Re:That Amanda Blum Article on Adria Richards is Not What It...
by MetaCosm on Sunday March 24, 2013 @07:17PM
(#5434288)
Also, it is chicken and egg. You need a pool of qualified people to pick from to promote the best. If only 20% of your workforce is women, the chance of the "best" person coming from that class is obviously reduced, you could decide to promote an unqualified or underachieving employee as an act of social justice, but you risk losing the qualified or better achieving employees as a result.
Nursing is a bit of an inverse of tech, 93% women. Nursing has great and growing salaries, similar educational requirements and massive upward mobility... yet men still make up less than 7% of the industry.
Why don't women go into tech? Because they'll be in a distinct minority, and if you're ambitious and have some sense you'll avoid putting yourself in that situation. Better to go into a field like medicine where you're not the odd one out if you're a woman, where it's not unusual or atypical to find women in positions of power, etc. That's the nuts and bolts of it.
Everything else is bike shedding. It's nothing more than "what do people talk like in this new version of the industry where women still have no power?"
So why is it the focus? Because the male-dominated industry is willing to entertain forcing everyone to by hypersensitive about what they say. "Sensitivity" and "inclusiveness" is cheap. It is not willing to take affirmative steps to hire more women, put women in positions of power, etc. That's not cheap and upsets the entrenched power dynamic.