[WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

Sat Nov 25 17:38:23 UTC 2006

On 11/25/06, Puppy <puppy at killerchihuahua.com> wrote:
> Those are my thoughts currently - does anyone else have any ideas?

End this painful thread, its forking off child threads that my mailer
isn't able to keep together.

>If someone feels the climate is hostile to speaking up, we are not
>making this a supportive or even neutral environment to women.

I honestly thought the OP was trolling and ignored the thread.... So I
was happily ignoring the thread until I saw Kat post .... I saw that
it was even worse than I expected it do be, so I tried to continue to
ignore it... but it's getting rather hard now.

The argument appeared to be of the form of "Look at [[indisputably bad
thing X]]. How can we reduce the harm thing Y is causing.", where the
blanks were filled in with "our bad coverage of subjects which tend to
be more interesting to woman" and "the material biases in our  caused
by the over-representation of men in our decision making".

Bad examples (in my house it's me that uses the hair drier, I'm as
able to write about them as any typical woman, .. it's just that no
one finds hair driers interesting) notwithstanding...

The fallacy here is that no suggestion was ever made that thing Y even
exists, much less is related to bad thing X.

This is the same form of argument we see in posts Gregory Kohs, where
he points out the deletion of some marginally notable corporate stub
and then waves his hands asking us what to do with this corporate
bias.

Why must we start off viewing poor coverage of ballet as some kind of
insidious bias against women?  Because that agrees with someone's
agenda?  ... Why not consider it a part of a larger unevenness of
coverage, and look for solutions which work independently of the root
cause? ... Because a 17 year old doesn't care that our coverage is
biased in favor of pop-culture when compared against subjects
interesting to the blue-hairs?

In any case, the attacking tone this thread has taken.. especially by
those who are claiming to be attacked is especially troublesome.   I
was and am honestly afraid to post my thoughts as a result of it.   I
think you should take a step back and think about that before
replying.