> The social fallout from uttering these unpopular ideas will earn you only contempt, unless you want to be on the wrong end of a twitter witch hunt.

I agree. The fact I have a penis attached to me means that I don't get to participate equally with all conversation partners. So while I'm all for equality, I keep quiet about things I both disagree and agree with, because my opinion is branded patriarchal bullshit a priori.

I gotta say I don't buy this. I was the token conservative on a lot of issues in grad school and I never got flack for saying my opinion on gender or race or economic issues as an Asian male from a privileged background. Not being an asshole about it works wonders.

Talking to people in person works wonders. The social media sphere of the internet seems to share a peculiar property with automobiles: when social media or cars are involved, people often dehumanize others and turn into massive assholes. Normally perfectly well adjusted people turn into tire-iron wielding maniacs.

It also helps if you do not pre-emptively open a full frontal attack on others, like the previous two posters did with "twitter witch hunt" and "my opinion is branded patriarchal bullshit".

Such people aren't interested in having a constructive discussion in the first place, make that perfectly clear in the same sentence as in which they express their opinion, and then proceed to act indignant if the other side responds in kind...

My feelings are invalid and actually just an attack?

Except of course, those two things have actually happened, multiple times.

When Adria Richards tweeted that guy's picture in DongleGate, he got fired, and she got called a hero and fashioned herself Joan of Arc (no really). When Feminist Software Foundation appeared on Github, Ashe Dryden tweeted the list of people who starred the repo and suggested their employers should be told. Shanley Kane's medium.com posts are full of blaming "white men", "privilege" and "patriarchy" for this or that, with usually nothing to back it but anger and indignation.

To me, the phrases "twitter witch hunts" and "being branded patriarchal bullshit" seem entirely accurate.

Or would you call that being interested in a "constructive discussion"?

> Not being an asshole about it works wonders.

That is just incredibly presumptive.

Difference: you were in gradschool, not online where people feel entitled to attack others for any difference in opinion.

That's because you were the token conservative.

A stereotype has no role to shift the status quo because the token exists to demonstrate that which is to be corrected.

If you're a good token, you're just being used to buy another round.

>Asian

Asians are considered privileged academically. In America they get better grades than average, on average.

> Asians are considered privileged academically. In America they get better grades than average, on average.

So studying more and harder and partying less is considered a privilege?

It's shocking and unconscionable. Some people are even given a leg up by parents that care for them and sacrifice for them and push them to succeed. Those nazis will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Don't they know they are oppressing other children through their success?

> In America they get better grades than average, on average.

Don't women get better grades than men on average?

Probably. At least in terms of college gender population, we're approaching a female:male ratio of 3:2.

And amazingly (/s) nobody wants to talk about that, nor the disparity in male vs female high school graduation rates and literacy rates.

The disparity in university enrollment seems less troubling to me, since it is likely in no small part merely a symptom of a root cause somewhere in primary/secondary schooling or child rearing (which causes the high school graduation and literacy rate disparity).

Something during that birth-18 age range also seems at least partially responsible for gender disparities in major enrollment. Male:Female ratios for particular classes in CS departments seem to get worse as each year (a class that starts off 1:4 might drop down to 1:20 by senior year), but the fact that they start off bad suggests that something is going wrong earlier in the process, likely during highschool.

Identifying exactly what is going wrong in primary/secondary schools is paramount, but I see rather little to address it. There are many extracurricular programs designed to correct gender imbalances that appear during primary/secondary schooling, but those programs are addressing symptoms, not attempting to identify the cause. What exactly is it about highschools that make boys struggle with literacy more than girls? What exactly is it about highschools that set the stage for disparate university and program enrollment numbers?

If I had to venture a guess, without any sort of evidence, I would say that zero-tolerance policies probably affect teenage boys more than teenage girls, and therefore probably play a roll in teenage boys receiving a poorer quality education (particularly since punishments typically involve being removed from lectures... rather than receiving supplementary instruction.) Areas where self-education is viable and common, such as CS, may not be hit by this as hard.

Somewhat related to this article, there is greater participation in the workforce as well. So while there may be a wage gap among workers, it changes considerably when you include the greater number of men earning $0.

Social justice is largely a white self-loathing thing, a perverse way to mark yourself as one of the cultural elite. There's a reason why Amy Chua is the public face of books she cowrites with her white husband. "White guy says that some cultures are better than others" doesn't go over so well. You'll be relegated to selling books through websites owned by Pat Buchanan.

Among social justice academics, Asian success in majority white countries is largely ignored. It upsets the Marxist narrative of oppressor/oppressed, where the oppressors are white and the oppressed are everybody else. In academic circles, "Asian privilege" is considered a myth and an attempt to derail a conversation.

>> Not being an asshole about it works wonders.

> Social justice is largely a white male self-loathing thing

I find it bizarre that anti-white racism from a Marxist perspective is an academic discipline with reputable journals and funded by the federal government in a majority white country. As far as I could tell in university, most of the professors involved were also white. Check out some whiteness studies material some time and be amazed at what people can get tenure for. Asian studies is still about how Asians are oppressed by white culture, only white studies is hostile towards its subject.

I guess my point is that white people are bona fide official second class citizens, as classified by taxpayer funded research. Asians aren't given special privileges like other minorities, but neither is their success considered evidence of oppression.

You seem to have a bad attitude going into it. If you have thoughts and feeling and you can explain your position when 'under attack' then you need not be worried about such things. If you think people discredit your opinions because of your penis then you are wrong. I am not saying that discrediting your opinions is a good thing or valid way of discussing things but the reason for it is not your genitalia, it is because male, female, trans etc all have very different experiences of how society reacts/treats their gender or sexuality. Some people may get agitated when they hear someone who is not in their situation, talking about their situation. But that is because of their past experiences and if you provide a comprehensive explanation of your beliefs, then there is no reason for you to worry about how people react to you, because you will know you have been understood. Some people are quick to throw opinions around without reason and it means people like you become afraid to voice yours. If you focus on what you are trying to say then it will contribute to a discussion and if it descends into something you did not expect (a twitter witch hunt?) then you know that you have articulated yourself in such a precise and intricate manner and you know your remarks cannot be taken incorrectly.

It's not really. Dishing out the previous trend on hn about women needing handicap still removed merit from all the serious, hard working women. So speaking up is in the best interest of the ones not willing to compromise the achieved equality for a little easier ride in the short term.