| > The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. Who properly bears the burden of proof is a question of your policy objective. For example, we place the burden of proof on the prosecutor in criminal proceedings because we have a policy objective of rather having guilty people go free than innocent people imprisoned. But nothing intrinsically says the burden of proof has to be with the prosecutor. If our goal was to prioritize making sure guilty people are held accountable, we could shift the burden of proof to the defendant. Placing the burden of proof it on the person making the claim simply prioritizes the status quo, which may or may not be what you want. Given our status quo is the product of proven, vicious discrimination against women, protecting the status quo through allocation of the burden of proof is the opposite of what we want. So instead, we have chosen to place the burden of proof on the party citing intrinsic differences as an explanation/excuse for evidenced disproportionate representation. > Achieving this by enforcing an artificial prioritization of women over men in tech jobs seems to me a last resort approach It has the strong advantage of being an approach that has actually worked in the past. |
Except that presuming the opposite allows us to flap around on the whims of opinion, unsupported by factual evidence, and thus allows us to do things that are massively harmful to the long-term well being of women (such as raising a generation of men after the inflection point on gender issues which faced institutionalized discrimination in places such as universities), and thus undermine our own end-goals through emotive decisions rather than rational ones.
The problem with the current approach is that you can't continue it long enough to cause the necessary change to restabilize the social trends, because the accumulated backlash of your intentionally inflicted injusticed builds faster than your positive social change, and you've simply entrenched a good reason to retaliate (they were intentionally discriminated against by a group who had previously suffered discrimination and knew what they were doing), and have already entrenched that intentional infliction of injustice is the means of correcting past injustices.
Far from changing the underlying social dynamic, the intentional discrimination against men actually reaffirmed the status quo one meta-level up from where your concern was: women will be just as sexist towards men as men were ever to women, given the chance, and even when they are personally "concerned" with the topic of discrimination.
Because it failed to use science in developing its methods, recent feminism has been a massive failure: far from standing against discrimination, modern feminism has demonstrated that women believe gender relations is a game of tit-for-tat, and they should be positively discriminated against by men looking for retaliation over their intentional discrimination anywhere that feminism has acted in excess.
This is a destabilizing force in gender relations, and should be set aside as an immature view. Instead, we should look honestly at the situation and develop a stance from actual ethics, rather than emotions.