Here are some reasons people give for not caring about increasing the number of women in skepticism:
Women are free to participate if they want. Nobody’s stopping them.
Men are just more interested in science.
I care about ideas–not demographics!
It is nothing new at all to say that the community of people actively participating in skepticism is composed by and large by middle-class white men. It’s more or less a homogeneous group, and it behaves like one, engaging in activities that the members of the majority like because they’ve never had to do it any other way. And that’s fine, I suppose, depending on your goals. If the goal of the skeptical community is to be a social club of people of like minds in a comfortable, non-challenging environment that is fun to be in and provides a social network of people who can hang out in small groups at the local level to talk and have some more fun, great! Clubs benefit their members in a lot of ways, as anyone who has ever joined one can tell you.
Even better, there are many formal skeptics and atheists groups built on the desire to improve the world we share, and that work very sincerely towards that goal by solving problems identified by and via the methods identified by this homogeneous group of people, who are used to thinking about themselves and what causes problems for them, and also sometimes the problems they perceive other people experience with strategies they suppose will work for those other people they don’t really interact with. Because, you know, homogeneity. Which has a very limited scope, in the end, and is likely to only solve problems for people just like you, and you’ll eventually run out of those people to reach and chances are good that no one from among the group of everyone else haven’t even heard about you and probably don’t care about your problems. They care about their own problems, but you don’t know what they are because you have no representatives from them in your group and get fussy when asked why not. Which may not matter if you’re just into skepticism or atheism for the fun clubhouse times but may matter if you are having trouble growing your influence or solving widespread problems on a large scale.
Does that make sense? I’m not saying that insular groups can’t have a positive effect in society–after all, they are part of society and changing people like them turns out to be a gain–I’m just saying that it’s likely going to be a pretty small effect. And that you aren’t even going to realize how small your effect is because you don’t have anyone else to talk to about it. And then very often you’ll fall into the trap of blaming everyone else for being stupid or stubborn about your efforts instead of realizing that they’ve never given you a second thought because you never approached them.
If everyone in your group has access to a private car, for example, it might not occur to you that you impede attendance by hosting events at night in places far away from bus stops. If everyone in your group is white, you might not realize that attitudes towards the value of religion as an institution (versus individual belief) vary by culture. If everyone speaks English, it might not occur to you to advertise your free vaccine event in the Spanish newspaper, to reach groups of people who would like to be vaccinated but have no easy access to health care. If everyone is male, it might not occur to you that women might not feel welcome or safe in your community. It might occur to you instead that they just don’t like it because science.
And these are just errors of omission and misunderstanding. You are missing out on opportunities to expand your organization and promote your goals because you lack diversity. You set yourself up to make other errors, too–errors that can create profoundly bad PR and public embarrassment, and depending on the kind of organization you are running, make yourself vulnerable to lawsuits. (That probably won’t happen to a skeptical group, but it affects corporations all the time.)
Consider the drama that hit HP when it developed face-tracking software that couldn’t see people with dark skin. Had they had people with dark skin represented in their organization, they could have caught the error before it went public, as well as saved themselves a lot of money in redeveloping and retesting and then apologizing. YouTube video here.
Consider the drama that ensued when Apple released Siri, a helper software that couldn’t find women’s services like abortions but could find men’s services like strippers. It’s just a glitch and not a conspiracy they say, but you know who could have caught that glitch? Women on staff in the right places.
And on a basic civil rights level and of probably more immediate concern: Not having a multilingual police force hampers the ability of Houston police to do their job. It’s probably difficult to find enough language speakers or teach police new languages, and maybe it’s not their fault, but it still creates big problems.
But there are also success stories, like when IBM went out of its way to cultivate diversity, and ended up in profit.
So let’s revisit the reasons people give for not caring about increasing the number of women in skepticism:
Women are free to participate if they want. Nobody’s stopping them.
Men are just more interested in science.
I care about ideas–not demographics!
If you care about ideas and not demographics, bully for you! But realize that you’ll be insulating yourself from the large community–which is maybe what you want–and relegating yourself to an ineffective social club–which is maybe what you want–and strips you of the right to complain about your situation as a marginalized skeptic or atheist or an ineffective world-changer, and of the right to blame everyone else for not treasuring the points of view you treasure. If you want to be exclusive and irrelevant, celebrate your homogeneity! But if you are sick of being marginalized, look around you and honestly analyze the efforts you’ve made to fit yourself in with the larger society and the efforts you’ve made to include people from it. They are probably minimal to none. Being marginalized is probably your fault. And when women–the largest untapped audience possible–actually volunteer to join a group that hasn’t been welcoming them even though they share goals and could double your task force, and pretty clearly tell you what you need to do to align themselves to your organization, listen to their suggestions and trust them as the experts in solving this problem. Don’t marginalize them instead.
