So the social trend has abated. Maybe? Let's just assume it has for the sake of argument. That hardly makes the platform "dead." It's earning more money now than it ever did.
I developed cross-platform simulator software back in 2008. One of our platforms was SPARC. Still used heavily at the time. They tried to replace them with SGI Itanium servers and we know how that turned out.
Just a Sunday project but there’s a limited release product dropping in October. One of the online retailers uses Shopify, so I wrote a bot to alert me when it comes in stock.
This is not surprising to me. There is so much effort and funding put into funneling girls into STEM there is not much leftover to help boys do anything. These things shouldn't be zero sum, but that's the unfortunate reality on the ground in some cases.
> These things shouldn't be zero sum, but that's the unfortunate reality on the ground in some cases.
A lot more things are zero-sum than not, especially in the short-term, which the US revels in running on (e.g. the next annual report, the next election cycle, the next super bowl. Everyone is obsessed with the short term) - land, job vacancies, potential dating mates, etc.
I'm not sure why this trope still hasn't died yet. I guess a whole generation made their careers during ZIRP era, so their worldview is extremely skewed.
> there is not much leftover to help boys do anything.
As someone that competed in FRC for all of high school, I don't understand how an informed person could come to this conclusion unless they are trolling. STEM classes and extracurriculars are veritable boys clubs - go look up the team composites for your school's local robotics club and count the ratio yourself. It's a blowout, and while marketing STEM to young women can end up ham-fisted (as it so often is for young men), motivating girls isn't taking any opportunities away from boys.
You are either misinformed or arguing in bad faith. Boys that want to participate in STEM aren't any more impeded today than they were prior.
I spent every week of my college career wishing I could be so privileged as to be a woman in STEM. They are preferenced in literally every single thing that involves a selection, and on top of that they get access to tens of thousands of dollars of financial aid only available to women. There are sparse few (read:none) equivalents for young men.
Not three days ago I was four feet from the woman that runs my entire division at a large financial institution, who complained that there were far too many men in our SOC last time she was there. This time she was quite chuffed that we had hired two more ladies - after silently changing our hiring criteria to filter out any men.
I don't think it's possible for the younger generation to appreciate how much better it is for boys in STEM today than it used to be.
Missing in this discussion is what it meant to be a boy interested in STEM socially.
It's cool to be an engineer today. It pays very well, it's easy to make friends, find a mate, etc.
Those of us who grew up as nerdy kids in the 1980s dealt with the kind of bullying and social ostracism that future generations cannot even imagine.
Are boys being downplayed in favor of girls for advancement opportunities? Maybe. But you still have it MUCH MUCH better in a holistic sense than we did, to a degree you'll never know.
I really don't want to do the "you don't get it old man" thing, but this post screams out of touch. There is 60 years of affirmative action bureaucracy set up to disadvantage me, and the momentum of that machinery only gets faster despite everything I could put up against it. Every guy my age I speak to knows this, liberal or conservative, and most just choose to not think about it because its seriously depressing to realize. We were brought up on the promise of a world that saw you as an individual, not as a skin color or sex, and we met that world with a hand put out in friendship. We were clearly lied to like some kind of sick joke, because that hand was rejected with uproarious laughter.
I think you're confusing the root cause. I grew up as a boy interested in STEM in the 1980s attending regular public schools and was never significantly bullied. Not to excuse bullying in any way but it's usually triggered more by personality and social skills issues than by interest in any particular topic.
You might want to get some therapy for your anger issues.
Also did FRC in HS. It's much more complicated than that. The high achieving boys did FRC and were wildly over-represented, but for every one of them there were five or six boys who just kind of...existed.
We have a real problem here but nobody wants to acknowledge it because the optics given the past couple decades of social progress are uncomfortable. There's nothing wrong with wanting to provide opportunities specifically for under performing young men even if it feels icky. We just need to be intelligent about it.
So... do we train them to work factory jobs in Mexico? I just don't understand what an equitable solution looks like, if you perceive this as a specifically-male epidemic. It seems infinitely more likely to me that people are self-selecting for what they are capable of, or hindered by things like a rough family life or low-paying service job. You're not going to create special opportunities for these people that aren't grossly unfair or outright unhelpful.
I agree that there is an intelligent solution here, but I don't understand why it necessitates scale-tipping because some men are less successful than others. There will always be a 75th percentile.
It's a bit of a weird situation and there isn't an easy answer yet, but it's something that at a minimum bears garnering some research money. If the trend continues and it ends up that being a woman means you're significantly more likely to have career success across the bell curve then yeah, we'll probably need support programs for men just like we had for women in the decades prior.
I have theories about the underlying issues though and I suspect you do too. It's less of an opportunity issue and more of a culture one. Women are being taught they need to fight and men are being taught they need to just exist. So they're doing just that.
Given the salary disparity between men and women and the discrepancies between those of men and women holding positions of importance, I would say “just existing” is a perfectly way for guys to be. Not everyone can be the top and that’s totally fine. You can still do pretty nicely for yourself and your fam by “just existing.”
> Boys that want to participate in STEM aren't any more impeded today than they were prior.
You're making my point for me. This is the line that was said about girls 30 years ago. They were not impeded from entering STEM either, but they also weren't encouraged like the boys were at the time. Boys are no longer encouraged or nurtured to do anything by our public schools (STEM or otherwise). The lucky ones have examples in their lives they can model after.
Boys don't need to be told by their school what their aptitude is, and neither do women. Getting women into STEM isn't about diverting potential dentists and heart surgeons to be white-collar desk jockeys - it's about stopping them from the same fate you're so afraid of men ending up at!
Dentists and heart surgeons are still STEM. The S stands for science, guy.
As for the "fate" you're fearmongering about for women, what is that to you? I'm not worried about men staying home to raise children. Hurray for anyone that can do that in this economy. I'm worried about men rotting away on drugs, committing crime, and ending up dead or in prison.
You acknowledge that girls need encouragement but think boys will just "figure it out." It's you who must be trolling.
That’s not really what’s at stake here though is it. it would take a HUGE structural shift for men to go from “less actively recruited to be in STEM than before” to “being in jail and on drugs.”
How recent? I experienced stuff like that from an all female teaching staff around ~20 years ago but I have no idea what it looks like now.
I wanted to learn more about computers but the staff that were savvy were much more excited about teaching the girls, they rightly figured I'd have no trouble exploring that interest. At the time it was fine if mildly frustrating, now I'd be pretty worried about such behavior.
Nowadays? It's so bad and cringeworthy that my young sons picked up on the STEM girlie nonsense and are actively rebelling against it and running with whatever they have. Leaving the coddled scrubs behind.
You think encouraging more people to become more interested in jobs that are essentially the future of civilization is “nonsense”? Don’t you think that’s odd?
Narrative shaping has become big business globally. That's why Reddit wants to force paying $30k/yr for their API. Twitter/X is doing the same thing for the same reason.
