I get it. It’s like the quote goes, “when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression”. And that’s an important quote when spoken with empathy, because people shouldn’t feel oppressed, and if we’re making people feel oppressed by our efforts to attain equality, we are failing somewhere in our project, and need to think about why we’re making people feel oppressed and how we can do better.
(I mean, you wrote that men face inequities today to balance past inequities. But that isn’t quite right. Explicit inequities - for example, making open efforts to hire more women - are meant to balance current, more subtle inequities - like every HR department using AI tools to screen resumes, and those AI tools being biased in favor of men because they were trained on biased training data. But men don’t generally see the implicit and structural biases that still exist in their favor. The do see the explicit way companies try to hire more women. And they, reasonably, feel it’s unfair. If I didn’t know how biased AI resume screening tools were against female candidates, and just saw the DEI hiring policies companies put in place to counter that bias, I’d think male candidates were being oppressed too 😆)
But conversations are hard. And the solution to this specific problem - which includes better education, more historical literacy among young people, and, yeah, discouraging people from saying things that sound bigoted against men - is especially hard.
So we decided we’d already won the debate and our critics were already consigned to the dustbin of history, and anybody who feels oppressed is obviously wrong and needs to man up and get over it.
I get it. It’s like the quote goes, “when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression”. And that’s an important quote when spoken with empathy, because people shouldn’t feel oppressed, and if we’re making people feel oppressed by our efforts to attain equality, we are failing somewhere in our project, and need to think about why we’re making people feel oppressed and how we can do better.
(I mean, you wrote that men face inequities today to balance past inequities. But that isn’t quite right. Explicit inequities - for example, making open efforts to hire more women - are meant to balance current, more subtle inequities - like every HR department using AI tools to screen resumes, and those AI tools being biased in favor of men because they were trained on biased training data. But men don’t generally see the implicit and structural biases that still exist in their favor. The do see the explicit way companies try to hire more women. And they, reasonably, feel it’s unfair. If I didn’t know how biased AI resume screening tools were against female candidates, and just saw the DEI hiring policies companies put in place to counter that bias, I’d think male candidates were being oppressed too 😆)
But conversations are hard. And the solution to this specific problem - which includes better education, more historical literacy among young people, and, yeah, discouraging people from saying things that sound bigoted against men - is especially hard.
So we decided we’d already won the debate and our critics were already consigned to the dustbin of history, and anybody who feels oppressed is obviously wrong and needs to man up and get over it.
Whoops.