Discussion on All-Girl events

[Drake Vargas]

Originally Posted by EricH

Allow me to put it this way:

Your robotics team decides to go out to lunch all together, as a team lunch. They do not tell you, invite you, or otherwise include you--but you hear about it.

Are you, or are you not, singled out for exclusion? There is no third answer. (For this exercise, at any rate. I'm lumping "oops, we forgot" in with "we don't want this person" because if they definitely wanted you, they would have remembered.)

Now, a "workable definition" of discrimination could be phrased as: singling some person or group of persons out for exclusion. Legally, there's somewhere between 10 and 20 different categories that are protected, depending slightly on which state's lists you read--mighty long list, don't you think? The sad part is that all those categories are necessary to be spelled out in the first place...



Let's go back to that exercise. If we assume that you consider that you are not singled out for exclusion, then I find that a little odd--just human nature here, unless there's some mitigating circumstance. If, on the other hand, we assume that you consider the other way (and, to be honest, many people will!), then you may have been discriminated against. On what basis? Well, seeing as I don't know you, or anything about you, per se, I can't say. And, I'm not willing to make anything up. It could have been that for some reason you had some really bad halitosis that day, or it could have been that you were _______ and they were all ______.

That would be what's going on in the post you responded to. And, I'm willing to bet that it WAS unintentional. That doesn't mean it hurts any less! Am I a male? Yep. But... I have had to help deal with the aftermath of what I'll call "unintentional gender bias", with some good engineering-student friends (and it wasn't just me. Several folks were involved in that discussion). All I'll say is that it doesn't just affect those who are on the receiving end, it affects everybody in the group. Eventually. Can I claim that I'm perfect in that regard? NO.


Remember: It doesn't have to BE discrimination to FEEL LIKE discrimination.


Now, in the situation originally mentioned, if they'd asked and been declined, your statement might have had merit. But, they didn't even bother to ask.

I highly doubt the group of men chose to not invite her because of some "subconscious sexist discrimination bias". If they had wanted her around, they would have invited her. If they didn't ask, they don't want to hang out! It's that simple.

Originally Posted by EricH

As far as your other post: Let's ask Why they aren't saying anything about that. Then maybe something can be determined about what else is going on. Just for the record, I don't have an answer on that--yet. Without knowing what may be behind that IS situation, we cannot know why people are not complaining that it does not match the SHOULD BE situation. (And, TBH: It could simply be that either the men or the women swarm all the openings before the other group can even get an application together. Stranger things happen...)

My theory, is that the two sexes have different preferences, ingrained in us biologically and enforced through societal norms. A portion of the population feels that this "status quo" is wrong. To them, unless a field is split 50/50 it is unfair. Here is where the hypocrisy comes in. The majority of the people with this point of view are women arguing that men-heavy fields are the most unfair. The truth is, the reality that most feminists want isn't the reality that most women, on the whole, actually want. When every option is available to women (UC's have a sex split of 50-50), they tend to not choose engineering. Biological differences explain why women enjoy becoming psychologists, and why men enjoy becoming engineers.