Thanks for the pushback. I think my above comment was in parts quite terse, and in particular the “odd” in “would be odd to single out” does a lot of work.
So yes, it agrees with my impression that in a reference class of explicit formalized groups similar to those you mentioned it’s more common for men to be excluded than for women to be excluded. The landscape is too diverse to make confident claims about all of it, but I think in most cases I’d basically think it isn’t odd to explicitly single out women as target audience while it would be odd to explicitly single out men.
I suspect it would require a longer conversation to hash out what determines my assessments of ‘oddness’ and how appropriate they are relative to various goals one might have. Very briefly, some inputs are whether there was a history of different treatment of some audience, whether that audience still faces specific obstacles, has specific experiences or specific needs, and whether there are imbalances in existing informal groups (e.g. similar to the above point on mentoring being ubiquitous surely a lot of informal networking happens at McKinsey).
I think this kind of reasoning is fairly standard and also explains many instances of target audience restriction and specialization other than the ones we’ve been discussing here. For example, consider the Veterans Administration in the US or Alcoholics Anonymous.
I think I don’t want to go into much more depth here, partly because it would be a lot of work, partly because I think it would be a quite wide-ranging discussion that would be off-topic here (and possibly the EA Forum in general). I appreciate this may be frustrating, and if you think it would be important or very helpful to you to understand my views in more detail I’d be happy to have a conversation elsewhere (e.g. send me a PM and we can find a time to call).
FWIW, while I suspect we have a lot of underlying disagreements in this area, I’ve appreciated your pushback against orthodox liberal views in other discussions on this forum, and I’m sorry that your comment here was downvoted.
Thanks for the pushback. I think my above comment was in parts quite terse, and in particular the “odd” in “would be odd to single out” does a lot of work.
So yes, it agrees with my impression that in a reference class of explicit formalized groups similar to those you mentioned it’s more common for men to be excluded than for women to be excluded. The landscape is too diverse to make confident claims about all of it, but I think in most cases I’d basically think it isn’t odd to explicitly single out women as target audience while it would be odd to explicitly single out men.
I suspect it would require a longer conversation to hash out what determines my assessments of ‘oddness’ and how appropriate they are relative to various goals one might have. Very briefly, some inputs are whether there was a history of different treatment of some audience, whether that audience still faces specific obstacles, has specific experiences or specific needs, and whether there are imbalances in existing informal groups (e.g. similar to the above point on mentoring being ubiquitous surely a lot of informal networking happens at McKinsey).
I think this kind of reasoning is fairly standard and also explains many instances of target audience restriction and specialization other than the ones we’ve been discussing here. For example, consider the Veterans Administration in the US or Alcoholics Anonymous.
I think I don’t want to go into much more depth here, partly because it would be a lot of work, partly because I think it would be a quite wide-ranging discussion that would be off-topic here (and possibly the EA Forum in general). I appreciate this may be frustrating, and if you think it would be important or very helpful to you to understand my views in more detail I’d be happy to have a conversation elsewhere (e.g. send me a PM and we can find a time to call).
FWIW, while I suspect we have a lot of underlying disagreements in this area, I’ve appreciated your pushback against orthodox liberal views in other discussions on this forum, and I’m sorry that your comment here was downvoted.