Your examples have the same problem that you criticized daenerys for:
focus on the experiences of women, excluding the experiences of men.
Your first two examples amount to focusing of the accomplishments and contributions of women at the expense of the (much larger) accomplishments and contributions of men.
Technically you are right, but there is a difference in context:
Saying “Grace Hopper wrote a COBOL compiler” can show some readers that “some women made significant contributions to computer science”, but is unlikely to make them think that all (or majority of) significant contributions were done by women.
(Okay, I can imagine doing that in a crazy way which could completely confuse a very naive reader… but I don’t suspect anyone would do this on LW, or that such kind of a naive reader could survive on LW.)
But in internet debates… well, sometimes I have this impression that some people really do believe that experiences like “people devalue my opinions because of my gender or because of my looks” are specifically female experiences, as opposed to generally human experiences. Then a discussion about this kind of experiences, focused only on women, serves to strenghten this prejudice. -- It would be an equivalent of saying “please send me a list of computer languages and people who wrote their compilers, but only if those authors are men”. Then publishing the list to show everyone that writing compilers is a uniquely male experience.
Saying “Grace Hopper wrote a COBOL compiler” can show some readers that “some women made significant contributions to computer science”, but is unlikely to make them think that all (or majority of) significant contributions were done by women.
Probably not, but it might make them think that a significant minority (or even nearly 50%) of contributions were done by women, which is false.
Your examples have the same problem that you criticized daenerys for:
Your first two examples amount to focusing of the accomplishments and contributions of women at the expense of the (much larger) accomplishments and contributions of men.
Technically you are right, but there is a difference in context:
Saying “Grace Hopper wrote a COBOL compiler” can show some readers that “some women made significant contributions to computer science”, but is unlikely to make them think that all (or majority of) significant contributions were done by women.
(Okay, I can imagine doing that in a crazy way which could completely confuse a very naive reader… but I don’t suspect anyone would do this on LW, or that such kind of a naive reader could survive on LW.)
But in internet debates… well, sometimes I have this impression that some people really do believe that experiences like “people devalue my opinions because of my gender or because of my looks” are specifically female experiences, as opposed to generally human experiences. Then a discussion about this kind of experiences, focused only on women, serves to strenghten this prejudice. -- It would be an equivalent of saying “please send me a list of computer languages and people who wrote their compilers, but only if those authors are men”. Then publishing the list to show everyone that writing compilers is a uniquely male experience.
Probably not, but it might make them think that a significant minority (or even nearly 50%) of contributions were done by women, which is false.