Highways already have intersections. Some are 4-way signals, some are stop signs on the secondary road.

Are you thinking of freeways?

In my ideal world, I would keep my Outback for long trips or lots of cargo, sell or donate our cheap commuter, and subscribe to a driverless car service for commuting to work or making other trips around town, like to the grocery store or the bar. I don't care if my commute is a half hour longer: I'll work in the car and spend an hour less in the office, or eat breakfast and meditate without having to think about the stress of rush hour.

One set of factors has obvious, macro level effects. The other has subtle psychological and mental effects. Those subtle effects are more difficult to measure and less well understood. Some of our popular/stereotypical understanding of these subtle psychological and mental effects is demonstrably false yet still pervasive. e.g it is a commonly believed that men have better analytical and mathematical ability than women. This is a myth: men and women in fact have about the same ability.

It's not about being inoffensive, it's about being correct. It's about improving society for everyone.

In my own anecdotal experience, yes: women are both more adept at teaching in classrooms and more inclined to be teachers than men are. But different students learn in different ways and need to be exposed to diverse viewpoints in order to learn effectively throughout school. We didn't always believe this: for centuries and still in some places, school was a function of the church and all teachers were male. Sometimes all students as well.

In my own personal anecdotal experience, yes: mean are more adept and interested in understanding how machines work. But IMO this difference is easier to explain by cultural influence than it is by biological differences. 2 year old girls are just as interested in figuring out how the world works as 2 year old boys. But boys are encouraged to take things apart and build them while girls are encouraged to look pretty and make friends.

With computer science in particular, there is absolutely no evidence that men have any innate neurological advantage over women, yet we outnumber women by at an order of magnitude at least. Women are said to be better than men at understanding the integration of independent parts into a larger group dynamic. Men are said to be better at spatial manipulation. We have equal ability at math. Software engineering requires all these skills, but in my own practice, I find systems thinking skills more useful and applicable than the other two.

Because cultural stereotypes affect people's confidence, performance, efficacy, and motivation. Look up stereotype threat effects.

Who called for a politically enforced diversity? Quotas are facile and ineffective. I am calling for individuals to seek diversity for its own sake.

Do you have any actual evidence of this?

Ooh here's a good one: there is negligible difference in mathematical ability between genders, yet stereotypes about male superiority exist and have been quantitatively measured:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

Yes, and the fact that most teachers are women demonstrates that indeed something is actually broken and needs fixing.

Do note that I explicitly said that the mere fact of a gender disparity is not an indicator that something is actually broken and needs fixing.

That mere fact is, however, a good reason to start looking.

Yes, and the fact that most teachers are women demonstrates that indeed something is actually broken and needs fixing.
Also, most nurses are female, such a monoculture cannot be healthy.

Yes, I agree. Those are further examples of the same issue, and similarly unhealthy. More women are teachers, more men are principals and superintendents. More women are nurses, more men are doctors.

And most garbagemen are men

There are likely factors here arising from macro biological differences in physical strength and risk aversion. Professional occupations are more concerned with factors influenced by micro biological and culturally-influenced psychological differences in knowledge and aptitude. However I am inclined to say that there is unwarranted bias in the waste management field quite similar to the bias the military is slowly starting to overcome.

The problem is, how do we measure what the actual problem is?

First off let's bring the focus back to the topic at hand: STEM occupations. There exist studies that show, given functionally identical resumes, hiring managers in STEM fields rate men as more qualified than women. When similar future studies show no such difference, we are can triumphantly declare centuries of systemic gender bias solved.

We can count indicators of manipulation of the free choice of the individual by other cultural biases as binary factors: do marketers show any boys at all playing with LEGO Friends, any girls playing with Technic? Does Barbie say "Math is Hard"? Does the classroom teacher?

Let's worry about giving an advantage or trying to artificially correct beyond the disparity AFTER we correct for the still-existing artificial bias below the disparity.

Quotas are a bad solution.

Actively promoting diversity as a worthwhile goal in itself is a good start.

male and female brains are literally wired differently.

Yes, hormones -- particularly testosterone -- have an effect on neuronal connections. Men and women are more alike than they are different, but they are qualitatively different to a minor degree. How much of this difference is due to biology and how much is due to cultural conditioning? There is no consensus. How much of the difference actually gives men an advantage in STEM fields?

"the brains of 949 young men and women were scanned at the University of Pennsylvania... [the] findings demonstrated that women are better disposed to deal with ‘analytical’ and ‘intuitive’ tasks at the same time. Men, meanwhile, were better at complex motor skills."

Which of those sounds like a more effective computer programmer? A more effective scientist?

Do you have any actual evidence of this?

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Even if we assume that men are indeed more apt at science and technology -- a questionable assumption -- it does not fit the facts of hiring practices.

Diversification for it's own sake is not beneficial.

I disagree: the result of diversification is indeed beneficial in itself. Ecological, a diverse population is more robustly equipped to survive disasters than a highly integrated and cohesive population. A diverse population has many chances to survive and thrive in the face of changing environmental conditions where a mono- or oligo-culture would collapse. From a systems standpoint, diversity in a population is similar to redundancy in a network. A diversity of viewpoints helps to solve problems in novel ways, allowing us to escape local maxima.

Surely a person with superior group dynamics processing has a lot to contribute to software projects dealing with massive parallelization and to teams dealing with the social dynamics of humans in proximity. Surely a person with well-integrated analysis and intuition has a lot to contribute to a project with a large legacy codebase.

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

It is false to assume we should have an even distribution of squares and triangles for it's own sake.

Add in the natural and useful distrust of the unfamiliar that we each possess. We get segregation, ghettoization, and balkanization. We create an us, we create a them, and We are usually right, and They are usually wrong, and this leads to crime and war. We see this happening today with rich vs. poor, rural vs. urban, democrats vs. republicans, SJWs vs. MRAs. Both camps are right, both camps are wrong, and we won't be able to distinguish the signal from the noise until we stop yelling and listen to each other.

When we seek diversity for its own sake, we make it more difficult to create a Them. All the nastiness that arises from us vs. them thinking dissolves.

the result is that our economy is built on the concept of dual income families now, which means no parent staying home to guide and raise children.

The problem of missing caregivers -- and many other problems related to the raising of children -- are firmly rooted in the deification of the nuclear family in the early 20th century. "Dad is always away at work" was already a problem before the move towards dual incomes. Communities of adults are much more effective at raising children than a single breadwinner and a single homemaker can ever be. Don't forget the issues that occur when one or both roles go missing, whether by choice or by chance. Not to mention that the move to dual income families has at least as much to do with wage stagnation than it does with the cultural empowerment of women.

I fully agree that the functional development of future generations is more important that promoting diversity in STEM fields today. Yet "women should focus on raising the children" solves neither problem -- we tried that and found it lacking. Let us look for solutions that address both problems. I suggest starting with "we should all and each strengthen our social bonds".

Teachers also have a much higher education level than the average worker. Teachers make below average wages compared to workers with the same level of education.

Where is the outrage over this?

For one example: this thread. For less outrage and more attempted solutions, I refer you to this post.

No need to read any further.

This is about STEM fields, not about other areas of education.

FTFY

http://www.forbes.com/sites/wo...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

Just because one gender tends to populate a field doesn't mean something is actually broken or needs fixing.

This is true, in general and abstractly.

But in this case, the predominance of one gender in all STEM fields does indeed demonstrate that something is actually broken and needs fixing.

Nature, science, and common sense show that while consensus provides great short-term efficiency, diversity is universally superior to monoculture in the long term. This is as true in the marketplace of ideas and the STEM fields as it is in the jungle or on the farm.

There does indeed exist a systemic cultural bias pushing women out of technical fields. It exists as a thousand little things, none of which is individually morally incorrect, none of which ought be banned, all of which can be rationalized, all of which ought be examined thoughtfully. Correcting this bias requires not zeroing the bias -- highly unlikely and in fact not at all effective -- but a proactive encouragement toward diversity. To see this demonstrated mathematically, see: http://ncase.me/polygons/

No he means the state WA that neighbors the state OR.

Webster's doesn't prescribe how words must be used. They catalog how words are used, and that changes all the time. Otherwise they wouldn't need to publish new editions.

I don't believe that Sony would have considered it a credible threat if they had not just experienced an enormous server hack.