Valantar said:
Given the societal and cultural biases against women in any highly educated field, it's astounding how great an impact they've had on our current wealth of knowledge and technical innovations
They weren't biases, they were common sense knowledge that men were better than women in certain tasks and fields of endeavor. It's the modern Marxist-feminist nonsense of gender equality in the last 50 years that clouds your bias against men and makes you think men and women are equal in all areas, when they are demonstratively not.
The fact is that women generally had very little impact on the knowledge base of most fields of endeavor in our universities, including areas like science, mathematics, engineering and philosophy. The vast majority of the corpus of the Western knowledge base in the last 700 years was built by men.
You might perhaps have heard of Ada Lovelace?
When feminists spout history about female accomplishments in science, engineering, and inventions, they almost always overstate their accomplishments and forget to mention, or downplay, that these women were in almost all cases working with other men on the endeavor who had a part in the science or invention. The feminist narrative in our universities is a sham and they spout nonsense after nonsense while being held to virtually no academic standards.
How many patents did Ada Lovelace file? Would that be 0? Compare that to …
Thomas Edison
Edison was a prolific inventor, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. More significant than the number of Edison's patents was the widespread impact of his inventions: electric light and power utilities, sound recording, and motion pictures all established major new industries world-wide. Edison's inventions contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.
There are no female equivalents of Thomas Edison -- not even remotely close.
While it's true that the fields of ICT and engieneering have "always" been male-dominated, making the mistake of thinking this is due to some innate male superiority in these fields is just plain ignorant.
Intellectual equality between the sexes is nonsense.
Studies have shown that men are better at dealing with abstract information -- better visual-spatial capabilities. This translates into men being better problem solvers, particularly in the sciences like mathematics and engineering. The superior male ability to solve problems means that in the real world it is generally men who develop the vast majority of the knowledge base -- they solve the problems and come up with the ideas that develop new knowledge. 99.99% of all math theory, like algebra and calculus was developed by men. The field of math would virtually look no different today if you removed women's contribution to the field. 99% of all inventions from the transistor to the pneumatic drill -- invented by men. 99%+ of physics and engineering developed by men.
When all genders (and social backgrounds, for that matter) are given equal access to good education and work experience, are shielded from discrimination (be it positive or negative), and actually rewarded based on merit rather than (conscious or unconscious) bias, the result is almost always a net gain.
Inevitably these promotions of women in STEM fields leads to affirmative action programs where human resource managers put their fingers on the scales to hire women in disproportionate numbers compared to their qualifications. Take a couple of the auto companies …
wardsauto
" … He says since 1988, Chrysler's policy has been to make half of its engineering hires minorities or women. At GM 57% of job offers made to engineering students last fall went to minorities and women ……………."
Do you really imagine that 57% of the qualified applicants are women and minorities? Yup, and I have a bridge to sell.
These hiring affirmative action programs (read -- hiring discrimination programs against men) at GM have been going on since the 1980's. When you build a company on the hiring and promoting of people for political reasons, rather than excellence and the ability to get the job done -- remember the GM bankruptcy? -- that is what happens. You end up not competing with companies that don't do this type of hiring/promoting, or level of it. If a company starts using gender or ethnicity to press the scales one way in their hiring and promoting practices, then is it using less merit in these -- there is no way around this stubborn fact. The "benefited" groups will be employees that are not as qualified for the job as others, and inevitably, everyone loses as these less qualified people (the favored groups) are put into positions where they fail or perform poorly. This leads to poorer products, a company that makes less money, and maybe even eventually fails. Companies like GM needs to abandon their affirmative action programs to compete with companies and countries that have hiring systems based on more competitive standards.
There are a couple of other factors that contribute to men generally excelling in some fields. First, men are more passionate about some fields of endeavor than women, and passion = interest = excellence. In my university days I frequently would stay up all night working on various computer problems with a couple of friends. I've never seen a woman in some field of endeavor in the sciences that they would give up so much sleep just to solve problems because they had such and interest and passion in that area. They may exist -- but they are rare.
And speaking of GM's affirmative action programs -- how many women do you see moding engines, swapping camshafts, installing after-market brakes, shocks, exhaust systems, or installing tripped-up stereo systems? Basically nil. How about women building motorbikes or restoring automobiles from the ground up? Almost nil. How many women do you see that have a real passion/interest for things in engineering/design, such that in their spare time they have hobbies where they build and engineer things? Rare again. Go to just about any auto forum and it's generally 95%+ males or more doing the posting. This shows who has a passion/interest in the auto industry. Go to a technical auto-forum where they are discussing things like camshafts, transmissions, performance modifications, and the gender of the posters will likely be in the area of 99.0%+ male. If men = women in all respects, then where are all the women that have a passion and interest for these things? Something is terribly wrong with the feminist gender equality picture.
It's quite evident that men have more passion than women for things that have to do with the intricacies of engineering and automobiles, simply put -- building things. It's what men like to do. So if women in general show no real interest and passion in engineering/design fields in general, and in the computer industry, how do you expect women to excel in these fields? Women don't have an interest in and cultivate the disciplines of engineering as men do and therefore are not as suitable as men for these tasks just on that basis alone -- even ignoring the intellectual differences.
If Intel hires a bunch of women, who in general demonstrate no real interest and passion for engineering/design, it's a recipe for mediocrity. You end up with a bunch of 9-5 women employees, who go home at the end of the day and think about shopping, their next pair of shoes, or what makeup to buy for the next day. Women rarely have any hobbies or extracurricular activities that will relate to their job in an engineering/design capacity.
Secondly, men have a wider distribution in abilities on things like IQ scores. In other words, more men will be distributed higher than women, and the farther out at the high end one goes there will be disproportionately more men.
newsbbc
"… There were twice as many men with IQ scores of 125, for example, a level said to correspond with people getting first-class degrees. At scores of 155, associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman. …"
The higher up the IQ scale one moves, the higher ratio of men over women.
humanevents " … In one Johns Hopkins University study of gifted pre-adolescent students, boys outperformed girls among the top scoring students on math by 13-to-1…."
The
IMO (International Math Olympiad) is dominated by males year after year. It's an international math competition for 20 year old’s and under and with no post secondary education. Another good example of where the ability of men to solve mathematical problems is better than women and helps in programming and engineering skills.