> It’s easy to spot direct sexism, and to react to something like an investor getting handsy. But the subtle sexism that hinders women goes ignored and is often denied.
The first kind is better called misogyny; the second is sexism. It is often denied not because it is subtle -- a quick look at the statistics, any relevant statistics, would show that it's far from it -- but because it's unintentional, sometimes seemingly benevolent, and often invisible unless you're trained to see it or directly suffer its consequences.
I think the first step is to understand that being sexist is to be expected -- it's like doctors infecting patients with germs on their hands before the discovery of microbes and disinfectants -- you can't not be infected unless you understand how the mechanism works. The next step is to learn what sexism is, how it works, why it feels "natural", and why fighting it may feel strange. Like with any mechanism that we can't easily see with the naked eye, coming to terms with its reality and its very visible effects is a process. It's OK to grow up sexist; if our current theories are correct, almost all of us do whether we like it or not. It's not OK not to learn about sexism and try to fight it now that we have a much better sense of how it works.
What saddens me is that sometimes the very people who are usually most curious to learn how the world works turn willfully -- sometimes proudly -- ignorant when it comes to social mechanisms. It's OK to disagree, but at least everyone should be familiar with the core principles. Sometimes arguments about the subject here on HN or elsewhere sound like people arguing with Quantum Mechanics not because they think the Newtonian model provides ample explanation, but because they insist Zeus is ample explanation, or, worse yet, because we have no business trying to understand how things below a certain size behave because it's just not important enough.
This is a great comment and I hope that people think carefully about what you are saying.
One problem with discussing our biases is that sexism and racism are considered moral failings in many places, and so a discussion of possible sexist behavior is seen as a discussion of sin. This is why so many replies are along the lines of, "I am not a bad person! Also, look at my childhood problems!" These are reactions to a perceived personal condemnation, not a discussion of a sociological phenomenon. To those who have this reaction,
> It's OK to grow up sexist; if our current theories are correct, almost all of us do whether we like it or not. It's not OK not to learn about sexism and try to fight it now that we have a much better sense of how it works.
Dealing with internalized homophobia as I came out to myself and others was eye-opening. The number of unfortunate things we internalize and perpetuate is amazing.
What amazes me is not only how much crap every one of us -- no matter how scientific or skeptical otherwise -- internalizes, but the kind of excuses we come up with to deny the reality of the evidence presented to us, or, better yet, the excuses we come up with so we don't even have to look at the evidence.
Contrast that with how some people respond to news about nutrition, true AI, and cryonics -- all far less scientific than the study of sexism and racism -- and explain that even though the science isn't rigorous yet, we must consider the "results" on the off chance it will make the world a better place. But trying to reduce proven, pervasive sexism or racism? That's just unsubstantiated "ideology" (all without even a cursory study of the findings) and an unimportant/impossible (take your pick) undertaking.
This is how this reads to me: first, realize that sin is everywhere even if you can't see it, you are all sinners and that is just the natural state of the world right now. But it is not OK to sin if you have been made aware of sin. (Is the Emperor wearing clothes?)
I guess the analogy breaks down with the acceptance of those that are truly ignorant (not just intentionally), and that one can build a better world wherein "sin" is not the default state of affairs.
The comparison with religion and science seems apt, but for the opposite reason that you seem to portray. These kinds of social questions, when you get down to the nitty gritty of them, often isn't science. And I don't mean in the sense that "it is not HARD science", I mean that the school of thought does not seem to be grounded in a (social) science. It's motivated by an ideology and a theory of how the world is/works. And it has few other competing ideologies/theories in its space. And despite being an ideology/theory which has little competition with other such things (except internally) so that people can see and compare it in different lights, they try to pass it off as gospel.
Right, except I think that the analogy to germs is more apt because sexism -- like germs -- has been verified, proven and measured in countless experiments and studies done by qualified researchers, whereas sin is dogma.
> I mean that the school of thought does not seem to be grounded in a (social) science.
No, that's just total rubbish. Sexism has been studied by hundreds if not thousands of historians, sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists for decades now. It's just as grounded in science as our understanding of the industrial revolution. It's much more scientific than cryonics, I can assure you that.
> It's motivated by an ideology and a theory of how the world is/works.
Like all fields of study, it's motivated by the desire to understand how the world works, possibly with the hope that understanding will help make the world a better place. If you somehow wish to portray the desire to make some people suffer less as an ideology that's somehow controversial, so be it. I'm sure everyone involved will be happy to accept your categorization.
> they try to pass it off as gospel.
That's the same kind of nonsense all evolution deniers say ("that's not science", "it's another belief" and so forth). There is a vast body of knowledge accumulated by meticulous researchers following as scientific a process as possible in those fields over the past four decades. It's just knowledge you don't want to learn, and there are plenty of psychological studies explaining that behavior, too.
You don't want to learn even the gist of it -- that's fine, but it's you who are being motivated by dogmatism, except that I don't even understand what your ideology is: keep things as they are?
> If you somehow wish to portray the desire to make some people suffer less as an ideology that's somehow controversial, so be it.
I see it as an ideology. Full stop. Any ideology is fallible and can be misguided, even if it is well-intentioned. I wouldn't be surprised if most ideologies have been bourne out of well-intentioned ideals. But intentions don't really help if the ideology is fundamentally unsound/misguided (we have some examples of that up through history).
> That's just rubbish, and you sound just like evolution deniers
Of course, the go-to shaming tactic of intellectuals. Bravo.
> You don't want to learn even the gist of what's in it -- that's fine, but it's you who are being motivated by dogmatism,
You don't know fuck-all about my knowledge of this. But yes, I could stand to investigate and learn more about it. I could stand to try to find out if some of my beliefs on this field or whatever is misguided. But I have seen "enough" from a long and admittedly cursory glance at the field that I've found that it is not something that I am likely to find worthwhile in the end, and it would be too draining. What I really should do is to stop whining about things like this on forums like this and just lay the issue to rest. That's my bad.
> you want to keep things as they are?
Of course that's your default guess. It's either "our way, or the old way", as some kind of liberal/conservative dichotomy.
I'm not happy with the old way or "the new way", and I think it's preposterous that people can try to reduce it to such either-or-thinking. No, the current mainstream thoughts on sexism aren't the be-all-end-all that all reasonable human beings can and should agree on.
On my beliefs, suffice it to say: I don't like sexism. Any more explanation beyond that and we get into fragmented territory with regards to what opinions are acceptable on this topic, as far as the mainstream thought goes.
> I've found that it is not something that I am likely to find worthwhile in the end, and it would be too draining.
BTW, that's precisely my feeling about chemistry (which, incidentally, I also view as an ideology, full stop). OTOH, you won't find me participating in chemistry discussions, let alone arguing about it.
Some parts of it -- sure -- but an ideology firmly based on evidence. Just like deciding that spending public funds on the design of the first computers or the internet -- or any technology -- is an ideology based on evidence. I'm not asking you to accept the ideology, though. You don't want to build computers -- fine! But sexism is as real as electrons.
I am sure some CS professors have strong opinions on whether we should build self-driving cars. Their ideology doesn't make their research any less valid. In fact, I'd expect CS professors to be very much "pro-tech" because they know better than the average person what's possible. Similarly, it's only to be expected that researchers studying sexism or racism will be very much opposed to them, because they know better than the average person how harmful they are. Their ideology doesn't disqualify their research, either.
> It's either "our way, or the old way"
What way? I just look at the research. You have a different explanation for how species evolve or why women make less money than men, put it out there so it can be studied. We can't "teach the controversy" because there is no controversy to teach. There's the vast majority of researchers on one hand, and a small yet vocal group of deniers on the other.
> the current mainstream thoughts on sexism
I don't know what you mean by that; I do know what the studies tell us about how sexism spreads, what it looks like, and what its consequences are. You may have a very different understanding of what sexism is from how the academic studies define it, but to me what you said sounds just like "the current mainstream thoughts on evolution". You just arbitrarily chose to disqualify a vast body of research because it doesn't jive with your gut feelings on the subject.
> On my beliefs, suffice it to say: I don't like sexism
I don't think you understand. Whether or not you like sexism is irrelevant. What matters first of all -- before we get to ideology -- is to study how certain power structures perpetuate themselves in society. Once you know that -- and only then -- you can decide what to do about it if anything. I don't like that people can't fly. But I know that the reason we can't is that we don't have wings, and the reason for that is evolutionary, and the mechanism is genetic. So, to make people fly we can either change their genes -- which may be hard or easy, safe or dangerous, ethically problematic or not -- or decide on some other way of dealing with it (building airplanes, for example). Luckily, thanks to decades of research, we already know quite a bit about sexism -- just as we know quite a bit about the limits to human flight -- so there's no need to start from first principles and/or total ignorance every time we discuss it. When we discuss human flights we can talk about genes and aerodynamics -- we don't need to treat the subject so mysteriously and suspiciously. Same goes for sexism.
>It's not OK not to learn about sexism and try to fight it now that we have a much better sense of how it works.
You are the one who opened this conversation with a judgment of morality. It is quite obvious what you are suggesting - every man has a moral obligation to educate himself about sexism on his own time and on his own dime (you're certainly not going to help with that, repeatedly asserting the existence of a "vast" number of studies without naming a single one).
Very few people here will dispute that sexism exists, or that the world would be a better place if it didn't. But you come off as so ideologically blinded that you are literally incapable of understanding why anybody would ever disagree with you.
And you're doing yourself and your cause a disservice. You appear so insufferably, patronizingly smug that it is hard to take your argument at all seriously.
> every man has a moral obligation to educate himself about sexism on his own time and on his own dime
No, only those curious about the world and wishing to learn how things work (and why only men?). But if you choose not to educate yourself, it's ridiculous to enter into an argument without at least some familiarity with the research.
> repeatedly asserting the existence of a "vast" number of studies without naming a single one
Are you kidding me? I feel like I'm in crazy land. I didn't know the existence of an entire field research done by world-famous researchers on government and private grants at the world's most prestigious institutions and published in the best of peer reviewed journals is either "asserted" or requires "evidence". It's ridiculous. If you're that ignorant, type "women roles" or "women power" into Google Scholar. Because you'll get literally millions of hits -- from various disciplines like history, sociology, psychology and anthropology -- you can narrow it down, for example "women roles victorian", or "women roles middle ages" etc. The field is not exactly obscure. There's a lot more to learn, but we already know quite a bit.
> so ideologically blinded
What are you even talking about? All I did was say that people who are otherwise curious don't wish to learn the subject. What ideology have I expressed?
> incapable of understanding why anybody would ever disagree with you.
Disagree about what? That we know a good deal today about how sexism work and how power perpetuates itself in society? That's a fact!
> You appear so insufferably, patronizingly smug that it is hard to take your argument at all seriously.
At the risk of sounding smug, I think I will repeat my "argument" (i.e. incontrovertible fact) once again: for the past few decades we have learned a great deal about sexism through research. Any argument about the topic must at least start with the basics of what we already know. I am really sorry for sounding condescending, but I feel like a scientist at a dinner party mentioning Newtonian dynamics and all of a sudden getting bombarded with insults and strange opinions because it turns out that the other people's backgrounds range from Etruscan religion to Aristotelian "physics". There's a lot to debate and discuss, but you just can't have a serious discussion when most of the participants willingly ignore the full body of research on the subject.
There are people talking about sexism or feminism without even knowing what those terms even mean; without even having looked up either on Wikipedia. How would you feel if somebody started disagreeing with your "opinions" on programming without having ever programmed anything, or even having read a single relevant Wikipedia article? I'm sure you'd sound pretty condescending to them, too.
Congratulations. You have managed to expertly dodge my point.
>It's not OK not to learn about sexism and try to fight it now that we have a much better sense of how it works.
>It is not OK not to [...] fight [sexism]
Please elaborate.
---
And to rephrase my request for evidence: Would you please name between one and ten particular studies, journals, or "world-famous researchers" I can pursue to get a general overview without getting drowned in "literally millions of hits"?
OK. If you don't know how to make it rain, it's fine to say or do whatever you want about it, but if you do, and it turns out to be possible and affordable -- and you need rain -- you should probably do something real about it. Same with sexism or racism. Since we are now familiar with many of the mechanisms by which they perpetuate themselves, and because we now understand how they shift power in society in ways that serve some at the expense of others -- assuming we believe enriching some at the expense of others is wrong -- we should do something about it, now that we understand the mechanisms.
Of course, I don't demand people accept my values, so I would settle for people understanding sexism yet deciding nothing should be done for whatever reason they deem justifiable. What I do not accept is people making things up (like "it's genetic", "it's unavoidable", "its unfixable") and using their unsubstantiated gut feelings in arguments like this.
> Would you please name between one and ten particular studies, journals, or "world-famous researchers" I can pursue to get a general overview without getting drowned in "literally millions of hits"?
Certainly (general overviews of advanced academic fields, however, are not usually given in academic journals or papers -- at least not that I'm familiar with -- but in books). There are two caveats, though. The first is that the field(s) of gender studies or racism studies is multidisciplinary; research is done as part of history, sociology, anthropology and psychology, and while those disciplines certainly interact, each of those disciplines has its own methodologies, and you’ll find few who are expert in all of them. The second caveat is that gender and race issues are rather advanced concepts, so a text is either an overview or an introduction (to one of the disciplines) but rarely both, just as it’s very hard to find overview texts about Quantum Mechanics that do not presuppose some basic understanding of physics and its methodologies or do not require many leaps of faith on account of the reader.
Having said that, let me try and address your request. While certainly not a scientific text, there is little doubt that 1949 book The Second Sex, by the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir[1] laid the theoretical groundwork for much that followed, drawing people’s attention to the cultural constructs underlying sex differences in society. Another groundbreaking conceptual (though not scientific) work was done by Michel Foucault on the concept of “power”, which is now considered possibly the most important concept in all of the social studies. The wikipedia article on the topic[2] provides a nice overview.
To get to actual science, we need to look to the disparate disciplines separately. My background is history, so we’ll start there. The best way to find relevant research in history is to search for "[topic] in [era [place (often implied)]]”. A lot of modern cultural constructs surrounding women (and race) are products of (or reaction agains) Victorian ideas, so a good place to start is with “women in the Victorian Era”; the Wikipedia page on the subject[3] is a nice introduction and has a nice bibliography. Historians sometimes track progression of ideas over several eras, so an interesting comparison is “women in the Middle Ages” (again, Wikipedia with bibliography[4]).
Next, we have psychology of sex differences, of which Wikipedia has an overview[5]. In sociology, I’ve found this nice course material (several parts with suggested readings and online resources)[6]. In anthropology, this[7] should provide an overview (though unlikely introductory).
The first kind is better called misogyny; the second is sexism. It is often denied not because it is subtle -- a quick look at the statistics, any relevant statistics, would show that it's far from it -- but because it's unintentional, sometimes seemingly benevolent, and often invisible unless you're trained to see it or directly suffer its consequences.
I think the first step is to understand that being sexist is to be expected -- it's like doctors infecting patients with germs on their hands before the discovery of microbes and disinfectants -- you can't not be infected unless you understand how the mechanism works. The next step is to learn what sexism is, how it works, why it feels "natural", and why fighting it may feel strange. Like with any mechanism that we can't easily see with the naked eye, coming to terms with its reality and its very visible effects is a process. It's OK to grow up sexist; if our current theories are correct, almost all of us do whether we like it or not. It's not OK not to learn about sexism and try to fight it now that we have a much better sense of how it works.
What saddens me is that sometimes the very people who are usually most curious to learn how the world works turn willfully -- sometimes proudly -- ignorant when it comes to social mechanisms. It's OK to disagree, but at least everyone should be familiar with the core principles. Sometimes arguments about the subject here on HN or elsewhere sound like people arguing with Quantum Mechanics not because they think the Newtonian model provides ample explanation, but because they insist Zeus is ample explanation, or, worse yet, because we have no business trying to understand how things below a certain size behave because it's just not important enough.