You touched on some of it yourself. NGO campaigns. For male nurses it would be simple, a series of adverts showing nursing as being just as demanding and manly as any other job would go a long way towards reversing the cultural issues. More importantly though (and the reason I brought it up in the first place) I'd want to see feminists spending just as many column inches on male nurses and junior school teachers as they do complaining about the lack of women in traditionally male jobs.
Ok, on that we have an agreement.
This is hilarious. You literally just did exactly what I complained about. You decided that the way things are now must be natural based on the fact that it is the way things are today.
Where the hell did you find this last statement in what I posted? I am not proving current men/women proportion in IT is perfect, I am not even trying to find a perfect one because there is no even such thing as a perfect proportion in a population. My thesis is not what you're claiming - that it must be unequal because it is now. My thesis is that it DOESN'T HAVE to be equal - for reasons I named above.
Speaking of which - you said my thinking is unscientific? You keep claiming there should be moreless same number of men and women in every profession, but you gave absolutely no arguments to support your claim. You treat this as an axiom and you are attacking the others for not accepting your axiom.
Which leads me to repeating my question - why should it be 50/50, taking into consideration that distribution of particular traits in the society is not equal, but highly dependent on biology?
This is despite evidence already posted on this thread that the number of female programmers was actually higher than the number of males at one point. You forget (or are completely ignorant of) the fact that the first computer programmer (or debugger) ever, Ada Lovelace, was a woman and that first ever computer development team was entirely female. You ignore that programming actually was seen as a woman's job for quite a while and only became more of a men's job after cultural shifts as has already been pointed out!
It's difficult to draw any conclusion from the simple fact the now women's percentage in IT is small, then - it was large. Lots of factors have changed since that time. In the beginning computer science was limited mainly to universities and military with only a handful of specialists employed, now there are millions of IT specialists and business IT plays the most part.
Partial explanation could also be that programming huge computers of that era didn't remind today's programming at all, it required much more patience and paying attention to detail. Now most problems of that time's programming are gone, high-level programming is dominating and emphasis is put on effective solving of complex problems and producing a structuralized and human-readable code easy to maintain and expand.
You said you are okay with biological differences and they alone are enough for you to never achieve moreless equal distribution of sexes in some professions.
I am. What I'm not okay with is people inventing biological differences like you just did.
We're coming to the bases, right? Biological differences between sexes are a scientific fact. Which ones I named incorrectly? Lecture of
this could help you
.
I wasn't directly basing on any external source, but only in this single wikipedia article you can find confirmation of what I said.
Hell, even Maslo seems to understand that cultural issues that prevent someone entering a certain profession don't begin and end at the job. You're not going to get a fair distribution of male and female nurses if men don't train to become nurses because they don't want to be called gay. If only women are training to be nurses then it doesn't matter how fair and undiscriminatory your hiring practices are, there aren't going to be any male candidates to discriminate against. Once again you've failed to actually identify the problem before telling us that it isn't a problem / there is a simple solution.
I want to be treated by the best nurse regardless of their sex too. But unlike you I understand that there are reasons that isn't happening at the moment.
Well, I can partially agree about males not taking female jobs because of stereotypes (despite they could actually be very good in them). They have roots mainly in education and this is where some work at the basis needs to be done. And it is already being done. To be honest I'm concerned about how far go the efforts to upbring boys and girls in a similar manner and what consequences it may have - but that's a topic for a whole another discussion.
I think it's actually a mixture of the two. I don't think you're at all wrong here but you've got to remember that people exiting a profession can also have a large effect on the demographics. If women who do actually become programmers get sick of the sexist bull**** they have to put up with and leave for other careers then that is also going to result in less women working as programmers.
Where did you encounter sexism against women working in male-dominated jobs? Got any research on that? In case of IT, small number of female programmers makes male programmers' attitude towards them more positive, not negative.