[TheAdamAndChe]

Given the fact that nearly every major corporation enacts some sort of affirmative action hiring system, women have every incentive to go into STEM in the US, yet are choosing other careers, which should be their right. Equal opportunity should be our goal, not forced diversity quotas.

As an aside, I don't hear many people complaining about the lack of diversity in other careers like plumbing, HVAC, or logging. Why do you think that is?

[sqeaky]

Maybe because plumbing and HVAC aren't growing at the same exponential rate as IT. Few fields are.

Maybe because by pure statistics[1] or by anecdote men tend to have greater upper body strength than women. This matters when replacing 50x 10kg condenser coils or carrying 10 meter long segments of steel pipe up stairs. But it doesn't matter at all when solving problems in front of a keyboard and a compiler.

[1] one example in hand grip strength - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17186303

[TheAdamAndChe]

Why should exponential growth be a prerequisite for equality?

[sqeaky]

In the long run it shouldn't be.

In the short term, it means firing experienced people of one class to hire inexperienced people of another. Fast growth means that equality can be reached faster with just equal training and hiring.

[TheAdamAndChe]

I see what you're saying and it makes sense. I disagree with the underlying assumption that differences between men and women are purely cultural and that all nonphysical jobs should be evenly distributed among the sexes, but if you disagree, then what you are saying would be a great way to create a more even distribution between the sexes.

[DanBC]

> As an aside, I don't hear many people complaining about the lack of diversity in other careers like plumbing, HVAC, or logging. Why do you think that is?

It's because you're not paying attention. All of those have been mentioned on HN before, and each of them have programmes to increase the diversity of the workforce.

Here's a post from a year ago that mentions forestry, and plumbing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11232237#11234613

[nananonymous]

I expected that to be a post to an actual discussion, not a link to one of your own posts which nobody actually responded to.

It also sidesteps the point that there's an orders of magnitude difference in how much effort goes towards getting women into safe and high-paying male-dominated jobs compared to dangerous low-paying male-dominated jobs.

[xenihn]

>I expected that to be a post to an actual discussion, not a link to one of your own posts which nobody actually responded to.

I laughed, that's some n-gate quality material right there.

[DanBC]

But that's the point - OP wasn't trying to have a discussion, OP was making the same tedious point that has been refuted countless times on HN, let alone elsewhere.

Every single time this discussion happens someone will make the same stupid point - "What about women in X?" or "What about men in Y?"

And every single time someone has already posted a link to a programme to increase the numbers of women in X or the numbers of men in Y.

It's dumb and it's lazy, especially so because this information is trivially easy to find.

> there's an orders of magnitude difference in how much effort goes towards getting women into safe and high-paying male-dominated jobs compared to dangerous low-paying male-dominated jobs.

CITATION NEEDED.

[nananonymous]

Grandparent comment was saying "X is bigger than Y", saying "Y is not zero" misses the point.

sqeaky's comment offers an explanation. I don't fully agree with it but it's a productive step forward in a discussion. When you use words like ignorant, tedious, stupid, dumb and lazy while failing to refute the argument it doesn't make you or your side look any better. I look at sqeaky's comment and have to admit I can see where they're coming from, meanwhile I look at your comments and wonder why you think you've just knocked this one out of the park.

> CITATION NEEDED.

Do you really need proof that more effort is going towards getting women into jobs from Column A than Column B? You had to resort to linking one of your own comments from a middle-popularity post on a fairly small website from a year ago. I could easily find videos of world leaders saying "This is important"

But you can just clear your cookies, go to google and see how "women in ____" auto-completes, then see how many results each phrase gets. You may not see an "orders of magnitude" of difference but you won't be able to act like there's equal attention going in each direction either.

[TheAdamAndChe]

Of course there will be some people pushing for that, but it isn't pushed for nearly as much as in tech.