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by borski 4561 days ago
I'm genuinely afraid of stating opinions about women in tech, almost no matter what they are. Being a white male, I have a lot of fear of being completely ripped apart in TechCrunch or ValleyWag for stating my opinions or making suggestions, because I'm never sure if I'm totally PC or not.

It sucks, because I want to help somehow, but I don't want to be misunderstood and have my name be raked through the coals either.
2 comments
1337biz 4561 days ago
Same here. It is pretty much pointless to discuss this issue. Any opinion that doesn't align with a hyper PC standard is getting framed as "controversial".

Votes/Flags are the silent voices of those who can't afford to get drawn into a battle with potentially severe consequences about an issue which they have personally relatively little to gain from.

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smadge 4561 days ago
There is a pretty easy solution to your problem: get informed. Your opinion is worthless if you don't know what you are talking about enough to not infuriate people who do.
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borski 4561 days ago
That's incredibly myopic. You have no idea how informed I am or am not. My point is not that I'm uninformed; my point is that often anything I say gets misconstrued into something I didn't mean, and then torn apart. So I avoid it, because that scares me.

I'd like to discuss it, without judgment, and come to a way I can help. The process of getting there is hard when it's so easy to jump the gun and assume that I, as a white male, am definitionally likely to be discriminatory. That occurs a lot.

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