Fixed.

Well, I'm sure once the gender balance in the STEM fields has been achieved initiative to create that balance will wind down...

TBH though - these sorts of initiative do seem a bit of an artificial 'quick fix' that don't really tackle the true, underlying causes of the problem, I'll give you that, but such is politics...

There's no big underlying problem. That's a myth. The reason for these gaps can be found in the difference in nature between men and women. If you have 100 men who are interested in technical stuff, you'll be hard pressed to find 30 women. And of those 30, the passion tends to be less as well. IF those jobs have more women, you'll often find that the balance does not fit the reality in terms of passion or interest but that women mainly pick that branch because (a) it pays well (b) they have advantages when it comes to landing such a job.

I notice the same in the graphics design field where I work. 80% is female yet the competence of these women is horribly low. I was unemployed for THREE years and every job I applied for, a woman got it. When I finally did get a job, with 5 other women and one older guy who was on his way out, I found that I was constantly helping them out and realized none of them even cared about self-improvement, becoming better and more efficient or expanding their knowledge. It was a job, nothing more.

Hasn't anyone seen the truth yet??? Its just the patriarchy making people think there is a problem.

bah dammit, I shoulda kept my big fat mouth shut.

Yeah, who needs accuracy when you can fling your shit around like a rabid monkey, then scream about whatever sticks?

Because the scales of justice are never equal. It is a see-saw caused by eternal human bias and the instinct to conquer. That primitive instinct covers all genders, all races, all classes. There's no human on Earth who doesn't want to see themselves as being better than others. That even goes for transexual lesbian journalism majors. Until these 'special' people turn into pumpkins or balls of pure energy, I'll know their motives and actions are as commonplace as anyone else's.

Balance does not mean 50:50. Even something like 99.999:0.001 would be balance if that is the natural state. You are a nature-denier is you are claiming that the interest distribution in different fields is the same throughout both genders. And that is what the activists are counting on, perpetually chasing a goal that can never be achieved. Job security for all eternity, the perfect scam.

They do?

Well firstly I don't think anyone's getting too anal about a perfect 50/50 gender split anywhere

And secondly, I at least think it's worth investigating just how much IS nature and how much is conditioning, and at this point it's worth mentioning the 'Pink Aisle'
http://time.com/3281/goldie-blox-pink-aisle-debate/
(once again I didn't read all the way to the bottom because it's a long way down)

I'm not saying that Barbie should be abolished (although her bodily dimensions are defiantly a separate body-image debate) and I also wouldn't like to think of any girls who WANT to play with toys from the pink aisle being forced not to, I'm just saying that how we condition our children from an early age to conform to gender roles and stereotypes is worth looking into, barbie was designed in the 60's and we've all seen Mad Med, after all!
It would be nice to at least confirm that we are allowing children to just be themselves and not foisting anything onto them - although, yeah, as I say, you'd have to be very careful not to do any foisting the other way!
If children even HAVE a 'themselves' to be and we're not all born as tabula rasas ready to be shaped and conditioned by everything around us - I don't know what we, as a society do if that turns out to be the case...

But anyway I think seeing well-meaning do-gooding as a conspiracy and a scam is being a bit paranoid, it might be a regional thing though - here in the UK I really haven't heard much about 'positive discrimination' relating to gender - there's some race based stuff going on but I don't think we're so into these kinds of schemes over here, maybe I'd take a dimmer view if we did...

This isn't about whether we should be rigorous about getting 50:50 or if say 40:60 is good enough. I say whatever happens naturally is the best, even if it ends up being 99.999:0.001. In the case of academia for example, don't provide and special benefits and don't hinder anyone, the result will be the natural balance.

The same for toys, thinking too much about it is a waste of resources. Just make the damn toys and if they sell you have done the right thing and if they don't you have done the wrong thing. Just let the children pick the toys they find fun and things will sort themselves out. And if most girls still want dolls and most boys still want cars, then so be it.

Stop this "we must encourage X to do Y" BS. Let nature sort it out.

You call it "well-meaning do-gooding". We see censorship (games being restricted like GTA). We see groups of people dismissing anyone who opposes their new vision of games as misogynists or neckbeards. We see dozens of journalists tooting the same horn (Gamers are Dead articles). You may call it paranoid, but anyone paying attention will see groups of people speaking the same exact words from many different platforms (just like the Republican party around election time). How many of them continued to call Obama a Muslim when they knew better? Only because they knew a portion of the uninformed public would buy into the lie. If that isn't the definition of an actual conspiracy, I don't know what is. Clearly, there are activist group pushing agendas. Your argument is just one of dismissal without facts. Strangely, this all said, we are to accept the "patriarchy" as a fact. That males somehow are conspiring worldwide to keep women down. Reminds me of the movie Undercover Brother, a comedy about white domination which was clearly satirical yet somehow we are to accept "patriarchy" as some undeniable fact.

Frankly, I see what you are doing, your only real contribution to this thread is to dismiss Gamergate, dismiss anyone who says anything positive about it, dismiss anything they have to say with anything you can make up. As spoken above, make claims, ignore facts, ignore the discussion and if something you say seems to be making any kind of headway, double-down on it.

So your pink aisle comment...So? No one here should argue with it. If parents aren't being so supportive, why should businesses in the sciences be pushed for equality? If what you say, the parents are the problem, fix that, not the end result. Because attempting to change the end result is an artificial fix. Artificial fixes just tend to breed resentment because they are unnatural. Forcing quotas in the STEM fields will just make everyone believe the positions gained are undeserved. There is a big difference between being placed into a position be it family ties or quotas and earning it. What the sciences need are qualified women who deserve the positions.

And here's what's really strange, being someone who has worked in science and now in production and manufacturing. In every job I've been in, the women present thrive and gain advancement. In fact, if anything, if two people are equally qualified, one a man, one a woman, the women advances far more often than the man...

Again, from what I see in the workplace, I do not see this problem you speak of.

Yes but I was talking about taking greater care to ensure that we ARE just letting children choose what they like and not 'encouraging X to do Y' in subtle ways that we might not even be fully aware of and that includes parents, corporate advertising and society as a whole.
As a social experiment, I mean, I'm not in favor of draconian new laws or anything, but it seems worth investigating...

How about letting parents maybe parent the way they each want? Why do you think it necessary to push an agenda on them?

Whoa, OK, I specifically meant HiPhish's comment that 'positive gender discrimination' was a scam but if you see everything you've argued against in the entire thread as one big conspiracy of which this is a tiny part then.. Wow, OK I guess I can see where that mindset comes from, I wasn't really prepared for that though...

And yeah, I've said myself that I think gender quotas in the STEM fields is an artificial quick-fix - we'll probably have to wait another 10 years before it's generally decided that it doesn't work and politicians come up with something else that no-doubt STILL won't really move anything forward in a meaningful way, if it can be, I'm not discounting that general female dis-interest in the STEM fields could be innate but it's certainly worth investigating, which is why I brought up the possibility of childhood conditioning in the first place

There's defiantly SPECIFIC women who have a lot to contribute as history has shown - not only Madame Curie but I was just reading in the New Scientist about Emmy Noether and her amazing contributions that laid the foundations for the Standard Model
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether

So I guess I'm saying that even if it turns out to be generally true that 'women don't like STEM jobs' we have to be aware that it doesn't mean that there are specific women who are going to be really good and into them, but we can't even get to that point without trying a few things first, I'm more in favor in examining nurture rather than giving the end product an artificial leg-up though, personally, I'll give you that.