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Change doesn't happen in a vacuum, and what you describe as "a growing problem in our society" feels like the beginning of a long-overdue good start to many others.
There's a fun study that actually measures this effect: "Lay misperceptions of the relationship between men’s benevolent and hostile sexism", by Amy Yeung. The data goes the "other way" though: when men treat men and women equally, they are perceived to be sexist.
>For example, in one pair of reviews a female employee was described as having “analysis paralysis.” A man with the same behavior was praised for his careful thoughtfulness.
On the other hand, I'm beginning to think the pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction.
I feel I have worked hard to get to where I am. But just because I am white and male, I'm no longer entitled to enjoy the privileges associated with this hard work and skillset I've developed.
I'm all for equality of opportunity. But this equality of outcome is not something I'm going to be shamed into supporting.
This doesn't factor in which gender is more represented. Parent could have said the same thing about nursing or elementary school teachers but that doesn't mean they're implying men are better than women.
GP used a lot of big fancy words to literally(!!) say "Whenever cases like this arise, people are so quick to jump to 'sexism' as the answer without even allowing for the possibility that women just actually are worse employees than men."
Again, you're reading what you want to read.
You could argue that we've over-corrected, but my own subjective experience leads me to disagree. I see constant reminders every day in the media and on the Internet of the persistence of irrational emotionally driven biases against groups of people. Wake me up when Reddit and Twitter are not overflowing with inane frothing at the mouth bigotry.
- Bias (conscious and not) is assumed to be a problem mainly perpetuated by white men, when reality is that, for example, women may have as much or more bias toward women than men do. I.e. the factor of women enforcing gender roles among themselves is dismissed.
- The success of white men in startups is assumed to be caused by them excluding others, rather than because they share a culture with each other from an early age with a lot of positive characteristics. Saying we excluded girls from programming and chess teams, or from spending long hours alone at a computer instead of socializing, is at least an oversimplification.
- Men being attracted to things and systems and tinkering vs socializing and people is real. It's more than a standard deviation (i.e. differences between groups are more than differences between average individuals), it starts hours after birth, it correlates to pre-natal testosterone levels, it happens across species. Scientifically it's a slam dunk and it is a pretty plausible hypothesis for why women are poorly represented in coding positions, compared to other equally demanding jobs, e.g. doctors and lawyers where women are doing just fine.
It's striking to me watching my nieces play and how strictly they enforce whether something is for boys or girls. Also it looks to me like groups of women in an office enforce very different norms on each other than men do in terms of fashion, socialization, communication style.
How large is this effect compared to biases down the power structure? I don't know, it's an empirical question but everyone seems to pre-assume the answer.
If you're watching the media then I assume you saw the article today about the bigoted statements that occurred last month at the Air Force academy? Turns out the "victims" were the ones that wrote those messages> Because claiming victimhood status is socially beneficial these days.
Not to say there aren't real problems out there, but we're deep in "boy who cried wolf" territory.