rev_bird

Oh! A moderator! How nice of you to arrive. No need to worry, I won't be coming back.

>I would like to offer another point of view

Honestly, I don't give a shit about "another point of view," and that you think it matters here is a great illustration of why women would run for the hills, whichever hills don't have you on them.

This is not about someone's experience as a "social reject," this isn't about sad boys not being cool in high school because they like comic books. This is about women wanting a place to talk to other women about an experience that they feel isolates them from their male colleagues. That men sometimes feel lonely too has nothing to do with it.

This is nonsense, you're comparing "let's chat with each other" with lynchings.

Problem: Women feel they don't have anyone to talk to about their experiences as a woman in tech.

Solution: Increase their access to people they can talk to about their experiences as a woman in tech. Like, say, an online community.

>Tech pushes many people out, male and female. Even if the men in tech are the same, what about the men who would like to be in tech but were pushed out? Or are all men the same?

I'd wager most men "pushed out" of tech weren't fleeing sexism and gender-based isolation. This whole thing seems like looking at a team of 10 -- nine men and one woman -- and, when the woman says, "Gee, it'd be nice to have another woman to talk to," responding by saying "Well how about you just talk to us nine guys instead? Wouldn't that be just as good?"

That's not the real question, you're pretending context doesn't matter. What's your argument? Women say "I enjoy having a place to communicate with other women in a place that feels safe from male interference," and your response is "Let me into the women's bathroom"?

This seems like a disingenuous decontextualization of what was said. Your link to dictionary.com says this:

>to initiate or precipitate (a chain of events, scientific reaction, psychological process, etc.)

"Psychological process," in this case, is what I was talking about, and what I think the original commenter was referring to. "Trigger warnings" aren't warning you that you might feel "anything that will cause a reaction," they're to help people suffering with PTSD avoid having a panic attack.

I agree that the colloquial definition is trending the way you describe, and I think it's irresponsible to just sit and watch it happen without speaking up in favor of the more specific psychological definition.

The only way you'd be able to say "groups like this won't fix feelings of isolation!" is if you ignored all the women in this comment section saying it has definitely helped their feelings of isolation. Which I guess might be kind of the point.

How convenient that pointing out discrimination ends up getting painted as bigotry. Do you think colleges having black student unions is "bigotry" too?

I disagree that white nationalists have a similar view, though it's interesting that someone linked to a forum where women can feel safe from attack in discussions and we're currently debating their similarities to neo-Nazis.

The white nationalist stance (in general) is that racial hegemony, with their group at the top of the heap, is the preferential state of affairs. The stance of this group, as far as I can tell, is that gender equality is the preferential state. Those seem like very different things.

As I noted above, "advantage" was the wrong word, my apologies. There's tons of information out there about the disproportionate number of men working in tech, to say nothing of the salary discrepancies that cause so much drama here.

At the end of the day, women say they feel that they feel isolated by an industry that is overwhelmingly male, and that being able to connect with other women and discuss their experiences is a valuable way to stay in a career that they might otherwise bail on. I'm inclined to believe them.

>Why would fighting racism with racism or sexism with sexism be a productive method of correcting imbalances? Wouldn't that just fuel and maintain the disdain between groups?

Is this the "all lives matter!" response to this project? It's not a crime to point out that some groups are poorly represented in an industry. Are you saying the solution to "hey, women feel isolated in the tech industry" is to say "Well, let's figure out how to include men too"? If women felt like their discussions were being treated fairly in public forums, they'd have stayed in them.

>What problem is this intended to solve that isn't solved by moderation policies and forum culture?

I think this comment thread is a pretty good illustration of the problem. A group of women are saying, "hey, we think this is a beneficial project, for this reason and this other reason," and a bunch of men are saying "WRONG it's pretty much white supremacy except against men." Forums reflect their membership -- in an industry dominated by men, discussions will be slanted away from positions held by women unless compensatory measures are taken.

You're conflating "excluded from a web forum" with "excluded from society." The whole point of groups like Leap is BECAUSE those members want everyone working together -- they're not in their clubhouse plotting the deportation of men, they're trying to figure out how to get on even footing in an industry that has been hostile to women for years.