You know why Silicon Valley and the whole tech industry is pushing women and minorities into taking up coding and into various techno-geeky fields of study? It’s because they want the other 50 percent of the workforce to join the pool of programming professionals and put downward pressure on tech salaries.
So when you come across idiotic articles like this one asserting that Tech Would Be Better If More Women Designed It, think again and wonder what the underlying agenda is. According to that piece;
Women make up just a quarter of the STEM workforce but closing the gap would not only help tackle the skills shortage in the tech industries, it would also lead to better performance, said Emma McGuigan, managing director of Accenture’s technology division in the U.K. and Ireland.
“We all know that you get the best team performance when you have diverse teams and people from different genders and backgrounds. That is when you get the best ideas,” she said.
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That figures of course, considering this is a claim tech giant Accenture is making. Accenture, after all, is a company that’s spreading its tentacles into every corner, nook, and cranny of the globe in search of cheap labor to churn out code, so it can bill its blue-chip clients hundreds of dollars per hour of “development time”.
So now it’s all about getting women into STEM fields (“STEM” is a now-popular acronym standing for Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics). That’s sort of the 21st Century equivalent of fat-shaming. Back in the old days, lots of women suffered self-esteem issues thanks to an entire marketing industry idealising a concept of beauty that favours tall thin and fair-skinned women. Today, it is Silicon Valley spreading notions that women who do not get into STEM are uncool.
See, the thing with political-correctness is that it is not immune to this thing called unintended consequences. The science and tech field, in particular, is rife with textbook cases of this phenomenon. Every invention has unintended consequences. Cars once heralded as wonder inventions are now the scourge of urban living. Antibiotics have led to the proliferation of “super-bugs” that now threaten to wipe big mammals off the face of the planet. Nuclear weapons beat a resolute enemy quickly back in World War II but now find themselves in the hands of an even more crazed bogey.
Those hipsters who now STEM-shame women into turning away from the humanities and liberal arts so that they can, we are told, go head-to-head with men in Silicon Valley have blinded themselves to the known and unknown-unknown unintended consequences of this initiative mounted under the banner of political-correctness.
All these guys really want is a vast pool of code monkeys they can pay with bananas. Politically-correct that.
In an age when people worry about the loss of our humanity thanks to the onslaught of artificial intelligence, social media and device addiction, and robotics, the last thing we need is an army of people — whether they be men or women — who got into coding just because some billionaire who comes to the office in jeans and sneakers everyday says it’s a “cool” thing.
benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.com.
Question, how do you plan to fill the STEM high paying shortage of jobs in the USA and many other countries? Unlike the Philippines, the USA has no discrimination in pay for the same job. STEM jobs from STEM teachers to bio mechanical engineers are the highest paying and shortage jobs in the USA. Also most of the jobs, provide fast tracks through the immigration process for VISA. What is the true fear? Is it that people will finally wake up and see that STEM involves technology that makes our lives better from the software coding used to make bullet trains that run to making better computers and lets not forget even coding medical equipment like MRI scanners and CAT scans. The future is here and unfortunately, it requires people who know STEM concepts and how to apply them. The choice is yours keep the Philippines in the past or become part of moving the Philippines in the future with the rest of the world. Which one do you want to do?
I don’t see any political correctness issue. It would be politically correct to demand to raise the salaries in the arts and humanities field. So it does not fit into your crusade against “political correctness”.
What will happen if women leave arts and humanities in favor of STEM? Well, the STEM salaries will drop. That’s not politically correct. The salaries in arty and humanities will raise. So these are becoming more attractive for men.
At the end you may have an equal distribution of men and women into STEM, arts and humanities and equal salaries. That’s what the PC advocates may dream of. But it’s driven just by market forces and not the activities of the PC advocates.
Equal salaries and equal gender distribution: PC
Driven by market forces: Not PC
Not as simple as the crusaders of either side wants to see it.
Then the balance should be left to the free market then. We can encourage woemn to do STEM, but we should not shame those who opt not to nor make them feel that they are “less cool” than those who do.
The important thing is that the opportunities are there. That’s the worthier cause to pursue. What is wrong is putting a stigma or a persona of coolness on one option or the other. I’d also be cautious about fully embracing the gospel being spread by these tech companies. A year or two ago, they’ve already been caught lying about the “tech talent shortage” they kept harping about that they used to lobby for an increase in annual issuance quotas for working visas in the US. Turns out there was no such shortage. They just wanted the cheap salaries immigrants tended to demand.
That’s the problem: shaming. Remember our former colleague who said shaming others is the way to make them “do right” (which actually means, do what they want)? No surprise, but still sad that there are ego-trippers out there who think shaming others is fine. They’ll soon find out how their method backfires.
dude, this is not a bad thing. the world needs a new marie curie more than it needs a next jk rowling. the point being, if women are not given this opportunity they’d most probably end up as just another wasted talent. If you can name at least 10 famous women scientists from the top of your hat (besides curie and ada lovelace) without consulting either google or wiki, i’ll concede my argument.
I graduated from a government-funded high school that requires all its students to take up science-related fields, and every time i hear about a schoolmate who instead chose an arts/humanities career, i tell myself that he/she was a total waste of the government’s time and money. Even if that person is lauded by the industry he/she works in. Why? because I think of all of those other batchmates who dropped out just because they either chose to fail subjects like filipino (guy who did that is still a mathematical genius albeit eccentric) or those who tried so hard to understand trigonometry at age 14. I myself almost got expelled because of my brain’s (then) refusal to process economic concepts. My skills did not pick up until i was much older, but i did have to work my ass off after graduating from a no-name college. If opportunities for exposure were given to those people they’d have probably reached their potential. Now this is a case that applies a lot more to women, since by default (yes, even if it is the 21st century), humanity has a chauvinistic disposition to it. Women need opportunities. STEM-shaming may be politically incorrect but it also opens up more possibilities. Because like i said earlier… do you think the world needs another stephanie meyer… or rosalind franklin?
I’m not saying that women are “not given this opportunity”. They are. They can take any course they want to take in university including STEM courses. Armed with one of those degrees (or even without one) they can apply in any technology company they want. In fact a lot of Accenture people I know and have met are, in fact women.
What I am against is making those (whether women or men) who do not get into a STEM field feel like they are inadequate people who have no place in the 21st Century.
There are people, in the U.S. workplaces, who simply do not like women and minorities. There is the so called: “glass ceiling”, whereby women and minorities cannot go up in the management level or higher positions.
However, things are slowly changing, as the world is slowly changing. Women and minorities are getting more and more higher education. And, these companies, cannot hold on to the notion, that some people are not fitted to such work and positions, because of their gender , ethnic background and the color of their skin. The workplace is getting diverse every day.
People’s brains and what they can do; do not have any ethnicity , gender and skin color.
The tech industry is inherently sexist.
Unless this is resolved, women in general will be uncomnfortable working in such industry.
If you have a vision and you are able to pronounce that vision clearly and consistently you have a fighting chance.