I don't think it's biased toward men inherintly. It's what I love about programming, the absolute simplicity of binary, the beauty of the baud. Ones and zeros can't be evil :) But I think people are much better at thinking of scenarios relevant to them, so the products tech companies make tend to have a bias toward men. It wasn't built to be that way, we used to have 30% women, hell the first programmer was a woman. But today those numbers are a lot worse, and I don't want that bias to cement. If we get enough representation for women and minorities soon we can avoid creating a more permanent heirarchy.

It's interesting you mention why your wife left. Tech has a bit of an image problem in that regard. I've done lots of work with young girls and the idea that tech is a selfish profession is probably one of the top reasons they avoid it. Of course that becomes circular, the more people who see tech as selfish, the more it attracts money grubbing brogrammers, who then perpetuate that idea. It's one of the many things we need to change if we want to close the gender gap.

And not just better attention to detail, but a wholly different perspective.

I'm working on forming a company right now, and we needed some help with a particular aspect. One of the guys suggested a woman he knows who had expertise in the particular area (nothing related to any gender specific knowledge), so we consulted her. She was into our idea, so we brought her in as a partner.

I never considered her "a woman", but rather "an expert" (which I still figure is a decent default in business). But then we were having dinner the other day, and discussing marketing strategies. We were discussing potential customers, and our limited capacity to imagine things beyond our experience was laser focusing the few of us dudes on guys just like us. She spoke up and said, "Wow, I have a totally different idea of who would be interested," and proceeded to expand our potential customer base by an order of magnitude, specifically because she was thinking from a woman's perspective. Big lesson on my end.

I think with some things it's really hard to tell. Has police brutality hit a new local maximum? I think so. I also think that that local maximum is a lot better than the global maximum.

So there are two different things going on; the long term trend has been good and the short term trend has been bad.

A lot of people say that police brutality has always been a reality for black people, and video evidence is simply bring it out into the open. I'm inclined to believe that this is true, but I think additionally things like stop and frisk and similar policies in the last 2 decades have made these problems even worse.

Basically 2 decades of politicians gunning for Tough on Crime policies has given us exactly what you'd expect. So it's both. Long term things have gotten better, but we've taken a bad turn.

As far as the rest of the surge in bigotry, I'm not confident one way or the other. With respect to gay rights, I think you have to think of things in terms of separate domains: policy, public opinion, and religious ostracization. In terms of policy, gay rights has made absolutely staggering progress. In terms of public opinion gays have a small majority in support of civil rights. The religious right is absolutely boiling over with hatred, but I don't know that that is any different than it was since christianity came into existence. So, overall, there isn't a surge here, so much as a sustained religious ostracization in particular religious circles. Within Christianity, broadly, your garden variety christian has moved pretty far in the direction of acceptance, but I wouldn't want to be gay in Alabama.

As rinx and tla have pointed out, women haven't fared well in recent years, but we'd do well to remember the historical context; things have been shitty for women... forever. That notwithstanding, the last decade has seen a rise in anti-woman sentiment, and I don't think this is as isolated as in the case of gay rights. The far right has always had religiously derived disdain for women, but now we're seeing that disdain take shape as an actual rape apologist movement. I would be curious to query someone that is a little more knowledgeable about women's rights to determine if this is a recurring theme, or if this is a novelty. I'm really not sure. I feel pretty confident in saying that Gamergate and things like it do not exist in my memory outside of the last 5 years. The psychotics gunning down women in public places also seems unprecedented, although there have been serial killers that have targeted women all throughout history.

I don't know. If you dig into each one of these issues I think you see a general pattern of long term historical progress with a short term turn for the worst. A lot of that might be tied to economic issues and the effects that those have on social climate, but some of these narratives are very troubling. I wouldn't say we should be pessimistic, but these recent developments don't seem encouraging, either. Are we going to turn the corner sooner or later, or not at all? I'm really not sure.

There's a definite surge against certain people. I agree with progress across the board, on average. But gamergate is a pretty big surge, chasing out some of the few women in tech with death threats. And with BLM backlash and reddit idiocy it seems like this year in particular is pretty bad for black people online.

It baffles me when I hear about "People of Colour only" spaces. Why would you ever want to promote segregation?

Dylann Roof was welcomed with open arms into a black church, and look where that got the churchgoers. The point of black-only, or POC-only, or women-only spaces is to feel a certain level of safety and be able to discuss one's experiences and perspectives without having white people/men dominate the conversation. Usually whites/men do this without even realizing it besause they are just used to their own entitlement.

There is an argument I see thrown around a lot which concludes that [...] It is impossible for a non-white person to be racist.

I have to agree it'd pretty absurd. Some of the most extreme ugliness I've seen was between Asians and blacks.

Eeeeh, I see where you're coming from (and I most certainly agree that the Irish people were treated horrifically by the British and, later, America as well) but I think you're missing the point about the PoC only spaces. That video you're referring to I believe was of Bernie Sanders having the mic taken away from his at a political event - this wasn't done by the broader BLM movement but rather two extremists whose views are fairly atypical.

He wasn't kicked out for being white, though - he had the mic taken from him because these two activists wanted to shed more light on racial issues in the US, particularly concerning the African American community, because they felt white progressives sort of ignored them. And they do, honestly - I think Bernie Sanders is an exception to this, though.

But any POC spaces (I mean, I don't even know to what extent they actually exist, to be honest with ya) exist just to give people a bit of a safe space where they can discuss issues that frankly a lot of people can't really empathize with just because they haven't experienced racism in the same way. It's all very well and good to say "We should see each other as people, not colors guys!" but that doesn't really work when the system is so ultimately rigged to see people as inherently different. You gotta start somewhere to get that ultimate egalitarian goal - and even then, it's a goal that will probably never, ever be achieved because people are a bit shit at treating others as equals, as the occupation of Ireland very clearly showed. Shit, if you had a English guy in 17th century Ireland walking into a pub and declaring HEY GUYS LET'S JUST GET OVER THIS DISCRIMINATORY DIVIDE AND BE COOL, he'd get a pretty rude answer. I mean, fuck, if you had an English person today going into Ireland or Northern Ireland and just saying "Oh hey that's all water under the bridge, you don't have to be so bitter about it all, couldn't have been that bad, amirite?" he'd get a rude response, and deservedly so.

White people aren't inherently racist. I don't agree with anyone who says otherwise. But it's important to note that Irish people weren't seen as human - heck I don't even think they were seen as white. They were seen, much like Asians and Africans and etc were, as a different race. So you could argue that because they weren't seen as white they didn't get the benefits of being white. The same goes for the Polish and Eastern Europeans and people from the Caucasus.

I think the American military presence is much less of a factor. The Army has gotten better about managing the young enlisted crowd, and anymore there's a greater likelihood that off-base shenanigans gets off-base punishments. And to be really blunt, GIs, especially enlisted, are viewed pretty low in comparison to other OECD foreigners by Koreans... just about the bottom of the developed-world heap. It used to be much worse, in terms of both how some GIs got away with stuff and general tensions between GIs and locals. In the 70s, there was a major riot in/near Itaewon, which started with black GIs not being provided the same services (as well as "services", ahem) as white GIs.

The colorism you brought up is interesting. Yeah, it exists, but I wouldn't say that it has a major impact all on its own. It's more or less something that kids tease each other about, and less directly, might play some role with the extreme importance of outward appearance in Korea (pictures on resumes, etc). It's also important to note that this colorism has just about nothing at all to do with white people; it's been considered a mark of beauty and class in Korea for centuries (kind of like it used to be in Europe, where you didn't want to identify as a tanned laborer).

The TEFL thing also requires a little more nuance. Those shitty job listings are written by the privileged majority, and they're also among the worst jobs. Korean Americans get the shaft there, but then again Korean Americans get easy access to a much better visa. Interestingly, Irish and other native speakers (white or otherwise) often have doors closed based on their accent- some schools specifically want a North American (most common) or RP-British teacher. We can connect all this back to ethno-nationalism (even ethno-linguistic-nationalism?), as language teaching visas in Korea are restricted to countries where some bureaucatic process has decided real native speakers come from- generally, wealthy(-ish) countries with a visible white population. So South Africans, regardless of what language they actually learned first, are in (including black and brown, though much less common in practice), while Indians and Phillipinos are out- again, you can see some blurry lines between race and economic status.

Hubski is one of the few places where something like this is even a possibility. It was pretty upsetting to see the shitstorm that took place a few days ago. Making a statement about it is important, in my eyes, because this place is special and keeping it special means speaking out when unacceptable abuses come spilling onto our feeds. You can't necessarily make the idiots disappear, but at least you can say, "Hey, I'm on your side, even if that doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot." Keeping this community enjoyable to a diverse group of people is the only way we're going to get to see those viewpoints. Without those people speaking for themselves, and knowing that they matter to us, we're left to guess at what their perspectives might be. We all lose in that case.