> I'm criticizing the part where you assume an indicator of progress (more women in CS courses) is unimportant or negative
That's not what I was doing, actually.
> I have not heard much about political or religious discrimination in the tech world.
I didn't say there was discrimination on those fronts, I said there was a lack of diversity.
> Think about how the current situation came about -- male-dominated cultures emerged at tech companies because the employees were almost all men. A workforce with a more balanced gender ratio would help bring about a more welcoming and equal culture, but since the culture discourages women from joining in the first place, it's necessary to have proactive measures to improve the balance. There are other factors in play, but it's really not too much more complicated than that.
Other factors... like gender roles, sexism, rape culture, inherently lower salaries, and every other form of discrimination against women? I guess it is easier to simplify everything into "there were more men than women, and so we should just add more women, which will make everything else okay" and ignore all the "other factors". But since it's all the "other factors" that led to this situation in the first place, perhaps they should be addressed, and not dismissed to make it easier for you to think about.
It's a complicated problem, and so people try to find simple solutions. But if the only thing you do is hire more women, the problem will not get solved. It will perhaps become a way to ignore the problem ("we have all these women in technology now! what gender stereotype?") or cover up the problem ("my best friend at work is a chick and loves making fun of women! what sexism?") or use the situation for more discrimination ("man, ever since all these women joined the job i can't get anything done"), etc. There are so, so many ways that things could get worse by ignoring the bigger picture and only focusing on job numbers.
There's a lot of discrimination out there. Try telling black people they need to wait until there are more women in IT. Try telling gay people that. Or try telling indian workers they need to wait until women get a higher salary before they're allowed to be paid the same wages as white people. These problems all need solutions, but they all have different origins. Just hiring an equal amount of all kinds of people would still leave institutionalized racism, sexism, and all other kinds of isms, because all the origins of the problems would still exist in the culture.
> This, to me, epitomizes what I find so very wrong with your attitude, which screams "keep women out for their own good, because we're too hopelessly misogynistic to create a good culture for them."
You have it backwards. I was saying that because we're (currently) hopelessly misogynistic (amongst other things), we are keeping women out, and we should fix the former to help fix the latter. Did I at any time advocate keeping women out of a job? If that's what you read, you were only interpreting what you wanted to. We're trying to accomplish the same thing and you're making me out to be an oppressor.
I want everybody to have a job, and I want nobody to be discriminated against. So I want all people to have an equal opportunity in all fields. But are HR departments going to start hiring exactly equal quotients of every single kind of background? Fuck no, that would make no sense... Even if you could find an female irish black gay republican and a male asian transgender hindutva and a russian cis male muslim, you're probably not going to find enough of all these people to hire exactly proportional to make sure everyone is represented.
Now, if you want to make sure there are more women (or any kind of person) to hire from, you get more of them interested in school and a career. And how do you accomplish that? By reducing the sexism and gender bias from video games, television, movies, computer labs/irc/forums, and challenge both boys and girls to rethink how they relate to one another so that they don't polarize on socialization or special interests. If you think just hiring more people today will accomplish that, I disagree.