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by _e21c 1952 days ago
The number and variety of knots “rationalists” will tie themselves into when trying to explain away the existence of discrimination and organized structures for enforcing that discrimination is really funny, and sad, and absurd.
3 comments

How about showing that there actually is discrimination, and structures for enforcing such discrimination? It's usually claims about demographics (#women < #men => discrimination!) or constantly moving the goalposts and redefining STEM as "fields where there are less women" so that they always get the expected demographic outcome. See: https://youtu.be/tbnVAE3BwiM?list=LL&t=936

Why is there never outrage the other way around with fields dominated by women, e.g., psychology?

Because, generally speaking and on balance, a least in American society, women have things worse off than men. The pay gap, gender roles, access to reproductive healthcare, representation in government, no paid parental leave, violence against women.
None of those things are evidence of discrimination in tech hiring. When we send 100 applications to Google for engineering positions, do we see male resumes selected where otherwise-identical female resumes are not?
Is that really true though? Men are overrepresented by multiples among the Homelessness, prison sentences, assult victims, suicides, gun deaths. Often by factors of 2-3x

They're also deeply underrepresented in college, and the gap between men and women going to college is growing. Among young people, especially in cities, women actually out earn men.

Figuring out who's "better off" seems to be entirely dependent on what ruler you're using to measure "better", and which subgroup you're using to do the measurement.

The simple response to your whataboutism is that we're not talking about other fields like psychology or education or nursing. If you want to discuss sexist attitudes towards men in those fields be my guest, but it's a different conversation.

The less simple response is that cis white men haven't been systematically kept from participating in the full economy, unlike women and people of color until about a generation ago. Systemic sexism and racism were built up over centuries and have not been evacuated from society yet. When engaging in discussion about it it's impossible to look at the entire scope and walk away with concrete actions to reduce its impact, which is why productive discussion needs to hone in on specific issues or else we get in meaningless argument over semantics like "#women < #men == sexist" when it should be obvious that something is wrong there

On the other hand we can't just notice an inequality of outcomes and assert that it's caused by discrimination.
Can you point to any examples?
This discussion thread is a good start.
How can we discuss sexism if even discussing it constitutes sexism?

(If I mis-understood what you're referring to please correct me).

I think they're saying to look at quite a few of the arguments being made, rather than the simple fact that a discussion is taking place.