I don't have access to the Stack Exchange market research data which could tell us the gender composition of our community. But my intuition would tell me the same. Among the top contributors over the past 12 month, most have male names or self-identified themselves as male in the past. None of t...
You know, somehow I knew the first answer would be some dude saying it somehow doesn't matter that the voices of women aren't represented, so I can't say I'm disappointed by that. I am however disappointed to see it was a moderator who said it.
@AquaticFire - I think this answer makes a good point: Posters' views should be irrelevant. Do you actually have an example of where a woman would have a different answer than the one(s) provided?
@janh I didn't think I needed to say, "Don't say it's not a problem because women's voices don't matter." If that's the general attitude, no wonder nobody knows of a single woman here.
@Bobson I'd say what poster's views should be is fairly irrelevant to what they are. It's abundantly clear that on many topics posters share their specific views only. I would think that if no women post here, then a fair number of posts could have a different answer, but if we don't ask women how will we ever know?
@AquaticFire Can you maybe provide some examples? If you show me some good on-topic questions which would benefit from a "female view" answer, that could change my opinion. But please note that my opinion is not that we should not have diversity. Diversity is important everywhere. I am just claiming that it is not more important for Politics.SE than for other websites, because we are not a website to share opinions.
@AquaticFire That's not what Philip said. In a question of political theory, gender has little to no influence, similarly in CS or mathematics. It's different (and so is the mix of contributers) on IPS, Workplace etc, but questions about Canadas internal economic regulations and how it compares to other countries for example do not really depend on whether you identify as a woman.
That's the thing. I don't necessarily think that many questions would benefit from an answer with a "female view" per-se (although maybe some questions about women-rights, feminism, etc could benefit) so much as I think there may be an issue of answers tending towards having a hard "male view" (not that's there's anything wrong with a "male view" or "female view" per-se, but that there may be an imbalance).
For example, I get a strong rape culture vibe off a number of recent questions.
@AquaticFire I don't think you can really blame the one asking the question here. It's really the politics / people in the confirmation hearing that normalised (allegations of) sexual assault.
Again, what specifically is the problem @AquaticFire? You make vague accusations of "rape culture" with very little explanation. You'll have to expand on that if you want to see any change.
@AquaticFire which parts specifically? I read the highest voted answer and it does seem to provide an accurate timeline. I agree (personally), that the process wasn't pretty and that there should have been a more thorough investigation, but that didn't happen. I can see how the way this was handled (by the politicians) can be very frustrating, but this site isn't really made for addressing that. If comments are needlessly rude or abusive, you can of course flag them and if they endorse rape (culture), I think they'll be removed or edited.
Things like users saying the allegations weren't credible, calling testimony "hearsay," saying 'but she was drunk,' glossing over opposing evidence/views, trying to edit the title to belittle the allegations, etc.
@AquaticFire I think that deserves its own meta post. I'd agree with deleting such comments as highly partisan (seeing that's the view the president takes). While you shouldn't pass it off as fact, pointing out that some politicians (in this case Trump) present that as fact should still be allowed as that is a fact (it's on video).
@AquaticFire what to do with comments calling into question testimony which one party thinks is credible and the other thinks is meant to smear the candidate.
The (perhaps uncomfortable) truth is that discussing the credibility of these kind of accusations is a perfectly valid discussion @AquaticFire. It's a valid discussion in most criminal cases. It's not a discussion that's really on-topic here, and it looks like the comments are already appropriately removed, I think? (you still aren't very specific about which comments exactly). Either way, I find the immediate jumping from having this kind of discussion to "women's voices don't matter" and "rape culture" to be ... unsettling.
@MartinTournoij I don't think most of those things have been fully removed. Maybe the hearsay stuff was moved to chat, but the other examples I gave are still represented on that page. I hate to point fingers, but you can find them all in the question comments, the accepted answer, and the comments on that answer. Also, the "women's voices don't matter" was in relation to how having no women was 'splained away as being a non-issue.
Alright, let's focus on the accepted answer then: what specifically is your issue with it @AquaticFire? As I read it, it's an accurate explanation of events and motivations that culminated in Kavanaugh's confirmation. Make no mistake: the answer doesn't represent my personal views either; we can quickly agree that Kavanaugh should not have been confirmed, but that wasn't the question: the question was how the confirmation happened in spite of the various problems with the candidate, and that's what the answer attempts to explain, and does accurately (as far as I know).
Are some of those views sexist or otherwise problematic? Sure, we can again quickly agree on this. But that's an issue with the GOP senators, not this site or this answer. Explaining a viewpoint is not the same as believing it.
@MartinTournoij Then those contentious points should be clearly marked, explaining who holds those view, preferably with what the opposing views are. Currently they are presented as if they were fact.
@AquaticFire I would have a very different answer than the ones provided, but I know better than to share what I think here. The opportunity-cost analysis does not pan out in favor of making the effort against the backdrop of just this one specific answer and comment thread, let alone my personal experience. I'm disinlined to expose myself to the negging a public answer from a woman inevitably, invariably draws, but feel free to ping if you want to discuss privately; I have research you may find interesting.
I don't think that describing dissenting viewpoints in a "what are the viewpoints of {group,party,ideology,..} X"-type of question/answer should be required @AquaticFire; it never has been in the past, and I'm not sure how feasible it would be to require this. I don't recall this ever being discussed in a meta question though, so perhaps it's worth starting a new discussion about this.
@MartinTournoij Here's a thought experiment. Imagine we had a question asking "Why did the Emperor of Atlantis ban vaccines?", which answer would be acceptable? 1. "Because vaccines are dangerous and cause autism." or 2. "Because the Emperor believes vaccines cause autism, a dangers belief rejected by the scientific community." Seems pretty obvious to me, so I'm not convinced it's worthy of a meta discussion, but if you disagree you can start one I guess.
@OpenSorceress I'm guessing I might be alone in saying this but, I'm sorry to hear that. I'd be interested to see your research, how should I contact you?
To clarify, it's not my research, I just found it. meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/290727/… Delineated here. I have further thoughts regarding the impact and implication. Also, read the comments responding to that answer carefully. And, you're not alone. This started in 2015 with Tableflip. My Twitter handle is the same as my handle here if you'd like to chat. :)
@Phillip - Given that the question asked in part whether any women contribute, it seems like saying that most top contributors seem male, while likely true, doesn't fully answer the question. Also, while a relative lack of female contributors certainly doesn't guarantee that certain views won't be represented, it definitely could result in a bias in the representation of political opinions. So I can't really share your sanguinity about this.
For instance, suppose that the gender representation of this site recapitulates Stack Overflow as a whole, with 7% women. (Perhaps there's some response bias there; it's hard to say). If 50% of men approve of US President Trump's performance, and 33% of women do (not made-up numbers), then an answer that approves of Trump's performance might have a nearly even balance of upvotes and downvotes on average, as opposed to being 40% upvotes with a more even gender balance. It thus rises to be the top answer, and is more likely to be accepted and receive ever more upvotes simply by prominence.
That is a false analogy @AquaticFire, as in the case of vaccines you can make a rather good objective/scientific case on the matter, which is very different here. Like it or not, there are people who will disagree with you on topics where you hold strong moral views, and not all these people are necessarily "wrong" in some objective sense. Should there be some limits? Of course. But jumping from what is in that answer to "rape culture vibe"... I don't see that. (cont.)
(cont.) If I accuse someone of any crime that happened 20 years ago, then some amount of investigation seems normal/expected to me. Would this be "burglary culture" or "assault culture"? That would be silly. I am not trying to defend any viewpoint here, just trying to explain that the viewpoint is a valid and reasonable one as such (even though I think there are a number of very compelling reasons to choose a different viewpoint).
@Obie2.0 You are very right about the bias that would show up in the opinions - however, opinions and things like "do you approve of president Trump" are explicitly off topic for Politics.SE. An answer about Trump's approval ratings here would cite the numbers you cited, one that just said "I like Trump" would be downvoted quickly and likely vanish.
@MartinTournoij The analogy is fine and you almost understood the problem there at least. An answer should only present something as fact if there a good objective/scientific case for it being a fact. If there is space for disagreement, then it's not a fact and shouldn't be presented as one, because like it or not your morals aren't fact.
@MartinTournoij Also, there's no such thing as "burglary culture" or "assault culture". Now if there were people saying things like: "sure they were robbed, but what were they wearing?" or "if they didn't want to be robbed, why did they have their wallet?" or "they testified they were robbed, but that's just hearsay" or "but they were drunk" or "assault isn't a serious crime" there might be a case for making such a term, but most people agree that line of thinking would be nonsense and don't try to say things like that about other crimes (this phenomenon is referred to as rape culture).
@Obie2.0 You appear to have completely skipped the research I provided that breaks down the participation of women on Stack Overflow in detail along with why women make ourselves invisible. To summarize that paper since you cba to read it: threads like this, to which men flock to post sentiments like these (as with this thread, almost always unchallenged by any so-called allies), are why we don't appear to participate. :) It's deliberate, and it's because of behavior including yours here and througout Stack that we feel compelled to hide. Yes, we're hiding. From you.
@janh By the way, if it hasn't been made crystal clear, I am absolutely feeling the same "vibe" as referenced by AquaticFire. Not that you'll acknowledge that I'm a woman seconding her motion as it's own concrete, specific example. Toward that, you were provided with the research up-thread and just clearly declined to review it, but nobody's going to hold you or any other dude here to that, because that's just not how Stack works. If I were to voice my actual opinion of any this, I would be met with immediate adverse administrative consequences. Because that's how Stack works.
@OpenSorceress - I apologize, did you mean to respond to me? If so, I was talking to Phillip, not criticizing your research. I'm fairly sure the point I was making was kind of similar to yours, not opposed to it, but if missed something, my mistake. Also, um, I did read what you linked, and I upvoted it, actually....
Anyway, what I wrote might have been vague or misleadingly worded. So as a more clear restatement for anyone who saw the previous comment: I expect that StackOverflow's gender bias is also present on this site. I think this is bad for the people it excludes, and also can have a negative effect on the site. One example might be a pro-Trump answer gaining lots of upvotes and being the top answer, which would be less likely to happen in a gender-equitable environment, but there are others.
@Obie2.0 It seems I was unclear, probably a consequence of my runaway negative feelings late at night. My remarks were more a much more broadly scoped observation of a pattern of behavior - of voicing a certain subset of presumptions and conclusions communicated with an observable shift in priorities (a singular lack of rigor being one example, by inventing statistical figures when actual data is assumed to not exist before effort is made to find any) not an indictment of you personally. I should have said "y'all" instead of you, or something.
And it's impossible to tender the even an abridged version of the full scope of those observed patterns here in comments, just the ones that have turned up here in the comments - all I can do is assert that they exist and handwave at the paper somebody else wrote that alludes to the same. Also, protip, it is possible to observe those same patterns yourself pretty easily. Just pick a board, search a tag like "gender" or "feminism" and look for commonalities in responses.
@OpenSorceress - I think I see what you're saying. I agree, statistical rigor and a knowledge of the research on gender disparities is very important. I wasn't really trying to say that my example was research in any meaningful sense (although those percentages were drawn from actual research, including I think the research you linked to), more giving an example to try to show Phillip one way in which I think gender disparities could be damaging to this site.
*Perception of gender disparities. One of the problems that often arises stems from the repeated subsequent handling of that hypothetical example has a way of conferring the weight of cross-referenced statement of fact. It further exposes a certain selective failure to interrogate that is not nearly as common under any other circumstances, which in turn points to a presumption that standards for citing are dramatically lowered in a manner which is consistently convenient to a male corporatist interest - ie, this can be measured according to who omits/demands sources, etc. and who obliges.
For the sake of rigor, I probably should have mentioned where those numbers were coming from. The percentage of men and women leaning for or against Trump came from here (news.gallup.com/poll/226178/…) or a similar poll, although I might have been sloppy with the numbers, and the percentage of women and men on Stackoverflow as a whole came from the Stackoverflow Developer survey, although I know it's been criticized and that the actual numbers could be different due to the factors you mentioned.
Fromthe research answer - I mention specifically to read the comments carefully. In the comments of that answer I linked to another Meta Stack answer whose comments are truly enlightening: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/290727/… where this diamond moderator openly admits to discriminating against women - and nobody objects or finds this remiss at any pointmeta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254891/…
@OpenSorceress - (Not referencing the comment right before this). If what you are saying by "perception of gender disparities" and is that there might be a lot more women on SO than the developer survey indicates, I think so too. If 24% of jobs in computing are held by women, it seems very possible that more women are on SO than 6% but don't respond proportionally to surveys or are misrepresented by other aspects of the survey's methodology.
@OpenSorceress - That said, I think it's probably a good idea to do some kind of assessment of gender influences on membership and engagement in SE. I personally feel like it's difficult to combat sexism and other systematic inequities without making an effort to measure the scope of the problem, even if the rigor of the SO survey leaves something to be desired.
@Orangesandlemons - I can't speak as to why other people are criticizing Phillip, but my reason doesn't have to do with his gender, but rather with the fact that he basically dismisses the notion that a gender disparity could damage the site (let alone that it could be bad for women).
@Obie2.0 an assssment of that nature was the subject of the research provided, (although scoped to Stack Overflow.) One of the observations made by the researchers was the paralyzing effect of the strident resistance to assessments for and out of hostility toward this purpose ...basically in exactly the same spirit as Philipp has done here. You requested specific examples - how about this answer that we're commenting on right now. :)
@OpenSorceress - I do appreciate the examples, and I'm definitely seeing some new information about gender bias on SE. I don't think I did ask for examples, though (maybe I forgot having asked to them). Also, I looked at the research that you posted. It definitely suggests a higher number of female users than the developer survey, insofar as 38% of users were classified as unclassifiable, and 7% female, if I understand it correctly.
@Obie2.0 Sorry, I was awkwardly trying to reference a question you asked in chat with the much more common, much less good-faith version of the same ("links pls.") but that connection would be ambiguous and damn these tiny comments. I'm in that chat, btw.
@Orangesandlemons - I don't see trying to conceptualize and rectify gender disparities as "identity politics." If it is, you'll have to explain why it's a bad idea, not just put a label on it.
@Orangesandlemons - Replacing "dude" with "person," maybe, since I've known many women to say similar things to Phillip, that comment seems pretty accurate. Tbh I was expecting someone to claim there was no issue as well, and I was a bit surprised that it was a moderator.
@Obie2.0 Do you believe that gender plays a role when answering a question about China's historical basis for claims on South China Sea? The US president's power over federal budget? Impeachment proceedings vs a vice president? Macron's economic policy basis? It seems to me the vast majority of questions do not. If tone in comments is a problem, that's a valid and important issue that's worth addressing, but I still fail to see how non-opinion answers (which are the only on-topic ones) are related to gender.
Discussion on answer by Philipp: Do m…
Discussion on answer by Philipp: Do m…