Women are picking the best man for the job as well.

"The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student."

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109#aff-...

Yup. I don't dispute that. Quotas would work against that too.

Quotas really are quite a multifaceted fix.

- Directly and immediately drive up numbers.

- Create a demand for women that pulls the supply.

- Create a supply of women leaders with experience and skills.

- And create somewhere for them to go, so they don't get discouraged and quit.

- Change people's mental image of working with/for women from abstract and theoretical to specific and personal. Overwrite their stereotypes with actual experience. This goes for both men and women.

- immediately reduces your competitiveness with people outside your legal jurisdiction. (And software engineering can be done anywhere.)

- reinforces prejudice at an everyday level as the group whoa re being quota-ed down resent losing their jobs to people who can't do them.

- sends a signal that excellence doesn't matter and that what you are is more important than who you are.

In a list of really silly suggestions to reduce prejudice, quotas are the stand-out silliest. We surely want to increase the number of any discriminated-against group because there is a level of untapped excellence in that group; if we get rid of prejudice then we can access that excellence. Quotas go against that idea; you reduce the level of excellence in the field overall, retard development and competitiveness and reinforce the prejudice that you're trying to combat!

Quotas: Because the best way to fight discrimination is with more discrimination.

You forgot one:

- Cause some coworkers to resent a person for being hired just to fill a quota rather than on merit.

This. Nothing would cement widespread sexism more than forcing everyone to work around a highly visible influx of unqualified women. We've already seen outsourcing reinforce racism, as bottom-feeding scammers exploit clients' inability to screen out unqualified contract development shops, and the rank and file here assume there are no smart people from that country simply because they only got to work with the bench warmers hired at random by the lowest bidders.

If you want 50% of qualified candidates to be women, you have to find the nerdy girls in middle school with the aptitude and give them the latitude to develop the obsession the way boys can. Nobody who starts in college because they're chasing dollar signs is going to be very good.

You know what? I resent the current nearly all male quota.

You might want to look up the definition of quota then. It might not mean what you think it means.

The solution to discrimination is not more/different discrimination.

De jure, de facto, potayto, potahto.

Discrimination is prejudice plus power. Men are the ones with the power right now and "sexism against men" can not exist. Not in this society.

Come up with a list of MRA talking points and I'll laugh at you.

dis·crim·i·na·tion /disˌkriməˈnāSHən/

Noun:

1) The unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, esp. on the grounds of race, age, or sex.

2) Recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another.

Hmmmm.... nothing in there about power.

sex·ism /ˈsekˌsizəm/

Noun:

1) Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.

Sure... it says typically against women. But if sexism against men can not exist then that definition would have to say always... not typically. So you might not want to accept it... but your statements are wrong... plain and simple... wrong. You can't just make your own definitions for words and then project them onto everyone.

Quotas discriminate. Period. If the rule says you must have 50% women and 50% men, when it comes time to hire a new person, you absolutely will have to take the gender of that person into account in order to make sure you stay within the quota. I have absolutely no idea how reasonable people can think quotas are anything but discrimination.

I'm not part of the MRA. But go ahead and lump me into the MRA group if that is what you need to do so you can laugh at me. I really don't care. Because that would just be one more thing you are doing to water down the real issues. You do your cause no good to be like that. Overuse of words that used to mean something is becoming the butt of jokes! You are making them a joke. Go laugh at that. Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! Eventually no one will listen anymore.

Dictionaries are not politically neutral. They record the popular, not the best, understanding of a thing, and they privilege the "mainstream" from the perspective of very white, very male, middle class academia. In practical terms, dictionaries are good at telling you what a subset of the population thinks. It's more or less argumentum ad populum, indirectly.

Would the quotas be proportional to the applicant pool's huge gender gaps? Only ~20% of CS graduates are women.

If it were me, I'd set a strict, cast-iron, no excuses 50% for the first, say, 50 years. After that things might have calmed down a bit.

Demand will drive supply, if needs be. Lack of demand has certainly driven it down.

With dramatically higher demand for women programmers, would it be permissible to pay women far more than men? How would this affect gender relations in the workplace?

Assuming that currently 20% of programmers are women, would 60% of the current programmer population (or 75% of current male programmers) have to go unemployed until more women had entered the workforce? Following from my first question: if we think paying men and women differently is a-okay, what would this 25/75 split do to the salary of male programmers? How would this affect gender relations in the workplace?

Would these same quotas apply to universities as well? How would the market react to universities making cuts in graduation rates to accommodate occasional fluctuations in the woman student population?

What kind of grace periods and permitted lag would be allowed? If I fired a woman, would I have to fire a man to make up for it that same day? That same week? That same month? Would I just have to refill that position with another woman? What if I decided to eliminate that role entirely?

I am not convinced that you have put thought into your proposal. It makes for a good sound bite and I don't doubt that your intentions are noble, but it is not a good idea.

> Would these same quotas apply to universities as well?

Most universities actually have more women students overall. So applying quotas to all fields would reduce female enrollment in many of them.