Silent Technical Privilege

by EricaJoy • 13 years ago

56 9 13 years ago

Instead of facing implicit bias or stereotype threat, I had the privilege of implicit endorsement.

In my life, this has always felt like an important asset. I started observing it happen to me in high school, and it's sort of continued through life. (Surely it was happening long before that, but I didn't notice when I was much younger.) At this point I can see it happening in realtime... and I still appreciate it.

I shudder to think how life would feel as a child and young adult if people assumed incompetence rather than competence. Getting credit that you didn't earn, at least for me, is one of the most powerful ways to get me to strive to earn it retroactively by giving thoughtful effort.

ps4fanboy• 13 years ago

Great I cant wait for this to catch on, Check your tech privilege.

mattip• 13 years ago

The second good article about ethics and technology since HN came back up. Maybe they should crash more often, sure beats articles about "x does y better"

jakub_g• 13 years ago

It was posted on HN before the crash and hit the first page with 268 pts but then the HN ids were reset after the rollback and id 7017480 got assigned to some comment on some other article (you can look it up on HN search or in google)

collypops• 13 years ago

This was buried ridiculously quickly. It fell from the front page to position 153 in a matter of minutes.

Can anyone think of an explanation why?

I know there were special rules in place for NSA stories. If the same rule applies to stories on privilege or equality in tech, I'd be worried.

klibertp• 13 years ago

For anyone curious, it happened again (8 days later) with repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7064853

I'm only posting this because I opened the comments and the article in background tabs, read the article, read the comments and refreshed the comments page (my usual workflow on HN) only to see them turned off and the topic marked dead. It's actually my first time witnessing this... And I'm not sure how I feel about it.

poolpool• 13 years ago

Actually, the existence of privilege needs empirical evidence, and until then it's just a hypothesis. There's no such evidence at least where I live.

Making a claim doesn't automatically make it true, even if we're talking about privilege. Yes, I know that the believers of privilege always say that 'privilege exists but you just don't notice it'. As a believer of the scientific method I actually need some empirical evidence to believe in something.

In effect, the article states that because of privilege a white male who has a lot of experience should be able to get a job easily, since "they look the part". Empirically that claim doesn't apply to me. You can "hand-wave" about it being even harder if I was a woman, but it's still just hand-waving unless there's some evidence to back it up.

In addition, I notice any privilege I get. Besides, women programmers have some privilege over me: they don't need to waste one year in forced labour. All women are basically one year ahead of me because of military service.

spion• 13 years ago

You forgot child labour. See how you didn't notice the privilege -- or is that still not enough empirical evidence?

zemo• 13 years ago

I grew a beard so that people would listen to me. It worked.

Silent Technical Privilege

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