5 ms·

Take two groups of people. We'll call group A the "Bears", and group B the "Foxes". The Bears had a strong natural interest and affinity for computers. They we

by jquery 12y ago

Take two groups of people. We'll call group A the "Bears", and group B the "Foxes". The Bears had a strong natural interest and affinity for computers. They were tinkering and playing with them despite society's mockery that they were pathetic nerds. When they found out you could make great money, well, that was just a bonus. The Foxes joined because they were told the industry was super rad and it paid really well. The Foxes were given advantages like additional Fox-only scholarships, special Fox-quotas in good engineering colleges, and lots of blogs praising Foxes and telling them how special they are, how they bring unique Fox-only insights to the table, and that The Bears have a conscious/unconscious agenda against them. Now ask yourself, which group would you expect to have more longevity in the industry, the Foxes or the Bears? What would a company have to do to keep more Foxes? Maybe special privileges, like conferences the companies could send the Foxes to that would tell the Foxes how great they are, promotion programs to ensure more Fox visibility, quotas for Foxes in senior management, etc. But the Foxes are still leaving in higher numbers so clearly the industry has a bias against Foxes, so funding for Fox-only programs must increase, until the number of Foxes is equal to Bears (and if eventually there are more Foxes then Bears, that's just great!) What about the Bears? Well, the Bears better sit down, shut up, and remember that they are just Bears and there is nothing unique about a Bear. Some Bears internalize this and start advocating for the Foxes themselves. And so it goes.

rayiner 12y ago
You lost me at "strong natural interest and affinity." That could've been said for law or medicine or accounting or any of a large number of professions that were male-only until they weren't.
- brighteyes 12y ago
  While I disagree with GP, I think there is a difference here. As GP mentioned, nerds tinkered with computers growing up, despite a stigma. There isn't such a social phenomenon for accounting or medicine, those are things that almost everyone gets into in college or later. Yet, as I said, I disagree with GP. The word "natural" is misleading, it sounds like he or she is suggesting a natural inborn aptitude, and we don't have evidence to support that. Unless all that "natural" meant here was "commonly occurring, happening without prompting", in which case I would agree.
  - pekk 12y ago
    I'm pretty sure there are females and males who have more natural aptitude or preference for one or another kind of technical work. And they typically are stigmatized as nerds when this is publicly known. We just don't have to suppose that nerds are more commonly male. It's too bad that it's not socially acceptable just to support nerds regardless of their gender. But that is just more of the same stigma which never really ended.
- vacri 12y ago
  It's also worth mentioning that men actually don't have a strong natural interest and affinity with computers. If you look at males in the general public, very few of them would actually be considered a 'power user' or higher. Regardless of whether it's more or less than women, the fact is that most men don't have an affinity for computers.
  - lambdaphage 12y ago
    This is a good point worth keeping in mind. We're talking about a statistical property of groups of people, and one that is relatively uncommon in both groups.
  - ANTSANTS 12y ago
    >It's also worth mentioning that men actually don't have a strong natural interest and affinity with computers. If you look at males in the general public, very few of them would actually be considered a 'power user' or higher. I disagree, and think that adults who grew up before computers were commonplace are skewing your perception. I was a teenager not too long ago, and as I remember it, personal computer ownership was about even between the sexes in middle class youth, perhaps even biased towards girls a bit because "a boy will just use it for porn." In spite of this, pretty almost every young boy I knew that had a computer, whether or not they were really a "computer person" or grew up to do anything related to technology, was interested in tinkering with their computers in some way. From playing games for long hours, tweaking their configs or even making maps or modding the game, running their own game servers from their desktop (Minecraft is especially popular for this today), to having the spiffiest desktop and theme, to building their own PCs, hanging out on forums/irc channels/etc. and the good ol' fashioned standby of amassing a huge collection of pirated music, movies, and pornography, there were a lot of opportunities for otherwise "normal" boys to get experience in playing with computers and learning something about them along the way. Being good with computers could even be somewhat cool, in a "you're a fucking wizard, dude" kind of way. And to be clear, this is the perception I got from hanging out with kids on all levels of the social spectrum, not just super computer dorks like myself. In contrast, most of the girls I knew used them mostly for IMing friends. The most "hardcore" girls I knew were involved in communities themselves like Deviantart or the various MMOs, which gave them plenty of their own opportunities to play and learn (for instance, Photoshop is a very complicated program, and sites like Neopets and MySpace taught basic HTML to a lot more girls than boys), but in general a larger proportion of the girls seemed more interested in study, their personal lives, relationships, and "drama" (the "dickhead teenaged boys" I mentioned in another post ITT would blush at the shit that girls do to each other), than in the computer itself or the internet outside of their "small world." I'm not a girl, though, so obviously I don't have the whole story. With the younger generations, the situation looks similar to me, but with smart phones. It's common and "cool" for a guy to have a rooted/jailbroken phone, get a buttload of apps for free, and customize the crap out of his phone. But while I obviously don't have much contact with teenaged girls nowadays outside of family, the ones I have talked with are more interested in instagramming and snapchatting with their friends than the phones themselves. People often say that women naturally have more emotional and social intelligence on average than men, so I don't really get why those same people get offended by the idea that men could naturally have more more "systems intelligence" or general interest in tinkering than women on average.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- lambdaphage 12y ago
  The interesting thing about medicine and law is that they are professions that deal with human needs and social relationships. As formal barriers were removed, the percentage of law and medical degrees awarded to women steadily increased to parity: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_doctorlawyer.png http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_do... The graph doesn't show the last few years, but I believe medicine is over 50% women now. Compare this to computer science. I can't find easily find data for Ph.D.s or master's degrees, so here is bachelor's degrees over roughly the same period: http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/ctw/2013/04/04/women2-100386539-orig.jpg http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/ct... Lastly, for contrast, look what happened to vet school: https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/PublishingImages/100215g1.gif https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/PublishingImages/100215g... (NB: technically enrollment rather than completion.) That looks to me pretty clearly like a thumb lifting off the scale. I do not think the quantity of sexism in CS is zero. Yet from my experience of CS and law, I have a hard time believing that there is more bad behavior, (on the order of a 200-300% difference) among computer scientists than among lawyers. Maybe I'm wrong about that? In any case I think comparisons to medicine and law actually raise more questions than they answer.
  - erikpukinskis 12y ago
    Software development at the highest level and at scale has everything to do with human needs and social relationships. Maybe if you're writing an app solo in your bedroom it doesn't, but that's not how the vast majority of industrial software gets written.
    - lambdaphage 12y ago
      All jobs require some dealing with people and some dealing with things. Does that imply no difference between the fractions of the day that software engineers and social workers spend systematizing vs. empathizing? But let's examine the point more closely: what is the name for the department that is explicitly in charge of managing human needs and social relationships at a large software development company? Who tends to prefer those jobs?
  - 12y ago
wavefunction 12y ago
I don't know, I try to remain a human.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
e1g 12y ago
Just a short time before they got internet in the woods, the Bears and the Foxes had a different arrangement - Everyone thought the Bears had a strong natural interest and affinity in working, and the Foxes had a strong natural inclination in cooking and babysitting. Then after some laws, changed policies, and social adjustments, Foxes must have changed their nature and started doing what the Bears did - often better. Within 20 years, the Foxes and the Bears reverted a few millennia worth of prejudice and assumptions, and everyone benefited immensely.
- forrestthewoods 12y ago
  all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia
- pekk 12y ago
  Is it really necessary to say that women are better than men at making software? I think this kind of inflammatory claim just stokes the flamewar that erupts around here every time the topic comes up. No one would stand for saying that men are better than women at making software. These generalizations are ridiculous.
vacri 12y ago
This is a 'begging the question' fallacy, where the conclusion of the argument is used as a premise for it.
nostrademons 12y ago
This comment is interesting in light of the HN story on Margaret Hamilton yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735912 It's not immediately apparent who the Bears and Foxes are supposed to represent in your parable.
- jquery 12y ago
  > It's not immediately apparent who the Bears and Foxes are supposed to represent in your parable. That's quite intentional.
pekk 12y ago
What about the male foxes? A big problem with the analogy is that there were always female bears and male foxes. That makes the picture more complicated.
- xtrumanx 12y ago
  I think you've missed the point of the use of bears and foxes in the analogy. It was supposed to remove any hint of gender. Notice he didn't mention the bears were male and the foxes were female.
  - pekk 12y ago
    The analogy mentioned quota programs, special scholarships, etc. But in reality there is not even allegedly any such thing aimed only at people who are non-nerds, so unfortunately these things have to be interpreted as being about gender. Which causes the whole analogy to be interpreted as being about gender, and causes a lot of controversy, because it sounds like it's saying that women can't take the role of the "bear" in the story. In fact there have been many women (like Rear Admiral Grace Hopper) who took that role without special scholarships or quotas or whatever. They were bears. So it feels unfair for the analogy to apparently imply that these women didn't have any innate talent and just came into the field to be called special. So if I am charitable, the analogy has a significant imperfection which is encouraging a negative response that misses any more constructive point which might have been there.
    - jquery 12y ago
      Great point. I think a story involving red/blue colors to the foxes/bears could make the analogy more accurate. You are absolutely right there are female bears and male foxes.
    - xtrumanx 12y ago
      > But in reality... It's a story. For a minute try to take it as it is; a story about bears and foxes and let's try to distinguish if the bears are treated justly. The point is to establish common ground. If we can't agree about what is just within the boundaries of our fictitious little story we'll have little hope to agree of what is just in the real world.
mxfh 12y ago
Take two groups; call one the enthusiasts, one the bros.
ANTSANTS 12y ago
You said in other comments that you didn't intend "bears vs. foxes" to be "men vs. women," but it still reads that way a bit, so let me take a stab at being more explicit: The bears are the kids that grew up fascinated by computers, and just knew they were going to do something with them when they grew up. Maybe they didn't always get the best grades in school, but as early as middle or high school they could blow you away with the knowledge they gained purely out of self interest. This group is mostly (though not entirely) male. Most (not all, though things are a lot better today than the used to be) of the bear's earliest experiences with computers were solitary endeavors free of gender bias; if you're the elementary school kid picking out computer books from the library and pouring over them at home, you aren't even aware of a gender bias or skew in tech, you're in your own little world. Sure, when you grow up a bit and start meeting i.e. dickhead teenaged boys in IRC channels, the skew makes itself known, but if you made it to that point in the first place, a few jerks aren't going to be enough to scare you out of your passion. Given that there seems to be a lot more male bears than female bears, this and other anecdotal evidence suggests to me that there could be some kind of unavoidable neurological difference that makes men on average more likely to be innately interested in this sort of thing from a young age. We can make things more welcoming for the female bears and attempt to insulate them from the aforementioned dickhead teenagers (though I don't think that is great idea either), but you can't just force any girl into becoming a programmer any more than you can guarantee that every boy with a computer will use it for programming instead "wasting" it on video games and porn. The foxes are the honor roll students that worked their asses off in school so that they could get into good colleges, get a good degree, get a good job, and continue their family's upward mobility. Whether it's business, medicine, law, or today computer programming, they didn't really care so much about what they did and didn't really worry too much about it as children (though of course they probably developed genuine interests in their field of choice during study and employment), but whatever they decided to do, they were willing to work hard to become good at it. They are at a bit of a disadvantage in tech vs. other fields that mostly lack a group of self-interested bears, but their strong work ethic helps to make up for it. This group pretty much already has gender parity (when you look at college graduates as a whole, not just in tech-related fields), so while the programming foxes may be made up of less women today, it will surely reach gender parity in time. (Yes, this is a false dichotomy; many people can be described by both the bear and the fox. Ignore it for now, or treat it as a suggestion that the foxes may come close to but never reach true gender parity either.) Any tech company is going to be made up of both bears and foxes. The proportions of these groups will vary, and the gender ratio within both groups will slowly shift closer to gender parity over time as barriers are torn down. However, if you accept that there may be a natural reason for the bears to be made up of more men than women, then it becomes clear that due to the bears tipping the scales, there will never be perfect gender parity in tech candidates, and that there can only be perfect gender parity in employed tech workers if the male bears are actively discriminated against by all potential employers. Sadly this philosophy does not seem to be very far off from what many employers and prominent figures here seem to actually believe and practice, but on the bright side for the male bears, it is almost impossible for them to be completely excluded; for as long as tech is a competitive field, ignoring a male worker because of his gender will just result in him being snatched up by someone else. So while I do support initiatives to reduce gender bias and punish blatant harassment in tech, I think that some amount of gender skew is unavoidable and not worth worrying about. The people that push for a perfect 50/50 split strike me as misguided at best (if you disagree with the idea that men could be "better" or more interested on average at tinkering as a whole, while simultaneously believing that women are "better" on average with emotional and social skills, then while I see where you're coming from, I think you have some cognitive dissonance to work through), and at worst, far left radicals and those they dupe, more interested in raging a never-ending culture war than in making any real progress. But hey, as a bear, I'm biased.

by jquery 12y ago

rayiner 12y ago

You lost me at "strong natural interest and affinity." That could've been said for law or medicine or accounting or any of a large number of professions that were male-only until they weren't.

brighteyes 12y ago
While I disagree with GP, I think there is a difference here. As GP mentioned, nerds tinkered with computers growing up, despite a stigma. There isn't such a social phenomenon for accounting or medicine, those are things that almost everyone gets into in college or later. Yet, as I said, I disagree with GP. The word "natural" is misleading, it sounds like he or she is suggesting a natural inborn aptitude, and we don't have evidence to support that. Unless all that "natural" meant here was "commonly occurring, happening without prompting", in which case I would agree.
- pekk 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure there are females and males who have more natural aptitude or preference for one or another kind of technical work. And they typically are stigmatized as nerds when this is publicly known. We just don't have to suppose that nerds are more commonly male. It's too bad that it's not socially acceptable just to support nerds regardless of their gender. But that is just more of the same stigma which never really ended.
vacri 12y ago
It's also worth mentioning that men actually don't have a strong natural interest and affinity with computers. If you look at males in the general public, very few of them would actually be considered a 'power user' or higher. Regardless of whether it's more or less than women, the fact is that most men don't have an affinity for computers.
- lambdaphage 12y ago
  This is a good point worth keeping in mind. We're talking about a statistical property of groups of people, and one that is relatively uncommon in both groups.
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  >It's also worth mentioning that men actually don't have a strong natural interest and affinity with computers. If you look at males in the general public, very few of them would actually be considered a 'power user' or higher. I disagree, and think that adults who grew up before computers were commonplace are skewing your perception. I was a teenager not too long ago, and as I remember it, personal computer ownership was about even between the sexes in middle class youth, perhaps even biased towards girls a bit because "a boy will just use it for porn." In spite of this, pretty almost every young boy I knew that had a computer, whether or not they were really a "computer person" or grew up to do anything related to technology, was interested in tinkering with their computers in some way. From playing games for long hours, tweaking their configs or even making maps or modding the game, running their own game servers from their desktop (Minecraft is especially popular for this today), to having the spiffiest desktop and theme, to building their own PCs, hanging out on forums/irc channels/etc. and the good ol' fashioned standby of amassing a huge collection of pirated music, movies, and pornography, there were a lot of opportunities for otherwise "normal" boys to get experience in playing with computers and learning something about them along the way. Being good with computers could even be somewhat cool, in a "you're a fucking wizard, dude" kind of way. And to be clear, this is the perception I got from hanging out with kids on all levels of the social spectrum, not just super computer dorks like myself. In contrast, most of the girls I knew used them mostly for IMing friends. The most "hardcore" girls I knew were involved in communities themselves like Deviantart or the various MMOs, which gave them plenty of their own opportunities to play and learn (for instance, Photoshop is a very complicated program, and sites like Neopets and MySpace taught basic HTML to a lot more girls than boys), but in general a larger proportion of the girls seemed more interested in study, their personal lives, relationships, and "drama" (the "dickhead teenaged boys" I mentioned in another post ITT would blush at the shit that girls do to each other), than in the computer itself or the internet outside of their "small world." I'm not a girl, though, so obviously I don't have the whole story. With the younger generations, the situation looks similar to me, but with smart phones. It's common and "cool" for a guy to have a rooted/jailbroken phone, get a buttload of apps for free, and customize the crap out of his phone. But while I obviously don't have much contact with teenaged girls nowadays outside of family, the ones I have talked with are more interested in instagramming and snapchatting with their friends than the phones themselves. People often say that women naturally have more emotional and social intelligence on average than men, so I don't really get why those same people get offended by the idea that men could naturally have more more "systems intelligence" or general interest in tinkering than women on average.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
lambdaphage 12y ago
The interesting thing about medicine and law is that they are professions that deal with human needs and social relationships. As formal barriers were removed, the percentage of law and medical degrees awarded to women steadily increased to parity: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_doctorlawyer.png http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_do... The graph doesn't show the last few years, but I believe medicine is over 50% women now. Compare this to computer science. I can't find easily find data for Ph.D.s or master's degrees, so here is bachelor's degrees over roughly the same period: http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/ctw/2013/04/04/women2-100386539-orig.jpg http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/ct... Lastly, for contrast, look what happened to vet school: https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/PublishingImages/100215g1.gif https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/PublishingImages/100215g... (NB: technically enrollment rather than completion.) That looks to me pretty clearly like a thumb lifting off the scale. I do not think the quantity of sexism in CS is zero. Yet from my experience of CS and law, I have a hard time believing that there is more bad behavior, (on the order of a 200-300% difference) among computer scientists than among lawyers. Maybe I'm wrong about that? In any case I think comparisons to medicine and law actually raise more questions than they answer.
- erikpukinskis 12y ago
  Software development at the highest level and at scale has everything to do with human needs and social relationships. Maybe if you're writing an app solo in your bedroom it doesn't, but that's not how the vast majority of industrial software gets written.
  - lambdaphage 12y ago
    All jobs require some dealing with people and some dealing with things. Does that imply no difference between the fractions of the day that software engineers and social workers spend systematizing vs. empathizing? But let's examine the point more closely: what is the name for the department that is explicitly in charge of managing human needs and social relationships at a large software development company? Who tends to prefer those jobs?
- 12y ago

wavefunction 12y ago

I don't know, I try to remain a human.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

e1g 12y ago

Just a short time before they got internet in the woods, the Bears and the Foxes had a different arrangement - Everyone thought the Bears had a strong natural interest and affinity in working, and the Foxes had a strong natural inclination in cooking and babysitting. Then after some laws, changed policies, and social adjustments, Foxes must have changed their nature and started doing what the Bears did - often better. Within 20 years, the Foxes and the Bears reverted a few millennia worth of prejudice and assumptions, and everyone benefited immensely.

forrestthewoods 12y ago
all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia
pekk 12y ago
Is it really necessary to say that women are better than men at making software? I think this kind of inflammatory claim just stokes the flamewar that erupts around here every time the topic comes up. No one would stand for saying that men are better than women at making software. These generalizations are ridiculous.

vacri 12y ago

This is a 'begging the question' fallacy, where the conclusion of the argument is used as a premise for it.

nostrademons 12y ago

This comment is interesting in light of the HN story on Margaret Hamilton yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735912 It's not immediately apparent who the Bears and Foxes are supposed to represent in your parable.

jquery 12y ago
> It's not immediately apparent who the Bears and Foxes are supposed to represent in your parable. That's quite intentional.

pekk 12y ago

What about the male foxes? A big problem with the analogy is that there were always female bears and male foxes. That makes the picture more complicated.

xtrumanx 12y ago
I think you've missed the point of the use of bears and foxes in the analogy. It was supposed to remove any hint of gender. Notice he didn't mention the bears were male and the foxes were female.
- pekk 12y ago
  The analogy mentioned quota programs, special scholarships, etc. But in reality there is not even allegedly any such thing aimed only at people who are non-nerds, so unfortunately these things have to be interpreted as being about gender. Which causes the whole analogy to be interpreted as being about gender, and causes a lot of controversy, because it sounds like it's saying that women can't take the role of the "bear" in the story. In fact there have been many women (like Rear Admiral Grace Hopper) who took that role without special scholarships or quotas or whatever. They were bears. So it feels unfair for the analogy to apparently imply that these women didn't have any innate talent and just came into the field to be called special. So if I am charitable, the analogy has a significant imperfection which is encouraging a negative response that misses any more constructive point which might have been there.
  - jquery 12y ago
    Great point. I think a story involving red/blue colors to the foxes/bears could make the analogy more accurate. You are absolutely right there are female bears and male foxes.
  - xtrumanx 12y ago
    > But in reality... It's a story. For a minute try to take it as it is; a story about bears and foxes and let's try to distinguish if the bears are treated justly. The point is to establish common ground. If we can't agree about what is just within the boundaries of our fictitious little story we'll have little hope to agree of what is just in the real world.

mxfh 12y ago

Take two groups; call one the enthusiasts, one the bros.

ANTSANTS 12y ago

You said in other comments that you didn't intend "bears vs. foxes" to be "men vs. women," but it still reads that way a bit, so let me take a stab at being more explicit: The bears are the kids that grew up fascinated by computers, and just knew they were going to do something with them when they grew up. Maybe they didn't always get the best grades in school, but as early as middle or high school they could blow you away with the knowledge they gained purely out of self interest. This group is mostly (though not entirely) male. Most (not all, though things are a lot better today than the used to be) of the bear's earliest experiences with computers were solitary endeavors free of gender bias; if you're the elementary school kid picking out computer books from the library and pouring over them at home, you aren't even aware of a gender bias or skew in tech, you're in your own little world. Sure, when you grow up a bit and start meeting i.e. dickhead teenaged boys in IRC channels, the skew makes itself known, but if you made it to that point in the first place, a few jerks aren't going to be enough to scare you out of your passion. Given that there seems to be a lot more male bears than female bears, this and other anecdotal evidence suggests to me that there could be some kind of unavoidable neurological difference that makes men on average more likely to be innately interested in this sort of thing from a young age. We can make things more welcoming for the female bears and attempt to insulate them from the aforementioned dickhead teenagers (though I don't think that is great idea either), but you can't just force any girl into becoming a programmer any more than you can guarantee that every boy with a computer will use it for programming instead "wasting" it on video games and porn. The foxes are the honor roll students that worked their asses off in school so that they could get into good colleges, get a good degree, get a good job, and continue their family's upward mobility. Whether it's business, medicine, law, or today computer programming, they didn't really care so much about what they did and didn't really worry too much about it as children (though of course they probably developed genuine interests in their field of choice during study and employment), but whatever they decided to do, they were willing to work hard to become good at it. They are at a bit of a disadvantage in tech vs. other fields that mostly lack a group of self-interested bears, but their strong work ethic helps to make up for it. This group pretty much already has gender parity (when you look at college graduates as a whole, not just in tech-related fields), so while the programming foxes may be made up of less women today, it will surely reach gender parity in time. (Yes, this is a false dichotomy; many people can be described by both the bear and the fox. Ignore it for now, or treat it as a suggestion that the foxes may come close to but never reach true gender parity either.) Any tech company is going to be made up of both bears and foxes. The proportions of these groups will vary, and the gender ratio within both groups will slowly shift closer to gender parity over time as barriers are torn down. However, if you accept that there may be a natural reason for the bears to be made up of more men than women, then it becomes clear that due to the bears tipping the scales, there will never be perfect gender parity in tech candidates, and that there can only be perfect gender parity in employed tech workers if the male bears are actively discriminated against by all potential employers. Sadly this philosophy does not seem to be very far off from what many employers and prominent figures here seem to actually believe and practice, but on the bright side for the male bears, it is almost impossible for them to be completely excluded; for as long as tech is a competitive field, ignoring a male worker because of his gender will just result in him being snatched up by someone else. So while I do support initiatives to reduce gender bias and punish blatant harassment in tech, I think that some amount of gender skew is unavoidable and not worth worrying about. The people that push for a perfect 50/50 split strike me as misguided at best (if you disagree with the idea that men could be "better" or more interested on average at tinkering as a whole, while simultaneously believing that women are "better" on average with emotional and social skills, then while I see where you're coming from, I think you have some cognitive dissonance to work through), and at worst, far left radicals and those they dupe, more interested in raging a never-ending culture war than in making any real progress. But hey, as a bear, I'm biased.