If you don't want these "programs" to exist at the professional level, you have to go all the back to college and high school. You can only continue to treat symptoms through affirmative action, because that is the cycle we're stuck in. That is the disease you are identifying. People who are propped up by outside assistance will naturally continue to depend on those props and leech resources at a disproportionate rate.
When these props are removed, the whole thing comes crashing down and we'll be forced to face the reality that these issues can't be fixed from a top down approach. Hiring more women or minorities into tech won't trickle down into incentivizing more women/minorities to major in Computer Science. Accepting more women/minorities into CS programs won't encourage more women/minorities to become interested in nerdy stuff in high school.
The real disease is third party intervention. Thinking all the world's problems can be solved as long as it looks like somebody's doing something for a long enough period of time. All that does is allow under-qualified individuals to shit the pool for the demographic that they represent and reinforce negative perspectives until people who pay for productive work can't turn a blind eye and then get punched in the face I suppose.
Sure, we need to get more women into the pipeline. But we also need to not be pushing them out of the industry because they don't want to be groped, ignored, or otherwise disrespected.
In my experience, every woman I've worked with in tech has been above average or excellent. It's the men I've worked with who are much more variable in skill.
I heard a woman on this phenomenon in a podcast, saying that we'll know we actually reach gender parity when there are women working in tech who are below average in skill. And we're not there yet; women in tech tend to the exceptional. Women who stay are the ones who couldn't imagine doing something else because they're so good at tech.
it seems like diversity and inclusion are at odds. id like to feel okay with my unfasionable identity, too. highlighting how different i am from others helps to discourage inclusion by them-ing my peers.
The spirit is one where we're not living in a system that encourages to sub-consciously bias ourselves against others.
I'd like it if my friends didn't have to succeed in spite of all the time whereas I get a (pretty much) free ride.
We've heard the same arguments from white supremacists in 1991 when Christopher Hitchens graciously hosted John Metzger Jr. (and Sr!) on his show. It was the same line then that these wet alt-right nationalists are using today: pride, freedom of speech, censorship. It didn't work on his show then and I'm not going to be fooled by this petty idea that we need to include every voice in the discussion. That's not the case and we need to maintain an "us versus them" attitude when it comes to defending ourselves against such abhorrent ideology.
The problem is not unapproachable. It takes time to change hundreds of years of oppression and institutionalized behaviour.
It's not a very high ground. It's more like a sunny hill. I think you protest too much.
I'm just an average, under-achieving person who tries really hard like most people here.
In a word, the thing that tells me which ideas are worth debating and which to ignore? Ethics.
Immigration policy is already a hot topic for many reasons. There are reasonable positions to take on various questions. Should we increase the number of allowed refugees this year in order to meet our international disaster relief commitments? A reasonable position would be, "No, the recent economic downturn has forced us to cut funding to essential services that are already operating at peak capacity; allowing more refugees in might put them into more harms way as we struggle to find out what we can do with them." What about the question, should we incarcerate and mass-deport people of X ethnic minority because they're taking our jobs and using our under-funded healthcare system? That's not even a debate worth having: the question is based in nationalist protectionism and racist ideology. It is unethical.
How about the "all lives matter" debate? Bunk. The only reason to argue against BLM is to continue stealing the spotlight from a very noble and necessary cause.
Don't even get me started on the anti-feminist rhetoric of MRAs. "Debate," there is just a trollish tactic to harass people.
There isn't a leg to stand on for these ideologies and positions. They're ethically and morally reprehensible and completely unreasonable. There's no debate to be had. The people who insist on debating in favour of them do so without a credible argument or position. They only want to continue the "debate" to keep attention away from the real arguments. It's a waste of time.
The only reason the Metzger interview was interesting to me was as a demonstration of just how weak and pathetic these people are. There's no reason for anyone to take the Metzger's of the world seriously at all. Rather we should take the proliferation of their ideas seriously and should stamp them out everywhere we find them.
It's not like that at all. Ideologies exist on a spectrum. And there are some on the extreme ends that are so reprehensible that there's no good reason to find a way to include them in any reasonable dialog.
I don't care how hurt someone feels if they can't find a safe space to talk about their racist ideas. If you're a little racist on the inside, fine, just be uncomfortable and don't be racist on the outside. We're not here to police how people think but you better watch how you behave. I won't feel sorry for you if someone punches you in the face.
The real problem is that centuries of oppression have made sexism normal. It's part of the institution. It's invisible to most people. There isn't a clear label you can apply to people to sort out whose sexist. It's everywhere. How do you fight something like that?
I want it to be normal as hell to be a woman/person of colour/queer/etc-in-tech (and the rest of the world). I don't look at programs that give people recognition or assistance as a pity-party or somehow makes them less. I see it as evening the playing field... but it's only treating a symptom. The harder battle is curing the disease.