On the other hand, I do see why women's underrepresentation has a certain urgency right now. Addressing it shouldn't be to the exclusion of the minority underrepresentation problem, but:

1. Women make up nearly 60% the U.S. workforce—about 3x the number of minorities—but the two groups' numbers in tech are comparable (nsf.gov). In tech degrees, minorities' numbers have improved in the last decade; not women's (bls.gov).

2. It's especially galling to see explicit biases against women—e.g., that they are not as good as men on panels, not as capable in jobs—openly defended in our field and by its leaders. I don't think you see that for (very real) biases against minorities.

Keep coming back to this thread, trying to find phrasing that doesn't reveal how much this framing annoys me. The only way the initial statement makes sense is if you assume white men are the default, deserving inherently of their dominance of the industry, and that it's therefore a zero sum game for the rest of us to fight over the scraps that are gifted to us, whether we're women, people of color, or both.

Women from privileged backgrounds can, and are, still victims of institutionalized sexism. That reality is orthogonal to the systematic exclusion of minorities from our industry. Positing that these two moral causes are somehow in opposition to one another is a classic demonstration of pitting the disempowered against one another.

Thanks, @anildash, for your thoughtful post. I feel silly for perpetuating the framing you mention, and without it having anything to do with my argument anyway.

What I'd hoped to say here was two things: first, that women do have a serious problem of underrepresentation in tech (jobs, conferences, etc.); second, that there are good reasons for the urgency, on Twitter and elsewhere, of those issues at the time I made this branch.

I needn't have made either of those points in the context of comparisons to other unjust situations in tech. I think I felt that the research added force to the idea that women's underrepresentation warranted consideration just like minorities', but I'm sorry not to have thought of the consequences you mention.