You are confusing two separate issues. The H1B visa issue needs to be dealt with separately, and actually one of the arguments for helping more female and minority candidates develop and get tech jobs is to reduce the alleged skill shortage that is driving companies to hire H1Bs.

So yeah, the people arguing for improved diversity absolutely would argue for fewer Indians, because with more skilled workers available there would be less need for H1Bs.

It's got nothing to do with numbers. The only time they are useful is for comparisons over time, to show if the number of women and minorities is rising or falling. For example, the proportion of women used to be higher, but it's been declining for 15 years now.

What is important is that people who want to study and work in tech are given the opportunity to get the qualifications they need and get a job. Note I said the opportunity, I'm not talking about lowering standards or handing out jobs. There are studies that ask if more women and minorities want these opportunities, and they tell us that they do but are facing gender and racial issues that make it more difficult for them.

Numbers are a red herring. Sadly some people, like you, use them to dismiss the argument because you are angry and think people are making you out to be a bad person, which is not the case.

It's like a time warp back to the 1950s.

Actually, in the 1950s a lot of the early pioneers were women. The proportion of women in computing was growing right up until the mid 80s, when suddenly it levelled off, and around 2000 started to decline. You need to explain why suddenly women became less "interested" in computing, when clearly it was more attractive to them before.

Generalizing about women in the way you do is unbelievably sexist. It really is a 1950s attitude. The whole point of women's lib in the 60s was to get away from those stereotypes, but apparently some people didn't get the memo.

I only read the first paragraph and then stopped. You made a faulty assumption. No one is claiming that there needs to be exactly equal numbers, except MRAs trying to set up a straw man argument.

Outliers in extremely specific disciplines. All races are capable of being very good at sports, world class in fact. If you were building a team you wouldn't exclude all but one race based on the current world champion's ethnicity.

You sound angry. You should understand that this isn't a personal attack on you. No-one is saying you are a bad person, even if you are part of the system that has a problem. You think they are wrong because if they were right it would mean you have to look at yourself, and maybe even conclude that you are part of the problem. Relax, no-one is saying you are a bad person, just that there is a problem that needs addressing.

It's interesting that you claim "SJWs", that ill-defined group, think that every group is nearly perfectly equal. Actually, one of the most common micro-aggressions that people labelled as SJWs mention is not acknowledging differences and inequalities. If you check any introductory material on micro-aggressions, the the alleged favourite club that SJWs use to batter people, you will find it mentions this.

Of course, that's the right thing to do. That's not what the issue this. No-one is suggesting you are bad person for doing this, quite the opposite in fact. No need to get angry about it.

The issue is that some businesses are failing to attract applications from women and minorities because of the way that they manage the process. For example, white guys tend to network with other white guys, that's just how it is, so if a company uses LinkedIn etc. to advertise and look for candidates they are likely to get more white guys and fewer minorities and women. That doesn't make them racist or sexist or bad people, it just means they could do a better job of looking for good candidates. And of course, just to be clear, in the end they select the best one.

If this were the case then surely there would be even more lawsuits coming from white males. Every time a black person or a woman got a promotion there would be a lawsuit from a white guy who felt he lost out and was discriminated against for not being black or female. Every time one of them got fired there would be a lawsuit claiming that a black or female employee used their privilege to avoid being sacked and forced the company to get rid of the white guy instead. Every time a white guy got a bad performance review there would be a lawsuit claiming that they were hampered by having an incompetent black or female person forced onto their team to meet some quota.

If it were the case the people who campaign for minority and women's equality would be fighting it. It's hardly without precedent, feminists have been critical of women who support the patriarchy for decades, and black people have been critical of those who take part in blacksploitation films and the like. Yet this does not seem to be a major issue. Perhaps you should make it one, if you feel it is important.

You are mistaken. Poverty and privilege correlate with competence, not race. Depending on the part of the world you are looking at, difference races fit into those two categories.

The fact that there did used to be a lot more overt injustice is making a lot of people angry and resentful of any suggesting that there still might be a problem. This observation explains about 75% of Slashdot posts on the subject.

Once women were treated really badly. Beating your wife was considered a reasonable way to discipline her, and in fact it was your duty as a husband to keep her under control. Many areas of life were simply off-limits to women. It was really bad. So women campaigned for equality and liberation, and got a lot of it. Most modern consider people who beat their wives to be bad people, again rightly so.

The problem is that many men now consider a sexist to be someone who does things like wife beating and overt discrimination. They think of sexual assault as a guy in a balaclava lurking in the shadows. So when someone suggests that there is some sexism or that a particular action might be a form of sexual assault they get really angry. They are not the kind of guy who beats his wife or keeps women down, they would never lurk in bushes waiting to rape someone. Therefore that person must be wrong, because if they were being sexist they would also be doing those things, and they aren't.

It goes further. Someone suggests that video games might be a bit sexist. Some guys reason that because they play and enjoy video games, the accusation is that they are sexist and must be a bad person. That isn't the accusation of course, but it forces them to consider the possibility that something they enjoy might make them a "bad person". It's a ridiculous false dichotomy, but when you look at GamerGate posts it's clear that's what a lot of people seem to think.

So there is a massive push back against efforts to get diversity in tech, because if tech is doing badly then people in tech must be bad people, right? And I'm not a bad person, so the claim that there is a problem must be wrong.

It's pretty easy to understand, try to wrap your head around it. Even if a population is generally disadvantaged that doesn't mean than an individual can't overcome that and become highly competent. Therefore not properly checking for good candidates in the population potentially excludes the best candidates. That's why companies are trying hard to avoid doing it.

You are missing the point. If the only difference is in opportunities in life for training then not checking to see if those candidates have that training is limiting the pool of good candidates unnecessarily.

So while what you say may be true in some areas, it only applies to populations and not individuals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The bottom line is that even if there is still some debate in this area, the margins are tiny and averaged over populations. Individuals don't seem to be limited by their race, and certainly not to the point where you could say that only a small fraction of non-white people are qualified to compete for tech jobs with white people.

If you want the best pool of candidates to select from you need to make the pool as big as possible, not just a small number of universities where you have traditionally got good employees from. Also, from TFA:

So even when ham-stringing themselves with a smaller pool of candidates they fail to select the best ones on merit alone.