The real answer, also an INFOGRAPHIC(!):
In no particular order:
- There's an overwhelming preference (across all academic and professional disciplines) for women to prefer working with people and for men to prefer working with things [1]
- Gender theory is a sociological and political theory that's often touted as being scientific. To be sure, it's contributed to science (e.g.: the idea that gender roles are socially-influenced), but the idea that men and women are equivalent outside of socially-constructed differences is (a) unsubstantiated (b) unfalsifiable (we can never fully remove social influence) (c) in contradiction with what cognitive neuroscience tells us about anatomy and physiology shape cognition.
Where gender theory has a role to play is in telling us how to structure our societies despite eventual differences between the sexes, but I really don't care for it's opinion on empirical questions.
On the whole, though, I feel like these ideas can be discussed, provided you mince your words and ignore the trolls.
>This is accurate, but it's looking at the symptoms, not the cause
You're claiming that gender studies is a response, rather than a cause. It takes some serious mental gymnastics to claim that a very politically active group is not exercising significant causal influence. It's their stated goal to "raise awareness", which implies heavy recruiting. It stands to reason that recruitment efforts will be more effective with man than with women, and the measures agree.
Regardless of whether or not gender studies departments are responsible for reducing female STEM majors, women prefer working with people rather than things (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19883140), and this across all disciplines. Granted, this can be the result of social conditioning, but the point remains that the positive claim "gender gap = symptom" requires positive evidence.
>CS/Eng as a community is not caring and welcoming as Gender Studies would be
Now you're implicitly making a normative claim: "CS/Eng should be as welcoming as Gender Studies". The problem is that the highest priority of gender studies is to promote social justice and cohesion, so that's not a reasonable milestone for whether or not another field is just and cohesive enough. The implied argument here is that if engineers make social justice their number-one priority, then little engineering gets done.
Right. And the argument I'm making is that they are NOT mutually exclusive. A lot of people seem to be taking the road of logic implying that taking conscious actions in increasing women's participation in tech will not get engineering done. I am contesting the logic behind that.
>Regardless of whether or not gender studies departments are responsible for reducing female STEM majors, women prefer working with people rather than things
As someone else pointed out in the thread, the women participation in tech has actually gone down. Now, you can argue women have actually gotten MORE people friendlier, but then I'd go back to my original point: what was in tech that drove them away?
I'll restate my general position once more: this is not a liberal wishy-washy 'ooh lets make all equal' argument. Diversity in tech is diversity in thought process, diversity in approaches to solutions, more resistant to specific types of failures. Just like you wouldn't want monoculture forests or crops, you don't want mono-culture engineers. I'd go one step further: even IF hiring women costs you quite reasonably in terms of 'efficiency' originally (measured by LOC's I guess? How do y'all do that?), your returns will be much higher in terms of longer term gain.
EDIT: I'll bite my words a bit. Above is necessary only if you want to (or want to pretend to) care about the long-term future of your company and environment for your employees. If your strategy is to pump and dump, forget women in tech (they just are not the coding type--right-- don't even get the starTrekWarsRingsLords references?)