Why would it be off-putting? I find it off-putting that people focus on a specific group of people because of their sex or some other irrelevant attribute.
Focus on people in general, not people who belong to the group G. Focusing on people in general is not an attempt to get the focus away from women, since women are humans, too. Focusing on women alone reeks of discrimination to me. You cannot "fight" discrimination by more discrimination.
It's the same as when "Black Lives Matter" is shouted back at with "All Lives Matter". It doesn't actually help nor highlight the individual and unique plight of a particular group. It's just a shouting attempt to silence the problems of a particular group.
"All Lives Matter" is a truism. Of course they do. It doesn't even need mentioning, so why did you mention it? "Black Lives Matter" highlights an actual problem that needs to be addressed, so why are you shouting "All Lives Matter" back at it when you weren't saying anything before?
"All Lives Matter" is just a bland retort to try to get the spotlight away from "Black Lives Matter".
In the case of women, their sex is not irrelevant, because the demographics of people in science overwhelmingly show a skew in sex and gender. Highlighting how women were relegated to footnotes much more than men were is an interesting bit of information that shouldn't be shut down with "what about the men?"
> "All Lives Matter" is just a bland retort to try to get the spotlight away from "Black Lives Matter".
It sounds like you're confident that you understand the motives of the persons in the "All Lives Matter" camp. Could you explain what lead you to that conclusion?
People tend to get upset when they are excluded from a group. Do you think that the right way of going against it is by further exclusion? I do not think that this is the case.
> "Black Lives Matter" highlights an actual problem that needsd to be addressed
So what is that problem? Does it have to do with exclusion? If so, why do not you promote "All Lives Matter", to make sure no one is excluded, then?
> "All Lives Matter" is just a bland retort to try to get the spotlight away from "Black Lives Matter"
And I could say that "Black Lives Matter" is just a bland way of trying to get the spotlight away from the fact that everyone deserves equal treatment, and that we should not discriminate people, or exclude them for their skin color, which is what it is actually doing. It is doing exactly the same thing it is fighting against.
Fighting fire with fire is not a good way of doing it. You do not even have to create such groups or whatever to address these issues. In fact, I cannot think of a reason of why shouting "Black Lives Matter" is a solution at all.
> In the case of women, their sex is not irrelevant, because the demographics of people in science overwhelmingly show a skew in sex and gender.
There are men who have been underrepresented, and there are women who have been underrepresented. Why focus on women only? What is the point here exactly?
> Highlighting how women were relegated to footnotes much more than men were is an interesting bit of information
So were men. How is it interesting?
Back to the matter at hand, what could be the reason that some men and women get shoved into the footnotes only? Does it have to do with the merit of quality of their contributions? Why do we assume that it has to do with their sex to begin with? Maybe it has to do with the contributions themselves, or something completely different.
The problem is that Black Lives manifestly do not matter as much as others, and particularly white lives, in the accountability structure that actually functionally exists.
> If so, why do not you promote "All Lives Matter"
Because a bug report needs to point as specifically as possible to the way the actual behavior is defective.
> I could say that "Black Lives Matter" is just a bland way of trying to get the spotlight away from the fact that everyone deserves equal treatment,
You could say anything, but as a matter of fact you would be wrong to say that.
It isn't about getting the spotlight away from a place it never was; if there had been a meaningful focus on universal equality, the glaring failures that provoked BLM would not have occurred with widespread unconcern outside of the Black community.
As a matter of historical fact, both All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matters are reactions in defense of status quo inequities from slightly different angles.
What is BLM's actual goal, what do they want to happen?
> defense of status quo inequities
Well yeah, the point should be to solve this issue. "Black Lives Matter" is not the right way of doing it as it excludes other people. If you get "All Lives Matter", then you can focus on lives that are not being treated equally, while not excluding other groups of people. My point is, that exclusion is really not necessary to recognize and solve issues, even if those issues' victims are predominantly a specific group of people.
But "this issue" can't be cleanly generalized across races and genders. Inequality is a theme that is represented in a variety of symptoms, but those symptoms and their causes differ across underrepresented groups (e.g. women are not disproportionately incarcerated or killed by police). As a result, there is not general solution because the problems differ. Advocacy for one group does not imply that other groups don't deserve advocacy, it's just targeting very specific issues impacting that group along with specific root causes.
Applying the same logic to software development, a product manager shouldn't assign a development ticket that just says "make the application better" and bug reports shouldn't just say "the application is broken". Those themes may be true, but it's not an effective way to solve problems.
"Black Lives Matter" is a truism. Of course they do. It doesn't even need mentioning, so why did you mention it? "All Lives Matter" highlights an actual problem of police incompetence and poor training that needs to be addressed, so why are you concentrating on "Black Lives Matter" and introduce racial context to the problem that affects the whole society?
Focus on people in general, not people who belong to the group G. Focusing on people in general is not an attempt to get the focus away from women, since women are humans, too. Focusing on women alone reeks of discrimination to me. You cannot "fight" discrimination by more discrimination.