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Comment by vGPU | Hacker News Reader

> dealing with misogynistic comments and just overall disappointing behavior from quite a few less than stellar men was a regular occurrence at work for me and my female coworkers.

Subjective judgements on behavior, from someone who complains that there are too many white scientists.

Pardon me if I take their judgement with a grain of salt.

The entire article is incredibly poorly written, to boot. I was expecting to see a credit card advertisement any second. “Use my referral code and you too can fly to Antarctica for free!”. Actually - the majority of points/credit card referral sites have higher quality writing.

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I mean, let's view this charitably. It makes total sense for a woman, who feels like she received misogynistic comments from men at her workplace, to have a poor opinion of the men there. I also don't know if it's really good faith to dismiss a woman saying something was misogynistic as subjective. Of course being a bigot is kind of subjective-- the bigot just thinks their prejudice is normal/true. I wouldn't trust any of the male scientists to say "no of course misogynistic comments didn't happen"; they're guys and, speaking as a guy, it's a blindspot for most men when they make women uncomfortable.

I also charitably don't think there's anything wrong with being suspicious of a very obvious lacking in racial diversity. Globally, white people are a minority of people, and they're likely not the overwhelming majority of all scientists even. So it would obviously be a statistical anomaly if only white people were on a specific research trip. [edited to add: a commenter below clairified this particular station is operated by the US, which is majority white, and scientists even moreso. I was assuming stations are operated with international cooperation :) ]

> Globally, white people are a minority of people, and they're likely not the overwhelming majority of all scientists even. So it would obviously be a statistical anomaly if only white people were on a specific research trip.

This was a trip to McMurdo Station, which is operated by the US, which is majority white as of the 2020 census (58.9% "white alone, not Hispanic or Latino"). In 1956, when McMurdo was established, the US was nearly 90% white. If anything, it would be a statistical anomaly if there were too few white people, considering that the science community is whiter than the country as a whole.

The GP's point stands, still: though the OP's article doesn't explicitly say that the lack of racial diversity in McMurdo is a problem, it's implied. Why is it a problem? I don't think anyone at McMurdo is complaining about minorities coming in.

Oh okay, I thought this was a station that was hiring internationally or something like that. I guess I'd be curious then if the station was significantly whiter than the science population of the US. Again, this is trying to observe this in a good faith as a reasonable thing to say/do. I'm assuming this is a reasonably competent person, and I can definitely see in modern day it might be something worth commenting as noticeable to be in the company of almost exclusively white people.

Not only that, but racism/sexism is too good to let go. People will always find another casus belli. White people still have most of the world's wealth, so, even when whites are the minority, they still deserve to be subalterned. And hey, they did that to other races for most of history, so it's all fair!

The only winning move is not to play these shitty games.

I guess you and i have a very different understanding of the word "complaint". Because i don't see any.

She's not wrong. There are too many white scientists (statistically) and STEM graduates.

One of the greatest fallacies of the modern identitarian movement is that every subsection of society, no matter how you slice and dice it, must reflect the composition of the society as a whole. There's no reason why this should be the case, because different cultural subgroups value and prefer different things.

"Too many white scientists" carries exactly the same amount of meaning as "too many black NFL players" (over half are black, compared to 13.6% of the population) or "too many male roofers" (95% are male) or "too many female special ed teachers" (84.2% are female); that is to say, it carries no meaning at all.

Once you free yourself from the plausible-sounding but false idea that the composition of subgroups must necessarily reflect the composition of the whole, a lot of today's racial divides and those who fan those flames are evident for what they are: those with agendas that benefit from pitting people against one another.

There are not nearly enough white, black, East Asian, Latin, or Native American scientists and STEM graduates.

Exactly man, we have to change that. Thanks for pointing it out.

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