What world are you living in? Women working in technology are so rare that tech companies bend over backwards to find and hire qualified women. In fact, given the choice of an equally qualified man or woman, tech companies will damn near always choose the woman.

Of course women can do the work. The argument is that they generally don't want to do the work. There's about a million other jobs that women find more interesting. Hence, discussions like this talking about the lack of women in technology.

Pay attention. Women aren't interested in engineering work in modern, egalitarian societies. They'd rather take other options such as teaching or nursing or other professions where they can help care for kids, adults, animals, plants, the environment, etc. When women have options, they move away from topics like engineering which they generally find boring. You see that in multiple cultures across the world. In fact, it's such a universal preference that researchers attribute the cause at least partially due to a biological difference between the sexes.

To get women to accept jobs in engineering, you'd need to take away their other options. You need to make society less equal. That's why we see so many female engineers from places like India. Women from countries like that don't have the same options as women in the US. They study engineering because they don't feel they have any other viable options.

Gender studies promotes the idea that men and women are exactly the same except for our genitalia. This assertion or hypothesis hasn't been shown true by actual science conducted by biologists. In fact, studies by actual biologists show the opposite. The brain controls hormone levels. The amount of testosterone in the bloodstream effects whether a child is interested in traditionally male-oriented or female-oriented toys. This is has been shown true for children as young as one day old. That's before a child has any chance of getting corrupted by societal influences.

Further, studies across 53 societies show that as cultures grow more egalitarian and allow men and women to do whatever job they like, we actually see more men doing traditionally male jobs and more women doing traditionally female jobs. It's only in less equal societies where men and women face unequal choices of work where we see men and women doing largely the same kinds of work. Were the differences in preference of job only a difference in culture, then we should also see different results in different cultures. That isn't the case. When given the choice, men almost always prefer traditionally male jobs and women traditionally female jobs. That suggests a biological difference between the preferences of men and women for the kind of work they prefer to do.

Here's a good video on these facts. Although, whoever posted the video to Youtube definitely should have chosen a better title. I suggest watching the whole thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Note that the sending array is huge. 1 sq km in the linked article. That means that the energy density of the beam is low, so you don't cook passing birds, but more importantly, don't waste energy heating up the water vapour in the air either. The receiving antenna also needs to be big. The bigger the better, so you can keep the efficient coupling over a long distance. In this case, long enough to get it to orbit.

The interesting thing about this idea is getting the high specific impulse, so you can single stage to orbit.

The coupled microwave idea has been mooted before for a couple of things.

1. Beam solar power back down to earth (1 km array in space, 10 km x 10 km array on earth. Quite efficient.)

2. Ion drive. With a 10km x 10km or even 100km x 100km and 1x1km or 10 x 10km you can power an ion drive over huge distances, enough to send something to nearby stars. With no power source on board, the rocket gets to be extremely efficient. There is of course the inconvenience of the earth both rotating and orbiting, so you really want the transmitter in space.

This latest idea looks quite interesting.

When women wanted to become doctors, they fought their way into med school, fought to earn a proper education, fought for credentials, and fought for equal standing amongst male doctors. When women wanted to become lawyers, they similarly fought their way through the system. Same goes for every other job women wanted to do. Women fought their way to get the jobs they wanted. Some of those fights took decades.

In tech, jobs require less qualifications than working as a doctor or lawyer. You don't need to spend years getting a masters, PhD, or going through a post-doc program. The pay for high-end IT workers can reach the same amount as the pay for low-end doctors or lawyers. The work environment in IT is often better than what doctors or lawyers encounter. Yet, tech companies can't give away the jobs to US women.

Why? Answer that question and you get to the root of the problem.

Women like to help. They'll help people, animals, forests, the environment, etc. But in general, they're not interested in working with machines. Machines don't need help. They don't care about making the next hipster app. They could care less about the coolest new programming language. They don't give a shit about all the things that cause religious wars in the tech community.

Most women don't want tech jobs because they find the work meaningless. Having done a great deal of the work myself, I'd also throw in soul-crushing. I've spent years developing apps for companies that ultimately went bankrupt. The product of my years of work? Gone. Thrown away. Has my work actually helped anyone? Hard to say. Probably not. Definitely not directly. Not in any meaningful sense. Say, I spend 3 months improving the performance of an app. Then users login half a second shorter. Big whoop. Do users even notice? Do they care? No, probably not. Does it really improve their lives? Definitely not.

When tech companies start doing truly meaningful work, then women will beat down their doors. Until then, all this effort to attract women won't matter.

His name is Kunte Kinte.

What do you mean "best people" and "best universities"?

Why do you assume the best people come from the best universities?

Did you come from the "best" university?

If not, does that mean you're not the "best"? So you don't deserve a job?

If yes, then no one else but your peers from the "Best" universities deserve to be hired?

You make a lot of assumptions: a "best" university, everyone else is not the "best", even the idea of "best" ... this makes for a meaningless argument.

You're arguing that only the "top" people should have jobs, which is utterly laughable, because (a) good look measuring, and (b) that would ultimately mean only one person deserves a job.

This is a big part of the meritocracy myth that drives inequity. And you buy it hook line and sinker.

I like and agree with your posts, thanks for carrying water on this one.

The reason why Silicon Valley is struggling is very clear: look at the rage in this thread. These are the same people who think diversity is bad because minorities are too stupid to be a part of technology. They're still humping the meritocracy myth.

If you are angry, it means you are smart enough to know they are right, but too worried about your identity to do anything about it. And it is easy for you to do nothing because it doesn't affect you. But, it's not about making you look bad, it's about helping other people who don't have the advantages you were born with.

Realizing you're acting in a way that makes life harder for strangers doesn't make you a bad person, it is what makes you wise.

They know what's in it. What they may not know is how it will be applied.

However, they know how it is applied, because it has been done for years. They know that employers will specify impossible and non-existent job requirements so that they can justify H1B hires. IN 1988 a recruiter contacted me looking for a programmer with 10 years of experience with PC DOS.

I hold out hope that the two of them are getting air time not because they could win, but because they are more interesting than Clinton v. Bush. Plenty of time for that boring crap later.

Vendors cannot be held responsible for stupid (or non-existent) engineering and policy.

Without knowing the GS/contractor divide at OPM, it's hard to say who is ultimately to blame. If OPM gave carte blanche to the contractor, the latter is generally the one at fault. If the government micro managed the contract and ignored suggestions, the blame is back with them.

Jim Webb doesn't strike me as particularly interested in the office.