| > This is of course a failure of meritocracy, in the same way that charisma often trumps skill at a job (which is the big problem for anti social men). It isn't a failure of meritocracy - in both cases, it's a failure to achieve meritocracy. Pet peeve. And arguably the best solution to the lack of confidence in women problem is a two step process: to (a) educate women on the difference so that they can (b) try to address it themselves, if they choose to do so. If a woman wants to be a housewife or a teacher, what's wrong with that? > So I don't know that we have it that bad, or that efforts to attract more woman (even if you consider the given reasons to be bogus) are really misguided. To attract more women into tech in the numbers wanted, the only way is to solve the pipeline problem - encouraging girls at a relatively young age to choose programming as a career, and encouraging them to stick with their STEM major in the face of adversity (but ultimately it's their choice, of course). But multiple times on Twitter, I've seen the pipeline problem sneered at, ignored, or downplayed, by women who claim to be supporting women in tech. They've even sometimes attempted to shame me for focusing on the pipeline problem, as if it was somehow grubby and unhelpful. The reality is, poaching female employees from one company to another achieves precisely zero for gender diversity in the industry as a whole, good as it may be for one company's PR in terms of its own gender numbers. |