[candiodari]

I sometimes wonder if the problem isn't exactly the opposite of what people think they are. Women are underrepresented in tech because they get more support, not less. More choices, and they get pushed to go for the truly glamorous choices.

What is glamorous in middle school and high school ? Well, the jobs the people "in power" at such institutions have, and in their own families. So Mom's job (the carer's job, because most families have a carer and a provider or at least have those roles be unbalanced and of course most contact will be with the carer, not the provider). The teacher's job. Caring jobs in general. And of course the "in power" jobs on TV. Men are immediately discouraged from doing that and so they skip ... what of course turns out to be mostly undesirable roles. Which make these women easily exploitable, and perhaps there ought to be some discussion of why that is such a big problem for anyone.

Maybe what needs to happen is we need to start telling women of age 10-12 "you know, in 10 years, a bit more, you'll need to support yourself, maybe a family. And as a teacher, carer job, or mom, it'll suck. You'll be low on the scale, and dependent. Think about it now and save yourself a lot of pain later".

20 years later (because that's how long it inevitably takes) we'll have a majority women, because they really do outcompete men on average given the chance. I mean, I do agree there's no way in hell this will ever happen, but one can dream.

[sleepysysadmin]

>I sometimes wonder if the problem isn't exactly the opposite of what people think they are. Women are underrepresented in tech because they get more support, not less. More choices, and they get pushed to go for the truly glamorous choices.

This is actually an interesting point and I haven't been able to find information about it.

Lets say we have X amount of women who are going into STEM... but say for example I used to live in the Detroit area. The universities at the time I was about to head into post-secondary were offering 'scholarships' where women who took their first year in engineering, would get the rest of their education for free and most of the engineering credits would act as wildcard credits toward any other degree if they chose to switch.

So perhaps we lack women in IT because they went to engineering instead?

[braindouche]

>I sometimes wonder if the problem isn't exactly the opposite of what people think they are. Women are underrepresented in tech because they get more support, not less. More choices, and they get pushed to go for the truly glamorous choices.

There might be something to this. I've anecdotally read somewhere that there are now more women in med school and law school than men. If that's true, and women are over-represented in even higher-echelon pipelines, are they funneling women away from comp sci? It's not the solution, certainly, but the answer to that question might be interesting.