mycatistakingover t1_j9hc6jo wrote on February 21, 2023 at 11:49 PM

Reply to comment by thzmand in Gritting routes are ‘sexist’ says Cambridgeshire highways chief and ‘must change’ by Bald__egg

I believe the investigation/test was done with the explicit motive to check if there was gender based biases affecting the system. It was an audit the local government was conducting on themselves to question the status quo of how cities are run. A system doesn't need to be sexist in intent to be sexist in impact. If a lot of systems like urban planning and road cleaning were put into place at a time where it was only men making the decisions, don't you think there may have been blind spots? And doesn't it make sense to go looking for those blind spots because by definition you don't know where they are unless you look?

thzmand t1_j9hwyol wrote on February 22, 2023 at 2:20 AM

You people....never stop....like evangelical Christians that think Monster Energy has satanic messaging. This can arguably be a public safety issue for pedestrians, but it is certainly not a gender issue. And even if it is a gender issue that doesn't make it sexist in any way shape or form. Unless of course anything that disproportionately impacts women is sexist. In which case, affirmative action is sexist, and pregnancy is sexist, and breast cancer is sexist. Of course that term isn't helpful to describe patterns that affect genders differently, which is why nobody uses it that way.

mycatistakingover t1_j9i0qaf wrote on February 22, 2023 at 2:47 AM

Frame it as a public health issue if you want, I really don't care. There is an argument to call affirmative action racist, but pregnancy and breast cancer are biological processes, not rules/systems created by society. No one is calling them sexist. There are plenty of issues in society that disproportionately hurt men that need to be resolved too and until there is an alternative term that is well known, I will happily call the draft and handling of men's mental health sexist too. Why can't we say that gender affects people's quality of life in different ways and try to address that? You don't need malicious people to make a certain demographic's lives worse.