[sfaf]

Do you have an ethical objection to surveying under-represented groups on general questions?

To me this is no different than "ask a black engineer, ask college dropout engineer, ask an engineer working in a developing country, ask a house husband, ask an engineer who grew up in the projects, ask an engineer who didn't study cs, etc."

The point is for me to get a perspective from a background that I don't have. To me that adds value.

[Trombone12]

Wow, that your comment got downvotes is baffling! Well, not really. But it should be!

I certainly agree with you, its really weird that people think its wrong to ask women for their opinion. Maybe they just had a really bad experience on a date when they asked what she wanted to eat? (badom-tsh!)

Going along on that tangent, who here has a male spouse that has a really hard time deciding what to eat? (I know enough examples in the other direction, thank you for asking. You are of course welcome to come with examples outside the binay, the more diverse the merrier)

[thanatropism]

Sure, but the subtler point is -- what is a group? How do we cluster people together?

I'm very stable (decades of medication) and no one in my workplace knows about it, but I have a mental illness; a rather serious one, too. And Jesus would it be cringeworthy to see the mentally ill parade their quirkiness in "Meet the engineers"-type situations. Cringeworthy and potentially damaging if I was "out of the closet" as it were.

I'm my own person. But just as I'm grouped as "privileged" (white, male, straight, cis, not drinking too much) by some clustering schemes -- and my "voice" somehow doesn't matter, I'm also grouped as "oppressed" which doesn't serve me better.

I'll leave you with some Emerson on pitying the underprivileged:

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Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

[tombone12]

A group in this context is a set of persons who share a property, in this case their gender.

As to the larger point you are trying to make, I'm sorry, you didn't manage to make one. It is true that any given person can be simultaneously in a privileged group and an underprivileged group (I'm both a man and a very short person), but this is a rather trivial observation much like saying that it can be both night and that at a particular place on Earth.

We get it, people have different possibilities in different contexts, what a remarkable observation! Now stop trying to restrict the possibilities women have to express their experiences, and dragging out a quote from Emerson about how he really dislikes the poor (which he can well do in the privacy of his own dead head or just generally away from me) does not count as discussion.