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> Why is this? What is the ethical justification for why addressing the gender imbalance in STEM/software engineering should be such an urgent moral priority?

Probably just because $$$. Have you ever seen someone advocate for more female coal miners or truck drivers?

> Have you ever seen someone advocate for more female coal miners or truck drivers?

All the time, as they should.

They also let women be engineers, geologists, farmers, doctors, etc.

Is this surprising to you?

[1] https://www.riotinto.com/news/releases/2022/Rio-Tinto-female...

[2] https://www.macktrucks.com.au/community/blog/2017/february/m...

Considering the fact that only 4% of Australian truck drivers are female[0], you'd think there'd be more of an effort.

0. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-26/qld-push-for-female-t...

Not everyone embraces the long haul trucking lifestyle, there's a much higher percentage of women in fork lifts, bob cats, and the uncounted by that poll (which is freight haul trucking only) dream job - remote 100 tonne haul pak operator.

These are all closer to home, have better hours, somewhat better pay for the light machines and exceptional rates for the Haulpaks.

>Why is this? What is the ethical justification for why addressing the gender imbalance in STEM/software engineering should be such an urgent moral priority?

My conspiracy theory is that software engineering is the last real, single, meritocratic, growing career path that costs a lot of money for employers and they'd rather tank the market by making sure the other 50% of sex is able to participate to wreck wages.

Nobody cares that nurses and teachers are majority female dominated fields ripe with discrimination and harassment because they don't make enough money. They're overstressed, understaffed, and underpaid and society needs more of both yet the bar is so low and so biased against men that nobody is even trying to fix it.

I still hope for the day when somebody will decide we need 50% teachers and nurses to be men.

I don't think your argument quite works. Suppose I'm a superintendent worried about the teacher shortage. Wouldn't it make sense for me to try & bring more men into the profession, in order to keep salaries low and fill my vacant teaching positions?

I think maybe there's a workable argument along these lines: Both nursing and teaching are bureaucratic industries with heavy government involvement. The price system doesn't function effectively in those industries, which means that a shortage of workers doesn't cause wages to rise. And the overall dysfunction means that managers in those industries don't think strategically about how to increase the supply of workers, the way managers in the software industry do.

EDIT: Another point is that the oligopolistic industry structure in tech means that big players have a stronger incentive to do things that benefit the industry as a whole.

>Wouldn't it make sense for me to try & bring more men into the profession, in order to keep salaries low and fill my vacant teaching positions?

I think at this point salary already doesn't matter as wages are already depressed. In other words, fishing for true workplace equity isn't an altruistic endeavor as much as cost savings. Once that is achieved, it's irrelevant who populates the industry. Nobody is interested in hiring male teachers as costs are already down and there's plenty of female applicants lined up, even though they actually should in the interests of equity and workplace representation.

Your government bureaucracy argument brings up an interesting tangent. Government agencies should be one of the most inclusive workplace environments, (looking at some US administrations, they generally try to espouse that trend [0][1][2]) so it's only reasonable to assume that the same principles would trickle down to heavily regulated industries. If anything, heavy government involvement would mandate such quotas. But they don't. Which leads me to believe there's something else afoot.

[0]https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

[1]https://facts.usps.com/postal-service-diversity/

[2]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/28/racial-ethn...

the tinfoil hat stays on and secure

>Nobody is interested in hiring male teachers as costs are already down and there's plenty of female applicants lined up

Not exactly, teacher shortages are widespread in the US.

This general phenomenon is not just a moral panic, and is not caused by social media, though it may have a role in its spread. It is caused by a number of deep-rooted factors compounding on one another. One of them is the increasingly bloated managerial class in Western societies that are trying to hold on to their power. This is done by sowing division in the society, dismantling its former institutions (religion, civil society), and instilling a new set of values which they can enforce. Another one of them is the legacy of the two World Wars of the previous century, in which the West lost belief in the values it once believed in, and postmodernist values took their place. One of the most prominent values among these is a view of any sort of heterogeneity as oppression, and that there is a moral imperative to "correct" it by any means possible. The elites, fearing that they might lose power if people became more class-conscious, channeled this sentiment to certain issues that would not harm them too much, such as gender and race politics.

I think you might have meant to type homogeneity rather than heterogeneity

> My friend who still lives in the Valley says this kind of sentiment is incredibly common there nowadays, e.g. advertising an open position and having discussions internally that a man won't be hired for the role.

Your friend (and your friend's HR organization) should be aware that this is extremely illegal.

It's not actually illegal. For it to be actually illegal, governments would have to enforce the laws but they don't. Left wing governments can't get rid of the laws but they can easily appoint woke allies to enforcement positions, to ensure the law is only enforced in one direction.

I've been in a company all hands, which was broadcast to the whole multi-office company via video link, where the CEO himself announced that the next person to fill a very senior executive role had to be a woman and it would remain empty for as long as it took to do that. Did he care that he just admitted the company would break the law, on video? No because it's not illegal, it's outright encouraged.

Fundamentally, you cannot have left wing people in charge of enforcing equality rules, whether it be legislation or company policies. They point blank will not do it because they think that handing women or racial minorities unique powers is the most morally virtuous thing they can do, and that the system they're tasked with enforcing is immoral.

It may or may not be legal but it opens the corporation up to stockholder lawsuits. Once a corporation begins hiring on criteria unrelated to maximizing stockholder income they've gone down a path that will bring down management.

DEI initiatives harm corporations long-term and will always ultimately fail because the corporation is no longer maximizing profits. This is not a new idea: IIRC even Adam Smith had something to say about such kind of activity.

Yes in theory, no in practice. Such lawsuits are incredibly rare, and this sort of thing is often done with the explicit acquiescence of the board anyway! And in many places they just change the law to explicitly make it legal, like in the UK, where they passed an Equality Act actually makes discrimination legal.

Yes it harms corporations in both long and short term but the people who do it don't care, because their moral code states that corporate harm either isn't real or is actually a good thing. You can't win when arguing with someone's fundamental moral code.

Software engineering is a high prestige job. Rightly or wrongly, most female dominated jobs are not.

Eh in my experience it's a highly paid job but there's 0 prestige in it.

I tend to agree with that. Lawyers have more "prestige", I think. Of course, a huge majority of people studying law are female. However, despite what the general public thinks, lawyers are not highly paid. (I'm talking about the UK. Some lawyers are highly paid, of course, but lawyers are not highly paid on average, particularly if you divide their pay by the hours worked because the famous law firms that offer reasonably high salaries also expect a lot of unpaid overtime.)

CEOs and politicians are even higher-prestige jobs dominated by men, but the sense of moral urgency around achieving gender balance in those jobs seems significantly lower.

Police officers have a lot of power in society & are mostly male. I think there's a strong case to be made that bringing women into the force would be very beneficial, in terms of improved handling of sexual assault cases and reduced police violence. However, I haven't seen a peep about the need to make policing gender-balanced.

That's not true, at least in the UK the gender and racial balance of the police force comes up a lot in the media.

It's often mentioned about UK politicians too, ie the gender balance of cabinet positions.

Perhaps your view of the apparent moral urgency is because you're in the tech industry and therefore closer to it?

>That's not true, at least in the UK the gender and racial balance of the police force comes up a lot in the media.

Fair enough, I've never seen discussion of police gender balance here in the US.

>Perhaps your view of the apparent moral urgency is because you're in the tech industry and therefore closer to it?

I doubt that's it. I feel like I've seen a lot more coverage of "Women in Tech" in mainstream news sources than any other "Gender in Career" pairing.

I've thought about this and I think I agree with you about the amount of noise around tech rather than other careers. But what I don't want to do is jump to a conclusion about it, it seems like a nuanced question.

My mother made a left field comment a couple of years ago that I've thought about a lot. She was a programmer starting in the 70s through to the late 00s. I mentioned the lack of women in tech thing and she said "Oh. I've never noticed. I always considered it completely equal and never felt treated differently."

:shrug: The first computer scientist (IMHO) was a woman - Ada Lovelace [1]. It's also my understanding that, when computers were first introduced, they were mostly seen as aide to secretarial work, which is why a lot of the early computer pioneers were women - it was actually women-dominated at that time [2].

So there's (IMO) historical evidence that it's not inherently a "male" field; which I see as evidence that the imbalance is unexpected and undesirable.

(That said, I can't speak to why it's an "urgent" priority)

[1] Babbage invented the mechanical calculator. Ada realized you could do calculations on something other than numbers. IMO that makes Babbage the first computer engineer, and Ada the first computer scientist.

[2] one article of many on this: https://digitalfuturesociety.com/programming-when-did-womens...

That's not really a point relevant to the discussion. What matters when it comes to hiring, is that for any open CS role, >90% of applicants are male.

Looking up the funnel, about 80% of CS graduates are male (even though females outnumber males in college attendance).

At the bottom of the Seattle Times article I linked is a list of occupations that used to be male-dominated and are now female-dominated, e.g. veterinarian.

Can we conclude that the gender imbalance among veterinarians is unexpected and undesirable?

It's a good question, and I am troubled by not having the same reaction.

I would say tho that yes, I think it's unexpected and it's probably undesirable. What I'd want to check is how the male veterinarians felt about it. Do they feel like they're running into issues doing their job because of their gender?