Stop treating women like it’s 1975

"You're Invited: Women in Technology Networking Night. Tech Hub’s fourth annual Women in Technology networking night is Feb. 27 at 6 p.m. at the TDAI Ideation Zone (300 Pomerene Hall). "

When I receive messages like this from Ohio State University I do wonder why after almost 50 years of pushing, nudging, cajoling and nagging, we still have to have "women only" events. Don't these people read the statistics about women and graduation rates, business start ups, life expectancy, special laws and set asides, etc.

Even President Trump got on the “women only” bandwagon at the urging of his daughter. In 2017 while the pink hat/hate ladies marched, he passed the "Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act," which encourages entrepreneurial programs that recruit and support women, and the "Next Space Pioneers and Innovators and Explorers Act," which directs NASA to encourage women and girls to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics and to pursue careers in aerospace.

Women first received more than half of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in the 1981-82 academic year—almost 40 years ago. Today they earn about 57% of bachelor’s degrees. The number of college-educated women in the adult population (ages 25 and older) surpassed the number of college-educated men in 2007--13 years ago.

Or maybe the diversity and inclusion people just have nothing else to do and have to keep building their empires. Or, maybe it's just another way to recruit women to vote for Democrats . . . keep telling them there's a gap, that they are oppressed, that white men especially are their enemy. Democrats hate happy citizens (usually conservatives)--have to find something awful.

Fall out of the MeToo movement

Will unleash a new torrent of gender and race demands and distortions. We won’t know about the superiority of the candidates not chosen.  “All white male” is a phrase that can produce panic in an HR department. It will make the previous 3 decades look like the golden age of diversity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS_RtvrsoIs

There is a war against merit, not just white males.

There is outrage that there are few or no female composers in symphony seasons. Orchestra boards will be competing for very scarce female conductors.  And Oh—what about a trans-conductor!  Goldmine. All a mediocre male conductor needs is to declare himself female—these days doesn’t even need the surgery and hormones.  Just the feeling.

STEM departments, which used to avoid the craziness going on the humanities the last 3 decades are under the gun to hire women, except there aren’t many in the pipe line, causing the departments to develop their own subdivisions for diversity on top of the bloated University departments of inclusion.

Gender statistics and Google

An NSF 2014 report claims the number of Science & Engineering bachelor's degrees awarded annually rose steadily from 398,602 in 2000 to 589,330 in 2012. Women received a slim majority of these degrees in EVERY year. Women’s share of undergraduate degrees is 57%. By age 30, women in the U.S. population begin to outnumber men (many more boys are born than girls), but at age 20-24, the age at which most graduate from college, the males are ahead of females by about 443,000 (2010 census). So there is a big gender imbalance--at the expense of men. Where are the safe spaces for men? Where is the hand wringing?

However, this NSF report includes “psychology and social sciences” in the S & E figure, but not health sciences, which in my opinion makes it almost worthless. Men do outnumber women in computer science and engineering, despite 40 years of special pushing and workshops for women. By lumping so many sciences together, from psychology to agriculture, it is possible to claim that women aren’t getting a fair deal in hiring/promotion for computer jobs. Especially at Google which doesn’t want crack downs on misuse of the H1B visas so more Americans can be hired. It wouldn't surprise me if foreign born Asian and Indians outnumber American men at Google. But I seriously doubt those stats are available.

Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google was born in the Soviet Union.  Do you suppose this type of totalitarianism is in the blood?

https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/truth-women-stem-careers/

https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/college-14.html

http://www.npr.org/2017/08/08/542180434/google-fires-engineer-who-criticized-diversity-efforts

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08/google-fires-employee-who-wrote-10-page-anti-diversity-manifesto
 

It seems women still need a lot of help

Several years ago I attended a meeting at church that mixed us all up so we weren't sitting with our friends.  I was at a table with a middle age father and his middle school daughter.  Making small talk I was asking her about her school subjects and interests.  Her father quickly jumped in.  She loved math and science--had been her great love from the beginning--but the way math was being taught was so confusing she dropped out of the component around 8th or 9th grade for something else (don't recall what that was).  Even back in the 80s I was helping with special summer workshops for high school girls to direct them toward STEM (through the veterinary and agriculture departments at OSU). It was hard to get their attention as they fussed with their hair and make up and squealed while in little cliches.

If you read her advice carefully, it is to treat women in STEM differently so that you can pour them into the pipeline so they don't leave by the time they are ready for the top positions. 

"I think that every individual brings a different perspective to the table. It doesn't matter whether it's men or women. The more diverse group you have at the table, the more diverse the perspectives and the viewpoints, and that really helps one build solutions and products that reach a broader group. You're able to build a product that's more connected to the real world, because the real world is very diverse. Your organization and your team have to look as diverse as the real world."

". . . Most tech companies don't have a gender-diverse leadership. Even if we increase the pipeline, we lose a lot of women when they reach a certain stage in their career, due to a number of reasons. Companies need to look deeply within their culture to understand why that happens, and provide the mechanisms needed to retain and grow a diverse leadership team.
Women deal with life events differently, and most organizations don't provide the support they need to deal with life events and keep growing in their careers. There should be a way to get them back and engaged in the workforce."

On the one hand she wants diversity and different perspectives, on the other hand she says gender doesn't matter.  Which is it? A diverse team in which women have been taught since toddlerhood that their biology doesn't matter?  You can cut it off, rebuild a vagina, pump in some hormones, and you'll have a woman created from a man--who will wear a wig and lots of make-up and pretend to be a victim?

http://www.technewsworld.com/edpick/84321.html

The drivers of innovation in the United States

Who is driving innovation in the U.S.? The demographics of U.S. innovation are different from not only the demographics of the United States as a whole, but also the demographics of college-educated Americans and even those with a Ph.D. in science or engineering. . . Immigrants born in Europe or Asia are over five times more likely to have created an innovation in America than the average native-born U.S. citizen, and they are better educated in STEM. . . Women represent only 12 % of U.S. innovators. . . The average male born in the United States is nine times more likely to contribute to an innovation than the average female. . . U.S.-born minorities (including Asians, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and other ethnicities) make up just 8% of U.S.-born innovators. However, these groups total 32% of the total U.S.-born population. Blacks make up just half a percent of U.S. innovators. The median innovator is 47 years of age and typically has years of work experience and deep knowledge in STEM fields.

This information was from the summary; an interesting survey and report on an important topic.

 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION FOUNDATION | FEBRUARY 2016