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Comment by mberning | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that having significantly more male than female engineers is regarded as problem that needs to be proactively 'fixed'. There are a vast number of occupations where the gender ratio is skewed one way or the other. The tech industry seems to be obsessively fixated on an issue that doesn't seem to bother most other professions where such a disparity exists.

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I imagine that, being steeped in the tech industry, you pay much more to our conversations than those of other industries. I would be hard-pressed to believe that other male-dominated or gender-skewed don't also think about these sorts of issues. Perhaps they just have other forums (like, say, Forbes magazine [1] or academic/industry journals [2]) to discuss them.

1: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0316/072_terminated_women.... 2: http://folk.uio.no/olegmo/Men%20in%20Nursing/Evans%20J%20199...

I didn't say there were none. I said most. Call me up when the trade organizations for construction, road work, plumbing, etc. have this as a topic of discussion on an almost weekly basis. Doesn't happen. Not to the extent it does with the tech industry.

My own personal theory, which is completely unsupported by anything other than my own experience and bias, is that it is a particular manifestation of the 'white knight' behavior that is so common among my peers.

Again, I am not saying that it is not a real issue, or that it is not worth discussing. I'm just pointing out that the tech industry has an unusual level of fixation on this issue.

You might want to read what you are linking to.

At the heart of this gender dynamic is the need to separate the masculine from the lesser valued feminine. Male nurses do this by employing strategies that allow them to distance themselves from female colleagues and the quintessential feminine image of nursing itself, as a prerequisite to elevating their own prestige and power.

Now spin that into computer science and female and post it here. The fire will reach sky-high.

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