Hacker News Reader

Comment by charlesu | Hacker News Reader

What is discriminatory about taking active measures to ensure that the tech monoculture does not perpetuate itself? If there are programs for women in STEM majors who need extra support, it is because women in STEM majors may have to surmount an obstacle that men do not: namely, that women are not fit for engineering.

This webcomic sums up why so many organizations take active measures to support women in STEM in one panel: https://xkcd.com/385/

View on HN

It’s illegal discrimination to provide programs only for the majority sex — see rulings on only having sports programs for men. (Women have been the majority of college students since the 1980s.)

There’s nothing wrong with women in STEM programs, but not having matching men-in-social-sciences programs is a Title IX violation... precisely in the way only having sports for men would be.

You can have programs for no one; you can have programs for everyone; you cant have programs only for one sex.

That’s literally the point of civil rights laws.

That's an oversimplification of Title IX. Nowhere does it state that a university must offer the same sports programs or even the same number of sports programs for each gender. It only states that women who desire to play sports be accommodated, which is to say, a school can't only have sports programs for men.

From the US Department of Education website:

A college or university is not required to offer particular sports or the same sports for each sex. Also, an institution is not required to offer an equal number of sports for each sex. However, an institution must accommodate to the same degree the athletic interests and abilities of each sex in the selection of sports [1]

[1] https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/interath.htm...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com