[troutwine]

> You conflate "losing your exclusive status" with the push to equalize representation in workplaces.

I am not. You have done that for me and incorrectly.

Firstly, It's absolutely appropriate to inform children that people of all backgrounds can, should and will become scientists and mathematicians and to encourage children with these interests to pursue them. Separately, it's entirely appropriate to be suspicious of behaviour as a society that artificially filters some subset of humanity out of a field they would otherwise be able to contribute to owning to individual talent and ambition.

> There isn't an infinite amount of jobs for any particular field or workplace at any one time, if you pursue a campaign of equality of roles going to men/women in a male dominated field, your going to have to reject some men who otherwise would have qualified.

This viciously cuts the other way too. If you leave a systematic inequality in place you prop up otherwise untalented schlubs who edged out people of merit. In my own field, software, I've seen talented software engineers leave companies that needed them because of continued, unwanted and rebuffed sexual advances by some EXTREMELY mediocre software engineers. These dullards then merrily added negative value alone in their pit of reinforced homogeneity. More effective HR would help in this particular example but, hey, so too would having a shop that wasn't almost entirely of homogeneous background in the first place.

[shard972]

So what if we do inform kids of all backgrounds they can do whatever they want and we still end up with 95% of programmers being white males? That would be ok and would require no more effort to correct in your book?

To your second point, then my recommendation to employers is that they should hire only these great women who have been sexually harassed. It seems clear whoever does this will have a large competitive advantage.