[RIMR]

If they said "Bryana, you're a great speaker and can really hold a crowd. We want you to attend conferences and represent our company. You're really the best at it!", then it would be wonderful. There is no need to treat every employee equally when they clearly have differing skills and strengths.

This isn't what is happening here though.

This comes off much more as "Bryana, you're our only female programmer, and we want to look more progressive and diverse than our competitors. We are sending you to conferences to speak for us so we can show you off as our token female."

It works out in her favor, so she'll never complain, but it is sexism nonetheless. Special treatment doesn't lead to equality. Equal treatment leads to equality.

[JoeAltmaier]

Sure it does. Inequality can be fought with quotas, biased hiring etc. Until the culture starts to change; then you need to change tactics. Are we so rich in diverse developers, that we can stop trying? I don't think so.

[programmernews3]

The irony of the left - they want to treat people differently based on their gender and skin colour.

In the UK, white British make up 40% of medical doctors.

Would you support quotas and biased hiring to increase the number of white British doctors? It would make it more representative of the population.

What about primary school teachers? If 9 females and 1 male go for a job, should the male always get preference?

[JoeAltmaier]

Yes straw men can always be found. But for the other 100 high-paying jobs and industries, there's a lot to be done.

[RIMR]

This isn't a strawman. These are real examples of where white men make up the minority in a field.

If you would support treating women special in fields where they are a minority, while opposing treating men special in fields where they are a minority you clearly have a sexist bias.

This isn't about leveling the playing field for a specific industry, this is about "reversing" the problem by pointing discrimination in the opposite direction that is has pointed historically. This ignores the fact that sexual discrimination is still occurring, and is even being encouraged!

Unless you can answer programmernews3's question or provide sourced statistics about these "100 high-paying jobs and industries", I can't regard your argument as anything other than an appeal to emotion.

[JoeAltmaier]

Well, cherry-picking then. "See, I can come up with one situation that isn't the same as all the rest; thus I refute the general claim" is plain wrong.

Semantic quibbling about 'reverse discrimination' is a standard lame trick used by those in power to justify their continued power. It doesn't fool anybody; its just selfishness.

And really, if you have no idea of the state of employment and the gender gap, what place have you in this discussion at all? Denying the widely published statistics and endemic problems in modern hiring is a species of willful ignorance I find breathtaking.

See, I take care 99 days out of 100 to reply evenhandedly and avoid any reference to others posting here; I try to stick with the topic and illuminate the issue as best I can. But today, I've been driven mad by the sophomoric nonsense.

[RIMR]

Let's be honest. Are Bryana's employers trying to make the workplace more diverse? It doesn't seem so given that they have a 20:1 male:female ratio.

It seems much more likely that they have chosen Bryana to represent them at conferences so that they can APPEAR to be more diverse. She's a token female in a majority-male environment. If they cared about equality, they would participate in programs targeting younger girls to get them more interested in STEM jobs.

The issue isn't in staffing, it's in education. If you want to change the culture of the STEM world, look to the schools, not to the tech conferences...

[JoeAltmaier]

My local Engineering college is 25% women. The education part has begun already, and is picking up steam.

We can do both. No good reason remains to delay corrective pressure in staffing processes.

[RIMR]

So since we're making progress towards sexual equality, your suggestion is to introduce some sexual discrimination to the mix?

Also, your local Engineering college is not representative of the country as a whole. Even if equality of opportunity is picking up steam, that doesn't excuse implementing blatantly sexist policies to try to give women an extra boost...

It's like people think that women are less capable of success by virtue of being women, and need men's help to pull themselves upward. It's asinine and basically infantilizes women...