I'm not shocked, but I am a little disappointed that the discussion here completely missed the main point, which was that maybe all these "women in tech" pushes are fundamentally flawed because they don't actually focus on the women in tech and the careers they've built. Instead the focus seems to be on "look at ms cutie teenager coding!" rather than "look at Ms. Senior Developer working on these interesting projects", and it's detrimental.

That actually makes a lot of sense to me. People need to be able to picture the future of something, an end result. A teenage girl isn't going to really be able to picture herself as a coding wunderkind unless she already is, and if all the images of adults in interesting STEM positions are white dudes, she's going to have a harder time imagining "hey, I could learn this, and then one day be doing job X!" And I think it's important that all this happens at a really subtle level, so it develops a series of expectations that are very hard to counter.

And it's something that's easily applicable outside the specific topic of women and IT jobs. If you want to motivate someone to volunteer, you don't tell them about George The Super Volunteer who single handedly saved orphans, you tell them that you need people to help sort canned goods in order to get food to hungry families. Specific action, specific outcome, both framed in such a way that the person can easily envision themselves in that role. People need to imagine not only how they could do something, but what it would achieve.

If I were trying to get boys to consider careers in nursing, I wouldn't just talk about boys who like biology, I'd talk about men whose nursing careers were successful and rewarding.

I have a friend who spent a summer working as a truck driver. As a trainee, she had another driver with her. Anytime they stopped, she couldn't go anywhere without the other driver present. At first she thought this was an exaggeration, but quickly learned to stick to it, because if she were seen as by herself, even for a minute, she got seriously harassed, mostly on the assumption that because she was female, she must be a prostitute. It was worse when they realized she was a driver.

Forget young people. The people in our communications department (ages between 30-60) managed to design and mail out a postcard advertising an event for kids that included an astronomy segment as one in which we were going to teach kids "astrology".

Of course they mailed it out to all of the parents, community partners, schools, and donors before showing it to anyone in my department (which was responsible for the event).. The word was in really large type and bold as well.

Because all male departments already exist, and when they do no one even notices, because it's assumed to be right and natural? It's the same idiotic question as "why does an oppressed minority get to have culture/clubs but it's considered racist to have a White booster group?" whine whine whine.

Well, they should get off their fannies and do something about this whole ridiculously resilient ridge that's keeping it from raining at all this winter in California (and is possibly related to the arctic conditions elsewhere...?) Damn it, you just can't trust the military industrial complex to do ANYTHING right. Where are the supervillains when you need 'em?

Yes, I would. In the advent that I had enough money to pay someone to give me an organ, I'd still be aware that the point at which someone is will to violate their bodily integrity for money is someone who is so hard up for cash that the issues of consent become irreparably fucked up.

The issues are different if we're only talking organ donation from corpses, but as other people have pointed out, even that creates extremely perverse incentives.

Kind of off topic here, but the past tense there is sadly inappropriate. Prison labor is still pretty common especially in the south.. They're even having prisoners do labor for corporations. That way, the big companies get all the savings of using unfree labor in china, but they get to do it at home, so they can stick a "made in america" label on it.

And the prisons are still full of people who are guilty of being black. Then there's the whole extraordinarily depressing school-to-jail thing. (including a judge in Pennsylvania who was taking bribes to ship kids off to juvie and....well, this http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/11/school_prison_pipeline_meridian.html where kids end up incarcerated for things like talking back to teachers.

Because it's exploitative, the way the act of performing surgery is not. Compare to how selling yourself into slavery is illegal, even though theoretically it's "your own body".

I wish more people would think of it that way. On both sides. I've gotten caught in a few too many very irritating conversations with people who were...damn, really, the only way to say it was that they were evangelists for various mind-altering substances who would seriously not let it go when told that while I was appreciative, I wasn't interested in experimenting because of a family history of mental illness and a tendency to psychotic episodes triggered by drug use. But it's HARMLESS, those are all LIES blah blah blah and you're just a TOOL of the CONSPIRACY AGAINST FREEDOM and blah blah blah. On and on for ever. Sigh. It was really, really weird, I'd never before encountered anyone whose reaction to being turned down on sharing was anything but "oh, cool. More for me".

You should be worried abut them knowing everything about you. Think of all the little laws (and maybe big ones) you have purposefully or inadvertently broken in your life. This kind of data collection means that if you ever got on the government (or some government worker, or some politician)'s shitlist, they could selectively skim through the information on you until they found things they could charge you with/sue you for/broadcast.

It's really pretty depressing how credulous people are when it comes to "don't worry, this is only applied to BAD people, and we need it to stop those bad people doing evil things." But that's not just in the case of asset forfeiture. You could just as easily substitute "horrifically militaristic raids that lead to civilian fatalities" or mass surveillance or extraordinary rendition or whatever. Few people really seem to care. You get a lot of, "yes, but..."s. At least I do. From pretty smart people, too.

The fourth amendment has been dead since civil forfeiture became common.

So being attractive is, in your mind, correlated with being unintelligent. For women, at least. Awesome. Dude, I probably don't have to tell you this, but you have issues. Misogyny is the least of them.

"an attractive candidate for the job" is a phrase that means different things than "an attractive woman", which is what the poster said. In any case, "attractive" would be an unusual word to apply to "candidate" unless one is speaking of physical attributes. Prospects are attractive, because you are drawn to them. Candidates are more likely to be called promising. Of course, that doesn't rule out just a slip of the tongue, figuratively speaking, but still, considering the rest of the post and everything, I'm kinda thinking that yeah, "physically attractive" was what was meant.

Do you actually hear what you're saying? You think that being attractive automatically means not being geeky, or not being attractive makes someone geeky? what the hell, dude? Geekiness is about your interests and your passions, which, unsurprisingly, have very little to do with what you look like.