Benquo comments on Community roles: teachers and auxiliaries - Less Wrong

7 Post author: calcsam 22 June 2011 10:52AM

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Comment author: SilasBarta 23 June 2011 01:50:17PM *  2 points [-]

Your derision is unwarranted. I did think about your comments for thirty seconds, and my response is still valid: that yes, you can come up with hypotheticals where men aren't noticing something they can do to draw in more women and it would be un-"offensive" to suggest, BUT at the present state, there are no actual examples where you can point out an effective strategy without being ridiculed for stereotyping.

More to the point, the phenomenon you mention of how certain kinds of discourse turn away women are not examples (of unridiculed effective ideas) until you can show that it is an effective strategy, which is very questionable and which no one has been able to substantiate. Certainly, people should be respectful in their communication, but I've attended numerous groups that have steam-rolled right over any hand-wringing about whether their language is exclusionary, and yet have huge fractions of women as attendees.

(I'm reminded of the feminists on OvercomingBias who seriously suggested to Robin that the reason more women don't comment there is that he doesn't do enough to distinguish biological and social gender. WTF? What fraction of women even think about that?)

Whatever the supposed impact of not walking on eggshells is, it's almost certainly dwarfed by other factors -- the ones we probably can't talk about without setting off the non-neurotypical gender advocates here.

Comment author: Benquo 23 June 2011 02:35:02PM *  3 points [-]

I didn't mean to imply that you hadn't thought about the issue for 30 seconds, just wanted to pat myself on the back for remembering to do so, and wished I had done so earlier. Sorry that it came across as derisive.

Also, I agree with you that legitimate efforts to encourage more women to participate are likely to resemble stereotyping and draw criticism. It will be difficult to distinguish in advance which such efforts really are counterproductive stereotyping, so feedback and criticism is valuable information we should be looking for.

ADDED: Thank you for being very specific about what you found derisive in my comment, which gave me a chance to explain what I meant.

Comment author: SilasBarta 23 June 2011 03:15:53PM -1 points [-]

Thanks for your understanding, and sorry for being on hair-trigger alert :-/

What I want to avoid is every suggestion being met with, "That's a stereotype, and I as a non-neurotypical female don't like that, so shut up about this, sexist", which (though not in that exact form) I see all too often here (and see all too often encouraged here).