Liz Smith
Liz Smith
Aug 8, 2017 · 3 min read

I agree with the vast majority of what you have said about bridging the gap — except this bit. As a woman, and someone who did work in tech for the first 7 years of my career, I did find what that young engineer said quite rhetorically violent, because it essentially challenged the right of women to be in the workplace doing the same job as him. Sexism feels threatening — violent even — to women. And the new undercurrent of anti feminist backlash is pretty scary. You only have to look at the shit openly feminist women get on here and social media to see what it looks like. It takes every form from “everything feminists say is stupid” ridiculing to rape and death threats on social media. This is a problem and I fear you are right, the kind of shaming and silencing Zunger advocated in his article might not be the best way to deal with it and may actually drive someone like this young man to go further down the MRA route and become even more anti women and even abusive towards them. It’s a difficult balance to find between hearing why men feel marginalized (and challenging it) and condoning it though. And that’s why so many women are leery of giving it a platform.

I’ve been having a conversation recently with Ryder Spearmann that highlighted for me why so many men are finding the culture shift difficult; because so many men still believe they retain ownership over these spaces and they generously allow women to participate — but only if they behave as men think they ought to and act sufficiently grateful for men admitting them into “their” spaces. For me this is the crux of it, as long as men feel that they “own” certain workplaces or professions, or they believe it is their place to generously bestow equal treatment upon women rather than women having an inherent human right to it, these problems and the adversarial nature of the debate will continue, because women will continue to feel that we have to fight for every single tiny concession. But what feels like a tiny concession to us feels like an infringement to more traditionalist men who see it as marginalization and threat to their position. Hence they dig in their heels even more.

There has to be a way of getting everyone out of the trenches on both sides — maybe it will happen and some minds will be changed, and I really hope men will come out and volunteer to educate young men entering the workplace. I fear that no matter how much educating and discussion happens, however, there will still be some who remain misogynist to the core and will never believe women deserve real parity. At some point, we do have to draw a line and say no, we’ve had these discussions now and there’s a broad consensus — if you come into the workplace spouting sexism and misogyny, there isn’t a place for you. The world isn’t going to go backwards because some people preferred it the way it was 20 years ago — progress is inevitable. Even those who opposed giving women the vote gradually had to give in — and so it will be until real equality exists.

Liz Smith

Written by

Liz Smith

Writer. Editor. Survivor of life. Mental health worker, counselling student, feminist, bookworm and unashamedly weird. www.wordsceneservices.co.uk

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