Also interesting is that it's one of the things social justice activists constantly criticize others for. I can't count how many times I've heard the following: "when we say men are privileged, we don't mean any and all men are privileged to the same extent." Or "when we say white people are racist, we're not talking about every single individual white person."

And it makes sense. Yet when it comes time for someone to say "the statistical average for career interests in females tends to lean away from technology", all observable nuance is thrown to the wind.

Worse, with social justice this usually takes the form of a motte and bailey argument. The statement that "we don't mean all white men" and "we mean a system of systemic biases/practices" is usually a defense in response to being called out for dismissing someone for being white or male.

"Mansplaining" is the clearest example of this. Supposedly it's only used to describe a man condescendingly explaining something a woman already knows, but in practice it's used to belittle and condescend any man criticizing a woman or women as a group. i.e. "Google employees are furious following the internal distribution of a memo mansplaining away low diversity in tech"

The only constant is the preconceived notion that they always know who the victims are ahead of time. The reasoning is then reverse engineered to suit the situation.

A man is talking based on feelings and anecdote? He's ignorant and pathetic, and probably needs to get laid. A man is citing scientific studies and making a cohesive argument? He's a mansplaining dudebro here to dogwhistle sexism and racism. If it's woman though, she's respectively sharing her lived experience and fighting the endemic patriarchy by being forced to work twice as hard as any man.

Of all terms that have been formed on the internet, "mansplaining" is the one I hate the most. All a discussion is, at the end of the day, is two people explaining their own viewpoints. But now, with this word, you have a get-out-of-conversation-free card because if you don't like someone's response, just say it's mansplaining. It's almost unbelievably ignorant.

I can't speak for the abuse of the term (I've never experienced what you're describing), but 'mansplaining' refers to a very real phenomenon.

To put gender aside, egos and biases can always get in the way of two people explaining their viewpoints. You are pretty lucky if you've never had somebody explain a concept you already understood in a very condescending way.

Many men do this to women when they assume that these women aren't as knowledgeable as they are. 'Mansplaining' specifically describes this.

I 100% agree with your second statement - condescension happens all the time. I've seen it a bunch.

But first, men do this to each other all the time. Most of my conversations with my male friends involve us constantly disagreeing with each other, in a way I've rarely observed in groups of women. It's far more likely that if someone is willing to be condescending, they're going to do it to everyone.

Of course there are instances where a man may only do it to women, but we've quickly moved on from that general observation to "any time a man disagrees with a women he's mansplaining". 99% of the time I've seen this term used, it's to lazily drop out of a discussion once it becomes difficult.

I haven't experienced a person who misuses "mansplaining" in the way you're describing. I'm sure it happens, and I don't agree with those who do that, but I have witnessed the situation the word is meant to describe several times too. I'm more inclined to think that it still happens all the time and is accurately pointed out by the word.

I agree that someone willing to condescend to women will be more likely to condescend to a junior employee or a teenager (i.e. they've already shown the propensity for prejudice), but I don't agree that they are probably condescending to everyone (I'd argue that kind of person is very rare).

It's not that there are legions of very sexist and evil people who are not prejudiced in any other way, it's that there's an unfortunately large spectrum of mostly well-meaning people who might harbor conscious or unconscious beliefs about women specifically. They might also harbor similar beliefs about minorities, or have a life experience that justifies their beliefs in their eyes, but nevertheless it's a big enough cross-section of society and a strong enough phenomenon that it's been noticed. That there is some subset of SJWs who think that they can take advantage of this isn't an extreme claim, but that it's a stronger phenomenon is a pretty extreme claim to me.

The difference is that the "on average" vs "the individual" in the memo is scientific. Which doesn't mean it's the gospel truth, by all means go and criticise the papers linked to. But at least it's science. In the case of privilege or the lack thereof, it's an opinion. As far as I know anyway, I'd be happy to be pointed in the direction of scientific studies on privilege.

Yeah I was more interested in just the interpretation of the statement. It goes to follow that if one of the claims isn't all-encompassing, the other isn't either.

But yeah I don't think it's a scientific claim, of course it depends on how you define "science". If you consider politically-motivated sociology to be science, then yeah I guess you could count privilege as a scientific concept...

> It's not personal by definition.

In my own experience, when one tries to talk with a woman in an impersonal way about something that is personal to her, she will tend to find that very offensive. Infuriating even, because one is ignoring her emotions, treating them as if they don't matter. And to her, her emotions really matter.

From talking to others and based on what I've read, things tend to trend this way. In fact, there was a woman neuroscientist who gave a talk at Google[1] on the differences between the male and female brains and in that she gave an example of this kind of thing. She says that when she comes home and is frustrated about a problem she has been having, her husband wants to go straight to an objective solution to her problem. It drives her nuts. She just wants to hear that he understands how she feels. Before he tries to provide a solution, he is supposed to say, "Honey, I understand how you feel."

I think Damore made this mistake. He has a footnote about the need to be objective instead of emotional about these kinds of things. And so he wrote a very objective, detached memo. I suspect that was a significant part of the problem. It's a male approach to a hot issue. He instead needed to write in a way that was very emotional about how great women are and all the unique gifts they bring to the table and how he wanted to empower them to be free to be themselves at Google and create an environment that was welcoming to all that is special about women. It could have had almost all the same content but lead with positive emotions. Had he done that, he might not have faced such a backlash from furious women.

Men, too, need to know that you care about them before they care whether or not your facts are factual or relevant. But most men do not find an impersonal approach offensive per se, the way that many women do.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu_uGr1ZOn4

    > She's explicit that statistical observations can't be used to judge particular individuals. 

That's perfectly fine but there's a lot more to it than the statistics, even if they're valid. Moreover statistics doesn't necessarily suggest a clear conclusion and course of action for organizations and decision makers.

That didn't stop the author of the original manifesto, however, from proceeding to make a bunch of bogus smug prescriptions for what google needs to do like "de-emphasize empathy" etc. These were way above his pay grade and I find it hard to believe that diversity has harmed this person.

The fact is, Google is doing just fine. They're not in a downward spiral because of diversity initiatives. They're thriving. At a minimum one could argue that Google's diversity programs aren't hurting the performance of the company.

The author of the manifesto clearly violated Google's Code of Conduct and got fired for it.

Do you really find that interesting though? Isn't that incredibly obvious?

My biggest problem with all this is how the author gave absolutely no thought to how his female coworkers would be affected by this. These are REAL women who have to interact with him every day. They are not just statistics who are on average less likely to be good engineers than he is. They are supposed to be on the same team. I can't see how any of his women coworkers wouldn't think of him differently after this.

This was not a paper released on the internet with no ties to his coworkers. By sharing it at work and tying it in with google he made it personal. The women reading it have no choice but to make it about them, because it is about them! They are the ones who interacted with programs that he is against. Everything he talks about is stuff they actually experience. And throughout the entire thing he shows that he does not care at all about these women.

Yes, really. It's not obvious to me why would people jump to conclusions like that. For example if I wanted to take things personally from my perspective from that memo, I could also find several points that I can misinterpret and get annoyed about.

Perhaps some people are more likely to see themselves in general statements and fill the missing info with their speculation. It may be the same reason why some people are susceptible to horoscopes or fortune tellers, except that this would be more subtle.

The manifesto didn't stop at citing statistics.

Sure, but many reactions were directly related to statistical claims. I'm finding these interesting.

Where he goes wrong is that he conflates statistical significance with clinical significance. Yes, his sources show that there are differences between men and women. However, the measured difference is so minute, there is little to no practical distinction.

Maybe i'm offended because, as a white man, it leaves me open to all kinds of statistics about how white men are overwhelmingly likely to be serial killers, compared to other groups. And it would follow that we could do a better of catching serial killers by assuming white men are unable to control their murderous impulses, and adjusting how our laws work so white men are diverted from jobs involving human contact. That way we don't lower the bar for the safety of our lawful citizens.

Human brains simply aren't very good at thinking statistically. You can say something totally factual and benign, like, "Most nurses are women" and someone will immediately chime in, "My uncle is a nurse!" It happens every time. It's practically a law.

We're good at noticing patterns and exceptions to those patterns, but, for whatever reason, we're just not good at distinguishing statements about populations from statements about individuals. For most people, breaking this intuition takes a lot of education and training.

So, yeah, you shouldn't really be surprised when some random person on Twitter fails to grasp the argument. It's disappointing, but it shouldn't be surprising.

I attribute this to lack of citizen sophistication. If you expect a public discourse to have clarity or nuance on statistical terms, then it probably means paying for statistics training for every citizen, even if it's just a little statistics unit as part of a larger civics course.

Because people do not understand statistics. A great example of this is the Gambler's fallacy [1].

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

Well if your beliefs is that the statistics are incorrect, I guess these kind of people would be offended by people who are simply stating the facts.