Thread:User talk:Armondikov/Re: Minorities in atheism/skepticism/reply (4)

When I say RW is "good" in this respect I mean it's "not bad". To have not 2-3 openly female editors in the top 10 here is pretty impressive in the grand scale of the sausage-fest we call the internet. As Neb points out, we haven't gone the apolitical route to be completely dismissive of it, and collectively I think we try, really hard, not to simply dismiss things as politics. That produces the most volatile section of the wiki, and whether that's a good thing or not your mileage may vary.

I do know what you mean about the academic world. On the Fry-Hitchens discussion the other week it certainly bugged me that it was just a succession of old, balding men - some with a nicely trimmed beard to go with it. Seriously, I couldn't tell which was which. The only reason I could pick Dawkins out of the line up of that show was because he had a full head of hair! But I think that goes beyond mere gender; ethnicity, sexual orientation (well, Fry's gay) and, frankly, age. Contrast the speakers with the three people who got up to ask questions and it was age was the disparity. Where are all the young people with new ideas and fresh perspectives on life because they were raised long after the cold war, or after The Beatles, or in the age of the Internet?

But I suppose the answer to that one is the same as your academics one above; they simply aren't old enough yet! It takes time to get to the top of your profession, so that means that unless you're talking X-Factor style factories that pluck people out of nowhere for arbitrary reasons people to look up to tend to be a bit older. And that means that the experiences that formed them (As you said "Not because of genetics, but because of experiences we have, ways we are raised, and roles we play") were years back. If we're lucky it's just a few years - but in the case of academics it could be decades. So what we looking at are people that emphatically don't have our 2000s zeitgeist attitude to equality, they'll think it but that deep, complex and difficult to shake stuff will be there. It's no comparing like with like to say that old and wizened academics reflect a wider ingrained sexism in people aged 20-30 right now. Sure, they may not be perfect, and the people being born now will probably be even closer to being "right" when they hit 20-30. 58% of undergraduates at my University are female. About 40% of the postgraduates. About 20% of the academic staff, and time is shifting those numbers up the chain, precisely because we need to wait for those women going through University to graduate and get on up there. Now you can probably see why I emphatically think quotas are the wrong idea; it's coming, we just have to have patience.

So I suppose I'm saying that we need to recognise that these people don't necessarily reflect the generation that is coming up (that will surely look bigotted and stupid compared to the one that replaces them) and have the patience for them to be replaced.

(Just for an aside I've just recalled: According to my other half who has been involved in a few operas recently, apparently it's very rare to find professional stage management crews that are predominantly male. We haven't quite figured out why this is the case yet, but it seems odd. Certainly in my amateur-level experience I've probably had more women on crew than men. And you'd think all the humping, dumping and bossing people about would be "traditionally male".)