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That's a perfectly valid perspective and it's more than likely that there are indeed both differences and some amount of overlap in the obstacles. What we obse
by mtrimpe 13y ago
That's a perfectly valid perspective and it's more than likely that there are indeed both differences and some amount of overlap in the obstacles.
What we observe however is that:
* in various countries the gender distribution in tech is quite close to 50/50 (-> probably little innate difference)
* in the US and Western Europe there are much fewer women in tech (-> probably some cultural difference)
* women in tech indicate encountering a lot of social obstacles (-> probably in the form of these self-reported mechanisms)
Those observations together make operating on the assumption that the social obstacles for women in tech are stronger than those for men (and working on improving it) a reasonable thing to do.
I agree that formalizing that as a 'goal of 50/50' is wrong but the underlying goal, which is the one that is actually getting support, is for the (systemic forces that give rise to) the gender gap to be reduced to an acceptable degree.
There will always be things to improve of course as Eastern European countries for example already have much more women in tech than here, but are dealing with stereotypes which steer women towards QA and men towards development.
Here we're not at the point yet though, so currently we won't do much harm by letting our main focus can still just be on increasing participation of women in tech, period.