Breaking news! Father takes 7-year old daughter to a comic shop for older, male audiences. Daughter is offended! Misogyny, etc! Males are creeps! Sexualizing women in comics is offensive to women and therefore immoral! It's not like women can choose not to read such comics. It is a sign that you live a life of highest quality if you can worry about sexualization in fictional comics.
Just because your eyes passed over the letters doesn't mean you read it. You went in with preconceived notions of what it was going to say and you came out without those preconceptions changed. Reading requires that you actually spend time trying to understand what someone is saying.
I admit it's not entirely clear what the author's point is, but that doesn't mean you get to fill in your own and pretend like the author said it.
I'm pretty skeptical of a lot of feminism, but there's nothing particularly outrageous being said here.
I gather you're being sarcastic, but high name inequality is just another illustration of a lack of social mobility.
People of a certain social class are more likely to name their child certain names, and those children are more likely to grow up into particular professions.
Name inequality represents clear evidence against the existence of a meritocracy.
> Name inequality represents clear evidence against the existence of a meritocracy.
Meritocracy in what sense?
Coming from wealthier background, you're more likely to be well educated.
While we may dislike that it is so, it doesn't mean there's no meritocracy in the sense that employers don't hire people based on their qualifications alone. Only that they don't care where these qualifications come from.
> Coming from wealthier background, you're more likely to be well educated.
So, by your admission, education is not meritocratic.
I claim that employment is non-meritocratic first by your measure: if access to a better education is not merited, then employers concentrating on qualifications alone are not hiring according to merit.
I claim also that employment is non-meritocratic independently. The most obvious example is that wealth similarly gives you exclusive access to low-paying but prestigious jobs.
I suspect overall that background wealth is still a better marker for job status than education.
> I claim that employment is non-meritocratic first by your measure: if access to a better education is not merited, then employers concentrating on qualifications alone are not hiring according to merit.
That doesn't follow. Maybe education changes your merit, and people with a better education actually are better at their jobs.
What definition would that be? A nation where people were not allowed to learn outside of standardized government training might achieve equality, but only by grinding everyone down to zero.
Haha. No, it's more like this for me: if the provided education system were good and appropriately diverse, few people would feel the need to pay to leave it.
Then you might be able to say that everyone had access to a decent standard of education.
That doesn't make the difference you think it does. There are European countries where barely anyone pays for education (and private schools/universities are less reputable than state ones). You still find the children of wealthy people are disproportionately likely to be wealthy themselves. Parental involvement, cultural attitudes to education - and, probably, as politically unacceptable as it is to say it, genetics as well - seem like bigger effects than expensive private education.
Sure, before I was derailed by education, my point was that society is not meritocratic. So we're now agreeing.
We don't know if genetics is an effect here because we can't eliminate background wealth - even twin studies are broken because twins get adopted into similar environments.
I suggest that it's fashionable to say social inequality is down to genetics - it certainly happens a lot in these forums and it comes up especially when people would rather pass the buck for difficult social problems.
Genetics aren't the only thing we inherit, and aren't the only possible source of differences in merit. It could equally be cultural differences - e.g. attitudes towards education, work, society and so on - that would be passed on even to adopted children, and would make people genuinely better at their jobs. Even if the advantages of the rich are purely environmental, that in no way proves that they're not meritocratic.
I don't think anybody claims that higher education in the US is a meritocracy.
When people on HN talk about the meritocracy as though it is something that exists, they are talking about it in the tech industry, not in the education system that precedes it.
If tech industry is a meritocracy via higher education, and higher education is not itself a meritocracy, then the tech industry cannot be a meritocracy.
Putting the unfair part in an early funnelling step of the hiring process, and then abstracting that away, doesn't change that the whole process is unfair.
You're missing the fact that we can see gender inequalities in this data. All of the disproportionate names for fitness instructors are female. Either there's much wider variance of male names for fitness instructors or there's terrible gender disparity in that profession.
