Be a Man and Stand Up for Gender Equality

Your viewpoint is predicated on an assumption: that equality is the equilibrium state of human society. In such a world where this equilibrium exists, there is no need for "ideology and affirmative action" because any affirmative actions to create inequality will be erased through the passage of time as the world returns to the equilibrium of equality.

The problem with this attitude is that it is utterly unwarranted, unsubstantiated, and totally Panglossian. It is irrefutable that for generations American society took "affirmative action" to suppress women, to pigeonhole them into an impoverished gender role concerned only with housekeeping and child rearing. You don't even have to go back that far to see this "affirmative action" (http://www.boredpanda.com/vintage-ads). Even if you believe that there is no continuing discrimination,[1] what on earth makes you believe that past discrimination will simply be erased through the history of time?

The solution to gender inequality issues is to simply hire women. Hire women and promote women. Once your organization and industry isn't perceived as male-dominated, once qualified and ambitious women don't turn away from the field to pursue others where being a woman is less likely to be a career liability,[2] the qualified applications will materialize.

One of the greatest success stories of gender equality is, in my opinion, are professional services firms, law in particular but also accounting and consulting. The legal industry went from 95%+ male in the 1950's and 1960's to almost even today, even at large corporate law firms. While tech companies are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to get any women in the door, law firms are under fire because "only" 1/3 of new partners each year are women. "Only" 15% of Big 4 accounting firm partners are women and its a source of constant consternation for women.[3] While any discussion of trying to get women into tech is clouded by the specter of "affirmative action" law firms, at least at the lower levels, no longer even need to take explicit steps to recruit equal numbers of women. Professional services firms are proof that when you hire women and promote women, equalized gender ratios become self-perpetuating. There are still major challenges faced by women today in the professional services industry, but these firms are operating in a whole different century than the tech sector.

[1] Which is itself a ridiculous belief in the face of studies proving that older men are, say, less likely to mentor younger women than younger men, and that employers tend to treat similar resumes with male versus female names differently.

[2] Who wants to, as a woman, invest themselves in a career in tech when there is a decent chance your boss will be this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875311 ("there are differences in the way men and women think, with men more naturally drawn to STEM fields...")

[3] At what tech company are the most senior engineering roles even 15% women? Marissa Mayer estimated about 15-17% for women engineers in Silicon Valley across the board. For comparison, Big 4 accounting firms are 45-50% women across the board, with 15-20% at the partner level.

Above, you agreed with the statement "You shouldn't force equality, but actively work towards it."

EDIT: My mistake, that was a different user.

Making the effort to consider qualified women is part of actively working towards it.

Maybe it does cost some small amount of extra money, but if you refuse to make even the minor effort of, say, posting to a women's tech board[0] then you are part of the problem.

[0] e.g. http://www.pyladies.com/

Law is a high status profession so of course feminists were interested in training more women lawyers. Now there are a lot of qualified women graduating from law school, and an overall oversupply of people with law degrees anyway, so it's easy to make gender equality a priority.

Look at the gender ratios getting CS degrees, consider how extremely competitive the hiring situation for programmers is, and then tell me it makes sense to put an emphasis on hiring women in particular when you can hardly hire anyone qualified at all.

> Why do we actually care about inequality in professions?

At an individual level, it's unfair if people are discouraged or denied the opportunity to peruse their interests because of their demographic characteristics.

At a societal level, we'll all benefit by having more people working in fields where they're most productive.

> so is every other field out there dominated by either/or.

That's not true at all. Some fields are near parity. Med schools are basically 50/50 these days.

The gender equalization in law happened through the 1980's and 1990's, at a time when salaries at large law firms were dramatically increasing due to the limited supply of graduates from which large law firms source their entry-level hires. The key difference is that law schools, being generally very progressive places, took aggressive steps to fill their classes with approximately equal numbers of men and women. And the field, being very progressive itself, embraced that trend.

It's also interesting to note that when it comes to LSAT scores, men outnumber women 2:1 in the top percentile. This is very similar to the gender gap in the top percentile of the Math SAT. Law schools tend to simply ignore that slight distinction, relying on the fact that women tend to have higher GPAs, so an index combining GPA and LSAT tends to result in roughly equal numbers of men and women. And in practice, it's a theoretical difference that has basically zero impact in the real world. Yet, people repeatedly hold up differentials in the Math SAT to justify gender gaps in STEM more extreme than the differentials in the Math SAT itself, as evidence that men are somehow more suited for STEM jobs.