Except in cases of extreme naivety, it's a challenge, or worse, a roadblock, posed to force a reexamination of the underlying assumption.
In this case, the underlying assumption is that the field of web development would be enhanced by a more equal ratio of women to men.
Your "why?" implies a host of reasons, bounded only by imagination, why this might not be the case — why we might be better off leaving this to the men — but luckily, you don't have to actually voice any of them.
So no, it isn't a serious question, and doesn't deserve a serious response here.
I asked my question crisply and respectfully, taking the pro-diversity folks as serious and being people of goodwill.
I think it's disrespectful of you, not to mention logically deficient, to immediately start your attack by asserting that my question was not intended in good faith.
If you can't muster up a simple, respectful response to a simple respectful question, it doesn't speak well of your self examination on this topic.
You seem to be saying the reasons behind having a 1:1 ratio are self-evident. And not saying that nicely.
People who work professionally in STEM fields in the US tend to be straight white males. This is okay, so long as the reason for the disparity is not that the culture in these fields tends to disparage members of the community who don't fit this profile. If we agree that women and men are roughly equally qualified when it comes to development, then the disparity in terms of participation is worth being investigated. This sort of statement (1:1 ratio) implies equality which will hopefully resonate with the community and ultimately tend towards a zeitgeist wherein people--regardless of gender or any other irrelevant criteria--are welcomed based on their merit.
Take a look biology. Back in the late 1990s, the majority of biology graduate students were female. When I was in industry, the number of females working on biology was also very close to 50%.
So why have women felt comfortable entering the field of biology when it used to be dominated by males?
There are lessons to be learned here.
I don't know about the US but in Europe this is not true. There are quite a few gay males (5% to 10% which is what you'd expect) in the courses that I took in maths, physics and computer science, and there are a lot of women in fields like biology. The number of women in mathematics and physics is also higher than in computer science, although still less than 50%.
As you said, the problem is that women are discriminated against in the industry. I don't think attracting more women will necessarily solve that problem. The problem is with the attitude of many of the men. Attracting more women might even make it worse. Men might start resenting them.
Fixing the attitude problem might attract more women--or it might not.
This is a good example of why I think "diversity" initiatives are missing the point. The point isn't to have equal proportions of races/sexes/nationalities/etc., the point is to ensure that they are all treated equally and justly. Many diversity movements do the exact opposite and treat people differently based on their sex or skin color. I think this is unjust and can often make problems worse, not better.
Back to the topic: I love the welcoming attitude, though. The intention is good, if a bit misguided. If more men adopted the same attitude as Dev Bootcamp, "Women, we value your contributions and will treat you as equals," then the problem would be solved.
> This is a good example of why I think "diversity" initiatives are missing the point. The point isn't to have equal proportions of races/sexes/nationalities/etc., the point is to ensure that they are all treated equally and justly. Many diversity movements do the exact opposite and treat people differently based on their sex or skin color. I think this is unjust and can often make problems worse, not better.
To begin with, the people who are underrepresented in tech are already treated differently on the basis of gender, race, etc. Knowing that and aiming to make sure that you include those people at some ratio isn't unjust. In the case of dev bootcamp chicago, they knew it would be easy to sell seats to the wider dev community that consists mostly of men, so they made a conscious effort to get the word out in spaces that inhabited mostly by women before going to their usual sources. That is most certainly fair considering that had they not done so, it was likely that men would greatly outnumber the amount of women attending.
The status quo is what's unjust. Do you agree? If so, how can correcting for that be unjust?
I disagree. Discrimination is not always unjust depending on the motivation and the outcomes of it. If the motivation is to correct for existing systemic discrimination, and if it is successful in doing so, I do not see the injustice.
I can see both sides of that. But ideally, you want to fix the systemic issue not just try to correct for it, because your correction is almost guaranteed to add more unfairness to the system not reduce it.
Web development is a profession, not (just) a hobby, and if women move away from it just due to the fact it's already a high ratio of males then it's a problem
I’d bet there is at least a small group of automotive mechanics that are interested in increasing diversity in their field.
A lot of industries that have issues attracting certain kinds of people don't have explicitly diversity goals as a part of their makeup. But that doesn't mean that people aren't trying to break into those industries and have a career there.
Keep in mind that the kind of work you do isn't just influenced by your hobbies and likes, but also by what is considered acceptable for a certain person based on gender/race/etc., stereotypes about kinds of work, and classism (among other things).
Then perhaps it is society that needs changing. But from the inside out. This patching from the outside in is never going to significantly affect the roots of the problem.
Further, women in technology and leadership positions has been correlated with business success: http://reclaimingleadership.com/why-you-need-women-leading-i...
As an example, I can tell you, I go to a lot of startup events and they are often centered around activities like ping pong or beer drinking. I know many women interested in entrepreneurship and try to get them to go with me, but they tell me they don't like ping pong or would feel uncomfortable. And, at the events themselves, there are typically only one or two women who actually came.
Changing the ratio would involve creating an atmosphere that would encourage women who already have an interest to act on it and thus be better represented.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177994
1. "Even science recognizes that diversity is important: research from both the Kellogg and Sloan Schools suggest that cognitively diverse teams perform better on hard problems."
2. "Beyond that, though, hiring for diversity will set up better recruiting opportunities. Consider Harvard’s graduating computer science class: forty-one percent of the students are women, and an inability to hire talented females will start to significantly impact your ability to recruit altogether."
3. "A number of studies, like one from CMU, have shown that people perform better in math and sciences if fifty percent of the participants are women, so gender distribution was a key metric in future Hacker School classes."
Citation required.
Positive stereotypes like this create just as hostile a work environment as negative ones.
The author cites several studies to back up those assertions. Agreed on the positive stereotype bit, though--I think people rely far too much on anecdotal evidence simply because the way that people talk is difficult to distill and quantify.
In the US, more degree earners are women now than men, so that is one large untapped talent pool for the tech industry. We ignore it to our detriment.
Not in STEM, which constitutes the vast majority of the degrees relevant to Tech/IT.
That's an assumption. We don't know. :-)
I don't know that future neuroscience is going agree with that statement. The male and female brain do differ on average, and it would seem that these differences may be related to the types of thinking that STEM encourages. Math maybe not so much, but engineering? Maybe. We don't know for sure yet. A lot of people love to think that there's no difference between men an women, but science chips away at that idealism every decade.
But there's no reason to treat men or women any differently with regards to STEM, true. We just have to remember that there may be some base-level biological self-filtering that happens. And if it does, that's OK.
Why?
That's a serious question.
My hobbies include writing, blacksmithing, cooking, and ceramics.
In writing, around half the people are women.
In blacksmithing perhaps 3% are women.
In cooking probably 90% of the blogs I read and people who take classes are women.
In ceramics it's again 90% female.
I have absolutely no desire to increase the percentage of women blacksmiths...and I have absolutely no desire to decrease the percentage of women pot throwers.
Why should I want to change these?
Why do you want to change the ratio in web development?