Women in IT don't need special treatment
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 28th May 2012 19:25 UTC
In the News This topic comes up quite a lot on technology websites, but I generally try to steer clear from it as much as possible, since I'm not the one to talk about it (you know, with me being a man and all that), however, I feel it might be a good idea to just get my opinion out there and be done with it. The topic of women in IT is a hot-button issue, so let me just go out guns blazing: assuming women need special treatment, help, protection, and affirmative action is just as insulting and degrading as outright claiming women have no place in IT - maybe even more so.
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the_trapper
Member since:
2005-07-07

Well, statisticians also found that black people tend to score lower on SAT than asian. That doesn't mean that admission scores to universities should be lower for black people. This is simply discrimination. Men's performance need to be significantly better than women's to succeed.


You can't possibly be serious in arguing that this is the same thing. Males and females have different physical characteristics. Do you honestly think that your average female can does as many pushups as your average male? (Note that I said AVERAGE, of course there are exceptions to this.)

The physicial differences between different races are much less than the physical differences between the different genders. Also, there is considerable evidence that the differences between races on SAT scores is due to social issues, not genetic differences. Black people have a tendency to attend public schools in poorer areas than their asian counterparts.

There are a lot of aspects to the Army's promotion system which are unfair, but gender differences are not one of them.

Reply Parent Score: 2

radix Member since:
2012-02-07

You can't possibly be serious in arguing that this is the same thing.


I am. Does it matter whether the difference in SAT scores are caused by genetic or societal factors? It's still the same thing - you positively discriminate some group of people because of their lower performance.

Males and females have different physical characteristics. Do you honestly think that your average female can does as many pushups as your average male? (Note that I said AVERAGE, of course there are exceptions to this.)


Can't argue with that. However, army is not about averages, top 10% or whatever. Admission tests are there to test that you can perform to some certain level in combat situations where it doesn't matter if you are man, woman, black, eskimo etc. Performance is all that matters.

Reply Parent Score: 2