
Melinda Gates' new mission: getting more women in tech - steven
https://backchannel.com/melinda-gates-has-a-new-mission-women-in-tech-8eb706d0a903#.te5y83cnv
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advantark2
Nothing is keeping women from going into tech right now. In fact, there are
all sorts of incentives for them to go into tech and they're STILL not going.
I think it's time to accept the fact that men and women are psychologically
different in some ways. That's not a good or bad thing, it's just reality.

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DenisM
Straight from the article:

When I was in school in the 1980s, women got about 37 percent of computer
science degrees and law degrees then. Law went up to 47 percent now. In
medicine, we were at 28 percent in 1984. That’s gone up to 48 percent.
Computer science went from 37 percent to 18 percent.

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advantark2
That is a good point. I've tried to think of a good argument against this, but
I haven't been able to come up with one. It's an odd statistic, since the
ratio of women to men in college has been going up & women have been
encouraged to go into STEM fields for a while now.

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erroneousfunk
> I've tried to think of a good argument against this, but I haven't been able
> to come up with one.

Why are you spending so much time trying to think of an argument against it?
Is it really so hard to consider that women are now leaving programming in
droves (particularly in the few years after college), in no small part due to
the overwhelming number of men who tell them, day in and day out, that they
need to accept the fact that they're "psychologically different" and that's
"just reality"?

We encourage women to go into STEM fields and then make them feel like freaks
a few years later when they actually try to make a career of it. Especially as
they start doing more advanced work in the company, being promoted (and
especially in specific IT fields), it becomes much easier to just throw their
hands up and say "I'm so done with this shit. Peace." than to be BOTH a great
programmer and a constant target/poster child of gender politics (both well-
intentioned and otherwise). It's a positive feedback loop.

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advantark2
I tried thinking of a good argument against it because it seems unintuitive.
From everything I see, women are ENCOURAGED to go into STEM fields. They are
significantly more likely to be hired and promoted when compared to their male
counterparts, and get all sorts of support and scholarships.

Are you suggesting there aren't any psychological differences between men and
women? Because testosterone has been shown to cause people to be more
competitive, assertive, and violent. That's a pretty good indicator of a
difference in psychology. We are of course talking about trends here. There
are of course individual exceptions to the norm.

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jtlien2
How bout not making tech careers that end at age 40? Or that are less likely
to outsourced? I was a tech person and based on my experience cannot recommend
it to anyone. The only stable jobs are working for the government or a power
utility.

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throwaway2016a
Previous discussion, same article
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12597442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12597442)

