Ben Finney wrote:
I have no idea what it would take to persuade you in particular. I do know that the combined privileges of being white, male, not-poor, and English-fluent (and many more privileges, I'm sure) grant both of us the luxury of barely even perceiving the harm done by a pervasive atmosphere of even low-level prejudice against any given group of people.
We have very effective cognitive blinders, merely because we have never needed to know what it's like being a woman in this prevalently-male field. The onus is on us to try hard to see, despite those blinders and easy rationalisations, that there is a lot we allow from our fellows which is perpetuating a hostile environment.
I'm not making a fuss about one sexist joke, which has already been retracted by its author. I'm making a fuss about allowing and, worse, defending such jokes as a tacitly-accepted norm of our community. And I hope those of us who prefer to think of ourselves as not-sexist will act to clean up our house more.
+1 ~Ethan~ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
