Nerds and Male Privilege

Nerds and Male Privilege

It’s a little long and subject-specific, but it’s a good explanation of the mostly unconscious bias that permeates our society.

Male privilege — again — is about what men can expect as the default setting for society. A man isn’t going to have everything about him filtered through the prism of his gender first. A man, for example, who gets a job isn’t going to face with suggestions that his attractiveness or that his willingness to perform sexual favors was a factor in his being hired, nor will he be shrugged off as a “quota hire”. A man isn’t expected to be a representative of his sex in all things; if he fails at a job, it’s not going to be extrapolated that all men are unfit for that job. A man who’s strong-willed or aggressive won’t be denigrated for it, nor are men socialized to “go along to get along”. A man can expect to have his opinion considered, not dismissed out of hand because of his sex. When paired with a woman who’s of equal status, the man can expect that most of the world will assume that he’s the one in charge.

In my sphere, tech and more specifically open source, this is why organisations like the Ada Initiative are so important.

← Older
Translations of Facebook's new advertising page
→ Newer
Solr, text encoding and unhelpful error messages