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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Yes, a biased pipeline is absolutely something that needs to be solved. Society should permit and facilitate people living their best lives and maximizing their potential. I found programming both incredibly rewarding and a wonderful way to jump start my career. So if there are lots of girls who would feel the same way if society didn't bias them against the profession from an early age, that's wrong and it needs to be fixed.

The idea that women want different things than men is pernicious and it's not something we should accept without proof. For a long time we rationalized keeping women out of the work force by saying that they preferred focusing on the home. Yet, I know more stay at home moms that are bitter about having given up their career than the other way around. It's a lie we told ourselves to justify a social arrangement that disempowered women. We should know by now not to fall prey to that sort of thinking.

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I'm of the impression that women select out of certain fields because they have different priorities; if you're proposing pushing more women into a career they evidently don't want, I think the burden of proof is on you that women are, in fact, socially corrupted in a way that pushes them or of tech. If there is a bias against women, we absolutely should fix it, but I don't like how our society assumes all gaps are necessarily attributable to bias pending damning proof to the contrary.

Besides, men and women have had distinct gender roles (and largely the same roles) in every society since before history; while (or rather, "because") I support women's rights to do whatever they dammed well please, it seems unlikely to me that we discovered in the last fifty years that that was entirely an ancient conspiracy to make women miserable, and thus we should push women into the careers we know they want (never mind that the evidence points in all different directions) even at great expense to the industry.

Anyway, the question isn't "should we force women to be programmers or housewives?". It's not a dichotomy and we shouldn't be pressuring anyone into anything.

So the goal for our society should be that the pipeline for every job from janitor to engineer to CEO should have a sex balanced pipeline? Or is there something special about programming?

The goal should be that everyone can freely decide which career path they want to join regardless of how the ratios in the final pipeline look.

This is a trope that recurs on every thread about this topic. It's insulting to everyone's intelligence. Clearly, the person to whom you're replying believes that, absent artificial and unnecessary barriers erected, deliberately or not, to keep women out of the field, far more women would choose technology career paths, just as they did when medicine cleared those obstacles and when law cleared those obstacles, and when biochemisty cleared those obstacles, and the field of mathematics, and actuarial science, and economics, and on and on.

I'm certain you know that's what he meant as well. You can disagree with him that any such obstacles exist (you'll be wrong, but at least you'll be coherent). But why instead waste our time and your own with a pointless no-op of a rebuttal?

I though that was pretty clear in my reply that people should not have to face unique (sex specific) barriers to enter a field i.e being able to 'freely decide'.

What exactly are the barriers that exist for programming that were not cleared at the same time as those for math, economics, and medicine?

> Society should permit and facilitate people living their best lives and maximizing their potential.

I suppose the word I'm trying to unpick is 'facilitate': is that by fair treatment of those already making it through the pipeline, so that the bad reputation is reduced, and more enter it, and so on; or is it by pushing more into the pipeline immediately?

> So if there are lots of girls who would feel the same way if society didn't bias them against the profession from an early age

I'm just not sure to what extent society has a duty to 'make people realise' that they'd enjoy a particular career path.

> Yes, a biased pipeline is absolutely something that needs to be solved.

No it doesn't. Bias isn't always bad or oppressive. It needs to be proven that the bias is "bad".

If rich kids are underrepresented in tech because their families have connections in finance and they tend to major in finance more often, is this a problem that needs to be solved?

Frat bros are underrepresented in engineering in tech atm.

HR, recruiting and hundreds of other job families and careers have "biased pipelines". Should resources be spent to solve all of them?

Why only tech?

No matter which injustice we choose to address, there will always be other injustices unaddressed, many of them horrible.

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