> And lots of people are investing lots of time and effort into trying to fix that problem
Are they? I worked in the mental health space for over 10 years and almost 80% of therapists are women -- and a vast majority of those are white women. There hasn't been any significant movement to "fix" that despite a very compelling argument that finding a therapist who is a good match to a patient is fundamental to the success of treatment -- there's actually a scientific case to be made that more diversity in mental health care is beneficial to outcomes. However, there's little evidence that "more women" designing silicon chips has any measurable benefit (or harm.) Having more women (and old people, and people from different cultural backgrounds) involved in UX design is definitely valuable -- but more women writing back-end server code or designing airplane wings has little effect either good or bad.
Women vastly outnumber men in the social sciences and in education however, "We need more men kindergarten teachers" has never been a serious initiative. Getting more women into commercial fishing, oil field work, plumbing, or over-the-road trucking has never been seriously pursued. But "computer science" -- it's a damned obsession with people of certain politics.
It's a fact that men and women are different, both biologically and socially. Women can certainly be exceptional computer workers and men could be great therapists or kindergarten teachers -- but that doesn't mean they necessarily want those things nor are they necessarily pre-disposed with the characteristics necessary for success in those fields. It's a fact, for example, that there are gender differences in spatial reasoning. That doesn't mean all men are better than all women at spatial reasoning, but it does mean that men have a statistically higher success with spatial reasoning than do women as a group. Women have their own advantages over men as well. There is nothing wrong with differences and it has gotten stupid how people insist on claiming that everyone is equal. They're not. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.
This insistence that we have to "fix" the "problem" is just woke nonsense. We should absolutely, 100% end discrimination in the professions -- no question or debate there. But we should stop trying to force equality as an outcome. Let people gravitate towards the things they're good at or care about instead of trying to social engineer everything to please some imaginary ideal. If a girl wants to hack on compilers -- we should get out of her way (i.e. removing bias and discrimination) and let her do it. But we shouldn't be focused on going into third-grade classrooms and trying to convince girls that they should care about hacking on compilers. We should be focused on exposing every student to vast possibilities, but we don't need to force it down people's throats as a social imperative.
I think it comes from how software has become a financially lucrative profession in nice office environment with semi-flexible hours relatively recently. An overall attractive package with the corresponding political attention it gets as a result.
While all the other things you mentioned other than maybe oil field work are not as financially lucrative.
> I think it comes from how software has become a financially lucrative profession in nice office environment with semi-flexible hours relatively recently.
In short, the goal is to put people of a certain group in positions of power and influence.
People of a certain group are already in positions of power and influence. The goal is to ensure that people from all groups get a slice of the power and influence. Why would you (or anybody?) not want that?
No one expressed any opinion or judgement, so please don't impose your prejudice on others. The point is that the first step to fix a problem is to correctly identify it. If you misrepresent the problem them obviously you cannot succeed at fixing it.
This is generally a great summary. We have near full employment right now, so that means in order to pull more women into engineering, you'd have to fill those industries the women are coming from with equally talented men.
In other words, you'd effectively be taking would-be male engineers and converting them into nurses and teachers. And vice versa. The number of people that consider those fields a toss up is vanishingly small. They require completely different skill sets.
It's a matter of power. There extremely few women CEOs, or millionaires, in positions of power. Legally they have all the same rights, sure, but all these power structures are men's clubs. IT is one of those, it's a matter of power, but much less ambitious.
It’s a sad reflection of the current world that you were downvoted. It is a matter of power. If it wasn’t professions typicalLy associated with care taking , I.e. women, would not be lower paid than professions associated with men. People in power, mainly men, decide which should be more valued and guess what they tend to value more? Historically software engineering started more a women dominated field (men were in the more valued hardware field then) and as software became more important it became increasingly defined as a men’s field and theories then prop up that it’s the natural way, men are simply more inclined than women. Bollocks!
The power structures are sociopaths' club. If anything, I'd rather say that it's powerful people prefer to be men, than being a man gives one any power. Most of the men are clueless powerless people.
