Truly unfortunate all around. PG getting slammed from every direction. Jessica Lessin's new venture gets a black eye for shoddy journalistic standards. Lots of invective going around for what appears to be liberties of interpretation. And of all of this, I am not sure this really does anything to address the very serious topic on the imbalance of men to women in technology jobs.
That's my biggest problem with this whole thing. I care deeply about trying to fix the gender imbalance, but these sorts of dishonest shenanigans make the whole movement look bad. At the risk of committing the No True Scotsman fallacy, I don't think the people responsible really care about gender equality. If they did then they would have checked their facts, rather than making people doubt them and the views they claim to hold.
I don't think the people responsible really care about gender equality. If they did then they would have checked their facts,
I think that kind of is No True Scotsman, because it's an unreasonable conflation of two attributes ('really caring about x' and 'being careful with sourcing in debate/arguments'). I know lots of people who care deeply about various causes but are terrible about research, sourcing and verification in general. And some people might care deeply about a cause but do damage to it by being involved (deeply unpleasant so that nobody wants to work with them and the volunteer group falls apart, that kind of thing). Level of caring is not, in my opinion, strongly correlated with a person's value as an advocate :)
"Equality" movements are doomed to fail. I don't believe that in a perfectly fair world, men and women would equally participate in every profession. If you focus too much on outcome you are taking on an impossible task.
What's important is fairness and equality of opportunity.
Well, not really. There are plenty of equality movements that have been quite successful.
But the real point is that if we believe that jobs will be more technical in nature and that deeper knowledge of technology and coding will be required, maybe we should be concerned with the current ratio. Thus we not only create a skills divide, but one that grows into an economic divide as the better paying jobs are technology jobs. Maybe this is an "equality" movement worth putting some energy into.
