christina comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong

58 [deleted] 25 November 2012 11:33PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (1254)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: christina 07 February 2013 08:46:31AM 2 points [-]

Why wouldn't you offer to assist a male who had no umbrella? That seems rather uncharitable of you.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 February 2013 03:07:00PM *  1 point [-]

It does, and the fact that I have implicit gender norms/behaviors like that bothers me. There's also other factors to take into consideration; all things being equal I'd prefer to associate with people in my age group (I'm on the low end of the age scale here - edit: I mean at my workplace, not on LW), and if she wasn't at a different site but rather a direct higher-up over me, it would be extremely awkward to offer the umbrella.

Comment author: christina 08 February 2013 08:54:57PM *  1 point [-]

My thought is that it would be best not to offer in the particular situation you gave. That is, it was night, and presumably there was no life-threatening danger to her from the rain.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with being generous, but there are always other factors to consider. If, for example, you want to hold doors open for people or offer to carry heavy things, that is fine, as long as you do that for everyone consistently and don't take offense if anyone refuses. Also, you may want to consider the context. Even if you are not a scary person, offering to help somone with a minor task if the area is dark and/or deserted can be perceived much differently than in a more typical context.

I would advise you to continue to make the effort to recognize when you may be conforming to undesireable cultural norms, as you have been doing here. That is the first step to taking action on this extremely pervasive issue.