You've clearly missed the point. In an ideal world there would be no discrimination. My post was not even about how the system is biased against men, it was about how bias against men also exists.
It is extremely difficult to achieve a perfect balance of a 50/50 gender split in the industry. There isn't a 50/50 ratio in Computer Science/Engineering to begin with. If a company or manager tries to bring the ratio to 50/50 (like in my post), you are bound to hire people who are not a good fit simply because you eliminated a portion of the pool for no valid reason. Of course bad hires occur all the time, but trying to force a 50/50 split or a female majority when the supply is not there will only increase that chance.
Sexism against females in the industry is nothing to be laughed at. And the skewed gender ratio within the industry is also real. However, we cannot fix that ratio unless we increase the amount of female students in Computer Science/Engineering.
(Often in feminist spaces, when people talk about removing systematic disadvantages against women, someone'll suggest how it's really men that are disadvantaged now. This has morphed into a meme-like joke of "WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ!")
My son's elementary school appears to be hugely discriminatory towards men. Less than 10% of the teachers are male, all of the leadership at the school is female. Yet I don't see any gender equality organizations complaining about this very widespread reality.
Gloria Steinem always argued that gender equality would only be achieved when society believed women could do what men could do, and men could do what women could. The latter half of that statement offers zero political advantages for the women's studies faculty members which make up the cornerstone of the gender equality movement of this country, and therefore Gloria's full vision is ignored.
Girls have lower scores on math than boys. Explanation: There is something wrong wtih the way math is being taught.
Boys have lower scores on writing than girls. Explanation: Boys are naturally biologically inferior when it comes to processing language.
Boys have lower grades overall than girls. Explanation: Boys aren't as well behaved or attentive as girls.
If the situation were reversed, there would be conversations about how to redesign the school day to erase the overall grade gap between female and male students. But because the group in question isn't a classically oppressed category, the cause of failure is immediately considered to be an internal factor.
See my point? Within some of the social sciences, there is a very potent politically motivated push to search for only external, rather than internal, causes for issues within any group which is considered socially disadvantaged. Nobody has any doubt that Saudi Arabia's Wahabi influenced culture has major internal influences on undermining their economy, but if the same analysis is conducted on any disadvantaged cultural groups within a Western nation, the group conducting said analysis is shamed as being bigoted.
Except, well, often times equality / anti-sex-discrimination law does benefit men. It's now illegal for driving insurance companies to charge men more than women (even though they are statistically worse drivers) (in EU).
Additionally there are attempted to get more men into professions where they were traditionally underrepreseted.
So yes, equality and governmental agencies are complaining about the lack of men in some professions and trying to increase it. The photo on the NHS's "Nursing" career page ( http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/explore-by-career/nursing/ ) is a man. (The NHS is the UK's public sector health system and is one of the largest employers in the world.)
You do not appear to have done any research and are claiming that "no-one tackling the lack of men in some cases", when in fact, they are.
With your specific examples, you don't give any citations, so I wonder if you're cherry picking? Humanity is big and people will have lots of opinions. You're telling me that the most common response to lower grades for boys as opposed to boys is an appeal to biology? Got any citations?
I don't know about this VAW Act (seems to be US thing), the US isn't so great on the equality law anyway (since there is no legal maternity leave, marital status or sexuality isn't a protected ground etc.) If I were to talk about how China does voting, would that be a fair cop against democracy?
Incidentally this is why it's so important to point out instances of discrimination against men. There's alot of hostility to the idea and interests that want to perpetuate such sentiment.
Although there are cases where men are disadvantaged and victim of gender roles, often the "WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ" is exclaimed when ever anyone says anything about women being disadvantaged, comparing a molehill to a mountain.
That ~40,000 men kill themselves in U.S is not a molehill. That men are statistically more likely to get a much harsher prison sentence and are filling up the prison-industrial complex in record numbers is not a molehill. That men are on-course to be outpaced in college degrees 2:1 is not a molehill. As users of ycombinator we're most likely privileged men that have never experienced any of this. But don't be so self-absorbed to assume that your cushy life is representative of the average man.
Thats because it's true but it's also true of all positive discrimination. Sex, Age or Race should never really be a deciding factor when you're attempting to decide who to hire, but we live in a world where people are trying to right wrongs that potentially aren't wrong anymore, but definitely have been in the past and occasionally probably still are.
I read somewhere (I'm pretty sure it was the WSJ) that Woman doing the same job with the same experience level are paid, on average, 8% more than their male counterparts. This is while militant feminists are still screaming about the average or median wage gap of around 20% without taking into considering that woman don't typically do the same jobs as men nor work as many years.
If you really want an effort to balance the demographic, do it at school level. Open a few female only CS schools / degrees, let them have it and lets see if they really compete with men both in numbers and in skill. It may be they just need a better environment to learn, but I also wouldn't be surprised if in general woman simply aren't interested in the subject for the same reasons boys play with cars and girls play with dolls.
In reality woman often have better life choices than men. Many of them have life plans which consist of landing a man and choosing not to work. Others can choose to work in a male dominated field and will likely get preferential treatment with regards to education, recruitment and renumeration. There is no such efforts to even out historically woman centric jobs that I know of, so they likely win there too. That however doesn't mean there aren't problems with sexism in sausage factories and that it should be allowed but I know if I was running a company, my ethos on hiring would be to get the best person I can for the role and the rest of it hopefully wouldn't factor in.
I think most people have this figured out though and most people are reasonable enough not to listen to the nut cases on either side. For those who do, I'd rather not work with them anyway.
I read somewhere (I'm pretty sure it was the WSJ) that Woman doing the same job with the same experience level are paid, on average, 8% more than their male counterparts.
Interesting. Got a citation? That would of course be illegal. Equality law doesn't say "You can't pay women less than men", it says "You cannot pay people less based on their gender".
Similar laws have been used to require (in EU) that you cannot charge men more for driving insurance than women.
"Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's."
I'm not sure on the original source, but thats the WSJ sorta citing it. If it is true, I'm not sure it'd strictly be illegal but it does suggests that feminists who don't understand equality is about fairness rather then sameness may be pushing further than they should.
It's simple supply and demand. If a minority of the engineers graduating from college have a particular trait (e.g. blue eyes), then if Silicon Valley companies compete to have a 50/50 split of blue eyed engineers vs non-blue eyed engineers, they'll end up paying blue eyed engineers more for the same skill level. (Unless the skill distribution of blue eyed engineers is somehow skewed higher than non-blue eyed engineers.)
