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> promotion candidates to comprise 30-50% women or other underrepresented groups

I think most tech companies would go into a full-blown panic if you imposed a quota of non-asians (who are something like 5% of the U.S. population) for technical positions.

> The legal profession is far ahead of STEM in addressing sexism. Many law firms have adopted the Mansfield Rule

But did they have this back in the 60's and 70's when representation started going up? What caused it back then, that didn't apply to engineering?

There have been decades of efforts at the various stages of the pipeline. In the 1960s and 1970s law schools started admitting gender balanced classes. In the 1970s and 1980s there was a series of lawsuits as a result of which law firms began to hire gender balanced classes of entry level lawyers. The Mansfield rule is now directed at addressing remaining disparities in the partner ranks.

> In the 1960s and 1970s law schools started admitting gender balanced classes.

Be specific, because this could mean different things. Were the genders balanced because the applicant pool itself had become balanced, or because law schools started enforcing balance in admission, or a mix of both?

> In the 1970s and 1980s there was a series of lawsuits as a result of which law firms began to hire gender balanced classes of entry level lawyers

And what were the graduate pools like at the time, re: gender balance? Do you have sources that talk about these points, because it sounds interesting.

Part of the issue for tech companies is that there are fewer women with CS degrees, something they don't directly control, and have only modest at best influence over. And then at the university level, they've had issues getting more women to sign up, though I understand some schools have had more success than others.

Your proposal is to force numeric parity through discrimination when women comprise 20% of the people entering the field? Of course people oppose this: it's blatant sexism, and it is illegal.

From quite long time ago women are accepted to universities. Yet to prove your point about "law being fixed long time ago" you refer to news from few months ago.

I didn’t say law was “fixed.” (To paraphrase Justice Ginsberg, law will be “fixed” when there are nine women on the Supreme Court.)

What I said was that recent progress is the result of work that started decades ago. Harvard law graduated its first women in 1953. But back then top women law graduates were still getting offers to be secretaries. (Justice Ginsberg’s story was not at all atypical for her cohort.) That, along with the prospect of joining a 90%+ male class in and of itself dissuaded women from pursing law. Law schools fixed that by making 50-50 classes an express goal, and then achieving that goal. Then law firms made 50-50 classes of incoming associates an express goal, and achieved that goal. Gender parity was achieved not simply by accepting women to law schools, but by actively seeking to admit gender balanced classes. But once that happened, the new ratio became self-perpetuating. When being a woman lawyer no longer meant being part of a tiny minority in law school, a firm, etc., women self-selected into it when previously they had opted out.

I strongly suspect the same factors are in play in STEM: women who would be good programmers self-select out of the field because they don’t want to be the 1-2 women in a class of 20 men, or the 1-2 women programmers on a team of 20 men.

My experience in school was more that the men in group projects would think that you were an idiot and you couldn’t find a team.

> (To paraphrase Justice Ginsberg, law will be “fixed” when there are nine women on the Supreme Court.)

Wait, what? Is this an argument that men are inherently unsuited to be Supreme Court Justices?

My guess is this means having 9 women on the Supreme Court is to make up for all the years there were 9 men on the Supreme Court.

I find this dangerous logic. Seeking to alternate oppression of one group versus another doesn't seem like a good long term solution, in my opinion.

By the way, thanks for your analysis about the progression of gender equality in the legal profession. That's something I didn't know about.

> My guess is this means having 9 women on the Supreme Court is to make up for all the years there were 9 men on the Supreme Court.

I took that to mean "just as it was unremarkable in the very recent past for the SC to be 100% male, it should be unremarkable if in the future it became 100% female (on merit)".

Well, it's doubtful it would be based completely on merit in either scenario.

> > (To paraphrase Justice Ginsberg, law will be “fixed” when there are nine women on the Supreme Court.)

> Wait, what? Is this an argument that men are inherently unsuited to be Supreme Court Justices?

It just means that if gender is not considered, we should see an all women's court once every 2^9 = 512 time.

If the number never goes above the mean, gender must still be a factor.

Interesting. I wonder if law vs CS makes much difference.

I do remember in my first CS class: about 70% of the men, and all but one or two women dropped the week after pointers were introduced.

My engineering university only started taking women in the 1970s. My mother could not attend as they did not accept women.