[eropple]

Going into a workplace with the idea that everyone should be treated fairly and equally is a distraction and a problem waiting to happen? "Feminism" isn't "women better, dudes worse."

(And the always popular implication that people who aren't engineers don't matter...)

[sergiotapia]

"Feminism" isn't "women better, dudes worse."

Woah woah woah - all those she-beasts online had led me to believe otherwise. Hell just take a look at /r/tumblrinaction.

[michh]

Tumblr isn't representative of feminism or humankind for that matter. And a collage of Tumblr posts cherry-picked for their awfulness isn't even representative of Tumblr itself.

[dictum]

The "I was born a woman but I really am a chinchilla inside" variety of Tumblr users in perpetual Poe's law mode aren't the average feminist, but the Twitter feminist circles I've seen (I don't know if Julie is really a part of them — I recall seeing her name often, but I don't know much about her) are, honestly, more articulate and powerful versions of some SJ Tumblr circles. They don't rise up for the same reasons the more unhinged[0] Tumblr posters do, but they have some pressure power that's used unwisely like in the dongle/fork situation last year.

[0] Both many prominent Twitter Feminists and Tumblr SJWs cling to the idea that if you're privileged, you can't criticize the oppressed (even if you're not directly oppressing the oppressed in question), so if you're misunderstood as doing something that opresses the oppressed they can start a campaign against you so you lose your job, etc, but you can't answer in the same tone. This is to say, I'm being a jerk for using the word "unhinged" when I don't have any apparent mental disorders.

[sixbrx]

How about university courses about feminism, taught by self-proclaimed feminists? I've been dropped from such a course against my will for no other reason than being male IMO, after two days of class, having said nothing (like everybody else). "Too many people in the class", the only two dropped were the two males of which I was one. I don't think it's a stretch either to say that a great deal of feminist writing reeks of misandry.

[Fomite]

The last women's studies course I took in college had the professor actively thanking the men in the class for their contribution to the discussion.

Some people are Assholes. Feminists are people. Ergo, some Feminists are Assholes. It doesn't say anything more about feminism than it does people in the checkout line at the grocery store.

[sixbrx]

I think we can expect more from full professors than people in the checkout line. It's hard to imagine any professor in any other discipline not being fired for that.

Here's another feminist who also did the same (and was eventually made to resign for it, thankfully): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Daly

[vezzy-fnord]

Tumblr feminism is actually an even extremer extension of postmodern feminism, which is the mainstream ideology nowadays, promoted by journals such as Jezebel and Feministing.

The vast majority of tech industry feminists are postmodernists.

[oneeyedpigeon]

If you choose to judge a group of people by the standards of a subreddit that claims to represent that group of people, we're all pretty much f*cked.

[wetmore]

A loud minority does not define something.

[ehutch79]

When no one does anything to counter them, or to make it clear they don't speak for the social group, it does actually define said group.

There's a lot more to this phenomenon than you could get into on hacker news, but it goes something like "if you don't agree with everything i say exactly, you're clearly the enemy"

[facepalm]

Correction: going into a workplace with the idea that women are treated unfairly is a problem to happen.

[eropple]

Uh. They generally fucking are, bruv.

[facepalm]

In my opinion that is a belief, not a fact.

[eropple]

So a 20% average lower salary for women compared to men (and even lower for women of color) is...just a figment, right?

[facepalm]

Sigh... No it's not, it is just comparing apples to oranges. If you cite the 20% number I know you have no interest in understanding the issue, because that number is a comparison across all jobs, and it ignores education, part time, everything. You don't have women and men working in the same company with 20% difference in wages (at least not significantly many - of course such things happen, but also with men vs men).

The 20% number definitely is not from the tech industry either.

So you have women picking different jobs. You have different incentives and preferences (motherhood is the big one here), different preferred industry (like media vs mining or whatever).

You also have women getting half of the income of their husbands, having the option to drop out of unpleasant jobs, not being under the same pressure to feed their family, and so on.

There are many many aspects to this. So far I haven't seen anything that convinces me women are being treated unfairly.

There are issues, but only if you consider staying at home with kids degrading. For example I suppose the incentive to get a good education is less if you know you will miss out several years where you could earn back the money invested. I don't think "unfair" is the right way to characterize that issue, though.

[rds2000]

> the always popular implication that people who aren't engineers don't matter

There is also the popular implication when there is a girl on twitter starting trouble again, they're not coding and trying to claim some form of discrimination, instead of developing programming skill.

[eropple]

Implied by the deranged, yes. Are you deranged?

You can't--and obviously I mean in the "if you're a basically functioning, mostly vertebrate human being it's morally repugnant" sense of "can't", not the physical, over-literal sense that I feel like you're going to use--blame shitty workplace behaviors (and this isn't the first I've heard of GitHub having problems) on people not knowing how to code. I mean, what kind of world do you want to live in where you can excuse mistreating people because they don't "develop programming skill"?

Actually, don't answer that. I don't want to know what kind of world you want to live in.

[sp332]

But that's an unfair implication, not one you should be looking to imitate.

Edit: I see from your profile that you're an undergrad. Hopefully you'll grow out of the attitude that only super-coders are valuable to a project, like I did.

[hmason]

Only women have to prove that they are engineers enough to matter to HN. Men get that for free.

[nav1]

How is she starting trouble? I suppose not being harassed at work is not too much to ask for, is it? What does programming even have to do with it?