Comment by icandoitbetter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by icandoitbetter | Hacker News Reader

This person is ostensibly is in favor of gender equality, but he believes that the problem has been overstated and it will simply solve itself. He believes that the world has become more gender-equal in the past decades not because of the relentless struggle of radical feminists, but because somehow men decided to become more civilized. Power struggles are a concept that's alien to him. He's too young to know about a society just a few decades ago in which women weren't able to go to the banks and receive loans without their husbands' permission. He doesn't realize that Mad Men really takes place in our 60s, that is, two generations ago. He hasn't spent enough time trying to picture how it'd be like to be 1 woman in the company of 10 "brogrammers". He doesn't understand that the "brogrammers" are more likely to hire more "brogrammers" until some exogenous force (like Etsy's initiative) fights against that.

In the end, I think that he doesn't believe that women's oppression is real. It reminds me of that Kurt Vonnegut letter that was in the front page a few weeks ago. And also of the following (taken from a talk by David Graeber):

"Women are always expected to imagine what things look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to reciprocate. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to the suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were an act of violence in itself. A popular exercise among High School creative writing teachers in America, for example, is to ask students to imagining they have been transformed, for a day, into someone of the opposite sex, and describe what that day might be like. The results, apparently, are uncannily uniform. The girls all write long and detailed essays that clearly show they have spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject. Half of the boys usually refuse to write the essay entirely. Those who do make it clear they have not the slightest conception what being a teenage girl might be like, and deeply resent having to think about it."

I agree on all points except the endorsement of Etsy's initiative. I understand that affirmative action-type efforts can lead to changes which are favorable to the oppressed class, however they are still inherently hypocritical in that they shift that oppression to the opposing class. The popular argument is that once this has been done enough times, the two classes will end up on relatively equal footing and society will in the process undergo a fundamental change which supports this equality going forward.

I have to believe there is an alternative method for creating that change in society, though I unfortunately cannot think of one.

I have struggled with this dichotomy for many years. I still feel that "affirmative action" is inherently discriminatory. But I too can offer no alternative to foster change. Considering the circumstances http://www.samefacts.com/2012/04/msm-mainstream-media/womens... I reluctantly accept that the end justifies the means.

I'm thinking I'll probably have to accept the same. I can't rightly argue against it unless I can offer up an alternative, and the need for change is significant enough.

I'd feel a lot better about it if it were at least acknowledged as such by the class it promotes, though.

Affirmative Action[1] is not discriminatory, but it is inherently _exclusionary_.

Discrimination:

> the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, esp. on the grounds of race, age, or sex

Is Affirmative Action unjust? No, it is justified by the vast wealth of research backing it and pointing to its success in changing the status quo towards a more equal environment. Is AA prejudiced? No, because prejudice is about not being based on reason or actual experience, and AA is very specifically based on both reason and past experiences.

Being left out of a group that is openly being exclusive may not feel right or sit well on your mind, but that doesn’t inherently make it a case of discrimination. AA can be an exclusive treatment based on gender, but it is neither unjust nor prejudicial, thus it is not discriminatory.

Hope that helps clear up the distinction for you! :)

[1] This is partly why it is no longer called “Positive Discrimination”—because that term is inherently oxymoronic—and instead is known as "Positive Action" elsewhere.

> they are still inherently hypocritical in that they shift that oppression to the opposing class.

Calling affirmative action oppression of the "opposing class" (by which you presumably mean the privileged group) is serious decontextualization, ignoring the entire history of the two groups of people and pretending that the moment in which you compare two individuals is all that matters. The fact is there is a systemic bias against un- or under-privileged groups such that the privileged person will almost always perform better on even an objective assessment, so affirmative action is a systematic correction.

In order for a privileged person and an un-privileged person to be even within spitting distance of one another academically or professionally requires a hell of a lot more work on the part of the un-privileged person, no matter how hard the privileged person worked. Affirmative action recognizes this and rewards that work despite the decontextualizing "objective" assessments that would give the reward to the higher achiever, basically placing a bet that in aggregate, giving these people more opportunity will result in better results.

Will there be errors? Sure. But it's a bit rich to complain about white boys being oppressed by women and minorities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com