Above:
> blames the feminist movement on him not having a girlfriend
That was too short to be accurate, the relationships between those events are parallel, not consequences.
Look, I'm the result of positive action: We've done lots of things in favour of women. I'm actually grateful that society did that, because it's just plain better when a bro group becomes a mixed group. And the result is much more in line with my ethics of equality of chances for everyone.
Unfortunately there are 2 drawbacks:
1. The mixed environment we have in programming is not a mixed environment. It's a separate environment with brogrammers in the mixed team, and girlsgrammers (I'm coining the term right now with you). Those girls are members of Girlz In Web movements. They get support from the company to get training. They get support from the team lead to develop their skills. They didn't have to have been programmers for 10 years before applying, because managers look for their human skills. They are targetted by specific job ads which filter by genre (ex: Twitter ads, Google Ads, Facebook ads). They get help from networks that are filtered for women. They complain that brogrammers harass them. So you may have a team with up to half of women (only 30% in my experience), but as males we don't have mixity and new acquaintances: We have a bunch of people who only talk to us if they want to, who are specifically protected by the management and who will be promoted anyway.
2. It is a known risk of positive discrimination, that we don't promote people who deserve it because we promote people to fit criteria. I'm a kid of that generation, I'm the one who repeatedly couldn't be promoted because there's a woman in the group. Now that you look at me in the eyes, what do you tell me? "Sorry for you mate, you couldn't develop your skills as a Team Lead, because we had this girl to promote, who's 4 years younger than you, doesn't know what an HTTP header is, but she's a girl"? That's not even what you tell me. You/society tells me "Those women, who got promoted early, aren't paid as much as males of the same management level, and it's unfair. By the way, men aren't oppressed.".
About empathy... I get that women sometimes feel impressed. That's why I really take care of being respectful with women and not talk to them when they don't show signs that they agree to, because I'm afraid they will complain of harassment. Guess what, that made me so respectful with women that I'm still single. Story of my life.
Anyway, back to the point: There isn't a correct depiction of the supposed wage gap in news articles, because they misreport scientific studies with blanket statements like "Women are better at multitasking than men". According to newspapers and if we believe the scientific studies they report, women only have qualities and males only have defects, except strength, which is the reason why men are rapists. I'm not even caricaturing much, it's pretty much equivalent to what they say. So we can't be surprised that men (in my situation, or other groups when newspapers misreport another truth about other topic) look for "more accurate sources". Because conflating "177s vs 169s" with "Women are better at..." isn't genuinely accurate, and repeating misreporting all across newspapers when it serves specific minorities isn't accurate either.