[gaius]

WHY should she try NOT IMPROVE them?

Because she's not trying to improve them - she's trying to skew the game. Maybe it's "male-centric" to insist that only the quality of the work matters - but personally I say that quality of work transcends gender and speaks for itself. Because my long experience of this industry is that we are the least biased people on the planet, gay, straight, black, white, boy, girl, fat, then, it doesn't matter if you can deliver. And if you can't deliver - the excuses that work in the rest of the world - don't cut it with us.

[jasonyyun]

Here's the problem though: if you're interested in meritocracy, it has to be a true meritocracy all the way through. You can't ignore other parts of the process and then, only at the very end, say that the quality of work is the only thing that matters. Sure, if boys and girls at home and in our education system were treated equally, encouraged to pursue the same things, given the same opportunities...then yes, you could make this argument.

The problem, though, is that this isn't the case. Women in the United States aren't shying away from STEM disciplines because they're generally intellectually incapable of it; it's because they encounter strong societal pressures against doing so. Other countries--I'm thinking of Romania in particular, which sent a large number of IMO medalists to my university during my years there--have many more women in math and science. (And no, they're not bad at what they do.) Unless you're going to try to claim that Romanian women are somehow different or more talented than American women, it seems clear that the ways that our society and educators are affecting them are responsible for this disparity.

And once you take that into consideration, the argument for improving this problem starts to become a lot more reasonable. It bears a lot of similarity to that line from Lyndon Johnson: " You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." It's pretty similar here. Jean (and others dedicated to this cause) aren't interested in "skewing" the game unfairly. Instead, they contend that because of issues earlier in the process, whatever they may be, the gender gap isn't and shouldn't be the natural order of things.

[tuhin]

I partly get what you are trying to imply here.

The thing is if she were talking about how people are extra rude with her when she commits a mistake or how she is given lesser opportunities than male counterparts I would totally agree with your point.

However, all she is saying is that the environment and attitude as a whole is not as supportive as it should be. That includes things like 50 females in 1000 programmer group at random, even if it is not within the control of you or I.

We might just need to be a bit more welcoming and receptive to these issues before we start saying that Hey, we have done enough and we no longer have that issue anymore.

Just saying it from a third person's perspective. I have not worked extensively with tech teams where this is a problem but maybe I was naive enough to just not realise that the one female programmer in the team of 25 programmers was not always supported to voice her thoughts about how things can be made better; in code and beyond it.