You sidestepped the workplace death question. Why are we so worried about forcing women into STEM no matter what, but we don't care about forcing them into the jobs that cause all those workplace deaths? As a corollary, why do people without STEM jobs constantly complain about other people not having STEM jobs instead of leading by example? After all, as we're constantly told, we need every able-bodied STEM grad we can get our hands on.
Lip service doesn't matter; change matters.
If you look at nursing stats, men leave at a much higher rate than women. Sexual harassment, liability when caring for women and children, getting saddled with the harder jobs (because he's a man), pay sucks, and a general every day attitude from everyone about being a male nurse (with the added bonus that generally speaking, old nurses really hate new nurses and the more different you are, the worse it is). Generally speaking, you'll tend to see male nurses gravitate toward specialties or travel nursing where most of these issues are less prevalent.
What about teachers? The split used to slightly favor men over women once upon a time. If there were ever a profession where male/female diversity were important, it would be in the education system. Instead, we see the huge male pedophile scare of the 70-80s followed by a large drop in the number of male teachers in general and in younger grades in particular. Most male elementary school teachers are there for PE. Factor that out and it's extremely easy for your child to go through almost a decade of schooling without meeting a male teacher.
To tie that particular idea back to software engineering, are the majority of female elementary teachers self-loathing, backward individuals who believe in the inherent inferiority of women? If not, then why do they work so hard to keep their female students out of certain parts of STEM?
We have an entire legal and regulatory bureaucracy dedicated to improving working conditions in dangerous work places.
I'm pretty willing to bet that the cost of that bureaucracy -- per year -- is easily several orders of magnitude more than all the money spent to date on encouraging women to take STEM jobs.
I could Google it for you, but this is apparently an issue dear to your heart, so I'm sure you're well aware.
Are these protections perfect? No. We should strengthen them! Also, we should have less gender disparity in STEM. I'm really still missing the zero-sum relationship between these two things... could you help me out?
> Why are we so worried about forcing women into STEM no matter what, but we don't care about forcing them into the jobs that cause all those workplace deaths
1. Who said anything about "forcing"?
2. HUGE elephant in the room: because this is a tech-focused message board. Again, why is it so surprising that we're discussing the tech industry as opposed to the healthcare or education industries?
> nursing... teachers
Great. Someone should do something about that.
Still not sure why you think any of this is a reason for software engineers to refrain from discussing and addressing similar culture problems within software engineering firms.
Discussing gender disparities between different fields is not, in fact, a zero-sum game.
The institutions pushing for change in IT are often not IT specific. The question is why do they focus on IT. They are the "someone" who should be doing something.
This is all starting to sound extraordinarily conspiratorial.
Who is this "they"?
To re-iterate, I'm still not sure why you think any of this is a reason for software engineers to refrain from discussing and addressing culture problems within software engineering firms.
I believe this is my first comment in this thread. Want to substantiate that?
> refrain from discussing and addressing culture problems within software engineering firms
That's not the issue, the issue is the unusual pressure and increased scrutiny tech receives relative to other industries. The various forms of tokenism, and HR risk-avoidance has nothing to do with a "discussion", it is very much one-sided.
Lip service doesn't matter; change matters.
If you look at nursing stats, men leave at a much higher rate than women. Sexual harassment, liability when caring for women and children, getting saddled with the harder jobs (because he's a man), pay sucks, and a general every day attitude from everyone about being a male nurse (with the added bonus that generally speaking, old nurses really hate new nurses and the more different you are, the worse it is). Generally speaking, you'll tend to see male nurses gravitate toward specialties or travel nursing where most of these issues are less prevalent.
What about teachers? The split used to slightly favor men over women once upon a time. If there were ever a profession where male/female diversity were important, it would be in the education system. Instead, we see the huge male pedophile scare of the 70-80s followed by a large drop in the number of male teachers in general and in younger grades in particular. Most male elementary school teachers are there for PE. Factor that out and it's extremely easy for your child to go through almost a decade of schooling without meeting a male teacher.
To tie that particular idea back to software engineering, are the majority of female elementary teachers self-loathing, backward individuals who believe in the inherent inferiority of women? If not, then why do they work so hard to keep their female students out of certain parts of STEM?