Interviews: Ask Adora Svitak About Education and Women In STEM and Politics 155
samzenpus writes Adora Svitak is a child prodigy, author and activist. She taught her first class on writing at a local elementary school when she was 7, the same year her book, Flying Fingers was published. In 2010, Adora spoke at a TED Conference. Her speech, "What Adults Can Learn from Kids", has been viewed over 3.7 million times and has been translated into over 40 different languages. She is an advocate for literacy, youth empowerment, and for the inclusion of more women and girls in STEM and politics. 17 this year, she served as a Youth Advisor to the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, DC. and is a freshman at UC Berkeley. Adora has agreed to take some time from her books and answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.
And Woman? (Score:1)
I know! I know! Ask her about her implication on the future best seller "Barbie: I, against all odds, can be a computer engineer for Amazon in Seattle"!
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I know! I know! Ask her about her implication on the future best seller "Barbie: I, against all odds, can be a computer engineer for Amazon in Seattle"!
You've won Slashdot for the day. Congratulations!
Question (Score:5)
What help do you have to reach your high expectations? What should kids do who don't have the same help?
Child prodigies (Score:4, Interesting)
To what extent do you believe child prodigies are merely products of their environment?
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She co-wrote the book with her mother.
Microaggressions (Score:4)
Do you believe in microaggressions? Why or why not? Is a belief in microaggressions helpful or harmful? To whom is it helpful? Who should worry about microaggressions? Who shouldn't? How can someone be certain they are innocent of committing microaggressions? If someone is accused of something like committing microaggressions, are there two sides that must be considered, or only one?
Where are the jobs??? (Score:2)
STEM is such a big area. Where are the jobs???
Daughter just complete BS in Math in 3yrs and cannot find a job. Now, is user support line on how to fill out a health insurance website at $10/hr.
So what good is STEM student degree by a female, if their is nothing waiting at the other end??????
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That's Because the Rich White Men have given all the STEM jobs to people from India using H1B Visas working for half the salary US Citizens would expect. Please note, (R) and (D) are in on this almost equally.
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This is uniformly true - it's easier to brain drain a developing country of its skilled labor than it is to pay appropriate wages to those domestic graduates who find themselves with immense, insurmountable student debt.
It's very interesting how capitalism works in this instance - we instill values in our youth that they have to work hard and they'll get jobs matching their talent and grit, and we tell other countries that with a bit of investment in education and succeeding past simple industrialization th
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STEM is such a big area. Where are the jobs???
Daughter just complete BS in Math in 3yrs and cannot find a job. Now, is user support line on how to fill out a health insurance website at $10/hr.
So what good is STEM student degree by a female, if their is nothing waiting at the other end??????
If your daughter has a degree in mathametics then she should have no trouble learning and becoming a programmer. Success in life is correlated with tenacity. Not with the level of education.
A message to Adora Svitak (Score:2, Interesting)
Dear Adora Svitak,
At 17 years of age, you do not have enough life experience to say anything of real importance about anything involving the greater issues facing society. It doesn't matter how brilliant you are or think you are. It doesn't matter how much of a rep has been manufactured for you by spinmeisters. You are simply too young to have any real perspective or ability to identify the machinations of those around you.
One of the most dangerous things in the world is for someone to believe their own
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You're young; therefore, all of your arguments are 100% incorrect.
That is brilliant logic. You are a true genius.
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Arguments stand on their own merits. Respond to the specific arguments she is making.
Re:A message to Adora Svitak (Score:4)
No, that is not what he said. That is how you twisted what he said, which only shows that some adults act more like kids who haven't learned anything.
For instance, What Adults Can Learn From Kids is a null point of view. ALL adults have been kids, so ... kids offer nothing new to adults. We can be reminded of what we already know, but that isn't really "learning".
The concept of using kids to question Adults is a tactic used by people with an agenda of control. You see, it is easy to manipulate the young minds, and if you tell them something is so, they will believe it, and if you can convince adults that kids know more than they do, you can control the world. This doesn't mean kids cannot contribute. It also doesn't mean kids are less intelligent than adults. In fact, i know some kids who are smarter than many adults. Which says more about the adults than it does the kids.
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No, that is not what he said. That is how you twisted what he said, which only shows that some adults act more like kids who haven't learned anything.
No, it doesn't show any such thing; you arbitrarily decided that it does.
In any case, he didn't respond to any specific arguments she made, and focused almost entirely on age, and then randomly concluded that the voting age should be 25. I do not think my interpretation was unreasonable in the least, given all that. If that person wants to come forward and clarify themselves, then fine.
You see, it is easy to manipulate the young minds, and if you tell them something is so, they will believe it, and if you can convince adults that kids know more than they do, you can control the world. This doesn't mean kids cannot contribute. It also doesn't mean kids are less intelligent than adults. In fact, i know some kids who are smarter than many adults. Which says more about the adults than it does the kids.
It's easy to manipulate anyone. That's why we have nonsense like the TSA, the NSA's mass surveillance, the Unpatriotic Act,
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I did not chose 25 randomly. 25 used to be the voting age in the U.S.
That in itself was arbitrary.
Well, the draft is gone so that argument fails now.
But the Selective Service is *not* gone. We need a constitutional amendment banning drafts, since they infringe upon people's fundamental liberties.
And besides that, that's the main problem with such arguments. Just because someone at age X is able to do Y, that doesn't mean they should also be able to do Z. Maybe they shouldn't be able to do Y either? Now, I'm not an authoritarian scumbag who would support all these restrictions, but still. I just think that, rather than resort
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He said "Draft" is gone, you changed it to "Selective Service" which is simply a prerequisite of a Draft. Convenient distinction. There has been no draft since 1973, at the end of the Vietnam war. Suffice it to say, that we have had two full generations of draftable people never see a draft. It is effectively gone.
We don't need a Constitutional Amendment to stop the draft, we already have stopped the draft. A constitutional amendment would only make it harder to reinstate (via another Amendment). And since
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He said "Draft" is gone, you changed it to "Selective Service" which is simply a prerequisite of a Draft. Convenient distinction. There has been no draft since 1973, at the end of the Vietnam war. Suffice it to say, that we have had two full generations of draftable people never see a draft. It is effectively gone.
Nonsense. All that means is that we haven't had an opportunity to use one. Unless we've fully banned the very concept of a draft, we could still have one.
and haven't ever reached the point of 0% you are just trying to make an impossible point out of ignorance.
Impossible point? A draft is not impossible in the least, given everything else our lovely government scumbags are doing. It just takes the right situation, which we haven't yet seen.
The reason I want an explicit ban on the draft is because it violates the very principles to which "the land of the free and the home of the brave" is supposed to aspire. I wo
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All that means is that we haven't had an opportunity to use one.
Not having one, and not needing one are two different things.
Unless we've fully banned the very concept of a draft, we could still have one.
You cannot ban an idea. Nice try though.
adults tend to be wiser than children.
Actually, that's not necessarily true.
You're right, some children have better comprehension skills than some adults
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Not having one, and not needing one are two different things.
My point: We must ban the draft, because it's not impossible we could have another one. It wouldn't even be all that surprising if a big war happened.
You cannot ban an idea. Nice try though.
You know precisely what I meant.
You're right, some children have better comprehension skills than some adults
Yes, I agree.
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And here I thought I would have to search to find an example of the ignorance of youth not grasping the concept of life experience.
If I'm interpreting this correctly, this is yet another example of True Genius where you assume that anyone who disagrees with you must be young. I assure you that not all adults are illogical, and I am quite offended by your implication; I might not be perfectly rational all the time, but I do try.
In reality, I don't have any problem with life experience, and I think it is very valuable. It's just that I want people to respond to other people's arguments rather than spewing forth ad hominems.
A 17-year old may have a logical argument, but it is not often one based on any level of real experience.
Arguments stan
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Were you a child prodigy, author and activist? I wasn't, and I'm interested to here about her experiences.
If you don't want to listen then feel free to ignore her article, but I'll see what she has to say before making a judgement. Age is no guarantee of wisdom or intelligence or experience.
The Empire Strikes Back (Score:2)
At 17 years of age, you do not have enough life experience to say anything of real importance about anything involving the greater issues facing society.
How perfectly appropriate that these choice lines should be posted by to Slashdot by an Anonymous Coward.
The timing couldn't be bettered as well.
We should certainly laud Mattel for deciding that 2014 is the year Barbie strikes out on her own as a career woman after 55 years and 150-plus jobs (including hating math and babysitting, with a welcome stint as a computer engineer in 2010).
But Entrepreneur Barbie reminds us that --- like every other ostensibly inspiring incarnation of the doll --- her main role is to look pretty and wear lots of pink.
In the end, both [Supermodel Barbie and Entrepreneur Barbie] are part of the same old problem. As 16-year-old feminist and former TED speaker Adora Svitak told Forbes' Denise Restauri this week:
''She encourages an unrealistic expectation of beauty grounded in narrow ideals --- whiteness, thinness, a lack of hair and an abundance of breast tissue --- instead of kindness, smarts, self-confidence, or athleticism.''
Mattel's Latest Affront To Little Girls: Entrepreneur Barbie [forbes.com] [Feb 2014]
I have nothing against padded bras in general. But my immediate thought in the store was, Why the hell does a teenage girl need one?
The issue of the over-sexualizing of girls from an early age has come to the forefront with a recent news story about model Thylane Lena-Rose Blondeau posing suggestively for the cover of Vogue magazine. Over a series of photos, the ten-year-old is shown sprawled on leopard-print cushions, wearing a skimpy gold dress, stiletto heels, and posing heavily made-up, with rouge and lipstick. She's ten years old, yet she looks scarily adult in the photos.
By creating so many illusory images of physical perfection, whether on store aisles or storefront ads, magazine covers or TV shows, we speak more to the profit margins of companies than the self-esteem of today's girls. The unsaid message of that endless rack of juniors' pushup bras? No matter what size you are, it still isn't good enough.
Would You Buy This for Your Daughter? [huffingtonpost.com] [Aug 2011]
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At 17 years of age, you do not have enough life experience to say anything of real importance about anything involving the greater issues facing society. Incidentally, What Adults Can Learn From Kids ~ {null}, which is why society would function much more smoothly if the voting age were raised back to 25.
Wow! That's mean. As a 40 year old myself, I've learnt a lot from my and other kids. I wonder whether you, Anonymous Coward, have enough life experience to back up your claims?
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You know, when I was a kid, people like you kept telling me that I didn't understand stuff and wasn't responsible. That was a long time ago - you know what? Damnit, I *was* right! I was as savvy and responsible then as I am now. The only thing I've learned as an adult is that "is an adult" has a weight of exactly 0. I used to think the people in newspapers saying stuff had some authority, but really they're just "a dude said some stuff".
One of the great lies adults like to tell and believe is that there's s
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At 17 years of age, you do not have enough life experience to say anything of real importance about anything involving the greater issues facing society.
I disagree completely with your uncalled-for insult.
Most human learning is done through vicarious experience and not through "life experience". That is to say vicarious experiences such as listening to people discuss their lives and recalling stories of how others live, as well as reading literature, news reports, scientific journals and so on.
Fortunate children learn and grow from association with adults who are living an intellectually engaged life.
I maintain that "life experience" has little relevance to being able to say anything involving the greater issues facing society.
If you had said "most 17 year olds ... have nothing of importance to say etc", I could buy that. But that is not what you said, and you directed your statement to a specific person.
By directing it to a specific person, and for your statement to be anything more than thoughtless insult, you must show how her published works and TED talks how your statement is true.
Furthermore, do have you in mind some specific "life experiences" that no 17 year old could understand well enough to discuss unless they experienced it in person? If so, what are those experiences?
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At 17 years of age, you do not have enough life experience to say anything of real importance about anything involving the greater issues facing society.
I disagree completely with your uncalled-for insult.
Most human learning is done through vicarious experience and not through "life experience". That is to say vicarious experiences such as listening to people discuss their lives and recalling stories of how others live, as well as reading literature, news reports, scientific journals and so on.
Fortunate children learn and grow from association with adults who are living an intellectually engaged life.
I maintain that "life experience" has little relevance to
Yes, I have a question... (Score:1)
When are you girls going to get off your knees and fight back? You're as masochistic as the average voter. You're being abused because you let them abuse you. Stop it! Just stop it [youtube.com]!!
Q&A of parents (Score:1)
what does some random 17 year old with rich helicopter parents have to tell us?
seriously...
all these "child prodigy" stories are bullshit and nothing more than advertisements for the parents
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Anyone who questions child prodigies is obviously just jealous, and being jealous invalidates your arguments. My logic cannot be defeated.
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What can be done to get more women into CS? (Score:4)
Hi,
I'm the "typical" white male in CS gradschool. My subjective view is that CS has one of the lowest number of women compared to other STEM disciplines. I'd estimate that typically there are about 5% tops in classes or at conferences. For various reasons I think that this situation is a shame for the community and society as a whole. What do you think can be done to improve this?
Thanks!
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I for one don't know. I hope your question is answered is a concrete manner. I am sick of vague answers and non-answers when this comes up. I want an answer that I can implement, and I am sick of being blamed for the actions of HR and hiring managers.
If you attempt to recruit women, you're a sexist. If you try to ignore the problem, you're a sexist. If you transition to living as a woman, now you're a rapist and invader, too.
The only thing I can do is to assist women asking me to know more about these
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Hi,
I'm the "typical" white male in CS gradschool. My subjective view is that CS has one of the lowest number of women compared to other STEM disciplines. I'd estimate that typically there are about 5% tops in classes or at conferences. For various reasons I think that this situation is a shame for the community and society as a whole. What do you think can be done to improve this?
Thanks!
What can be done to improve the number of male registered nurses?
What can be done to improve the number of female aircraft mechanics?
What the hell do you mean no one in those industries are up in arms about the gender inequalities?!?
My point here is simple. After two decades of decline, the statistics SHOULD show hiring discrimination IF that were the clear-cut case. If it doesn't exist by now, then what exactly are we all up in arms about? Could it be the same exact reasons we're all "up in arms" abou
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You are assuming that discrimination is happening during hiring. That's quite a powerful assumption, but not the only one.
Put yourself in the position of these women when they were children. Nearly every "computer person" they saw was a guy - from the computer TV shows, to the most famous writers in Computer magazines, the CEOs, the developers, and so on. They saw they were not represented in that industry. Why should they want to study in this masculine field, when it appears like no place for women, a
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First off CompSci accounts for about 10% of all degrees conferred, just to put things in perspective. Second women earn nearly 2/3rds of all degrees and either dominate or are near parity in virtually every major other than CompSci and Engineering as well as utterly dominating every single measure we have for the education system.
CompSci, Engineering, IT... all of these fields commonly require people to make great personal sacrifices to pursue them, giving up any semblance of a work/life balance and throwin
Happy thoughts (Score:3)
Hi Adora! Looking through any debate on gender issues is somewhat demoralizing, as there seems to be little focus on resolving the underlying issues. What do you think could be done to help people cooperate rather than yelling at each other?
Do you support it? (Score:1)
Do you support women in stem?
Do you support stem in women?
If it's good for the goose, is it good for the gander?
I Don't Get It (Score:4, Insightful)
After seeing my development job outsourced to India in the early 2000's during an IT slump, I have no compulsion to steer my daughter into STEM. I hope she finds a career that she grows into and does well, STEM or not.
STEM is in demand at this spot in history, but I've learned the hard way it's subject to fads, bubbles, age discrimination, H1B's, and outsourcing.
Please tell me, why push women into such risk?
I suspect it's lobbyists trying to get cheaper IT labor for their plutocrat bosses by flooding the market. Feel welcome to convince me otherwise.
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You are correct.
It's actually pretty short-termist too. Women are being pressured into taking on careers, are having children later or not at all and denying the future new scientists, engineers, whatever. It's self-defeating at root.
Now I will attempt to defray the cries by stating that women who are interested in these things should absolutely be encouraged to follow their dreams. I hope my own daughter has significant achievements. Let's not force it though, eh?
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Please tell me, why push women into such risk?
It's not pushing. They want to enter IT because they find it interesting. It's removing the barriers.
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Then why not equally focus on removing barriers in other lucrative fields, including CEO, where females are underrepresented? Play the whole piano, not just the STEM key.
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IT is not special.
Did TV make us do it? (Score:5)
How much credence to you give to the theory recently put forward in a recent NPR Planet Money piece [npr.org], ascribing the absence of women specifically in the computing industry to 1980s media representation of geeks and computer worker lifestyles?
I'd just like to take the chance to plug my book (Score:2)
"When I was a teen, I thought I knew everything too".
ISBN Number" 0071111eleventy
It actually took me until fairly recently to be right about everything ;)
Should it go both ways? (Score:2)
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Barbie (Score:1)
1. Were you aware that the Barbie line includes dolls of different skin colors? How would you plausibly represent the diversity of skin color in a single example?
2. Where would you add hair to a Barbie doll?
3. How would you project k
Oppression of young people (Score:1)
Women and STEM Topics (Score:2)
There have been a lot of talk and even initiatives to improve the number of women in the STEM field. While I myself participated in assessments for young women to encourage them to choose STEM topics, I am less and less convinced that these initiatives are working. The main problem is that we do not really know why women choose other topics. True they have been asked what they want and why they have chosen this instead of STEM. However, this does not give us the root cause which pushed them in that particul
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Slashdot, will you please end the fucking obsession with feminist gripes.
Not yet. Slashdot thrives on controversial stories, pitting ideologies against science and reason. Remember when they used to post Florian Muellers every article on Sco? Or when they used to post creationist stories? Or that brief period when we had at least one LGBT discrimination story a week? Bitcoin, even?
Slashdot fully understands that creationist/feminist ideologies are subject to a wide range of debunking methods. So /. wins when they post the stories so that the majority will debunk the very obviou
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Shouldn't you be crying into your pillow and lamenting how having a tiny penis and a small brain has handicapped you and the world is against you?
Seriously, grow up and get a life.
Penis jokes, and then it has the temerity to tell someone to "grow up"... Further comment hardly seems sporting.
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He has a point. Every story about women in STEM is plagued with posts trying to disrupt any effort to improve things. Typical arguments include:
- There is no problem
- Girls just don't like computers
- There is nothing we can do, women can already apply/read job web sites
- It's too late to do anything
- It's sexist because it discriminates against men
- It's a feminazi conspiracy to cut off my balls
The list goes on... All designed to make sure we don't gain any traction on this issue. The simple fact is that nu
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I used to think it was just ignorance, but now I'm starting to realize it's actually a campaign my misogynists to try and keep women out of IT for some reason. That's the only explanation for why so many people either say or vote up posts like that.
I think it's neither. A lot of men simply don't care at all about how many women are in IT and react to the feeling that they are made responsible for it, while the vast majority are simple low level guys who have little impact on who gets hired and even less on who gets promoted.
What I don't get is why is it important? Even the immense majority of men were feminists, corporate managers would still be the only ones with the power to change the distribution. And whoever thinks corporate managers take their d
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I'm not so sure I'd call it a campaign.
That implies ordered and rational thought, and some coherent strategy.
Re:So ... (Score:4, Interesting)
He has a point. Every story about women in STEM is plagued with posts trying to disrupt any effort to improve things. Typical arguments include:
...
- There is no problem
- Girls just don't like computers
Is it possible that either of these are true, even in a general sense? There are gender disparities in several fields. The median salary for nurses is $65,470 [usnews.com], whereas the median salary for IT Technicians is $42,992 [glassdoor.com], but you don't hear a whole bunch of FUD over the fact that 90% of nurses are females. And when it comes right down to it, nurses are far more valuable to society than IT techs. Meanwhile, oil rig workers, about 95% male, make on average $99,175 [cnn.com]. Why no big push for women in that field?
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- There is no problem
There is because women tell us they are interested in IT and STEM but get put off by certain behaviour or find systematic bias against them. Unless they are all liars I suppose.
- Girls just don't like computers
Why did there used to be more women in IT than there are now? The timescale (back to the 80s/90s) is too short to account for anything other than changes in society and in schools/jobs. Also, women tell us that they do find computers interesting.
So, I don't think there is any real
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I believe that you are right in thinking that most people have a superficial understanding.
Re: So ... (Score:1)
All you did was prove his point. A 30-year organization supporting male nursing and they still have not affected change. Maybe that means more about human behavior and less about a gender equality. MAYBE it is true, less women are interested in computers than males. This may be something influenced in childhood, subtly through things like disney, but that certainly is not something you will solve, even in 2 generations.
P.S. every female engineer at my startup is paid better than me and that is okay.
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Women also tell us that people like you are con artists using fear to control women and inflammatory rhetoric to create a moral panic. Why should we listen to you and not them?
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Why did there used to be more women in IT than there are now?
You repeatedly answer that statement with "It must be due to misogyny/sexism!". What makes you so sure that that's the answer? That's a leap of faith usually made by creationists when making their god-of-the-gaps argument. Just because no one yet knows the reason does not mean that your proposed reason is correct. Did you even look for any study that might disprove the "regression to the mean" answer for this statement you keep throwing out? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Seriously, arguing this is like arguing
Off the tangent, but... (Score:2)
He has a point. Every story about women in STEM is plagued with posts trying to disrupt any effort to improve things. Typical arguments include: - There is no problem - Girls just don't like computers ...
Is it possible that either of these are true, even in a general sense? There are gender disparities in several fields. The median salary for nurses is $65,470 [usnews.com], whereas the median salary for IT Technicians is $42,992 [glassdoor.com]
OMFG, who the hell would want to work in IT for less than $42K a year? Because if $42K/year is the median that would suggest half of all IT technicians are getting paid peanuts. Unless you live in a low-cost, rural small city or town, less than $42K/year is very goddamned low nowadays.
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Yes clearly the logical conclusion is a massive global conspiracy and it's not simply that the rest of the world is increasingly fed up with idiots obsessed with trivial bullshit [washingtonexaminer.com] (in the words of Aayan Hirsi Ali). Clearly the problem isn't that IT and similar fields are textbook examples of exactly the kind of extreme hours and lack of work/life balance that women are empirically proven to be repelled by time and time again. Clearly it's got nothing to do with the ever more extreme fearmongering and disempo
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He has a point.
So, wait... you're going to get your troll in before the other trolls arrive? Yeah, that makes sense...
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'pussy-whipped' implies he actually got some pussy.
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[sarcasm] Great, so basically you're saying no women allowed, right? [/sarcasm]
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