Slide 6 represents Facebook with an attractive woman. (why?) Slide 13 compares steak to salad. (why?) (and note that it's not as if women do not eat steak, but culturally steak is a more "manly" food than salad)
Why? Because political correctness says so?
I don't understand this obsession with "diversity" in the U.S., I really don't. Personally, I think that we should instead bring intelligent and motivated people into CS. If they're all white males, so be it. They could be black-asian mixed-blood muslim lesbians... who cares? Just as long as they're interested. People who choose a career based on the "coolness" factor dictated by the clueless masses are like people who choose jobs based on the title (I will kill the next person who claims to be hiring code ninjas)... they are sheep. We need wolves, not sheep.
You want diversity of opinion and diversity of talent. The question he's asking is: why do Americans care so much about diversity of skin color? Why does it matter if the engineers are all black or white or Malay or whatever?
"There were too much buttons on it - it had been only designed by a team of men, all engineer."
Yup. Because all men are incompetent at UI design, just like how girls can't do math. </sarcasm>
"You want diversity in the product conception because you want your product to appeal to a diverse (global) world."
What does that even mean? The vast, vast majority of products are only intended for First World use, because only First Worlders have the money to buy them.
I really don't like how people use the words "cultural diversity" as a feel-good buzzword without actually understanding what it means. Real cultural diversity doesn't consist of dark-skinned people with bright-colored clothes doing some sort of ritual dancing. Real cultural diversity is like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFkeKKszXTw - things that seem horrifying, disgusting, and wrong to us. (Biblical culture is roughly as distant from ours as many African cultures are.)
Engineers are supposed to design systems given some specs. The specs are to be compiled by someone else. The designers are the ones who should worry about the buttons in the product. The engineers should worry about making the electronics and software work.
So, I say it again: we need wolves. Not just in electronics and software, but also in design, manufacture, etc. People who go along with the flow make good, loyal employees at some big corporation, but they will never create anything new... and the main reason is that they lack the motivation to create something new. If they had such motivation, they would be wolves.
While I agree with you that ideally the most motivated, competent, intelligent people should be in X field and those are the only criteria one should care about, the reality is all too often quite different.
What does that even mean? What you want is diversity of opinion (so that, if one person has a bad idea, everyone else will call them on it instead of nodding like sheep), and diversity of talent (so that everyone doesn't share the same weaknesses). I suppose those correlate with gender and ethnicity to some extent, but why not try to hire people with lots of different resumes (coders at big companies, startup founders, independent consultants, people who've lived abroad in different countries, etc.)? That would be way more efficient.
"Because if a field is dominated by say, white males, the few women or non-white males are going to feel (frequently with good reason) like they're not taken as seriously by, or seen as being as competent as, the other white males."
Proof? Some fields are obviously like this, but why all of them, or even most of them? If a field is dominated by people who are born in the winter (as many professional sports are), is someone born in June going to be assumed to be less competent?
Do they?
Note that if they actually do, the logical implication is actually less diversity within a given task area because different task areas benefit from different perspectives....
I don't pretend to know every reason for the gender imbalance in CS, but I can suggest a couple of factors that likely contribute. One is cultural stereotypes about the type of person who would get a CS degree. The stereotypical CS person in the US (and in the UK as well, if the BBC's TV shows are any guide) is an introverted, socially awkward, physically weak male. This stereotype is pervasive enough in our culture to harm many peoples' interest in computers from a young age; it likely keeps both men and women out of CS, but I suspect it has a disproportionate effect on young women due to the particular social pressures they face. Working to eliminate this stereotype would help everyone involved and bring more talent into CS.
The other factor is that CS can be a bit of a boy's club at times. I've seen some of my CS professors make comments that frankly shocked me about things like the role of women in the workplace. There's no excuse for this attitude; it can do nothing but push talented people out of our field, and anyone involved in academia should show no tolerance for this kind of behavior.
Frankly, I think this discussion of "wolves and sheep" is nothing but an excuse to sweep very real cultural problems, both in the general US population and in academic institutions, under the rug.
It's perfectly ok to value competence and interest-level over diversity. But why are there significantly fewer women in computer science? Because they are less competent or interested for some biological reason? Absurd.
Few women are in computer science for a host of reasons (and probably more we do not know about). Perhaps the slides I pointed out in the presentation are part of the reasons. It's hard to be sure but when we give presentations about joining CS, perhaps we can specifically try to avoid isolating women. (Of course, I have not solidly argued that those particular slides do isolate women.) And I mean specifically, intentionally avoid isolating women. That is, read over the presentation twice; the second reading is to find such issues.
Slide 13 compares CS at MIT to steak at a steakhouse, and salad to any other major. As far as I can tell, most women prefer steak to salad, given the choice and no strong social pressures either way.
I'd say this slide set is much more encouraging to women in CS than discouraging.
I also feel slide 6 is generally a negative view of CS, since it refers to "The Matrix", and the joke in the notes is about how people already upload their brains to the web and escape "real-life". Finally, "these are some of the LESS interesting things we talk about in computer science!"
This slide does not show that creating tech is for everyone, simply that, in this case women at least, make significant use of it (for better or worse...).