"Futurist" is the same as "clueless moron". I had hoped for Stephenson to not have lost his sanity or his insights, but apparently it is too late.

And they can even, gasp!, used in hyperlinks!

These people are as greedy as they are stupid.

You seem to have trouble understanding statistics or reading plain text. All the information you are missing was actually there.

Indeed. Being female is not a valid excuse for laziness.

Indeed. Being a victim is _convenient_. You do not have to change anything on your side. (Well, you should if you want to get your agency back, but that is not the public perception...) It however has extreme drawbacks, such as far less control over your life. No smart person goes that way.

These feminists are stupid. There are physical differences in men and women and they are quite enough to explain the gender disparity. While CS, on the surface, seems to be a purely mental activity, the larger situation matters. One thing is that CS is _hard_. Quite a few women these days still sell their reproductive capabilities in exchange for a meal-ticket or at least go for a less demanding education because they know that have this fall-back option. Yes, it is not politically correct to say so, but it _is_ happening. That is a pure physical (not mental) factor right there that reduces the number of women in any thing that is hard to learn. Sure, men and women are on average probably equally lazy, but men do not have this convenient and traditional way out of that quandary and hence need to try harder and know that.

As I said, these feminists are stupid. Ignoring relevant facts leads to faulty conclusions.

As to "women need to be taught CS differently", just no. That is patently false. I know quite a few women in CS and none of them found that they were somehow taught "wrong". Sure if was hard work for all of them to learn, but that is just as true for the men. Sure, getting women _interested_ in CS may have to be done different in order to overcome cultural factors, but once they are, there is no need for a different style.

No. Most people cannot be taught that skill. Not at all. Just as most people cannot be taught to use Math beyond very simple things. And yes, I have experience in that area. These "useful" apps create far more problems than they solve. In fact, your attitude is the root cause for the ongoing software crisis: Too many wannabes doing things that critically require competent engineers. It is really no surprise that most software is f*cked up these days.

Right on the mark. We do not have to few people in CS. We have far too many, and hence too many mediocre ones and they create most of the problems.

Indeed. This is a terrible regression. Equality is about equal opportunity, not about giving the same certificate for different skill-levels. And if most (but not all) women do not want to study a demanding subject like CS, that is their prerogative. Gender equality demands that we do keep the opportunity open for women that want to take that challenge, not that we make it so easy for them that there is in fact no equality, just statistical numbers that look good. Gender equality also demands that we expect the same of a female CS graduate as of a male one, namely that they are competent engineers. I know a few women that are competent engineers in the CS and EE field, and the only thing I see is that making is easy for them would have actually made it much harder for them to become competent at the subjects and given them a CS/EE degree of lower value. Instead, they faced the same challenges and hence are competent engineers first and gender becomes irrelevant.

There is also another thing that conveniently gets overlooked in this debate: A woman that fought her way through a demanding STEM program is not going to stop working for a longer time when she has children. She has far too much effort invested in her education. Hence the problem that employers of lower-skill women face, namely that they sometimes can become unavailable for year or two due to motherhood, is significantly diminished (and it is a valid concern). I still remember when the in-progress Java documentation was not updated for more than a year, because both technical writers had gone on maternity-leave. Things like that are not professional and hugely expensive. (Become unavailable for 2-3 months, work reduced for a year or two: no problem. But this? No.)

I agree on that. And currently what they can get in supply from the male half of the population is not driving labor costs low enough, so they are trying to get women as even cheaper labor, and all that under the guise of "equality". Fact is that likely most women with an interest in IT are already there. There are no magical barriers preventing them from going there, or at least not really more as the men are facing.

In the side of technology, the problem we have is that there are too many people with low talent and hence low skills in the IT field. That is what makes IT so expensive, namely the sheer number of people required to get something done. Quite a few projects with 30-100 "cheap" programmers, designers, architects could be done by teams of 1...5 highly competent individuals and both faster and better. _That_ would lower cost for IT. Instead they are trying to flood the market with even more low-skill people, like IT was manual labor. That is only going to make things worse. And the utterly pathetic thing is that this has been known for half a century. Just look at "The Mythical Man-Month" by Brooks.

I don't think so. Look at the general state of knowledge in Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, etc. Most people cannot reach or do not want to reach a state where they actually start to understand complicated (yet critical) things. They want the easy solutions, the simple viewpoints and the warm, fuzzy feelings that come with them. Just look at the drivel politics is selling. Most of that is so obviously nonsense that any smart and educated person can immediately see it. Yet most people eat it up.

Very much this. We have far too many bad CS graduates, and they are destroying the work that the few good ones are doing. We also have far too many bad programmers. We need less and better people in these fields, not more.

I also think you cannot even teach critical thinking, you can just encourage those that have the talent to use it.

I doubt it. I know quite a few women that are engineers or in IT, several with a PhD. Their explanation for the low numbers universally is that most women are too lazy to study a demanding subject and rather look for an easy way out. (This statement is usually delivered in scathing language.) The easy way out of course being to find a male that works for them.

Now, I am not saying this is a shortcoming of the female personality. In fact, I think that the same amount of males would like to do that. However, because female bodies have most of the reproduction functionality, females can sell that to get an easy life. Males need that functionality if they want to reproduce and hence they have to pay some female for access, usually under the thin veil of "marriage" or similar arrangements where the male typically provides much more and sometimes all of the economic basis. While arrangements where it is the other way round exist, and I know a few, they are a lot less frequent than that traditional case. At least these days most women in the west are not stupid enough to make themselves dependent on a provider, which probably does more for equality than anything else.

One thing that would be interesting to see is whether women that know at a young age that they are sterile chose to go into STEM fields more often than others.

While I agree primarily that people are different and male and female people t the core of their being are not fundamentally different, the hardware you run on plays a major role in your interaction with the environment. Quite a few emotions (if not all) are body-things and do influence the overall hybrid being. The problem with some feminist fractions is that they think they can ignore what the body contributes to the being. That is just plain stupid. Eliminating the influence of the interface that _everything_ you experience of the world goes through is just not feasible and ignoring it has a massive negative impact.

I disagree on the "hard" part. Actual reality is that most people cannot learn to do it well, as it requires a lot of talent. The myriad of people in software creation without that talent is the root-cause why so much software is so bad.

Those that have the talent do indeed not need to start that early. It is not a question of learning how to do it. It takes the right kind of mind.