I never suggested you throw away better qualified candidates to hire a very poor one purely based on gender, I suggested that if you are concerned about diversity you take positive steps to help improve things without harming the quality of your workforce.

There are probably some extremely talented potentially IT workers with vaginas who have simply never had the opportunity to explore their potential. Whoever figures out how to tap into that massive overlooked talent pool will make a killing.

Now if the particular suggestion I made is illegal, there are surely other ways one could approach these things.
I actually believe that apprenticeships and internships are among the best ways to learn I.T. for those who did not have the right exposure as children to arrive at university already mostly self-taught like I did.

Right... because people scholarship students all starve unless they are employed while studying...

Of course, you will also find that statistically those students who did internships have a much higher rate of postgraduate employment since they have an advantage over their classmates: they have some work experience in the actual field they are entering.

When I was studying I was dating a girl who wanted to become an animator - she actually PAID A COMPANY for the privilege of being an intern for them while studying to get the experience.
She wasn't just unpaid - she paid THEM to work for them for a year.

Personally - I think THAT is terrible, but a couple of hours a day in between classes when the job is mostly learning-while-doing is a valuable thing which will pay for itself a thousand times over and many students would be grateful for such an opportunity.

While I should point out that not all feminists are women and not all women are feminists what you describe is otherwise pretty much exactly my experiences as a young father and a man who, some 20 off years ago in my late teens had seriously considered a career as a child-care giver, so that I could do my engineering passion completely outside of the constraints of finances.
As it happens, even today, my best work is the stuff I do in my free time and give away for free - the stuff they pay me to do will simply never have quite the same level of passion attached because it wasn't MY creations.

And of course your personal feelings are a perfect representation of our culture at large ... Oh wait...

The candidates are students - who already have means to support themselves. Unpaid student internships are hardly a new idea...

> Were I to consider a teaching job, my enthusiasm would drop as the student's age decreased. I like younger kids just fine, but I sure wouldn't want to spend all day, every day teaching them. I'm just a sampling of one, of course, but those rates makes perfect sense to me, and it has nothing to do with others' perceptions.

Well, speaking as the father of an infant, and an engineer in good standing with one of the largest companies in the world (suffice to say it's one of the three most bashed companies on /. but I only ended up with THEM because they bought out my startup)... I would have traded it all in for a chance to be a preschool teacher and spend my life showing infants the wonders of the world. And I LOVE engineering - but I would have done it as a hobby and had a preschool dayjob in a heartbeat if the world would have let me.

At least, as a dad, I'll get a small taste of that.

So now we have a sample of 2 - with a 50% split, more-over the samples are almost certainly not accurate because the samples themselves are polluted by the the same stereotypes (it's called gender conditioning).

There isn't really a good way to control for that, but what I will tell you with absolutely no fear of science ever contradicting me is that the numbers as they are CANNOT represent more than 5% of what they would be in a non-sexist society.

Wait... what the hell are you doing on slashdot ?
If you believe THAT - shouldn't you be over at raptureready or something ?

>I doubt there's some grand conspiracy to prevent men from becoming kindergarten teachers

Oh there most certainly is, only it's not women or feminists behind it but other men. It's the patriarchal stereotype that men cannot be nurturing which means any man who shows affection to children gets branded a paedophile - and that means getting hired in preschool or kindergarten teaching jobs become virtually impossible as too many parents will harbour such unfounded suspicions.
Gender roles and sexism hurts men as well as women - only, not quite so often.

How ironic that you chose to try and prove your point by showing a field where men are under-represented and failed to realize the main REASON they are under-represented is because of the sexism of other men !

If you SERIOUSLY want to know ?
Offer an unpaid internship to interested but unqualified women - pick say the three best candidates and train them on-the-job for a year, then hire the best one.

Repeat each year.
Voila, in five years time you'll have made massive strides in diversity without at any point compromising on quality. You're at a university for crying out loud - you're SURROUNDED by people desperate to get any work-experience under their belts to improve their odds in the jobmarket before they graduate and internships is a great way to do that

Except that five posts up we have SCIENTIFIC PROOF that you are wrong about everything you say.

But yeah, ideologues will always choose common sense over evidence based science.

> I'd guess it is good enough to be useful, but you'd not want to rely on that test alone.

Perhaps not, but if this test is cheap and easy it offers something very valuable nonetheless.
You go to your doctor with some symptoms that seem fairly generic and non-serious, like many cancers do in the early stages. Your doctor knows there are cancers that present that way, he also know there is a much higher chance it's a pulled muscle. Right now he'd most likely recommend going to a physio (this is exactly the course it took in a friend of mine who recently passed away from lymphatic melanoma - it was misdiagnosed as a sprained groin muscle until well after it metastacized), in part because testing for the cancer on such a long shot is very expensive- and your medical insurance may not want to pay for it.

But now imagine a quick, cheap and easy blood test - it won't give you absolute confirmation but since it's cheap it's not worth it NOT to do it, and then if that says "red flag" he sends you for the more expensive and reliable tests.
Even if it's only 50% successful that's twice as many cancers caught really early - and taken care of while it's still easy and likely to work.

There are plenty of cancers that can be entirely prevented if you catch the risk early. Bowel cancer can be guaranteed prevented with annual colonoscopy's - but that's a painful and uncomfortable and expensive procedure, hardly something you want to do if you're not at risk (especially for a cancer that runs so strongly in families) so a lot of people don't.
But if you could catch it early, you can actually CURE early stage bowel cancer with this simple process, once it metastasises it's usually a death sentence.

Anything that makes early detection cheaper, will save millions of lives.

>On the other hand, if the +apple runs into a brick wall at several km/sec, itâ(TM)s going to make a fair-sized hole. Where did the energy to break the bricks come from? You donâ(TM)t expect the wall to reform as the â"apple deals it a second blow, do you?

Nope, nothing of the kind, at most I would expect the bricks it knocks lose to land a tiny bit further away.
The +apple hits, transferring kinetic energy to the wall (it had to have a lot if it was moving at several km/h as in your hypotheses) - which knocks the bricks out and makes the hole.

Now what happens when the -apple hits depends on what the nature of the particle's are, more specifically whether they obey the Pauli exclusion principle. If not, it passes straight through the wall without breaking it at all (though the repelling between the particles as it passes through might cause some micro-cracks). This is the prevailing theory.
If it does obey the exclusion principle - then you have energy transfer just like with the +apple, and the +bricks move WITH the energy regardless of the source, so the bricks fall in the same direction - however because as they are knocked out they are ALSO repelled by the -apple's negative mass, they fall a few microns further than when the +apple hit.

At least, that's my understanding. I am not a physicist, just a fan of physics.

If it exists, we can do something so much better - we can build Alcubiere Drives - that is, the real version of what Star Trek called "Warp Drives".

(This reference is not accidental - Star Trek inspired Alcubiere's research as he himself pointed out in an e-mail to Shatner - he wanted to test if Star Trek's loophole was really possible, and he found out it is at least theoretically possible, but only if negative mass exists).

>As it should be. We need fewer laws, not more of them.

While I agree with the general principle you DO need enough of a functioning system to be able to actually pass the good laws and revoke the bad ones.
A government that cannot get either done at all (which is what the US has today) is nothing but a massive and worthless expense.

As an anarchist the system I favour would make new laws much easier to suggest and pass than any govenrment but, with a much greater level of oversight (since everybody votes on every proposed law) and by removing politicians you make corruption far more difficult and oligarchy all but impossible.
On the other hand - libertarians generally hate the idea because they know that an anarchism is likely to be stronger welfare state with the sensible ideas from socialism in place and the bad ones ignored (or rapidly revoked) instead of their "unregulate everything" madness. A small government gives you all the downsides of a government with none of the potential benefits.
No government or big government are both better ideas (actually - I would argue that no government is the biggest government of them all - since now EVERYBODY is part of the government).

So, considering that the average person is still paying in almost 4 times as long as they are gaining, there should be no reason why this cannot be solved.