Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is the lack of gender diversity in tech an obvious problem? Women can do whatever they want to do, if they aren't in tech, they probably don't want to be there. You might say something about discrimination or sexism or some such thing, however I am highly skeptical of that. I have been a programmer for 10+ years and never saw any kind of negative discrimination against women. I have seen many examples of positive…
> Women can do whatever they want to do, if they aren't in tech, they probably don't want to be there. This is so far from the lived reality of women in tech or any of the data on hiring that you should be embarrassed to open your mouth. On HN most people get that before opining on the merits of functional programming, they should have tried it. Or at the very least spent a fair bit of time reading about what people…
Honestly you don't deserve any reply though, after the way you treated OP. It is always the person who makes a claim who has to provide evidence for it - it is NOT the person who disagrees with the claim.
>Partly because so many of these people seem to think it's somebody else's job to argue them into an understanding. (Rather than, say, their responsibility to do a Google search and read for a whole hour.)
That is exactly what the rules for civilized debate proscribe. You have to argue your case, I don't have to.
1)Lawyers were (assumed) to be a safe career in 2005, in a world that did have that many safe jobs left. In 1965 there were a lot of other jobs that seemed safe, but didn't require you to work as hard to obtain them.
2)Lawyers have high earning potential - unlike most other jobs you can get with a college degree today. In 1965, this would have mattered less, because most jobs were relatively high paying (boom time does that).
3)In a world that changes rapidly, lawyering seems relatively safe, again the world changed less rapidly in 1965, with fewer obsolete jobs.
4)A safe, high paying job gives a high prestige. With fewer such types of jobs, more people will want to join those that exists.
So those would explain a higher amount of applicants to law schools, but not necessarily a higher amount of women, right? The thing is that law schools are limited in how many can be accepted and in how many new law schools can be created. You can't learn the law on your own in your bedroom and then get a job as a lawyer.
Is this what happened? Hell I don't know. I do know that it is at least possible it went this way and the explanation is as good as there were a large amount of sexism in law. After all if there were that much sexism in law in 1965, but not in 2005 why would there be so much sexism in computers today?