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Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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ITT: men who can't ever admit they might be the problem. So many excuses here it's pathetic.
edit: I love the "not all men" and "not me". As always, it's not all men. But it's enough. And the men here getting so defensive really prove the point. And before anyone gets into it, it's not really the sex or gender. It's the societal expectations and allowances that encourage men to engage in abusive shit like we see in the article here. I.e. the patriarchy and those who support it.
Can you expound on that statement?
It sounds as if the organizers were too quick to take the $650 from attendees and those willing to pay were very eager to pony up the cash in the hope of networking.
The attendees should be able to tell that they would be intruding even if the organization didn't bother to check that. Both were in the wrong.
Problem for what?
I exist, I need a job to live, I have job, I try my best not to be an asshole, I fight (and vote) for a better society, for social and civil rights.
Why exactly I - since I am a man I feel included in your statement - should be THE problem?
Maybe people are getting too in the weeds with this because muh culture war
But it is an asshole move to show up to an event meant for one group of people when the original issue is how over represented your group is. I'm a developer. The grind sucks. But I would be an asshole to show up to this.
If I was out of job, I would honestly care less about the fact that "my group" is over represented. There is no white male lobby that pays my mortgage. That said, I - as in the actual me - would not go to such event either, but that's also because I wouldn't go to any job fair atm since I don't need a job.
Sure, that's what makes people behave like assholes. "I don't care about X" is why we have a pretty shitty world in many areas.
This is pure rhetoric, I can flip the argument:
"You care more about the gender than about my material condition."
Also, the moment I need to let prevail abstract concepts over my material condition (i.e., caring about "my group" being over represented while I am out of a job) is the moment in which the class unity is broken. Me and those women who are out of a job have so much in common that there is no reason for me to consider us part of two separate groups. That's the whole point of my argument, I advocate for worker solidarity and I absolutely feel that this attitude is overall harmful for it.
I don't agree. I can be at a disadvantage and still accept that another group has even greater disadvantages that I would continue or make worse by stepping into something they built. Its freeloading in a pretty assholish way. I'm not just some animal trying to get a nut with narrow focus that says fuck everything else. I can job search and find my own opportunities without freeloading
Let me say this: to me this seems the completed detached thought of someone who never faced material difficulties.
I can only think this if I am in a position of privilege where I can choose. I absolutely can't relate with any of this, I completely agree to disagree.
That would only make sense coming from a position where you assume people have no sense of integrity.
First issue is assuming your material difficulties is some how superior to others.
Second assuming the only thing that matters when facing material difficulties is how to advantage only yourself.
Lots of people in life are capable of enduring difficult times while also sacrificing or placing themselves behind others. I don't see how you don't understand that. I can promise you I have faced and continue to face many difficulties which all have taught me life lessons. One of the most important lessons is that overcoming those times by hurting others is not a position I enjoy.
I genuinely think this has nothing to do with integrity.
This is not an issue, it's absolutely normal, because I am aware of my material difficulties, while I am not aware of other people's one to the same extent. I can't decide not to buy a house because by doing so I increase the demand, which increases prices and makes it harder for poor people to afford housing. You are putting the burden to address a systemic issue on another victim.
I am not saying this is the only thing that matters, but I am saying it matters, and I think it's completely unfair to think that people shouldn't take care of themselves. I turn my eye to the mechanisms that create the scarcity that put me and a woman to fight for resources, not on either one of them.
Again, I think we have simply too different of a perception of what means a difficult time. Sorry, but this argument to me sounds as complete madness.
So not only I am forced to sell my labor to survive, which is the only chance I have, but when I do I am anyway hurting others. So what are my options? Suicide? Any job I am going to take, whether it comes though this fair or not, I am taking it potentially from an under represented category, be it a woman, an old person, black folks, LGBTQ+ community, etc. So I should just stop working?
I will say more, if you carry on your line of reasoning further, any of the people working in tech is US are participating in a system that in a bigger scale hurts people from third world countries (thinking for example of labor exploitation) and pollutes the planet. So what should people do?
The working class should build solidarity, should develop a consciousness that allow them to fight united against the system that creates arbitrary scarcity of resources, not self-police and create a hierarchy to split the crumbles among themselves.
Do you realize that there are women out of a job too? It's not just out of good vibes that people bring up issues of representation, they represent the material conditions of people. For you the percentage of women vs men in the workplace might be a meaningless number, but for those women, it's their chance of a living.
I am just saying that this burden shouldn't fall on other people in material need. It is simply extremely unfair from my point of view to imagine that a person which happens to be a man, and is in need of a job should just sit quietly and leave space for women, because generally, in the whole field, women are under represented.
Again, this is just some kind of thought process that can only come in my head if I am not risking for my house to be repossessed by the bank, or when I have enough cash to keep paying rent, or I don't have a family to support. It's a complete luxurious form of integrity that is completely detached from the real world (the one I live in, at least). This seems completely peak war between poor people, where we stop challenging the arbitrary scarcity of resources and we want to solve the problem just by creating a hierarchy by which the crumbles should be shared.
I am from a different country, maybe it's cultural, but this position is completely alienating and unrelatable for me.
You are still not thinking of the women who are also struggling to get jobs, who are poor as well. Women also struggle to pay rent or to feed their families too. You are contrasting women against struggling people as if they couldn't be in the same position.
So not only women in this field already need to fight an uphill battle against the industry's predisposition to hire men over women, now they are having to fight over opportunities that had been aimed at them to begin with. Don't you think they will also face real financial struggles because of this?
It's not a matter of caring about representation or material needs. It's an opportunity to provide material needs through representation.
I don't know where you are from, but I'm not american or european if that's what you are assuming. Yet there are still women struggling where I live. I assume the same is true all over the world.
Surely, there is a point to be made regarding our need to pressure wealthy people so that more poorer people have means to live. But how does pulling the rug under a poor woman have anything to do with that? That's not even the same discussion, that's just changing topics from the ruthlessness being displayed.
And you know what, as a man, if I were in a situation of need as well I wouldn't look favorably over people who are so intent on tripping whoever is around them to cut in line. Desperation is real for sure, but for that very reason solidarity is important.
Well, good thing it doesn't in this case.
The whole point is that everything in this field is already, by default, directed at men. That's what it's like in the US. It's the same with race. And saying we have have equality when we don't is just ignoring the way these divisions affect historically oppressed groups. Acknowledging systemic hierarchy and division between races and genders in order to fix it doesn't automatically mean you have to ignore class divisions. They're far from mutually exclusive. Why would it be impossible to acknowledge both at the same time?
It's to the point where no one else can have anything without men going "what about me and my problems?" "Well here's what I think about all these social issues that have never and will never negatively affect me." As usual, the "not all men" of every comment section of every article about a women-only-something-or-other are just making a great case for women-only-something-or-others.
This is a very broad statement. Perhaps the population of males that showed up here is not an average male population in tech but the outliers of the statistics (looking at the videos, it seems mostly foreigners)? So I think it's fairly alienating to go tell them "sorry, fuck off, everything is meant for you already", when maybe you are out of a job for months and decided to pay 600$ (!!) in the hope of getting one.
Who said this?
It's not impossible, but this happens. A lot of focus on the relatively minor differences between oppressed people creates fragmentation that impedes those people to realize they actually share problems and interests. To make an example, you coming and saying that "everything is meant for men anyway" is alienating to a 45yr old male who has just been fired to be replaced by a 23yr old (maybe, woman). It simply conflicts with the experiences of individuals who - despite potentially being men - face other kind of discrimination and generally struggle. That man has more in common with a woman who is not promoted, compared to the boss of that woman who is sexist, instead, and should not be alienated by gaslighting him with a reality that for him does not exist (I took this example, but the same applies to a black person, a foreigner, someone who didn't study in a fancy university, someone with a disability, and so on). So I am not saying that they are mutually exclusive, I am saying that concretely some arguments, including the overall tone of the article, seem to me to damage class unity to purely focus on gender discrimination.
Sorry, but I would not like to be mixed up with arguments made by others, nor with those who are arguing a-la Jordan Peterson in this thread. I don't care of men as a category, I am a supporter of feminism, I just have an idea of feminism as an inherently anti-capitalist and progressive ideology, which is an enabler for class unity. I just don't see the kind of arguments made by this article (and by some of the commenters) going in this direction. Instead, they seem to me as part of a feminism which is reactionary and part of the system in that it doesn't challenge it. Getting angry at fellow victims just because they are men seem to me an expression of this.
Nota bene: if the kind of tech-bro with a cushy job would be attending this fair with the intention to waste the time of the recruiters or even to look for a better job, my opinion would be different.
That's the part I really don't get. If you're cis male looking for a job, do you really think crashing this event is going to reflect favorably on you and that you'd be more likely to land a job? People are going to look at you and think that you have good judgment and won't be a problem at all? What the heck is the thought process that makes this a good plan?
seriously this happens a lot people will go off and say word for word that a whole group of people are evil and bad when its a subset of a group. When called on it they may simply say that its not talking about the group as a whole or “not for you” if they dont genuinely believe the whole group is bad (which is wrong and discriminatory)
The issue is the discrepancy of what you say in relation to what you mean will lead others to believe in what you say but not what you mean and this harms those just trying to survive normally.
The first comment literally wasn't talking about a whole group of people, they were talking about the men in this thread leaving comments that illustrate the exact reason why this space created by and for women and non-binary people should be about and for the benefit of women and non-binary people.
It also didn't explain why, nor made the distinction you are making. So yeah, it was a blanket statement to karma farm on Lemmy...
Being an asshole is not illegal. Obeying the law doesn't mean you're a good person.
If these dudes were - as the article quotes describe - pushing, shoving, cutting in line then like I don't see why you feel you need to identify with these particular dudes.
You can absolutely wait until some guy actually is being unfairly treated before dying on this hill.
Great Parks and Rec episode