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> since 2019, there are apprenticeships that provide 2 days a week tutoring. before you had be of a certain company size to qualify for funding. However the battle is to get enough people to apply for the apprenticeships.

Right, you can't solve pipeline problems near the end of the pipeline. You have to provide robust support as far back as possible. Quotas are a lackluster response to outrage porn and a desire to implement quick fixes, when thoughtful, long term policy decisions are what provides the desired outcome (equitable power distribution).

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

I agree. These three points you raise are discussed at length in this blog post constructed around a letter written by Judge Flemming in 1969 which accurately predicted how a quota system, or using different standards for different groups, would result in these types of negative outcomes: https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/the-amazing-1969-prophecy-...

Undermining the credibility of existing, properly qualified players in the field is one of the most pernicious aspects of a quota system.

> 3) they don't fix the underlying issues

Quotas and affirmative action have worked successfully in other fields.

Law in the US was a hostile profession to women in the 1950s and 1960s. Ruth Bader Ginsburg (first in her class at Columbia) and Sandra Day O'Connor (third in her class at Stanford), for example, both had trouble finding work after graduation. The legal industry addressed sexism by making gender balance an explicit goal. Law schools admitted equal numbers of men and women; law firms hired equal numbers of male and female associates. Women now make up 36% of lawyers and the majority of law school graduates.

Do you have any information on firms and law schools having gender balance quotas? I did a quick search but didn't find anything.

AFAIK gender balance quotas are no longer in effect.

Gender ratios are widely tracked within the industry, though, e.g. (https://ylw.yale.edu/top-firms/). Also clients for legal services often have their own diversity requirements (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/02/business/dealbook/faceboo...).

If you're looking for a historical reference, (https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...) is 26 pages and covers the history of women in law from 1920 to 1970. Cynthia Epstein's Women in Law should cover this topic but I haven't yet read it.

Thanks for the references, but I didnt see anything about quotas for admissions and associates.

Setting hard quotas is pretty different than tracking diversity as a key performance metric

I haven't found any online sources that discuss them in detail; it's certainly possible that I'm mistaken about this.

UK society has decided that girls are not destined for IT and that needs to fucking stop.

Women outnumber men as graduates, in medicine, in law. What is the difference between those fields and IT?

Because it is perceived to be full of cash and everyone now wants a piece of the action

> Women outnumber men as graduates, in medicine, in law. What is the difference between those fields and IT?

I'm not sure about the UK but law and medicine in the US used affirmative action to address sexism in the profession.

There were class action lawsuits that required law firms, law schools, medical schools, and hospitals to accept women doctors and lawyers. After sexism was recognized as a problem law schools used affirmative action to admit gender-balanced classes and law firms hired equal numbers of men and women.

STEM subjects didn't have these interventions so it's unsurprising that sexism is more of an issue than in other fields.

> US used affirmative action to address sexism in the profession.

I'm not sure what changed, but its seen as something that a career minded middle class girl _should_ do. it certainly wasn't any sort of legal discrimination.

I'm not sure of the exact stats, but the slim majority of first year doctors in the UK are women

> What is the difference between those fields and IT?

Now this is the million dollar question. I don't have a succinct answer. I _suspect_ that a strong part of it is that IT is notorious for having handsy/abusive colleagues. but that cant be the entire reason, especially given Law's reputation.

> Women outnumber men as graduates, in medicine, in law. What is the difference between those fields and IT?

This is probably not the answer anyone wants... but in medicine and law, you need a university diploma, or it is illegal to do the job. So you can simply set quotas at schools, and thus shape the future workforce.

In IT, many people do not have formal education. So even if you would set 50% (or even 100%) quotas at schools, it wouldn't necessarily achieve the same change at workplace. I suppose people are aware of it, so they don't even try this way.

If you want to fix gender ratio in IT using the same strategy, the first step would be to make it illegal for people without diploma to program computers. Then you can restrict the number of men at workplace by limiting the diplomas.

Of course, if you would want to fix gender ratio in IT using a different strategy, you could e.g. listen to Damore and make overtime illegal, perhaps require companies to provide part-time jobs, and otherwise remove things that women actually try to avoid.

> I think it makes a better, stronger, more agile company.

Why do you think that? Do you have any evidence to back it up or is this just a feeling?

> UK society has decided that girls are not destined for IT and that needs to fucking stop.

Any evidence for this? Or just another feeling?

I've often wondered about this myself. I always see "diversity is a moral good" and "diversity is good for business" bundled together. What happens if we were to hypothetically discover unequivocally that more homogenous groups outperformed for diverse ones? Plenty of non-diverse societies are high-achieving (Japan, South Korea, Scandinavia. It always creeps me out when people try to couple morality with "and it's got a practical benefit too". The whole point of a moral is that you follow it because you do, not because you get some added reward.

If folks (and society as a whole) are going to push diversity, we should all be clear on whether this is a moral issue or a practical issue because the implications are very different and it dictates which one takes priority.

> Why do you think that? Do you have any evidence to back it up or is this just a feeling?

monocultures have explosive growth, but are vulnerable to the same threats, this means that one small change can bring a company to its knees. Its the same throughout nature.

> Any evidence for this? Or just another feeling?

https://www.bcs.org/more/about-us/press-office/press-release...

shows improvement, but its far from equitable

https://www.stemwomen.co.uk/blog/2021/01/women-in-stem-perce...

is for university, and shows a less rosy picture.

given the numbers, its pretty clear there is something significant stopping women studying computing. Given the attitudes, and general conditioning that programmers are male, I can see how it arises.

As a thought experiment, try this: imagine being a boy at 16 and standing up in front of class and saying that you want to be a nursery assistant. Its not going to end well.

Almost the same level of ridicule and "raised eyebrows" would be given to a "normal" girl at 14/15/16 standing up and saying that she was going to be a developer.

> given the numbers, its pretty clear there is something significant stopping women studying computing.

Or that they are free to do what they want and choose to do something else.

I strongly encourage you to expose yourself to people who are not like yourself. Especially women, because they are most unlike you. Believe it or not, vast swathes of the general public have no interest at all in computers or programming. And this is despite it having lower barrier to entry than other technology. The GNU project is coming up to 40 years old and today not only is there more free software than ever before, it's more easily available than ever before. There is a wealth of free training material out there ranging from excellent interactive tutorials for the latest frameworks to full University lecture series. Anyone who wants to do it can do it. But most don't because they are not like you!

> I strongly encourage you to expose yourself to people who are not like yourself.

I don't hang out with programmers. I live in a council estate in a rough part of london. I am fully aware of the world outside tech. Why? because I spend my time trying to unfuck what the council/government are doing to the people around me.

I'm going to level with you. why do I want more women in tech? two reasons:

1) I want my daughter to walk into my job and feel at home. I don't want her to be constantly creeped on like my colleagues are now. (or worse just being told they are wrong because they are different) I want them to feel comfortable like I do.

2) I worked at a number of companies where we had almost parity, it was wonderful. Its hard to describe what it was like, the only way I can think of is when your really loud tinnitus suddenly disappears.

> Anyone who wants to do it can do it

yeah nah.

I had to change my accent to get a job. Nobody hires a country bumpkin. I have coached a number of people, I know they are good programmers, excellent communicators, brilliant interviewers. They have been rejected for "culture fit" reasons, because they are brown, have a vagina, or worse still a long name.

At one company, my boss overruled my teams hire because they didn't find a candidate attractive enough. We lost a cheap and brilliant engineer because my boss was being a shit.

The last point is this: on the minimum wage, in rented accommodation, getting enough time, space and privacy to learn programming is a herculean task. especially if there only one TV, and you can't just shove your pi in at any time.

> UK society has decided that girls are not destined for IT and that needs to fucking stop.

That actually sounds universal.

I think a big part of choosing a career/education track is having role models. If there are no women now in tech, then girls will not be inspired. Imagine how many boys are inspired by Elon Musk to work on cars and rockets.

Quotas are not the end game. It can be seen as a necessary hack to kick start the process.

Nope. Girls have their role models. We've been pedalling the exaggerated truth of Ada Lovelace being the first programmer for decades. She even has a programming language named after her. Grace Hopper is pulled out at any opportunity.

Boys don't need role models. They don't do things "because Elon Musk is cool". You speak about things you really don't understand. Boys do things because they are driven to do them for seemingly no reason at all. Boys obsess over things. Taking things to sometimes absurd extremes. And they're not doing any of it because they want to be rich, or want women, or want to be Elon Musk. Trust me. I've spent all my evenings of the last month on my latest electronics project. Do you think I'm doing that just because Charles Babbage also had a penis?

>Do you think I'm doing that just because Charles Babbage also had a penis?

Lol. Well what I've noticed is that it is women who obsess over their gender, men far less so.

Freud got it right I think - penis envy is real!

> Boys don't need role models.

Boys are surrounded by role models in lots of areas in a way girls are not (and that was even more true a couple generations back.) They don't need any special effort to provide them because their social context is suffused with them, both real and fictional.

> Boys do things because they are driven to do them for seemingly no reason at all.

No, if you pay much attention to boys, there's plenty of direct inspiration from specific role models and images from their social context.

Boys do as they are taught.

its not role models, its expectations.

I as a man am not expected to become a carer. I am not expected to be a nurse. I am not expected to show emotion. I am expected to fight, talk through grunting and like sports.

Girls are taught to be girls, they must be nice, they must smile, they must care, they must be demure.

Now, this is automatic. You treat others how you see others being treated, unless you have reason to change your behavior.

> I've spent all my evenings of the last month on my latest electronics project. Do you think I'm doing that just because Charles Babbage also had a penis?

nope.

but, try this: obsess over caring for orphans, injured animals, restoring habitats, etc etc. Kinda naff right?

Its equally as hard as electronics, requires the same level of science. But its not done by boys because its "what girls do"

This comment is strange to me, since the women I've seen that do the best work, particularly my CS high school teacher, were as hard-nosed as any man in the field; e.g., they knew their stuff and didn't let anyone else tell them otherwise.

I don't think that sort of attitude comes from anywhere but the family unit. All this talk of orgs needing to cater to otherwise non-applicants and governments needing to intervene is just barking up the wrong tree.

I have explicitly argued against hard intervention by government.

I am not asking for state mandated _anything_ I am arguing for a societal change.

For example I'm asking for adults to stop telling my daughter that her mum isn't a doctor, that I am.

I want them to stop telling off my daughter when she says that I am the one that combs/washes/plaits her hair.

I want them to stop yanking soft toys from my son saying "only girls play with soft toys"

> All this talk of orgs needing to cater to otherwise non-applicants

Nothing I have suggested is this.

> I as a man am not expected to become a carer. I am not expected to be a nurse. I am not expected to show emotion. I am expected to fight, talk through grunting and like sports.

Guess what, I wasn't "expected" to become a programmer either. I was outcast and bullied in school for being a geek and a boffin. I still did it, though, because I don't give a toss what you or anyone else says I should do. I don't fight, nor do I like sports.

As for girls being taught to be nice etc., are you suggesting we teach them to be not nice? Or maybe you think they are all naturally unpleasant but they've been taught to have a nice façade? Personally I think girls who are nice are nice because they are nice. But that's just me.

Who says caring for orphans or injured animals is naff? You? Certainly not me. I honestly don't know a single person who thinks that.

You vastly overestimate the importance of nurture in all of this. Think about it: even if we assume boys and girls are treated differently, why is it that some boys grow up to be programmers while others grow up to wipe shit off toilets? They had exactly the same education. Exactly the same opportunities. Why would did one choose to earn a pittance wiping shit over earning loads sitting at a desk?

> They had exactly the same education. Exactly the same opportunities.

a working class boy has the same education and opportunities as a boy going to a boarding school?

At my school I was expected to become a builder, farm hand or similar. Its only because I had parents with enough time and education to _expect_ me to be different. My genetics are not superior, had I been adopted at 3 weeks and given to a posh couple, I'd have been a lawyer, or "business man". Had I been given to an inner city working class couple, most likely I'd be in jail now, knowing the shit I got up to as teenager.

> a working class boy has the same education and opportunities as a boy going to a boarding school?

I didn't say that, but even within the same school, people end up doing different things. I went to one of the worst schools in the country. When it was closed down the OFSTED report said it was in the "most deprived area in the country".

We could certainly talk about the differences in opportunities between being rich and being poor in this country. The class system is alive and well. No matter how hard I try I will never be part of the elite Oxbridge club in this country. And realistically speaking poor people can't become rich just by hard work. Being rich requires inheritance.

But that's a different issue. Rich people have just as many girls as boys. Rich girls have far more opportunities than poor boys, yet still we see more boys end up in tech than girls. You might say the same barriers exist throughout all layers of society, but then tell me why if I go on Github and pick any random project, it was in all likelihood written by a man? There are rich women out there with not a shred of responsibility and all the time in the world to dedicate to programming. But they don't. Because they don't want to.