Wow, literal quotas? That's just discriminatory.
Such discussions are tedious, and tedium is an enemy here.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13896887 and marked it off-topic.
It's for the same reason that we ask people not to conduct political and other battles on HN. Those may be important but they're also extremely repetitive. Indeed, anyone who enters into any kind of battle needs to gird themselves for repetition, otherwise the more patient side will win. It's not hard to see how incompatible this is with intellectual curiosity, the guiding value of this site. Battles have to be off-topic here or a site based on intellectual curiosity becomes impossible.
As an aside, I don't hear many people complaining about the lack of diversity in other careers like plumbing, HVAC, or logging. Why do you think that is?
Maybe because by pure statistics[1] or by anecdote men tend to have greater upper body strength than women. This matters when replacing 50x 10kg condenser coils or carrying 10 meter long segments of steel pipe up stairs. But it doesn't matter at all when solving problems in front of a keyboard and a compiler.
[1] one example in hand grip strength - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17186303
In the short term, it means firing experienced people of one class to hire inexperienced people of another. Fast growth means that equality can be reached faster with just equal training and hiring.
It's because you're not paying attention. All of those have been mentioned on HN before, and each of them have programmes to increase the diversity of the workforce.
Here's a post from a year ago that mentions forestry, and plumbing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11232237#11234613
It also sidesteps the point that there's an orders of magnitude difference in how much effort goes towards getting women into safe and high-paying male-dominated jobs compared to dangerous low-paying male-dominated jobs.
I laughed, that's some n-gate quality material right there.
Every single time this discussion happens someone will make the same stupid point - "What about women in X?" or "What about men in Y?"
And every single time someone has already posted a link to a programme to increase the numbers of women in X or the numbers of men in Y.
It's dumb and it's lazy, especially so because this information is trivially easy to find.
> there's an orders of magnitude difference in how much effort goes towards getting women into safe and high-paying male-dominated jobs compared to dangerous low-paying male-dominated jobs.
CITATION NEEDED.
sqeaky's comment offers an explanation. I don't fully agree with it but it's a productive step forward in a discussion. When you use words like ignorant, tedious, stupid, dumb and lazy while failing to refute the argument it doesn't make you or your side look any better. I look at sqeaky's comment and have to admit I can see where they're coming from, meanwhile I look at your comments and wonder why you think you've just knocked this one out of the park.
> CITATION NEEDED.
Do you really need proof that more effort is going towards getting women into jobs from Column A than Column B? You had to resort to linking one of your own comments from a middle-popularity post on a fairly small website from a year ago. I could easily find videos of world leaders saying "This is important"
But you can just clear your cookies, go to google and see how "women in ____" auto-completes, then see how many results each phrase gets. You may not see an "orders of magnitude" of difference but you won't be able to act like there's equal attention going in each direction either.
There are likely many reasons as to why there are fewer women in STEM fields than men. Culture and socio-economics are two very big factors being completely dismissed here.
Chalking everything up to discrimination is intellectually lazy (unless there's good data presented and indicating that to be fact), and does nothing to help the situation. If you don't fully understand the root cause, how can you resolve the problem?
We should, of course, attempt to address and improve on all of the possible explanations except the last. If it isn't the last and we make the mistake of assuming that one, then there is harm in that assumption. If the last does contribute, then there is little harm finding that out after making an honest attempt to improve things. Because there are bound to be multiple contributing causes, and you'll at least make the situation better.