Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, elegantchorus has provided the definitive mansplaination as to why the apparent sexism in the tech world isn’t really sexism.
He starts by addressing one recent controversy: the lack of any female presenters at a press event for Sony’s Playstation 4. Sexism — or just the whimsical finger of fate?
Sony not having female presenters at its console announcement because Sony doesn’t have any female executives, MIGHT be sexist, but its more just coincidence … .
What a strange coincidence that is! Sort of like, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but all the popes so far have been men. Weird! What are the odds? Anyway:
[T]here is certainly great examples of women in leading positions in important tech companies. Marissa Mayer of Yahoo comes immediately to mind.
That certainly is great examples!
Yet people spent a lot of time talking about how sexist the Sony conference was, while giving relatively few props to women who have actually succeeded, I actually think that’s more sexist than anything the IT industry can conjure.
Yeah. I mean, Kotaku ran an actual article about that Sony thing. Yet where — WHERE!!!? — are the articles about Marissa Mayer, or about that Sheryl chick from Facebook. What’s her last name?
Sheryl Sandberg! That’s right. I wonder how Google knew that. I mean, it’s not like she gets much press coverage. Oh well. Kudos to the male programmers at Google for figuring out which Sheryl I meant!
Anyway, enough with the discussions of actual women in tech. Elegantchorus moves on to the truly important question to deal with when we talk about women in the tech world, which is: where are all the lady coal miners?
The complaints about apparent inequality are always directed towards jobs like Computer Science and Engineering but never towards something like Coal Mining.
You’ve got to admit he’s got a point there. I mean, why are these selfish ladies all worked up about being excluded from high-paying jobs that involve sitting on your butt in front of a computer in a nice office instead of the really dangerous ones that take place deep underground? Why are women more interested in good jobs than in not-so-good jobs?!
It’s quite the GOTCHA moment. I mean, feminists NEVER EVER talk about getting more women into mining, except, you know, when they do. And it’s quite telling that there are ZERO organizations devoted to expanding the number of women in the mining industry except for, you know, the Women’s Mining Coalition and Women in Mining International, and maybe others, I don’t know, which obviously don’t count because of reasons.
Why aren’t there more Coal Mining women? Is the coal mining industry inherently sexist? If you can’t take that question seriously, why should I take the concern about the IT industry seriously?
Seriously, what a ridiculous notion! Sexism … in the mining industry? Pshaw! Women have always been welcomed into the mines with open arms — and some good-natured ribbing! Consider this amusing anecdote I found on the Internet.
The women who broke ground as coal miners faced discriminatory hiring practices from the owners as well as sexual harassment from men who felt threatened by the demands of the women to be treated as human beings, equal in every way. Barbara Angle, a mining woman, said, “There were three women and 300 men in my mine. They used to ‘joke’ with me. “Hey, just set up a cot at the pit mouth and you’ll make more each shift than if you mine.”
It’s funny because women are really only useful as vagina suppliers to men!
Meanwhile, I’d like to add, while feminists sit on their butts and don’t do anything about the lack of women in mining, except organizing and filing lawsuits and all that, bold and courageous Men’s Rights activists have been active indeed in trying to increase the number of men in glamorous female-dominated professions like, you know, housekeeping. Selfish ladies, bogarting 89% of the housekeeping jobs! And 97% of the secretary jobs!
You may recall the chants that filled the air at last year’s Men For Crappy-Paying Lady Jobs rally* in Washington DC.
What do we want?
To be secretaries!
When do we want it?
Right before your 11 o’clock appointment, sir!
And besides, though elegantchorus doesn’t get into this, women are simply not biologically suited for high-paying jobs in tech, just as men are biologically incapable of taking jobs as dental hygienists.
As a Redditor named lbzip2 explained in a comment posted in the thread, women
lack the necessary attention to detail. They are simply not interested in it. Guess what, they have no place here, just like I could never be a historian or translator or lawyer or doctor, because I hate meeting new people. I’m not “enforcing” this or some shit like that, I simply accept that most girls are like this for whatever reason and I’m not trying to force them into IT.
As for those ladies who for some crazy reason actually want to work in the tech world, lbzip2 offers nothing but respect, and the occasional sexist joke:
I treat my female coworkers with respect, I politely discuss technical stuff with them if they feel like. I do make sexist jokes if I was able to get to know them sufficiently before, like any healthy male. They mostly laugh and if they don’t, I apologize and tune it down.
They mostly laugh!! So obviously the sexist jokes are fine, and probably not even sexist. Did you hear the one about the lady miner and the cot?
Yet some ladies bizarrely think that the deck is stacked against them in tech:
“Missing out on best career opportunities?” Well, concentrate on the fucking task at hand, not irrelevant details. Suppose I’d like to work in a fuckin’ bakery but hate that the clothes are white (which doesn’t mean in the least that they are clean). So who will start a crusade for me? If the circumstances of your otherwise coveted dream-job are accidental, try to change them. If they are intrinsic, live with them or leave.
Oh, and speaking of things that are stacked:
In my college class we had this beautiful girl with huge boobs. She was smarter than any guy in the whole class. Did we envy her? Did we hate her? Hell no. We respected her and we constantly tried to bring her in discussions for her insights. Did we talk about her body among ourselves? Hell yes, we’re no monks!
Boobs.
Boobs boobs boobs.
Booooooobs.
Oh, sorry.
Anyway, all you gals who don’t like sexist jokes at tech conferences, consider this: lbzip2 doesn’t like to travel!
Women consider sexist jokes repugnant in conference presentations? Well, I don’t go to no fucking conference, because I hate to travel, I hate to spend money, I hate the crowd.
Q.E. fuckin D! Male logic defeats weird lady feeeelings once again!
So, in conclusion, ladies don’t belong in the tech world, and there’s nothing whatsoever sexist about that. Also boobs.
—
*The Men For Crappy-Paying Lady Jobs rally is imaginary. The chant is real, though, in that I said it out loud a couple of times to my cats.
His talking points are the typical ones:
“Bad things happen, therefore there is no reason to do anything about those bad things.”
“GUNS ARE MY RIGHTS.”
I pointed out that we have laws to deal with everything from murder to driving under the influence and mere fact that people are still stupid enough to do those things does not mean that we have repealed those laws. It means we make them stronger, work on the root causes and pay attention to the fact that sometimes it does work and figure out why.
And the second one:
I responded with the point that literally every amendment has some kind of restriction on it and more importantly, the Congress has the duty, power and responsibility to provide for the general welfare and if the general welfare is being harmed, why would Congress not have the ability to act?
There is a reason the judge at the court I work at will put people in jail who treat her clerks badly-her view is that they are just as much a part of the court as she is so therefore, if someone acts badly to a clerk, they are showing the same contempt of court as if they were saying such stuff to her. That is usually if the careful detailed explanation of why they will never do that again does not work.
Yes, anytime I talk about attractive men I make sure to include the fact that they are attractive in my story.
Example:
There is this guy in my class who is gorgeous he has abs and a tight butt. I sometimes invite him into conversations about economics because he is very insightful even though he is a man. Did you know he was a MAN? Did you know I found him attractive because I did. What insightful comments did make? Hell if I remember.
I remember I had a conversation with a guy about my job and his conclusion: “so you are a glorfied nanny?”…….
WTF dude. I just told you that I work with sex offenders, arsonists, ect and you think I’m a (*#&*$^(*Y#$ nanny?
Yes, because all he heard was I work with kids.
@CWS (continuation of the large-breasted student convo): Yeah, really. Even if we take him at his word that they truly weren’t sexist towards her (LOL, but let’s go with it), the entire example is sexist. I mean, I’ve had attractive coworkers and fellow students. Yet when we discuss sexism or lookism, I’d never think to be like, “But one time there was this person I was really attracted to, and I went out of my way to include zir, so there.” Like, do they even listen to themselves? And that’s a generous reading of it…he didn’t say she was attractive, he specifically described a part of her body that he found sexually attractive. It makes my head explode.
@kittehs, retail is a really hard job. In addition to the dangers you list, repetitive use injuries and even issues like arthritis from standing all day on a hard surface (yeah I know most places supply those mats, but that’s not really enough) are common in cashiering as well. Yeah, it’s not the same as dying in a mine cave-in or early detonation or something (which would happen less often than they do if companies were held accountable and made to follow safety regulations), but living in constant pain is a high price to pay for a $10/hour (if you’re lucky) job.
Incidentally, I believe the most dangerous job field out there in terms of maiming injuries and death is agriculture, which also has a significant number of women and children working in it (children due to family farms which are exempt as well as farms that hire undocumented workers and don’t enforce legal working age laws). Not that mining is an easy or safe job (Mr. AK was actually a miner for many years, so I know a bit about it), but really, many jobs are dangerous in a variety of ways.
Also, on many feminist wage-gap discussions I’ve seen, a major feminist complaint is how difficult it is for women to get relatively high-paying, low-education trades like mining and oil rig work (and the sexual harassment they face if they do get it, of course). I’d rather work in a mine than clean houses all day, that’s for sure…at the very least, the pay is a lot higher.
@shehemoth- That sucks. There’s a really easy way for that douchecanoe to feel “more manly;” take over some of that extra work they have you doing. Jeez. People are terrible.
Reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld claiming that making someone stand on a box isn’t torture. He stand up for hours at a time don’tcha know. Doesn’t bother him.
I literally can no longer tell the difference between our trolls and someone parodying the trolls.
Here’s the difference:
Shitty, dangerous jobs that primarily men do: recognized as shitty and dangerous, given cultural cachet, paid well considering educational requirements
Shitty, dangerous jobs that primarily women do: LOL, is that even a job? (Eldercare is my favorite example here.)
That’s an interesting photo David, where did you find it? Charles Babbage used Jacquard’s “punch-card” loom automation concept as a basis for programming his “Difference Engine”, and the concept was also used by Hollerith in his famous census-counting machines. As it turns out, Ada Lovelace was the first “Developer Evangelist” but was not utilized by Babbage to good advantage.
As for women in tech, They Are All Adria Richards Now :
http://www.the-spearhead.com/2013/03/25/they-are-all-adria-richards-now/
I did a stint at a nursing home, wordsp1nner. I will never do elder care again, because even if the job did have fair wages, it wouldn’t be enough.
In the brain-bleach file: https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/7165934592/hBB394174/
And why do you title it “womanconfused.jpg”?
And, brain-bleach for the Spearhead article: https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/7165934592/hBB394174/
It took me a little while to find the link, but there’s a historian named Nathan Ensmenger who’s documented how the early computer programmers up until the 1960s were mostly female, because it was considered closer to secretarial work than the more “manly” hardware side of things.
Once people figured out that being a good programmer is actually a valuable and difficult skill, the menz took it over with straight-up sexist tactics to push women out of the field.
Stanford University’s institute for gender research posted this excellent summary of Ensmenger’s findings, which really need to become more generally known, since so many people mistakenly think that programming has always been a male-dominated activity.
http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-%E2%80%9Ccomputer-geeks%E2%80%9D-replaced-%E2%80%9Ccomputergirls%E2%80%9D
Most telling quote:
Gah, sorry for the double-post of the image link–I glitched while typing.
@tugley logger
This happened to me when I first started lurking, I assumed about half of the trolls were kidding. Poe’s law :/
Also, I’m going to stay up late forever because I got bored and decided to re-read the first thread pell appeared in. I am so not getting to bed on time today XD
@freemage
oh well. it was a cute kitty <3
My mum did a bit of elder care back in the 70s, and her back never really recovered from the work involved.
So true about the wages with retail – they’re crap, even here where minimum wage is higher than in the US. Mind you clerical wages are crap too, though not as bad.
The standing up thing and inadequate spring in flooring (used those stress mats, they’re hopeless) – when Museum Victoria’s new building was made, they cut costs all over the place, including bothering to get underlay for the carpeted areas. This on concrete floors, of course. Guess what: heaps of people in the office areas have back and leg problems they didn’t before (the old building had wooden floors). I hate to imagine what it’s like being in customer service in that building. It’s badly designed, noisy (great open spaces that amplify all the yelling and screaming children) and you’re on your feet all day on those totally unyielding floors. It was bad enough in the old place, a building I loved; no way would I have tried to get into the new one.
Plus the uniforms were so Ken Done ugly I laughed out loud the first time I saw them. 😉
@kittehs
bleh. why must people suck so much. Grr. I mean, I guess I’m in a rambly/ ranty mood, so you guys feel free to tell me if you want to shut up, but, for the moment, rant ahead.
What kind of a person decides cutting the budget for something is better than other people’s well being? It’s like, blah, empathy fail! >:(
It’s weird, isn’t it? Like they just don’t think why something’s designed that way anyhow – underlay, for instance. It’s not put there for the heck of it, it’s necessary.
On a vastly worse scale, I was reading an article in History Today about the Irish Famine and the British government response to it just before. That response wasn’t just down to the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic bias, though that fed a lot of it; it was partly driven by Malthusian economics. The men in charge of so-called relief were quite deliberately aiming to get rid of Ireland’s “excess population” by letting them starve, or even hastening the process (putting starving people on road-building projects that were paid like piece-work; naturally the wages weren’t paid if you couldn’t work because the road was deep in snow).
I came away from that article wondering, among other things, why it is that “economist” so often seems a synonym for “sociopath”.
oh wow. wow. wow. Faith in humanity minimal. Okay, on the note of that horribleness, I’m going to go to bed now, since I really should. See all you guys later.
Kitteh’s: Well, honestly? That’s true of almost any social science, when read in a vacuum, pretty much by design. They have to have no emotional connection with the subjects, or else it gets in the way of actually evaluating what they’re trying to study.
Much like the physical sciences, the problem comes when the people responsible for applying that science are actual sociopaths. The gatling gun was invented by a guy who thought it would make people so terrified of warfare that they would do anything to avoid it, including work harder for peace. Sadly, it didn’t work out that way. Accountants and corporate leaders–the people who apply economic theory to get the maximum gain–become so focused on that goal that they ignore the reality that they’re dealing with people.
@ Jake Hamby- That is both fascinating and incredibly depressing. I worry sometimes, because of evidence over and over that our culture shifts and moves to devalue any work with even the slightest stink of “women’s work” on it.
Good point, freemage. Reminds me of the social science teacher I had who giggled through the film of the Milgram experiment. Nervous giggle? Maybe, but it sure burned itself on my memory – that was over thirty years ago.
It seems all too common with economists, though. Everything has to give way to TEH MARKET – individual people’s quality of life or actual lives don’t matter, the environment doesn’t matter, nothing else matters.
Kitteh’s: Yeah, that particular field is especially prone to looking only at the ‘social machine’ level. Again, though, often they’re working deliberately on a theoretical level. There are economists who then try to at least describe those other factors (quality of life, lives lost, environmental impact, etc) in economic terms so they become relevant to the theories–but to us outsiders, it can often look like a rather ugly “Human beings are worth $X for every year you shorten their lives.”
This is the problem, isn’t it? Working deliberately on a theoretical level has extremely ugly implications when it’s a field that has an immediate real-world impact, and when it means, effectively, dehumanising people. It’s like they take the privilege of being able to study economics at all and complete it with an empathy-ectomy.
I’m somewhat to the left of Stalin, so I’m hardly a free-marketeer, but you’re really, really oversimplifying things. You’re also confusing economists with politicians, right-wing talking heads and the like. Many of these people have turned economics (particularly neo-liberal “Regaonomics”) into a quasi-religion. Milton Freedman, were he alive today, I think would want nothing to do with the US Republican party (or indeed Australia’s Liberals).
Economics is, at it’s heart, about how to share scarce resources. What’s the best way to use what we’ve got to enhance the wellbeing of everyone. So yes, when you’re trying to find ways of maximising the benefit of a state or a country or whatever, it can become intensely impersonal (although the sub-field of behavioural economics, which is a hybrid with psychology can get quite up-and-personal).
You’ll find economists working in development agencies, environmental groups, welfare groups, etc… If you spoke to most practising economists in government or where-ever, you’d find people trying to use their professional training to better the lot of many people.
That doesn’t mean that when they make serious mistakes, many are removed from the impact of their decisions. There also doesn’t seem to be a willingness to discard failed ideas in the field. And sure, there are those who see the market as a means, not an end. But it’s a human enterprise, and is subject to human failings.
To lump the entire, disparate field with Marx on one extreme, Hayek on the other and everything in between is as silly as saying that all physicists are evil because they built the hydrogen bomb.
Disclosure: I’m not an economist, but my partner is, so I can get defensive.