

Silent Technical Privilege - EricaJoy
http://pgbovine.net/tech-privilege.htm

======
carbocation
> Instead of facing implicit bias or stereotype threat, I had the privilege of
> implicit endorsement.

In my life, this has always felt like an important asset. I started observing
it happen to me in high school, and it's sort of continued through life.
(Surely it was happening long before that, but I didn't notice when I was much
younger.) At this point I can see it happening in realtime... and I still
appreciate it.

I shudder to think how life would feel as a child and young adult if people
assumed incompetence rather than competence. Getting credit that you didn't
earn, at least for me, is one of the most powerful ways to get me to strive to
earn it retroactively by giving thoughtful effort.

------
collypops
This was buried ridiculously quickly. It fell from the front page to position
153 in a matter of minutes.

Can anyone think of an explanation why?

I know there were special rules in place for NSA stories. If the same rule
applies to stories on privilege or equality in tech, I'd be worried.

~~~
klibertp
For anyone curious, it happened again (8 days later) with repost:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7064853](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7064853)

I'm only posting this because I opened the comments and the article in
background tabs, read the article, read the comments and refreshed the
comments page (my usual workflow on HN) only to see them turned off and the
topic marked dead. It's actually my first time witnessing this... And I'm not
sure how I feel about it.

------
poolpool
Actually, the existence of privilege needs empirical evidence, and until then
it's just a hypothesis. There's no such evidence at least where I live.

Making a claim doesn't automatically make it true, even if we're talking about
privilege. Yes, I know that the believers of privilege always say that
'privilege exists but you just don't notice it'. As a believer of the
scientific method I actually need some empirical evidence to believe in
something.

In effect, the article states that because of privilege a white male who has a
lot of experience should be able to get a job easily, since "they look the
part". Empirically that claim doesn't apply to me. You can "hand-wave" about
it being even harder if I was a woman, but it's still just hand-waving unless
there's some evidence to back it up.

In addition, I notice any privilege I get. Besides, women programmers have
some privilege over me: they don't need to waste one year in forced labour.
All women are basically one year ahead of me because of military service.

~~~
spion
You forgot child labour. See how you didn't notice the privilege -- or is that
still not enough empirical evidence?

------
zemo
I grew a beard so that people would listen to me. It worked.

------
mattip
The second good article about ethics and technology since HN came back up.
Maybe they should crash more often, sure beats articles about "x does y
better"

~~~
jakub_g
It was posted on HN before the crash and hit the first page with 268 pts but
then the HN ids were reset after the rollback and id 7017480 got assigned to
some comment on some other article (you can look it up on HN search or in
google)

------
ps4fanboy
Great I cant wait for this to catch on, Check your tech privilege.

