The term and nature:- feminism can't be eradicated.

Feminism means something. Masculism means something. And these are governed by hormones (note feminism doesn't mean all women as masculism also doesn't mean all men)

There is no such thing as a feminist. There's just normal people and bigots. It quickly becomes obvious which one one is.

The term and nature:- feminism can't be eradicated.

Feminism means something. Masculism means something. And these are governed by hormones (note feminism doesn't mean all women as masculism also doesn't mean all men)

There is no such thing as a feminist. There's just normal people and bigots. It quickly becomes obvious which one one is.

So, a person that thinks women and men should be equals and have equal political and economic power, something that at this point in time is not true, but also believes that women as individuals can be sexist against men, and prejudice against anyone, even against "white males", is not justified, is...what? Are they "normal"(???) or bigots?

Also, feminists would be happy to know there's no such thing as feminism, I guess?

(I mean, I guess a fanatic would also say "there's no such thing as a socialist, there's only normal people and enemies of the people" or "there's no such thing as a capitalist, there is only normal people and degenerates" or "there's no such thing as a Christian, there's only normal people and Antichrists" or "there's no such thing as an atheist, there's only normal people and delusional idiots"....yeah you can say I don't have much respect for fanatics of any kind, for which their ideas are part of the very fabric of reality and anything else is just unthinkable and immoral).

I am Left in a lot of issues and Right on other points. Calling me Left or Right is ignorant.

I am a PATRIOT. I am TOP and CENTER.

Thank you for explaining IN CAPITALS.

Otherwise, no-one would have UNDERSTOOD.

That said, whenever I see people proclaiming they are a PATRIOT, I mentally replace PATRIOT with DELUSIONAL IDIOT.

Well, all those political statements I have seen from him were right. Not just right, extremely right. Obviously, if you are that far right, a lot of things seem left to you, even those a more normal person considers well right of center.

While I cannot really bring myself to disagree with your replacement rule for the string 'patriot' I'd like to propose 'jingoist' instead.

I have to say, I'll never stop going "WTF" when I hear the term "Cultural Marxism". And I vote for the Communist Party back home.

What on earth *do* they mean by "cultural Marxism"? Is it, like "homos and lefties are taking over the media"?

yes

Literally the conspiracy theory that not-being-conservative-bigots is a ploy to bring down the west from within.

...because if we're talking female discrimination, rather than, say, racial discrimination, it looks to me like females aren't in programming because of choice, and it looks like that choice is mostly biological,

I have to jump in again. So far as I am aware, there is ZERO evidence of this; in fact, as far as I know it's total bullshit mostly repeated by people who want to justify the status quo and not doing anything about it.

What "biology" do you think causes women not to be interested in programming? What research has brought you to this conclusion?

That said, whenever I see people proclaiming they are a PATRIOT, I mentally replace PATRIOT with DELUSIONAL IDIOT.

Every time I read the word Patriot, I think of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot

The term and nature:- feminism can't be eradicated.
Feminism means something. Masculism means something. And these are governed by hormones (note feminism doesn't mean all women as masculism also doesn't mean all men)

There is no such thing as a feminist. There's just normal people and bigots. It quickly becomes obvious which one one is.

So, a person that thinks women and men should be equals and have equal political and economic power, something that at this point in time is not true, but also believes that women as individuals can be sexist against men, and prejudice against anyone, even against "white males", is not justified, is...what? Are they "normal"(???) or bigots?

A person that thinks women should be equal to men is a bigot, yes. That sentence itself is an example of "begging the question" because it has the built-in a priori assumption that being a man is the gold standard by which all things are measured and women are either not as good as or at the very most equal to men, by nature of their sex. The English word for that is "discrimination." Someone who says men and women are equals, however is not a bigot. It's a subtlety. That subtlety is important. I can tell I've already lost most of the people on this thread.

Someone who thinks there are only human rights and responsibilities is a normal person. If you believe there are "women's rights" and "gay rights" and "minority rights" then you're being bigoted. Every single one of those issues dubbed as "${adjective} rights" are fundamentally human rights and only distinguished by their casual denial by a self-appointed societal elite, usually in an effort to preserve some sort of privilege or entitlement (aka "the system"). Rights are rights, and only in their denial is there a problem. In fact, any time you see someone called for "${adjective} rights" what they're calling for is actually an end to the systematic denial of human rights to the ${adjective}s.

It's true that there are groups of people who actively seek to deny rights to others on the basis of perceived or actual membership in a social group. As a society, we have a long and sordid history of that. In the 1860s, the USA found an internecine war over the right to deny freedom to others, just as an example. Left to their own devices, the jerks always seem to dominate and few will deny we have a long way to go before the ideal of true human equality is reached. So, yeah, we're in agreement there's a problem. I don't think we're in agreement that the case is that women need special treatment; it's my belief that the people who deny the basic human rights need to admit they have a problem and change their expectations of entitlement.

Oh, and there's no argument that there are extremists in all directions. The extremists are actually not really the problem.

Also, feminists would be happy to know there's no such thing as feminism, I guess?

You might find it instructive to listen to a "feminist" some time. I mean listen, with an intent to understand, and not just think about your defence arguments while the other person is talking. Here's a start: where do you think I got the "no such thing as a feminist" from? Here is a relatively painless editorial piece to start with. I know for some of you there's a lot of printing and your lips will get tired out from reading it, but if you're not one of those guys then do make an effort.

Seriously, there's a widely acknowledged problem with keeping certain groups of people out of the software (and in particular game development) industry. Most of the posters on this thread seem to be enthusiastic about demonstrating how they are contributors to the problem, but it's everyone's responsibility to help solve the problem. Everyone. It's not a women's issue. It's our issue.

But it also seems like efforts to artificially bring every possible career to a perfect 50:50 male-to-female ratio is predominately driven by political philosophies

Hang on... Apart from a couple of folks on the other side of the debate throwing up strawmen, I don't think anyone has proposed that.

The issue is one of equality in opportunity, not Harrison Bergeron-style enforced equality.

I agree with equality in opportunity; as long as (at least long term) we're talking equality in the opportunity to attain skills and equality in opportunity to get hired when up against others of equal skill.

My point is, it seems like we see a gender gap and assume it's a problem. But shouldn't it be more like a code-smell - and indicator that there's likely a problem, but one that warrants closer inspection?

Well, I don't think we are going reach agreement on much of anything in that case.

Maybe, but people grow in understanding through discussion. By assuming there is no common ground, then we reinforce the existing divisions.

I'm asking genuine questions, coming with my existing biases, because I haven't studied this in-depth. All I've heard is other people who seem to know what they are talking about, and citing studies and statistics, and there's no consensus between the studies.

Since I don't know the information, and can't argue their views against you (which would be stupid anyway - one should never try to argue someone else's argument), instead all I can do is ask questions, which either:
A) If I ask a dumb question, it permits you to explain things, making me stop and think, and if it makes sense, brings me closer to whatever is reality, which brings exactly the awareness and change you are after.
B) If I ask a good question, makes you stop and think, and leads you to refine your viewpoints, bringing you close to whatever is reality.
C) If I ask a good question that makes you stop and think, and you have a good answer to it,

This is how progress happens - discussion. When any group says, "We're past the time for discussion", then that's the sign that war is inevitable. And that's exactly what some liberals and some conservatives say.

Speaking of the UK in the 1920s, GK Chesterton said: "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the 'advanced' person who rushes us into ruin, and the 'retrospective' person who admires the ruins."

I feel like that fits modern USA politics pretty good as well.

Repeated studies have shown that male interviewers exhibit implicit bias against female candidates, even male interviewers who claim to be pro women in the workplace.

All the facts in that one are behind a paywall; how did the female recruiters evaluate females, how did the male recruiters evaluate males, and how did female recruiters evaluate males?

And at universities, there's a 2:1 bias in favor of hiring women.

Women account for just 18% of Computer Science degrees, despite the fact that they accounted for 37% in 1985.

And what is the cause of that?

Were we less sexist 30 years ago? I doubt it.
Were women so unwelcomed that they were driven out by a toxic culture? Possibly.
Was programming marketed in some way that is different than now? Absolutely.
Where there other differences between early days of programming and today? Most likely.

Let's identify as many possible variables as we can, before trying to enact a 'solution'.

Of those who take the Calculus AP exam, 48% are women, but of those who take the AP Computer Science exam, only 18% are women.

And significantly more women get college degrees than men. More white women than white men, more black women than black men, more Asian women then Asian men, more women total than men total.

Why is it this specific field? What does this indicate? Is it a problem and harmful? Cultural or biological? Do our current school systems cater to women more than men, as some suggest?

We see the opposite extreme in some other fields, like women getting 80k bachelor degrees in Education, compared to 20k degrees for men.

Then we go to Engineering (as a broad category) and men have 80k and Women 20k, but some of the sub-disciplines have that gap oddly shrunk, like Industrial Engineering - while there's still a big gap, the ratio is much smaller. Though maybe that's just too small a sampling size.

Women dominate literature, speechcraft and communication, family sciences, legal professions, biology, etc...

They have a 6k to 14k lead on Foreign languages and linguistics - which is news to me, I hadn't thought about language, but I would've assumed it'd be pretty tied. Are foreign language studies typically seen as undesired "women-work" forced on them by a patriarchal society?

Then you get to Health services, and women absolutely slaughter men here: 31k to 168k. Ofcourse, alot of that comes from Nurses, but men half of men who get into health services are also in nursing. Women also are ahead in health administration, management, and health record management fields. They dominate psychology, and have a healthy lead in the arts.

I'm all for removing impediments we can accurately identify that prevents people from making choices, but if we are talking about artificially encouraging a specific gender to enter one career over another, I'd like to be confident that it's a career they actually want, rather that merely a job they are filling that may end up making them less happy overall.

When new programmers come on the forums, I frequently see people say things like, 'Unless you are really passionate about it, you shouldn't go in it as a career' (I personally try to encourage them to give it a year or two because it took me six months or so before the programming fire caught on myself), but whereas people seem to be quick to jump to, "If you don't feel it, you might not be cut ought for it", with women it seems to be, "Yes, we need women in this field so whether you like programming or not, you have to take this career for teh sake of teh womens! If you later decide you don't like it and drop out, it'll look badly on your entire gender (apparently? :huh:), so you better not drop out!"

I obviously don't know what is going on in other peoples' heads, female or male, but it seems like the feminist movement is saying that there are immense cultural pressures that force women to enter specific careers... and then they go and be a cultural pressure to force women into specific careers...

i.e. Fighting fire with fire, except the fire they are fighting may or may not actually exist - they might be seeing what they think are signs of a fire without there actually being a fire.

They also say that there is pressure on women because if women fail it reflects badly on women in general... and then they put pressure on women to not fail, because it'll reflect badly on women in general.

This is how it looks from where I sit.

If you can look at all that data, and still honestly believe that there's no such thing as gender bias (let alone, racism) in the tech field...

I agree that there is inequality for blacks in a few dozen different ways, I think this results from lack of education and lack of role-models, as well as racial discrimination in other ways, that creates an uphill battle. Again, though, I want to know what the root problems are before taking action (or rather, before governments and corporations and charities take action) - are the schools underfunded? (welcome to America! Or at least California). Are there too few teachers? Is the curriculum somehow different than the white curriculum? Is our curriculum biased towards whites? Do black somehow learn differently then whites? I seriously doubt it. So what is the problem? I think it's a mix of underfunded schools, distracting environments, and bad role models. But I'd like to know for sure, so we know what the best, most effective, way of solving the problem is.

But if black men dropping out of highschool is because of racism... but hispanics have a higher dropout rate relative to their population, does that mean there is more racism towards hispanics than blacks? Or is using one variable (highschool dropout rate) an oversimplification that can't fairly be used as a direct measurement of discrimination? Whites also have alot of highschool dropouts - is this evidence of discrimination against whites, or are there more factors involved?

I also agree there is some sexual biases in some areas. Women do get objectified, for example. My question is specifically, is the gender gap we see in programming from bias against women, or weighted choices from women? Are those weighted choices cultural, or biological?
If there is biological weighting in career preferences that makes, on average, men more geared to certain types of careers, and females on average, geared to different types of careers, is that a problem we need to address?

People theorizing that not all the perceived gender gaps are inherently harmful is not the same thing as saying gaps don't exist. People asking, "Is this a problem?" or saying it balances out in other areas, doesn't mean they are blind to the data - it merely means they are questioning the interpretations of the data.

What is the root cause of this gender gap? Hand waving the cause away as generic "discrimination" and blanket "bias" may be accurate, because it's such a broad dragnet that it captures loads of different meanings, but unless we figure out the actual cause, how can we address it? Artificially encouraging more females into programming would just hide the cause, instead of addressing it head-on. What is the cause? Certainly there could be a dozen minor causes, but since we've observed a major drop-off from the early days of computing, I would expect two or three major causes behind such dramatic change. Let's locate and address those.

Maybe it's just because I'm a programmer, but I've never liked bandaiding over problems. I want to understand what is causing the numbers, and how it's affecting the rest of the program.

Every so often as a programmer (especially when I was more of a beginner), I see the symptoms of a bug in my code I can't locate, and while I can patch around it to accommodate the bug, it always makes me feel queasy, because I know it wasn't really solved, and it might be manifesting itself in other less-observable ways.

We observe two things (among many) in our country:
A) There is a small percentage of women in programming currently.
B) There used to be a larger percentage, 30 years ago.

I don't want the "fix" to be, "Let's guess what the problem is, and then fix the guesses". I want to know what is causing the manifestation, is it even bad, and if so, work to fix it as close to the root cause as possible.

Due culture standards, women are not inclined to pursue stem fields.

Due less women in stem fields, a prejudice is created towards women in stem fields (what the hell is a girl doing here)

I think we talked about that on other thread, that prejudice is not against "women" specifically, its against anything that dont fit our standards, its the same prejudice against a handsome model looking guy, or an extremely muscular guy, it doesnt fit -> not the safe option.

Show me a study comparing the bias of interviewers against : standard women, fat ugly geek women, handsome model looking guy, overly muscular guy.

If everyone has the same portfolio quality, the priority goes:

fat ugly geek women > handsome model looking guy or standard women(cause from my POV, the standard for women today IS overly carrying about appearances) > overly muscular guy ( cause we just take them for brainless, god knows why)

It happens to blacks, it happens to men pursuing dance careers, etc..

What I want to know is how ppl want to solve this?

I just cant see how trying to force this can work. Imagine a company that was totally bias against women. Say a women who was to be rejected, due feminism solution X got the job. Do any girl actually would want to work on that company? Knowing they would not normally hire you? Can you imagine the situation you would be in? Youd be there against theyr will, on a place that dont have respect for you.. I want she to put the company in her blacklist, boycott, never support, pursue better company, be an entrepreneur (create your own company, be successful, buy that company that rejected you, fire everyone, rainbows and marshmallows).

The solution is deconstructing biases, thats a hell of a task.

To me its all about how do you present reality to children, parents responsibility (not professors, not the politicians, you cant give this kind of responsibility to ppl who screw society over more than anyone). If you see a girl playing with cars you dont go screw her head saying "thats not girly", if you see a boy dancing you dont screw his head saying "thats not macho". You teach children that they need to fight for what they want (just dont step over other ppl), you teach them to not depend on bad ppl, to have principles, to stand by them, to not subjugate yourself.
Quite the long term solution.