KOkoeselitz·Apr 17, 2012
I really have to say I strongly disagree with Kenneth Ballenegger's characterization at the beginning of the second paragraph of the developer who was "forced to rename his open source project." Clicking on the link provided, that's clearly not what happened, unless you call him having a chat over Twitter with a friend of his "being forced." Reading over the guy's account, he was glad to do it, and felt like it was a great step to take. Talking as though it was some sort of situation where people ganged up on him to force him to take down something he worked hard on is more than a little misleading. Here, read it yourself and let me know if you think it sounds like he was "forced":
https://github.com/whit537/assertEquals/blob/master/ANNOUNCE...
That mischaracterization aside, though:
I disagree with almost everything in this article, alth
Read the rest
ough I think I see where he's coming from. Yes, for us guys in tech, it can sometimes seem a bit scary watching how much damage it can do when a company gets hammered for sexism on Twitter. I think a lot of us get a sort of fear of that happening to us, and can get a bit defensive when we're told that we've done or said something sexist, racist, or otherwise bigoted. And because we are generally blind to the ways our privilege assists us every day, we tend to feel as though we're the ones being attacked, completely missing the fact that sexism still hurts women and holds them back.
>>We cannot beat sexism until gender is no longer an issue.
This point doesn't make much sense to me at all. I think this is supposed to mean that sexism is a problem when and only when people 'make gender an issue' - and to imply that discussing sexism makes everything worse because it naturally 'makes gender an issue.' The question here is natural - an 'issue' to whom? The whole point is supposed to be that sexism is an issue women in tech have to face even if we men have the privilege of completely ignoring it if we want. It wasn't an 'issue' in 1950 that women were forbidden from holding any authority in the office; it was just a fact of life.
What really bothers me about this standard of victory over sexism - 'when gender is no longer an issue' - is that it sounds distinctly like a request that people please shut up about it already. Particularly when coupled with the next sentence...
>>Keeping up the current level of discourse is making things worse.
... which, by the way, seems demonstrably wrong to me. Does anybody care to cite any statistics about women in tech right now? Women in business? I wonder if there's any metric by which the current discourse is actually making things worse. Sure, it's not fun to have to confront privilege and deal with inequality; but it makes us all better human beings, and that's the point.