Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utcsstat.UUCP 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