[dijit]

> I am not sure if you intentionally ignored it because I said the same - that women in tech is a minority - outlier. The problem with accessing whether the field is unattractive to women is asking women not in the field why they don't like the field which I haven't seen done much. This is the reason why I compared construction.

Sorry, I thought we were still discussing the James Damore memo, because he said and backed up the assertion that women seemed to not _want_ to join compsci programs or join the associated industries in aggregate when compared to men.

I think you're assuming that I am the poster child for diversity and inclusion; I am really not. I just make my own decisions I'm definitely on nobodies side and I'm not going to go down the path of defending other industries.

I can just see a value in diversity in teams that work on products we all use, and I think I communicated that effectively enough in previous comments.

[searchableguy]

No, I didn't assume anything. Sorry if I came off that way.

And I wasn't talking about damore memo.

I like the idea of diversity and support it but it depends on what cost. My country suffers from reservation (quota) and it's wrecked.

Although I wanted to talk more about organisational diversity. Whether organisations as a whole have 50/50 gender ratio at scale. Whether roles are "diverse".

Because that would be more interesting.

[dijit]

Incidentally that's exactly what Damore was saying;

Quotas are terrible no good bad and ugly hacks which will cause a lot of harm and the reasons why are controversial.

I think 50/50 gender parity is a stupid goal too, I think more representation but if it's not 50:50 then it doesn't mean that there is sexism, 60:40 is fine even 70:30 is ok, wether it skews more to women or men, it doesn't matter, the point is that women, men, blind, black- everyone needs to have their voices heard on teams that design global products.

The closer you try to force it to 50:50 the worse and much harder it'll be, bureaucrats will love you though, at what point do you stop breaking down societal boundaries? I'd argue that getting a few voices from each are is a good thing but I don't think exactly defining the distribution of the country is a good goal.

Instead of quotas, we should investigate what would make the industry more appealing to those under-heard voices.

Damore says that women tend to favour flexible working hours, that's great Tech can support that.

Damore says that women tend to favour jobs that have a high emphasis on collaboration, excellent, tech can support that.

This is why I dislike the overwhelming criticism of Damores paper, because it's the quintessential attack on the author for daring to insinuate that women are different, instead we should boulder through the idea that Women == Men, and anything other than that is sexism, but also we want 50:50 gender parity... and why isn't it happening! sexism! therefore men are bad and we should hire women over men using quotas! that will fix it!.

It's egregious, and stupid, and harmful. And a conversation about why and trying to actually improve the situation is more fruitful than shit slinging because the only people to let Damore speak are right-wingers.

If you're left-wing (as I am) you should want him to speak, he's promoting equality and compassion.