For anyone wondering why "girls" is a loaded term, think about how it used to be ok in the US for white people to call adult black men "boy". Would you call your coworker or boss "boy"? No, it would feel terribly terribly wrong, especially if they are black. It would be a gross microaggression and bullying behavior.
That's what calling women "girls" is like. It's a pejorative that maintains bias and prevents us from seeing a class of people as active and capable.
Men get tied up and abused as prisoners of war and they're heros. Women get tied up and abused by men, they're victims. Women as "girls" is part of this false socially constructed narrative about female "impotence."
I imagine a lot of technical people are or could be into zines: they mix DIY and maker zeal with principles of distributed information sharing. They're the OG artisanal local blogs ;-p
You can make little zine booklets -- which I find especially satisfying -- from a single sheet of computer paper using the following instructions: http://staycalmcomic.com/how-to-zine
Hi author. Small nit: consider changing your title to "their" time rather than "he" since you talk about "a technical co-founder". There's no need to use gendered language in the general case, and gendered language needlessly encourages gendered based identification. Imagine if you included your race and ethnicity and sexuality in the title - that'd feel silly, right? It would limit the audience who found the piece relevant, and it could be read as though those aspects were somehow relevant to being a technical co-founder. No doubt gender and race and ethnicity do effect one's experience and interactions, and that's a great piece to write, but that's not what you're trying to talk about in this piece so why put it in the title?
The important thing is to be awareness of this disparity. It's often set up as a false dichotomy: you either have to feel guilty, or you have to ignore and forget poverty and privilege.
It's ok to observe differences and then keep that in mind when relating to other people. Use this knowledge to be more empathetic. Be kinder. Be grounded. Be connected. You can lead your best life earning tons of money while also understanding your relationship to the world and the diversity it contains. You can let this understanding inform your responses and intentions.
Processing the world isn't simple. But you can continue to evolve how you relate to differences and different people, and that can guide your overall goals as well as your decisions in specific interactions.
This is an area where I see the free market causing great harm. How can a population contend with greedy, money-rich corporations who wage huge psychological and legal campaigns? It's very one-sided. In the US, science and the people's own best interest are seldom enough. The government must have some balance of power to regulate corporations that are otherwise happy to abuse their fellow humans and distort culture and consciousness to systematically disempower whole populations.
It's an awful cycle. It's possible that a system built on nurturance and development, one that empowered people with a wide array of tools including compassion and self-realization, would produce corporate leaders who could themselves balance multiple constructive ends. Imagine if the mega-corps who routinely disenfranchise poor communities and third world countries not only sought money and power, growth and impact, but also felt internally compelled to be accountable, admit mistakes, build constructive non-manipulative and non-bullying relationships, empower others when possible, and respect others when not possible even when taking care of oneself, etc.
I'm a big fan of free-will and independence and no human having more authority than another, but I also see a huge importance in nurturing and developing children to bear those responsibilities constructively, for example free from low self esteem and arrogance, and rich with curiousity, support networks, courage and inventiveneess. Unfortunately, nurturing, developing and supporting others are tasks that are largely seen as "feminine" and therefore economically unimportant (stay at home parents are free labor, and teachers, nannies, etc earn very little money, and research in those areas is similarly seen as lesser science to math and engineering). These professions are often shunned by those needing to defend their "masculinity", and in fact nurturance and emotional support is often required of women and people of color as free labor (the classic "mother" and "grandmother" and "POC friend" role). So it's a strange world we live in, where corporations are seen as people under the law, and are of course directed by people in charge, and yet we keep the bar very low for how mature and capable these people-corporations are.
how much of a problem are false accusations compared to not reporting sexual harassment or rape?
this is a really interesting point worth investigating. i don't have research on hand to link to (though it's fresh on my mind from reading Roxanne Gay's Bad Feminist), but my understanding is that sexual harassment and rape are grossly underreported. false positives is not a huge problem. false negatives are.
by talking about false accusations you are placing greater importance on the suffering of the fewer people who are falsely accused compared to the suffering of the greater people who are falsely silent.
that's fine to intentionally value this, but do consider how this parallels rape culture and the protection of aggressors over the safety of victims. (for offenders, like priests who abused children, become repeat offenders)
as for the fact that men are also harassed and raped, and that male-male and female-female harassment and rape also exist: these are big problems, too, and the silence of the victims is even more complicated, for it doesn't follow the usual victim norm. people want to be heard. they want their problems to be seen and resolved. thus i contend that being heard is the greater problem. not false accusations.
> "well, she wore a sexy dress and followed him up to his room so maybe his claims that it was consensual are true."
how is that reasonable? maybe we should ask what she claims and what he wore.
but wait, what clothing indicates whether someone is a rapist? tshirts and tatty jeans? polo shirt? suit? of course clothing implies nothing.
why does her wearing "sexy" clothing -- to say nothing of "sexy" being all about the male perception and desires, as if her own clothing can't be worn for her own reasons -- imply anything about her desire for sex?
> "isn't it just as/more important that they correctly figure out who the victim is?"
if you're only asking men their opinion, and believing whatever assumptions you want to make about women based on their clothing rather than their word, the system is already tilted towards men getting want they explicitly want, and women not being listened to.
i'm not saying believe rape victims without scrutiny. i'm saying have a little more compassion and support and actually listen to their words as much as you listen to the man's words, and care about their clothes as much as you care about the man's clothes.
indeed. victims of rape and sexual harassment are often blamed for the aggressors behavior, as if clothing or inebriation or past interactions makes such violations ok.
women who wear feminine or even sexual clothing and make-up aren't "sluts who are asking for it". they're not asking for unprofessional flirtation or jokes, and they're certainly not asking for bullying, disrespect or aggression. i'm not talking about dress code nuance. i'm not talking about whether someone is making destructive decisions or simply different decisions. i'm specifically talking about how femininity is used as an excuse to diminish and over-reach, as an excuse for those with power to project their desires and discount the will of those without. how one person dresses or behaves doesn't justify someone else being an asshole. and yet that is exactly how we make women feel when men cross boundaries, whether it is a rude joke or a physical violence.
the only other time i can think of clothing mattering in a crime is when black people are murdered and somehow it is justified because hoodie :-O
more generally, notifying authorities about sexual harassment or rape is extremely difficult - culturally, not just logistically. because of rape culture and the normative masculinity of most people in power, eg management and police, victims face aggressive doubt. people who speak up often face serious retaliation (bullying, asked to move locations rather than asking the aggressor to move, seen as a problem, stigmatized, etc), which can be even worse - professionally and emotionally - than the incident itself.
Casually telling people to shut up and file a claim reveals deep ignorance. In the Bay Area for example, we've recently had issues with police texting each other homophobic slurs, being involved with an underage sex worker, asking "shaming" questions of a rape victim, and of course being acquitted for murdering unarmed black and brown people. These are just the news-reading ways in the last 12 months that might lead someone to have less trust in authority, to think that maybe those with power aren't on their side.
One's parents, one's friends, one's experiences in the world - they also tell some people that police are not on their side. Daughter, always find a populated, well lit place to pull over at night if a police car flags you to stop. Son, you are black, so when the police pull you over for no reason be calm, be the bigger man, white people are taught to fear you, to see you as an "angry violent black man", so be extra small, don't draw attention. Child, you were born here like your friends, but your parents don't have papers, if you come home from work one day and we are not here it is because they found us, don't draw attention.
Having "the law" on one's side is a privilege. If someone can expect to call the police and have their problems taken seriously, they have a privilege. They don't need to feel guilty -- all of us on HN have some kind of privilege, eg access to the internet and reading and writing -- but they do need to acknowledge that not everyone is the same as themselves. they're not a jerk for having access to the police. but they are ignorant for not thinking about the challenges and differences others face, and then telling people they're doing it wrong for not shutting up and choosing an "easy" solution. have some compassion. be supportive. that's what it means to acknowledge privilege.
our cultural environment gives us a bias toward downplaying the problem of rape and sexual harassment. i've found this thought experiment helpful in exploring bias:
rape is torture. for some it is worse than murder.
sexual harassment is aggression. for some it is worse than being punched in the face.
how would you feel if someone at your work murdered or punched someone else?
how would you feel if there was a systemic cultural inequity such that 1 in 3 people could expect to be murdered or punched at some point in their life?
ps - the opposite of rape (bully) culture is nurturance (support) culture.
I'm disappointed though not surprised by comments suggesting that Amazon only pay attention to their bottom line. Why shouldn't they do more for racial inequality? That's just as meaningful as $$. Powerful corporations are more and more like governments -- they should be looking out for us, and we should be asking them to.
That's what calling women "girls" is like. It's a pejorative that maintains bias and prevents us from seeing a class of people as active and capable.
Men get tied up and abused as prisoners of war and they're heros. Women get tied up and abused by men, they're victims. Women as "girls" is part of this false socially constructed narrative about female "impotence."