- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
The Grace Hopper Celebration is meant to unite women in tech. This year droves of men came looking for jobs.
The Grace Hopper Celebration is meant to unite women in tech. This year droves of men came looking for jobs.
Well, good thing it doesn’t in this case.
The whole point is that everything in this field is already, by default, directed at men. That’s what it’s like in the US. It’s the same with race. And saying we have have equality when we don’t is just ignoring the way these divisions affect historically oppressed groups. Acknowledging systemic hierarchy and division between races and genders in order to fix it doesn’t automatically mean you have to ignore class divisions. They’re far from mutually exclusive. Why would it be impossible to acknowledge both at the same time?
It’s to the point where no one else can have anything without men going “what about me and my problems?” “Well here’s what I think about all these social issues that have never and will never negatively affect me.” As usual, the “not all men” of every comment section of every article about a women-only-something-or-other are just making a great case for women-only-something-or-others.
This is a very broad statement. Perhaps the population of males that showed up here is not an average male population in tech but the outliers of the statistics (looking at the videos, it seems mostly foreigners)? So I think it’s fairly alienating to go tell them “sorry, fuck off, everything is meant for you already”, when maybe you are out of a job for months and decided to pay 600$ (!!) in the hope of getting one.
Who said this?
It’s not impossible, but this happens. A lot of focus on the relatively minor differences between oppressed people creates fragmentation that impedes those people to realize they actually share problems and interests. To make an example, you coming and saying that “everything is meant for men anyway” is alienating to a 45yr old male who has just been fired to be replaced by a 23yr old (maybe, woman). It simply conflicts with the experiences of individuals who - despite potentially being men - face other kind of discrimination and generally struggle. That man has more in common with a woman who is not promoted, compared to the boss of that woman who is sexist, instead, and should not be alienated by gaslighting him with a reality that for him does not exist (I took this example, but the same applies to a black person, a foreigner, someone who didn’t study in a fancy university, someone with a disability, and so on). So I am not saying that they are mutually exclusive, I am saying that concretely some arguments, including the overall tone of the article, seem to me to damage class unity to purely focus on gender discrimination.
Sorry, but I would not like to be mixed up with arguments made by others, nor with those who are arguing a-la Jordan Peterson in this thread. I don’t care of men as a category, I am a supporter of feminism, I just have an idea of feminism as an inherently anti-capitalist and progressive ideology, which is an enabler for class unity. I just don’t see the kind of arguments made by this article (and by some of the commenters) going in this direction. Instead, they seem to me as part of a feminism which is reactionary and part of the system in that it doesn’t challenge it. Getting angry at fellow victims just because they are men seem to me an expression of this.
Nota bene: if the kind of tech-bro with a cushy job would be attending this fair with the intention to waste the time of the recruiters or even to look for a better job, my opinion would be different.