Actually, sex and gender are not nearly as "simplistically binary" as this article makes it seem. Even forensic anthropologists, given a skeleton and DNA, talk only about "sex estimation, not sex identification, a process that is probabilistic rather than clearly determinative, and that is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher."
Furthermore, "There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification. On the contrary, anthropologists and others have long shown sex and gender to be historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories."
If even trained forensic anthropologists can at best only "estimate" sex, can we really believe lay observers, conducting very superficial examinations at this jobs fair, could give even a rough approximation of the sex/gender breakdown of the attendees?
I love that people want to blame what happened on non-binary and trans people as if it's their fault that all these cis men are liars. I'm seeing far too many comments about blaming this on "gender ideology". Victim-blaming at its finest.
The policy of the conference is to blame too. Up to 2021, it was a women-only event. Then in 2022 the organizers decided to open it to people who call themselves 'non-binary' as well, therefore implicitly making the event about 'gender identity' rather than sex. As anyone can claim any 'gender identity', they effectively changed the conference to include men, instead of being exclusively for women. They also said that men who were 'allies' could attend, and then of course found that the men did not behave like allies at all.
This policy change was a huge departure from the original mission back in the 1990s, which was to have a conference by and for female computer scientists, who every day have to endure the effects of working in a field that is very heavily male-dominated.
I hope that this year's influx of insolent men calling themselves 'non-binary' has reminded the organizers of the extent to which males will dominate given the opportunity, and why their change of policy last year was so absurd and harmful to women. By trying to be more 'inclusive', the end result was female exclusion.
That said, there has been a lot of ideological pressure to center 'gender identity' in recent years, so I can understand why the organizers may have felt the need to go along with this. But redefining 'woman' to be some unfalsifiable inner abstract feeling of femininity doesn't work in reality, given that this is not the basis on which women are discriminated against in tech or anywhere else.
The policy isn't to blame. The bad actors are to blame.
Non-binary people are also under-represented in tech and the change was an attempt to deal with a situation that is itself non-binary, despite what people may pretend. Most men are allies. Just because some took advantage of the situation doesn't put the blame on the people who were taken advantage of.
Also, your generalizations are not helpful for this situation. Do better.
If the policy isn't also to blame, what's to stop the same mass intrusion of males happening again next year?
Your 'gender identity' is literally the words you say or the box you tick when asked what your 'gender identity' is. A policy that welcomes 'non-binary people' is a policy that welcomes any man who says he's 'non-binary'.
Women at the event were saying they were literally barged out the way and hurt by men pushing past them. Everyone is well aware of who the men are in this situation, but policies that prioritize declarations of 'gender identity' over reality have the effect of pressuring women to ignore their natural instincts, lower their personal boundaries, sit silently in their discomfort, and basically just be nice and accepting.
I'm glad to see the pushback against the hordes of disrespectful men taking advantage of the situation, but it will all be for nothing unless the organizers fix their policy to keep these men out in future. Women deserve better.
I think we need to examine this more closely in terms of who and why, not just the binary format men or women mostly because from the footage it appears to have been a system which was attempted to have been gamed for advantage by two particular IT-centric demographic groups perhaps South east Asian, and Indian-continent from what i could see from the video footage. Afterall, graduates these days in particular are learning to game the system more and more in order to attempt to find an advantage whether it is being from a wealthy family background and having easy access to the top colleges and universities (varsity blues scandal, Vyapam medical scandal, 11 plus exam, etc), to doping with ritalin before important exams, to parents buying their kids into sporting academies, or paying to have another sit an exam for you. The list of potential creative hustles never ends and will never end as long as we place the dependency of top jobs going to top-certified undergraduates. People will literally do anything to get on board the life raft of salaried employment instead of chancing it with trusting in their invention and skills abilities to come up with something which will give them financial independence. But in the Internet age product shelflife isnt vey long and perhaps I don't blame them either. Besides it has been discussed many times before in depth about the problems in creating gender/race based subsidies/bursaries for employment roles.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 34.6 ms ] threadFurthermore, "There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification. On the contrary, anthropologists and others have long shown sex and gender to be historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories."
If even trained forensic anthropologists can at best only "estimate" sex, can we really believe lay observers, conducting very superficial examinations at this jobs fair, could give even a rough approximation of the sex/gender breakdown of the attendees?
Source: The American Anthropological Association: https://americananthro.org/news/no-place-for-transphobia-in-...
This policy change was a huge departure from the original mission back in the 1990s, which was to have a conference by and for female computer scientists, who every day have to endure the effects of working in a field that is very heavily male-dominated.
I hope that this year's influx of insolent men calling themselves 'non-binary' has reminded the organizers of the extent to which males will dominate given the opportunity, and why their change of policy last year was so absurd and harmful to women. By trying to be more 'inclusive', the end result was female exclusion.
That said, there has been a lot of ideological pressure to center 'gender identity' in recent years, so I can understand why the organizers may have felt the need to go along with this. But redefining 'woman' to be some unfalsifiable inner abstract feeling of femininity doesn't work in reality, given that this is not the basis on which women are discriminated against in tech or anywhere else.
Non-binary people are also under-represented in tech and the change was an attempt to deal with a situation that is itself non-binary, despite what people may pretend. Most men are allies. Just because some took advantage of the situation doesn't put the blame on the people who were taken advantage of.
Also, your generalizations are not helpful for this situation. Do better.
Your 'gender identity' is literally the words you say or the box you tick when asked what your 'gender identity' is. A policy that welcomes 'non-binary people' is a policy that welcomes any man who says he's 'non-binary'.
Women at the event were saying they were literally barged out the way and hurt by men pushing past them. Everyone is well aware of who the men are in this situation, but policies that prioritize declarations of 'gender identity' over reality have the effect of pressuring women to ignore their natural instincts, lower their personal boundaries, sit silently in their discomfort, and basically just be nice and accepting.
I'm glad to see the pushback against the hordes of disrespectful men taking advantage of the situation, but it will all be for nothing unless the organizers fix their policy to keep these men out in future. Women deserve better.