Re: More women in key positions ?
bjf092@gmail.com writes:
> One of the great things about the internet and a project like this is
> that personalities and qualifications come forward without the ability
> to judge based on their physical image- whether racial or gender
> related. Maybe we should find ways to capitalize on this so as to reduce
> the chances for someone to be judged bases on a name or their designated
> gender- reduce chances for this to be communicates and emphasize content
> of the work- what is being done over who is behind the work.
This is a common suggestion and, on the surface, has a lot to recommend
it. After all, if the goal is to eliminate sexism (and racism, and
similar bigotries) as much as possible, shouldn't we just treat everyone
exactly the same and completely ignore such characteristics? And that is,
indeed, what a lot of women prefer.
The limitation to this approach (which, let me be clear, doesn't undermine
the idea entirely) is that men, and white men in particular, are the
unremarked normal in most (not all) of the societies that contribute
people to our project. This has a subtle but persistent effect: treating
everyone the same rarely translates into treating everyone by the pure
average of all the possible cultures, genders, and other variations in the
world. Rather, treating everyone the same almost always, without a lot of
very careful attention, translates into treating everyone like the
unremarked normal. In other words, treating everyone like men (and
usually like white men).
This isn't always bad. Some women strongly prefer this. But other women
don't, and don't find this as welcoming as it's intended to be. Not
everyone wants to be treated like "one of the boys" and have their gender
erased, even with the best of intentions towards an ideal of equality.
And men are often oblivious to the drawbacks of this, since they don't
*realize* they're treating people with gendered assumptions. They're
following the golden rule: they're treating people the way that they would
want to be treated, and obviously they're perfectly comfortable being
treated like the unremarked normal of white men, since that's who they
are. It takes some practice and attention to even realize there's an
often significant difference between treating everyone like men and
treating everyone equally while respecting their actual identities.
I think it's fair to say that the general feeling among the folks who
think about equality and diversity issues a lot is that the "X-blind
culture" concept, which is roughly what you were referring to, was a
useful blunt instrument to get us past the era where women were fired when
they got married because of course married women shouldn't work and should
be raising children. But that type of obvious, blantant sexism -- which
can be fought with obvious, blatant concepts of equality -- is mostly gone
(thankfully!). That doesn't mean there's no sexism left, as one can see
from the sad statistics about diversity within the project. Rather, it
means that what's left is subtle, and difficult, and complicated, and is
not particularly amenable to this sort of blunt solution.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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