If I were in the situation presented in this article, I'd simply speak my mind. I'm fairly sure that I've been a good ally to the women and non-binary folks in my life, and that people who know me would be quick to defend accusations of misogyny or bias. And if that proved to be incorrect, I'd re-evaluate whether I was doing enough to further women and non-binary people in the tech industry.
If, as most in this comment section have, you see yourself as having to keep quiet in the situation presented in this article, ask yourself: who would defend me, and who would throw me under a bus, and why? Think long and hard about why the people around you wouldn't rush to defend your character. Ask yourself if it's really that the feminists are out to cancel you, or if there's a sliver of validity there.
You don't have to be perfect. But there's a large gulf between most people's words and their behavior. That's the real root of the issue here. Merely paying lip service to equality doesn't indemnify you from accusations of bias. If you really truly act as an ally, people will take notice and defend you when the cancel culture comes knocking.
This seems naive. When you see Twitter threads cancelling people, your colleagues aren't going to make a dent in that mob even if they are brave enough to stand up for you on public platforms.
Honestly, if it's so risky to give candid advice to anyone, why take the risk? There's no reason to. They can make it on their own afterall.
It probably is naive. But my point is more about the fact that it seems to very rarely (never?) be people who are champions of diversity getting cancelled because of one comment they made that got taken out of context. That seems to be what people in this thread are scared of. It's invariably the latent misogynist who's been saying and doing misogynist things their entire life, and this time things erupted instead of being swept under the rug. The lack of evidence of otherwise upstanding people being cancelled seems to go against the narrative that 'this can happen to you' which this article proposes. It'll happen to you, if you don't have a history of being respectful.
How would you know what the people being cancelled are like in real life when all you see of them are one sided Twitter rants?
Honestly, you could draw parallels to victim blaming. He deserved it because he didn't cultivate allies to defend himself against false accusations of sexism/racism/*ism
If, as most in this comment section have, you see yourself as having to keep quiet in the situation presented in this article, ask yourself: who would defend me, and who would throw me under a bus, and why? Think long and hard about why the people around you wouldn't rush to defend your character. Ask yourself if it's really that the feminists are out to cancel you, or if there's a sliver of validity there.
You don't have to be perfect. But there's a large gulf between most people's words and their behavior. That's the real root of the issue here. Merely paying lip service to equality doesn't indemnify you from accusations of bias. If you really truly act as an ally, people will take notice and defend you when the cancel culture comes knocking.