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.
Not sure we can or should read too much into it.
Not sure we can or should read too much into it.
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.
(From abstract)
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.
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.
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.
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.
On reddit, this style of hypothesis adjustment was common about weed until it was legalized.
You: > From personal experience...most...almost always...usually
c’mon, try harder
Race. Gender.
I see this pattern where you define a class so broad any proposition becomes a truism, and productive discussion becomes impossible.
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.
I'm not saying you are not making a point - it's just a unnecessarily broad point that is difficult to discuss constructively.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have to force people into roles they don't want just to create a statistic to suggest equality?
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)?
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?
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.
Male teachers are nevertheless underrepresented, due to other biases.
And clearly there is some issue of implicit bias, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion in the first place.
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.
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
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?
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 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!
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.
'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.
win some, loose some. not really helpful to compare that.
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