This is pretty scary. Inclusivity fine but what else can they push and censor.
I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US pretty big deal like (landlord, guys - which is gender neutral in our country).
Its like pushing your culture on different countries. I don't want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.
There is no issues of inclusivity in our country. Google is pushing their agenda on different groups, cultures and countries,
>I don't want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.
This is something that I just cannot reconcile with the notion that all these measures are meant to make things more inclusive. All I see are groups of rich and powerful people telling people "below them" how to behave, and makings tons of money doing it. D&I is a grift.
DEI is a great system as long as you assume that everyone participates, everyone is completely free of biases
Having been on more than a couple DEI boards, I'm really curious where the notion that everyone must be "completely free of biases" comes from in your mind? I've never understood, and never saw any DEI effort describing bias to be something to be completely, utterly and totally eradicated, but instead something to recognize as a source of potentially--but not always--folly-filled actions ("what happens when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me", etc).
Everyone has biases about something or another. Every last one of us.
That's why such things as "implicit" vs "explicit" bias exists, and any DEI effort worth its salt should really be making it known that there's a difference between the two.
The argument might then be that because only a small portion of people will be part of DEI boards, and the people on those boards will tend to be biased a certain way (for the same reasons that most liberal arts professors tend not to be Republican) a certain view is consistently presented and a certain course of action is generally followed that affirms the biases of that group of people. Hence the "grift"; as DEI boards become more powerful, they inevitably force a specific culture on the rest of the group.
It's a big assumption to suppose that the 'failing up' guy was only able to do so 'because he was white'.
'Buddies with the execs' - that's easy to believe. But 'because white' ... much harder to convince me there.
The amount of easy and assumptive bigotry going on around these things makes me dismissive of all of it unless there's evidence otherwise.
Paradoxically, you may have highlighted one of the issues with DEI policies, in that people may be encouraged to perceive their lack of progress up the ladder as somehow 'racially oriented'.
This is pernicious, because it's a pyramid and it gets narrow quickly.
Everyone has a beef, everyone has a 'reason' for why they aren't at some stage higher than they are, it's the perennial social issue of middle management.
So that makes it hard to sort out the legitimate cases where DEI would be relevant, to just the standard 'beefs' that lie just below surface level in every office environment.
At about the Director level and above, it's very political and 'talent' is not only just a small part of the equation, but it also means something else at that level.
DEI is a really complicated subject, and I suggest 1990's progressives, with a focus on 'treating people equally' or 'equal opportunity' (ideals which are dismissed these days as actually being systematically racist) ... should be the rule.
A dude 'failing up' if that's the case, is just unfair all around and that's it.
It's 10x more complicated if you step into another cultural context i.e. outside of the US.
To the point where I think Google should actively trying to avoid having too much of a posture on anything really. Aside from 'genocide' etc.
I don't really understand how your anecdote applies to what I said. What you described is nepotism, I don't really think that the guy was not promoted because he was black, and without any evidence of that being the case, I think it's kind of a stretch to assume. Can you provide any examples of why it was about his race? Otherwise, that is just nepotism, like you said.
DEI is horrible and returns us back to solely viewing people by the pigment of their skin. The pigment of your skin should be as irrelevant as your hair color, that should be the goal.
Also, higher up execs at literally every top tech company(google, Fb, Apple) are aggressively pushing DEI and hiring of minorities. They literally have goals to hire x% of some minority for management positions.
You raise a good point that there are still real problems that need fixing. But I don't think google docs snarking at me about capitalizing black or eschewing the gender-neutral masculine will help that.
I prefer to call it DIE. It was always Diversity & Inclusion and now also Equity I guess. Equity is also a shareholders stake, so I am not really sure what is meant here, but it overwhelmingly seems to be this meaning as they are often those that push for such measures. The exalted lords believing to improve life for the peasants.
Equity means special consideration for marginalized groups to compensate for past oppression. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said "A society which has for 300 years done something special against the negro must now do something special for the negro." That should give you some idea of the concept, even if nobody would say that in as many words today.
I know what it means and what is supposedly meant here, but I think it is quite funny that a very distinct homonym can very well be the same in these instances.
>Its like pushing your culture on different countries.
I think the original point was there is no way for Google not to do this. Sometimes cultures have opposing viewpoints which makes a neutral decision impossible. One obvious example is with displaying disputed borders in Google Maps. Any decision there is going to be political. Lots of people are going to be upset with Google for making the wrong decision regardless of which decisions they make, but I think that anger is misplaced. The real problem is Google has the power to make this decision for too many people. Companies like Google are simply too powerful and need to be broken up.
There is no reason to put this feature. This is political feature and can be used in many ways and affects other countries and cultres you cant imagine
There are second order and third order consequences of having this kind of features.
Google should not push their politics and agenda on other countries and cultures. It affects every other country in different ways.
In future this kind of feature can be used in many ways we dont know.
Well, yes this is a political feature, but your comment leads me to believe I didn't make my point clear enough. Almost every feature is political when you are the size of Google. You may only be objecting to this feature because it goes against your culture. However there are thousands of other decisions that Google has made that support your culture at the expense of some other culture. Many people here are viewing the problem as Google choosing the wrong culture. I am saying we should instead focus on the immense power Google has to force one culture on another culture.
Competition. Google is able to use its power to push out competitors. Without that power, there would likely be lots more companies challenging the various product categories that Google currently dominates. Not every company would reach the same decision on all these issues, especially if these companies arose in different cultures.
presumably those smaller companies would be beholden to the jurisdictions they're located in, where the laws are drafted by people who are democratically elected.
so, i guess democracy would have been achieved. or at least a relative increase in democratic control
well at the very least the companies in question actually reside in the jurisdiction in which they serve and are thus at least in some form accountable to the people and hopefully share some values.
Being German I'm kind of tired of the fact that American social media sites have for some reason exported QAnon protests to our cities while women get banned for showing a nipple.
Is the suggestion there actually complaining about landlord being a gendered word? I didn’t even realise that people thought landlord was gendered although I know landlady is a word. Often a landlord is a company, for example.
But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise? Proprietor works better for describing a pub landlord, for example, as many pubs are being managed by people who rent the building, landlord could confusingly either refer to the person running the business or to the company owning the building, though I guess to some extent proprietor has that problem too. If you’re talking about a rental property instead, landlord is probably more precise because eg your landlord might own a lease and be subletting rather than owning the property itself.
Sometimes people in my culture treat obviously gendered words as gender-neutral to the point that they re-gender them when they need to be specific. For example "policeman lady", "postman lady" or "men's perfume". So I think the gender-neutralizing of words happens naturally without having to change the word itself, just like your example of landlord becoming gender neutral.
> But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise?
I didn't know the distinction until you pointed it out, and didn't know very well the range of meanings proprietor had until now. Which I suppose highlights an important problem with such suggestions: if they suggest replacing a term A with a more precise term B that does not signify what was intended to be conveyed by A, based on concerns that both author and audience do not care about, and the author blindly accepts the suggestion, then such suggestions are creating miscommunication.
>I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US pretty big deal like (landlord, guys - which is gender neutral in our country).
Ask your hetrosexual male friends how many guys they have slept with.
I would imagine response will illustrate "guys" is less gender neutral than might think.
Some locations they use "y'all", some use "you guys". It's gender neutral in that sense.
In the sentence you gave, the context wouldn't be gender neutral because you said "slept with".
If you enter a room and say hey guys, it's neutral. If it's all girls you could say hey gals, which would be fine, either works.
I can't imagine anyone other than liberals that would be offended by a blanket statement of "hey guys".
It's really a stupid thing to get hung up on. It's like searching for something to offend you.
It doesn't make sense until you realize the goal. What you're doing is creating arbitrary rules to form a kind of censorship via social pressure because you can't censor speech legally.
I don't think words need to be gender neutral. Grammatical and biological gender are not really the same. I think this urge to clean languages is a bit detached.
Personally, I have no skin in the game of gendered language. Sometimes I think it's exaggerated, sometimes I think it's necessary. I do have a hard time changing how I speak, old habits die hard. As far as people and everyday communication is concerned, I address people the way they want to be addressed. Nothing to do with gender, just general politeness. E.g. I wouldn't use a nick name people hate, so why would I insist in calling someone "her" (or "he") if they don't want to?
I wasn't referring to calling someone another gender. Doing so is just minimum courtesy. I do believe that courtesy cannot be mandated though and I would not want anyone having it mandated for my sake.
I meant words like mailman and such. Of course a mailman could also be a woman. I think calling someone a mailwoman is fine, but the word does not carry intrinsic offense.
We don't disagree, I think. Gender neutral job titles are ok, as far as I'm concerned. Mostly that is, as the female jobs are, historically, more often lower income jobs in the same domain (nurse vs. doctor comes to mind). Coming back to courtesy, if a female mailman prefers to be addressed as mailwoman I would do so.
Funny side note, the German language has some interesting edge cases. E.g. the rank of Hauptmann (Captain in the army and air force) usually isn't gendered, the other ranks aren't neither. So usually female soldiers of that rank are addressed as Frau Hauptmann. The funny thing is Hauptmann is also last name... The plural of the rank Hauptmann is gender neutral again, it's Hauptleute...
I don't believe this is entirely honest since you probably also have a limit in what you are willing to accommodate, be that faith, self-identification or just a usual form of courtesy.
Granted, apathy would be my solution too, but here I am expected to align the way I express myself.
I do believe that the desire to frame anything gender neutral is not something I want to put too much thought into but I don't mind conflict if someone requests to accommodate what is basically a faith.
>"If cancel culture actually existed, there would be many examples we could point to. But there aren't."
>"Cancel culture isn't random individuals telling you to shut up, or drowning out inanity. That's just free speech."
As a point of order, it's not profound to say that no examples of "thing" exist when you apply your own definition that frames all instances of "thing" as something entirely different.
If there wasn't an element of cancel culture then Brendan Eich would be Mozilla's CEO and not the incompetent CEO they currently have.
Don't get me wrong, I profoundly disagree with Brendan Eich's political views, I am for same-sex marriage and I'm very much a liberal when it comes to any moral leanings. That doesn't stop the fact that Brendan Eich being ousted of Mozilla for his intolerant political views is a shame and set back Mozilla considerably.
You don't seem to know what cancel culture refers to. It's not the celebrities you listed. It's women being deplatformed for expressing traditionally feminist positions; it's students calling for biology professors to be fired because the professor teaches that the sexes are fundamentally binary in Homo sapiens.
> Though abortion is conduct, it does not follow that the State is entitled to proscribe it in all instances. That is because the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law. The mother who carries a child to full term is subject to anxieties, to physical constraints, to pain that only she must bear. That these sacrifices have from the beginning of the human race been endured by woman with a pride that ennobles her in the eyes of others and gives to the infant a bond of love cannot alone be grounds for the State to insist she make the sacrifice. Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman's role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture. The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society.
For the overwhelming majority of women in the world, feminism is still inexplicably intertwined with issues unique to women because they involve pregnancy, birth, raising children, and the vulnerability that comes from differences in physical strength compared to men, etc.
If suddenly all women who got Covid (including the asymptomatic ones who never officially tested) were infertile. Would everything you said become moot since now a big chunk of the female population does not have the pregnancy and birth?
Raising children relates to every one who identifies as a woman. Same with physical strength for any one who transitions which includes estrogen et al. more so vulnerability in general specifically is an issue more for people not born female.
I appreciate your comment and the quote. Did you mean to write "inextricably" though? (Hopefully it's clear that that is a straightforward question and not rhetorical!)
What I mean by "traditionally feminist" is the view that feminism concerns the challenges faced by biological women as a result of physical differences from men, the fact that they give birth, and the millenia of abuse of women by men in human history for domestic work and sexual purposes. I.e. to be explicit, that feminism is not about the challenges faced by biological males who are attempting to change their bodies to be female and to live their lives as women. This is not to say that the challenges faced by transwomen are at all to be dismissed or treated unsympathetically; just that it is a distinct issue from traditional feminism.
Your question is also answered rather more eloquently by rayiner in the sibling comment.
I’ll mostly repeat what I responded to the sibling.
If all biological females who got Covid (including the asymptomatic ones who never officially tested) became infertile. Or let’s just say 30-40% of biological females became infertile. Does this make “traditional feminism” moot? The primary differences that are exclusive to biological females would not be true for so many of them then.
If so, that’s cool. Sometimes these talking points are obfuscation to gatekeep and discriminate. However if traditional feminism really would segment out infertile women to some degree like women who transitioned, then that’s cool :)
Every time a baby girl is born, a human being comes into the world who has
1. the potential to become pregnant and give birth
2. a statistical expectation to have weaker body strength than the average man
3. the potential to be abused by men due to a combination of their statistically greater physical strength and sexual desires
4. etc
Feminism concerns the fact that biology produces such human beings on 50% of all births -- production of female children is a pretty important phenomenon.
Feminism is in no way invalidated by a thought experiment whereby some proportion of women lose one or more of those distinguishing attributes. It remains a fact of biology that 50% of births produce female children. Your thought experiment does not describe the real world. You might as well say "what if humans had 3 sexes, then where would feminism be?" or "what if women were stronger than men, then where would feminism be?".
It sounds very much like you, or whoever you got that thought-experiment from, are starting from a premise that
> we do not like the fact that the vast majority of women in the world define "woman" to exclude transwomen, and define "feminism" to be concerned with the traditional definition of "woman"
and then you are trying to think up reasons to invalidate the concept of feminism. That sort of "desired conclusion first, argument second" approach has a history of not being terribly successful at aligning with how reality actually is.
Looking at the status quo as a defense has historically not worked out well. Similar resistance and excuses were said of gay men, lesbian women, minorities (IE dark skinned people in much of the world), slavery or indentured servitude, basic women’s rights, marijuana users, mental health issues like autism, bipolar, borderline, schizophrenia, physical disabilities or deformities, and more.
Most of those instances now have first world societies with a majority of people agreeing those people deserve [near] equality and basic human respect besides. For the instances where a majority has not been reached yet across the first world (racism, religious intolerance, sexism) the trend is getting there.
That’s not how things were before. How is what you are saying any different? For all the above, people had their reasons they believed to their core and were sure the detractors like myself were wrong. As you have noted in the moment, you could use the status quo and human tendency to be conservative (not in the political right/left sense but in the general definition) and having a hard time with change to show society does not want this progress/change.
I understand you believe this time is different. But isn’t that what all the people before believed too?
I never understand this question being used as a gotcha. Yes a sterile woman is a woman. Pregnancy and birth are just examples demonstrating womenhood. There's also lots of other things: XX chromosome, menstruation, bone structure, physical strength, and emotional intelligence just to name a few.
Obviously a male -> female trans person cannot menstruate. Are you pointing out that a female -> male trans person can menstruate? Yes, they can, because they are still biologically female. I didn't get your point re. menstruation here.
I mistyped. I meant can get some of the symptoms. I was wrong to write menstruation. I know this isn’t the exact pr or topic but since the overall point is about how the lines are blurred more than “tradition”, intersex people can menstruate and some have almost or every biological female issue. Intersex people are not a part of “traditional” feminism.
To my bigger point I sent to the other commenter, the status quo and how things have historically been for issues like identity, gender, sexuality, end up not being looked upon favorably and first world societies have consistently albeit slowly progressed on them.
I realize I am committing some fallacies by not sticking to the exact comment/topic. However I saw you edited your comment from being aggressive to respectful/kind so I thought I’d go for it.
There are many countries this could apply to. For example, landlord, as in someone who rents out a property is considered gender neutral here in Ireland. The term landlady exists, but is only used for female publicans, and only rarely, as publican and vintner are both used more frequently in that context.
"Guys" is mostly male oriented, but wouldn't be unheard of for a mixed gender group, and similarly "Lads" here is often gender neutral despite it being the most male of working class male stereotypes in the country that is our nearest neighbour.
Here in Australia, “guys” is generally used in a gender neutral way. Even when hanging out with groups of only women, I’ll use it and so will others without batting an eye. Eg, “What are you guys doing after this?”
Years ago I had an American friend tell me “guys” was sexist. I’ve been thinking about it for years since her comment. I think in an Australian context she’s wrong. And I think we move in the direction of gender equality by making words less gendered. Not by inserting gender bias where there was none.
You make “landlord” a gendered term by policing it as such. What a waste of a good word.
This one is still widely argued; many women say they don't care and are happy to be included in the guys, and others consider it a real terrible thing to say. I have to conclude that it's unlikely that stopping using guys as a gender-neutral address will truly move the needle in equality.
Yes, even in the US. But of course, given enough influence, you can make absolutely anything non-inclusive. And social pressure will make everyone have to accept it.
I also find it baffling that inclusivity folks find a term that used to be male exclusive becoming applicable to both male and female as problematic. Wouldn't they want something like this to happen?
I don't see this as too baffling- in their logic, if you have two alternatives (landlord and landlady, say) and landlord gets picked, it's evidence of patriarchy (because it defaulted to male). They would prefer "landperson", or perhaps "rent seeking capitalist"
When I rented a room from a woman in Atlanta, the other tenants and I always referred to her as "landlord" and nobody batted an eye. The only time I hear "landlady" is when One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer plays on the radio. So that's my datum.
Why does e.g. Ireland's poor treatment of the travelling community mean we need to defer to American interpretations of language? Is America such a shining paragon that everyone needs to copy their every action?
If the starting position was "America's diversity concerns are not [e.g.] Ireland's concerns" I'm more sympathetic! In fact I think having software that tries to do this is fundamentally broken! But the starting position is always "we don't have any problems here" which is an even lazier, and wrong, argument.
In that case you're as equally arguing against an argument I didn't make. I did not say that Ireland has no problems. I said that Ireland does not have problems related to the gendered implications of landlord, guys, or lads, due to these words having much less gendered implications in the Irish context. (and elsewhere in the thread, that the south eastern Ireland usage of "boy" does not have the racial implications that it does in certain contexts in the US).
Nowhere did I say that Ireland has no issues with inclusivity.
You started this reply chain on a response to a post claiming India has no issues with inclusivity, and mentioned instead we should also be considering Ireland for some reason! What are you doing?
This is pretty scary. Inclusivity fine but what else can they push and censor.
Inclusivity is fine, as long as you're not encouraged to be inclusive? Are you sure you think it's fine?
It's certainly fair to say that you feel that inclusivity has gotten out of hand and that it shouldn't change the way we talk. But it seems disingenuous so say that it's "fine", but think it's scary when it's suggested to you.
I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US pretty big deal like (landlord, guys - which is gender neutral in our country).
Its like pushing your culture on different countries. I don't want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.
There is no issues of inclusivity in our country. Google is pushing their agenda on different groups, cultures and countries,
This is how it starts.
https://twitter.com/thecitywanderer/status/15161769835495301...