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You're conflating two different comparisons: comparing the aggregate experience of two groups, which we use as an efficiency mechanism to see if we can make things better for lots of people, and comparing the personal experience of one person against a group. With various spherical-cow-in-a-vaccum-ish assumptions, if women and men are equally qualified, then, by logical implication fully half of all women are below-average, and there are millions of women who are more qualified than every single software engineer at several companies. Neither of these facts are really the point of comparing women and men as an aggregate group. As a man, as a person on Hacker News, as a person with whatever hair color you have, how clever you are is just how clever you are. That's it. (And this is exactly why we wish to reduce subconscious discrimination: unless there's an actual statistical difference, nobody should be thinking you're more or less clever knowing just your gender, any more than knowing just your hair color.) Your job is yours, and up to your ambition and capability. The existence of millions of qualified people who don't have your hair color -- and, frankly, millions of qualified, more social people who don't have your hair color -- isn't keeping you out of your job today. It's bad to hear "Women aren't clever enough for programming" because years of research have failed to find rational basis for this belief. If there is rational basis for a belief (and if the belief is stated in a way that doesn't cause most people to react to it irrationally), then sure, let's say it. I'd be thrilled to help you with lack of confidence in anything I'm qualified to help with. I'm not particularly likely to do so in a subgroup situation, since this is something you yourself say is "personally" yours, but yes. I'm also happy to support organizations that do help groups where the group is relevant, and definitely happy to support all people with confidence in group situations where there isn't any definition of the group. |