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by Grishnakh 3625 days ago
Except women frequently are a majority, not a minority. In the US, 60% of college students now are female. They just don't go into technical professions.

From what I've gathered from being around different women and talking to them, I think all this talk about being "disadvantaged" is missing the real root causes. They actually are disadvantaged, but the problem isn't the workforce, fellow college students, etc., nearly as much as it is their own upbringing, and their very own parents.

If you really want to fix the problem with women in tech, you need to take all female children away from their parents and raise them in state-run facilities where they're taught that they actually can do math and play with toys that aren't dolls and pursue careers in these fields. Somehow, I doubt this suggestion will be seriously considered....

In short, our very own culture is to blame here. That's not something that's easy to change, because now you're advocating having the state usurp the power of the parents to parent their children.

2 comments

> If you really want to fix the problem with women in tech, you need to take all female children away from their parents and raise them in state-run facilities where they're taught that they actually can do math and play with toys that aren't dolls and pursue careers in these fields. Somehow, I doubt this suggestion will be seriously considered....

Been tried throughout history. It almost never works and is as horrific as it sounds humanitarian wise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...

Yeah, I hope it was obvious that I wasn't seriously advocating that. I'm just pointing out how this stuff is embedded into our society, and it's hard to root out without taking extreme measures (which will likely have even worse unintended effects).

Also, it doesn't help that most of our kids seem to be raised by people who are either uneducated and poor (and thus don't pass on to girls the idea that they can get an education too and be good at math), or by people who are conservative and/or religious (and who actively discourage girls from doing well in math and science because of their traditional sexist values). The people who do have liberal values about this stuff aren't having kids (or not very many), so we just have this almost religious belief that our liberal values will somehow pass to these kids through societal conditioning (which they do to a certain extent thanks to the media and internet).

I've seen more people than I thought possible advocating against democracy, for coups, for segregation, and other crazy things I thought humanity had moved passed. I no longer know what's serious and what isn't anymore.
While I agree with the premise that our culture is (at least partially) to blame, I want to clarify something about my post. When I use the word minority, I do not mean "there are fewer women. Rather, I mean it in the way that the census bureau would mean it: women are underrepresented in our society. There are fewer women in politics, and positions of power, than there are men. Women may outnumber us, but if they are not in positions of influence, where their needs and concerns are being represented, they still qualify as a minority. Minority is not exactly the best word to use, because it conjures that image of a small group standing up to a big group, but it is the common parlance term for the idea of a group that is underrepresented in our society, unfortunately.