(I apologize if I currently seem defensive; I'm getting pretty massively downvoted for trying to understand you, by people who are telling me you mean something

(I apologize if I currently seem defensive; I'm getting pretty massively downvoted for trying to understand you, by people who are telling me you mean something very different than what you seem to be saying; I'm glad you chose to respond. Thank you.) . "But why ask for what's common?" I didn't say ask for what's common. I asked why to ask for something uncommon. They're quite different and they aren't the range of possibilities. Another possibility entirely is to just not limit it. When talking about mentors, "because a mentorship is a many year relationship that can have a significant impact on a person's life, and I'm not sure why you would only search half the space available to you for the best person for the job." . "Because equality is often an unstable equilibrium." Not in the case of human gender. . "So exerting a force opposed to the instantaneous natural tendency may be the right response at any given time." I don't see any instantaneous natural tendency to select for male either, and I'm still looking for a supporting cause for that "may be" which isn't a vague reference to an unstable equilibrium. I'm not even sure what equilibrium you might mean, unless you mean how many people are in each gender, and expect that to change. . "In fact, the system may have to be permanently pre-stressed to change from unstable to stable." As that stress has been applied, beginning in the late 1970s, the division in gender in technical roles has increased dramatically. Indeed, it appears that since women's mentorship in tech has been steered towards other women, the number of women in tech has dropped dramatically. It's important to take a look at the data before taking a position on hypotheticals, in case the data suggests exactly the opposite of what the suspicion suggests. How would you respond if it turned out that giving a child a mentor of the opposite role, meaning they were used to a broader range of gender roles than otherwise, increased diversification? Would that change your mind about the right thing to do? . Lastly (and sorry it's out of order, but it's to me the dividing point): "So "female engineer in San Diego" is actually a tractable problem within my social circle." It's not clear to me what makes this the problem to solve, yet. I'm not arguing with you, or saying you're wrong; I don't understand the reaction I'm getting. I'm just trying to understand why you are cutting away the vast majority of the available mentors. If there are ninety Xs and ten Ys available, and if Xs and Ys are fundamentally equal quality, but if both groups have individual variation, then it is strongly statistically expected that the best available individual is an X, because of the variation of individuals and the larger sampling pool. People don't get several mentors. I don't understand why the choice is in any terms other than finding the single best available individual. I just want to understand the data driving your choices. I'm not arguing.