paris, and I have to say Autolib is just pure awesome. It's the piece of the puzzle that has been missing in public transport, because sometimes you just need a car. Some examples:
Moving large bulky items
Getting around quickly in the suburbs, out of the city centre
Rerving parking in the city centr a ahead of time
Actually, those are the three main use cases for me. I do everything else with my electric bike or the metro. Still, the service has changed my life - I no longer own a car because of it, and I'm not alone in that. Just yesterday another friend was selling her car on Facebookfor the same reason.
Anyway, I think the Indy city council would do better by stopping worrying about who had the right to do what, and just get behind this thing. It just makes people's lives better.
I live in Paris suburb and Autolib isn't useful for me and the lost of parking space complaint is quite real.
So 'pure awesome' for its customers, probably, annoying for other: that's true also.
As someone who uses neither Autolib nor regular car, I'm way more annoyed by the regular cars completely filling the roads everyday (one person by car, 95% of the time), polluting, making buses late and taking a huge part of the city/sideways, than by someone using Autolib once in a while.
Orbits are not intuitive. To head "downwards", you have to slow down your orbital velocity, which reduces the radius of the orbit. In other words you have to decelerate. When you do the maths, you actually have to decelerate more from Earth orbit to get to the sun than you do to accelerate up to solar escape velocity.
Right, so an orbit implies an amount of kinetic energy which you need to lose to lower your orbit; and losing kinetic energy in a frictionless environment requires some kind of propulsion.
All maintenance on aircraft is closely tracked. They can probably find evidence of maintenance operations that were conducted on the found piece and confirm that it matches the maintenance records for the aircraft. It's a similar idea to identifying people by dental records.
I also use Siri to send text messages if I'm driving or riding my bike, or to find the answer to a piece of trivia, or to launch applications, rather than having to hunt for them. That makes quite a lot of use cases, but nevertheless I agree with you that I wouldn't miss Siri if it was to go away
Noooooo, that's the whole point! The question that is being asked is not "how to make gun owners less likely to shoot people" but rather "how to make it less likely that people get shot". Per capita is absolutely the right measure to use for the latter question.
In terms of rampage shootings, the way to reduce the number of shootings is to reduce the number of guns. That's what the data shows.
A per capita analysis starts discussions about how the US is different in multiple ways. Oh, well, in the US a person is 5x more likely to go on a shooting rampage than in other OCED countries. Maybe it's US media coverage? Maybe we don't have the background checks or psychological evaluations other countries have. Maybe it's our action movies?
No.
It's simply that we have more guns. In fact, on a per gun basis, other OCED countries combined have a 50% higher rate of spree shootings. We just have a LOT more guns than other countries.
Now, whether this is a good or bad thing is a much broader discussion. But the ONLY data driven answer to "why does the US have more spree shootings than the rest of the world?" is: "Because the US has more guns".
TL;DR: A per-capita analysis leads to sociological problem solving as the base metric is people-based. A per-gun analysis cuts directly to the significant factor.
I wonder how good a proxy the number of guns is for the number of people with access to guns.
(It's probably reasonably good, I'm interested in what the numbers would be, not trying to put forward a conclusion)
I guess in the US over recent decades the number of people with access to guns has increased relative to the number of guns (because I think there are less hunters and more self defenders).
