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Path: utzoo!utcsstat!laura
From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: Culture and AAP
Message-ID: <719@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 26-Jun-83 06:03:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.719
Posted: Sun Jun 26 06:03:35 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 26-Jun-83 11:37:02 EDT
References: <132@houxu.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 103

another in a series of dialogues  ---

Larry, 
People have prefrences. Some of these preferences are as a result of
conscious decisions. Others are not. A lot of the preferences you have
will be based on the preferences of your family and friends. In short,
you are shaped by your culture.

Sometimes your culture has a funny view that other cultures do not
share. this does not make them *wrong*, only different. To improve
such a culture you do not *change* it unless it is actively harming 
other people. The Ku Klux Klan may have a culture of a sort but
they cannot be allowed to hang any Blacks around here because it
is part of their culture. Beyond issues like this you have to stop
and ask whether you are actually helping members of another culture,
or rather forcing them to conform to what you consider "better".
If you are doing the latter then you are saying that in some way
your culture is better than theirs, which is as much a no-no as
saying that you are better than some member of a culture.

There are other things besides jobs to consider. I am going to
consider breakfast. The North American breakfast you get when
you go into a North American food restaurant consists of some
grouping of juice, cereal, eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, waffles,
toast and coffee. I hate eggs. Fried eggs look up at you with
dead fish eyes and all the others taste bad. Cereal I have never
much cared for. Maple Syrup is what you get with pancakes and
waffles and Maple Syrup ias the single most hated thing on my list
of things that taste ***BAD***. Pancakes and waffles plain are
boring and tedious to eat. Bacon often comes too underdone for
my taste, and other times it is burnt. I am trying to cut down
on the amount of coffee i am drinking.

For me, therefore, the North American breakfast is a real lose.
This is okay, because I am a great fan of Dim Sum which you can
get in Chinatown from 900 to 1700 in most Chinese Dim Sum Restaurants.
To eat breakfast I step out of my North American culture and into a
Chinese one for the purpose of eating.

In the same way i stepped out of "traditional female roles" and became
a unix hack. You can walk away from cultural traditions. I chose to
keep others. Some Chinese friends eat a lot of tripe. Had I been
raised to eat it, I probably would too, but I think that I will
keep passing on sheep's intestines, thank you.

Do you see what I am getting at? If anybody did a survey on breakfasts
would people like me be forced to eat North American breakfasts more
often than I do? Would Chinese people have to eat egg-mcmuffins? Do
I need to eat tripe? Statistically, what you eat for breakfast is
usually a matter of culture after all.

I have never said that it is a bad idea for women, or Blacks, or
any other group to not be represented in any occupation, but I am
saying that it is more important that the indivuduals themselves
be allowed to chose what they want (given that they can do the job)
as a career.

Passing laws saying that you have to let women into the computer industry
(no discrimination due to sex) is a good idea. Expecting the computer
industry to be split 50/50 between men and women is a naive idea.
Most women want to directly be involved with helping people when they
chose a career. (At least in Ontario 85%+ wrote "helping people" as
one of their top 3 requirements for a computer job search funded by
the Ministry of Education geared towards locating jobs based on each
student's perceprtion of his needs). Most women, therfore would be
upset and displeased with my job. i hack code at late hours in
order that fewer people can phone, bother, pester, and otherwise annoy me.
I have more fun staring at the pcc than in solving user problems.
If there is a problem i will fix it, but it isnt how I get my jollies.

If you want a 50/50 male/female split in the unix world you are going to
have to change the minds of a significant fraction of the 85% who want
to help *people*. Now suppose you take 100 happy nurses and force them to
be unix hacks because there are too many nurses and not enough unix hacks
who are female. Who are you helping? Not the ex-nurses who were happier
directly helping people. Not the companies that have all these incompetant
(well as unix hacks, they may be terrific nurses) workers on their hands.
What have you done? Forced some people to conform to your way of thinking
which states that there ought to be 50% women in the unix hack business
within 2 standard deviations.

This is your belief and you are forcing it on people who dont want it.
CANT YOU SEE WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS?

make it illegal for companies to discriminate on the basis of race or
sex. then stop. consider discrimination to be at an end when you get
very few phone calls from militant or non-militant groups complaining
that they have been discriminated against by company X Y or Z. Dont bother
getting out the statistics at all to see if every career is represented
proportionately by every race and minority group. Why bother? As long
as the career doors are open to people who want to break away from
traditional roles you have done enough -- what people decide is their
own business.

You would do far more good to spend the money that goes into making and
restricting quotas into education. First, to let people know about
obscure careers they otherwise might never have heard about and 
secondly in the form of scholarships so that underprivledged kids
of any race could receive the higher education that they desire
without the handicap of coming from a poor family.

Laura Creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura