There is no quantification (or even validation really) of the supposed discrimination. People don't look bother trying to figure out what actions would make the scale equal. They are completely concentrated on moving the scale in one direction only and never check the balancing.
People must believe that there is discrimination is always so severe that any necessary evil used to balance it out is justified.
Not necessarily, I see 2 opinions on how to fix this :
- An "active integration" like you explain, where the differences are highlighted (what we mostly see in the US). The idea is that by forcing the change we'll get used to it.
- A post-racial/genre approach, where the differences are made as irrelevant as any physical trait, so the change comes naturally but it's a long process (what I've mostly seen in France)
IMHO the first approach may yield faster results, but only the second can solve cultural issues (in part by blurring and mixing the cultures, instead of crystallizing them)
I also think it's morally reprehensible to just sit back and accept generations of people who don't have the chances others do.
I grew up (in the US) thinking that my generation (I'm a very early "millennial", apparently—the kind that well remembers a pre-Web world and grew up with a lot of Gen X media) pretty much had this down, and that especially the tech people did. The Internet of the hacker world wasn't supposed to care about this stuff, just results and ability.
Now everyone seems more divided over sex than it did then. Hell, sexual orientations of all sorts and interracial relationships (anyone else remember those "look who's coming to dinner" episodes of daytime talk shows in the 90s?) and such, which were all still very much issues to the adult public when I was growing up, really do seem to be disappearing as Things To Be Upset About (I know, bathroom bills and not counting your chickens and so on, but the progress there seems huge and very real), but the regular ol' divide between men and women? It seems to be way worse than it was.
I'm not sure what happened, but this certainly wasn't something I expected to be a major problem for adults of Gen X/Millennial generations. And I was raised in the Midwest and surrounded by Republicans (including my parents), so it's not like I grew up in a liberal bubble or something. The last decade or so's "culture war"-type battles in online communities, all the reports of significant difficulties for women in technology, and so on, have caught me very much by surprise.
Also, you editorialized a lot in your description of "active integration".
Sorry for the edits, I'm not a good english speaker and the tone wasn't right.
The reality is that integration follows a similar pattern - bigger cities mean better integration. Find a vote map and you've basically got a map of how good integration is.
Yes, of course in an ideal world these things would be non-issues, but they aren't. People are discriminated against, and there are barriers from culture that won't change without intentional scruity.
Of course, everyone should be able to just do their job and no more. If you aren't interested in being a role model or trying to push for that equality, that's absolutely fine, no one is obligated to do so. Some people do, however, and they will be trying to find others that do, I don't think that's unreasonable.
If, for example, women are routinely excluded from male-dominated clubs, for example, maybe they never get an interest in programming. While in an ideal world everyone can attend those clubs and it doesn't matter, if that's not the reality because of societal expectation, until that expectation has changed, maybe girl's clubs allow girls to get involved without fear of the societal stigma of doing "boys things" (if they don't happen to be one of the IDGAF people who do it anyway), resulting in more women in tech, which normalises it, eventually removing the need for girl's specific clubs.
This isn't exactly a new idea. It's the same idea behind things like women's-only chess - if the culture has excluded a group for a long time, it can be hard for talented individuals to get started because they get excluded inherently. If you can create a separate culture to get them interested, then merge the cultures over time, you can fix that.
To me, saying "we should just have everyone together" is like proclaiming racism was done the day slavery was abolished. Things don't magically get fixed culturally and socially - that takes an integration.