It looks like it's from 1983. How relevant are these points today?
"The principal conclusions of this report are:
"Although not a generally accepted fact, the women here are as qualified as the men.
"In order to realize their potential, women must be given the same opportunities as men to participate in and benefit from all aspects of the professional community.
"Many individuals in the community, either consciously or subconsciously, have expectations of women that are different from their expectations of men.
"Pervasive subtle discrimination can do as much damage as, if not more damage than, isolated incidents of overt discrimination.
"An uncomfortable social atmosphere interferes with a woman’s ability to work productively.
"Responsibility for change rests with the entire community, not just with the women.
"Many problems would be alleviated by increasing the number of women."
The debate would be more honest if the "different-interests" group were just saying that they don't want our culture to change. As for me like I said there is no evidence that there may be some genetic predisposition other than cultural ones.
An interesting talk that gave me some perspective (not sjw, just someone's experiences): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FEeTLopLkEo
Edit: clarified second paragraph
What also definitely does not help are odd ideas about what kind of personality can enjoy tech work. The best predictor imo is willingness to solve puzzles and personality that likes to learn. Meanwhile, people use "playing action games or clash of clans" as proxy. When i was studying, dudes who spend all their time on irc or muds were seen as potential genius programmers, cause they spend all time with computer. Most of them could do only a bit of administration, but they acted confidently.
Different interest thing is cop out. Tech is not magic, interest in it develops exactly like interest in anything else - starting from litterature and art, continuing though biology to astronomy or sport.
Whenever topic came out, it was "women just have different brain and are not naturaly as good". And people truly believed that. So I am kinda glad for "actually women have same aptitude" change, but if you are convinced the child is incapable in x, child will grow less interested in it - even if it is a music.
Regarding the "just look at other cultures" point; that actually supports the different-interests hypothesis, because those other cultures are almost always those cultures with the least gender equality. The countries with the greatest score on the gender equity index have larger gender occupation gaps. The discrimination hypothesis actually fails to explain this, while the different interests hypothesis does a pretty good job.
Lastly, given that women achieved parity with men in law and medecine in the 80s and 90s (fields during a time that were far more hostile to women than now); women didn't need special programs, diversity officers, scouting programs, pipeline investment, etc, none of which are significantly helping tech now. The discrimination hypothesis fails to address this as well.
Hopefully this at least makes it clear that there are legitimate reasons to be skeptical of discrimination. At worst I'm simply wrong, not dishonest.
Sorry for typos, sending from phone.
I specifically presented a third hypothesis, that the primary driver is cultural (in the sense opposed to natural, not the "tech culture") i.e women having internalized since childhood "it's not for me", and men internalized "women have a different brain", like stated in the sibling comment. Different interests is not wrong but it's a symptom, same as discriminations exists but they are more of a symptom reinforcing the cause for me.
I don't think the different-interests hypothesis group is dishonest, my opinion is that they are wrong and that some might instead switch to "my culture and gender roles are fine, don't want to mix things up with feminized men and women having boy's center of interests etc..." (and that's often what comes out when I start digging when debating this topic). I disagree with this opinion but at leat it's debatable (vs some pseudo-scientific genetic predisposition).
Edit: for the other cultures point, I didn't say the gender equity was good, just that more women were interested tech in some.
I'll believe it when I see the admission statistics. Do they have gender segregated admission statistics for MIT? Anecdotally, I had a (male) friend in high school who was waitlisted with a 34, yet a girl in the same class with a 32 got in (no waitlist).
The difference between a 34 and a 32 on the ACT is the difference between the 99th percentile and the 98th percentile. This is well within the range of an individual's personal variation. A given ACT taker's score can vary by a couple points around their "true talent" based on short-term environmental factors (e.g. the quality of their pencils, the temperature of the room, their luck with guessing...) An admissions process that admitted a student with a 34 and not a student with a 32 would be deeply arbitrary. Which is why every college admissions officer I've ever spoken to has said they use standardized test scores as a rough initial screen and then never look at them again.
The relative qualification of students should be measured by their performance at the school, not by their standardized test scores.
It was a surprisingly noisy conversation involving far more angry young men than I expected.
Anyway if the subject comes up, I recommend pointing people to the ENIAC story. Women have been buried in most tech, and at least computing, history for much longer than the past 30 years.
The women in the following articles were practically unknown to history until the 1980s, even though they were involved in one of the monumental technical projects of the 20th century. For the period up until the discovery of their roles, the photos of them were thought to be "refrigerator models" showing off the machines:
https://iq.intel.com/how-female-eniac-programmers-pioneered-...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB848012407846877000
Of particular note is Betty Holberton:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Holberton
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/17/business/frances-e-holbert...
Furthermore, there's still only around 15% women in CS here. Less among faculty. And you respond with a critique of diversity to a story detailing the awful crap women have to face every day during their studies?
>Kieran Snyder interviewed over 700 women who left the tech industry. Almost all of them said that they enjoyed the work itself. It was the work environment that drove them out. And six out of seven have no plans to return.
During the two years at my previous job I didn't see many men who did like the job, but yet they stuck around for the pay. Women who didn't like the job just left for to pursue something with lower pay / something they liked.
Right, the study is useless if it doesn't say what they did instead - did they cross train and become successful lawyers, for example?
If you click through a couple of links to the Fortune article, it seems to say that most of them simply stopped working altogether. That's an option most people don't have. Presumably they had partners to support them, as you say.
As for the complaint about "3.2 Invisibility" ... welcome to the fact that it sucks to be male, too! It always annoys me when women somehow think that men magically get noticed without active efforts. That fact that you are invisible does not imply that everybody else is visible. Go talk to your introverted male friends and ask their opinion about the corporate environment. "Squeaky wheel gets the grease" is a saying for reason.
Maybe this should not be. However, if so, acknowledge that it should not be for both genders.
The primary thing that amazes me is that it really does seem that while institutional sexism does seem to have gone down, individual misbehavior seems to have gotten dramatically worse.
I just wanna give a bit of historical context when this was written, back then these were acceptable ads on magazines: http://cdn2.independent.ie/incoming/article30576661.ece/128f... http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/536a53836da8110b266... http://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/p5hte68.jpg
My work experiences were mostly positive. Where I experienced some of those things (like being unable to ask question without having to subsequently fight for control over my task, assumption that I will happily do all simple boring tasks and no interesting ones, etc - reasons why I hate agile setup basically), they take pleasure away from work big time and had me doubt choice of career at some moments.
The part about assuming girl is there to get husband is away entirely. I think it is much more ok for women to be aggressive now. People are less open about prejudice these days too.
Majority of male collegues is absolutely fine.
A lot of women still do this or are expected to do this. I'm not sure how many of them are going to MIT or enrolled in CS, but it's common for women to go to college with the expectation of finding and husband and being a house wife, or working a few years, then having kids and doing that.
Overwhelming majority don't assume that. Traditionalists I know complain about women not wanting to do that anymore.
I think my post was intrepreted as something that applies to a majority of women or that I think women should act a certain way. I was just saying that anecdoctally, the practice of going to college to find a husband is not dead.
So, unless you assume your classmates are in school just to find husbands and assume all girls are like your friends, the preferences of your friends are irrelevant.
I knew people who had trouble to keep up in school, because they came basically for party life and procrastinated too much. I don't assume all guys are like that. Similar thing (through being family oriented and willing to accept negatives of being at home is more noble I guess).
https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/10/how-harvey-mudd-transforme...