Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, fellow
researchers,
First of all, if you’re wondering, you may address me as João, or Mr. João,
other acceptable terms are: old horse, fellow human, and Batman. I will not
be addressed neither as “Tiger” nor “Tarzan” for those terms are to be used
exclusively by my wife (even though, truth be told, increasingly less
often).
I confess my bewilderment with the content, and tone, of recent discussions
on this list. If we make the assumption that the list is exclusively made
up of adults than I would like to propose the notion that adults are
perfectly capable of dealing with heated and passionate debate. This is not
a perfect world (like any Benfica fan will immediately tell you) and living
with freedom of expression and liberty to debate does not come cheap. Among
other things, it means that occasionally we have to hear or read ideas that
are utterly repulsive to us. Other times it means that we have to debate
with obnoxious or stupid people. But none of that matters when compared
with the importance of free speech and the virtues of debating freely!
I have also detected, here and there, a surreptitious animosity towards old
white males. Call me an old fashioned liberal but I like to think that the
gender and race of a person is completely irrelevant, all that matters is
what a person does or says. But maybe that’s because I’m neither racist nor
sexist.
This list is open to all. There are no barriers for participation. This
means there is equality of opportunity. Of course, equality of opportunity
does not mean equality of outcome. In short, nobody is stopping young black
girls from participating on the list. Nobody cares about the gender of the
participants. We care (hopefully) about ideas, knowledge, reasoned
arguments, wit, humour, challenging threads, interesting discussions...
For what it is worth, my opinion is that any rules that might shackle the
openness of this forum are utterly out of place in a an academic list.
All the best,
Tiger
I mean, João.
On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 12:49 PM, Carlos Pires <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> On 07/06/2015, at 05:10, Stefanie di russo wrote:
>
> > Carlos,
> >
> > Your claims are questionable. A quick google search under the term "ratio
> > of female to male designers" surfaces these statistics:
> >
>
> ...
>
> > Female domination in undergraduate enrolment or in industry? As many of
> my
> > references have pointed out, females dominate the percentage of design
> > students but unfortunately this is not reflected in practice.
> >
> >
> > Just because you do not see this imbalance doesn't mean it does not
> exist.
> > Im surprised to read such loaded and subjective claims from a research
> > student.
> >
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > -Stefanie
>
>
> Dear Stefani,
>
> I never claimed that the imbalance doesn't exist.
> It would be foolish to make such a claim.
> (This is the only thing in this exchange that relates to "Respect": please
> respect what I write and try not to load it with your own words or
> obliterate a big part of it. That section of my message has 800 words, and
> not all of them lean towards your interpretation)
>
> I said:
> > Admittedly, in my country we don't have the "old boy network" of
> > anglo-saxon tradition, so that might be the reason why all these gender
> > issues seem so outlandish to me. We do suffer from an age-old gender bias
> > across all sectors of activity, don't get me wrong. But in design,
> > specifically, the tendency is actually towards female domination.
>
> The tendency towards female domination I mention here is regarding design
> industry and academia in my country. This has nothing to do with game
> designers in Britain, Creative Directors in the UK, or women scientists in
> Australia. You are falling prey to another bias I already addressed in that
> same post: there is a whole world out there, outside the anglo-saxon
> universe.
>
> Yes. My results are questionable.
> This was a non-random sample, so it affords no statistical inference.
> I'm sorry for not making that clear — I failed to take own medicine there.
>
> The focus of my study was not sex or gender.
> Nevertheless, I was expecting to see an imbalance and was surprised to see
> there wasn't.
> Not only that, female respondents show higher education levels, and
> respondents' mothers also.
> This also surprised me.
>
> (Some clarifications: my numbers refer to professional designers, not
> students; my questionnaire refered to "gender", not "sex", and "motherly
> figure", not biological mother)
>
> Thank you for the references.
> I will dig deeper into this issue in the near future, for those results
> intrigued me and there is a lot more to assess here.
>
> Best,
>
>
> ==================================
> Carlos Pires
>
> [log in to unmask]
> [log in to unmask]
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> Design & New Media MFA // Communication Design PhD Student @ FBA-UL
>
> Check the project blog:
> http://thegolemproject.com
>
>
>
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--
*João Ferreira*
00351 967089437
0031 0619808750
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