"You heard the scare-mongering"

"Promised "2-3 feet" snow"

"government's overreach"

Congratulations, Timothy. Today's the day I take Slashdot up on its longstanding offer to disable advertising, and it's all because of you!

Because honestly, y'all don't deserve money for this level of pabulum.

To be clear: "WhatsApp Plus" is an imitation app that uses the WhatsApp name.

Go out and make "Internet Explorer Plus" and see how well that works for you. Maybe you can get Timothy to post something about it to Slashdot.

a different userbase?

And that works wonderfully, given that we assume humans are frictionless spheres in a vacuum.

In the world in which we live, though, millennia of societal mores and pressures have resulted in a situation where huge swaths of people are presented with unique challenges and roadblocks simply by dint of their genetic makeup.

You simply cannot have a society based on merit so long as these deficiencies exist. If you want our world to become a meritocracy, then the responsibility of the coming generations is to work to eradicate these social discrepancies. To pretend they are no longer a factor does not move us towards a society built on merit.

But there were already many women participating in the workforce, particularly as teachers, nurses, and clerical workers. Women formed the backbone of the war machine for World War II--and were basically kicked out of those jobs when the fighting ended, whether or not they wanted to be. The concept of women working wasn't foreign back then; it was the concept of women doing jobs they weren't supposed to do that was the big sticking point.

Yes, absolutely yes! Until the 60's, this was completely true, because programming was viewed as women's work! Then something happened, and women dropped like flies from the ranks of computer programming. Did they suddenly stop being good programmers, or was something else going on?

I'm going to guess that you're with a Fortune 500 company, then. Consider this Senate testimony that goes into considerable detail as to the persistent gender challenges faced by women in large corporations in America, particularly in professional and higher-level positions. It includes data pulled from the Fortune 500, and goes into painstaking detail as to the disparities--both in numbers of women and their compensation--that continue to exist in large corporations.

That's absolutely part of the solution, but it's only part of the solution. Those of us already in the tech sector need to be asking ourselves exactly why, for an industry that repeatedly insists that it is rooted on merit, we look so very different from the society in which we exist.

Further, there exists a clear and significant disparity between women and men pursuing CS degrees--a gap that didn't exist until the 90's. Something happened, and "well, that's just how things played out" doesn't cut it for me.

Oh, this is a problem across many industries, but that doesn't mean we're somehow absolved of trying to get our own house in order. Further, we have some unique challenges of our own in this regard--the large drop in CS college enrollment, for example.

Oh, I recommended a quota? I must be getting old. I have no memory of doing any such thing.

Yes, we wouldn't want to overtax ourselves with doing more than one thing at the same time.

That would be wonderful.

Then you either work for an outlier of a company, or you haven't been able to see it where you are. When as many women--from as many levels and walks of life as we've seen--come out and very clearly state that this is, in fact, a problem, it behooves us to consider that they see and experience things that other people--men, for example--don't.

It's a big part of it, yes! It was also a problem for the medical and legal professions in 1970!

Tech is emphatically not a meritocracy. We really, really want to believe it is, but it simply isn't. It's about who you know. It's about growing up with the right teachers, the right environment, the right access. It's about having the luxury of time--years and years of time--to develop your skills on your own. Tech requires comprehension of advanced, abstract concepts--a thing that is difficult to get without sound educational roots. Tech is still, by and large, an elite playground.

This problem isn't up to the tech sector alone to solve. This is a huge, structural, society-wide problem, its roots going back for centuries. But we're part of that society, and for us to ignore our role in trying to fix it--or worse, claim that things are basically as they should be--would not be particularly meritorious of us.

I'm going to take two sentences from your original post and run with them. First, the opening sentence:

...and the opener to your third paragraph:

If one presumes that there is, in fact, fundamental gender-based inequality in skill, then the most sensible stance to take in this matter would be "therefore, unless we get more women into these fields, we won't really be able to get good data on whether they make better doctors and lawyers than men!"

If we never have a world where women dominate the legal and medical fields, we'll never even have the opportunity to know whether or not we've been royally screwing it up for the past few centuries. After all, we're not about to presuppose that men are better at this than women, are we?

I'm glad to hear it--thank you!

...note that there's a large ball of cooler-than-average over the mid-Atlantic, riiiight on top of the largest and most influential concentration of climate change deniers...

Here ya go, AC.

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pu...
http://kff.org/other/state-ind...
http://scholarship.law.cornell...
http://www.americanbar.org/con...
https://docs.google.com/spread...
http://www.indiana.edu/~emsoc/...

I can only assume that you'll return the favor. :D

I was just a kid in the 70's, but I'd suggest that the overall employment of women was a key part, but far from the whole, of this issue. Specifically, while there were very few women who were doctors back in 1970, the medical profession had large numbers of women performing medical work: nurses. Similarly, in the legal profession, there were a good number of women fighting to break into the profession as lawyers (as opposed to clerical workers,) with generally disheartening results.

While overall employment of women back then was decidedly lower, those women who did seek employment were virtually guaranteed to be excluded from positions "not suited" to women. It took generations of coordination, organization, education, training, and flat-out grit to overcome this--and we're still far from "done".

Well, we could look to both the legal and medical professions.

For example, back in 1970, about 8% of all doctors were women. Today, roughly 1/3 of all doctors are women--hardly parity, but a significant improvement, nonetheless. Similarly, about 1/3 of all lawyers are now women; back in 1970, that number was closer to 5%.

So what happened between the 1970s and today in the legal and medical professions? For one, there was a concerted effort to even make these professions accept that there was a problem. In both the industry and the public eye, it was generally accepted that women weren't lawyers or doctors because women simply weren't cut out for that kind of work--it was too demanding, too rigorous, too technical, too high-stakes, and required an 'instinct' that women just generally didn't have.

Additionally, there was a very active and ongoing effort to encourage women to enter these fields--efforts that took a long time to gain steam, as these fields require years of specialized study and training on top of a sound primary and secondary education. Professional organizations dedicated to supporting and encouraging women in these fields were created. Major existing professional organizations--like the AMA and the ABA--started paying attention to the issue, as well.

Today, you won't find many people defending the position that women are somehow less fit to be doctors or lawyers than men. That's gone. It took a long time, and it took a lot of people--mostly women--fighting a grueling and protracted battle against a broader community that was, at best, condescendingly tolerant of them, so long as their numbers were small enough and they accepted adapting themselves to life in a man's profession. You still see gender disparity, both in pay and people, and you still see a lot of the vestiges of the old system that need to be retooled, but there's been real progress.

Getting a solid number on how many women are employed as software engineers/programmers is tricky, but one recent effort compiled information from around 200 companies and found that about 15% of software engineers are women. Certainly not as bad as the medical and legal professions in 1970, but a far cry from what you'd expect--and, frankly, a far cry from where software engineering and programming has been in the past.

So here we are, in 2015. There's a lot to be done. We've barely even begun to accept that this is a problem yet, and the backlash against this concept is virulent, to put it lightly. That said, there's momentum building, and I'm hopeful that we're finally--finally--starting to move in the right direction.

The system won't be burned down, but the system won't survive in its current form, either. With any luck, 40 years from now, we'll be looking back on this with the same incredulity as we do on the legal and medical professions of yore.

There are a fair number of people out there who happily traded the 2-week battery life of their perfectly functional cell phones for dead-in-a-day smartphones. As it turns out, the inconvenience of having to constantly recharge a smartphone was worth putting up with in exchange for being able to do all the things you can do with a smartphone. Clearly, not everyone shared this sentiment, as you can still see any number of people using non-smartphones today--but significant numbers of people chose functionality over battery life.

It's hardly a stretch of the imagination to see the same thing happening with smart watches.

Even before that: have a business plan. Do your best to determine what you want to create, how expensive it will be to make it, how many people you'll need to manage, how much you expect to charge for it, and how big your likely market is. If you discover that there's no way to make your endeavor even close to profitable, you can save yourself months of heartache and mountains of lost money. Always have a plan, even if you don't stick to it in the end.

This, folks, is a textbook example of "damning with faint praise".