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by Certhas
3463 days ago
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No. It's really not. It's him demanding exacting standards of evidence for people even raising the topic, while ignoring vast scientific literature on persistent biases. There are difficult conversations to be had about how we should go about being inclusive, and what exactly that should mean, but this post is a terrible starting point. How do you proof that you didn't get a spot to speak at a conference because your equivalent work was valued slightly lower by some organizers, especially when the organizer was not aware they were making gendered assessments? How do you measure people who decided not to engage with a particular community due to unnecessarily adversarial technical discussions. Especially before the background of women not interrupting men at nearly the rate as men interrupt women. This has nothing to do with the technical merits of what is said and everything with who gets to speak. Whenever you measure these things using science you find that gendered behaviour is absolutely pervasive. Sometimes you learn that things aren't gendered in the way they first appear. For example it often turns out that women discriminate nearly as much as men do against other women. What we can't do is pretend all of that doesn't exist simply because the discrimination isn't manifesting itself as overtly and blatantly as it used to. This is an important achievement by the way. The fact that overt blatant sexism is almost universally condemned is after all what makes the charge: "That's sexist!" so problematic. |
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The way I read what ESR wrote, if you have someone that has a demonstrable history of technical contributions (or per his second point, other interesting factors that make the person notable), then it's objective information that can be used when saying "wait, why isn't Person on the schedule?" Evidence is strong and interesting; identity politics or accusations, far less so.
> How do you measure people who decided not to engage with a particular community due to unnecessarily adversarial technical discussions. Especially before the background of women not interrupting men at nearly the rate as men interrupt women. This has nothing to do with the technical merits of what is said and everything with who gets to speak.
This is back in the realm of anecdotes. Men interrupt men. Women interrupt women. Vice versa. Some people are jerks, often on accident. ESR is talking about open source culture and, for most participation in it, people only know about your physical identity what you offer.
> Whenever you measure these things using science you find that gendered behaviour is absolutely pervasive.
If you can link provide actual evidence and not the kind of poor-method pseudo-science that comes out of gender studies, then I suspect this would fall into ESR's:
> If you pass all these filters, maybe you have something to teach me, and maybe you’ll get to see what I’m like when I am righteously pissed off because hacker norms have been violated in a serious way.
> This is an important achievement by the way. The fact that overt blatant sexism is almost universally condemned is after all what makes the charge: "That's sexist!" so problematic.
Speaking from my perspective, and not ESR's (or speaking from/to his article), this is where I think evidence and dispatching of witch hunts in tech is important -- give evidence of _real_ sexism in tech and we can fight it together. If it's constantly trying to blow something out of proportion for personal gain or is something entirely without evidence, "that's sexist!" is going to start falling on deaf ears.