Inspired by this:

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/38 ... eneral-RSS

Now a lot of that obviously is sexism, even if only inadvertently. But this is a world that runs on stereotypes and easy narrative, and who isn't guilty of it these days?

In my office we talk about anything and everything, there's newspaper 'posters' of literally fit Olympian persons... We'd be hard pushed to define sexism amongst ourselves, especially since shouting 'Sexist!' has been a running joke for months!

Have we reached a mutual level of sexism? Look at the TV ads where men are either hunks or morons, or where women, when not squealing in excitement at each other, are eating chocolate. I can't remember when a bloke last ate chocolate in an ad . You're continually being sold a sexist stereotype across all media and nobody complains, so it needs to be pretty blatant to make an issue of it in the real world, unfortunately. Actually, maybe that's a good thing, tolerance-wise

Anyway, have you experienced sexism? Ever complained about it? Have you been affected by the issues raised in this post?

In my current workplace, no.

When I worked in hospital in an obs & gynae post, yes. Couldn't go to smear clinic because I was a male doctor and female patients wanted a female doing their smears. A muslim woman who was pregnant, had a bleed and needed an assessment declined because I was male. She then had to wait five hours to be seen as there were no other free female doctors around (nightshift on a weekend). Basically, if you were male, it was frowned upon if you wanted to go into obs & gynae despite the fact that a few years back medicine was completely male-dominated.

The public are sexist and this is perpetuated by the media. The media is to blame for a lot of our modern problems imo.

In my twelve years offshore, I've only ever met one sexist.
She was an evil man hating bitch! She would deliberately twist anything anyone said into something sexist. If that wasn't possible she'd twist it into a personal attack on her.
She only lasted a few years, but tried sueing the company for sexual discrimiation when she was laid off. The fact she was useless at her job and the company had lost most of their contracts didn't seem to matter to her. One of her arguements (that her supervisor hated women engineers) was a bit silly to say the least seeing as he was engaged to a female engineer.
Sooooooo glad to see the back of her.

Where is the helpline number?

Never suffered from it, though had a few interesting experiences working in an office full of women. I kept my head down and the topics were varied. I knew who was shagging who, even tales of the nights events. Though that really is not sexist. In fact never really experienced it ever even as an observer.

This whole thing pops up about every three months. The bare fact is few girls/women buy video games and lots of boys/men do. The only time you see stats that suggest a decent portion of the games market is female is when you include stuff like games played via Facebook which nobody actually pays for. The people who buy video games and therefore finance the associated industries are predominantly male and young and therefore the video game industry is inherently pushed towards catering for their tastes. Which are often... simplistic. What sells? Guns, basically. Guns and stabbing and football. It's a bit revisionist for women who take home paycheques that rely on catering to that market to complain about how awful it is.

One of the female games jounalists I follow on twitter who was a big contributor to the #1reasonwhy thing has just had an article published where she claims one of her favourite games of recent times was Lollipop Chainsaw. Well that's helping reduce sexism in the games industry isn't it... I actually quite admire the woman in question - she'a good writer and wears her geekiness on her sleeve (you don't see many women tweeting photos of the Warhammer figures they just bought) so she's patently comfortable with herself. But you can't have a half page article saying a game that has an achievement for getting a crotch shot of the cheerleader heroine is good and then complain about how sexist the games industry is.


It's one of the cases where I look at the notion of 'equality' and think 'of all the male attributes you decided you wanted to replicate, you picked that one?'


Yorkie. Even then it was 'post modern' and 'ironic' when they brought it back recently.

To be fair, there are some adverts where things have crossed the other way. There are now adverts for men that imply if you buy our miracle face cream/razor/deodorant(!) you'll be eternally youthful and/or incredibly attractive to the opposite sex. Turns out men can be just as big a bunch of narcissists as women. Who knew?


I've certainly had women treat me as a some kind of simpleton because I'm a man and therefore must be lumpen and unsophisticated in a social situation. They are generally much mistaken and I tend to be quite... descriptive in my criticism of women who do it. If they treat me like an idiot, I'm going to treat them like one. In work it's not really happened but then I work in an industry where women are a small minority so it's not as if there's much opportunity for reverse sexism. My current boss is a woman but I wouldn't generally stray into areas of conversation other than work related with my boss anyway (regardless of their gender) so it's never really been an issue. Plus she's a not a moron so she knows sexism from her would be no more tolerated than sexism from me.

In many respects women suffer more from female bosses than male bosses. It might be that they cannot manipulate the female boss like they could a male boss. Though many men also prefer male bosses as well. I think that women bosses can sometimes try too hard. That said I have probably had more incompetent male bosses than female bosses even in percentage terms.

That's true. My wife if always complaining that her (female) boss doesn't like other women who are intelligent. She seems to see them as a threat, and treats them as such.

Every serving woman in the military has been sexually harassed.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/d ... 614868.ece

That is appalling and the Royal Military Police are clearly not fit for purpose.

In over 30 years of working, I've only experienced sexism in the workplace once, and that was a freelance programmer, so we didn't renew his contract, when it came up a month later.

I had at my previous place of work - I didn't get a job and later was told by the manager running he dept that he had been "advised" by Head office that he needed to recruit more female managers.

But isn't that more positive discrimination in favour of women rather than sexism?

I hate that term

Indeed, it's the 'terrorist/freedom fighter' thing again. Making a decision based on someone's gender is sexism. Always. 'Positive discrimination' is just 'sexism we want to get away with'.

Jon

Maybe but I didn't get a job I was (IMHO ) better qualified for so I was discriminated against