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Discussion on: Why I'm Not One of the Guys

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John Colagioia (he/him)

I have to appreciate (though not in the spirit they're offered) objecting to the term "mansplaining" in exactly the way that it proves the point of the term. Erasure of women is a marginal issue, but a jab any man's masculinity is an affront!

Anyway, backing you up, a bit, if I may...

Some argue that it is a gender-neutral term.

Speaking as a man who's older than most people here, that's because we spent decades/centuries ignoring the people who objected. I can remember having these exact arguments on the school playground, and "I meant the term as gender-neutral" (I don't remember if I specifically said that, because it's been a long time) is nothing more than an insistence that the pain we're causing isn't of interest.

Likewise, men are the default, because women have been excluded. It's true in almost every field, but most obvious in software, because there are still people alive who have seen the entire industry. Early computer programmers were almost universally women, because the work was considered too boring to hire someone who'd demand a full salary. When I was in high school, Computer Science classes were split roughly evenly between genders. When I graduated from college, women had slipped to a distinct minority. And today, we're at a point when interviewers ask women "how did you get into computers," as if that's going to be some epic story about a prophecy and a religious sect in a hidden city, and not "there was a computer in the house when I was a kid," like any male candidate.