Because the one aims to reduce an imbalance in the workforce, which leads to a particular section being under represented.

Thwe other aims to increase an imbalance in the workforce, which leads to a particular section being under represented.

Some people believe that discrimination on the basis of race/sex/etc is bad. By that standard, discrimination in favor of women is also bad.

Other people believe that imbalance is bad, and thus discrimination should be used to counteract this.

IMO people with the second opinion probably shouldn't call what they dislike "discrimination".

Presenting it as bad is simply, at worst: propaganda espoused by sheep and their shepherds, and at best: ignornace.

There has been a ton of research done on "Thing vs People" career interests, which show very clearly that men prefer working with Things, whereas Women prefer working with People.

(When I say prefer, I mean the average in a normal distribution)

Simply google: occupational interests people vs things

Ex1: "Men and Things, Women and People: A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Interests"

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...

Ex2: "Straight Talk About Sex Differences in Occupational Choices and Work-Family Tradeoffs"

"Sex differences in occupational interests have been known for decades, and a recent aggregate analysis of the interests of more than 500,000 people shows that some of these differences are quite large.1 The most relevant finding here is that about 15% of women have the same level of interest in engineering as the average man; 50% of men, by definition, would have stronger interests in engineering than the average man."

https://ifstudies.org/blog/straight-talk-about-sex-differenc...

Ex3: "Brainwash: The Gender Equality Paradox"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE

Is it only a question of sex-related disposition? If so, what has caused disposition to change so radically over the last 30 years?

And why, for example where over 50% of nurses men in the 1900s in the US, but it is now only around 7%? What caused men to apparently become so much less interested in people over the last 100 years, starting to become more interested in people again in the last 10?

The same thing with programming, women were dominant when it was mostly low level computations, but more and more men joined the field as computers grew more powerful and people saw the breadth of programs you could create. So the job changed, early it was more about maths and algorithms, and then we added more and more engineering tasks on top and people started to create huge programs which doesn't resemble math at all. So the gender balance of programmers shifted from the relatively equal applied math field to the extremely male dominated field of engineering. You can look it up, STEM without E has a very balanced gender ratio, while E tend to have above 80% men.

I can't justify for you your presupposition [nor demonstrate the existence of your chosen, yet unjustified presupposition given the evidence], you'll need to do that for yourself. Sounds like the news & entertainment media told you something repeatedly (without evidence), and you accepted it on its face without critical analysis.

Now, like many, when presented with evidence, you feel a sense of cognitive dissonance and would prefer to refute clear evidence rather than adjust your public opinion-- as to be expected given human nature of desire to save face.

However, what is apparently demonstrated in the studies is that the vast majority of individuals in a normal distribution favor a particular occupational set of interests based on gender: Men -> Things/Systems. Women -> People.

"The most relevant finding here is that about 15% of women have the same level of interest in engineering as the average (Read: 50% i.e. 50th percentile) man;"

"Straight Talk About Sex Differences in Occupational Choices and Work-Family Tradeoffs"

https://ifstudies.org/blog/straight-talk-about-sex-differenc...

But you're pointing out the imbalance yourself...

> The most relevant finding here is that about 15% of women have the same level of interest in engineering as the average.

But when presented with evidence, you feel a sense of cognitive dissonance and would prefer to simply presume some biological effect. Is there any evidence that this is a biological effect?

Your presumtion is that balance = men and women have the exact same interests and should therefore be represented exactly identically in occupations of things & people.

That is an irrational posture, foisted upon you by your media overlords, and accepted by you wholeheartedly without critical analysis.

I do not believe men and women are equal-- if they were, we wouldn't have two names for two genders in a dimorphic species.

If apples equal oranges, we wouldn't have two names for them.

I don't know what sort of mentality you live within, but it isn't a rational nor informed one, in my estimation.

Given the psychological science (again, many studies over the course of decades), and given the biological science (hormonal and brain differences between sexes), I think it is very clear: Women prefer working with people, men prefer working with things -- On average.

I don't think you understand how statistical distributions work. There are two distributions here: One for men, one for women.

They don't both fit onto the same normal distribution-- if they did, it would be bimodal, not normal.

Good lord, I see you're trying to argue against biological differences between men and women-- You must not be aware of hormone differences, which in fetal development, yield either a male or female.

OK, I am done talking with such a brainwashed person. Your ignorance does not offend me, I just think it's pointless to discuss this with an irrational person who prefers to block out the daylight of reality falling upon their presuppositions, and media-informed (not science-informed) perspective.

Besides, inclusive and diverse workforces have been repeatedly shown to be better for the bottom line because organizations are more able to serve a wider market when they are made up people more representative of the total market.

Revenue for the division I work in at my current employer exploded when we started hiring people outside of the traditional avenue for new hires. Until a couple of years ago we had been staffed by traditional government/military-focused scientists and engineers with narrowly-focused aerospace engineering backgrounds. Our customer base was 100% domestic government/military because that's who we knew and had relationships with. Outside consultants recommended non-"traditional" hires, and we followed their recommendations.

New hires in the environmental sciences (mainly women) and personnel with foreign language experience opened up market opportunities that we had been unable to see before and by diversifying our workforce we were able to diversify our customer base to include foreign environmental management organizations, agricultural, and natural resource-based markets.

My employer develops and sells a pretty unique Synthetic Aperture Radar system with capabilities not found in competing platforms. We had been trickling out systems to the Navy and Air Force on a onesy-twosy basis every year.

People with a diverse background said "hey we can sell this to oil and gas companies, departments of agriculture and environmental science all over the world, and we can work with all of these universities on terrestrial surveying projects and make more money".

And we did.

I imagine for mass-market consumer products and services the impact of understanding the needs of the market by having a workforce representative of the market as a whole would be even greater than what we experienced.

So when society changes the demographics we have to fire and hire the right amount? Sorry you're the best candidate we've ever interviewed but we have hired too many black men and are above our diversity quota.

> Besides, inclusive and diverse workforces have been repeatedly shown to be better for the bottom line because organizations are more able to serve a wider market when they are made up people more representative of the total market.

Is it the diversity of color or diversity of thought that is what drives a better bottom line? I'm gonna go on a hunch it's the diversity of thought that you're taking credit for.

But why?

I understand the point that diverse workforce leads to diverse ideas. But will fifty women per hundred employees produce five times more diverse ideas than, say, ten women?

Hiring women just for the sake of hiring women looks like a cargo cult.

The more honest, less PR answer is that people still discriminate on huge range of factors. Race and Gender are just the most obvious and egregious.

The post you're replying to specifically claims that it is to make employment more representative of the whole of society. Your statement that it's "hiring women just for the sake of hiring women" completely ignores the very words you're quoting.

Using a job board that explicitly discriminates based on a protected class is a very, very risky idea. If a member of the untargeted portion of the class (a male) sees a job ad there and is denied employment they have very good evidence for a sex discrimination lawsuit.

[1] https://content.next.westlaw.com/Document/Ibb0a38daef0511e28...

From what I get is that you are referring to woman as the poor, and man as the rich.

Just because it's a man dominated field, does it mean the others remaining have no chance to get anything in that field?

If so, do you suggest that one half of the world is not allowed to have these jobs at the same condition because some people already do, just because they have a male reproductive system? --- Meaning that all men are representative for all men, the same for women?

This is not equality.

Strictly my opinion: There are few women in software engineering because few women WANT to be in software engineering, period. ...and it's not a given that this is by definition a bad thing for them either.

Or at least arkward. When I started to study IT, I was surprised to see, that the stereotypes were the majority. Meaning, long, oily hair, etc.

So I guess that is still changing, and I really do not believe 50% women should be the goal, but maybe the IT world still needs reflection sometimes, why so little women want to get into it.

Not only is 85% a really large part of the majority of everyone employed, and a higher number than in the US, but for any male dominated sector there is a equal large female dominated one. In addition, the trend has been for the last 50 years of ever increasing gender segregation.

If sexist atmosphere is the culprit then the numbers makes no sense at all. People like to throw in the gender paradox, but that is more of an observation rather than explanation. If we go by the data the cause must be very fundamental, exist in practically all work places, and have equal force at both women and men.

I personally ascribe the phenomenon to a pretty old theory from the 1970. People feel slightly more confident and secure in a decision when they mimic decisions of people they identify with. From the first moment someone choose a education path, to succeeding and failing with exams, to applying for jobs, to succeeding and failing in the job, each time the benefit of feeling more confident and secure apply a small bias. You thus get a leaky pipe, and the more equality in choice people have in every step the higher the probability is that you end up with a gender segregated work place by the time people are in the mid 40s or 50s. If we wanted to prevent this we would need to raise confidence of any minority (gender, race, wealth, background, anything that people identify with) to be identical to the observed effect. In my view this is the primary reason mentor programs actually work, while looking at atmosphere (sensitivity training comes to mind) is unlikely to change the outcome.

Of note is that the percentage of open source programmers who are women is half that of the broader industry, despite open source programming generally involving less face-to-face interaction. Surely, if women were scared away by ugly creepy nerds, the safety from behind a screen and absence of compelled personal interaction would tend to bring them out? It would seem to be suggestive that far fewer women enjoy doing that sort of thing for fun.

Incidentally, we have a nursing shortage. The incidence of male nurses is similarly low to female programmers. I find it amusing that no one hand wrings about this, or would dare make comments like "maybe men don't want to be nurses because nurses are ugly".

I don't see at all how an environment full of unattractive and not well-socialized people create an environment that is in any way hostile to women.

But superficial people who, when female, will play the feminism card against people who happen to be unattractive and not well-socialized do create a hostile work environment for the latter group.

No. Genes play a role, but attractiveness is not so much about looks as it is about confidence and self esteem (and smell, of course).

I was considered very ugly in my youth. And yes, I compensated with computers. I did not got much experience with girls in teenage years.

Then I traveled, studied and grew in my mind and confidence.

And today, well, lets just say, sometimes I am still confused, when very attractive women flirt with me, as my old me would have considered them to be way out of league.

Now I know how to play the game, so to say, but in the beginning, I know I hurt quite some feelings and was probably considered arrogant, when I simply did not know how to respond.

So, I got out of the basement. But:

"I don't see at all how an environment full of unattractive and not well-socialized people create an environment that is in any way hostile to women."

many nerds never did. They long for women, but never learned the game and sometimes think, they are too ugly etc. bullshit.

So when you have lots of men with unfullfiled desires and weak confidence or knowledge regarding women ... then yes, they act awkward towards women. They would like to bond, but don't knowmhow and think they never can. So not hostile, but awkward, so quite some women feel uncomfortable and rather leave.

Now to be clear, no, not every IT nerd is like this. But too many. I was one of them once.

Exhibit A: Physical unattractiveness pairing off with acting like you're not unattractive, perhaps because of some misguided Disney-movie philosophy about how self-confidence makes you attractive. Somebody acting like Johnny Depp when they look like Patton Oswalt is pretty much the definition of creepy, while somebody acting like Patton Oswalt when they look like Patton Oswalt may be perfectly acceptable.

Exhibit B: Up until this point of the conversation, attractive/unattractive was in reference to the presence/absence of factors that make women uncomfortable when being around you, which does not really extend very far into the sexual realm. And all of a sudden you start talking about bonding, longing, unfulfilled desires, flirting, playing the game, hurt feelings, etc. That is precisely what women want men in the workplace to steer clear of, when they look like Patton Oswalt.

I rest my case.

It is even more creepy, when someone "acts" like looking good, when he actually believes inside, he does not.

But when someone believes he looks good and feels actually good in his body, no matter the weight fot example, then this person does look good. (to most people) But that does not mean, that suddenly everyone wants to have sex with him or her.

You seem to took the hollywood definition, that attractiveness is objectivly measurable on a linear scale. With sexiest woman toplist etc. That is bullshit. There are general things if course, like healthy body and mind, but attractiveness is highly subjectiv. Eastern areas for example love fat women. Weetern not so much (in general)

And I have seen really "ugly" men (by common standard) with very beautiful women in true love. Because the men had confidence amd strenght and knew is way around in this crazy world and the women loved that strength to feel save.

At university .. I got the impression that quite some people forgot that. Regulary. Also to wash clothes. There is a difference between unattractive and disgusting. And I love open source and fresh air. But I did not enjoy some linux convention for example, because I seemed to be the only one, who minded the bad, worn out air in the rooms. So all of this I find offputting, I suppose is putting of women as well. What is the problem with more hygiene and fresh air and more sensitivity?

And the number of male nurses is increasing.

Why? Complex, I guess. But also not too interesting to me. I am more interested in motivating people in IT towards a healthier live style in general.

Do you realize how this comment would come off if you were talking about women and judging them for their appearance when they went to school to study something utterly unrelated to appearance?

I believe body hygiene is wanted in all professions. (btw. my hair is long, too)

This is hilarious. I don't know if it is more insulting to nerds or to women, but I somehow like it.

Seriously, I don't even know how to begin here...

It's the concept that women have no agency. That other people are responsible for the choices of individual women.

Check out my other post on this thread-- I show three different investigations into the reality:

Regarding occupational interests:

Men prefer working with things, women prefer working with people

But if you want it explained, well above I just said, that many (not all!) IT nerds still fullfill the stereotype in my experience.

And the stereotype is unwashed nerds, who have never been close to a women in a way they wanted, but they want to, but don't know how. So they behave weird with women around.

That makes women uncomfortable and avoiding the scene. Not long hair.

I see what you mean, the real discrimination in tech is against well groomed people! So all the well groomed men and women get pushed out and are forced to study things like business, medicine or law instead!

How do we solve that? I know, we put up posters like "Deodorant is not a sin", have mandatory diversity training days teaching the nerds how to properly shave, and have recruiters float well groomed peoples applications to the top!

Hmm, this is a reason I never heard of. Honestly I haven't come across many men with long hair in 20 years.

Do you think this might be regional? Are there a lot of men with long hair in your area? Perhaps moving countries might help.

I was more speaking of things like body hygiene ...

well, stereotypes don't appear out of thin air.

but think about it : when you started to study IT, you had to enroll a few months before, right ? the 1B$ question is why, with the information you had you chose to enroll, while many women with the same information do not. If we don't solve this, there's no chance to get anywhere near 50% parity in the workplace.

Edit: citation https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/aug/10/how-the-tech...

The fact that data entry was a female dominated profession because women were pushed into it and men discouraged from it doesn't serve to prove that current women are not able to work in the field.

There was a time that nobody would have considered education peasants. It was not a conscious bias.

Times have changed and will continue to do so, we need to do what we can to correct the mistakes of the past.

Independent autonomous people making decisions about which field they would like to study and seek employment in is not a mistake that needs correcting.

In order to study CS at my school you had to take some fairly advanced Math classes including Calculus and Linear Algebra, which are not easy unless you are comfortable with Math.

My SO codes but hated anything girly from a very young age and was constantly told she wasn't acting ladylike.

Those experiences are from prior to encountering the effects from the rest of society. My SO was diagnosed with ASD as an adult but has had elevated testosterone levels found at a young age. So just personally it feels weird attributing those things to upbringing.

And Sweden where I am really shouldn't have as few women in tech as we do either if it was based on gender roles in upbringing.

I wish. I have a baby and the most important question is allways: a boy or a girl? (Not: healthy? Everything allright? Hard birth? (Yes, allmost, yes))

And clothes, very important the distinction between boy and girl. We got a lot of second hand clothing ... and people did not understand, that I really don't car about the color shades. They should be comfortable, good to the babyskin and fitting for the weather. And good looking, yeah, that comes afterwards. But underlining that it is a son? Why?

The reality is pretty much the opposite, with Eastern Europeans, Indians and Chinese being overrepresented in software engineering and higher degrees in STEM subjects.

Maybe women have less of a chance to get something in that field because employers are specifically excluding them from their job ad targeting?

For women as a whole it's another issue, but very few are going to learn an entirely new skillset just because they saw an ad.

I can't talk about everyone's experience, but this is true in a "We desperately want to have more women", but not true in the sense of "We're willing to address the systematic reasons women don't join our company". It doesn't matter how much you advertise on a website for women if you're advertising a job with no maternity benefits, or one of your engineers remarks "Oh! Is this our new HR lady?" when you're showing the prospective employee around the office.

As for men making condescending comments towards women, that's not a systematic problem with a systematic solution. And women (or really, feminists) pretty routinely make condescending comments towards men in my experience, at a much, much greater rate. The idea that women face a hostile work environment and men don't is the inversion of my own experience. Men face a much more hostile environment. The last thing the software industry needs is ramping up the hostility towards men even more because that's the only way feminists can think of to increase the number of female hires.

Now, I see the feminist movement in our industry definitely overshooting towards that other bad end, and it doesn't really matter that most women are reasonable - the mere possibility of chancing into someone unreasonable drives overly cautious behavior. There is such a thing as pushing too hard. Stirring a conflict of sexes may have been the fastest way to enact change, but the antagonistic atmosphere isn't going to just dissipate itself.

--

[0] - I mean the cases that make women uncomfortable; I've worked with women whose sexual innuendos during regular office chats made me uncomfortable.

[1] - Or, worst case, someone who does that on purpose, to advance their career at the expense of others. There's always a fraction of people of both genders ready to play dirty, but in current environment one of them is now armed with a superweapon.

> every male in the office becoming tense and extremely self-conscious in presence of their women co-workers, because of the perceived risk that they may be dealing with someone that gets easily offended about random things and is ready to create a stink with HR

Seems like things are setup to fail.

If discrimination is THE issue, then woman specific job ads also needs to be banned.

I suspect you probably know the reason (even if you disagree with it) and you're making a polemic point rather than genuinely asking this question.

If I'm mistaken then forgive me. In short - certain sectors have a very skewed gender bias and it's regarded as a good thing to try and correct for that.

However - the arguments for, against and for many points in between have been stated many times. Either you already are aware of them in which case you should be engaging with those rather than restating a starting position - or you can just do a Google search and get up to date with what is a fairly complex and nuanced topic.

The degree of “unfairness” is the same, but the goal isn’t “fairness” as such but rather equality. Whether we personally agree with forced equality or not is really beyond the point in a society that views inclusiveness as good and exclusion as bad.

I think I interpret "naturally so" as some biological argument, but even if it alludes to what society makes us do, I still think it is incorrect. The reason is that working at broculture dev shops killed my will to code, so I really think it's a question of how a vocal fraction those 95% men create a culture of exclusion.

Remember we are both talking about personal experiences here, I do not think that all workplaces that do not have women are broshops, nor do I have solutions for more women in CS. For me it has been a pleasure to work in places with a lot of women doing "things that are naturally ment for men", that's one of the reasons why I do not like the term "naturally".

So the conclusion we draw from that is ... women aren't as interested in money as men?

I've heard a number of other theories that also sound plausible, and they sound like problems that should be addressed.

Examples of other theories (not exhaustive): alienated by brogrammer/strutting/aggressive culture many places, discriminated against in hiring many places, harassed by some individuals, not trying due to belief that they'll be discriminated against, not trying due to belief that they'll face harassment or other hostile culture.

There are also, for whatever reason, differences of employee distribution across gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic, etc.

I think it's reasonable to suspect that tech organizations overall would tend to have different hiring practices, cultures, and distributions of individual behavior than organizations in other fields overall.

I don't know the research on this, but there's a lot of grassroots talk that they do.

First, we need to stem the losses of women in tech that happen due to the traditionally woman-hostile culture that has pervaded the industry for so long, and is only now beginning to recede. Women (and in fact all minority groups) get pushed out of the industry by hostile work environments. A specialized channel like this allows companies to say "We don't tolerate that, so come work for us." It allows them to tap a potentially huge labor force before it shrinks too much.

Second, markets like these offer a less stressful job search for marginalized groups, because they can have greater confidence that they won't get jerked around this time. It means that less women get so fed up that they quit, which means less time and effort is required to reach a critical mass where the momentum of women in tech begets more women in tech on its own.

This isn't about excluding men; it's about providing a more confidence-inducing hiring process for marginalized groups.