I know that it’s poor form to explain what a given parody should be taken to mean, but I’m not in the mood to be misconstrued, so I’m going to briefly explain the not-so-veiled meaning behind the increasingly infamous and ever-lengthening List of Known Sexists.
Firstly, and most importantly, it is all too easy to find accusations of sexism online, especially in the atheist and skeptical communities. I’m not going to speculate right now on why this is so, but I will suggest that we’d do better to confront sexist assumptions or arguments than to label someone as a sexist or misogynist and refuse to deal with them thereafter. People get a bit touchy when they are expressing genuine concerns and are written off as trolls, sexists, woman-haters, or worse.
Secondly, and this is when I put on my wonky stats hat, gender imbalance at freethought groups or events is not necessarily evidence of sexism therein. Americans who self-identify as atheist do so at a rate of seven males to three females, according to a recent Pew Forum study. Even assuming a decently sized confidence interval, that is a fairly lopsided statistic, and if we find that local atheist groups are only at 60/40 we shouldn’t slam them for not making enough progress in the face of demographic headwinds.
Finally, I’d like to reemphasize the inherent trade-off between sensitivity and specificity on a binary classification test. If you are too worried about detecting even the smallest traces of sexist language and binning those people into the misogyny column, you are going to have a very high false positive rate. Practicing oversensitivity leads to situations in which (for example) CFI leadership winds up castigating and blocking lifetime Friends of the Center because they seem to be associating with the wrong crowd. How much better would it be to engage with each other, rather than practicing the sort of mutual excommunication which we’ve read about in church histories?
