Equality, sexism, feminism, etc. *Read Mod Note in 1st Post**

Dave! wrote: »

Hey folks,

I realise I'm taking my life in my hands by raising this, but it's probably safer to do it here than Twitter, where people are routinely garrotted for questioning any of the feminist received wisdom.

I'll not bother with a long post about it, but a few examples come to mind recently of companies/governments/men coming under pressure from feminist activists (online and in print media) for perpetuating the disproportionately male balance or bias in various fields:

• Gender quotas in nominations for political parties*
• No women speakers at the opening of the Rosie Hackett Bridge
• Under-representation of women in the IT industry
• World Cup TV coverage panel—I think it was a station in either Finland or Sweden which was lauded for having a majority of women on its panel, with the comparison drawn against RTÉ, which had a bunch of old men
• Women lead characters in computer games! There was some controversy when a gaming company said that they weren't going to add a woman lead character because it was too much work
• "Every day sexism" in language and other areas

*This is a bigger issue which would probably take up a separate thread

I'm quite aware that there are still outstanding issues in relation to gender equality (pay parity), women's rights (abortion), sexist culture, etc., and I fully support moves towards fixing those and other issues. And some of the things that I listed above are genuine problems—I'm just listing them all off the top of my head.

I do cringe a little though when certain issues are raised.

• Am I just being a jerk because I'm a privileged middle-class white male, who doesn't have to deal with this stuff daily?
• Should there really be exact 50/50 representation for every single thing?
• Is it not okay that some things are skewed more in one direction, and others are skewed more in another?
• Should there be 50% men on any panel where the show is geared towards females?
• What about representation of minorities—should every panel contain at least one female, black, gay, traveller for maximum equality?

Dave! wrote: »

There is loads of it on Twitter, seriously! You'd be hard pressed to find someone who voices an opposing opinion to it. If they do, they get "outed" as a misogynist and have their name dragged through the mud. Example that comes to mind is Jeff Atwood wrote this pretty benign and well-intentioned blog post, and was subsequently destroyed on Twitter by Shanley Kane (account is protected now) for... I can't even remember what.

It's not just some fringe on Twitter though, there are plenty of columnists in mainstream media outlets who routinely post opinions about this stuff. Una Mullally is pretty vocal about this kind of stuff. One example from her that comes to mind is when the Nigerian schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram, she had an article in the Irish Times attributing the lack of media coverage of the kidnappings to the latent misogyny of Western society—implying that if it were boys who were kidnapped, that the coverage would be greater. But of course there were 50 schoolboys kidnapped earlier this year also, and there was little or no media coverage of that either.

Dave! wrote: »

There was some controversy when a gaming company said that they weren't going to add a woman lead character because it was too much work