I'm particularly enjoying how ignorance of the state of the industry leads to victim-blaming. Telling women who are continuing to deal with these issues in their "everyday realities" that it's all in their heads is the exact attitude that is perpetuating this mess.
Some men honestly don't see it. I have upvoted a lot of your remarks here and I hope it opens some eyes, but I mostly prefer a less confrontational path forward. (Not saying you should.) Just saying that if you think you will change this person's mind, you are likely mistaken. If that is not your goal, hey, you go girl.
Thanks for your support, Mz. After reading "Guess what? Men don't possess this kind of self-doubt. They don't start arguments, they start companies.", I am officially out of words (but at least I had a few laughs). Knowledge and understanding don't come as an all-inclusive package, and it is a shame we see otherwise smart folks speaking so authoritatively on topics that are deep and multi-faceted and begin at birth, so-much-so that they couldn't possibly understand them (just as I cannot speak on behalf of someone else's life experiences and do not wish to). Ah well, just another day.
It's not a question of not seeing it, it's a question of dwelling on it, allowing it to degrade one's effectiveness. You need to realize that men face the same kinds of erosive, degrading comments from their peers, but they (at least successful men) process them differently -- they ignore all but the constructive suggestions. And so do successful women.
More constructively: your advice is not really actionable if your premise is that one must have the same emotions as you and think the way you do. And people can't just rewire their brains because a man on the Internet says their problems are all in their head.
I sometimes wonder why people are so desperate to craft a position that the other person has never taken. Want to constructively discuss issues? Limit yourself to thing the other person has actually said.
My statement is that men have chosen a more effective way to deal with erosive influences, and it's a behavior that women can and should adopt -- not by imitating men, but by adopting a more effective approach to negative influences. There's no gender dimension to it.
If I had said that gerbils have a more effective adaptation, would you have the right to ask, "So you want everyone to become a gerbil?"
> And people can't just rewire their brains because a man on the Internet says their problems are all in their head.
You need to stop inventing imaginary positions for other people. I never said or implied what you claim. My remarks address, not the original influences, but constructive ways to deal with them.
> Telling women who are continuing to deal with these issues in their "everyday realities" that it's all in their heads is the exact attitude that is perpetuating this mess.
Yes, so it's a good thing I never said any such thing, anywhere, ever. It's not in your head, it's real -- so start your own company and exclude the overgrown adolescents. But you need to stop blaming men -- there's no point and it makes you look childish.
At a certain age, usually early teens, everything is the fault of one's parents. Isn't it nice that we all outgrow that phase, move on to the kind of personal accountability that validates other people's trust in us?
Correct -- if there are no legal or practical remedies, to focus on the speech or behavior can only waste time and energy. That's what the PyCon episode ought to have taught all of us -- it was purely negative in its outcome, for all involved.
> That's a great way to avoid holding anyone accountable for their peers' behavior or their own behavior.
Read the history of the PyCon episode before deciding that sounding an alarm at every slight is a constructive choice. The PyCon episode (which was based on speech, not behavior) is a perfect example of what goes wrong when everything is reinterpreted as a gender issue. It also shows the danger of escalation -- when the reaction is a bigger offense than the original stimulus.
> The way to address this is to call people out on their sexist bullshit and force them to own it, not to ignore it and thereby grant tacit approval.
If I believed that, I would call people out on their clear (reverse) sexist bullshit expressed in this exchange. But it's not worth it -- it's not important, it's below my personal radar, and I have better ways to spend my time. But clearly this is not true for everyone, for example those desperate to retain their victim status at a time of declining justification and rationale for that perception and status.
Better to ask yourself which actions move women forward faster -- constructive engagement with activities that will improve the status of women, or unconstructive complaints about imagined slights, or as a recent correspondent put it here a week ago, "microaggressions".
When I read the "microaggressions" meme, I almost fell off my chair. How can anyone think reacting to "microaggressions" represents constructive behavior?
Bottom line -- if the activity is simple speech, not a direct action that discriminates, you're better off ignoring it. Oversensitivity -- turning everything into a gender issue -- does more harm than good. It falsely portrays women as powerless victims whose ascending status can be undermined by words.
