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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

Politics, statistics and stereotypes have a reality.

Sometimes you don't want to be politically correct, and you go along with what things actually are, what people want and what is already working. A company is not there to solve stereotypes.

Just look at the proportion of women who can read code, or are actually interested in dealing with code. That's an issue. Same thing goes for people who do construction work, miners, the military, etc.

I totally admit that it's a cynical opinion. There's are a lot of things civilization can do to define what humans do and how they behave. Gender might have deep implications, that cannot be changed by civilization and principles of equality.

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> A company is not there to solve stereotypes.

That ties into the question if companies should have a responsibility to society or just be a vehicle to make money. Opinions differ on this.

(Legality is another topic, but for the sake of this thread I propose to assume that this behavior is legal)

"for the sake of this thread I propose to assume that this behavior is legal" - it's not, in USA it's illegal to discriminate genders and some other groups in certain types of advertising (jobs and IIRC housing).

For the sake of the thread, you could read the article or have some awareness of the topic instead of assuming.

> “The ads themselves are illegal,” Galen Sherwin, an ACLU lawyer, said. “It’s been established for five decades.”

>Sometimes you don't want to be politically correct, and you go along with what things actually are, what people want and what is already working. A company is not there to solve stereotypes.

And that is why we have anti-descriminatory legislation.

Even if there are differences, generalizations will overemphisize them. Minorities are overlooked and you cater to the lowest common denominator. It's easier to sell people a conforming stereotype then to provide a diversity of options. It's cheaper to exclude by category, but it is deeply unfair to everyone for whom it doesn't apply, and even if in mant important ways you are fairly normal and benefit from it, most people are in some kind of minority.

"Sometimes you don't want to be politically correct, and you go along with what things actually are, what people want and what is already working. A company is not there to solve stereotypes."

And sometimes you'll only trust a man for the job for no good reason.

Programming was a women's job, almost exclusively, until the last half century when it became a hobby and a lucrative profession. Men pushed the women out on both fronts.

You are no Grace Hopper, and you are in no position to tell women what they can't do.

Care to show actual statistics about this, I'm genuinely curious.

> You are no Grace Hopper, and you are in no position to tell women what they can't do.

I'm not telling anyone what to do, but it's hard to unroot stereotypes and even more difficult to go against our natural behaviors. If minorities are complexed because they're in smaller number, what is there to do?

I would like to tell young women to enroll in computer science curriculum though. Is that a good advice?

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