Originally a comment by Maureen Brian on Charles Seife is telling the same story.
garyggpelow,
You don’t sound as though you’re old enough to have been around in the ’60s and ’70s but believe me we achieved a hell of a lot then. There is no need to go back and do that work again. It is done.
Achievements included, depending upon where you are, anti-discrimination laws and the codes of practice in place in most institutions and big companies, a means of redress for discrimination, direct or systemic, access to better education, equal pay (in theory) – the list is too long but we’ve got the works in law and in policy at least on paper.
Yet by about the end of the ’90s those of us who achieved such things – in the face of the sort of mindless antagonism you display – noticed as rational beings that progress had sort of ground to a halt. So we looked for the reasons why the pay gap was still there, all aspects of computing where women were once well represented had become sterile male ghettos, women with good degrees in STEM subjects and apparently promising careers were dropping out at an astonishing rate.
And what did we find? This may amaze you but the backlash which Susan Faludi described on the basis of actual evidence in 1991 was not merely still with us, it was gaining ground. So different women worked on different aspects of this problem, gathered even more evidence and took action to both assist understanding and to make a course correction. Anita Sarkessian is just one among many – addressing a specific problem the most effective way she can.
Do you really expect us to unravel the work of more than a century in order to knit you a comfort blanket? Get real! And do stop whining, please.