> There are two reasons why "female" is problematic: ..
Your reply demonstrates some standard rhetorical landmines used by fringe groups:
1) Redefine words within your subculture (in this case: 'gender', 'sex', 'male', and 'female') and then use the new definitions to claim externally inconsiderate use of those words.
2) Assume that whether or not someone was offended ultimately defines ethical norms (especially when tied to #1, redefining vocabulary to create reasons for offense).
I don't care whatsoever about 'offense.' I do care about causing actual harm to human beings. De-humanizing others causes actual harm, through things like wage gaps, (in this case) rape culture, lack of equal rights, etc.
1) There's no 'redefinition' going on here. Sex is a biological thing, a scientific term. If you say "male" and "female," I'd argue you're being a bit clinical, but if you say "man" and "female," you're obviously demonstrating something. It may not be conscious, but you are.
2) You're free to have whatever ethical norms you want, but just like 'free speech,' that doesn't mean you're free from criticism. You can call anyone whatever you like, doesn't mean that I (and others) won't think you're a shitty person, _especially_ after having an explicit conversation about it.
"Hey, this thing hurts me." / "I don't care, I can say whatever I want."
"However, Money's meaning of the word [gender] did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences[5][6] and documents written by the World Health Organization (WHO).[4] However, in most other contexts, even in some areas of social sciences, the meaning of gender has undergone a usage shift to include "sex" or even to replace the latter word."
That's just 'gender' and 'sex'. The first responder proceeded to redefine 'female' and 'male':
"Females as a noun is used to refer to lower animals, I believe you mean women."
No reputable dictionary or colloquial usage defines 'female' as a noun to refer to "lower animals."
> 2) You're free to have whatever ethical norms you want, but just like 'free speech,' that doesn't mean you're free from criticism. You can call anyone whatever you like, doesn't mean that I (and others) won't think you're a shitty person, _especially_ after having an explicit conversation about it.
Which one of us gets to tell the other how to behave on the basis of how we feel about it? I find it offensive how you use rhetoric to label those you disagree with as 'shitty' people; it doesn't leave any room for discourse.
I'm reminded of the Stephen Fry quote:
"It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what."
Indeed, being offended provides no insight into understanding why you're offended, and without explaining why, there's no basis to make a rational evaluation of whether the behavior that offends you is actually ethically wrong.
1, I totally disagree 100% with the 'lower animals' statement, so you know. I think that's pretty ridiculous.
Let's put it this way: words change over time, and if the word changed in the 70s (that was before I was even alive), then it's changed, and the words we use _now_ matter _now_. Language is _never_ static.
2, You keep going back to that 'offense' bit, and referring to 'feelings.' I am not offended. That doesn't come into this at all, as I'm not a liberal. Please read my part about wage gaps, rape culture, and equal rights again.
> Indeed, being offended provides no insight into understanding why you're offended, and without explaining why, there's no basis to make a rational evaluation of whether the behavior that offends you is actually ethically wrong.
As I said before and above, there has been endless explanation of material harm caused by the cultural situation that women (and other minority groups) face today. If you don't know why, at this point, you're just being willfully ignorant.
> Let's put it this way: words change over time, and if the word changed in the 70s (that was before I was even alive), then it's changed, and the words we use _now_ matter _now_. Language is _never_ static.
I wholly agree. But the usage is not universal (by far), and the reworked definitions are used to hit people over the head.
I call a trans person by their preferred gender because it's the polite thing to do, and I try to be a polite and respectful person. However, bringing it up in this context to hit someone over the head for their word choices is not polite.
> As I said before and above, there has been endless explanation of material harm caused by the cultural situation that women (and other minority groups) face today. If you don't know why, at this point, you're just being willfully ignorant.
Which is why using logic-defying rhetorical anvils is just so counter-productively trite and trivial. It leaves me wondering whether these forms of divisive identity politics are really about the equality they claim to be trying to achieve.
> If you can't recognize that men have a vast amount of privilege compared to women, then I don't really know what to say.
The locally-defined concept of "male privilege" is quite possibly the least productive gender generalization to use in a conversation about gender equality.
This -- along with redefinitions of vocabulary to justify offense (see the comment about 'female' being offensive), and truisms that assert that any opposition to preferred policy is opposition to gender equality (see the reference to Lewis's law, or your own murder quote), are why these conversations are so pointlessly and ridiculously laden in rhetorical nonsense as to be useless.
> "Men and women live in different worlds. At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them." And according to my girlfriend, this is not even the slightest bit exaggerated.
According to my wife, this is ridiculous and your girlfriend should adopt a more fact-based view of the world.
I looked it up. From 2000 to 2010, there were 128,971 male victims of murder in the US. There were 35,777 female victims.
> The locally-defined concept of "male privilege" is quite possibly the least productive gender generalization to use in a conversation about gender equality.
Well, let's clear it up then:
"Male privilege refers to the social theory that men have unearned social, economic, and political advantages or rights that are granted to them solely on the basis of their sex, and which are usually denied to women."
It's actually a fairly useful generalization, and most understand what's implied by the use of the term. Of course the real problem isn't the use of rhetoric, it's the outright dismissal of the argument because rhetoric or faux outrage was used to make a point (or, as in my original comment, _real_ outrage).
I'm sorry to say, but we're past the time to be calm, cool, and collected. It's time to get angry, and it's time to put and end to gender inequality. Especially in tech, where we claim to hold ourselves to a higher moral standard.
> Well, let's clear it up then: "Male privilege refers to the social theory that men have unearned social, economic, and political advantages or rights that are granted to them solely on the basis of their sex, and which are usually denied to women."
The useful part is "... which are usually denied to women". The rest is just divisive stereotyping.
> It's actually a fairly useful generalization, and most understand what's implied by the use of the term.
Useful how, exactly? Other than stoking the flames of online discourse, and writing off viewpoints by using "privilege" as a rhetorical bat, I don't see much that can be usefully garnered by pulling the trigger on that particular weapon.
> It's time to get angry, and it's time to put and end to gender inequality. Especially in tech, where we claim to hold ourselves to a higher moral standard.
As far as I can tell, you're getting angry at the wrong people, for the wrong reasons.
You really think the tech industry is responsible for clueless mouth breathers telling your daughters that technology is 'boy stuff'?
I'd look at the educational system and the magazine rack at the supermarket. By the time someone gets to the technology industry, they've already been subjected to a lifetime of indoctrination and have missed out on critical educational opportunities. We're not paid to be educators or social crusaders; we're here to write software, design hardware, and ship products.
We do need to have access to better candidates, and one way to do that is by broadening the pool to draw from, but divisive adults playing at identity politics won't help with that problem.
As a two word phrase which everyone understands to mean the social theory that men have unearned social, economic, and political advantages or rights that are granted to them solely on the basis of their sex, and which are usually denied to women.
> As far as I can tell, you're getting angry at the wrong people, for the wrong reasons.
>You really think the tech industry is responsible for clueless mouth breathers telling your daughters that technology is 'boy stuff'?
Directly no, but by saying it's not our job to deal with the problem, you're just as culpable. So long as there are people in this industry, or any other, who refuse to address gender issues because it's not our job, or there's nothing I can do about it, then those are the people I should be getting angry at. By refusing to acknowledge the problem and addressing it directly, we allow the problem to continue.
As an industry that embrases diversity (gender; racial; social) but suffers from a lack of it, regardless of blame, it's on us to stand up to society and find solutions. We should be social crusaders. By being a members of the society in which the problem exists, it _is_ our responsibility to work to correct it.
My job is not "to write software, design hardware, and ship products," from the moment my daughters were born my job is educator, and social advocate. Shipping products: That's just what I do to pay the bills. Don't get me wrong, I love what I do for a living. I still get excited about new toys (we have new equipment showing up next week), cool projects, being involved in cutting-edge research, but at the end of the day, it's all meaningless. None of it compares to the glow in my daughters eyes two years ago when she opened the Mindtorms kit she got for christmas, or the excitement _she_ has when she pulls out the erector set with some grand new idea.
> As a two word phrase which everyone understands to mean the social theory that men have unearned social, economic, and political advantages or rights that are granted to them solely on the basis of their sex, and which are usually denied to women.
How do you think people react to hearing that what they perceive (often rightfully) as hard-earned success was, in your eyes, unearned?
It's not a productive line of discussion.
> So, yeah, _my_ job is to educate and crusade.
Using divisive and emotional rhetoric just makes people stop listening.
I'd be interested in sponsoring, hosting, or otherwise contributing to non-gendered youth programs that were welcoming to girls and boys.
I don't even know where to start, but I do know that the Ada Initiative's divisive identity politics and concern-trolling aren't something I agree with, and disagreement with their organization doesn't make me a "male privileged" moral bankrupt individual.
> How do you think people react to hearing that what they perceive (often rightfully) as hard-earned success was, in your eyes, unearned?
Ahh, but that's the guts of male privilege isn't it. Their hard-earned success was much easier to come by than a women whose achieved the same level of success. That's what privilege means. It was easier for man to gain that success than their women counterpart. Perhaps not so rhetorical after all. It just stings. Sometimes the truth does that. And sometimes, the only way to break through the denial of an issue is to take a hard stance.
This _is_ an emotional issue. It's people's lives we're talking about. As young women, it's emotional for my daughters. As a father, it's emotional for me. As developers who want to "expand the talent pool", it's emotional for the industry. As people who wish to be blind to gender, it's emotional for society.
> I'd be interested in sponsoring, hosting, or otherwise contributing to non-gendered youth programs
That's great. I'm involved in several myself, including the STEM outreach program at our schools. That doesn't mean that programs targeted at young girls aren't necessary. These "gendered" programs are as much about counter-acting the social pressure the keeps them out of STEM as they are about introducing and developing interest in STEM generally.
Now, I don't know anything about the Ada Initiative, so I'll leave that alone, but will say this, as I said before, ignoring the problem may not make you morally bankrupt, but it does make you complicit in others bankruptcy.
> Ahh, but that's the guts of male privilege isn't it. Their hard-earned success was much easier to come by than a women whose achieved the same level of success. That's what privilege means. It was easier for man to gain that success than their women counterpart. Perhaps not so rhetorical after all. It just stings. Sometimes the truth does that. And sometimes, the only way to break through the denial of an issue is to take a hard stance.
Do you want to be right, or do you want to be heard?
> Their hard-earned success was much easier to come by than a
women whose achieved the same level of success.
But perhaps the men never wanted to be engineers and society forced them. It wasn't easy for them to give up their dreams. But they did because of evil society.
... that’s what happens when we hold events for women in IT when there aren’t that many women in this industry – we tend to broaden the definition of women in IT.
The software industry exists to write software, and ideally it's good software. We're not here to engender happy feelings about bad code. If you're worried about immature people non-constructively mocking your code, then the solution is to realize that those people are unlikely to be particularly great developers themselves, and aren't worth paying attention to.
Any sufficiently experienced and mature developer ought to know better than to throw stones from the glass house of their own imperfection. It's better to join or create a welcoming community of experts, than trying to create a coddling safe-space where equally inexperienced people can provide each other with congratulatory pats on the back.
There are an estimated 9-12% women in the field of programming. Are you saying that 90% of the female population has no balls? Or is it more likely that due the systemic method of education, girls don't get interested in programming because by the time they are taught it, the boys are in the computer lab making a ruckus and they'd rather go socialize elsewhere. I speak with teachers at primary schools who get girls as young as 9 to enter robotics competitions. I mentor young programmers to stay enthused, get through their teen years (more often than not, not programming because of socialization aspect) and pick it up again in their later teens when being alone is fine again. And now the IRC channels and open source communities are solely male and there seems no way in. Ada, of all foundations, knows this better than anyone and this is very, very small step to get some more girls back into coding and sharing that experience with others.
> Are you saying that 90% of the female population has no balls?
No. The major hurdles to becoming a programmer are crossed long before it becomes time to put code in a github repository.
> Or is it more likely that due the systemic method of education, girls don't get interested in programming because by the time they are taught it, the boys are in the computer lab making a ruckus and they'd rather go socialize elsewhere.
Given that there aren't any well-considered studies that show fundamental non-socially-caused cognitive differences between men and women, and that behavior seems to be entirely mutable and culturally-driven, then the fact that "they'd rather go socialize elsewhere" is likely the result of considerable cultural programming outside the immediate realm of putting code into a machine.
Of course, it's not that simple -- yours is a broad and inaccurate generalization of what girls want in school, and of how boys behave in school. Personally speaking, I didn't want to spend any time in the computer lab either, because the only people in there were super-nerds playing video games for hours.
> the only people in there were super-nerds playing video games for hours
I know! It was really annoying. I just wanted to get stuck into computerized maths, CAD and plotting when I was 14 but it was uncomfortable being the only girl in the lab during lunch hours. If there had been another boy or girl I respected as a friend there I might have joined in, not to be sociable but just knowing there was someone else there who wasn't geeking out on gaming.
Compared to advancing your knowledge of programming, CAD, et al, it's a lot easier to bolster your ego and social standing with video games, so that's what those kids do.
I think the solution (for schools, anyway) would be adult-led structured activities where intelligence and hard work are rewarded: electronics/robotics/programming clubs, with long-term group projects where people with varied levels of experience can be accommodated.
I'd naively like to believe that gender can be left out of it, other than making a structured effort to recruit students irrespective of gender.
>bolster your ego and social standing with video games
I had never had it explained to me like that - maybe girls and boys separate themselves so much as teenagers there's just a huge amount of information we don't have. If I was back at school and I knew that I would have had no problem hanging out in the computer lab, knowing that what was going on was a male-growing-up thing and outside of my participation.
I believe that we can have gender-neutral education. Sports is good at it but women and minorities fought hard in the 20th century for equal right to the field. Something to think about.
This is terribly off-topic, but you don't have any contact info in your profile. Are you going to AdaCamp in June, by chance? If you are, please email me (it's in my profile), because I'm going and I've love to get to know other attendees. If you're not, you should apply if it's reasonable for you to attend (it's in San Francisco). The application period ends on April 30th. http://sf.adacamp.org/apply/
It's fine you think that. I think that hundreds of girls don't really care about that initial help, will get some seriously good programming done, release some fantastic code and not read your comment at all except with a passing glance at someone who feels slighted for something that doesn't affect him at all.
If the original statement had a nugget of truth it would be easiest to just ignore it and not answer. Instead, they are going on the record and saying its not true.
> Instead, they are going on the record and saying its not true.
It's not like "going on record" means anything; truth is an oddly malleable thing. What's true today might not be tomorrow, what is said to be true may only be what the speaker needs you to believe is true, or it may be the speaker only believes it to be true.
The best predictor of what's to come is past experience and objective observation, not the words of people who have both incentive and ego wrapped up in propagating a particular narrative.
[edit] From another comment, here's an e-mail from the Parse team, from 1/15/2013 -- only 3 months ago:
"Being acquired isn't part of our game plan for now. We want to build a viable business that people can use and enjoy. We have 50k apps built on our infrastructure and a huge customer base that is growing rapidly. Everyday we have more and more Basic, Pro, and Enterprise users paying us for our awesome services."
> Yes. (at least on iOS, not sure about Android or Win)
er, what? It's an afternoon's worth of work, involving basic PKI and TCP sockets. I know it's an afternoon's worth of work, because I've done it in an afternoon.
That's silly. Seeing as how I had to google PKI to see what it was, I doubt I'd be able to build a Parse-like service in one afternoon. Parse may not be strictly necessary, but it's a fantastically easy and cheap way for iOS (and Android and front-end and Windows Phone) developers to get their backend up and running.
> Seeing as how I had to google PKI to see what it was, I doubt I'd be able to build a Parse-like service in one afternoon.
Then it's something you would learn, and those several afternoons would mean that you'd be well equipped to tackle a similar problem in an afternoon later.
Basic x509 certificates and PKI is really something an iOS developer (or any developer, really) should be able handle. Understanding this stuff is pretty central to just about all secure communications we have between clients/servers anywhere. It's not like you have to reimplement a crypto library; you just need to know the basics of how they work.
I actually did build all of my company's push stuff for iOS in an afternoon. It's a very simple TCP protocol that's well documented. If you know anything about basic networking it's cake.
It actually is very easy, we have a tiny pushserver written in Python that was written in a day or something like that. It's been running for almost a year without a restart, so it didn't even need further development.
It's still an afternoon's worth of headache. Parse is just the time it takes to set up the certs, profile and configure your app. Plus, doing it DIY means you have to maintain a system for sending the notifications, whereas Parse provides that for you.
Unfortunately, intentions about how you'll operate after an acquisition are just wishes.
There's a huge corporate political apparatus that just paid a lot of money for the right to implant their thumb print on how you do things. You may be able to push that day forward, but unless you wind up in charge, there's not much long-term hope.
Congratulations on the acquisition, but sorry about the acquisition.
https://gist.github.com/brianpattison/5463282 "Being acquired isn't part of our game plan for now. We want to build a viable business that people can use and enjoy. We have 50k apps built on our infrastructure and a huge customer base that is growing rapidly. Everyday we have more and more Basic, Pro, and Enterprise users paying us for our awesome services."
Everything in those quote is correct. It wasn't part of our game plan at the time. It was never our "game plan" in general. In fact, at the time, we were planning the strategy for a fundraise.
> It wasn't so long ago that you were a douche if you walked around in public talking into a cell phone.
You still are. It's still considered rude to subject everyone to your cell phone call. These people walk up to the register while on a call, block the sidewalk while distracted, and otherwise are clearly not actually with us in this universe.
> Or if you drove around showing off your crazy automobile contraption instead of riding a horse like a normal person.
Yep, the 'showing off' part is still douche.
> Or if you wore a timepiece strapped to your wrist, instead of on a chain in your pocket like a proper gentleman. (And later, if the watch on your wrist was some kind of ugly LCD thing, instead of a handsome analog face.)
This one too. Once watches stopped being a functional item (the advent of phones), they became douche status badges.
Your reply demonstrates some standard rhetorical landmines used by fringe groups:
1) Redefine words within your subculture (in this case: 'gender', 'sex', 'male', and 'female') and then use the new definitions to claim externally inconsiderate use of those words.
2) Assume that whether or not someone was offended ultimately defines ethical norms (especially when tied to #1, redefining vocabulary to create reasons for offense).