Presenting it as bad is simply, at worst: propaganda espoused by sheep and their shepherds, and at best: ignornace.
There has been a ton of research done on "Thing vs People" career interests, which show very clearly that men prefer working with Things, whereas Women prefer working with People.
(When I say prefer, I mean the average in a normal distribution)
Simply google: occupational interests people vs things
Ex1: "Men and Things, Women and People: A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Interests"
Ex2: "Straight Talk About Sex Differences in Occupational Choices and Work-Family Tradeoffs"
"Sex differences in occupational interests have been known for decades, and a recent aggregate analysis of the interests of more than 500,000 people shows that some of these differences are quite large.1 The most relevant finding here is that about 15% of women have the same level of interest in engineering as the average man; 50% of men, by definition, would have stronger interests in engineering than the average man."
Exactly what proportion of the gender imbalance is accounted for by a "Thing vs People" disparity, according to those studies?
Is it only a question of sex-related disposition? If so, what has caused disposition to change so radically over the last 30 years?
And why, for example where over 50% of nurses men in the 1900s in the US, but it is now only around 7%? What caused men to apparently become so much less interested in people over the last 100 years, starting to become more interested in people again in the last 10?
Historically most nurses were related to war, men fight war and thus become nurses. Even in the modern military you learn how to apply bandages, identify different kinds of wounds and how to treat them etc to keep your mates alive even in the modern military, so you could call everyone in the army a "nurse". But of course they are not modern nurses, the profession changed over time from mostly patching up people after fights to mostly treating diseases as our understanding of diseases improved.
The same thing with programming, women were dominant when it was mostly low level computations, but more and more men joined the field as computers grew more powerful and people saw the breadth of programs you could create. So the job changed, early it was more about maths and algorithms, and then we added more and more engineering tasks on top and people started to create huge programs which doesn't resemble math at all. So the gender balance of programmers shifted from the relatively equal applied math field to the extremely male dominated field of engineering. You can look it up, STEM without E has a very balanced gender ratio, while E tend to have above 80% men.
Gender Imbalance is a presupposition -- it begins from the place that a "gender imbalance" exists.
I can't justify for you your presupposition [nor demonstrate the existence of your chosen, yet unjustified presupposition given the evidence], you'll need to do that for yourself. Sounds like the news & entertainment media told you something repeatedly (without evidence), and you accepted it on its face without critical analysis.
Now, like many, when presented with evidence, you feel a sense of cognitive dissonance and would prefer to refute clear evidence rather than adjust your public opinion-- as to be expected given human nature of desire to save face.
However, what is apparently demonstrated in the studies is that the vast majority of individuals in a normal distribution favor a particular occupational set of interests based on gender: Men -> Things/Systems. Women -> People.
"The most relevant finding here is that about 15% of women have the same level of interest in engineering as the average (Read: 50% i.e. 50th percentile) man;"
"Straight Talk About Sex Differences in Occupational Choices and Work-Family Tradeoffs"
> I can't justify for you your presupposition [nor demonstrate the existence of your chosen, yet unjustified presupposition given the evidence], you'll need to do that for yourself. Sounds like the news & entertainment media told you something repeatedly (without evidence), and you accepted it on its face without critical analysis
But you're pointing out the imbalance yourself...
> The most relevant finding here is that about 15% of women have the same level of interest in engineering as the average.
But when presented with evidence, you feel a sense of cognitive dissonance and would prefer to simply presume some biological effect. Is there any evidence that this is a biological effect?
No, imbalance would presume things are out of balance.
Your presumtion is that balance = men and women have the exact same interests and should therefore be represented exactly identically in occupations of things & people.
That is an irrational posture, foisted upon you by your media overlords, and accepted by you wholeheartedly without critical analysis.
I do not believe men and women are equal-- if they were, we wouldn't have two names for two genders in a dimorphic species.
If apples equal oranges, we wouldn't have two names for them.
I don't know what sort of mentality you live within, but it isn't a rational nor informed one, in my estimation.
Given the psychological science (again, many studies over the course of decades), and given the biological science (hormonal and brain differences between sexes), I think it is very clear: Women prefer working with people, men prefer working with things -- On average.
I don't think you understand how statistical distributions work. There are two distributions here: One for men, one for women.
They don't both fit onto the same normal distribution-- if they did, it would be bimodal, not normal.
Good lord, I see you're trying to argue against biological differences between men and women-- You must not be aware of hormone differences, which in fetal development, yield either a male or female.
OK, I am done talking with such a brainwashed person. Your ignorance does not offend me, I just think it's pointless to discuss this with an irrational person who prefers to block out the daylight of reality falling upon their presuppositions, and media-informed (not science-informed) perspective.
I don't know for sure whether it's natural or not, but I keep wondering: imagine someone runs a groundbreaking research which eliminates all the possible biases and digs to the root of the issue. And it turns out the difference is natural Is any member of our corporation diversity board going to apologize then?
Imbalance is bad because participation in civil society, to include employment, should be representative of society as a whole.
Besides, inclusive and diverse workforces have been repeatedly shown to be better for the bottom line because organizations are more able to serve a wider market when they are made up people more representative of the total market.
Revenue for the division I work in at my current employer exploded when we started hiring people outside of the traditional avenue for new hires. Until a couple of years ago we had been staffed by traditional government/military-focused scientists and engineers with narrowly-focused aerospace engineering backgrounds. Our customer base was 100% domestic government/military because that's who we knew and had relationships with. Outside consultants recommended non-"traditional" hires, and we followed their recommendations.
New hires in the environmental sciences (mainly women) and personnel with foreign language experience opened up market opportunities that we had been unable to see before and by diversifying our workforce we were able to diversify our customer base to include foreign environmental management organizations, agricultural, and natural resource-based markets.
My employer develops and sells a pretty unique Synthetic Aperture Radar system with capabilities not found in competing platforms. We had been trickling out systems to the Navy and Air Force on a onesy-twosy basis every year.
People with a diverse background said "hey we can sell this to oil and gas companies, departments of agriculture and environmental science all over the world, and we can work with all of these universities on terrestrial surveying projects and make more money".
And we did.
I imagine for mass-market consumer products and services the impact of understanding the needs of the market by having a workforce representative of the market as a whole would be even greater than what we experienced.
> Imbalance is bad because participation in civil society, to include employment, should be representative of society as a whole.
So when society changes the demographics we have to fire and hire the right amount? Sorry you're the best candidate we've ever interviewed but we have hired too many black men and are above our diversity quota.
> Besides, inclusive and diverse workforces have been repeatedly shown to be better for the bottom line because organizations are more able to serve a wider market when they are made up people more representative of the total market.
Is it the diversity of color or diversity of thought that is what drives a better bottom line? I'm gonna go on a hunch it's the diversity of thought that you're taking credit for.
Imbalance is bad because participation in civil society, to include employment, should be representative of society as a whole.
But why?
I understand the point that diverse workforce leads to diverse ideas. But will fifty women per hundred employees produce five times more diverse ideas than, say, ten women?
Hiring women just for the sake of hiring women looks like a cargo cult.
I agree that "increase diversity" is a rather obtuse meta argument, and using it implicitly argues that there are not other significant discrimination issues facing these groups. Maybe it is a better argument to make in certain settings though. For example, a company wouldn't want to admit to having discriminatory biases in hiring, so "increase diversity" is a much more palatable objective.
The more honest, less PR answer is that people still discriminate on huge range of factors. Race and Gender are just the most obvious and egregious.
The post you're replying to specifically claims that it is to make employment more representative of the whole of society. Your statement that it's "hiring women just for the sake of hiring women" completely ignores the very words you're quoting.
Because the one aims to reduce an imbalance in the workforce, which leads to a particular section being under represented.
Thwe other aims to increase an imbalance in the workforce, which leads to a particular section being under represented.