Ah yes the old and tired argument comes out again. Since there are 50% men and 50% women in the world why doesn't tech look the same?
Cool opinion though...it's so 2015. Almost vintage! I particularly enjoyed the part where you imply it's a bad thing. Why don't we hear about that with welding, house building, firefighting, policing, the military, or any other male dominated field Dr. Inclusion?
For example, the United States Marine Corps is slowly integrating some basic training and has a few co-ed companies [1]. This was such a far-fetched idea in the 90s that Ridley Scott made a movie about it starring Demi Moore (G.I. Jane, 1997).
Firefighting is another excellent example [2]. 7-11% of firefighters in the United States are women (depending on how volunteer vs. career firefighters are counted). I remember that statistic because StackOverflow's female respondent rate hovers around ~5%. "Women are more likely to run into burning buildings than what I'm doing now" is the kind of gallows humor that gets me through the day.
There are also advocacy groups for other gender/work minority combinations, like male nurses and caretakers.
[1] https://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Portals/61/Docs/FOIA/Reading-Ro...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_firefighting
Edited: typos
Personally I don't care as long as any prospective firefighters can quickly carry a 200 pound unconscious person out of a burning building. For some reason, I suspect that pool of qualified candidates skews male.
And... if you were following any of those fields, you'd find gender inclusion is also an issue. Tech definitely gets more attention in a tech centric forum like HN, and usually (because $$) gets more attention from the general interest press, but the issues are everywhere, with fairly similar discussions.
Your take, is a bad take. Things are civil. They don't also need to look like two robots talking to an oven.
This whole endeavour to have equal representation of all genders in all aspects of life completely misses the mark that career choices and most life decisions are rooted in personal preferences and interests, and that on a fundamental level males and females (and other genders as well, I suppose) are different. And this is OK.
Not only that, but it doesn't address the main issues of discrimination and wage gap, but pretends it will somehow fix itself if we maintain a perfect balance of gender representation.
And why stop there? Why focus on gender and race only? Shouldn't we also have equal representation of all nationalities, religions, hair colors, eye colors, and whatever other human criteria?
The entire DEI trend is absurd, and ironically only serves to further divide us into arbitrary buckets.
Women are perhaps the closest distant group that gets undeserved presuppositions thinly-veiled and anecdotal pseudoscience.
The point is that most non-labor intensive jobs don't have such a hard gender preference. Without the loss of generality, my family tree of Soviet citizens were able to be chemists, engineers, doctors, and now software devs just fine. I fail to recognise what IT or playing chess is different to warrant such a huge discrepancy, something doesn't add up.
The fact that discriminating is short-sighted when it come to employment tells me of a deprecated conceptual model that I doubt can truly be resolved through fixing IT alone,
to be blunt, the problem is old because the actions are ineffective.
I would guess that you don’t hear it because you don't pay attention to news concerning those domains, at least as it relates to gender inclusion, as gender inclusion is an active issue in each of them.
https://www.yourcentralvalley.com/news/education/education-m...
https://www.achrnews.com/articles/147486-welcome-women-into-...
https://www.hsaj.org/articles/21721
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/public-safety-car...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/21/hire-fema...
https://www.lexipol.com/resources/blog/police-culture-and-wo...
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2023/01/military-must-recr...
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2022/12/19/...
What do you mean? It basically hasn't changed at all, the only thing that changed was the messaging but not anything significant. The ratio of women in engineering related fields like programming has been pretty steady the past 30 years.
Well uh, isn’t this the reason why this exists in the first place? We are on the subdomain of a startup accelerator.
I don’t like with most of them either, especially those that loudly complain about not being able to legally siphon my data without my consent because of the GDPR.
But we are on their turf after all.