This story itself seems to be perpetuating a small false hood by captioning the leading photo as, “Egypt’s first female ship’s captain”.
If you read the article it then says she was the first female to be accepted to Egypt’s merchant navy school and in the second to last sentence says she is currently the rank of fist mate though will be a Captain soon if she passes her exam. She is also clearly wearing the rank of fist mate in the photo billing her as Egypt’s first captain.
This is why people have lost faith in the news. They can’t even get a basic fact right and manage to contradict themselves in the same story no less.
> and captained the Aida IV when it became the first vessel to navigate the newly-expanded Suez Canal in 2015. At the time, she was the youngest and first female Egyptian captain to cross the waterway.
It's a bit confusing. From another linked article[0]
> “One has to spend many years at sea, studying and taking exams before reaching this level.
> I graduated in 2013 and got an MBA, then I was promoted from second officer to first officer, and now I am a captain,” she added.
Still, I think this is... minutiae compared to the larger issue of smear campaign targeting oppressed classes of people. Perhaps she can be acting captain before getting the official rank?
I’d guess it is a poor translation of Arabic. ربان Can be translated to “captain” but it means the person piloting the ship which is part of the duties of the first mate when the captain isn’t at the helm. Saying that she piloted the ship through the canal would be consistent with the rest of the facts presented.
The point is that the antidote to distasteful fake news isn’t good intentioned fake news it’s factual news. So wether this error was unintended or driven by their own biases to write an overwhelmingly positive story to counter the false one it manages to perpetuate the problem.
It’s possible she has a Masters Ticket (ie is qualified to Captain a vessel) while working as First / Chief Mate - it’s quite common as it would allow her to take command in an emergency if the Captain was incapacitated.
It's possible to be a First Mate without that credential? I'll readily admit to being extremely ignorant about shipping, but I always imagined the position being akin to the US Vice President, in that part of the job description is to take over from the captain as necessary.
There is a specific Chief Mate license (according to STCW) but indeed commonly the Chief Mate holds a Master license, it’s just not required for minimum safe manning. (If it was, than the Manning regulations wouldn’t be met anymore when the captain is incapacitated)
At least here in Germany it only take ~3 years of sea service to progress from officer of the watch to master - but no one will entrust you with a major cargo or passenger vessel with that little experience.
The Arab News also covered the controversy: Anti-feminist trolls target first Egyptian woman captain with fake Arab News profile [1]. Hopefully the story is covered in non-English news sources as well. I suspect that the coverage will ultimately be good for Marwa Elselehdar and Egyptian women in general.
In the age of online mobs it's probably very commendable for the news outlets not to throw anybody to the lions, especially since in this case the responsibility seems difficult to establish. Is it the fault of the captain? The Egyptian pilot? Some technician that caused directly or indirectly a blackout on the ship? The Egyptian authorities who authorized the ship to cross during bad weather? Etc...
It's a very good thing that the media was more cautious IMO. And conspiracy theories don't need anybody feeding them, you have armies of losers online doing nothing but making that stuff up 24/7.
I don't think there's anything "strange" going on (a rather conspiratorial wording in and of itself IMO), it's just that it's very hard to place the blame with the information currently available, especially since all the first party sources have a very strong incentive to push a certain narrative.
The Costa Concordia on the other hand was much more clear cut and you had the extremely embarrassing recording of the coast guard telling the captain to return to the ship and him cowardly refusing to do so. There's no such thing here as far as I know.
Again, I don't care to find them excuses. "Somebody called me a loser so I decided to spew bullshit online" is what losers do.
I'd much rather empathize with this captain who was targeted solely because she's a woman. That seems like a much better use of my time than caring about keyboard warriors on twitter or 4chan.
I'm talking about addressing systemic issues in our culture (like calling any group we don't like by a bad name) that are definitely, provably, obviously, causing more of the bad behavior that we're trying to criticize.
I live in a very "purple" area and even though I am "blue" I get along with "red" people easily by, I dunno, not calling them "deplorables" when they say something that offends me.
It's up to each of us if we want to link our identity with a zealous cause and never back down because we're afraid of social penalties from our in-group, or if we want to actually learn how to get along. But if you go around calling people "losers", you should consider how that might be adding to the problem you're trying to solve.
Edit: btw I agree 100% with everything you've said except for the "armies of losers" phrasing. That's all I'm trying to communicate to you. That there may have been a more constructive way to get your (correct) point across.
I understand your feedback, and I generally try to be level headed in these matters, but I simply think that it's a losing battle.
Playing the victim is a competitive sport online, suffice to see the outrage caused by "literally whos" who post some silly extreme take on some social network. It then gets posted and reposted everywhere to rile the troups.
My point is, if a nobody like myself calling a bunch of people "losers" online is enough to motive some of these people to change their behaviours, IMO they were just looking for an excuse to do so. In truth in my experience they're not arguing that in good faith, they're just cherry picking in order to "both-sides" the issue.
I think it's a waste of energy to try to build bridges with these types of people, they're not interesting in honest debate, they just espouse the form of a civil debate in order to bog you down. So I just explicitly reject them without engaging, if you're the type of person who likes to spread disinformation like the one discussed in TFA then you're a loser in my book and I move on with my life.
Note that I'm not singling any particular faction here, while I do think that the right wing is definitely employing these tactics at a much greater scale, the left is definitely not above them either. It's standard internet discussion tactics, unfortunately.
I cherish HN because it's one of the only relatively mainstream online forums I know of where these types of discussions don't turn completely one-sided. It's far from perfect but places like reddit, facebook, twitter or 4chan are effectively lost to civil discourse as far as I'm concerned.
I'm saying "civil" means not saying "armies of losers". More or less by definition. If you're not trying to build bridges with most people most of the time, what are you doing exactly?
Again, my only point, is that your idea that calling them losers will do anything except trigger a double-down is hurting your own cause.
Also, HN is a niche echo chamber similar to those others you mention, in many ways.
Cruise ships tend to have the name of the captain widely promoted, so it's trivially findable public information. The same is not true for random freighters. And Schettinos name was widely broadcast because there were clear points to criticize his and the crews specific behavior (which we do not have here), which lead to death of a bunch of people (which we do not have here). It's a really odd point of comparison - there's plenty of nautical accidents where this isn't widely reported because it's not especially interesting and there aren't immediate reports of the captains misbehavior to report on.
Do you remember when a subreddit managed to frame someone innocent for the Boston marathon bombing?
This kind of thing happens regardless of whether the media correctly identifies the person(s) responsible, especially if the scapegoat people run with fits into preexisting prejudices (e.g. nobody in the country questioned it when the German police blamed the murders of Turkish minority business owners on "probably the Turkish mafia" until it became clear they were part of a terrorism plot of the _National Socialist Underground_, a white nazi group).
It's also worth questioning what good identifying "the person" responsible in the media would do. If anyone directly involved faces criminal charges, we'll probably find out once they've been found guilty. But anyone involved in software development should know that saying "this person did it" when doing a post mortem on a catastrophic incident like this is not a productive use of anyone's time unless the goal is just to have someone to sacrifice in order to avoid addressing the underlying problems that led to the incident.
Also, while the Canal was blocked for days, the ship did not sustain any critical damage and the cargo seems to have remained safe and secure. The captain of the Costa Concordia on the other hand killed 32 people and sunk his ship. The two incidents are hardly comparable.
While you are being downvoted for exposing the obviouness of the subreddits accusing others (something I have no issue with).... But the real guilty parties are the mainstream media when they let storytelling enter their coverage like what we had when white Tim Mcveigh did the Oklahoma bombing and all the large media outlets like CNN, NY Times framed muslims for that. We saw the similar coverage of the German pilot who crashed Germanwings recently by the (white) media and how different it would have been if the pilot was not white.
The white media would have covered fascist France run by dictatorial Macron differently if it was say in Russia or China or Bolivia:
A couple of years ago one of five highly modern frigates in the Norwegian Navy collided with a barely moving oil tanker[1] in a well monitored area. The collision turned out to be fatal to the ship, which is now on its way to become scrap metal.
When it came to light that four out of five of the navigators on board were female, the results were fairly predictable[2][3].
Will be interesting to read the final accident report once it's released.
>The KMN Helge Ingstad is one of five Nansen-class frigates billed as “unsinkable” due to its construction with water-tight zones designed to keep the warship “intact and operable”.
>Norway’s Ministry of Defence has not yet reported whether they plan to lift the frigate from where it sunk to repair the vessel.
I have no doubt that she would be able to block it if she wanted to. She must have a very strong determination to get where she is.
My cousin is a quantity surveyor. Her mother wanted her to be a nurse and made a huge drama over what would she do all day discussing with construction workers, but there she is, also rising two children.
I remember a Ted talk saying that China grew much faster than India not because of any infrastructure advantage they had. But because of stronger role women play in the work force.
There was something I read once about the Arab world failing to use 50% of its workforce efficiently being a reason for slower development. An interesting hypothesis for sure.
That's pretty bad, but who was the real captain? It's the first time I see total silence about the crew in official sources. At least it is mentioned in some reputable sources (e.g. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/04/01/suez-can...) that the crew was Indian, but still not a single name.
It's not mentioned because it likely doesn't matter and is rather complicated as:
- Ships large navigating the canal normally do so through pilots specialized in it provided by whoever operates the canal. And while the captain still is in control he/she delegates the control to this pilots under his/here supervision (as they are still responsible for the ship I think). So even if the captain is responsible he/she wasn't "really" navigating the ship...
- There was a unusual large sand storm, it is
possible that things had been 100% outside
of the control of anyone navigating the ship.
Just consider a causality chain like
sand-storm => engine failure(cause by it)
=> wind drives ship onto shore before
restart of engines is possible.
So it's completely pointless to name anyone human involved until the actual causality chain is properly investigates.
A thing which tbh. should be done much more in other cases, too.
No other ships were impacted by the storm. If the captain was a European or American national he'd be all over the news. His identity is newsworthy. My guess is that the Western media is having trouble confirming the identity of the captain and/or finding any details of his identity.
> If the captain was a European or American national he'd be all over the news.
Citation needed. HN is going down the drain with low quality comments like these. Identities are probably hidden to prevent Western media from spinning a bullshit narrative about how the crew nationality was a factor in the accident and get more clicks with clickbait headlines.
Honest question: Why would that be relevant right now? Nobody outside knows what exactly happened, so what value does the name of a guy we never heard of give the public, except fodder for speculations and blaming people based on nothing?
We're not even at the stage where there is an "accused", that's the point. Similarly, the names of the pilots that guided the ship haven't been released - they are equally good candidates to be blamed without further knowledge. None of the involved parties has a particular interest in making it about the persons, and if media found it then what? "Here's a name of a dude nobody ever heard of, and we can't tell you anything about him or what he has done"?
Or look at the reporting about the airliner that crashed in Indonesia earlier this year: While the pilots name is public knowledge, its also not really been part of the reporting because it's not especially relevant yet and there is nothing interesting to say about them. (Apparently the voice recorder has been found, so if there is anything interesting on there expect that to change)
Nothing really - printing the name of a murderer, say, is a trade-off between the public's right to know and the person's right to privacy. Simply speaking: Also assumed murderers, say, are humans and have rights.
Different countries/societies choose this trade-off differently.
as i understand it, while ships go through the canal, they are accompanied by a local guide who i believe takes over control of the ship.
so even if this was human error, it's not likely that the actual captain was responsible. but i can also imagine that a guide, while familiar with the local conditions was less familiar with the ship itself, a ship that large, which has a different response time than smaller ships. this alone should increase the risk for innocent mistakes. so i find it hard to believe that there should be anyone to blame.
You are correct, this "guide" is called a pilot, and exists for every port and canal.
However, you're wrong about ship size being a problem. A suez canal pilot is guaranteed to be very familiar with container ships of the suezmax size, specially considering that to become a pilot, you have to have been a captain yourself.
>it's not likely that the actual captain was responsible.
It'll be interesting how it plays out, but the captain is ultimately responsible and can overrule the 'guide'. So the captain is not off the hook here.
good point. but when it comes to slow reaction times, if the guide is giving the wrong order, by the time the captain can counteract that it may be to late.
but you are right. we'll just have to wait until we know more about what really happened
>we'll just have to wait until we know more about what really happened
No doubt. This is going to take years to sort out. The Egyption government has a lot of power here because they can simply bar Evergreen Marine from crossing the Suez and ostensibly destroy them as a business ... but then they wouldn't get anything either. Most likely it will be quietly settled in a way that all sides save face, especially if the appointed guides made a mistake.
I'm not even remotely qualified on anything ship related so my question might be totally pointless.
But by your logic, couldn't one argue that reaction time plays a rather large role? If you are navigating a narrow canal with thin margins for error, wouldn't you need good timing to start a manuever at a certain point so that the ship is able to respond by the time that you need to truly adjust it's position? If some sort of weather event/anomaly caused an unexpected change of course, wouldn't reaction time be even more critical because you have less time to make a correction if you don't act immediately?
What I was trying to say was that even if the captain instantly tried to reverse the course, ship has already started to move and due to size its momentum is enormous.
fair point. you are right. reaction time works both ways. if it takes long to counteract a problem, it also takes time for there to be a problem to begin with
i don't have any experience with ships larger than a small sailing yacht myself and i guess, either you see a problem coming, then you have enough time to react, or you don't see it, and then it's to late either way.
while pilots take over it's under supervision of the captain, the captain still bares responsibility.
The ship size is also common for the canal, pilots are
trained especially to be able to route such big ships through the canal.
But it still likely a chain of bad coincidences which you can't really blame on anyone. Including a unusual strong sandstorm and an engine failure as far as I can tell.
It literally might have been sand storm => engine failure due to sandstorm (air intake getting clogged up or similar) => wind moves ship onto shore without anyone being able to do anything against it. Not I said it might. It needs a proper investigation as far as I can tell.
The ship had a blackout, so not sure what could be done to avoid grounding it. Ultimately the captain is responsible for the technical state of the ship.
Probably they want to wait to announce anyone "responsible" as they haven't quite figured out what really happened and who really was responsible. So before letting media guess who it was (and then Twitter or whatever else shittyverse to make everything even worse), they wanna make sure any claims are correct.
Don’t the operators of the Suez require their own capitans, familiar with the channel, to board a vessel and navigate the channel. Similar to Harbor capitans/Harbormasters.
I think even on this site there was a link documenting the crazy amount of bribery needed to easily transit.
You have to bring pilots on board, and their performance will surely be part of the investigation, but fundamentally the ship is still run by its captain and crew.
The captain is pretty well-known internally. He had an similar incident on the Elbe before, damaging a small freighter, and was banned from the Elbe. They needed two weeks to free the ship. He is Taiwanese. There were jokes that he will now be banned from Suez also.
Gender discrimination and prejudice are absolutely terrible (I feel I have to say this before I'm accused of discrimination). But the article doesn't say if she was actually the one at the helm of the ship, and it also doesn't explain why it would be bad to hold the captain of that ship responsible for the disaster (regardless of gender).
I've got ask "what is wrong with people" that they can't deal with a woman captain. It's also telling that this posted in English, and it wasn't in the "so misogynistic" Arab social media.
Well, that was probably predictable. If the news coverage of her being the "first female ship's captain" happened near the same time as the Suez Canal incident, those two stories can easily be conflated into a "told you so" narrative to justify condescension towards women aspiring to be ship's captains.
It doesn't matter whether the correlation is real because the narrative feeds into existing stereotypes and anyone peddling it confronted with evidence to the contrary will just say that while it may be factually untrue, it still carries some underlying truth and that's what matters.
This is just a microcosm of why "fake news" has become so widespread on social media.
Are you claiming the fake Arab News story was created by accident? No, it was deliberate misinformation intended to generate views and attention. There is nothing predictable about it beyond the fact it is shitty behaviour.
Or, is just a "fun" joke that ties into stereotypes. "Haha, told you women couldn't drive, look at this one stopping global trade" and then it spirals out of control.
Men pose higher per-km risk to others than women for all modes except buses, as well as being over-represented among users of the most dangerous vehicles.
Intuitively, it seems correct that in aggregate, women kill less people on the road. From personal experience, most people can drive well enough regardless of who or what they are, but if someone's driving extremely riskily then it's almost always youngish males. But also, if someone's exceptionally incompetent then it's usually old people or women.
The distribution skews at the extremes and that's where the common perception that women can't drive comes from (and probably also the fact that men kill more people in aggregate). Actual data is not going to dissolve this perception because you see it every time you get outside.
Very rarely do you see the gender of someone driving incompetently. So, most of this ‘personal experience’ is simply conjecture which can self reinforce.
Yet personal experiences do happen and shape us, and we talk about it and propagate the skewed perceptions seasoned with half-assed ruminations.
I'll make an example of how this works between well intentioned people:
My wife is an excellent driver. We live in small town, in a country where infrastructure predates cars. Roads are very narrow, often on steep inclines, and flanked by tall stone walls. My wife regularly complains of large SUVs stuck unable to maneuver. On her account, they are almost always driven by women. Her reaction is invariably: "if you can't drive, just get a nornal-sized car!".
As this happens again and again, with caring frequency etc, occasionally we talk about it ans wonder about this pattern and what may cause it, or whether it is real. My wife's theory is that some women feel unsafe in a car and solve the problem by buying a bigger car instead of getting some practice.
And here we are spreading crappy anecdata. But that's life, that's how human interact.
Physics. You can see a lot more cars than you can identify the gender of the cars driver. For example on a freeway at night, how many cars in front of you can you see vs how many drivers genders can you identify and remember.
Now sure, the smaller percentage may still add up to a significant number. But people do a crap job of limiting their mental tallies to only the people they actually verify. If they assume someone is say drunk their going to add that as evidence even if they never actually have any direct evidence for drunkenness/age/gender/ethnicity etc.
It’s a smaller sample than all cars I ever see, sure. But it’s still fairly big. If I look at a car I’ll usually try to look at the drivers face too, just because it’s useful information to know where they are directing their attention. I don’t think that’s particularly idiosyncratic and so it seems like a somewhat cheap argument to me to imply that people are basically just willfully deluding themselves.
The issue is cognitive biases make the total sample size irrelevant, which is something to be aware of. Unfortunately, said biases are not willful which makes them far more insidious a problem to notice and deal with.
Anyway, as a simple test try and count how many cars you can see next time you go for a drive, how many people’s gender you can infer, and how many you can positively identify based on their looks. It’s significantly safer to try this as a passenger.
> Anyway, as a simple test try and count how many cars you can see next time you go for a drive, how many people’s gender you can infer, and how many you can positively identify based on their looks. It’s significantly safer to try this as a passenger.
Might be interesting to try, but I think in a situation where I notice a bad driver I'm much more likely to identify their gender than in a random passing car.
But I live in a comparatively small Austrian city riddled with traffic lights, weird intersections, crosswalks, and way too much traffic in general, so I get ample opportunity to look at slow moving cars. If you're American your culture around cars is probably very different and that might explain why we seem to have a different intuition about this.
The media are a trusted class of society who are afforded a blanket level of respect based on their role in society.
The media have started to act in the best interest of their clan vs society as a whole.
The Media has fragmented and serves their niches but not society as a whole.
So talking about the media as a whole is possible without having to identify tribes within.
In the above paragraph replace "the media" with "doctors", "scientists", "politicians", "elected officials", "the police", "big pharma", "journalists" ...
I'm not saying you are not making a point - it's just a unnecessarily broad point that is difficult to discuss constructively.
An alternative interpretation is that the media is a reflection of society. If people weren't looking for bullshit articles to click on (actually, not even click on, they usually end up just resharing the article on social media for the headline) to artificially confirm their biases, then the media wouldn't be making bank on this strategy.
Also, the media does not exist outside of society. The media sucks because our culture in general sucks.
Same thing with politicians. We don't get shitty politicians out of nowhere. They come from the people, they optimize for what people want, and people vote for them.
It can be tempting for others to try to call this an example of the Prisoner's Dillema, but the Prisoner's Dillema doesn't apply because there isn't even a marginal upside to "defecting" when your counterpart "defects". We're personally better off when we choose to not participate in this stuff, regardless of what other people do, and we're all more better off as more people choose to not participate.
The news story is literally that she's the _first_ female captain, so it's safe to say that there are probably a lot of deeply entrenched prejudices against women in those roles.
Jokes are (almost?) always political because it only works if you share similar views about what the world is like and how it should be. In this case the joke is that women are unfit to be captain, the setup is that "they" eventually "let" a woman be captain and the punchline is that she went on to cause one of the most economically disastrous incidents in recent history (ba-dum-tiss). If you don't think women are unfit to be captain (or at least "intrinsically less fit" or whatever) the punchline doesn't work.
> If you don't think women are unfit to be captain (or at least "intrinsically less fit" or whatever) the punchline doesn't work.
You seem to have a rather linear view of humor. People laugh at (and enjoy) comedians they disagree with all the time - a well crafted joke can be considered well crafted and funny by many people, regardless of the target or the listener’s personal beliefs.
A joke can be funny and disagree with your beliefs if the fact that it disagrees with them is the basis of the joke. Most shock humor is meant to work this way: it's funny because it's completely inappropriate and violating social norms.
The problem with shock humor is that it can still be funny to people who agree with it and can help normalizing the views it's meant to make fun of. You can see this play out in real time on websites like 4chan that always shift from "transgressive humor" to genuine far-right talking points.
If the joke is "women are bad drivers", you either have to agree with the premise (so the joke is likely about the humorously exaggerated extent to which this is confirmed by an anecdote), or the joke is that someone holds this view while presenting evidence to the contrary (so the joke is that the character doesn't understand he's wrong), or the joke is that the view is extremely inappropriate and doesn't follow at all from what is laid out before (so the joke is that the character is so absurdly bigoted they just bring up their prejudices all the time).
Examples for the three structures would be:
1. <statement that Egypt now has a female captain> <statement that the Suez Canal was blocked by a massive ship>
2. <statement about female drivers presenting them positively> (optional: <statement about one minor data point that could be construed negatively>) <assertion that women are bad drivers>
3. <statement about some scenario involving a woman that could be a strained analogy for driving a vehicle> <assertion that women are bad drivers>
There are probably a few more of these patterns, but they still work by presenting a position that either agrees with your views, follows logically from them or intentionally contradicts them.
Having watched hours and hours of comedy roasts and heckler takedowns on youtube over the years, I just don't see this in practice. The butt of the joke never gets it.
Do you believe that there’s a perfect mapping between ‘jobs that people want’ and ‘representation in those jobs’?
And if so, how do you account for the fact that a) people working in the industries themselves cite that there is work to do on gender diversity and b) that the disparity remains even when you control for manual/heavy physical work (i.e you account only for people working in desk / design based AEC roles)?
I'd imagine barely anyone has the job they'd choose; maybe I'm an outlier.
Suppose I'm a doctor/refuse collector, but really wanted to be a ship's captain, am I 'behind'. I guess it's that there's an implicit hierarchy of roles implied .. if I'm ship's engineer, but really want to be engineer, am I 'behind' the captain?
I just don't know what's really meant by this: is it about competitive roles, is it about access, is it about status. I'm not trying to be argumentative, I don't know that the parent means by 'behind'.
It seems all the responses have assumed I did know what they meant and had taken a particular view on it.
FWIW I'm not in the slightest denying that in some countries women/men are excluded from (or find it more difficult to get) some roles for sexist reasons.
I'm aware there are disparities in all areas (in UK), one of the biggest is teaching - very few men are able to get roles in primary (5-11yo) teaching. In other areas it seems you're more likely to get a job if qualified. Where I work women are being offered jobs at about equal rates to men (higher rates of women, actually), but the pool of qualified people is heavily male as women don't choose to take the degrees that feed into that pool. None of this proves anything, except that I know senior management were lauding the offering of more jobs to women, as opposed to just to qualified people regardless of sex [I can't cite this, internal stats, sorry].
I'm interested in your (b) do you have stats to cite on that?
that's not how being behind is meant. it's the industry that's behind if you were not able to become a captain because of prejudices against you.
you are assuming that there are not many women in this field because they don't want to be. but the reality is that there are not many women because they are not welcome. 50% parity is not the goal here. (though in some fields like teaching children, it actually should be) but the removal of all barriers so that all women (or men, if that's the case) that want to work in this field and are qualified, can.
Usually I'd agree with you, but this arguments works as a heuristic with a 70/30 split. Maybe even 90/10, if you have some data. But when we're talking about a single woman on thousands of men in the job, personal preference is very probably not the reason.
I’m assuming you didn’t read the article. At the time she applied, women were not legally allowed to enter the merchant marines in Egypt. No less than Hosni Mubarak had to review and approve her application to join.
Not that it's okay but note that it is "first in Egypt" which is a lot less surprising. Outside Egypt it is a lot more common. I know a few female captains in places like in the Danish shipping company Mærsk (like this ships captain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_M%C3%A6rsk).
If lack of female ship captains is a sign that women are far behind, is lack of male school teachers, nurses, and HR professionals a sign that men are far behind?
At least in your first example, yes, it is a sign that men are far behind when it comes to being trusted with children. But that's not really relevant to the ship story.
They might be, but that‘s not the reason why there are less male teachers. It is not harder to become a teacher, when you are male. They are just less interested in becoming one (on average). As are women to drive container ships. Although I don’t think that there is just one woman, who wants to do it.
it is the reason in new zealand. there it is practically impossible for men to become teachers at least in kindergarten and primary school because parents don't trust them.
sad really because kids need rolemodels from both genders
The "solution" to this problem is to not allow people to choose. In the country where I live the vast majority of schools are funded from the very high taxes you pay. You'd still have to pay those taxes if you choose to enroll your kid in a private school just so you could avoid a male teacher.
Male teachers are nevertheless underrepresented, due to other biases.
Then what is the solution? Because as far as I can tell, unless you force people to be 50/50 in a profession, it will be basically impossible to get rid of the implicit bias people have in those jobs. And I'd be willing to bet that applies to other immutable characteristics, not just gender.
People working in those sectors themselves acknowledge there is implicit bias. And the difference remains even when you control for dangerous work (I.e looking at people who only work desk jobs).
You may never get to 50;50 but there is no reason for the disparity to be as large as it is - any more than women (or any any other immutable characteristic) don’t self select not to be CEOs or similar.
And articles like this tell you you don’t have to look too far to find out what the real reason is.
Do you really extrapolate that women are 'far behind' from the fact there are few female ship captains? What about coal miners or steel workers or construction crews then?
Jumping to a completely different edge in the graph of human relationships seems like a poor way to get through anything, be it a conversation or an actual social challenge.
Networks are local. Speaking and making negating cases based on far-away, low-connectivity areas makes little sense and serves no one except those favouring inaction or an abundance of caution (for whatever reasons).
Anyhow, I'm saying the above respectfully. Not attacking you as a person, but your way of seeking perspective i feel quite opposed to. I'm content to be in amicable disagreement though, and have no sense that you're compelled to agree with me
What in the world? This is the most out of place reply I've ever received. I can't begin to understand what you think you read and the volumes of strange assumption you made about me
I honestly don't know if this reply represents sanity at all. Literally nothing in the reply even appears to relate to a single word I said. The entire reply appears to be based on a completely different post?
haha oookie dokie. i do ok, thanks[1]. i feel you're reacting to a gentle yet eccentric message in a pretty uncharitable way, and so this interaction would maybe not be productive for either of us
EDIT: ok, against my better judgement, i'll engage and try to communicate better -- the leap where i may have jumped off your train of thought (and it was a jump, but is always very evident to me) is this: i disagree that it's productive to use a relationship between men in china (compared to women in America?) as some sort of measure with which to determine actions that those in other countries should take. I mean this in regards to repairing relationships with women (in the "network of relationships" sense). It's a trap and a red herring to think that way with those comparisons. To continue with that way of rationalizing: if there's some minimum trough of ethics anywhere, we'd always lose energy to do better elsewhere (outside that minimum) until we somehow drag that far-removed minimum up. And since that minimum is likely far away, non-local and hard to affect, then operating this way is a recipe for the least productive mode of using our limited energies for change. This isn't a "women's rights" point I'm making, but about anyone affecting change on anything.
Comparison of how women are treated in their local communities [elsewhere] with how men are treated in China is completely irrelevant and counterproductive imho. Unless someone doesn't want to do anything about it or have responsibility put on them, and wishes to paint a blanket rationale for that -- in which case it's a helpful framing. (Ps, it's totally ok to not work on these things. Life is busy. But it feels particularly unhelpful to rationalize it with weird intentional logic.)
I'm a very network-centric thinker, so this is how I speak and process (at least on HN, if not in real life)
Again, despite you not receiving my message well before, I state again: I say the above kindly, and not with any sort of "argumentative" or "gotcha" style of engagement. I tried to state these as my beliefs, and not some truth of the universe, though maybe i slipped in my language a few times * shrug * Anyhow, hope you're well
I feel almost entirely the opposite as you. Ignoring inconvenient comparisons because of political borders or because it is difficult to enact change is the actual red herring and trap.
I would charge that your "network centricism" is a buzzword to help you rationalize ignoring bad things in our world. I would charge that it appears to be nothing more than "Completely ignore things you can't change", which is a honestly horrific ethos to live by.
"Comparison of how women are treated in their local communities [elsewhere] with how men are treated in China is completely irrelevant and counterproductive imho"
It's only irrelevant if Chinese people are irrelevant. Sorry to state hard facts, but this comparison is only irrelevant if the plight of the Chinese person is irrelevant.
To you, maybe.
I don't take offense to how you write, I think you use 100 words where 15 would work, and I think you enjoy the concept of ideas more than thinking them through to their endpoints. I amount all of this response to nothing more than justifying not giving even 1% of thought to the plight of people who are oppressed in the world. The highest IQ "Out of sight, out of mind" I've ever witnessed.
I think you're clearly smarter than me, but I think you have some very immoral ideas. I don't mean to offend, I just think it's shocking how one can compartmentalize so efficiently that you think it's a "red herring" to bring up real oppression in the world because, basically, you can't do anything about it. Reality isn't a red herring and to even suggest that real situations happening right here today right now are "red herrings" is just such a feat of smart stupidity to me.
Thanks for replying. But I fear your opinion is why it's so easy for genocide's like the one happening there to happen. Out of sight out of mind, it's a red herring and trap to think about it!
What an outrageous example of a straw man, I never suggested anything of the sort.
Women here can run for president, own newspapers, vote and own guns and property. That's more free than most people these days.
We should celebrate that best of all time freedom for women. Never in history have women been as equal and empowered as right now and right here.
We should care more about our chinese and other brothers and sisters who live an oppressed life of authoritarian rule.
All people deserve what american women have, and all Americans deserve more than we've achieved, and american women deserve more. All of these can be true.
I'm not trying to leave the USA, but suggesting it's not fubar is a willful denial of reality.
'It could always be worse' is an agent of the status-quo.
This place maybe the least-worst, but we can still strive for actually good.
Edit: you're completely right that we should balance our efforts domestically with our efforts universally. The latter is unfortunately a much more intricate web to unweave than the relatively simple issues we've got here. It sucks.
It certainly feels like false equivalence to suggest "you win some and lose some" when comparing free speech and political rights to gender representation in some fields.
But I'll take your word for it, perhaps there are american women who would trade their right to vote and speak freely in exchange for more of their gender at work with them
you are right it is, i did say those are not really comparable. i was only trying to point out that there are positive aspects and negative aspects to both societies. not that those are equivalent.
People here in Egypt think it is funny. That's why the media likes to publish these fake stories. They are not anti-women or something like that, they just think it is a good joke. But it is not funny at all.
I don't want to disagree, it must have been very upsetting for her. But I know them, they are too stupid to be anti or pro anything, I won't be surprised to know that the person who wrote the article is in fact a woman.
Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. Your account was banned and we unbanned it a while back because it seemed to have been sticking to the rules. Please do that and not this, so we won't have to ban you again.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
The irony when people use these "gotchas" whenever anyone talks about women entering jobs they've been previously denied or actively removed from (e.g. programming?) is that you're literally complaining about the same thing as feminists, just from the other end.
Yes, we should encourage women to take on ultra dangerous[0] jobs they're underrepresented in. We should also stop thinking the problem is a lack of encouragement. Women are harassed out of male dominated fields and men ae harassed out of female dominated fields (e.g. nurses, teachers, etc). Most of this harassment comes from men, but the harassment is bad regardless of who does it.
Men are more likely to commit suicide, yes, but also more likely to use more effective (and "manly") means and thus "succeed", so the difference vanishes once you look at attempts. Men are also far more reluctant to seek mental health care or even simply go to the doctor, which drastically shortens their lifespan.
This is what feminists[1] mean when they talk about toxic masculinity: shaming men for not being "manly" enough is part of it and it's literally killing men AND women. The "patriarchy" isn't a secret club men have access to, it's a cultural order that treats men as disposable and women as property while serving only a very small elite[2].
I fully acknowledge this comment is off-topic, but so is at least the comment it is replying to and all of its siblings. I just think if you can dunk on people looking for equal rights with a quick zinger, I can at least provide a retort.
[0] For a fun time look into the severe injury risk of cheerleading compared to football. Apparently there are already ultra dangerous jobs and past-times women dominate but that we _for some reason_ don't view as dangerous or "serious". That said, yes, definitely more female deep sea welders and lumberjacks. But maybe we could also spend some time making jobs safer across the board because there's nothing manly (or womanly?) about losing your limbs or life doing a job nobody wants for mediocre pay.
[1] While you're looking up things, it's worth trying to understand the difference between feminist theory and "feminism" as seen on TV or Buzzfeed. If you've ever complained about a piece of media you like being ruined by a greedy corporation that doesn't understand any of the source material and just wants to make a quick buck, you got this. No, Buzzfeed complaining about manspreading isn't furthering the feminist agenda, it's just generating outrage because it drives engagement and thus increases ad impressions. Feminism has remarkably little to do with individual misdoings or what is in your pants and more with historical power structures built on these things that still impact us today.
[2] And before you come to any wrong conclusions: even that tiny elite is ultimately limited by the hierarchy it exists within, so literally nobody is truly benefiting from patriarchy, yet we propagate it because we prefer the familiar confines over the uncertainty of abandoning this order.
I always find it fascinating, when people start to claim words for themselves. I don’t even necessarily disagree with OP, it is just that the majority of it’s speakers (maybe within a context) decide what a word means in a language.
I'm not sure whom you're talking about. Feminism and toxic masculinity are both words that weren't claimed by feminists but defined by them.
"Toxic masculinity" has been purposefully misunderstood by self-styled anti-feminists to mean something it does not. I agree that it's a bit obtuse and unnecessarily provocative, but the only other meaning than the feminist one is the one either based on genuine ignorance or purposeful misdirection.
"Feminism" is a broad political term referring to a wide range of movements and academic fields of study. I wouldn't claim that "Buzzfeed feminism" isn't in any way "feminist" but this brand of "pop feminism" is clearly driven by profit motive rather than ideology. Gillette, Disney, etc aren't promoting "feminism" out of genuine care for feminist ideologies, they're doing it because it makes them money because in pop culture "feminist" has been watered down to a generic "supporting the status quo but in a good way".
If anything, the majority of speakers probably use "feminism" to vaguely mean "women's rights", but I'd wager beyond the very online crowd, few people even have heard of "toxic masculinity" or can think of a meaning beyond literally just creating ad-hoc synonyms (probably wrongly, because they expect it to be about "men bad" because that's what pop feminism often boils down to).
It's bizarre that the name of the real captain hasn't surfaced publicly. I really don't understand why, but even on the corners of Twitter that usually dig obsessively at everything, there's been a weird kind of radio silence.
If you read the article it then says she was the first female to be accepted to Egypt’s merchant navy school and in the second to last sentence says she is currently the rank of fist mate though will be a Captain soon if she passes her exam. She is also clearly wearing the rank of fist mate in the photo billing her as Egypt’s first captain.
This is why people have lost faith in the news. They can’t even get a basic fact right and manage to contradict themselves in the same story no less.